If we weren’t at school or work or church, we were out exploring. My mom’s attitude was: “I chose you, kid. I brought you into this world, and I’m going to give you everything I never had.” She poured herself into me. She would find places for us to go where we didn’t have to spend money. We must have gone to every park in Johannesburg. My mom would sit under a tree and read the Bible, and I’d run and play and play and play.

On Sunday afternoons after church, we’d go for drives out in the country. My mom would find places with beautiful views for us to sit and have a picnic. There was none of the fanfare of a picnic basket or plates or anything like that, only baloney and brown bread and margarine sandwiches wrapped up in butcher paper. To this day, baloney and brown bread and margarine will instantly take me back. You can come with all the Michelin stars in the world, just give me baloney and brown bread and margarine, and I’m in heaven.

As modestly as we lived, I never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience. We were always out doing something, going somewhere. Sometimes, my mom would take me on drives through fancy white neighborhoods. We’d go look at people’s houses, look at their mansions. We’d look at their walls, mostly, because that’s all we could see from the road. We’d look at a wall that ran from one end of the block to the other and go: “Wow. That’s only one house. All of that is for one family.”

Sometimes we’d pull over and go up to the wall, and she’d put me up on her shoulders like a little periscope. I would look into the yards and describe everything I was seeing. “There’s a lemon tree! They have a swimming pool! And a tennis court!”

My mother refused to be bound by ridiculous ideas of what black people couldn’t or shouldn’t do. She raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back, I realize she raised me like a white kid — not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. The highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life is that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.