Around the Way Girl Page 5
This was a skill that I began to hone in an acting class at the Kennedy Center, right around the time Debbie Allen was on the big and small screen, turning me out. My father’s older sister, Norma, and my godmother, Brenda, paid for me to go to this particular weekend arts program—in part because they knew I was interested in becoming a performer, but also because my mother had to work weekends and needed a safe place to send me to while she put in her hours. It took a village to get me up on that stage, but only seconds for me to fall in love with everything about being there: the collaboration with my fellow students; the encouragement from the instructors; the excitement of creating stories, memorizing the lines, blocking our places on the sets we created; the smell of and the bigness of the room. I especially craved the attention I got—the applause extended to me when our performances were over. I’d look up and see my entire family, all the way in the back of the room, hooting and hollering my name as I took my bows. They were the perfect audience—egging me on and making me believe that being an actress was really possible. My father was my biggest cheerleader. He would say to me consistently and loudly, like a corner man hyping up a prizefighter in the heat of the ninth round, “Taraji, you already got the glory. You’ve already collected your Oscar. Right now you’re just going through the motions. Stay on your path. You’re the greatest actor alive. That’s how you walk. Walk in that.”
I recognize now how important this was to my development as an actress, even at that tender age. After all, the natural inclination of adults is to devalue the dreams of kids who express an interest in pursuing the arts. Let a kid show any kind of special aptitude for math or science, and the world will move mountains to put him in programs that stimulate his gift. The same goes for children who express even a remote interest in subjects society thinks will lead them toward careers we all tend to consider exceptional: doctor, lawyer, professor, engineer, or if it’s the arts, a classical musician and the like. Hardly anyone ever encourages the child who can’t sit still, or who runs her mouth a little too much or who lets her imagination soar, to do what is perfectly natural and right to her: consider acting, singing, dancing, or otherwise making a living performing. Even celebrities turn their kids away from the business, though they know firsthand the ins and outs of the trade and could help navigate their children’s experience. I get it: the road to Hollywood is littered with the bodies of child stars who couldn’t handle the success, money, and fame, people who had quite a time of making the hard transition from child darling to functioning adult. But it seems such a wasted opportunity, so incredibly unjust to steer a kid away from what makes his heart sing.
I thank God that when I was staring at that door to Hollywood, my father and, by extension, my family and some key players in my adolescent and teen years told me I could walk through it if I wanted; in some cases, they even jimmied the door open for me when I thought for sure that I couldn’t break the locks. I recognize the importance and especially the beauty in their telling me “You can.” This wasn’t something anyone told kids from around my way. For all too many, saying you wanted to be an actress was about as realistic as saying you wanted to go to the NBA, or that you were going to run a Fortune 500 company or be president of the United States. It was a pipe dream. Everyone was too busy hustling to be dreaming, or too scared of what lay outside their zip code to imagine ever having anything more than a stable government job and a couple dollars for the go-go clubs. I was surrounded by friends whose families had to hustle to try to make ends meet in their households, where fathers were absent and mothers were on public assistance, barely feeding the family and hardly scraping by. Jobs were scant, and what was available, mostly, was minimum wage—nothing that could sustain domestic stability, much less support dreams that were bigger than southeast DC. I don’t judge the mentality; I understand it and respect that my peers were trying to make a way out of no way in a system that was set up to see them fall hard and fail miserably. Nothing made this more apparent than my junior high school, the Friendship Educational Center.
• • •
Friendship was a school like no other I’d ever been to before. Up until then, I’d gone to a Catholic school where the education was fine, I guess, but the nuns believed in beating ass. One in particular, Sister Theresa with the short hair, big butt, and habit of talking through clenched teeth, was always beating my hands and smacking my butt with rulers and spoons and her bare hands for the smallest of infractions: talking out of turn, moving too slow, breathing. I learned the hard way how to be more restrained. Then, after my mom ran out of money for tuition, I got sent to a halfway decent public elementary school. More changes followed when I was old enough for junior high. Tracking down a decent school that was educationally superior and safe took a backseat to my mom’s need to have a daughter who was reasonably self-sufficient. By the time I was headed to the seventh grade, Mom, who was toiling hard as a manager at a local department store, Woodward & Lothrop, was depending on me to be able to wake myself up in the morning, get dressed, eat my breakfast, and hustle to school before the first bell rang—on my own. The school she enrolled me in was Friendship Educational Center, a junior high literally across the street from our apartment building.
Hours before my first day there, my mother helped me lay out my clothes, fixed me my favorite breakfast—I lived for her scrambled egg sandwiches—and handed me a key to the apartment. It was official: at age thirteen, I joined the ranks of the neighborhood latchkey kids. We were the children of working parents, who made very clear that the house key came with very specific responsibilities and rules: we had to go straight home after school, lock the door behind us, refrain from bringing over company, and stay put until a responsible adult got home or risk getting our behinds beat and everybody else who wasn’t supposed to be in the house unsupervised in major trouble. My mother was strict like that; she didn’t play, and I quickly learned to make a habit of doing exactly as she said.
I was well prepared for the responsibility that came with taking care of myself in my mother’s absence, but I did get into some trouble along the way. I’m still embarrassed by that one time when I did have some friends over while my mom was at work and we called a couple of those 1-900 sex hotline numbers we saw in some late-night commercials. I didn’t know calling those numbers would run up the phone bill; the lady in the ad said the calls were free. Free. What did I know? I was in junior high and trying to impress my friends. We were curious enough about sex at that age to wonder what we’d find on the other side of the line, and we thought calling the number and listening to the women talk dirty in the phone would be fun and funny—nothing more, nothing less. It was, too, until that phone bill came the next month. Four hundred dollars—that was the damage. The look in my mother’s eyes when she waved the papers in my face, yelling and screaming and demanding to know what I was thinking, tore my heart to shreds. I knew she was a struggling single mother living paycheck to paycheck, and my thoughtlessness made her cry. I can still hear the disappointment in her voice: “How dare you be so careless? Like, really, how could you do this to me?” she asked. She called the parents of every kid who had been on the phone with me and dimed them to their folks, too. It took quite some time to live that down with them and with my mother.
Ultimately, being home alone wasn’t my biggest problem. Friendship was. This school was ghetto; once you walked through the big metal front doors, you could practically feel the hate and broken dreams. We kids sat in this big, brown building with square bulletproof windows so itty-bitty no one could see out of them, in classrooms designed like office cubicles. The classrooms had no doors, paper-thin carpet, and literally no walls.
My first day there, I didn’t know what to make of either how the school was situated or the wild students that inhabited its space. The kids made quick work of making me, the new girl, feel like I didn’t belong. I deserved some of that. After all, within seconds of my arrival, I’d already broken one of the codes: I went to the first day of
school dressed up in a new outfit. I had worn floral culottes and a ruffle shirt that stretched up my neck, with a bowtie that matched the print in my pants, plus loafers with shiny pennies tucked in the slots across the top of the shoes. Apparently, I’d missed the memo that said, “Don’t be pressed to wear new clothes on day one.” More, with my hair curly and pushed to one side of my head, I looked like Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie—like an Amish girl who’d just been let out into the world for the first time. My teacher made it that much worse when she made me stand up in front of everybody and introduce myself. “Hi, um, I’m Taraji,” I said, nervously fiddling with my bow tie while everybody in the classroom laughed. By the time I slid back into my seat, I was wishing the floor would open up and swallow me and my desk whole. But a quick wave from a girl who’d turned around in her seat to give me a knowing look—one that said, “It’s going to be all right and we should totally be friends”—quickly made things better. “I’m Tracie,” she mouthed, her introduction coaxing a quick smile from my lips.
From that moment on, it was Tracie and me in Friendship, the worst school ever. Looking back on my time at Friendship now, as a grown woman who put her child through a patchwork of private schools that she handpicked based on how they fit her son’s learning style, I can honestly say, “Whoa, that shit was kinda fucked-up.” They didn’t care about us kids. It was as if they were setting us up to fail. All too many of the teachers were giving a halfhearted effort, the curriculum was substandard, there was no money for books and supplies, noise from the classes spilled over into each other because of the ridiculous design, and no one could get a handle on the student body, half of whom came from homes where crack cocaine had devastated their families. These kids had issues: parents who were addicts, siblings who, caught up in the drug game, were either experiencing or committing violence or being sent to prison for dealing. They were exhausted on both a physical and mental level. Kids were coming to school hungry, confused, angry. Shit was real for them. And they brought all of that to the makeshift classrooms at our school. Honestly, looking back, it resembled juvie hall. Thank goodness I never experienced that for real, but this seemed close to it.
Tracie and I survived it, though, because we were different—we had mothers who held down jobs and worked tirelessly to keep the madness of DC’s crack epidemic from crossing our thresholds, and Tracie was lucky, too, to have her father at home. Stability at home translated into the two of us excelling in class (I even made the honor roll), diving headfirst into extracurricular activities like the pom-pom team (Tracie and I were cocaptains), and being noticed by the few teachers who cared about us kids—teachers who could identify and nurture our passions. It also opened the door for both Tracie and me to pursue our passion for acting, even in a school that fell far short in programming that appealed to that particular desire. One teacher in particular, Mrs. Hawkins, saw enough good in Tracie and me that she recruited us to star in a junior high performance of Macbeth as part of a competition in a local Shakespeare festival. We played the witches and so thoroughly slayed our performances that we won an award for it—a huge deal considering our school wasn’t known for its dramatic pursuits. The recognition, and Mrs. Hawkins’s belief in us, only pushed Tracie and me to hunt for more opportunities to show off and show out. One summer, I even put all that dancing I’d done in front of the mirror back at my grandmother’s house in North Carolina to good use: Tracie and I performed DeBarge’s hit single “I Like It” in the school fashion show, and I hit that high note El DeBarge rides the song out on like there was nobody else watching—like the world consisted of only me, the stage, and that microphone. We killed it, and we were thirsty for more.
So good were our grades and our extracurricular accomplishments that by the end of eighth grade, both Tracie and I were invited to the math and science program for advanced students, a curriculum that would take us out of that godawful junior high school and place us in a specialized series of courses at our local high school. It turns out, though, I wasn’t ready for the transition. Maybe I was too young to be around all those high school students, or perhaps it was simply developmentally appropriate for me to act the donkey at that age, but when I got to Ballou High School, I was the good girl gone bad. I laid all my nerdy ways to the wayside, dumbed myself down, stepped away from acting, and quickly established myself as the class clown. I was still creative, but now it was in much more distracting, destructive ways, which helped me fit in with the rest of the student body at Ballou, a school in which a creative child like me did not belong. One teacher, Mrs. Esther, kept me from going off the deep end. She could have easily failed me in her English class, but instead, she’d laugh at my disruptive ways and embrace all my drama. Even when my mother sat in front of her in those little chairs for the parent-teacher conferences, Mrs. Esther had my back. That first meeting, I was sitting wide-eyed and nervous next to my mother, imagining all the terrible, painful ways she would put me in my grave for all the trouble I caused in English, when Mrs. Esther made clear she wasn’t interested in diming me. Rather than talk bad about me or tell the exact truth, she protected me. “You know,” she said, slowly, shifting her eyes in my direction then back at my mom, “she’s a talkative child. She talks a lot.” What she should have been saying was, “Look, your daughter is bad as shit. She comes to class late and when she gets here, she’s disruptive. She stands up and she blows her nose like a go-go band trumpet, and when I lock her out, she tries to heave-ho her way through the door. By the time she’s finished acting the clown, twenty solid minutes of instruction are wasted.”
She let me get away with that kind of behavior because she knew it came not from dire circumstances at home, but a lack of a creative outlet for my true passion. Rather than turn me in, she tried to turn me back on to acting, suggesting that Tracie and I compete in the local Hal Jackson’s Talented Teens competition, a popular pageant for girls that focused not only on beauty and comportment, but also, and most significantly, talent. I jumped at the opportunity, if only for the chance to stand up in front of an audience and show off my skills.
• • •
For weeks, Tracie and I worked on our monologues—dramatic scenes we created on our own and rehearsed together after school. I settled on a story about a young girl struggling with her identity: my main character was unpopular, unattractive, sexually abused, hated by her mother, ridiculed by her peers—a tragic, not-so-sophisticated precursor to Precious, the character created by Sapphire and brought to life in the Lee Daniels 2009 drama starring Gabourey Sidibe as a Harlem teen mom of two who, after escaping horrific incest and abuse at the hands of her parents, winds up HIV positive. All the other contestants went on that stage tap-dancing or playing their flutes and singing their happy songs, but I was going for drama. I wanted my monologue to be so moving and fierce and memorable that when I finished performing it, Hal Jackson himself would take me by my hand and introduce me around Hollywood as the next Oscar-winning star.
My biggest supporter was, of course, my dad. Though he was only just getting back on his own feet after scoring a modest-paying government gig, he found the time to drive me back and forth to rehearsals and even took me to buy my dress, a lovely, pastel-colored number we both agreed would make me stand out among the other contestants. “Oh my God, this is the sweetest thing ever!” the salesgirls exclaimed when my daddy walked through that storefront holding my hand, talking about “My baby’s going to be in a pageant. Make her look pretty.”
The night of the pageant, I wasn’t nervous at all. I flaunted the gown Daddy bought me in front of the judges. And when the announcer called my name for the talent contest, I walked from behind that curtain and traversed the stage to that microphone, with the spotlight shining in my eyes, and I performed the monologue I penned as though the very oxygen I breathed depended on its impact. I raised my voice when the moment suited it, and whispered when I was searching for a more quiet, meaningful response from the audience. They were with me
, too—I could feel the energy in the room. It was like a high. All eyes were on me, clinging to my every word. And then, I went in for the kill: I walked over to an imaginary window, said my final line, and twirled my body to the ground. As I lay there, my body splayed awkwardly across the floor and my eyes shut tight, the heaviness of the scene fell like a pall over the audience. It took them a beat to realize my character had committed suicide. Finally, a collective gasp rose in the air.
And then, silence.
After a lot of murmuring, I heard someone pounding his palms together, clapping furiously. “Yeah, baby!” my father was yelling from his seat in the middle of the theater. “That’s the way you do it! That was beautiful!”
It was like that moment in Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America when the singer Randy Watson, portrayed by Eddie, finishes croaking his tragically inept Las Vegas–style version of George Benson’s “Greatest Love of All,” then tries to bolster the audience’s weak applause by tossing the mic on the ground, stomping his feet, and yelling, “Sexual chocolate! Sexual! Chocolate!” My father meant well; he was going to support his baby to the end, even if the audience didn’t quite embrace the drama and suspense I brought to my piece. But damn, it was awkward.