But even as I hid my body, I wasn’t afraid to be me. Whether it was singing a song the loudest, making the most noise in a pom-pom girl competition cheer, or climbing into an ROTC uniform in junior high so that I could show out as part of the drill competition team, I never had a problem looking someone dead in the eye while I gave one thousand. Being “the realest” has its consequences, though. It’s one thing for me to pepper magazine interviews with a few curses or talk candidly about my romantic life and the fears I have raising an African American son in front of a roomful of entertainment journalists or on Facebook. It’s another thing when standing true affects your work or determines the roles you will even be allowed to audition for. My Washington, DC, accent, colloquialisms, and straight talk, both on-screen and off, have cost me a few roles because casting directors simply couldn’t visualize me in the role of the characters I lobbied to portray. I’ve always been different from Nia Long, Sanaa Lathan, and Gabrielle Union, the actresses who’ve been the stars of some of the biggest black film classics, like Boyz n the Hood, Love & Basketball, Love Jones, and The Best Man. I am the sharp, jagged corner to their sleek, smooth lines—always have been, even before I accepted and starred in the role of Yvette, the wisecracking, volatile, thumb-sucking baby mama to the irresponsible hood boy, Jody, in Baby Boy.
Every audition would yield notes from casting directors who would write repeatedly, “She’s too street,” and “She’s too edgy,” even when I would turn myself inside out to pull off my goofiest, out-of-character best. Once, I flopped, literally, during an audition for a romantic comedy flick I wanted desperately to land. The script was hysterical; I read it and said to myself, Oh my God, I would kill this. The scene called for the character to scrape off barnacles from the bottom of a boat, so I ditched my street clothes and showed up to the audition drenched in props: I had flippers on my feet, goggles, a snorkel mask. I jumped feetfirst into that role, figuratively and literally—enough so that the casting directors were able to see my character, rather than me. I got a callback, too, but there was a special request in the notes: leave the props at home. “Too distracting,” they said. When I showed up for the second audition, however, the casting directors, it seemed, were distracted by me. Scribbled in the second round of audition notes were the words with which they would reject me for the role: “She’s too edgy.”
That word again.
That’s who I became in their eyes—that street girl who talks with that DC twang and is a little loud and “edgy.” That’s code for “black girl from the hood.” For the longest time, Hollywood used my real-life persona to lock me in the proverbial box. All I kept getting from the industry, the profession I adore and in which I’ve trained, were scripts for baby mamas and ghetto girls. That was true even of films with majority black casts, which sought to appeal to a broader cross section of moviegoers. Eleven years after my first big role in Baby Boy, Will Packer of Think Like a Man, the hit feature film based on Steve Harvey’s New York Times bestselling book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, initially lobbied hard for me to play Candace, the single mom in love with a mama’s boy. When I refused her, they came back and asked me to play Meagan Good’s character, Mya, a sexy siren who struggles to forgo sleeping with her love interest for ninety days.
“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.