Engineering.
I knew better. Truly I did. It took not much more than a semester and a grip of failed math tests for me to face that fact and come clean to myself: You’re not a mathematician. This is not where you’re supposed to be. I’d fail precalculus on one side of the campus and then, in a different building on the other side of the property, I’d get A’s writing monologues, dressing up in character, and performing my pieces in English classes. There was no fighting the gravitational pull of acting. Everything about me—the way I dressed, the way I expressed myself, the way I used my left brain instead of my right—betrayed my true desire to act. Sized up next to the kids in the sciences, I most certainly didn’t look like anybody’s mathematician. I fashioned my hair into a loose top-knot that fanned out across the crown of my head, and cropped my pants and bedazzled them with oversized, glittery buttons. “Girl, what you got on?” the geeks would ask, trying to make fun. But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter if I were wearing a tin man outfit, I was totally committed to being eclectic—different. Much more like the kids over in the English department—my tribe.
In other words, I was the circle trying to fit into the square peg. A girlfriend of mine from high school who went to North Carolina A&T and saw one of my class performances would tell me years later that everyone at our school knew I was in the wrong place. “I looked at you,” Candace said, “and I thought, She doesn’t belong here. She needs to be acting.”
It was my father who gave me the air I needed to fly out of the math department in North Carolina and into the theater department at Howard University, the prestigious historically black Washington, DC, school that boasts a roster of successful alumni who’ve gone on to make indelible marks in politics, the sciences, media, and, most notably for my purposes, the arts. I grew up practically in Howard’s backyard and had long admired the huge list of Hollywood stars who honed their craft in the classrooms of the university, including Ossie Davis, Debbie Allen, Phylicia Rashad, and so many others. All it took was one conversation with my dad to take a fresh look at studying there.
“I failed, Dad,” I told him over the phone after getting yet another F in math class. “I’ve never failed anything in my life.”
“Good,” he said simply.
“What do you mean, ‘good’?” I snapped. “I can’t afford these failing grades.”
My father was uncharacteristically quiet; he was thinking up just the right combination of words to make it plain. “You had to fall on your face to see that’s not what you were supposed to be doing,” he said finally. “Now get your ass back up to DC and enroll in Howard’s drama department. Do what you’re supposed to be doing.” As was my custom, I took his advice.
In other words, I was born for this. Built for it. I may not have that Oscar my father claimed for me all those years ago, but he was right: every move I’ve made since those days gyrating in my grandmother’s mirror came in divine order to bring me to this moment, to my dream of being an actress. If my father were alive today, he would call it like he saw it. “I told you, lil’ nigga. I knew you were going to be a star.”
4
Hustler
All my life, I’ve been a hustler. Where I come from, that’s what you did when you wanted that fresh pair of sneakers, or the gold necklace that spelled your name out in bubble-letter script, or that pack of cherry Now and Later candy your mother didn’t want to blow good money on, because every penny she wasted on crap you didn’t need meant not having the cash for the things that mattered: the light bill, gas for the car, food for the refrigerator, rent so you had a place to lay your head at night. Of course, there were plenty of kids around my way who hustled in the traditional sense of the word to get what their families couldn’t afford; there are back alleys and dark shadows all throughout southeast DC that tell that story. But my hustle wasn’t nearly as sinister or desperate. I was just really good at relieving the people around me of their cash so I could have a few dollars for my pocket—a skill I was practicing as early as eight years old back in 1978. If the lady down the hallway with all the kids had to run to the Safeway to pick up some eggs, cereal, and milk, I’d step right in. “Go ahead, I’ll watch the kids . . . for five dollars.” Somebody needed help getting bags up the stairs? I’d chip in for a dollar or two. Nobody had to worry about sweeping a porch, folding laundry, or cornrowing their daughter’s full head of hair while I was around: for a fee, I’d handle all that and toss in a smile, free of charge.
I brought that “get money” spirit with me everywhere I went because there was little money to spare in my house. I saw my single mother struggling to make ends meet on her salary from Woodward & Lothrop department store (back then, it was known as Woodies); she may have risen from the stockroom as a price tag attacher to her own office as divisional manager of distribution and logistics over the course of my childhood, but she was still raising a kid on her own in one of the most expensive cities in America, without any financial help from my father.
With a baby on her hip and not so much as a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of once she left my dad, my mother moved herself first into my father’s sisters’ house in northeast Washington, DC—the home my aunts Norma and Brenda inherited from my father’s parents after they moved to North Carolina—and then, later, into the nearby basement of my mom’s oldest brother, Buck, until she could save up enough money to get on her feet. Her family, firmly planted in the upper-middle class, was generous like that—always stepping in to help support us. Buck lived in a two-bedroom row-house duplex with his wife, Joyce, and their four children. The two boys shared one room, I shared a second bedroom with the oldest daughter, and the baby girl slept with her parents, while my mom made a home in the basement, sleeping on my twin-sized bed, the only furniture my dad would allow my mom to take from our apartment when she left him. My uncle didn’t charge my mom rent; all he wanted was for her to help with the utilities. That’s how close, loving, and caring my mom’s family was and still is, even more so today.
Still, becoming self-sufficient enough to find her own place was an uphill climb for my mother; securing a deposit, first and last month’s rent, and moving fees on a not-so-generous department store salary was no easy feat. And just when she thought she was getting somewhere, a pipe burst and flooded my uncle’s basement, water seeping into all of my mother’s treasured possessions; her furniture and clothes, which she always kept so pristine, now soggy and reeking of mildew, were completely ruined. She ended up moving upstairs and sleeping on the sofa, with the eight of us cooped up in that duplex for months. I know this much, though—I was so happy to be there because spending that much time with my cousins was like having siblings. Later, more havoc rained down on her belongings: my uncle’s damn dog chewed through her business shirts. At one point, she was so broke she couldn’t afford even to buy herself a pair of dress shoes; she wore the one pair she had to her job every day for an entire year.
Eventually, we moved into a garden-style apartment on Livingston Road, in southeast DC, right on the border of Oxon Hill, Maryland. My mom scratched and saved every penny she could and cashed in some savings bonds she’d been keeping for me to pay the first and second months’ rent plus the security deposit. When we moved in, we had nothing but that twin bedroom set my father let my mom take and the few clothes we had left after the flood. Both by mom and I slept on that twin bed until she woke up one too many times to find me lying on the floor. My Aunt Pat and her husband, Uncle Casper, gave my mom an extra full-size bed frame they had stored away, and my mom got herself credit approval for a mattress set that cost her $188. I don’t know how she can still remember that exact amount, but I’m guessing when you live through hard times and make it out, those things are forever embedded in your memory. Gradually, mom was able to purchase a used kitchen table and two chairs from Salvation Army and a living room set from a used furniture store nearby.