I recognize now how important this was to my development as an actress, even at that tender age. After all, the natural inclination of adults is to devalue the dreams of kids who express an interest in pursuing the arts. Let a kid show any kind of special aptitude for math or science, and the world will move mountains to put him in programs that stimulate his gift. The same goes for children who express even a remote interest in subjects society thinks will lead them toward careers we all tend to consider exceptional: doctor, lawyer, professor, engineer, or if it’s the arts, a classical musician and the like. Hardly anyone ever encourages the child who can’t sit still, or who runs her mouth a little too much or who lets her imagination soar, to do what is perfectly natural and right to her: consider acting, singing, dancing, or otherwise making a living performing. Even celebrities turn their kids away from the business, though they know firsthand the ins and outs of the trade and could help navigate their children’s experience. I get it: the road to Hollywood is littered with the bodies of child stars who couldn’t handle the success, money, and fame, people who had quite a time of making the hard transition from child darling to functioning adult. But it seems such a wasted opportunity, so incredibly unjust to steer a kid away from what makes his heart sing.
I thank God that when I was staring at that door to Hollywood, my father and, by extension, my family and some key players in my adolescent and teen years told me I could walk through it if I wanted; in some cases, they even jimmied the door open for me when I thought for sure that I couldn’t break the locks. I recognize the importance and especially the beauty in their telling me “You can.” This wasn’t something anyone told kids from around my way. For all too many, saying you wanted to be an actress was about as realistic as saying you wanted to go to the NBA, or that you were going to run a Fortune 500 company or be president of the United States. It was a pipe dream. Everyone was too busy hustling to be dreaming, or too scared of what lay outside their zip code to imagine ever having anything more than a stable government job and a couple dollars for the go-go clubs. I was surrounded by friends whose families had to hustle to try to make ends meet in their households, where fathers were absent and mothers were on public assistance, barely feeding the family and hardly scraping by. Jobs were scant, and what was available, mostly, was minimum wage—nothing that could sustain domestic stability, much less support dreams that were bigger than southeast DC. I don’t judge the mentality; I understand it and respect that my peers were trying to make a way out of no way in a system that was set up to see them fall hard and fail miserably. Nothing made this more apparent than my junior high school, the Friendship Educational Center.
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Friendship was a school like no other I’d ever been to before. Up until then, I’d gone to a Catholic school where the education was fine, I guess, but the nuns believed in beating ass. One in particular, Sister Theresa with the short hair, big butt, and habit of talking through clenched teeth, was always beating my hands and smacking my butt with rulers and spoons and her bare hands for the smallest of infractions: talking out of turn, moving too slow, breathing. I learned the hard way how to be more restrained. Then, after my mom ran out of money for tuition, I got sent to a halfway decent public elementary school. More changes followed when I was old enough for junior high. Tracking down a decent school that was educationally superior and safe took a backseat to my mom’s need to have a daughter who was reasonably self-sufficient. By the time I was headed to the seventh grade, Mom, who was toiling hard as a manager at a local department store, Woodward & Lothrop, was depending on me to be able to wake myself up in the morning, get dressed, eat my breakfast, and hustle to school before the first bell rang—on my own. The school she enrolled me in was Friendship Educational Center, a junior high literally across the street from our apartment building.
Hours before my first day there, my mother helped me lay out my clothes, fixed me my favorite breakfast—I lived for her scrambled egg sandwiches—and handed me a key to the apartment. It was official: at age thirteen, I joined the ranks of the neighborhood latchkey kids. We were the children of working parents, who made very clear that the house key came with very specific responsibilities and rules: we had to go straight home after school, lock the door behind us, refrain from bringing over company, and stay put until a responsible adult got home or risk getting our behinds beat and everybody else who wasn’t supposed to be in the house unsupervised in major trouble. My mother was strict like that; she didn’t play, and I quickly learned to make a habit of doing exactly as she said.
I was well prepared for the responsibility that came with taking care of myself in my mother’s absence, but I did get into some trouble along the way. I’m still embarrassed by that one time when I did have some friends over while my mom was at work and we called a couple of those 1-900 sex hotline numbers we saw in some late-night commercials. I didn’t know calling those numbers would run up the phone bill; the lady in the ad said the calls were free. Free. What did I know? I was in junior high and trying to impress my friends. We were curious enough about sex at that age to wonder what we’d find on the other side of the line, and we thought calling the number and listening to the women talk dirty in the phone would be fun and funny—nothing more, nothing less. It was, too, until that phone bill came the next month. Four hundred dollars—that was the damage. The look in my mother’s eyes when she waved the papers in my face, yelling and screaming and demanding to know what I was thinking, tore my heart to shreds. I knew she was a struggling single mother living paycheck to paycheck, and my thoughtlessness made her cry. I can still hear the disappointment in her voice: “How dare you be so careless? Like, really, how could you do this to me?” she asked. She called the parents of every kid who had been on the phone with me and dimed them to their folks, too. It took quite some time to live that down with them and with my mother.