Let me back up so you understand who you’re dealing with. My name is Alyssa Moore, and I wasn’t supposed to get here. I was born in 1964 in Atlanta, back when being Black and ambitious wasn’t just hard—it could get you hurt. My mother, Dorothy, cleaned houses in Buckhead six days a week. My daddy, James, worked at a garage off Simpson Road, the kind where you got paid cash and pretended you didn’t exist when the tax man came around. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment that smelled like Pine-Sol and my mama’s quiet regret.
Every night she came home with her knees aching and told me the same thing: “Baby girl, don’t you ever let nobody make you small. Not your husband, not your boss, not even your own family. You hear me?”
I heard her. I got myself to Howard University on loans I’m pretty sure I’d still be paying if heaven took credit cards. Studied marketing because I liked the idea of making people want things they didn’t know they needed. Met Harold Moore junior year—fine as sin, smooth as silk, and about as useful as a screen door on a submarine, but I didn’t know that yet. Married right after graduation because that’s what you did. Had Terrence when I was twenty-three, and Lord, that boy was perfect—seven pounds and six ounces of pure joy wrapped in a blue blanket.
Harold left when Terry was five. Said he didn’t sign up to be married to a woman who worked more than he did. Said it wasn’t “natural” for a wife to be the breadwinner. Said a lot of things, but what he meant was, “Your success makes me feel small and instead of growing, I’m leaving.”
So I raised Terry myself. Started Hayes & Associates in 1990 with that $8,000 loan from Grace Community Church’s credit union. Black churches preach humility on Sunday, but Monday through Saturday, they’re the only ones who bet on Black women. Every church mother who put five dollars in that credit union, every deacon who vouched for me—they’re the reason I made it.
