For one, the logistics of raising a boy alone were complicated. Showing him how to pee standing up: challenge. Explaining wet dreams: challenge. Giving tips on shaving, butt funk, and condoms: a test for the ages. Illuminating him on the inner-workings of menstruation—at age six!—was a treat. I’ll never forget the day he entered the bathroom without knocking, only to discover me in the middle of changing my pad. He almost passed out. “Calm down, boy,” I snapped when he started screaming. “I’m not dying. I told your ass to knock on the door, and you didn’t, so now you have to deal with this.” That bathroom break-in was quickly followed by an impromptu “birds and bees” conversation that I was not ready to give and he wasn’t ready to receive, but that had to go down anyway because he’d forced my hand.
The biggest test of all, though, was helping my son work through the anger that came from not having his father around. I never told Mark he couldn’t be in his son’s life; in fact, I welcomed and encouraged his presence. But when we broke up and went our separate ways, Mark first had to work on getting himself on a stronger emotional footing. My father played an important role in that; after the big fight that ended with Mark hitting me, my dad took my son’s father under his wing and schooled him on the value of controlling his emotions. He did that because he wanted Mark to be in his son’s life, and he knew that the only way that could happen was if my ex grew himself up a bit and learned how to express himself without the anger. In Mark, my father saw himself, and he deep-dived into helping Mark navigate around the same destructive land mines that nearly destroyed my father and could have easily obliterated his relationship with me. “You can’t spend your whole life walking around mad at the world,” my father recalled telling Mark repeatedly. “You have to be a positive example for your son, so he can be better than both of us. That’s what a good father wants for his child.”
Eventually, Mark got more involved in our son’s life. I’d moved to Los Angeles to pursue my career, but I would send Marcell to my father’s house for the summers so that they could have that father-son bond Marcell craved but couldn’t get while in California with me. Dad would have Marcell out in the backyard of his house in the suburbs, hunting frogs, making art projects in his metal workshop, play-fighting with makeshift swords they built with wrapping-paper rolls. Mark would join in on the fun, or he’d take Marcell for the afternoon to visit with his mom or his other children. At some point, Mark thought he’d gotten himself together enough to actually ask if our son could move back to DC to live with him and his girlfriend. It was a novel idea; a boy needs his daddy. I know this deep down in my soul. But I didn’t trust that Mark was ready to care for Marcell full-time. He was living with a woman I didn’t know, and his living and employment situation were still sketchy as far as I was concerned. “I’m not comfortable with that,” I said as gently as I could. “I mean, you don’t even have a landline. How am I supposed to send my son three thousand miles away from me and you don’t even have a landline? I’m just not comfortable with that.”
“Taraji, come on,” he insisted. “My mom is here, she can help out—”
“But Marcell is not her responsibility,” I interrupted. “He is my responsibility and yours.” Mark was upset, but he recognized that there was truth in what I was saying. Finally, he let it go.
• • •
Marcell and I went home to DC in 2002 for the holidays. We had our annual Christmas dinner at his mother’s house; all of his children were there, as were their mothers, and my friend Pam and her husband, Mark’s best friend. From the moment I walked in the door, something felt off. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but when Mark’s eyes met mine, I had a weird, dark feeling—call it a mother’s intuition. I was heartened, though, to see him interact with Marcell—to see the two of them connecting in the way only fathers and sons can. I even witnessed Mark parent Marcell as the two played tic-tac-toe at the dining room table. The game wasn’t going well; Marcell was yelling, upset that he’d lost several rounds in a row to his father. Mark put his hand on his shoulder and schooled him: “Let me tell you something, son,” he told Marcell. “Don’t you let anger control your life the way it did mine. Use your head, black man.”
What he was saying was practically word for word what my father had told Mark over the years as he struggled with his own anger. I’ll never forget the sound of Mark’s words or the look in his eyes as he talked to our son. Love was there.
That would be the last Christmas Marcell would see his father.
We left for Los Angeles right after the New Year, with Marcell settling back into school and me into work, our hearts full from the quality time we’d spent with our family. But only three weeks later, on January 25, 2003, I got an early-morning phone call from Mark’s mother that woke me out of my sleep. The second I heard her voice—the way she said my name and how her words shook in her throat—I knew Mark was gone.
“Mark was killed last night,” she said.
My heart stopped beating.
My first love, the father of my precious son, was gone from here—taken at the tender age of thirty-three. I wasn’t ready for him to go. None of us were. He had so much more living to do, so much more loving. But God had other plans. As I lay in my bed, crying and praying for Mark’s soul, my mind kept wandering back to the dream sequence in the movie Baby Boy. In the scene, Yvette, crying, bruised, and in the throes of sexual passion with Jody just moments after he punches her in the eye, imagines herself laughing with her son’s father, visiting him in prison, and then, dressed in black, standing hand in hand with her son as the two of them gaze at her first love’s body lying dead in a coffin. The connection was so powerful, particularly that scene; when we’d filmed it some three years earlier, I’d been hyperemotional, as the entire movie in general and the fight and dream sequence scenes in particular were unfolding in front of the cameras just as I was still processing my own personal drama with Mark and our volatile relationship. Watch the scene closely and you’ll see the physical manifestation of my anxiety; I’d lost at least ten pounds during the filming, mostly from the stress of acting out what I’d just lived through. My clothes look like they’re resting on a hanger, I’m so thin.
The first non–family member I called after Mark’s mom told me he’d died was John Singleton. “The dream came true,” I said, sobbing.
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“My son’s father was killed and I have to go to the funeral with my son.”
• • •
Marcell was nine when I took him by the hand, walked him to his father’s casket, and helped him say his final farewell. He was too young to understand the full implications of what was going on; all he knew was that he would never see his father again, and his mother was extremely upset. As I sat in the pew sobbing, Marcell, ever the comforter, ever my protector, rubbed my back, doing his best to soothe me. I wiped my tears as I listened to the choir sing Mark home, then turned toward Marcell to give him a reassuring look that I hoped would say, “Mommy is okay, and I appreciate you looking after me.” But when I looked in my son’s direction, something in his hand caught my attention: it was a beige rubber band, the same color, shape, and length of the rubber bands Mark, an office clerk, loved to play with. He used to fashion them into huge rubber band balls, and kept them all around him—at work, at his apartment, in the car.