What did we want to say? The film takes place in an urban setting. Our Aunt Sarah, Simone’s long-suffering woman, is raising children who aren’t hers and mourning the loss of her husband and sister. We portray Saffronia, a mixed-race teenager raised by a single mother, being bullied on her way home from school and then again on the web. (Fucking Millennials! I’m kidding. You’re probably reading this book right now. Hi! Snapchat is so lit, right?) Sweet Thing is an artist who is sleeping with a married man. And then there’s Peaches. Peaches is a video blogger who sits in front of a shrine to her dead son made up of his medals of achievement, college graduation pictures, and diploma; she is making a vlog update after more than a year of fighting for justice for her son, who was killed by a police officer.
I’m a black woman. Surprise! I don’t want to get into a conversation about race relations, being compliant around police officers, or #AllLives vs. #BlueLives vs. #BlackLivesMatter. Frankly, that conversation feels like it’s too big and important to have in a book where I talk about using my imagination to blow creeps over the phone and writing fan fiction featuring NSYNC. It’s also too big a conversation to have on Twitter (as we Millennials do). Every time I tweet something like “Why are police so quick to shoot down and kill unarmed black men when their hands are clearly in the air?” I get about a hundred tweets from eggs or profile pictures of Trump or the Confederate flag calling me a monkey or a fat nigger. Tweets telling me to go back to Africa (according to my dad, I have a lovely home in Senegal, so being told to go back there is actually a great vacation suggestion; thanks, racist!) or telling me that I should be grateful that my people were saved from Africa and brought here in the first place. I get tweets about how black people kill one another all the time so—so what if police kill them? No, Twitter may not be the right place for this conversation. But I don’t have the privilege of pretending I’m not concerned about the target that seems to be tattooed on the backs of people who look like me or that I am not absolutely terrified. Not for myself, for all of the black men in my life. For Ahmed. For my younger brothers, Malick and Abdul. All three of my brothers are gentle giants who stand over six feet tall. Abdul, who is twenty-two years old now, has special needs and speaks with a very pronounced stutter. The idea of him walking around Brooklyn by himself and being perceived as a threat by the police and not being able to talk his way out of a standoff terrifies me. I can’t say that on Twitter, so I had to find a way to say it in my film.
When it came to Peaches’s story, it was an extra-emotional day on set. For one, I cast my real-life cousin Sean to play Peaches’s murdered son. Sean is six-foot-four, kind, and harmless. He came in for photography the day before his wedding. He’s three years younger than I am, and no matter how much he towers over me, he will always be my nerdy little cousin. Directing our actress, Aisha Hinds, to cry over his photograph was harder than I thought. I directed the entire day with tears streaming down my face, but it was worth it to convey our message. Please see my humanity before you kill me.
With every role I play in film or television, my goal is to bring life and humanity to the character. To lose myself and dive into someone else’s space and world. With my own work, like this book and my film, I don’t have a character to hide behind. I wrote this! These are my experiences, thoughts, and emotions. If someone reads this book and decides that I’m a bad person, I can’t say, “Oh, you just don’t like Becky from Empire or Andrea from The Big C.” Nope. It’s Gabby from Gabourey who that person doesn’t like. If someone doesn’t like my film, it’s just me here—my art, my opinion. (Directing is just a matter of opinion. I learned that from my assistant director Marcus.)
I knew that if I wrote a book or directed a film I would be on my own without anything to hide behind. That’s why I didn’t want to do it. Fear. But here we are five or so years later, and the fear is gone. I’m standing by myself in front of the entire world with my book under one arm and my film under the other. Most of my secrets, most of my shames and fears, are written into them. My humanity is written into them, too, and I actually don’t care if someone doesn’t like it. That’s just an opinion. It won’t ever make me any less human.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. Yes, it is hella awkward whenever I run into anyone from NSYNC. They never want to make out with me like in my soap operas. Rude.
Acknowledgments
There are many names swirling around my head to thank or acknowledge concerning this book. I would love to brag that I wrote this book all by myself—and I do and will continue to do so—but I certainly couldn’t have done it without the push of several people I am grateful to know.
Working backward, I have to first thank Deanne Urmy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, my editor, whom I trusted most because she knows how to interrupt me and stop me from talking. I don’t mean that in a passive-aggressive “she’s always interrupting me” way because I’m so grateful for it. I tend to talk too much, tell too much of the story and then the backstory and then the back backstory. It’s too much and the first story, the only interesting part, gets lost. Deanne always keeps me on track while protecting the true story. It is a gift to be shut up by you, Deanne. When I first met Deanne, I noted that she looked smart and that everyone at HMH seemed bright. I soon found out that Deanne was even smarter than she looked that day. A brilliant woman I’m blessed to have in my corner. Thank you, Deanne. Also, she knows that when I say “Oh, yeah, I’m almost done with this chapter; I’ll send it to you by Friday” that I am most certainly lying and I mean Friday of next month. Thank you for never calling my bluff.
Becky Sweren, who was my editor before HMH, helped me so much. She carved every single one of my ramblings into a solid story, sometimes taking three different chapters and making them one as if she were a literary Frankenstein. Just as brilliantly, she could take one chapter and turn them into three. This gave me so much freedom! I felt as if I could write as much or as little as I wanted but that it was all valuable in some way so that even if I didn’t think the paragraphs and themes would somehow meet each other Becky would find the links and make sure they were consistent. Clearly, this book would’ve just been a pile of Post-it notes with crudely drawn emojis and tearstains on them if she hadn’t wrangled my rants and tweets together to make the manuscript. Thank you.
David Kuhn, my literary agent, is a fancy man in a fancy hat who could sell snow to an Eskimo. He first had to sell me on the idea that maybe I had a book in me. Then he had to sell me on sharing the possible book in me as I was sure it was all a dark mess. I’m glad he convinced me. My dark mess didn’t seem so dark or messy on the page, and my heart felt lighter. I didn’t expect that. Then he sold the living shit out of those not so dark and not so messy pages. I couldn’t be happier. Thank you, David, for helping me to bleed. In a good way.