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.
I didn’t win that night; I was a runner-up to Tracie, who ended up representing Washington, DC, in the national finals of the competition in California. She came in second there, but returned to our hometown having been thoroughly turned out by the glamour of Hollywood. “This is it, Taraji,” she said breathlessly when, finally, we were able to talk. “We have to get out of Ballou and go to Duke Ellington. That’s where we belong.”
• • •
I wish I could say that being admitted to the prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts, alma mater of such luminaries as the comedian Dave Chappelle, the opera singer Denyce Graves, and the actors Clifton Powell and Lamman Rucker, was as easy as saying, “Let’s go to school there,” but it wasn’t. There was an interview process and an audition, and while Tracie managed to secure a spot with her Hal Jackson competition monologue, mine, again, fell flat. I didn’t get accepted, and I was devastated—convinced that I simply didn’t have what it takes to be a star. I held on to that notion, too, giving up acting altogether, not just at Ballou, but later also at Oxon Hill High School, where I transferred after my mother moved our family across the DC border into a newer complex in Maryland. So shook was I by the loss that, though acting was still a passion of mine, I shelved the desire and focused instead on other things: fashion shows, sewing, even science and math after I took an educational detour into a science program at the University of the District of Columbia, where I learned how to solder electrical boards and build motion-sensor lights, transistor radios, and even a robot. I really liked the soldering part because it reminded me of what I’d seen my father do when he’d taken me along on a few of his jobs, installing wrought iron doors and windows on these huge houses out in the suburbs. I loved putting together the circuit boards in particular because it was like assembling a puzzle: you had your circuits, your LED, your conductors, and your energy, and you soldered it all together and it worked—easy. Somehow, in my brain, that translated into Yes, absolutely, you could do this for a living! I was so thoroughly sure that acting wasn’t in my cards that when it came time to apply for college, I chose to go to the Greensboro, North Carolina–based historically black college North Carolina A&T to study—get this—electrical engineering.