Around the Way Girl Page 4
• • •
My dad didn’t let anything slide; he would call anyone on their bullshit—kid, spouse, friend, foe, it didn’t matter. I didn’t always appreciate my father’s voice, but I learned some valuable lessons from him about the importance of speaking my mind, no matter the consequence. If Boris Henson thought you were wrong, he’d tell you about yourself, straight talk, no chaser. That was my father: so real and raw, inappropriate and honest. Isn’t that how it should be? Wouldn’t you want the people you’re dealing with to come from that place? So many people are afraid to live in that space. My father wasn’t, though. From that, I learned to never, ever apologize for who I am—to never apologize for my journey. God gave it to me because He knew I could handle it. So much of what I learned from him, I apply to my profession.
My dad is the very essence of my Empire character, Cookie Lyon, the drug-selling, truth-telling, time-doing matriarch. Some of my best lines are ad libs drawn directly from the crazy things my father used to say. Give it up to Dad for that classic Cookie commentary about modern-day beauty in Empire season one: “You know I was never into wearing all them damn weaves,” Cookie snaps. “Girls walking around with their scalps smelling like goat ass.”
Beyond the direct quotes, Cookie is like my father in that she is the walking, breathing truth who blurts it out without so much as a fast blink, no matter how embarrassing that truth may be for the human on the receiving end of it. There’s a childlike innocence in that. Though the rest of us are trained to stop, think, and manipulate our answers when someone asks a question, Cookie refuses to do such a thing, precisely because of the journey she’s taken. She’s not just some loudmouth ghetto girl who served time and then came up on some cash; she’s so much more complex than that. Cookie’s survived seventeen years in a cage and she managed to get on the other side of that prison cell with her soul intact. The system couldn’t break her. That’s the superwoman power that she has: a voice that matches those gregarious outfits she wears. That is the superman power my father employed when, after losing his home and living out on the streets, he got himself together, found himself a job, and slowly rebuilt his life, finding God, a wife, and second daughter, a new home, and even a studio in which to practice his beloved metalworking. Nothing—no circumstance, no pitfall, no setback—could stop him from acknowledging his struggle and lifting his voice to let everyone know he was always the baddest man in the room, no matter the setback he was processing.
I come by my frankness honestly. I’m an extrovert by nature, and I have no problem being unapologetically bold, loud, foolish, and funny, and saying exactly what’s on my mind. I can think of only one stretch of time in my forty-five years when I shrunk around others: when I was in high school. Chalk that up to a bit of timidity around the fellas (and a smidge of developmentally appropriate adolescent angst). When it came to relationships with the opposite sex, I hid. Literally. Under oversized sweatshirts and long skirts that flowed down to my ankles. I didn’t want anyone—especially guys—to call attention to how bony and flat chested I was. I weighed one hundred pounds sopping wet, and I looked even thinner than that when I was standing next to my best friend, Tracie (who remains my best friend to this day). Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate with an hourglass shape that brought all the boys to the yard, Tracie had the perfect breasts and a round ass. There I was with my little flat chest and a little onion hiding in the folds of all that material I used to wear. The guys were always hot on her; they liked my personality and they thought I was cute, but that was about it. At least that’s what I told myself as I cocooned like a caterpillar beneath those baggy outfits. I’m sure now, with the vision and wisdom of a grown woman, that it wasn’t so much my skinny frame that kept guys away as it was the energy I was giving off. My lack of confidence when it came to attracting guys made me unapproachable, and so they didn’t bother to step to me.
But even as I hid my body, I wasn’t afraid to be me. Whether it was singing a song the loudest, making the most noise in a pom-pom girl competition cheer, or climbing into an ROTC uniform in junior high so that I could show out as part of the drill competition team, I never had a problem looking someone dead in the eye while I gave one thousand. Being “the realest” has its consequences, though. It’s one thing for me to pepper magazine interviews with a few curses or talk candidly about my romantic life and the fears I have raising an African American son in front of a roomful of entertainment journalists or on Facebook. It’s another thing when standing true affects your work or determines the roles you will even be allowed to audition for. My Washington, DC, accent, colloquialisms, and straight talk, both on-screen and off, have cost me a few roles because casting directors simply couldn’t visualize me in the role of the characters I lobbied to portray. I’ve always been different from Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, and Gabrielle Union, the actresses who’ve been the stars of some of the biggest black film classics, like Boyz n the Hood, Love & Basketball, Love Jones, and The Best Man. I am the sharp, jagged corner to their sleek, smooth lines—always have been, even before I accepted and starred in the role of Yvette, the wisecracking, volatile, thumb-sucking baby mama to the irresponsible hood boy, Jody, in Baby Boy.
Every audition would yield notes from casting directors who would write repeatedly, “She’s too street,” and “She’s too edgy,” even when I would turn myself inside out to pull off my goofiest, out-of-character best. Once, I flopped, literally, during an audition for a romantic comedy flick I wanted desperately to land. The script was hysterical; I read it and said to myself, Oh my God, I would kill this. The scene called for the character to scrape off barnacles from the bottom of a boat, so I ditched my street clothes and showed up to the audition drenched in props: I had flippers on my feet, goggles, a snorkel mask. I jumped feetfirst into that role, figuratively and literally—enough so that the casting directors were able to see my character, rather than me. I got a callback, too, but there was a special request in the notes: leave the props at home. “Too distracting,” they said. When I showed up for the second audition, however, the casting directors, it seemed, were distracted by me. Scribbled in the second round of audition notes were the words with which they would reject me for the role: “She’s too edgy.”
That word again.
That’s who I became in their eyes—that street girl who talks with that DC twang and is a little loud and “edgy.” That’s code for “black girl from the hood.” For the longest time, Hollywood used my real-life persona to lock me in the proverbial box. All I kept getting from the industry, the profession I adore and in which I’ve trained, were scripts for baby mamas and ghetto girls. That was true even of films with majority black casts, which sought to appeal to a broader cross section of moviegoers. Eleven years after my first big role in Baby Boy, Will Packer of Think Like a Man, the hit feature film based on Steve Harvey’s New York Times bestselling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, initially lobbied hard for me to play Candace, the single mom in love with a mama’s boy. When I refused her, they came back and asked me to play Meagan Good’s character, Mya, a sexy siren who struggles to forgo sleeping with her love interest for ninety days.
“I want to play Lauren,” I insisted. She was the pretty, upscale, savvy woman who let her laundry list of expectations for her significant other—he had to be rich, degreed, in a powerful position, handsome, and this close to perfect—get in the way of love with a struggling chef trying to scare up the money he needed to start his own restaurant. Basically, Lauren was as far away from Yvette as any role could get.
“We’re thinking we want a white woman for that role,” Will told me candidly.
“Why, in an all-black movie, would you make the most successful character a white woman?” I demanded. “You mean to tell me in this circle of friends, the only very successful person would be a white woman?”
“That’s the direction we’re going in,” Will reasoned. “We think it would be the best route for a diverse cast.”
“You
know what? Don’t call me until you offer me Lauren. I’m not interested in anything else.”
I was able to pull that card because I had the pedigree to back it up. But I spoke my mind because my father taught me that there is power in speaking truth to power. That I had to do this, and sometimes still do, speaks volumes about Hollywood. After all, I’m a trained character actress. With the right dialect coach, I can give you a London accent, I can give you Becky the Valley Girl all day long. I can pull it back and get corporate when I need to, too. But checks are usually attached to that. I have to get paid to be that person. That is not who I am. Catch me at the grocery store, in the park, at a get-together with my friends, or on my Instagram account, where I dialogue with my loyal fans, and my authentic self will come out. I haven’t changed much. I’m still so much like the girl I was in elementary school: confident and connected to my own voice. I can only be Taraji.
3
Drama
Every summer when the sun climbed high, when the blue and hot pinks crept into the mop-head flowers on the hydrangea bushes and the cicadas sang their songs, my mother, her fingers worn to the bone from scratching up the cash and the mental wherewithal she needed to feed, educate, protect, and discipline a kid on her own, would send me down to Scotland Neck, the tiny North Carolina town where her parents raised her and her siblings decades earlier, before they made the journey, one by one, from the Deep South up to my Aunt Janie’s house in DC in search of a new life, jobs, and refuge from the drag and degradation of Jim Crow. In the small three-bedroom house, my grandparents, former sharecroppers, lived a simple, country life, and for six weeks out of the year, I would settle in with them, doing what little city kids do in rural towns where the living is easy and the existence is pure: try my best to keep myself from dying of complete and utter boredom.
I would ride in the front seat of my mother’s car, kicking and screaming the entire four-hour drive down I-95. Every year, the conversation would be the same. “But all Grandma and Pop Pop do is watch soap operas all day,” I’d say, trying to reason with my mother, hoping that my pleas would compel her to turn the car around and head back north. Alas, my fits never worked. My mother would keep right on driving to Grandma’s house.
I didn’t understand it as a child, but once I had a baby of my own to raise without the help of his father, I understood why my mother would be so relieved when she dropped me off at her parents’ house and sped back down the highway: she was about to get a much-needed break from the unrelenting exhaustion and madness of doing it alone. The relief of knowing that while she worked her child was in good hands and safe in her parents’ house rather than sitting alone in an apartment in southeast DC, without grown-up supervision or protection, was everything to my mom. She missed me, of course. But for that part of the year, at least, my mom’s mind was free and clear.
• • •
Honestly, so was mine. It was in the fields of my grandparents’ land, after all, that I found my imagination. There was no PlayStation or Xbox, no Netflix or iPad or any of the other easy distractions today’s kids lean on for entertainment. Back then, you had to find your fun, and I was damn good at that. In my hands, a long, pointy stick would turn into an explorer’s staff, perfect for pushing back wildflowers and brush in search of worms and ladybugs; a huge rock would be a dinosaur’s toe, stomping through the land in search of pterodactyl eggs to serve at Sunday brunch for my best imaginary girlfriends. I especially loved when dusk fell over the sky; I’d push away from the dinner table, rush out the front door, and fly down the porch steps, chasing after the magical lights bouncing on the booties of the fireflies. I loved how they tickled my palms when I cupped them in my hands; I’d whisper a quick “sorry” to every one of them before I’d squeeze them between my fingers, carefully removing the fluorescent yellow kernel of jelly and adding it to the “diamond” ring and bracelet I’d fashion for whatever evening festivities I’d conjured in my mind. I complained about being cooped up in my grandparents’ house with no one but my baby cousins to play with, but quietly I had me a good time.
It was in a tiny pink room there where I found my greatest joy—where I found my desire for stardom. That was my Aunt Glenda’s old bedroom. She was long gone from there, but her childhood sleeping quarters remained the same—down to the framed picture of Isaac Hayes in his “Black Moses” getup, the one in which he’s rocking some badass dark shades and his bald head is draped in the hood of a long, striped robe—as if frozen in time before she moved out on her own. I’d stare at that picture while I fiddled with the small portable radio sitting next to it; if I turned the dial just so, I could pick up a faint signal from the R&B radio station in Raleigh. If one of my songs was on, I’d crank up that music and tuck myself right in front of the floor-length mirror hanging on the back of the bedroom door, singing into my makeshift microphone fashioned from rolled-up pieces of construction paper, and gyrating my hips as if I were center stage on Soul Train. I would get lost in the music, imagining that the little girl smiling and singing hard and staring back at me with those great big ol’ eyes was famous, like Diana Ross, Goldie Hawn, or Lucille Ball. Some days, the hypnotic pull of my own fantasy was so strong that nothing else in the world existed, not time, not space, not fireflies or Grandma or even my mother and the friends I was missing back home.
Falling into my dramatic trances had its setbacks, though, and it sometimes got me into big trouble, as was the case on one particular afternoon when I took a break from watching my little cousins Tamera and Cliff to dance in that mirror. My grandmother was in the kitchen, no doubt getting a solid lunch ready for her grandchildren, and I, the oldest of the bunch at age eight, was supposed to be babysitting Cliff, who was about four, and Tamera, who, at almost two, was still in diapers, just learning how to walk and prone to getting into things. I needed to take a little break from watching them, though, because Teena Marie’s funk hit “Square Biz” was blasting on that tinny radio, and I wanted to put on my show in the long mirror. “I’m talkin’ square biz to ya, babaaaay,” I sang out from the depths of my gut, completely unaware of the drama that was unfolding just behind me: Tamera getting out of pocket with a jar of burgundy nail polish. I didn’t catch on until my grandmother rushed in the room and popped me square on my ass.
“I told you to watch these children, Taraji!” she yelled, wrestling the nail polish from Tamera’s hands. “You so busy in here twisting in that mirror you didn’t even see your cousin painting all over my floor!”
Startled by the hit and the screaming, I spun around, and was shocked by what I saw. That nail polish was everywhere—all on the floor, the walls, in the baby’s mouth and her hair. I think you can still see a swoosh or two of that burgundy polish in the wood grain on the floor. I was mortified, having been called out for falling down on my duties. For the rest of the day, I felt absolutely horrible and was mildly terrified that something awful would happen to my baby cousin because she drank some of the polish. “I’m sorry, Grandma,” was all I could muster. My head was hanging so low. That didn’t stop me, however, from singing in that mirror. Best believe I was back at it the next day, this time with one eye on my moves, the other on my cousins.
A few years later, at around age twelve, I would be standing in that mirror again, this time mimicking my idol, Debbie Allen. In my adolescent world, the cast of Fame, the hit 1980 movie about the students and faculty at a New York City performing arts high school, were gods. Leroy, Coco, Bruno—I loved them all. When they later adapted the movie into a television series, every week, I would show them my devotion by parking myself in front of the television and clinging to every word they said, every note they sang, every dance move they made, all the drama that defined their big lives at their school. But it was Debbie Allen—she portrayed the dance teacher, Lydia Grant—who, for me, stole the movie with one scene, proving that there is no such thing as a small role. So naturally, when she was on television every week, I’d rush and finish up my homework and any ot
her chores my mother laid out for me so that I could be front and center when the opening sequence flashed across the screen, and then I’d stand there transfixed, waiting to see Debbie with that huge stick in her hand, stalking menacingly around her dance students, sneering her warning in her young charges’ faces. Mesmerized, I’d say the lines right along with her: “You want fame? Well fame costs! And right here is where you start paying—in sweat!”
You better believe I wore out that mirror at my grandmother’s house that summer, walking in circles with an imaginary stick in my hand, repeating the line with that same signature snarl. (Years later, in a season-two episode of Empire, I would pay homage to Debbie by channeling that moment in a scene in which I used a similar stick and attitude to gather together a three-member singing group looking to make a splash on Cookie’s burgeoning record label; I hope I inspired some acting hopefuls in the same way that Debbie inspired me.) Unlike my favorite actress at the time, I wasn’t saying that line to a bunch of impressionable kids when I was leaning into that mirror as a child; I was inhaling the sentiment for my own inspiration, because by then, I’d caught the acting bug so thoroughly, so completely, that I could not envision myself doing anything else but what my favorite actresses of the time were doing: making the masses laugh, relate, feel something. Entertainers like Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball teleported themselves into my living room every week, pulling out the most ludicrous actions and wittiest words to make me remember them. To want to be them. I can still feel the workout my abdomen got from the roaring belly laughs Lucille coaxed out of me with that I Love Lucy episode in which, at the start of her job at the candy factory, she stuffs her cheeks with chocolate in a desperate attempt to keep up with the conveyor belt of confections whizzing by her. Similarly, I can’t shake the look of disgust on Lucy’s face in the episode in which she rolls up her pant legs, steps into a barrel of grapes, and feels the fruit squishing between her toes. Watching Carol Burnett try desperately to smother her laughter in the middle of a funny scene in her variety show gave me an aspiration: to get lost in pretending to be someone else.