at ’em,” I said, smiling extra hard. “Looks like a basket, doesn’t it? It’s incredible. Kendra’s hands are touched by God.”
Bruce leaned in, took a close look, and said: “Great! We’ll shoot that.”
I’m sure my brows, furrowed enough to be a braid in and of themselves, betrayed my horror at the mere thought of being seen like this in front of Bruce, Carine, and all those fine men on our set, much less having the look documented in the pages of one of the fiercest fashion magazines around. But Bruce gave my “What? Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” zero energy. “Your hair is perfect exactly the way it is,” he insisted.
“Bruce. Bruce! Hey, Brucey!” I said, snapping my fingers to get him to focus on the words coming out of my mouth. “This is not the hair people look at, you know what I mean? This is not what the world needs to see. When we put the wig on, that’s what they see. This is like a wig cap, you know? You don’t put this in a magazine.”
My pleading was futile; Bruce was nonplussed. “Of course it’s perfect for the magazine. It’s not about your hair, it’s about your face. It’s beautiful.”
Moments later, Carine walked in and cosigned Bruce. “Yes, I love it! Beautiful! Let’s go! Go to makeup.”
I immediately broke out in a sweat and started walking around in circles, talking to myself, trying to figure out how to get out of this particular pickle. I mean, I’d just come off of incredible cover shoots with W magazine, Glamour, and Allure, high-fashion beauty bibles. Their work was stellar, and I was honored to represent for black women, who rarely get to see someone who looks like them peeking from mainstream newsstands in such a big way all practically at the same damn time. And now the photographer and the editor in chief of CR Fashion Book, a delicious magazine everybody in the fashion industry checks for when it comes out twice a year, was going to see to it that I looked like a plucked, bald rat, slithering around all these fine men? My confidence was being tested that day, and though I’ll be the first to borrow from the rapper Bone Crusher in saying, “I ain’t neva scared!” the idea of being photographed this way had me shook. I could just see the memes floating across my Instagram and Twitter timelines: my head, looking all kinds of crazy, with the words “When Cookie Gets Her Wig Snatched!” and “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” written in bold letters across the top. We women put so much stock into our hair; it is our crown and glory—the perfect punctuation to our style and beauty. Looking like this in the fashion spread, I was convinced, would not end well.
Jussie, bless his heart, was over in the corner, lifting me up with praises—“But you’re beautiful! Stop worrying”—and my publicist chimed in with more of the same: “Your face is gorgeous, look at you!” and that was helpful, kind of. But after everyone stopped blowing smoke up my ass, and I did a shot or two of tequila, I forced my mind to stop thinking like Taraji the fashionista and look at the situation like Taraji the artist: “You have to trust the process,” I kept saying to myself again and again as I paced. I saw that twinkle in Bruce’s eye—that artist’s glimmer. He was inspired. Who was I to question his art? I had to approach the photo shoot not as a woman who wanted to look pretty, but as a character, the way I did when I showed up to my Hustle & Flow audition looking like a broken-down, greasy dust bucket to win my part as Shug. Trust the process, I repeated. Go there.
I did, and Bruce’s photos are inspired. It was in those moments, when I was bare and vulnerable, that I did some of my best work. It didn’t hurt that all those gorgeous men were helping me along, so sweet and delicate in their handling of me. I was most nervous with Beasley because he’s a basketball player; I know the kinds of girls he likes looking at, and you can best believe they’re not prancing around him in sew-in weave braid patterns. Earlier he’d been gushing about seeing all my movies, and now he was sitting next to me in the hair and makeup room, seeing me this way. Working through that