“I want you,” he said. “You were great. You were great, kid. I want you.”
I got up the nerve to ask slyly, “So, did I knock your socks off?”
“Yes, you did,” Vince said. “That was amazing.” Then he let out a hearty laugh as he reached down, unlaced his shoes, and gave me his socks. I still have his olive-green socks somewhere—eighteen years after he agreed to represent me. Ours is a relationship built on trust, mutual admiration, and profound respect, and by now we know each other as well as we know ourselves, meaning Vince knows all the ways to turn my fast no into a slow yes. Which explains why he kept shoving that Empire script in my face.
“I’m telling you, you gotta read this one. You’ll knock this out of the ballpark,” Vince insisted.
“I hate TV. No.”
Vince sent me the script anyway, and one night after a fully busy day working on the play, I sat in my living room and picked it up, hoping that reading it would beg off my manager so that he could focus on something else—anything else—instead of Cookie Lyon, the loud-talking matriarch of a record label dynasty. I read the synopsis and sucked my teeth. Hip-hop? Please. Stupid, corny as hell, I said to myself as I flipped through the script. Then I got to the page when Cookie first gets out of prison. I was licking my pointer finger to flip through the pages even faster when I got to the part where Cookie’s husband, Lucious Lyon, tosses his young, effeminate son in the metal trash can, and I really lost it when Cookie, fresh out of prison, visited her youngest son for the first time, only to end the scene using a broom to beat the hell out of him for calling her a bitch. “What?!” I screamed, alternately excited by the prospects but also wary of its implications: What kind of image is this for black people? How can anybody justify beaming a murdering, thieving, drug-dealing family into the living rooms of a nation grappling with and floundering over race? What would people think of me playing this violent, drug-dealing felon? Will the NAACP come for my neck over this? Though I saw Cookie’s heart beating all over the pages, I couldn’t see myself playing her.
I called Vince on his cell. “I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I just don’t see the value for me. I’ve done this before: she’s street, she’s hood. I don’t need to do this again.”
“Taraji, just think about it,” Vince said. “Can you do that for me? Read it again and think about it.”
I promised him I would, and a few days later, I did. As was the case the first time, I was hooked, but instead of my brain judging the characters and calculating how they’d be received by the audience, my gut kicked in: I felt the fear. It wasn’t about Cookie or how the television viewers would view her; it was about how they and all the casting directors who’d kept me tucked in that “she’s too edgy” box would see me. I simply did not want to go back to the bottom of that pool, where the weight of stereotype, judgment, and typecasting could drown my career. Drown me.
It is precisely then that the courage, experience, and trust in myself that my father had ingrained in me empowered me to make the decision to kick fear in the ass. The surest way to do that was to use all that I’d learned along my journey as an actress to figure out how to breathe nuance into Cookie. I understood her. But how would I get everyone else to get her, too?
I decided that, like my father, like my mother, Cookie would be courageous. I would build a backstory for her so airtight, so sympathetic, that viewers and critics alike would see past her troubles and straight to her heart. Think about it: in the real world, people will empathize with the coldest, most calculating evildoer imaginable if he’s got a story to tell. A man could be up for the death penalty for killing a dozen children, but if someone gets on the stand and testifies to his backstory—he was raped as a child and tossed in the streets by his no-good parents, in and out of group homes where he was bullied and tortured by kids much worse than him—the jury might be more inclined to give him life in prison instead of the needle. That’s how, I decided, I needed to handle Cookie. I created a backstory rooted in courage and her love for her family. It took both—courage and love—for her to deal drugs to make sure her children were fed and the lights stayed on while she supported her husband’s dream of becoming a rap star; it took both for her to go to prison for Lucious, rather than have both of them locked up and their babies left out in the street. It is love and courage, too, that makes her want to succeed in her epic battle to wrest control of the family empire from her devious husband: she doesn’t want the business for herself; she wants to leave it as a legacy for her sons.
Building that backstory for Cookie helped me really see her. It helped me see me, too. Soon enough, I was tossing a middle finger to the notion that playing Cookie would take me right back to that place in my career when casting directors were telling me no because I was too “edgy.” Bitch, please, check your résumé, I finally said to myself. Literally, you’ve done it all except put on a cape, get on a wire, and fly. You got this.
And I do. I’m not saying I’m invincible. I don’t walk around completely fearlessly. Skiing, for example, looks amazing, but I have no intention of climbing into a ski suit, pulling goggles over my eyes, and flinging my body off the side of a mountain. That’s a fear I’m not interested in overcoming. Same thing with skydiving: I will not be jumping out of anyone’s airplane and flying headfirst at 120 miles per hour toward the ground with nothing more than a piece of fabric to keep me from crashing into the hard concrete. I’m scared of rodents. And snakes. Don’t care for spiders too much, either.
But when it comes to something that stokes my passion, and to things that mean something to me, I tend not to lean on fear. Like my daddy said: fear is a liar. I make a point of calling its bluff.
2
Authentic
I had a mass of thick, tight, kinky curls growing out of my head, and just the thought of my mother pulling that huge, black comb with the wide teeth through my tender tendrils would make me tear up. I couldn’t stand hair day. Sundays would roll around and my mother would assemble her tools, her comb, shampoo, towel, the blow dryer, and that big jar of Afro Sheen hair grease, and I would take off running and screaming as if Freddy Krueger’s razor fingers were coming for my scalp. Every week, it felt as if a serial killer were pushing me down on a plump pile of pillows atop a set of thick, yellow pages phone books, using her knees like a vise to hold me still while she spent hours shanking my head.
“Shut up all that noise, Taraji,” my mother would snap as I shrunk and shrieked under the sharp edge of the comb’s tooth, which she used to part my hair into tiny sections that, over the course of hours, she would braid into a mass of fantastic cornrow creations. Sniffling, I’d wipe the tears streaking down my cheeks and just sit there, praying to sweet baby Jesus in the manger, Jehovah, Buddha, Big Bird, and any other deity I thought could hear my cry to give me the strength to make it through.
Still, I’d always manage, as I choked back my tears, to give some kind of direction on how I wanted my hair styled. As early as the first grade, I commanded some agency over my crown and glory, even if it hurt like hell. “Mommy,” I’d whimper, “can you make the braids swoop up and to the side so I can wear them in a ponytail with the dark blue beads?” Mommy would oblige the request, no doubt in part to quiet me down, but also because she was intent on extending to me the autonomy I craved.