Robertha Everett moved to Fayetteville’s Forest Hills Drive neighborhood 42 years ago. She raised her now 39-year-old daughter, Lathesia, and her older brother, Clarence Everett Jr., in the same house she lives in today, down the road from another longtime resident.
“They’ve been nothing but like family,” Robertha Everett said of Gloria Peuster and her family. “Not neighbors, but family.”
The sense of community and looking out for one another has persisted through generations on Forest Hills Drive.
As J. Cole prepares to return to Fayetteville for his Sept. 23 homecoming concert, the tight-knit neighborhood off Cain Road that helped shape him is once again stepping into the spotlight.
Even as the former resident of 2014 Forest Hills Drive began to achieve international fame and claim the stage name J. Cole, to his neighbors, he’s still Jermaine, the kid who played basketball at neighborhood cookouts.
“He had a lot of wisdom, being small,” Robertha Everett said. “I was listening to him.”
Forest Hills Drive takes the spotlight
Today, residents want the Forest Hills Drive neighborhood to exist as it might for any hometown kid who has left to make a name for himself. When Cole returns, they say they’ll welcome him with pride, excitement and a profound love for what he has done for his hometown.
Over the years, the way Forest Hills Drive residents perceived Cole never changed. But the neighborhood became inseparable from Cole’s story, and he made that clear when Cole’s childhood home took the spotlight in his third studio album, “2014 Forest Hills Drive.”
On the album cover, Cole sits atop the four-bedroom, two-story ranch home gazing outward at his neighborhood.
Cole’s mother moved to the home with her two sons from a Spring Lake trailer park after she remarried. The family first bought the home in 1994, according to property records.
Once Cole made his upbringing on Forest Hills Drive a central part of his narrative, it became clear that living in the neighborhood would bring a few minor inconveniences.
Nearly a decade after his mom sold it, Cole’s Dreamville Foundation bought his childhood home in 2014 for $121,000, intending to use the property as a rent-free home for single-mother families.
The house did function that way for a short time, neighborhood residents said, but the initiative was eventually discontinued because the album’s release drove too many uninvited fans there who were constantly taking photos.
“She was there about three weeks, and there was so much traffic, she couldn’t. And she left,” Gloria Peuster said of one tenant.
So many people attempted to steal the Forest Hills Drive street signs that the city reduced the number of signs to two and raised them to between 15 and 18 feet high. In most urban and residential areas, traffic signs are mounted 7 feet from the ground.
Others would clamber onto the roof of Cole’s home, attempting to recreate the album cover. In June 2018, someone vandalized the home with graffiti that said, “J Cole … do you even care about the ville?”
Still, residents said those incidents were the exception rather than the rule. The city’s efforts to keep the street signs out of reach have been successful, for the most part — though with only two remaining, tourists or other Fayetteville residents might have a hard time navigating the neighborhood.
City officials told The Fayetteville Observer in an Aug. 18 email that they are aware of the Sept. 23 concert and are preparing for any increased traffic or other issues that may arise in the neighborhood.
“We will have sufficient personnel on hand and ready to respond as necessary to monitor and address any increased traffic in the Forest Hills Drive neighborhood,” Sgt. Antoine Kincade, public information officer with the Fayetteville Police Department, said in the email.
People who moved in years after the release of “2014 Forest Hills Drive” said the attention surrounding the area has caused few problems and has often been a source of excitement when Cole’s work brings him back. Kelvin and Jennifer Sanders, who have lived two doors down from Cole’s house for five years, said they have always been happy to help tourists who need a photographer.
The small corners are where Cole’s rise began
The Forest Hills Drive neighborhood is a peaceful enclave off Cain Road, which connects major thoroughfares Pamalee Drive, U.S. 401, to the north and Bragg Boulevard to the south.
Coming in from its only major direct access point off of Cain Road on a recent Saturday afternoon, Forest Hills Drive was almost as quiet as it could get. Only a few distant lawnmowers, door slams and highway noise, maybe a confused tourist or two slowing down just short of the J. Cole house, interrupted the ambience of this heavily residential neighborhood near the Eutaw Village Shopping Center.
“It was, and still is, friendly, alive, a lot of kids,” Robertha Everett said.
Much of Forest Hills Drive’s old guard lives closer to its Cain Road intersection, farther away from where most of the action happens. Homes on dead-end side streets like Gloria Peuster’s on Woodberry Lane are where Cole’s continued connection to the neighborhood began.
Lathesia Everett said her brother, who now lives in Germany, and Cole grew up around each other and remain friends to this day. She remembers how both Cole and Clarence, whom she says everyone calls Junior, were always musically inclined.
“We had assigned seats on the bus, and I had to sit beside Jermaine,” Lathesia Everett said. “He sat on his book bag and just bebopped to whatever Junior was playing and rapping.”
It’s more than a tourist trap
The Sanders family said they see Cole at the Forest Hills Drive home at least once or twice a year. Jennifer Sanders recalled one instance where Cole’s production crew was parked up and down her street, and Cole later personally gave her family tickets to the 2025 Dreamville Festival in Raleigh.
“There’s so much love that goes on down there,” Jennifer Sanders said. “People are showing love all the time.”
Charmaine Keel, a Fayetteville native who graduated from Seventy-First High School and Methodist University, has lived across the street from Cole’s home for two-and-a-half years. She said that when she moved to the area, she expected more “ruckus” and disruption than there has been.
On the contrary, she said, aspiring creatives often come through looking for inspiration from Cole’s home and the story of his upbringing.
“It’s amazing to see the talent that comes through here,” Keel said.
Keel said the love that Cole has shown for the residents of Forest Hills Drive is a sign of what his return to the Crown Complex on Sept. 23 will mean for Fayetteville. Cole structured ticket sales so that residents were a priority, and those on Forest Hills Drive understand that their neighborhood is still more than a tourist trap.
“I’m excited about the concert,” Keel said. “But I’m more excited for the people in our hometown than I am about people outside. I’m more excited about the love that we have here for him.”
The love that Forest Hills Drive residents have for Cole, who left decades ago to pursue his music dream, is the same love that they have for the people who have stuck around all these years. No matter what, no one from Forest Hills Drive loses sight of their roots.
It goes back to the family dynamic between the Everetts and the Peusters.
“What she had, I had, if she could give. Just warm-hearted, welcoming people,” Robertha Everett said.
“That’s true up and down the street,” added Peuster.
Reporting by Alex Goldstein, Fayetteville Observer / The Fayetteville Observer
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
