“I want to play Lauren,” I insisted. She was the pretty, upscale, savvy woman who let her laundry list of expectations for her significant other—he had to be rich, degreed, in a powerful position, handsome, and this close to perfect—get in the way of love with a struggling chef trying to scare up the money he needed to start his own restaurant. Basically, Lauren was as far away from Yvette as any role could get.
“We’re thinking we want a white woman for that role,” Will told me candidly.
“Why, in an all-black movie, would you make the most successful character a white woman?” I demanded. “You mean to tell me in this circle of friends, the only very successful person would be a white woman?”
“That’s the direction we’re going in,” Will reasoned. “We think it would be the best route for a diverse cast.”
“You know what? Don’t call me until you offer me Lauren. I’m not interested in anything else.”
I was able to pull that card because I had the pedigree to back it up. But I spoke my mind because my father taught me that there is power in speaking truth to power. That I had to do this, and sometimes still do, speaks volumes about Hollywood. After all, I’m a trained character actress. With the right dialect coach, I can give you a London accent, I can give you Becky the Valley Girl all day long. I can pull it back and get corporate when I need to, too. But checks are usually attached to that. I have to get paid to be that person. That is not who I am. Catch me at the grocery store, in the park, at a get-together with my friends, or on my Instagram account, where I dialogue with my loyal fans, and my authentic self will come out. I haven’t changed much. I’m still so much like the girl I was in elementary school: confident and connected to my own voice. I can only be Taraji.
3
Drama
Every summer when the sun climbed high, when the blue and hot pinks crept into the mop-head flowers on the hydrangea bushes and the cicadas sang their songs, my mother, her fingers worn to the bone from scratching up the cash and the mental wherewithal she needed to feed, educate, protect, and discipline a kid on her own, would send me down to Scotland Neck, the tiny North Carolina town where her parents raised her and her siblings decades earlier, before they made the journey, one by one, from the Deep South up to my Aunt Janie’s house in DC in search of a new life, jobs, and refuge from the drag and degradation of Jim Crow. In the small three-bedroom house, my grandparents, former sharecroppers, lived a simple, country life, and for six weeks out of the year, I would settle in with them, doing what little city kids do in rural towns where the living is easy and the existence is pure: try my best to keep myself from dying of complete and utter boredom.
I would ride in the front seat of my mother’s car, kicking and screaming the entire four-hour drive down I-95. Every year, the conversation would be the same. “But all Grandma and Pop Pop do is watch soap operas all day,” I’d say, trying to reason with my mother, hoping that my pleas would compel her to turn the car around and head back north. Alas, my fits never worked. My mother would keep right on driving to Grandma’s house.
I didn’t understand it as a child, but once I had a baby of my own to raise without the help of his father, I understood why my mother would be so relieved when she dropped me off at her parents’ house and sped back down the highway: she was about to get a much-needed break from the unrelenting exhaustion and madness of doing it alone. The relief of knowing that while she worked her child was in good hands and safe in her parents’ house rather than sitting alone in an apartment in southeast DC, without grown-up supervision or protection, was everything to my mom. She missed me, of course. But for that part of the year, at least, my mom’s mind was free and clear.
• • •
Honestly, so was mine. It was in the fields of my grandparents’ land, after all, that I found my imagination. There was no PlayStation or Xbox, no Netflix or iPad or any of the other easy distractions today’s kids lean on for entertainment. Back then, you had to find your fun, and I was damn good at that. In my hands, a long, pointy stick would turn into an explorer’s staff, perfect for pushing back wildflowers and brush in search of worms and ladybugs; a huge rock would be a dinosaur’s toe, stomping through the land in search of pterodactyl eggs to serve at Sunday brunch for my best imaginary girlfriends. I especially loved when dusk fell over the sky; I’d push away from the dinner table, rush out the front door, and fly down the porch steps, chasing after the magical lights bouncing on the booties of the fireflies. I loved how they tickled my palms when I cupped them in my hands; I’d whisper a quick “sorry” to every one of them before I’d squeeze them between my fingers, carefully removing the fluorescent yellow kernel of jelly and adding it to the “diamond” ring and bracelet I’d fashion for whatever evening festivities I’d conjured in my mind. I complained about being cooped up in my grandparents’ house with no one but my baby cousins to play with, but quietly I had me a good time.
It was in a tiny pink room there where I found my greatest joy—where I found my desire for stardom. That was my Aunt Glenda’s old bedroom. She was long gone from there, but her childhood sleeping quarters remained the same—down to the framed picture of Isaac Hayes in his “Black Moses” getup, the one in which he’s rocking some badass dark shades and his bald head is draped in the hood of a long, striped robe—as if frozen in time before she moved out on her own. I’d stare at that picture while I fiddled with the small portable radio sitting next to it; if I turned the dial just so, I could pick up a faint signal from the R&B radio station in Raleigh. If one of my songs was on, I’d crank up that music and tuck myself right in front of the floor-length mirror hanging on the back of the bedroom door, singing into my makeshift microphone fashioned from rolled-up pieces of construction paper, and gyrating my hips as if I were center stage on Soul Train. I would get lost in the music, imagining that the little girl smiling and singing hard and staring back at me with those great big ol’ eyes was famous, like Diana Ross, Goldie Hawn, or Lucille Ball. Some days, the hypnotic pull of my own fantasy was so strong that nothing else in the world existed, not time, not space, not fireflies or Grandma or even my mother and the friends I was missing back home.
Falling into my dramatic trances had its setbacks, though, and it sometimes got me into big trouble, as was the case on one particular afternoon when I took a break from watching my little cousins Tamera and Cliff to dance in that mirror. My grandmother was in the kitchen, no doubt getting a solid lunch ready for her grandchildren, and I, the oldest of the bunch at age eight, was supposed to be babysitting Cliff, who was about four, and Tamera, who, at almost two, was still in diapers, just learning how to walk and prone to getting into things. I needed to take a little break from watching them, though, because Teena Marie’s funk hit “Square Biz” was blasting on that tinny radio, and I wanted to put on my show in the long mirror. “I’m talkin’ square biz to ya, babaaaay,” I sang out from the depths of my gut, completely unaware of the drama that was unfolding just behind me: Tamera getting out of pocket with a jar of burgundy nail polish. I didn’t catch on until my grandmother rushed in the room and popped me square on my ass.