How one tough mom guided Cody and Caleb Martin from poverty and racial hatred to the NBA
Jenny Bennett had three simple rules for her three sons, and they had to be followed:
Once you start something, you must finish. Don’t go anywhere without saying where you’ll be and who you’ll be with. Always protect your siblings, as they protect you.
This was survival in Cooleemee, a town of fewer than 1,000 in Davie County, 35 miles southwest of Winston-Salem. As the single mother of an interracial family, Bennett saw horrifying things while raising oldest son Raheem and twins Cody and Caleb.
One Sunday morning she awoke to a cross smoldering in her front yard. That wasn’t an isolated incident of racial hatred she experienced in the 1990s as the white mother of three mixed-raced children in the South.
“People would say things quite often,” Bennett recalled of the slurs. “One instance where my car had broken down and we were actually walking back to our home and someone tried to run us over. The stares, the looks, the whispers — direct and indirect comments. Those things happened a lot.”
Today, each of Bennett’s sons are thriving professionally. Raheem is a basketball assistant coach at his alma mater, Greensboro College. Cody and Caleb are rookies for the Hornets; each playing himself into Charlotte’s rotation before the NBA season was halted March 11 by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cody and Caleb are with Jenny in the Winston-Salem area, not just for a Mother’s Day visit Sunday, but to ride out the pandemic together. There is a tightness — a sense of mutual protection — in their relationships that is enduring. They believe that’s what got them first to N.C. State, then to Nevada, and now to the Hornets.
“Our mom was on us,” said Caleb Martin, who made the Hornets as an undrafted free agent. “She had three jobs and still found time to be in our ears.
“That’s really hard to do. We had friends whose parents couldn’t care less what (their children were) doing. ... (She) kept us on a narrow line, (and it took that) to get to a place like this.”
Problem-solvers
Hornets veteran Nic Batum noticed quickly last fall there was something different about the Martin twins. They were obviously mature for rookies, but this was something more: Batum called the Martins natural problem-solvers.
Cody and Caleb said that trait is the best thing they learned from their mom throughout their upbringing.
“It’s crazy how Nic noticed that,” Caleb said, “because that’s how we viewed her. It seemed like every time things were going downhill or sideways, she always figured out a way. Typically, it wasn’t financially.”
Childcare, for instance: One of Jenny’s several jobs was at a Food Lion. The twins were too young — about 8 at the time — to be home alone, and there wasn’t money for a babysitter. So with the store manager’s blessing, she would pack the kids’ lunches and favorite movies, and set them up in front of the TV and VCR in the store’s office.
When things got slow, their treat was racing each other in the motorized shopping carts the store had. Cody said they actually continued that into their early teens.
Living in a dangerous neighborhood became an early lesson in teamwork.
“We’d take the trash out in pairs,” Caleb described “I’d walk with (Cody) to make sure everything is good. There were times you didn’t want to be taking the trash out late at night — a protection plan.”
That protection extended to mom. Cody recalled them waking up at 1 or 2 in the morning, as Jenny was preparing to leave for one of her jobs. They’d start her car, watch her drive off, then wait for a call to make sure she got to her workplace safely before returning to sleep.
The financial strain sometimes meant her not eating so there would be enough food for the three boys. While Jenny tried to shield her sons from stress, as they grew older, they recognized the toll.
“We’d come back from school or working out and she would be crying,” Cody recalled. “When you’re younger, you don’t think much of it. Then more and more you understand what’s going on. She made a lot of sacrifices.”
Jenny didn’t view it as sacrifice. For her, it was love in action.
“If I don’t eat, I don’t eat,” Jenny recalled of those times. “That’s your job as a parent — by whatever means. They were my first priority, 100 percent.”
In return, she demanded accountability and vetted their friends warily.
“She made sure that we were good all the time about letting her know where we were at and who we were hanging out with,” Cody said. “You just know it only takes one time to mess up. That’s why our circle has always been small and always will be like that.”
Time for serious, time for silly
Jenny’s maternal instincts particularly arose when Cody and Caleb decided to transfer from N.C. State in the spring of 2016. They were heavily recruited by Nevada’s Eric Musselman, a former NBA coach. The idea of the twins moving across the country was initially rattling to mom.
Jenny’s questions to Musselman were probing.
“She asked very direct questions about roles and our vision,” for each twin, Musselman said. “She point-blank wanted to know if I valued Cody as much as Caleb,” who was the more proven scorer.
Musselman came to appreciate the protectiveness Jenny practiced; while that family circle is tight, once you are within it, you have a powerful ally in mom.
“She creates this trust. You have to earn it, but then it’s strong,” Musselman said. “Those kids were no-maintenance, and I never got a call from Jenny; no complaints about anything.”
As serious-minded as this sounds, Jenny’s family has plenty of fun, too. She says her intense sons show their silly side at home, dancing and breaking out into “Soul Train lines.”
One night this past week, Jenny and her sons grilled dinner and got into a raucous discussion — everything from politics to old television shows — that lasted to 5:30 a.m. Cody and Caleb might be in the NBA, but the simplicity of their family bond hasn’t changed.
“They’re still my babies,” Jenny said, “no matter how old they are.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "How one tough mom guided Cody and Caleb Martin from poverty and racial hatred to the NBA."
