When Kevin Hart was barely a teenager, he learned a lesson about trust that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
To this day, Hart still recalls the exact moment he learned this lifelong lesson, which he says came about one afternoon while he was under the care of his after-school babysitter, a kind, grandmotherly woman named Miss Davis.
Typically, Hart helped Miss Davis with chores around the house while his mother worked. One day, however, Hart decided to skip the chores and join some neighborhood friends in a “game” of throwing rocks at passing cars.
“Kids do stupid s―t. This is probably in the top two dumbest things that, as a group, we did,” Hart says.
As it went, the rock Hart threw broke a car’s window. The car screeched to a halt while Hart and his friends bolted from the scene. The driver of the car stepped out and asked around the close-knit neighborhood to find the culprit. Eventually, those same friends all pointed to Hart. “They threw me under the bus so fast!” he says.
News of the incident quickly made its way to Miss Davis.
“It was the scariest thing ever,” Hart says. “She was like, ‘I’m just trying to sit up here and decide if I should tell your mother or not.’ She’s like, ‘You do right by me, you come here, you do what you’re supposed to. You’ve never had an incident like this. What made you do something stupid like this?’”
Hart didn’t have an answer. He spent the rest of the day in a panic, fearing what would happen when Miss Davis told his mother.
...Yet, Miss Davis never told. That single act gave Hart an important perspective about trust and loyalty. “You got to give it to get it,” he says. “You’ve got to give trust to get trust.”
Hart adds that he never got into trouble as a teenager from then on, all because of Miss Davis.
“I didn’t want to make her feel like she made the wrong choices by not telling on me, and for that, hey, you don’t have to worry about ol’ Kevin Hart doing nothing,” he says. “I made my one mistake. You don’t have to worry about nothing else.”
What’s more, Kevin says his mother ― who passed away in 2007 ― never found out about his transgression.
“This is the first time I’ve even talked about it out loud,” he says. “My mom right now is probably pissed off in heaven.”
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