Around the Way Girl Read online

  Now when I say this to her—when I extend the credit she is due—she shrugs it off, but it is the truth. She stands back and looks in amazement at all that I do: balancing a demanding career with raising my son on my own, and all the while squeezing in some semblance of a personal life. But what I do is not magical, or, in my opinion, unique. All this drive, all this passion, all this get to it and get it done all up in my bones, I get it from my mama. She set up the goalposts and showed me in word and in deed that no matter what lies in the road ahead of me, fear is utterly useless. This she had to do because she was a single mother, heading our family of two in a neighborhood in southeast DC that, when we stepped outside the cocooned paradise she created, replete with my very own room and everything I needed and even some of what I wanted, wasn’t the safest place for a woman and her young charge. When she wasn’t battling my father, she was battling the streets—literally.

  The parking lot was where she did her fighting, or, more appropriately, where she defended herself. It was a trap, really: the parking lot, set in a U-shaped valley between the two large apartment buildings that made up our complex, was always dark, and each entrance was flanked by steps on one side and a laundry room and trash room on the other, neither of which had doors or lights. It was the perfect setup for a thief to knock someone over the head and take all she had, and that’s exactly what happened to my mother twice, both times in front of me.

  The first time she was robbed, I was six years old. Until that very moment, I hadn’t a care in the world. It was late October in 1976, on one of those warm Indian summer nights, and I was floating high, strutting between my mom and my friend from first grade, who, on this rare occasion, had been invited to sleep over at our place. My mother went all out for me, even taking us out for hamburgers and fries at McDonald’s, an uncommon treat for us back in those days when money was tight and eating out, even at a fast-food restaurant, was a luxury. Though I was living in one of the most troubled areas of a city in which poverty and hopelessness made neighbor prey on neighbor, I hadn’t experienced anything to cause me concern. With my mother, I felt protected, mainly because she always made a way out of no way for me. Because of her, our little family had stability: we never got put out of our place, neither the power nor the water was ever shut off because of an inability to pay the bill, we were never hungry, Christmas was always bomb. I lived for the oversells at Woodward & Lorthrop department store—those exclusive sales when merchandise the store couldn’t move was offered to employees for deep discounts. I was fly in high school: Guess jeans on my behind and Coach bags on my shoulders. I still have a beautiful silverware set Mom bought for me when I moved into my first apartment; the only time I pull it out is for special occasions, and when I do, I can’t help but think about her and the sacrifices she made to make life beautiful. Knuckles raw, back sore, eyes burning, mind numb, she made it work. Made it so that even in the middle of the hood, where crime ran rampant and there were a lot of folks who had little and lived hard, her daughter found paradise in our little southeast DC apartment. Once I crossed the threshold into the home my mother made for the two of us, I felt like I was arriving at a grand mansion. In her typically selfless form, rather than buy herself a bureau for her clothes or a sofa on which she could relax after a long, hard day’s work, she bought me a gorgeous Elizabethan bedroom set, which she outfitted with a Holly Hobbie comforter and a Strawberry Shortcake doll and posters. It was so lavish that for the longest time, I didn’t know we lived in the hood or that we were struggling.

  On that fateful night of the first robbery, it was to this paradise that my friend and I were going to eat our McDonald’s, play dolls, color, and maybe watch a little television, before climbing under the covers to talk and giggle and fight sleep until sleep won out. We were skipping along ahead of my mother in the parking lot, making our way to the main entrance of the building, when all of a sudden, a man wearing a stocking cap over his face ran up behind us. My friend and I were too busy talking and laughing and doing what six-year-olds do when they’re excited about a sleepover to understand exactly what was going on. If anything, I was thrown off when my mother giggled, thinking it was a man who was sweet on her, playing a trick. “Oh, George, why don’t you stop playing!” she said, laughing, when the man grabbed her.

  “Give me your purse, bitch,” he snarled, his breath hot on her cheek. The metal of the gun pressed against her temple.

  To force her to comply and show her he meant business, he grabbed my mother’s hair, jerking her head so hard that she gave a little scream and dropped the fast food and sodas. All three of us froze when the cups crashed to the pavement, splashing liquid at our feet. Terrified, my mother pushed her purse into the thug’s hands. “You got any more money on you?” he yelled.

  “No,” my mother said, shaking.

  He ordered us to walk back to the car, and then he took off running. Once she thought it was safe, my mother hurried me and my friend up the stairs and called to a neighbor, who’d come down to empty his trash. He took us to his apartment and called the police, and let us stay with him and his son while the cops asked my mother questions and went looking for the thief. They came up with nothing, which only made my mother more scared. When she searched her pockets for her keys, she found a twenty she’d stuffed there after ordering our food and freaked out even more. “What if he searched me and found out I was lying about not having any more money on me?” she asked. The thought of what he could have done to her or us girls gave her chills. While desperately trying to keep her composure, she arranged to swap cars with her sister and change the locks on our apartment door, seeing as the thief had taken off with everything, including her wallet and the spare keys to our entire life—the apartment, our car, my mom’s office. It would be close to an hour before we got back into our place, but the tension was still thick. Though I was only six and barely aware of the mental, emotional, and physical price my mother was paying for the attack, I knew something was wrong, and, even as I played with my friend on the living room floor, I had my eyes locked on my mother, watching her every move. I held my breath, terrified when I saw her reach into her hair, beautiful, long, thick, Farrah Fawcett–feathery and lush, and pull out a clump that the thief had tugged from her scalp. As she dropped her hair onto the table, the tears finally fell. Though on occasion I would see her rub her temples trying to figure out how to pay the bills and the rent so that we weren’t put out or left in the dark, this would be the first time I ever saw my mother cry.

  We never talked about that moment; my mother wasn’t the type of parent who unpacked the gravity of a situation like that for a child’s understanding. It happened. Life went on. She soldiered on, and, by extension, because I was her daughter and it was her sole duty to protect, raise, and move in lockstep with me, I did, too. I was scared of the dark for the longest time, but she made me feel safe, and so in my first-grade mind, I was safe. That was the energy she extended to me—the energy she had to employ because my father was not there to offer protection.

  Years later, when I was in junior high, it happened again—same parking lot, same apartment building, same circumstances. This time, our city was on the brink of the crack epidemic, and junkies, desperate to score their next high, were out in full force like the zombie apocalypse, preying on anyone within their reach. It was midnight and we were on our way to the car, heading out to pick up a friend whose ride had broken down. Mom always put me in the car first, so I was tucked away in the front seat when a man ran up behind her as she made her way to the driver’s side. As she opened her door, the man punched her in the eye—so hard that years later, when she accidentally got hit in the same eye playing softball with her coworkers, her retina tore. “Please,” my mother begged the thief as he tugged at the door between them, reaching for her purse, “take my money. Take all of it. Just leave me my purse.”

  “Shut up, bitch!” he yelled as he wrestled my mother’s purse out of her hands and ran off.

  I wa
s in the passenger seat, screaming, “No, no, no! Not again!” But my howling was useless. My mother got in the car, closed the door, turned the key, and, without saying a word, started driving in dead silence. She was trying her best to be strong, but with every passing minute, her eye stretched and ballooned and turned various shades of black and blue. In the other unmolested eye, a single tear slowly traced a wet track down her cheek, across her chin, and down her neck.

  This was the only home we had. Though she was working her way out of the hole my dad’s absence created—she was toiling from sunup to sundown—her salary would take her only so far. It would be perfectly reasonable to think that the two of us, in that moment, in that space in which we’d been violated twice, would be absolutely terrified. Broken. But that’s not how it works—at least not for Bernice Gordon. Rather than melt, she once again soldiered on, no doubt because she had no other choice, but I know she also did it because her daughter’s life depended on her ability to keep moving, despite the obstacles, despite the adversity, despite what anyone thought about her. She refused to disappear into a cave. She was more cautious, of course; while we lived in that apartment, she made sure from then on that whenever we were leaving or entering the building, someone was around to meet and walk with us. But she never, ever gave me cause to panic. What a profound lesson to learn as I began my own, long journey toward becoming a woman, a lover, a single mother, and a human moving through the world. My mother always said I got all my strength from my father, but I know so much better than that, even if she doesn’t realize or refuses to acknowledge it: she taught me, by leading her life, how to be. My father may have put the fire in my heart, but my mother taught it how to beat. They both showed me, by example, how to be fearless.

  • • •

  Even today, when I taste fear on my tongue, it’s my parents’ example I draw on to help me swallow it whole. Nothing could have been truer than when my manager, Vincent Cirrincione, floated the script for Empire my way. I was scared to death of Cookie. After all, I’d been trying to escape the typecasting that had come from starring as the loud-mouthed, around-the-way baby mama Yvette, in John Singleton’s hit 2001 big-screen hood tale, Baby Boy. Yet no matter how hard I tried to climb out of it, I’d been stuck in the muck and mire of screenplays that tried to resurrect that character. The only roles casting directors could see for me were ones that were “edgy” (read: ghetto). Now, after stints on three television shows—one as a police officer in Lifetime’s The Division, one as a fierce litigator on ABC’s Boston Legal, one as a detective in CBS’s hugely popular Person of Interest—an Oscar nod for my role as the adoptive mother of a reverse-aging white child in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and box office gold in the Think Like a Man films, in which I played a businesswoman, I had finally managed to shake myself out of the exclusively stereotypical roles Hollywood producers envisioned for me. I wanted no part of a loud, wisecracking, gaudy ex-con fresh out of prison from a seventeen-year bid on a drug conviction—especially on a television show to which I’d have to commit all of my time. After being locked into fifty-five episodes of Person of Interest, going back to the grueling, stifling schedule of television production wasn’t even a consideration.

  “Leave me alone with this one,” I told Vince over the phone during one of the many calls he made, begging me to read the Empire script. I’d been back in Los Angeles only for a short while, and I was preparing for a starring role in the play Above the Fold at the Pasadena Playhouse, biding my time until another film project came along. “Where’s my brilliant film script? I don’t care about this mess. I don’t want to do it.” Vince knew me well—he knew how no-nonsense and in-your-face I could be. He’d learned that the first time I met him, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles and went on a frenzied but exhaustive search for an agent. A friend arranged my meeting with Vince, but he made it clear he wasn’t looking for new clients; at the time, he already had a power roster, including Halle Berry, and taking a chance on a young, inexperienced black actress at a time when roles for actresses who looked like me were few and far between wasn’t a priority. But I got to him by standing in front of that man and being regular ol’ Taraji from southeast DC, with my slightly country drawl and one fingernail painted bright red.

  “What’s with the fingernail?” he asked.

  I looked down at my hand absentmindedly and shrugged. “I forgot to take the paint off,” I said matter-of-factly.

  After that, Vince launched questions at me in rapid-fire succession, and I answered each of them easily and truthfully, hiding nothing. I told him how I’d studied acting at Howard and got pregnant in my junior year—how I came to Los Angeles with my baby and only seven hundred dollars to my name, but a passion for my craft as wide as the Pacific.

  “Where’s your son?” he asked when, finally, I took a breath.

  “He’s with the babysitter.”

  “So you brought him out here with you?” he asked, surprised. “Usually actors leave the kids with family until they get on their feet in this business.”

  “No, he’s right here with me,” I said. “He’s where he belongs.”

  Vince stared at me for a moment, no doubt trying to figure me out. Finally, he ordered me to stand. “Let me take a look at you.”

  I stood, uncomfortable for the first time in his presence. What the hell is this, a slave market? I asked myself as I turned awkwardly. Now I understand that he was simply trying to give me a taste of what it would be like to audition, but I wasn’t feeling it in that moment. Annoyed, I snapped at Vince when he began talking again. “What did you say? You’re talking too fast. My daddy told me not to trust a person who talks too fast.”

  Vince smirked. “You’re a spunky one, aren’t you?” he said. After another beat, he said what I wanted to hear. “Okay, you can do two monologues for me.” But, he warned, “you better knock my socks off.”

  A week later, there I was, standing in his office, reciting for my life. I came prepared with a serious monologue and a funny one, and hit him hard with my presentation, a scene from Down in the Delta. When I finished, I’d barely taken a breath before Vince burst into a wide grin.

  “I want you,” he said. “You were great. You were great, kid. I want you.”

  I got up the nerve to ask slyly, “So, did I knock your socks off?”

  “Yes, you did,” Vince said. “That was amazing.” Then he let out a hearty laugh as he reached down, unlaced his shoes, and gave me his socks. I still have his olive-green socks somewhere—eighteen years after he agreed to represent me. Ours is a relationship built on trust, mutual admiration, and profound respect, and by now we know each other as well as we know ourselves, meaning Vince knows all the ways to turn my fast no into a slow yes. Which explains why he kept shoving that Empire script in my face.

  “I’m telling you, you gotta read this one. You’ll knock this out of the ballpark,” Vince insisted.

  “I hate TV. No.”

  Vince sent me the script anyway, and one night after a fully busy day working on the play, I sat in my living room and picked it up, hoping that reading it would beg off my manager so that he could focus on something else—anything else—instead of Cookie Lyon, the loud-talking matriarch of a record label dynasty. I read the synopsis and sucked my teeth. Hip-hop? Please. Stupid, corny as hell, I said to myself as I flipped through the script. Then I got to the page when Cookie first gets out of prison. I was licking my pointer finger to flip through the pages even faster when I got to the part where Cookie’s husband, Lucious Lyon, tosses his young, effeminate son in the metal trash can, and I really lost it when Cookie, fresh out of prison, visited her youngest son for the first time, only to end the scene using a broom to beat the hell out of him for calling her a bitch. “What?!” I screamed, alternately excited by the prospects but also wary of its implications: What kind of image is this for black people? How can anybody justify beaming a murdering, thieving, drug-dealing family into the living rooms of a nation grappling with
and floundering over race? What would people think of me playing this violent, drug-dealing felon? Will the NAACP come for my neck over this? Though I saw Cookie’s heart beating all over the pages, I couldn’t see myself playing her.

  I called Vince on his cell. “I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I just don’t see the value for me. I’ve done this before: she’s street, she’s hood. I don’t need to do this again.”

  “Taraji, just think about it,” Vince said. “Can you do that for me? Read it again and think about it.”

  I promised him I would, and a few days later, I did. As was the case the first time, I was hooked, but instead of my brain judging the characters and calculating how they’d be received by the audience, my gut kicked in: I felt the fear. It wasn’t about Cookie or how the television viewers would view her; it was about how they and all the casting directors who’d kept me tucked in that “she’s too edgy” box would see me. I simply did not want to go back to the bottom of that pool, where the weight of stereotype, judgment, and typecasting could drown my career. Drown me.

  It is precisely then that the courage, experience, and trust in myself that my father had ingrained in me empowered me to make the decision to kick fear in the ass. The surest way to do that was to use all that I’d learned along my journey as an actress to figure out how to breathe nuance into Cookie. I understood her. But how would I get everyone else to get her, too?

  I decided that, like my father, like my mother, Cookie would be courageous. I would build a backstory for her so airtight, so sympathetic, that viewers and critics alike would see past her troubles and straight to her heart. Think about it: in the real world, people will empathize with the coldest, most calculating evildoer imaginable if he’s got a story to tell. A man could be up for the death penalty for killing a dozen children, but if someone gets on the stand and testifies to his backstory—he was raped as a child and tossed in the streets by his no-good parents, in and out of group homes where he was bullied and tortured by kids much worse than him—the jury might be more inclined to give him life in prison instead of the needle. That’s how, I decided, I needed to handle Cookie. I created a backstory rooted in courage and her love for her family. It took both—courage and love—for her to deal drugs to make sure her children were fed and the lights stayed on while she supported her husband’s dream of becoming a rap star; it took both for her to go to prison for Lucious, rather than have both of them locked up and their babies left out in the street. It is love and courage, too, that makes her want to succeed in her epic battle to wrest control of the family empire from her devious husband: she doesn’t want the business for herself; she wants to leave it as a legacy for her sons.