by RuPaul
It wasn’t really an unhappy childhood—but it wasn’t a fairy tale either. When we were little kids, my parents would fight all the time, real fistfights. Renae, Renetta, Rozy, and me would huddle together in the back while they battled with one another in the front room, screaming at each other and tearing the place apart. By the time we came out of hiding in the morning, everything was all over the place; bits of shattered lamps, broken plates, and glasses everywhere. It was a total mess.
It was like something straight out of The Prince of Tides. In the movie the kids went underwater when their parents started fighting because it was peaceful there, a safe haven. When I saw that film I started crying uncontrollably, and not silently. It was embarrassing because I literally could not control myself. The movie triggered these feelings that just gushed out of me. As children we bury a lot of our feelings deep inside and learn to become experts at hiding our emotions behind masks.
RuPAUL’S FAVOURITE SAYINGS
- Don’t let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.
- Don’t let the smooth taste fool ya.
- Your country breakfast is ready.
- You got some money for me?
- Strong enough for a man, made for a woman.
- If I’m lying I’m flying, and you don’t see no wings, do ya?
- You better work, bitch ...
- Everybody say love.
- She done already done had hers’es.
- If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?
- All right, god damn it!
Much later in life some catalyst, some event, will bring them all back, and they will all pour out, even stuff we forgot was there. So there I was in a theater full of people, gasping for breath—I couldn’t stop it.
I remember the day my childhood ended very clearly. It was the day my parents went to file for their divorce. Normally, I would come home for lunch every day, and my mother would be there with oatmeal or something. But that particular day, I went home for lunch and no one was there. So I went back to school, lined up ready to go back into class, and suddenly started crying. My teacher asked me what was wrong and I explained that I had gone home to lunch but my mother wasn’t there, and so I hadn’t had anything to eat. She sent me off with a note to the cafeteria. As I trotted off I felt better already because of this special treatment. I was on an adventure! When I got there the cafeteria was totally empty except for the janitors who were cleaning off tables. They only had some hot dogs and potato chips left, but I didn’t mind. A few minutes later as I sat eating my lunch, the principal came over and said, “May I join you?” I nodded, and the two of us proceeded to eat lunch together. It was my first power meal. After all, having lunch with the principal was like having lunch with the President of the United States. I can still remember the rush of being with a VIP, and not feeling so stranded after all.
My mother was Creole and came from St. Martinsville, Louisiana. It’s near where they make Tabasco. But my mother was the hottest bottle of sauce for miles around—a real fire-cracker of a woman.
My mother was mulatto. It’s a weird color—I can never quite describe it—neither black nor white but something else, a sort of beige. She had six brothers and sisters, two of them died at birth, and the surviving brothers and sisters—Frank, Felicia, Mandolia, Enorris—moved to California in the fifties. My grandparents’ names were Ernestine Gerard and Felix Fontinette. My mother was named Ernestine Fontinette after her mother, and she was every bit as bold and grand as her name suggests. When my mother was fifteen, her mother was mad at her for something and said to her, “You make me so mad sometimes, I wish I hadn’t given you my name!” My mother said, “Fine! I’ll change my name!” And from then on she had everyone call her Toni, which is what my dad called her. The social workers called her Mrs. Ernestine Charles. All the kids in the neighborhood called her Mean Miss Charles.
Mama was full of one-liners. She was wise in many ways, but dysfunctional in others. Still, some of her words of wisdom were hard to forget, like, “Never argue with a fool.” I go by that to this day. There’s no point to it. Another one was, “Blind Tom said, ‘Sight beat the world, and we shall see.’” As a child I had no idea what this meant, and I only recently figured it out. It basically means the truth will make itself known.
My mother was very clean. She wasn’t a clean freak like Joan Crawford, but she liked to keep her house clean. Another one of Mama’s bits of advice was, “If you don’t have nothing to your name, at least keep it clean.” That was her philosophy. I was a boy, so I got away with keeping my room a mess. It’s funny how ultimately you turn into your parents. If you go to my house today, it’s not spick and span—I may throw my corset on the floor—but it is clean, especially the bathroom and the kitchen.
I have an early memory of my mother walking me to kindergarten. It was a sunny day, and I cried when she left me there. But the thing I remember most of all was the dress she had on. It was very sixties, very pop art, with big brown circles in black squares against a beige background, the sort of thing you see in old curtains, mostly. It was cut so that it flowed out at the waist and went below the knee. My mother was a fashion plate. Next to her idol Jackie O. she was best the dressed woman in the United States. Simple but elegant.
Around the house her hair was all messy and she only wore a caftan, and I have that caftan to this day, as well as her collection of costume jewelry, which she used to collect with a passion. Since she knew what her son would need for a full and happy life, she left it to me in her will. Mama’s passion for shopping turned me into someone who doesn’t like to shop. She would drag us around with her shopping all day with her friend Phyllis from up the hill saying, “Should I get this?” or, “What do you think of that?”
By the time I was seven, my mother and father had had enough of each other, and my father moved out. I don’t remember them ever being in love or even together—there was always tension between them, and so in a way we were glad once he was gone, because we knew he had made my mother unhappy.
Now, my mother would have you believe that she kicked Daddy out, but no one can be kicked out of their own house. That was just the way my mother was; “I’m a bold, black bitch” was her favorite line. She was really in love with him in a big way, and, I guess, in the wrong way. I remember standing across the street from our house when I was about six with the whole neighborhood watching my parents in the garage. My mother had poured gasoline all over my father’s car and was holding a book of matches in her hand and screaming, “Motherfucker, I will light this! I will ignite this motherfucker!” Meanwhile, my dad was on the other side of the car saying, “Toni—don’t do it. Stop!” Sister Harris from my mother’s church came and talked her out of doing it. The fire department was there too, and crowds all around. I didn’t realize it at the time, but if she had done that she would have killed herself, killed him, and burned the house down, with us kids watching from across the street. Very Movie of the Week. My mother was very much that way; Leo the lion, born July 24, 1927. That French, Napoleonic-type thing. Hot temper. Very much so.
That particular episode was triggered by the affair my dad was having with someone else. Betty—that was the other woman’s name. It broke my mother’s heart. By that time they were already sleeping in separate rooms, but when she found out about it she went in and spray-painted Betty’s name all over the yellow walls in red while he was out. All over. In fact she did such a good job that even though the room has been painted dozens of times since, there are still traces of that red paint there today.
My parents divorced in 1967, and my mom never really recovered from it. After the divorce she literally had a nervous breakdown. One day she just stayed in bed and stopped functioning completely. That was the day my two older sisters Renae and Renetta became adults, because they had to become parents looking after me, my sister, and my mother, who continued to stay in bed for days. My mother also started seeing a psychiatrist. His
solution to her problems was an endless supply of Librium and Valium. This was the beginning of some pretty scary times. Because of the drugs, you never knew what kind of mood she’d be in. So you would approach her very tentatively, like, “Ma, can I have a quarter for some pop?” And she would either say, “Yeah, Ru baby, just look in my purse and get what you want,” or else she’d scream, “YOU PUSSY-MOUTHED MOTHERFUCKER GET YOUR BLACK ASS OUT OF MY FACE!”
Matters weren’t helped by the fact that she didn’t get along with my father’s side of the family—even when they were married. She maintained that they never liked her because she was light-skinned and they were all dark-skinned. They thought she thought that she was too good for them. She was always aloof and her own person, so she certainly didn’t make things any easier. To a certain extent they were projecting their own insecurities onto her, but then, for her part, she actually did think she was too good for them. Especially after a party at my father’s sister’s house for which my mother had her friend Hilda make a beautiful satin dress with pearls on it. It was really gorgeous, and before she went she was so excited because she was gonna be the best dressed there. The first night—it was a long weekend party—some of the guests slept over at the house. But when my mom woke up in the morning, she saw that the dress she was going to wear had been slashed to bits with razor blades. In her room! While she slept! She never found out who did it, but that was the last straw, although as far as the party went she played it cool and wore something else.
That was the last time she took any shit from them. In fact, from then on she handed it out. One afternoon after the divorce, one of my father’s sisters came round to check up on us kids. My mom had just gotten in and was hanging up her coat when she answered the door.
“What the hell you want?” Mama said.
“Irving wanted me to come over and see what’s going on with Renae,” said my aunt.
“It ain’t any none of your goddamned business,” said my mother.
With that my aunt tried to push her way into the house.
Big mistake!
My mother had a wire hanger in her hand and started beating her with it. Somehow it got caught on her nose and ripped it wide open. There was blood everywhere! Fortunately, my aunt’s daughter was with her, and rushed her to the hospital, where she had eighteen stitches. Next morning the front porch looked like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Needless to say, my aunt didn’t come round much more after that.
Although everyone used to call her Mean Miss Charles, I didn’t think she was that mean, and in fact it wasn’t till I got older that I learned that other parents didn’t say things like, “Get your black ass in here, you little pussy-mouthed motherfucker, or I’ll whip your goddamn ass.” That was one of her famous ones—“pussy-mouthed motherfucker”—I think she must have coined it. My mother was a poet when it came to cussing someone out. She came from a long line of cussers and was fluent in this whole other language that had its own rules, had its own grammar, and had its own rhythms. It wasn’t just random obscenities, but time-honored tongue-lashings designed to reduce you to a stuttering mute. She swore the way Olivier delivered Hamlet. She would curl her lip, grit her teeth, squint her eyes, and deliver a one-two punch like Muhammad Ali.
She wouldn’t let us have kids come over to the house at all. If kids did come over she would say to me (with the kids standing right there in front of her), “What did I tell you about having them little black motherfuckers in my house? You take your little nappy-headed friends someplace else!” And then later when the kids would ask me, “Why is your mother so mean?” I’d say, “She’s not really that mean, she’s a pussycat.” But I didn’t know other people didn’t talk that way, that’s just how I grew up.
She would never go to school plays or functions, even when the teachers sent us home with notes asking our parents to come. She would just say, “You tell them teachers to come round here and kiss my black ass.” Other times wewould be out with her at a grocery or department store, and she’d go after some poor store attendant and cuss them out. We would plead with her, beg her, not to start acting up. Often that would be enough to set her off, but at least it was us she went after rather than some innocent bystander. But if she didn’t like you, she just didn’t like you, and there was no two ways about it. She didn’t pretend or anything like that. Still, her bark was worse than her bite. Meeting you for the first time she might say, “Motherfucker, what you lookin’ at?” But if you could withstand that and hold your own, she’d be cool with you after that.
You can see why I really only wanted to please my mother—as all us kids did. There was a period when Laugh-In became the thing in 1969, and Mama said, “Okay, Ru, let’s do it, do your thing.” I would get up and do impersonations in the living room for my mother and my sisters. I would do Charo, Cher, Carol Burnett, Tina Turner, James Brown, and Elvis. I would also do the people across the street, because they had a thick southern black accent, particularly this man called Nate, who was one of our neighbors. My mother especially loved it when I did him, and pleasing her made me happiest of all.
Back then we were on welfare. They didn’t have food stamps, but there was surplus cheese, butter, flour, and sugar that you could get. I remember going down to the welfare department to pick stuff up and the other kids would tease you chanting, “I can tell by ya knees ya eat commodity cheese!”
MAMA USED TO SAY: TONI CHARLES SAYINGS
- I don’t lend, I don’t borrow, and I don’t visit.
- Blind Tom said, “Sight beat the world and we shall see.”
- Ain’t no two ways about it.
- Repetit and Gone.
- You think I’m drinking water through my ass?
- A fool and his money soon part.
- Don’t let the same snake bite you twice.
- What comes around goes around.
- Don’t take my kindness for weakness.
- You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
- Still waters run deep.
- A circle always meets.
- I’d rather drink muddy water than sleep in a hollow log.
- There’s a time and a place for everything.
- Pussymouthed motherfucker.
Mom used to sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and looking out the window. From there you could see everything that was happening from our front porch all the way down the street. If a salesman, Jehovah’s Witness, or social worker came to the door, she could see them coming. When they knocked on the door, she wouldn’t answer it. Then they would back up, try and catch her eye through the window by waving or something, and then go back to the door and knock again. She still wouldn’t answer it. This would go on until they got the message that she did not want to be bothered.
Sometimes she would make us answer the door. The social workers were the worst. They’d want to know everything that was going on: if there was a man living there, if our mother was working, if we were going to school, if our father was sending child support checks—which of course he wasn’t. But we didn’t say anything, we had been trained early on by my mother not to let any information leave the house. So we learned how to keep secrets at an early age, which is too bad, because kids shouldn’t be keeping secrets.
After her breakdown my mother had to build herself up from scratch. That took about three years, until 1970, when her father died. Suddenly she seemed to come into her own. She picked herself up and got a job with Planned Parenthood, where she worked until 1976. After that she got a job as a registrar, admitting students to San Diego City College. She made a decent living, paid off the mortgage, and supported herself.
My mother held a grudge against my father from the day they were divorced, and painted a picture of him in our minds as a no-good, dirty-rotten scoundrel. She also swore that my father and his sisters had put voodoo on her. Once she found a little Susie Homemaker doll in the front yard. Someone had painted stuff on its eyes and done other funky th
ings to it too. From the day that the trouble started to the day she died, she always cursed his name and always, I mean always, had something bad to say about him. She was obsessed with the whole thing for twenty-five years, a quarter of a century—now that’s a long time to hold a grudge. I’ve learned that this behavior is unhealthy. In fact it does the person holding the grudge more harm than it does the person against whom the grudge is held.
I think that’s what killed her. She died of cancer. I truly believe that a lot of things like that, thoughts trapped inside the body, manifest themselves as physical ailments. So it’s important to heal those thoughts by bringing them back up to the surface from the cellar of your heart where you’ve locked them away. By doing that you can change your perception of how things are, and let go of the old perception. And if you don’t do that those thoughts can poison and kill you—body and soul.
Now, Mama kept it all inside and internalized everything. Altogether she was something of a closed book. I don’t know very much about her at all. I always tried to get her to open up, but she never wanted to talk about her past or her people. In frustration I would go to my mother’s bedroom, go through all her stuff, and read her letters. She would cuss me out for spying on her, but I wasn’t really spying—I just wanted to know. Well, I never found out much. I’ve learned more from my cousins and my aunts than I have from her. I know that she had malaria as a child, that she’d gone to Catholic school, and was a practicing Seventh Day Adventist (although she didn’t go to church because she thought it was a waste of time), and that’s pretty much it. Very secretive. I put it down to that deep southern vibe. A lot of mysteries still linger there—and my mother’s just one of them. Although she didn’t tell me much about her past, I learned plenty from her. I learned how to stand up for myself. I learned how to break away from the pack, how to do my own thing and not let what other people thought of me get in the way. Above all, she was my ultimate inspiration because she was the first drag queen I ever saw. She had the strength of a man and the heart of a woman. She could be hard as nails, but also sweet and vulnerable—all the things we love about Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Diana Ross. To this day when I pull out my sassy persona, it’s Ernestine Charles that I am channeling.