As J. Cole rang in his 30th birthday, he revealed the special gift he planned to give struggling moms.The "Apparently" rapper will let single mothers live in his childhood home in Fayetteville, N.C. for free, telling The Combat Jack Show recently he's still working out the details, but his "goal is to have that be a haven for families."
"So every two years a new family will come in, they live rent-free," he continued. "The idea is that it's a single mother with multiple kids, and she's coming from a place where all her kids is sharing a room. She might have two, three kids, they're sharing a room. She gets to come here rent-free. I want her kids to feel how I felt when we got to the house."
In his album 2014 Forest Hills Drive, which is also the address for the home, J. Cole talks about his mother losing the house to foreclosure when he was younger, and why he decided to buy it back last year. After he did, he invited fans into the home for an exclusive album listening party.
In addition to his commendable gestures, the hip hop star also dished on his own childhood and experiences moving from military housing to a trailer park to the home, talking specifically of his time before they moved in the single-family house.
"My parents separated before I was even conscious," he continued on the show. "After we moved back they were separated. When they got divorced we had to move out of the military quarters 'cause you can only live there if you're married. That's like real nice housing, it ain't no mansion but it's safe. Everybody got jobs, everybody got benefits 'cause they're all in the Army."
"When I'm four years old we have to move; it's me, my brother, and my mother and we moved to Spring Lake, a little outskirt area of Fayetteville," he said. "We moved to the trailer park in Spring Lake. It was my first taste of like, 'Oh, sh*t. This is nothing like where we came from.' I knew the energy was not right. I knew my mother was the only white lady in the neighborhood and there was no man in the house."
Still, J.Cole found strength in those struggles, adding, "When I was at my brokest and before the deal when we was trying to get on, I was so happy. Even though I was living in the future I was living so hopeful in the future. I had faith. It was hope and faith. I was appreciating the journey because I was sure of what was to come.""Appreciation is everything," he also said. "Life could be both beautiful or ugly depending on how you look at it. It could be both hard and blessed. Heaven or hell. It's all within us. The devil is in us. God is in us. All of these things are within us. It's just how we choose to view it, it's the decisions we make, how we decided to view it."