Marcell wasn’t on the same page this one particular night. I’d come home from an event, gone only about three hours, only to find my son knocked out in his room and the entire house smelling like weed. I yanked his ass off the bed. “I thought we had a promise!” I yelled. “I thought you weren’t smoking anymore!”
“I’m not,” he said, groggily.
I’d already spotted a bag of weed sitting on his sink counter—meaning that not only was he breaking that promise, but also lying to my face. I snatched the bag and waved it in front of him. “Well what is this?” I demanded.
At my wits’ end, I did only what, in that moment, I could think to do. “You don’t want to act right? Get out.” I handed him his cell phone. “Call whoever’s house and tell them to come get you.”
Marcell dialed someone’s number, but whoever it was didn’t pick up. He left at least two messages before I demanded he hand his phone over. “Where your friends now? Oh, nobody’s picking up? You see who your only ally is?”
We argued some more until he got so angry he reared up at me like he was going to strike. “You don’t want to do that, son. See, you not hood. You not ’bout that life. Hit me. Please hit me so I can have a reason to take your ass out!” Tears streaming down his face, Marcell stood right there and took that, because he knew hitting me would be the death of him. Ghetto Betty—my alter ego—is unpredictable, and neither of us can promise you what’s going to happen when she comes all the way out. “Now where’s that ride?”
“It’ll be here!”
“Oh, it’s coming? Fine. Get your ass out.” And with that, I pushed Marcell out the door and locked it.
There we were, the two of us on either side of the door, a world away from one another as we both struggled our way through this new phase in our relationship. He was on the cusp of manhood, trying to get his shit together, and I was in the throes of mothering an adult, understanding it was time to loosen the reins but unable to let go of my hold. He was outside—quiet, seething. I was inside, quiet, seething. Soon enough, taillights were shining in my window, and my son was gone. I had his phone, thus no way of contacting him, and because it was locked, I couldn’t call any of his friends to check up on him and make sure he was okay. I sat up all night, racked with worry.
The next day, Marcell came home, head hung low—broken. He had no idea I had it in me to put him out, but he understood it when I broke it down to him. “You’re not going to be here driving me crazy,” I said calmly as we sat at the dining room table, trying to work out our issues. “I’m not going to die of worry over you when I know I’ve done my job. You have no other choice but to get it together or die trying. I really do not know what else to tell you besides that.”
• • •
Raising Marcell has been a journey, one that I loved him through. With prayer, therapy, candid talk, and love, he came through on the other side. My son is smiling again. The life is back in his eyes. He’s an aspiring rapper, producer, and music engineer, with a keen sense of self, and he pours into his music all the memories, passion, and sentiment he has about his experiences growing up as a black male without a father, and the dynamics of being one of only a handful of black boys in an all-white school. This is pain and isolation that many people know—no matter their color, background, or economic status—and rather than stew in it, Marcell is using all that creativity running through his DNA to lift his voice and let people who can identify with his struggle know that they’re not alone and that this, too, shall pass.
He’s wearing his maturity and growth on his sleeve now. I took Marcell with me to Monte Carlo recently, and while I was working at an appearance with the producers and cast of Empire, my son gravitated toward the men and started kicking it with the show’s creator, Danny Strong, Terrence Howard, and Webb, a man on Terrence’s security team. Next thing I knew, they were huddling together, having “man talk.” When they were finished, Terrence, Danny, and Webb gave me the rundown. “Man,” Danny said. “You did a good job. He’s got his head on right.”
That came from me fighting for my child. That was the advice I got from Mark, my makeup artist on the set of The Division. I sat in his chair one morning with the weight of the world on my shoulders, crying so hard over Marcell that Mark had to stop applying my foundation until I pulled it together. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked at my reflection in the mirror. What he said to me, I’ll never forget: “Don’t ever give up on him.”
There were times when I wanted to, believe me. If I had a dollar for every time I called my friend Pam and her husband, Jerry, to tell them I was packing Marcell’s clothes and sending him their way, I could have retired a decade ago. But I hung in there, and so did my son. And now he gets it. The cards he writes on special occasions confirm what I know to be true. “Mom, you loved me when I didn’t want to love myself.”
It’s something when your child finally understands.
9
Breathing Life into Art
Paradoxically, miraculously, it was Daddy’s death that helped teach me about the power of art. Daddy got saved after my grandmother died—walked up to the baptismal pool dressed in that crisp early-Sunday-morning white, held out both his strong, battered hands in submission, folded them over his heart, and, in the arms of the pastor, went under that water and then came back up new. After that, trouble didn’t last. There was no more drinking and fighting and tearing up the good that moved in his life. He focused, instead, on delivering on the promises he boasted for anyone who had ears: he got himself a good woman, a house with a garage to do his metalwork, a pickup truck, and a Harley, too. He wanted to be a better man. His mother, who had been hard on him, was gone from here, and he needed to give her in death what he’d had a hard time giving her when she walked this earth: the very best of him.
As it happened, we got to see the married, Bible-thumping, polished Boris Lawrence Henson only for a little while. My father was incredibly intuitive, and he knew deep down in his gut that he was going to die the same way his mother did, and he was just about right: pancreatic cancer stole her breath; liver cancer put my father in the ground fourteen years later. In my dad’s case, cirrhosis of the liver, the result of years of drinking, made his organ so hard it was rendered inoperable, leaving the cancer to fester and grow and have its way with my father’s body.
Somehow, though, we expected Daddy to make it; he was our warrior and often reminded us of his strength. “Get your scrawny ass out of here,” he’d snap, curling his biceps into mounds of muscle. “I’m Mandingo! Big Daddy!” But from the cancer, no amount of muscle could save him. He grew weaker and wearier by the day, and all I could do was watch.
It was a rainy, bitterly cold February night in 2006 when my father started taking that slow, torturous walk toward his final day. My stepmother crumpled her body on the bed alongside my father, the only thing keeping her from falling to the floor in overwhelming grief. She’d just witnessed my father throw up what looked like coffee grounds—curdles of blood that had accumulated in his body as his organs began shutting down. I caught a glimpse of the doctor shaking his head. “What does that mean?” I asked him.