I didn’t realize it at first, but Bruce was on the side, his camera primed to capture those intimate moments. “Get in his lap,” Bruce said, looking up from his camera. “Sit in his lap and keep talking like that.”
We went for it, laughing and flirting and resting in the silence between the words, his hands on my waist and back, mine on his face and neck, the two of us looking like lovers, connecting, sharing. Primed. I was blushing and giggling; he was grinning. And every bit of that emotion, you see in those photos. Bruce caught it all, and we sizzled on both the page and the screen, shot with vintage film and very little retouching. The same is true of a picture Bruce captured while we were walking down the local streets, picking random places to pose and create: we found one shot against the wall in an office building, where a bunch of Czech Americans were working. There they were, banging it out on their computers, completely oblivious to Bruce, his camera, and me, and just beyond them was a wall that, as if by some magic or kismet, had the word COOKIE scrawled across it in some kind of old-world font.
There was no laughing at my hair or those pictures—no backlash or Internet disses. When the magazine published, I saw those gorgeous pictures and thanked God for convincing me not to control the process—to be okay not just with the art, but also with me, in my most natural state, exactly as I am.
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As a black woman who looks like an everyday, ’round-the-way girl, squeezing myself into some teeny-weeny box designed to appease the white gaze was never my thing. I knew girls of color who wanted the fame so bad that they thought they had to starve themselves or have their thighs shaved down to fit in, but most of the rest of us knew that back home, nobody is checking for the skinny girl, and up on the screen, enough of us are representing so that the little girls with chocolate skin and kinky hair and Coke-bottle curves know that they can watch a film or television show and see someone who looks like them. This is why I absolutely loved performing that scene in the first season of Empire when Cookie showed her ass, literally, at Lucious and Anika’s engagement party. Cookie, under the impression that Lucious is hot for her, climbs into her finest lingerie, drapes herself in a sable fur, and shows up to what she thinks is a private, romantic dinner, only to have to witness her archnemesis gloat about getting a marriage proposal from Lucious. Cookie ends up throwing a fit and storming out the room, but not before flashing her risqué panties. “Oh, and Anika,” she snarls, “this is an ass.” When she says that, Cookie grabs her cheeks and makes them bounce. It’s easy to view the scene as yet another outrageous Cookie moment, but dig a little deeper and you unearth its significance: America can’t keep thinking a flat ass or an ass plumped artificially is it. Mine is neither tiny nor gargantuan, but a nice-sized, natural one. These kids out there need to see that it is possible to be yourself, love yourself, and win in this industry looking like your natural, beautiful self. Authenticity means something to me, and I make a point of sharing my authentic self rather than pretending to be something I’m not.
Now, I admit I’m luckier than some. Looking younger than I am, and having the wherewithal and energy to work out and eat healthy without giving up the foods that I love or killing myself over a pound here or a wrinkle there is a blessing. It’s just as well. I’m so afraid of pain and needles that I don’t want to get anything sucked and cut. Hollywood will have you thinking you can have surgery on one day and be up and back to work the next—like it’s as easy as picking up a pack of gum and some Newports at the local convenience store. Folks be like, “I’m just going to the store, girl! I’ll be back . . . with my new ass.” I’m not fooled, not even a little bit. I won’t be cutting my way to a skinnier me. What I will do when I’m feeling a little toxic is do a cleanse—twenty-one days of raw, vegan food with lots of vitamins, up to thirty in a day. The older I get, the more I lean toward a raw, vegetarian diet because it makes me feel better, lighter. A lot of my friends are doing this more, too. Personally, I’m inspired by the owner of Karyn’s Fresh Corner in the Windy City, a raw restaurateur who, well on her way to seventy, keeps a cardboard cutout of herself in a bikini by the front door. Her abs and all are right there on display, in case you have any questions about what a raw diet can do for you. I also work out about three times a week with a trainer, but mostly he makes fun of me for being an errant, combative client. I’ll head to his gym in my finest workout gear, with a pep in my step, but as soon as I open that door and I see all the machines and equipment and my trainer standing there with his arms folded and his muscles bulging, I revert right back to that little girl who runs around the perimeter of the pool and refuses to touch the water. “Okay, Taraji, give me twenty squats with these weights,” he says.
“I’m not doing twenty.”
“Taraji, give me twenty,” he repeats, as if I didn’t hear him the first time.