Though she tried not to show it, living paycheck to paycheck got to her. It would show up on her face, mostly in the evenings when she’d sit at the kitchen table, hunched over a stack of bills, rubbing her temples and fighting back the tears when she’d see the words “Final Notice” and “Past Due” written in bright-red block letters at the top of her statements. I may have been too young to process the gravity of it all, but I was intuitive. My mother was hurting. I remember once when I was eleven years old, tiptoeing up to her in my pajamas and running my hand over her back. “Don’t cry about money, Mommy,” I implored her. “I’mma be rich one day.”
She just kept on keeping on, as they say. An excellent provider, she made sure I always had what I needed, and occasionally what I wanted, too. Still, I knew something as simple as a trip to Burger King or as extravagant as a fancy purse meant that she would have to go without something else, sometimes the basics. It was also made clear that when I was of age, there would be no sitting on my ass being lazy while my mother busted her behind at the department store. When I was too old for summer visits with my grandparents, when the late seventies gave way to the mid-eighties, I stayed in DC and worked, first with the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program when I was fourteen and fifteen, and then, when I was old enough for a work permit, in sales at Woodies. My mother was teaching me early on that if I really wanted something, I better be prepared to hustle hard to get it on my own.
Nothing could have been truer when it came time to get that college tuition together for Howard University. I’d gone to North Carolina A&T in part on the wings of a grant from a local youth-services organization. But the university was holding my transcripts hostage until I paid off the balance of what I owed for my year there. When I got back to DC, I had to hit hustle-hard mode to make the transfer. First order of business was to quickly nail down a gig and a place to stay, as by then my mother had moved to the suburbs with my cousin to cut back on expenses. I ended up moving into the basement of the house owned by my stepmom and father, who by then was on his way to getting himself together with a steady job of his own, plus a wife and my little sister and stepbrother to support. Once I was settled, I got a job at the Pentagon, paid off my debt to North Carolina A&T, and got down to the business of classes at Howard.
Still, I was restless and headstrong, two characteristics that certainly go hand in hand with being a hustler. If your game is tight, you get what you want, but once you do, you’re automatically on the hunt for something bigger, something better. My want once I got into Howard and got myself a couple of dollars was more independence. Asking my parents for rides back and forth to school, and coming home to find my nosy father rifling through my things, was more than I could handle. I’d fume and pace from wall to wall, whisper yelling and shaking my fist at the ceiling: “Why are you in the basement, in my space? Nothing down here concerns you!” Then I’d stomp away. “I’m twenty! Stay upstairs with Shawn and April. That’s whose stuff you need to be going through, not mine!”
I couldn’t get out of their house fast enough, and as soon as I amassed a critical amount of cash, I scored my first car in 1990—a used Nissan Pulsar, crisp white with a T-top. My mother’s sister’s husband, Uncle Jessie, sold it to me for six thousand dollars. You couldn’t tell me nothing. I drove straight from his house to Duke Ellington High School to surprise my best friend, Tracie, who worked there. The sun was high, my radio was bumping, and I was beeping the horn when she walked out. “Girl, it’s me!” I yelled, waving wildly and smiling so hard you could see my back teeth.
“Oh my God!” Tracie yelled as she took off running toward me. I jumped out of the car and posed on the hood like I was a star on the cover of Essence; Tracie ran her hand across the side panel as if she were fingering the finest silk. The two of us went completely nuts on adrenaline and excitement. On the weekends and during the summer when I wasn’t working, the only thing my parents saw of me was the taillight of my Pulsar. Tracie and I were either laid out on the beach in Ocean City, or running up I-95 to New York to see what we could get into there.
This had my mother feeling some kind of way because for so long, it’d been her and me. Now, with my newfound independence, she sensed that I was growing up—that I was pulling away from her control and making some decisions on my own. She was also upset because though I thought I was grown, I was still a twentysomething dumbass whose irresponsible ways were costing me some serious cash. My car, for instance, was an incredible money suck. More often than not, the car was booted by the city for some parking violation. I knew that street cleaning rules dictated I get my ass out of bed and move my car from one side of the street to the other, but if I’d drunk too much the night before, dragging myself out from under the covers wasn’t a viable option, so the Pulsar would take the hit: a boot on the wheel until payday, when I could scrape together enough cash to pay the ticket and have it removed. Some days when I didn’t have the money, I’d have to walk right past my car on the way to school, trying real hard not to look at that big yellow hunk of metal clipped to my wheel. The feeling was even worse on days when I was running late and my mother had to drive me to campus. Real talk: you’re not winning if you insist you’re grown but you’re looking at a boot on your ride from the front seat of your mom’s car.
• • •
That pile of tickets didn’t stop me from wanting more independence, and hustling harder to get it, though. I had my eyes on moving out of my father’s basement, and my little Pentagon check wasn’t cutting it, what with all the tickets and the debt I’d run up on my credit cards. Clothes. Gas for the Pulsar. Eating out. Renting hotel rooms in Ocean City, where I’d spend the weekends. More clothes. Spending all my money on ripping and running up and down the highway and trying to look good doing it. Soon enough, my balances crept so far north that keeping up with even the minimum payments was out of reach. Talk about Oscar-worthy performances? The bill collectors who called my house got the best of my earliest ones. “¿Qué?” I’d yell into the receiver, putting on my best Spanish accent to throw off the collectors who blew up my phone looking for their payments. “Taraji no live here!” This would hold them off for a little while, but really what I needed to both keep up with my bills and get out of my father’s house was a solid hustle, something bigger than that desk job with the government.
That’s when Taraji’s Basement Apartment Salon opened its doors to my fellow friends, cousins, aunts, fly girls at Howard, and whoever else had money, and I began hooking up wet sets and acrylic nails for extra cash. Twenty dollars could get you looking right for Saturday night; another twenty could get you a full set of acrylic nails, which would have cost double that in one of the local salons. I was good at it, too; so good, in fact, that had this acting thing not worked out, I’m sure I would have been someone’s cosmetologist somewhere, styling hair, doing makeup, and hooking up nails.
When I wasn’t supplying everyone’s beauty needs, I was talking drunk diners out of tips as a singing waitress on the Spirit of Washington, a dinner barge that floated down the Potomac River. I made a killing singing my signature song, Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary.” I’d start the song on a slow simmer, just like Tina, swaying to that deep bass while I worked over those “rolling on a river” lyrics. With every note, I could see the diners, swaying and leaning forward in their seats, just waiting, practically holding their breath for that explosive moment when the horns blared and I’d take off spinning, leaning into the mic and practically growling Tina’s song, with the National Harbor, the Capitol dome, and the Washington Monument twinkling in the distance. It was a great job for an artsy person with an outgoing personality and a thirst for the spotlight and an easy dollar. On a typical night, I pulled in one hundred dollars—a lot of money for a college student. Certainly enough to move out of my father’s basement and into my own apartment. The guests liked my voice just fine, but it was my swagger that got me paid: I could pour wine and, more important, connect with people.