Charge that to the national conversation on parenting and motherhood, which has, for the longest time, relegated moms of color and single moms of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds to the media equivalent of the children’s table, where we’re all too often told to shut up while the “mainstream” moms who stuck to the rules—“first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage”—have their say on everything from work-life balance and stay-at-home mothering to mundane parenting matters, like teething, potty training, and getting your kid to sleep through the night. The only time anyone cares to hear our take on parenting, it seems, is when the conversation’s focus is our pathology: dropout rates, poverty, crime, fatherlessness, the list goes on. Sure, with time, the social ostracism attached to being a single mother has diminished to some extent; chalk that up to the increase in our numbers across race and class lines and the paparazzi lens that stays trained on movie stars and pop singers happily raising their children alone, with neither apology nor guilt. It helps, too, that the celebrity children of single moms make a point of telling the world that their mothers are saints whose hard work, love, dedication, and sacrifices saw them through. Hell, even presidents of the United States—four of them, in fact—were raised by single mothers, a detail that, in the presidential campaign and election of Barack Obama, was a point of pride, rather than a mark against him.
Nevertheless, mention that you’re a single mom, and all too many of us still have to cut through a thick, gristly layer of stigma before we’re given our proper due. I have to say, I’m consistently amazed at how personally people take it when a black single mom gets some shine for being a good mother to her children sans the ring. Everyone, black people included, reserves a special kind of vitriol for us single moms, calling us and our children out of our names, with absolutely no regard for the fact that we can be as smart, beautiful, and accomplished in our own right and as passionate about our babies and our roles as moms as any married mother. Each of us chose to have our babies. How, exactly, does the choice not to be married to the fathers of our children personally affect our critics? Are they any richer or poorer because of our decisions? Are their kids missing out on something because I didn’t marry the father of my child? Is the earth about to spin off its rotational axis because my household mirrors the households of more than 70 percent of black households in which children are being raised by a single parent? What I’m sure of is this: The grace and understanding for the familial choices of married women is a given. The humanity of single moms comes with asterisks, ridicule, and judgmental questions.
So I’ll set my personal record straight: my baby, Marcell Johnson, was most certainly the product of a loving relationship. Yes, it was dysfunctional, sure; his father and I were young, dumb, and clueless about how to make our partnership work. But we did love one another and were in love when I got pregnant with our son. Though Mark and I weren’t actively trying to have a baby together, Marcell is not a mistake. He was—and always will be—wanted.
I never saw my baby as a roadblock to my goals or a strike against my ability to do exactly what I planned to do with my life; I simply started planning and dreaming about ways I would get what I wanted out of life while I had a baby on my hip. Having my son gave me a laser-sharp focus. That is the miracle of single motherhood: it is not easy to raise a human being with a partner, but doing so alone requires a herculean effort that is all muscle and grit and sacrifice, built up with repetitive sets of sacrifice. Whatever you gain, whatever you earn, you give to your baby and you work triple hard to show your child—not anyone else—that moving forward, no matter how tiny the steps, is possible. This is a single mother’s love.
7
Going to Hollywood
I simply could not juggle caring for a newborn, finishing up my senior-year classes, and working, so something had to go. It couldn’t be my kid or my education, the one thing I was sure was going to open doors for me and, by extension, my baby. So I went to the social services office and struggled through the nastiness and contempt the social workers threw my way so that I could get the food stamps, rent subsidy, and baby items I needed to keep us fed and housed while I did what I had to do to graduate. I was not ashamed of this, not even for a second: I’d been working since age fourteen and, since age sixteen, paying taxes into the system, which was designed, in part, specifically to help families like mine sustain themselves while they did what they had to do to get back on their feet. Public assistance gave me the support my family needed. Sure enough I graduated—I walked across that stage that fine day in May 1995 in my cap and gown with Marcell in my arms to collect my bachelor’s degree in fine arts. Shortly after that fateful fight with Mark, I gave up my apartment in DC and moved into my father’s home in Clinton, Maryland, to save money on rent and continued to work on the crew of the Odyssey.
Now, even with the monumental education I got at Howard, it took me some time to pursue my passion. I still had big dreams of being a star, but reality deferred them. I was a single mother with a baby to support on my own and bills that weren’t going to pay themselves. I was pulling shifts and making enough money to get back on my feet again, and eventually I would stack enough cash to buy myself a little town house somewhere down the line and live a decent life raising my son. So focused was I on getting money and keeping up with my responsibilities that I actually lost focus on the bigger prize: acting took a backseat to the real-life hustle of single parenthood.
My father, who always saw bigger things for me, even when I didn’t immediately see them for myself, wanted me to have so much more. It was he who tapped me on the shoulder one day, pulled my face toward his, and ordered me to stop hustling backward. “What are you still doing here in Maryland?” he asked me one day while I sat at the kitchen table feeding Marcell. I was in my work clothes, ready to rush out for the evening shift, with an exclusive focus on squaring my baby away before I hit the door.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I got a job.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “But didn’t you graduate with a degree in acting? Ain’t no acting jobs in Maryland. How you expect to catch fish on dry land?”
I looked at him, alternately confused and a tad annoyed by the conversation, considering I had only a few more minutes before I needed to be on the other side of town. I absentmindedly looked at my watch, then focused on putting the last spoon of mashed potatoes and peas in my baby’s mouth. Daddy was undeterred. “You gotta go where the fish are,” he said, this time more urgently.
“What you talking about? Fish?” I asked, even more annoyed.
“The jobs! You gotta go where the jobs are! Los Angeles!” he said, exasperated. “You want acting jobs, but they’re not here in Maryland, they’re in Los Angeles. Where your cousins are.”
He wasn’t lying. At the time, my cousin Dee was in Los Angeles with her son, Bobby, who, inspired by my star turns at Howard, had become a child actor and rapper. Little Bobby would always come to see me in my plays, with his little lemon head perched on a seat right on the front row, feet all dangling and swinging above the floor. When I hit the stage, I would have to focus above his head because he would be sitting there, staring up, beaming at me, smitten and totally turned out by my acting—quite the sweet little distraction when I was trying to stay in character, but a distraction nonetheless. Still, he got enough of the acting bug to get good—good enough for a Maryland-based manager, Linda Townsend of Linda Townsend Management, to send him on an audition in Los Angeles, where he booked a gig on a UPN show called Minor Adjustments, starring fellow Howard University alum Wendy Raquel Robinson. Unbeknownst to me, Dad already had put in a call to Dee, seeing if she would be open to me moving into the two-bedroom apartment she and Bobby were staying in while the show’s season played out. She was on board. “I’m going to send her out there with you, then,” Dad told Dee.