A Song for You

by Robyn Crawford

  Whitney wanted to go to Cicely L. Tyson Community School of Performing and Fine Arts, a public school in her East Orange district. She was trying to find herself and her tribe. Her mother told her the girls there wouldn’t like her and that they’d be jealous. Mount St. Dominic was mostly white. One time she was at a sleepover at a classmate’s, and when the girl’s father came home, he said, “What’s that nigger doing in my house?” Whitney called her mother to come take her home. She said the sting of that ugly word made her feel awful. The racial environment remained the same throughout her years there. During her senior year, a classmate asked Whitney to sing at her wedding. She was excited to do so, but the girl’s Italian American parents wouldn’t allow it because she was black.

  Her grandfather John Russell Houston Sr., who passed away five years before Whitney and I met, didn’t show his granddaughter much love, either. He was partial to his other son Henry’s children. Nip explained, “One day I was at the park playing with my cousins and when my grandfather came to fetch us, he said that before going home he was going to take us for ice cream. But then he took them and intentionally left me behind. When I got home, I was upset and told my father what he had done to me. They got into such an argument my dad threatened to kill him.” Nip continued, “I was a child and didn’t understand why he did that to me.”

  “Do you understand now?” I asked.

  “Sure. My skin was darker than the other girls’ and my hair wasn’t long.”

  “What color skin did he have?” I asked.

  “He could pass for white,” Nip responded. “He never liked me. He was a mean motherfucker.”

  Nippy couldn’t wait to graduate and did the bare minimum to get by. The only class she spoke about was Sister Donna Marie’s religion class, because she enjoyed the debates. Whitney, firmly rooted in her Baptist beliefs, had a direct relationship with God and an aversion to confession. “Why should I go sit down and talk to some man behind a curtain about my problems?” she asked. “How much sense does that make?”

  I honestly have no idea how Whitney graduated. On one hand, she was a disinterested student, and on the other, she already knew where she was headed. Back in those days, it was rare to see a black girl on the cover of Seventeen magazine, but in 1981 Whitney shared it with a young white model, and afterward the nuns took to calling her “Miss Seventeen.”

  She was doing just enough to get by in school; no one was telling her that she wasn’t going to amount to anything. She had her mind made up already. College wasn’t even a thought, and she said, “Going back to school would be my worst nightmare.”

  Following Mount St. Dominic tradition, as a junior Whitney had chosen a first-year named Michelle Zakee as her “little sister,” which meant Whitney was supposed to look out for her. She did so by buying her lunch almost daily, teasing, “Damn, girl, you don’t have lunch money again?” They went on to become lifelong friends.

  Almost every morning before Michelle and her mother left home to pick up Whitney for school, Michelle would sneak a call—and when Whitney answered in a hoarse whisper, she always sounded as if she was dead to the world.

  “Girl, you’re still in bed!” Michelle would exclaim. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Cissy never helped Whitney get ready for school, and years later Michelle told me that her mother pretended not to notice but felt for Whitney’s struggle to get out the door unassisted. More than that, it angered her that on the rare occasion Cissy took a turn driving the girls to school, she dropped them off late.

  Once Whitney proclaimed her devotion to singing, Cissy began bringing her to the studio for session work, and she spent her teen years among studio musicians, standing next to her mother, learning how to sing background. During the summers of her youth, Whitney often went on the road with Dionne, which was another sort of education. She had the gift, and the seeds were there, but her time in the studio and touring was her accelerated degree. She wanted to be ready.

  But Whitney couldn’t talk to her mother—not about school and not about her feelings. As the youngest child, she was the only one still living full-time with her parents. She told me that her stepbrother Gary had a brief stint playing with the NBA’s Denver Nuggets but was dismissed from the team and sent home. Though I didn’t know either of them, her brother Michael had played on Clifford J. Scott’s varsity basketball team while I was there and had gone on to Fairleigh Dickinson.

  Nippy was Daddy’s girl and Cissy’s daughter and caught in the middle of her feuding parents. When they confronted her about her failing grades during her freshman year, she unleashed years of anxiety and anger by screaming, “I hate being here in the middle of the two of you!” Soon after, Mr. Houston moved out and into an apartment in north Newark.

  Whitney had conflicting emotions concerning her family and felt that they were always putting her in the middle of their issues and dramas. When she shared some of the stories with me, I suggested she try again to open up to her mother the way I did with mine.

  “I can’t talk to my mother. She knows best,” she said sarcastically.

  “You should try,” I said.

  “I could never tell my mother about how I’m feeling.”

  “Well, would you talk to someone else?” I asked, and told her that my mother had sent me to counseling when I was younger.

  One time before my parents were officially divorced, my father showed up at our apartment looking for Mom. When he discovered she wasn’t home, he flew into a jealous rage. As he circled around in his car looking for her, I prayed Mom would make it home before he could get to her. My brother, my sister, and I watched out the window, and as soon as we saw her coming, we yelled down to her to get inside. She made it, but as soon as she closed the door, my father arrived and tried to push it in. Marty added his weight and I heard the lock click into place. My father went to work on the heavy metal door, and once he kicked that door in, he dragged my mother around the apartment holding a hammer to her head.

  “Daddy, that’s not right!” I yelled, but he acted as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Call the police!” Mom told Marty. My brother picked up the rotary phone and tried, but his hands were shaking and he couldn’t get it right. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen. I snatched the receiver from him and dialed myself.

  My great-grandmother Alvina Crawford, who lived across the courtyard from us, came in and said, “Sonny, you done gone too far.” He finally released my mother. The police arrived and told my father to leave, but he wasn’t arrested.

  From then on, I was always the one who would stand up in the middle of some trouble. That’s what I knew how to do. It was just the way I grew up—always having to get in the middle of some drama. When I was twelve, Mom arranged for Marty and me to attend two weeks at summer camp. It sounded great: We were promised lots of swimming and other sports and a chance to see something new.

  As we left from city hall in Newark, I enthusiastically waved goodbye, but when we arrived at camp, I refused to get off the bus.

  “Honey, you’ve got to get off,” the driver said.

  The counselor who climbed aboard the bus was sympathetic and patient, so after about thirty minutes, I finally got off, but once I reached the last step, I froze again and wouldn’t let them walk me into the camp.

  “Call my mother,” I said.

  When she was on the line, I agreed to go into the office, where I told my mother I didn’t want to be there. Mom said, “Robyn, it’s going to take me over two hours to get there. Why don’t you spend the night and see how you feel in the morning.”

  “Mommy,” I said, “come and get me.”

  Marty had already gone to the boys’ side of the camp and was clueless about what was happening. I was too worried to stay. I didn’t know what would happen to Mom in my absence.

  After that, Mom was concerned that I was too attached to her and
perhaps seriously scarred by my father.

  I told Whitney that the weekly counseling sessions I went to were really helpful in allowing me to feel more comfortable and less worried. She said it was good that I went, and Whitney then fell silent, going deep within her thoughts.

  These thoughts stuck with me, and by spring semester of my third year at college, I was having trouble in my sociology class. We were studying juvenile delinquency, drug arrests, and petty offenses, and a correlation was drawn between single-parent families and these outcomes. I didn’t connect much with the professor, which was my first challenge since it was an intimate class of maybe twelve students. According to her, if you came from anything other than a two-parent household—“the norm”—you were put in another category. I didn’t think it was fair to those of us who didn’t fit into that norm. I knew people who came from two-parent households who were a mess, and children of single-parent households who performed very well. I would bristle at these and other designations and participate in open class conversation to challenge them.

  I said, “I’ve been there. I’ve been to an all-white school and I know what they have access to.” Whitney also used to say there were more drugs in Mount St. Dominic alone than there were in the city of East Orange. Those girls had money for cocaine or whatever they chose.

  If it wasn’t about drugs, then it was about broken homes, and I just wouldn’t fall in line. My professor would say, “These are the statistics.” And I would respond, “Who’s taking the statistics? They haven’t been to my house.” My mother told me that I could be and do anything that I wanted; no one could stop me from moving forward but me. But in that same breath she also said, “Don’t be foolish, this is a white man’s world, pay attention.”

  I can’t explain why I was even willing to put anything bad into my body. Anyone who knew me from high school or my years in college knew that I did not indulge. But I guess I was so taken with Whitney in those early days, I just went with the flow. We knew that the use of cocaine was not something we should get comfortable with but must have convinced ourselves—if only in our heads—that we would do it for only a short time.

  If Whit felt like talking, she talked a lot, and fast; and when I was high, it would almost make my head explode. We’d start with a game of Uno or Spades—those games could go on forever. We’d talk music and scripture for hours and before long, I would nearly cry with frustration because she would not stop talking. I continued to read the Bible on my own. I knew there had to be something more than what life had presented so far and it bothered me that the creation of human life was so amazing and yet finite. We are supposed to enjoy this journey but not hold on too tight to anyone or anything because inevitably, it all goes away.

  In the beginning I enjoyed taking a few hits, but coming down from cocaine was always bad. I hated it. I felt like a vampire running from daylight and avoiding people. It took days to fully recover, and I found myself shriveled up, dry mouthed, and blinking uncontrollably, with a crusty nose and insomnia.

  We knew that everything we’d talked about as far as show business was starting to get real. We agreed that we couldn’t take cocaine along to where we were going, though we weren’t ready to give it up entirely just yet.

  I thought we were in control, but we were doing it enough that one day Mom told me my face was shaped like the devil’s. Apparently I was getting much thinner, and it showed.

  I finished my sophomore year at Monmouth and headed home for the summer, returning in time to learn that Nip was going to her senior prom with a family friend named Richie. He was good-looking.

  “Don’t worry about Richie, he’s gay,” she said.

  On prom day, Cissy was beaming and gushing over her daughter, calling her “my princess.” We’d been hanging out, and I stayed for a while as she got ready. Whit looked lovely in a lavender-and-white two-piece floor-length gown with wide fluttery sleeves and a long sash tied around her waist in a bow.

  Whitney was traveling for fashion shoots as far away as Santo Domingo. She thought we might have more time together if we were both modeling and took me to meet her agent, who said she might be able to book me for runway in Africa. That was much farther away than the Dominican Republic, so modeling was a dead end for me.

  It was much better for me to be around New York anyway. Since Nip didn’t have a license yet, I would drive her to go-sees, Sweetwater’s, or wherever else she needed to be. There were always people visiting backstage after the shows at Sweetwater’s. Luther Vandross, Phyllis Hyman, industry people. I’d be in her dressing room off to the side watching. Cissy was usually upset about something: Maybe the drummer played too loud, or maybe someone handed Whitney their business card without going through her mother. Whitney was always very gracious and sweet and looked at every visitor as if she was really listening, when all she really wanted was to change into her T-shirt and jeans and leave.

  My mother came to some of those early shows, and after one of them she was dining at a table near where Cissy sat with her church friends using the F-word like other people say excuse me. My mom told me that she was leaving and, on her way out, whispered, “And she calls herself a woman of God.”

  While Mom didn’t appreciate our late-night phone marathons, she really liked Whitney. Many times she said that she didn’t know how she’d turned out the way that she did. Whitney was responsible and her brothers were not. She was lovely when she spoke, while her mother’s mouth was foul. Whitney was respectful and polite, with a disposition that was likeable and engaging.

  One night backstage at Sweetwater’s, a man from the music industry came over to praise Whitney and talk to us. When he said, “You’re both so beautiful,” Cissy whipped her head around and pronounced, “No one should be looking at anyone but my kid.” We thanked him for his kind words, excused ourselves, and left.

  Five

  The Future Is Now

  In the fall of 1982, I headed back to college to finish out my senior year. But halfway through the semester I decided that I needed to take control of my future—and that future started with my decision to leave college.

  My basketball team was nearing the end of the regular season, right before the start of tournament time. The WNBA didn’t exist, so it wasn’t like I was working toward anything significant by playing college ball. It was a different time, and I knew that coaching wasn’t for me. Also, the coach who’d recruited me, Joan Martin, had stepped down. Her replacement was a guy who bellowed, “I’m your father; I’m your boyfriend; I’m your coach; I’m your everything.” I knew he meant well, but I no longer felt inspired. My mind was elsewhere.

  During one of our late-night conversations, I asked Nippy what she thought about my leaving college. She replied, “That’s a decision you’ll have to make on your own.” I knew she was suppressing her true feelings. Almost every previous call had begun and ended with her saying, “I wish you were here.”

  I thought about it and decided to leave Monmouth before the fall semester was over. I informed my mother, who said that I was ungrateful and that I’d received a scholarship only to toss it out the window. I couldn’t argue; she was right. Janet, who had worked so hard to lift herself and to give her children opportunity, wanted to see at least one of her children graduate from college. After telling my mother, I called a meeting after practice and told my team. We had played nineteen games and I was probably the leading scorer. It was a difficult conversation.

  Finally, I told Whitney. “Are you sure?” she asked, but she could barely contain her excitement.

  No one else understood my decision, but it made perfect sense to me. I believed in my friend and what she was trying to do, and moving back to join her cemented that commitment. So I said my farewells, packed my bags, and left college just over one semester short of a degree.

  It wouldn’t be easy, of course. Nip and I needed money, and her modeling gigs weren’t putting enough cash
in her pocket to live on. I drove her to local jobs, and she traveled to places like St. Barts for catalog shoots. She hated how the fashion world treated models—as if they weren’t real people. Sometimes the photographers and stylists would stand there discussing the setup for a photo as if she weren’t sitting right there, saying things that were insensitive and hurtful. After one shoot, Nip came home in tears, her head a sticky mess from all the product applied to her hair to make it comply to the photographer’s vision. I played it down, told her not to worry, that I would take care of it, and I washed the styling gunk out until her hair returned to its natural cottony-soft texture.

  My first morning back home, Mom was in my face. “If I’m getting up to go to work, you will, too!” I told her that I was helping Nip launch her career, which was like a full-time job, and that I was reading books like The Road Less Traveled and thinking a lot. Of course, Mom didn’t buy it. Neither did my uncle Robert, who’d practically laughed in my face: “You think this girl is going to make it big, huh? That only happens in the movies, child.” My mom just listened. She’d always believed in me, and I think that deep down she even wanted to believe in my and Whitney’s dream.

  But I gave her reason to doubt: She saw the signs. In the months after I left school, there were too many times I was silly from weed or distant and cold when I came home high on coke. I often stayed out all night without the courtesy of a phone call.

  One morning, when I got up, Mom was sitting in the living room waiting for me.

  “Robyn, I want to talk to you. Sit down,” she said in a soft but firm voice, her eyes never leaving mine.