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come to the conclusion that I can’t make a person acknowledge, accept, or want me. It just so happened that a couple years after that, he died and the rest is history.
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On advice she would give to people who may be in the same situation she was in with her father:
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Oh my God, I’m probably the best person that this advice can come from. There are so many different scenarios and situations…but I don’t feel that there are a lot of things that are a whole lot worse than not acknowledging you. It’s like you could be bad to somebody, you do something bad to somebody, but that’s about the worse thing that you can do. Even in the Bible it says “If you won’t acknowledge me, I won’t acknowledge you.”
You don’t create a child and then say ‘I don’t know who you are, you ain’t with me’…that’s pretty bad. And to be able to experience that, live through it and see the glory on the other side of it…I can’t stress this enough to anyone who has an issue with a mother or father…whatever the situation is: what’s so beautiful about God is He covers it all. It just doesn’t matter…it hurts, but at some point I guess anybody can come to the fact that what’s beautiful about it is yes, we all have an earthly mother and father, but even moreso than that, they have to answer to somebody and that [is God] and he’s such a great God who is capable of being whatever you lack. I live by this: Why get upset when a human being doesn’t like you, or doesn’t accept you, when the King over everybody does? So any issues with parents, siblings, uncles…it’s just so completely irrelevant when you look at the big scheme of things. You do what He (God) tells you to do, and that stuff becomes minuscule.
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Carlena said things eventually started to change after she said God told her to just up and go to L.A. where her sister, Tammy (who’s also Mike Evan’s daughter), was living in their Grandmother’s home. That was the same home that their Dad, died in.
Carlena ended up having to sleep in the same room her dad died in and that’s when she said that felt that his ‘spirit’ apparently talked to her and asked her to save his land and his home, that had just been burglarized and about to be foreclosed. She said that’s when she realized that in death he not only needed her, but actually finally accepted her and that’s when she was able to fully forgive him. Although she doesn’t have any interests whatsoever in his home (her sister, Tammy owns all of her father’s properties), she felt compelled, as his daughter, to try to help save the land, despite the fact that she herself was financially strained.
Carlena is now fighting for she, her sister Tammy, and Mike Evans’ co-creator of Good Times, Eric Monte’ to get the earnings from her father’s work that are rightfully due to them.
It sounds like there was some seriously bad blood between Carlena’s mother and Mike Evans but the child they created in their moment of passion was unfortunately caught in the middle. Like I said, this is just another reminder that it’s never too late to right our wrongs and although Mike Evans didn’t take the opportunity to do that with his daughter prior to his death, the lessons other parents, who may be in a similar situation with their children, can get from Mr. Evans’ journey are priceless.
BELOW IS CARLENA’S FULL INTERVIEW:
-ILoveOldSchoolMusic, Old School news with a new point of view
Turn the page to watch a video clip of Carlena Harris talking about the amount royalties that her Dad’s family and business partner are getting shorted.
