I knew the stakes, too. I am, after all, the product of a single-parent household—the only child in my extended family to grow up in a nontraditional home in the inner city. My mother constantly struggled under the mental, emotional, and financial weight of providing for herself and me, and I felt that pressure every time my mother had to go to work rather than stay home with me, every time we left my aunts’ spacious homes in the suburbs and came back to our tiny apartment in the inner city, every time my mother had to tell me, with tears in her eyes, that she just couldn’t afford things that seemed to be a given in two-parent households, from exotic vacations to fancy clothes to college tuition. I borrow from Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” in saying this: Life ain’t been no crystal stair for my mother or for me.
Still, there was never a question about whether I could or would keep my baby. When those two red lines slowly crept into view on that home pregnancy test, there wasn’t a second of hesitation. I knew God intended it and that I could handle what was to come. I didn’t want anybody crying for me, even and especially my overly worried mother. Besides, Mark and I were still together, and though we were not married, I fully believed he would be a good father to our baby and a sound partner in parenting. When my mother freaked out, I put the grown woman in my voice and let her know what was up: “Why you over there crying and stuff?” I asked, annoyed. “I can’t have negativity. I won’t have it! This baby is not a disease. You’re up here acting like I’m fifteen and in high school. I’m twenty-four years old, in college, paying my own way, and I’m on the dean’s list. There are other things you could be freaking out about; this ain’t it.
“I don’t need anything from you except your unconditional support,” I added. “I’m having a happy, healthy baby and I’m thrilled about it, and if you and your family aren’t down for that, I’m not coming around.”
I thought she was going to come out of the phone and choke me; you don’t talk to black mamas like that. Instead, she dried up those tears real quick.
She was the undercard fight, though. Breaking the news to my father? That was the main event. Of him, I was scared. He had gotten his act together. He was a born-again Christian by then, firm in his beliefs about what was moral, and I was about to tell him that his little girl was with child, thus confirming unequivocally that I was having premarital sex. Surely, I would incur a wrath of biblical proportions. Even my stepmother was scared for me.
“Did you tell Henson yet?” she asked when I called and broke the news.
“No,” I said meekly. “I’m telling you first.”
She paused. “Okay,” she said all slow. “Hold on, here you go.”
She handed the phone to my father and before he could get the receiver to his ear, he was asking, “What’s up? What’s up?” loud and obnoxious. He knew there was news.
“What’s up, Dad. I’m pregnant,” I said, quiet and slow.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m pregnant,” I said again, this time more clearly.
Dad was silent, no doubt letting the news sink in. But only for a beat. “Praise God,” he yelled into the receiver. “Praise God! That’s a blessing, baby! I’m coming to take you to breakfast. Let’s celebrate!”
No more than a half hour later, he was at my doorstep, grinning and grabbing my hand and tucking me into the front seat of his pickup truck. We ended up at McDonald’s; I sat across from him with my pregnant-lady appetite and that big breakfast special—the one with the pancakes, eggs, and sausage. And as I stuffed my face, Daddy spoke good things into me. “Let me tell you something,” he said, leaning in. “Hold your head up high. A baby is a blessing. This is going to be your strength right here. It ain’t gonna stop you.”
He knew like I knew that God doesn’t make mistakes and my son was put into my life at that specific moment for a reason. He was right: every moment with my baby in my belly made me stronger and more focused. I was exactly what I told my mother I would be: a happy, fat, pregnant woman who got salty only when she was hungry. I didn’t have morning sickness. My hair was thick, beautiful, and long. I got around campus to every one of my classes all winter long, without missing so much as a lecture or an assignment. I didn’t consider it hard, it just was what it was. I got acclimated and refused to treat my pregnancy as though it were an obstacle. I was boisterous and in-your-face with it. Of course, there were haters and naysayers sneaking looks at my belly and whispering, “Taraji’s pregnant,” and praying for my downfall. They thought I would stop. Little did they know, I was just getting started.
The first person I made this clear to was my drama professor Mike Malone. I marched my fat ass right up to him one afternoon and called his name like only I could.
“Oh God,” he said, shaking his head and laughing. He always did that when he saw me coming; he used to tell me all the time that I reminded him of my idol, Debbie Allen, with whom he was close. I was a spitfire, he’d say, just like her. “What do you want?”
“Look here: don’t you bench me because I’m pregnant,” I said through clenched teeth, my belly poking through my T-shirt. “Just because I’m fat doesn’t mean anything.”
And when auditions came for a play Mr. Malone was directing called E Man, I waddled my fat ass in there and sang the hell out of the audition song and did the choreography, big belly and all, and then I leaned into my right hip and looked at him dead in the eye.
Mr. Malone gave me that part, but not out of pity. I earned it. The play was about a man’s attributes and all the personalities attached to them, each of which came to life. I played his cheating wife, and Mr. Malone switched up the part a bit so that my pregnancy made sense: under the rewrite, my character was supposed to be pregnant and unsure of whether it was her husband or her side piece who’d fathered the child. I was doing choreography on that stage and climbing up ladders and doing everything a nonpregnant person would have done, so much so that people were convinced that I was wearing a pregnancy pillow to get through it all. “How are you doing that?” they kept asking. “It looks like you’re pregnant for real.”
“I am,” I’d say, and keep right on moving.
Nobody gave me grief after that, because I didn’t give anyone a reason to think for even a second that I couldn’t handle the work that acting involves, the academics, and the pregnancy. My core group of friends—artsy folk who had nothing but love in their hearts—had my back, and that’s all that mattered to me. That’s all I ever required—support for my journey.