wrong place. “I looked at you,” Candace said, “and I thought, She doesn’t belong here. She needs to be acting.”
It was my father who gave me the air I needed to fly out of the math department in North Carolina and into the theater department at Howard University, the prestigious historically black Washington, DC, school that boasts a roster of successful alumni who’ve gone on to make indelible marks in politics, the sciences, media, and, most notably for my purposes, the arts. I grew up practically in Howard’s backyard and had long admired the huge list of Hollywood stars who honed their craft in the classrooms of the university, including Ossie Davis, Debbie Allen, Phylicia Rashad, and so many others. All it took was one conversation with my dad to take a fresh look at studying there.
“I failed, Dad,” I told him over the phone after getting yet another F in math class. “I’ve never failed anything in my life.”
“Good,” he said simply.
“What do you mean, ‘good’?” I snapped. “I can’t afford these failing grades.”
My father was uncharacteristically quiet; he was thinking up just the right combination of words to make it plain. “You had to fall on your face to see that’s not what you were supposed to be doing,” he said finally. “Now get your ass back up to DC and enroll in Howard’s drama department. Do what you’re supposed to be doing.” As was my custom, I took his advice.
In other words, I was born for this. Built for it. I may not have that Oscar my father claimed for me all those years ago, but he was right: every move I’ve made since those days gyrating in my grandmother’s mirror came in divine order to bring me to this moment, to my dream of being an actress. If my father were alive today, he would call it like he saw it. “I told you, lil’ nigga. I knew you were going to be a star.”
4
Hustler
All my life, I’ve been a hustler. Where I come from, that’s what you did when you wanted that fresh pair of sneakers, or the gold necklace that spelled your name out in bubble-letter script, or that pack of cherry Now and Later candy your mother didn’t want to blow good money on, because every penny she wasted on crap you didn’t need meant not having the cash for the things that mattered: the light bill, gas for the car, food for the refrigerator, rent so you had a place to lay your head at night. Of course, there were plenty of kids around my way who hustled in the traditional sense of the word to get what their families couldn’t afford; there are back alleys and dark shadows all throughout southeast DC that tell that story. But my hustle wasn’t nearly as sinister or desperate. I was just really good at relieving the people around me of their cash so I could have a few dollars for my pocket—a skill I was practicing as early as eight years old back in 1978. If the lady down the hallway with all the kids had to run to the Safeway to pick up some eggs, cereal, and milk, I’d step right in. “Go ahead, I’ll watch the kids . . . for five dollars.” Somebody needed help getting bags up the stairs? I’d chip in for a dollar or two. Nobody had to worry about sweeping a porch, folding laundry, or cornrowing their daughter’s full head of hair while I was around: for a fee, I’d handle all that and toss in a smile, free of charge.
I brought that “get money” spirit with me everywhere I went because there was little money to spare in my house. I saw my single mother struggling to make ends meet on her salary from Woodward & Lothrop department store (back then, it was known as Woodies); she may have risen from the stockroom as a price tag attacher to her own office as divisional manager of distribution and logistics over the course of my childhood, but she was still raising a kid on her own in one of the most expensive cities in America, without any financial help from my father.
With a baby on her hip and not so much as a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of once she left my dad, my mother moved herself first into my father’s sisters’ house in northeast Washington, DC—the home my aunts