35 years later: The children who raised themselves

Charlotte waitress Mary Mingo often confided in friends that she feared dying during childbirth, as her mother had nearly four decades earlier.

And that’s exactly what happened to her on Feb. 7, 1980, in a Charlotte hospital.

Mingo, 39, was estranged from her husband and it was clear Curtis Mingo would not be raising the newborn boy, Kemuel, nor would he take in their other eight children.

So there stood Kayle, Karen, Kathy, Kelda, Kaiser, Kasper, Karla, Kertis and Kemuel, with no parents, no money and no guarantee of a home by their landlord, the Charlotte Housing Authority.

The only realistic option appeared to be to divide up and move in with relatives or foster parents.

It was 19-year-old Kayle Mingo who decided not to allow that.

“Our mother would have wanted us to stay together, and the best way to honor her memory was to try everything in our power to do just that,” says Kayle, who was then a senior at Independence High.

The other kids agreed with her and voted to stay put in their mother’s apartment in Dillehay Courts, and to raise themselves.

On Saturday, 35 years to the day after Mary Mingo’s death, her kids gathered at Charlotte’s Veterans Park for a first-time family reunion that surely exceeded their mother’s wildest dreams.

Eight were able to be there – an artist, two shop owners, an attorney, a contractor, two college students and a former professional boxer who was a one-time Olympic hopeful.

“Their story is amazing,” said John T. Crawford, 77, a retired Charlotte Housing Authority staffer who convinced that agency to let the Mingo kids stay after their mother’s death.

“I’m not even sure the housing authority would be willing to take the chance today of letting kids live in a home alone. But everything about what the Mingo children did is unusual, starting with the idea that they fought to stay together.

“I didn’t know their mother well, but (after her death) you couldn’t work for the housing authority and not know of the Mingo kids.”

‘We were a team’

Six of the Mingo kids were age 16 or younger when they decided to raise themselves.

Kayle says no one ever mentioned she might need court permission to take custody of her siblings. She’s not sure why, but believes it’s because Crawford and the housing authority let them stay put in their apartment.

It was not a temporary arrangement, either. They stayed in the home 16 years, with the siblings taking responsibility for cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, paying the bills and helping each other with homework.

“We all took turns taking care of the baby,” says Kayle (pronounced kale), who is now 54. “If I was at work, Karen had him. If she was some place, Kathy had him. We were a team.”

As the oldest of the children, Kayle took charge of paying the bills. She worked a circulation department job at The Charlotte Observer to supplement her mother’s Social Security benefits. Relatives occasionally donated money, too.

She also served as the family’s “de facto mother,” checking everyone’s homework at night, making sure they took a bath, and hustling them to bed on time.

Kertis, the oldest boy at 16, became the father figure, which he says involved “dishing out whoopins” and getting the big piece of chicken at meals. He later got a job driving a school bus, which also helped with money.

Karen, 17, was the cook, and Kathy, 15, was the babysitter and cleaning lady, a job she took seriously enough to lock everyone out of the house to keep her freshly mopped floors from being tracked up.

“I once caught one of my siblings trying to come through a window and I had to hold it down and tell her: ‘You ain’t coming in this house until my floors are dry,’” says Kathy Mingo Thomas, now a wife and mother of two.

The younger ones – Karla, Kelda, Kaiser and Kasper – helped out, but Kayle says “we tried our best to let them be kids as long as we could.”

Kasper Mingo, who was 10 at the time, jokes that they all took responsibility for making sure Kelda didn’t wear makeup to school. “She was 13 and putting on lipstick, trying to be like the other girls. So we did what any parent would do and tried to stop her.”

Thirty-five years later, Kasper is a husband, father of two, and working for Morgan Stanley as a private banking advisory associate. He got his law degree at Syracuse University College of Law, on an academic scholarship. In his spare time, he mentors college-bound students from low-income families.

Kasper, 45, seems to speak for all the kids when he says they didn’t really have time to grieve over their mother’s death. At first, he says, they were in shock, then came a kind of blind acceptance as they tried to survive and stay together.

“I only knew my mother 10 years,” he says, “but in that 10 years she gave me and the rest of us enough love to last a lifetime.”

Their father, Curtis, never dropped completely out of their lives, but he remained a distant figure. He died in 2007. “He did what he could, when he could,” says Karla. “And we loved him no matter what.”

They never did find out why all their names begin with “K.”

Mary Mingo’s legacy

Kaiser Mingo, who was 8 at the time of his mother’s death, tells a story that illustrates how the family dynamic worked in a home ruled by children.

One Saturday morning, he got up to watch cartoons and noticed 10-year-old Kasper was nowhere to be found.

“I remember thinking: Where is my brother and what could be more important than cartoons?” recalls Kaiser, who now is 43. “It turned out that he had been sweeping out an auto body paint shop for money. He showed the money to me and even shared some of it with me.”

Kaiser was fascinated and soon launched a career of his own, offering to help women at a nearby store load their groceries for tips. That was followed by an even more successful business buying candy at the store and reselling it at school for a profit.

Then, at age 14, Kaiser says he began cutting people’s hair on the front porch of their apartment. “Our living room was the waiting room and it would be full of people waiting to get their hair cut,” he says.

Without realizing it, Kasper and Kaiser were following in the footsteps of their hardworking mother. Mary Mingo was a truck-stop waitress, known for working a lot of double shifts. She even once did an entire third shift by herself, taking the orders and cooking the food, while Kathy and Karla washed dishes in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Mary often came home exhausted, which meant her children had to take responsibility for things beyond their years, such as cooking dinner or cleaning up the house.

They’d like to believe they were good kids, but on those occasions when one of them stepped out of line, punishment from their mother was swift and not soon forgotten, says Kathy Mingo.

“Once, when Kertis was about 15, he came home and he’d been drinking, and she spanked him, tied him to the stove and called the police. They told her there would be a lot less trouble in Charlotte if we had more mothers like her.”

Kertis, 51, says it was the last time he drank alcohol.

Dreams achieved

The Mingo kids weren’t angels and Kayle says not all of them took the straightest path.

All but the youngest, Kemuel, either stayed in Charlotte or moved back here after trying to find success in other states.

Kayle herself tried and failed to achieve a longtime dream of being a New York City hairdresser. But she returned to Charlotte in 2000 and found success operating the Braid Factory, a hairstyling business launched by her sister Kelda Mingo.

As if that’s not enough, Kayle is also enrolled at Central Piedmont Community College studying auto body repair and refinishing, with intentions of being in the insurance business.

Kelda, 46, now is the owner of the Hair RX Salon, and she’s in school, too, working on the final year of her bachelor’s degree in education studies at Belmont Abbey College.

Karen, 52, is a delivery truck driver. And Karla, 49, is enrolled at CPCC, and works as an independent contractor in the painting business. Her dream is to be an interior designer.

Kathy, 50, is a stay-at-home mom who has assumed the role of taking care of big brother Kertis, who has health problems because of a tumor removed from his brain. They’re living in a home left to them by their father.

Kertis was a local celebrity in the late 1980s and early ’90s, with a career as one of the state’s top-ranked amateur boxers. He later became a pro boxer and in 1988 competed in the Olympic boxing trials. At the time, he led the Carolinas Golden Gloves 165-pound division.

Kemuel, the youngest, couldn’t be at the reunion Saturday. While the others have either achieved dreams or are chasing them, he is incarcerated in Florida for drug-related offenses. His troubles started at 16, as the siblings began going their separate ways and leaving Dillehay Courts, a public housing community north of uptown.

Kayle Mingo says he’s still their little brother and they believe he now is a changed man. When Kemuel gets out of prison, they want him in Charlotte, back in their circle, so they can help him become the son their mother would have wanted him to be.

“He was the most gifted of all of us,” Karla says. “But he never knew his mother from the very beginning. He never got what the rest of us got.”

A sense of community

The Mingo gathering Saturday was not just a reunion. It was also a “thank you” party for anyone who helped them as kids, including the neighbors who surrounded them in the Dillehay Courts apartments.

“Everybody in the community knew what happened to us and understood the tragedy of losing a mother,” Kayle Mingo says. “Once word got out that we were trying to stay together, help came whenever we needed it.”

John Crawford says a big reason the Charlotte Housing Authority allowed the Mingos to stay in public housing was that their mother had been held up as an example for others in the neighborhood. She kept her house clean, her kids out of trouble, and her neighbors afloat when they were in a jam, he said.

Kaiser Mingo, 43, believes the siblings made it through in part because of all the favors that neighbors felt they owed his mother.

He visited their old apartment building on Thursday and stood in the cold, reminiscing about a time when neighbors saw every child as their own and everything they had as something to be shared.

“After our mother died, one lady took me into her house and told her kids that I was to come and go as I please in their home, eat their food and use their stuff,” Kaiser says.

George Wise was one of their neighbors, the same age as Kayle. He remembers Mary Mingo as a woman who was always heading off to work, “rain, sleet or snow.”

Her children have turned out just like her, he says.

“Those kids really stuck together. If you fought one, you fought them all,” says Wise, who is now 54. “They had their faults and their differences, but Mary Mingo instilled love in them. That was the secret of how they accomplished so much.”

This story was originally published February 7, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "35 years later: The children who raised themselves."