She was the undercard fight, though. Breaking the news to my father? That was the main event. Of him, I was scared. He had gotten his act together. He was a born-again Christian by then, firm in his beliefs about what was moral, and I was about to tell him that his little girl was with child, thus confirming unequivocally that I was having premarital sex. Surely, I would incur a wrath of biblical proportions. Even my stepmother was scared for me.
“Did you tell Henson yet?” she asked when I called and broke the news.
“No,” I said meekly. “I’m telling you first.”
She paused. “Okay,” she said all slow. “Hold on, here you go.”
She handed the phone to my father and before he could get the receiver to his ear, he was asking, “What’s up? What’s up?” loud and obnoxious. He knew there was news.
“What’s up, Dad. I’m pregnant,” I said, quiet and slow.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m pregnant,” I said again, this time more clearly.
Dad was silent, no doubt letting the news sink in. But only for a beat. “Praise God,” he yelled into the receiver. “Praise God! That’s a blessing, baby! I’m coming to take you to breakfast. Let’s celebrate!”
No more than a half hour later, he was at my doorstep, grinning and grabbing my hand and tucking me into the front seat of his pickup truck. We ended up at McDonald’s; I sat across from him with my pregnant-lady appetite and that big breakfast special—the one with the pancakes, eggs, and sausage. And as I stuffed my face, Daddy spoke good things into me. “Let me tell you something,” he said, leaning in. “Hold your head up high. A baby is a blessing. This is going to be your strength right here. It ain’t gonna stop you.”
He knew like I knew that God doesn’t make mistakes and my son was put into my life at that specific moment for a reason. He was right: every moment with my baby in my belly made me stronger and more focused. I was exactly what I told my mother I would be: a happy, fat, pregnant woman who got salty only when she was hungry. I didn’t have morning sickness. My hair was thick, beautiful, and long. I got around campus to every one of my classes all winter long, without missing so much as a lecture or an assignment. I didn’t consider it hard, it just was what it was. I got acclimated and refused to treat my pregnancy as though it were an obstacle. I was boisterous and in-your-face with it. Of course, there were haters and naysayers sneaking looks at my belly and whispering, “Taraji’s pregnant,” and praying for my downfall. They thought I would stop. Little did they know, I was just getting started.
The first person I made this clear to was my drama professor Mike Malone. I marched my fat ass right up to him one afternoon and called his name like only I could.
“Oh God,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. He always did that when he saw me coming; he used to tell me all the time that I reminded him of my idol, Debbie Allen, with whom he was close. I was a spitfire, he’d say, just like her. “What do you want?”
“Look here: don’t you bench me because I’m pregnant,” I said through clenched teeth, my belly poking through my T-shirt. “Just because I’m fat doesn’t mean anything.”
And when auditions came for a play Mr. Malone was directing called E Man, I waddled my fat ass in there and sang the hell out of the audition song and did the choreography, big belly and all, and then I leaned into my right hip and looked at him dead in the eye.
Mr. Malone gave me that part, but not out of pity. I earned it. The play was about a man’s attributes and all the personalities attached to them, each of which came to life. I played his cheating wife, and Mr. Malone switched up the part a bit so that my pregnancy made sense: under the rewrite, my character was supposed to be pregnant and unsure of whether it was her husband or her side piece who’d fathered the child. I was doing choreography on that stage and climbing up ladders and doing everything a nonpregnant person would have done, so much so that people were convinced that I was wearing a pregnancy pillow to get through it all. “How are you doing that?” they kept asking. “It looks like you’re pregnant for real.”
“I am,” I’d say, and keep right on moving.
Nobody gave me grief after that, because I didn’t give anyone a reason to think for even a second that I couldn’t handle the work that acting involves, the academics, and the pregnancy. My core group of friends—artsy folk who had nothing but love in their hearts—had my back, and that’s all that mattered to me. That’s all I ever required—support for my journey.
• • •
I went into labor on Mother’s Day, just after Mark took our mothers and me to dinner. I’m at least 95 percent positive I ate my way into the contractions. The whole time I was stuffing my face, Mark was clowning with me like he always did, calling me a beached whale and a few other things that had me cackling and feeling good. I swear, all that teasing is the reason why Marcell came out looking just like his daddy; they’ve got the same head and eyes, the same thick, hard, leathery hands. Marcell is Mark’s boy, indeed. And Mark was so excited to be his father. He was Johnny-on-the-spot when it came time to beat it over to Presbyterian Hospital in Washington, DC, just blocks from Catholic University; it was he who helped me into the wheelchair and rushed me through the halls into the emergency room. My God, he was so excited and nervous, he was bumping me all into the walls. “Calm down, dammit, you’re going to make me have the baby right here in this chair!” I yelled after he pushed me right into a wall, too clumsy with excitement to steer the damn thing.
He was equally antsy in the labor and delivery room, as was my entire entourage of family and friends who came to witness my son’s birth. Mark alternately celebrated with his boys in the hospital parking lot and in the room with me, where he did everything from read the newspaper to catnap. And when I took to the hallway to walk through the labor pains, he and my parents led the pack. Every time I had a contraction, I would stop and the group would stop, too, and stare at me, and then when the pain subsided and I could see something other than stars, I’d walk again and they would, too. We were causing such a ruckus that at some point, one of the nurses came out and let us have it. “You know there are other people giving birth here,” she said, huffing. “You can’t have the whole second floor!”
She didn’t have any more problems out of us when it came time to push, though. Mark was front and center, with the camera to his eye, aimed at the miracle revealing himself on the delivery table. When Marcell finally made his big debut, Mark lay on top of me and cried tears so joyous, so infectious, everyone else in the room fell out in tears, too. “You gave me a son,” he said, in complete euphoria as our baby, wrapped in a bundle of blue just like in my dream, nuzzled against my chest.
It was beautiful, and it stayed that way for a while, too; Mark was an attentive dad in the beginning, picking up and dropping off the baby while I took my classes and went to work, making sure I had what I needed to juggle the demands of both school and my job while parenting a newborn. We were doing exactly what I’d envisioned for us: we were a family, and I was holding us down while helping Mark see that life could be good if we worked together.