“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 other 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.
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.