It was like that moment in Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America when the singer Randy Watson, portrayed by Eddie, finishes croaking his tragically inept Las Vegas–style version of George Benson’s “Greatest Love of All,” then tries to bolster the audience’s weak applause by tossing the mic on the ground, stomping his feet, and yelling, “Sexual chocolate! Sexual! Chocolate!” My father meant well; he was going to support his baby to the end, even if the audience didn’t quite embrace the drama and suspense I brought to my piece. But damn, it was awkward.
I didn’t win that night; I was a runner-up to Tracie, who ended up representing Washington, DC, in the national finals of the competition in California. She came in second there, but returned to our hometown having been thoroughly turned out by the glamour of Hollywood. “This is it, Taraji,” she said breathlessly when, finally, we were able to talk. “We have to get out of Ballou and go to Duke Ellington. That’s where we belong.”
? ? ?
I wish I could say that being admitted to the prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts, alma mater of such luminaries as the comedian Dave Chappelle, the opera singer Denyce Graves, and the actors Clifton Powell and Lamman Rucker, was as easy as saying, “Let’s go to school there,” but it wasn’t. There was an interview process and an audition, and while Tracie managed to secure a spot with her Hal Jackson competition monologue, mine, again, fell flat. I didn’t get accepted, and I was devastated—convinced that I simply didn’t have what it takes to be a star. I held on to that notion, too, giving up acting altogether, not just at Ballou, but later also at Oxon Hill High School, where I transferred after my mother moved our family across the DC border into a newer complex in Maryland. So shook was I by the loss that, though acting was still a passion of mine, I shelved the desire and focused instead on other things: fashion shows, sewing, even science and math after I took an educational detour into a science program at the University of the District of Columbia, where I learned how to solder electrical boards and build motion-sensor lights, transistor radios, and even a robot. I really liked the soldering part because it reminded me of what I’d seen my father do when he’d taken me along on a few of his jobs, installing wrought iron doors and windows on these huge houses out in the suburbs. I loved putting together the circuit boards in particular because it was like assembling a puzzle: you had your circuits, your LED, your conductors, and your energy, and you soldered it all together and it worked—easy. Somehow, in my brain, that translated into Yes, absolutely, you could do this for a living! I was so thoroughly sure that acting wasn’t in my cards that when it came time to apply for college, I chose to go to the Greensboro, North Carolina–based historically black college North Carolina A&T to study—get this—electrical engineering.
Engineering.
I knew better. Truly I did. It took not much more than a semester and a grip of failed math tests for me to face that fact and come clean to myself: You’re not a mathematician. This is not where you’re supposed to be. I’d fail precalculus on one side of the campus and then, in a different building on the other side of the property, I’d get A’s writing monologues, dressing up in character, and performing my pieces in English classes. There was no fighting the gravitational pull of acting. Everything about me—the way I dressed, the way I expressed myself, the way I used my left brain instead of my right—betrayed my true desire to act. Sized up next to the kids in the sciences, I most certainly didn’t look like anybody’s mathematician. I fashioned my hair into a loose top-knot that fanned out across the crown of my head, and cropped my pants and bedazzled them with oversized, glittery buttons. “Girl, what you got on?” the geeks would ask, trying to make fun. But I didn’t care. It didn’t matter if I were wearing a tin man outfit, I was totally committed to being eclectic—different. Much more like the kids over in the English department—my tribe.
In other words, I was the circle trying to fit into the square peg. A girlfriend of mine from high school who went to North Carolina A&T and saw one of my class performances would tell me years later that everyone at our school knew I was in the 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