Years later, when I was in junior high, it happened again—same parking lot, same apartment building, same circumstances. This time, our city was on the brink of the crack epidemic, and junkies, desperate to score their next high, were out in full force like the zombie apocalypse, preying on anyone within their reach. It was midnight and we were on our way to the car, heading out to pick up a friend whose ride had broken down. Mom always put me in the car first, so I was tucked away in the front seat when a man ran up behind her as she made her way to the driver’s side. As she opened her door, the man punched her in the eye—so hard that years later, when she accidentally got hit in the same eye playing softball with her coworkers, her retina tore. “Please,” my mother begged the thief as he tugged at the door between them, reaching for her purse, “take my money. Take all of it. Just leave me my purse.”
“Shut up, bitch!” he yelled as he wrestled my mother’s purse out of her hands and ran off.
I was in the passenger seat, screaming, “No, no, no! Not again!” But my howling was useless. My mother got in the car, closed the door, turned the key, and, without saying a word, started driving in dead silence. She was trying her best to be strong, but with every passing minute, her eye stretched and ballooned and turned various shades of black and blue. In the other unmolested eye, a single tear slowly traced a wet track down her cheek, across her chin, and down her neck.
This was the only home we had. Though she was working her way out of the hole my dad’s absence created—she was toiling from sunup to sundown—her salary would take her only so far. It would be perfectly reasonable to think that the two of us, in that moment, in that space in which we’d been violated twice, would be absolutely terrified. Broken. But that’s not how it works—at least not for Bernice Gordon. Rather than melt, she once again soldiered on, no doubt because she had no other choice, but I know she also did it because her daughter’s life depended on her ability to keep moving, despite the obstacles, despite the adversity, despite what anyone thought about her. She refused to disappear into a cave. She was more cautious, of course; while we lived in that apartment, she made sure from then on that whenever we were leaving or entering the building, someone was around to meet and walk with us. But she never, ever gave me cause to panic. What a profound lesson to learn as I began my own, long journey toward becoming a woman, a lover, a single mother, and a human moving through the world. My mother always said I got all my strength from my father, but I know so much better than that, even if she doesn’t realize or refuses to acknowledge it: she taught me, by leading her life, how to be. My father may have put the fire in my heart, but my mother taught it how to beat. They both showed me, by example, how to be fearless.
• • •
Even today, when I taste fear on my tongue, it’s my parents’ example I draw on to help me swallow it whole. Nothing could have been truer than when my manager, Vincent Cirrincione, floated the script for Empire my way. I was scared to death of Cookie. After all, I’d been trying to escape the typecasting that had come from starring as the loud-mouthed, around-the-way baby mama Yvette, in John Singleton’s hit 2001 big-screen hood tale, Baby Boy. Yet no matter how hard I tried to climb out of it, I’d been stuck in the muck and mire of screenplays that tried to resurrect that character. The only roles casting directors could see for me were ones that were “edgy” (read: ghetto). Now, after stints on three television shows—one as a police officer in Lifetime’s The Division, one as a fierce litigator on ABC’s Boston Legal, one as a detective in CBS’s hugely popular Person of Interest—an Oscar nod for my role as the adoptive mother of a reverse-aging white child in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and box office gold in the Think Like a Man films, in which I played a businesswoman, I had finally managed to shake myself out of the exclusively stereotypical roles Hollywood producers envisioned for me. I wanted no part of a loud, wisecracking, gaudy ex-con fresh out of prison from a seventeen-year bid on a drug conviction—especially on a television show to which I’d have to commit all of my time. After being locked into fifty-five episodes of Person of Interest, going back to the grueling, stifling schedule of television production wasn’t even a consideration.
“Leave me alone with this one,” I told Vince over the phone during one of the many calls he made, begging me to read the Empire script. I’d been back in Los Angeles only for a short while, and I was preparing for a starring role in the play Above the Fold at the Pasadena Playhouse, biding my time until another film project came along. “Where’s my brilliant film script? I don’t care about this mess. I don’t want to do it.” Vince knew me well—he knew how no-nonsense and in-your-face I could be. He’d learned that the first time I met him, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles and went on a frenzied but exhaustive search for an agent. A friend arranged my meeting with Vince, but he made it clear he wasn’t looking for new clients; at the time, he already had a power roster, including Halle Berry, and taking a chance on a young, inexperienced black actress at a time when roles for actresses who looked like me were few and far between wasn’t a priority. But I got to him by standing in front of that man and being regular ol’ Taraji from southeast DC, with my slightly country drawl and one fingernail painted bright red.
“What’s with the fingernail?” he asked.
I looked down at my hand absentmindedly and shrugged. “I forgot to take the paint off,” I said matter-of-factly.
After that, Vince launched questions at me in rapid-fire succession, and I answered each of them easily and truthfully, hiding nothing. I told him how I’d studied acting at Howard and got pregnant in my junior year—how I came to Los Angeles with my baby and only seven hundred dollars to my name, but a passion for my craft as wide as the Pacific.
“Where’s your son?” he asked when, finally, I took a breath.
“He’s with the babysitter.”
“So you brought him out here with you?” he asked, surprised. “Usually actors leave the kids with family until they get on their feet in this business.”
“No, he’s right here with me,” I said. “He’s where he belongs.”
Vince stared at me for a moment, no doubt trying to figure me out. Finally, he ordered me to stand. “Let me take a look at you.”
I stood, uncomfortable for the first time in his presence. What the hell is this, a slave market? I asked myself as I turned awkwardly. Now I understand that he was simply trying to give me a taste of what it would be like to audition, but I wasn’t feeling it in that moment. Annoyed, I snapped at Vince when he began talking again. “What did you say? You’re talking too fast. My daddy told me not to trust a person who talks too fast.”
Vince smirked. “You’re a spunky one, aren’t you?” he said. After another beat, he said what I wanted to hear. “Okay, you can do two monologues for me.” But, he warned, “you better knock my socks off.”
A week later, there I was, standing in his office, reciting for my life. I came prepared with a serious monologue and a funny one, and hit him hard with my presentation, a scene from Down in the Delta. When I finished, I’d barely taken a breath before Vince burst into a wide grin.