Yesterday on my walk, two women did just that. One had a dog on a short leash and the other was an older woman I recognized as a close neighbor. As I approached them with their backs turned to me, I rehearsed what to say to avoid scaring them.
“Excuse me, ladies,” I said in my sweetest, singsongiest voice. The older woman turned, reacting with a full face of pleasantness. But as she saw my two inches of skin, I watched a wave of terror come over her face as her entire body clenched.
I sidled past, and as I walked away, I heard my neighbor say something I couldn’t place, but then heard the last word as clear as could be: “thug.”
Was she talking about me? The kids? My sweet husband, who I often call Poopy? Something completely unrelated to me? Whatever the answer, I gave my workout to her. I thought about her saying “thug” the entire time I was on the treadmill, pounding out that run.
The next day, as I layered up to make my walk to the gym, I remembered that I had two new pairs of gloves and mittens, both in black and white stripes. I instinctively reached for the gloves, but I stopped.
“Well,” I said aloud, “thugs don’t wear mittens.”
I put the mittens on and went out into the street. Of course I was fumbling with my phone because, honestly, you can’t do shit with mittens on. But I was going to make my neighbors feel comfortable, dammit. Surely they would see my black face and say, “But wait, she’s got on mittens! She’s an acceptable Negro. She belongs. Just look at those darling mittens.”
That day, I decided to walk through the park instead of on the sidewalk. To save myself two minutes, I cut from the path to walk across a patch of grass. I was four steps in when I got trapped in a quicksand of icy mud. I looked down, my sneakers getting muddier and muddier, and I wasn’t sure where to step next.
Suddenly, a sea of children ran toward me. They were probably on a field trip, racing through the park, with their teachers trying to keep up. “What are the teachers going to think about this black lady,” I thought to myself, “in a puffy coat and black hoodie, standing frozen in this swamp of mud?”
I panicked, sticking my hands out at my sides. I’ve got my mittens on, I thought. Those teachers can tell their children not to be afraid. As the kids ran around me, I tried to skedaddle past them, because that is the only word for the ridiculous “walking” I was doing, slipping and sliding across the icy mud. And I became furious. Had I really reassured myself that I could erase four hundred years of history with these fucking mittens? Yes, the mittens were the thing that was going to separate me from the other black people who my neighbors deem threatening or, at very least, have decided don’t belong on the Gold Coast.
I had dared to go off the path set for me. But when I got to the gym, I didn’t think about my neighbors on the treadmill that day. I thought about my friend Ricky Williams. Ricky is a retired Miami Dolphin who I met while I was doing Bad Boys II. He would be the first to tell you that he has social anxiety, so we bonded over that right away. I called him Buddha because he was so cosmic and sweet. Like me, he likes to go for walks, and like me, he doesn’t always know where he’s headed. When I’m filming in new cities, I walk around and allow myself to get lost. And yes, I have been known to aimlessly follow squirrels.
Ricky was showing just that trait in January 2017, before an award ceremony in Tyler, Texas, when this ex–University of Texas prodigal son left his hotel to kill time with a walk. Ricky was strolling through nearby woods when someone called the police because he looked “suspicious.” On the body-cam footage, before the officers even got out of the car, one of them said, “That looks like Ricky Williams.” It was actually four cops who arrived on “the scene” to search and question him. He was told to put his hands behind his back, and right after they told him to spread his legs, a starstruck young officer asked if he was Ricky Williams.
“I am.”
What followed presents a surreal portrait of fame and the black body. On video, the cops seem to slip in and out of seeing him as Ricky Williams, someone whose fame sets him apart, and seeing a black man in a white space. Ricky stands there as the cop runs his hands all over his body. “I’ll explain everything to you in just a second,” says the cop, pulling Ricky’s hotel key card from his pocket. “People don’t know who you are, nothing may have happened that was wrong, but we gotta find out.”
When Ricky tells them he is staying at the Marriott next door, the policemen seem to leap on this fact as a reason to let him go. “If you tell me you’re staying at this hotel,” says one officer, “it makes a little more sense as to why you’re walking around this area.”
Ricky then shows just the slightest crack in his Buddha cool, and points out that the cop had pulled out his hotel card.
“Isn’t that the whole point of searching me?” asks Ricky. “To get information?”
“You’re not in handcuffs. We’re just talking to you.”
“Why would I be in handcuffs? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You’re acting really defensive.”
And then Ricky tells the truth: “Do you know how many times I’ve been messed with by the cops because I’m black?”
“Oh, no no no no,” says a cop, as the others shake their heads. “Come on now.”
Yes, come on now. There was an assumption of guilt because of his very identity, and Ricky had to convince these men that he was innocent. The police stopped him as a reminder of the power structure Ricky is supposed to enforce upon himself: he should know that his skin puts him under constant surveillance and that his very presence outside of sanctioned spaces creates the assumption of wrongdoing. It is, in fact, an inconvenience to the police that they have to be bothered to tell him this. By now, as adults, Ricky and I are supposed to have internalized these rules and regulations that come with our very existence. We put on the mittens, we utter singsong hellos, and we stay where we belong.
I cut through the little field at the park that day. If someone had stopped me and I had to try to explain my moves, why I opted to go through the park, why I came across these children, why I was sliding through the mud . . . if I had tried to explain myself, I might have sounded crazy, but really all I would have been explaining away was the presence of my body in a space where it has been decided that black bodies are violent and threatening.
Worse, I am told that people don’t want to hear these stories, but the reality is we experience life in a never-ending loop in which we are told that if we just “make it,” we will enjoy the fruits of our labor: assimilation. My father tried so hard, but he was pulled out of his Mercedes at gunpoint in Pleasanton on his way to work in a suit. The police said they were looking for an escaped convict from nearby Santa Rita Jail. My father was a middle-aged man who looked nothing like the convict except for being black. There was no neighborhood outcry or protest. No one came to his defense. It was a necessary “inconvenience” for maintaining the safety of the neighborhood.
But what does that say about aspirational living? Hey, you moved into a big house and you made it . . . except you didn’t. There’s this idea that you will be safe if you just get famous enough, successful enough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move into the right neighborhood, do all these things to fully assimilate into the America people have been sold on. We all bought in, and we keep thinking if we just get over this mountain of assimilation, on the other side is a pot of gold. Or maybe a unicorn, perhaps a leprechaun. Any of those is as plausible as the acceptance of the wholeness of me. But there’s just another mountain on the other side. And someone will be ready to tell you, “Don’t be breathing hard. You need to make this look easy.”
Just as the cops were annoyed when Ricky said he had been repeatedly stopped because he is black, discussion of race is often dismissed or talked over unless it is in a sanctioned space. You can talk about your experience at a roundtable on race, but don’t talk about yourself at a “regular” roundtable. It is exactly the same as when I would challenge my friends in Pleasanton nea
r the end of high school. “That again?” they would say. “Get off your soapbox.” Only now these are grown-ups who fashion themselves as allies. But these are my stories; this is what I have lived. I know what the boys I raise go through, what my husband goes through, and beyond my family, I can watch a video of it happening to Ricky. Each of us experiences these “same things,” but each experience has value and deserves telling. I need to write them and read them aloud to constantly remind myself of my reality. I need to hear these stories. If I think mittens—or the way I talk, or the fame I have—will make my breathing and living on this planet permissible.
I am told no one wants to hear about it. I even hear it from other people of color in Hollywood. Some have climbed the mountain and have been able to assimilate so thoroughly, they think they are in a parallel universe. “You’re sabotaging your own success by limiting yourself to being a black woman,” they say. They tell us that if we just stripped away these layers of identity, we would be perceived not for our color or gender, but for our inner core. Our “humanness.”
My humanness doesn’t insulate me from racism or sexism. In fact, I think I can deal effectively with the world precisely because I am a black woman who is so comfortable in my black-womanness. I know what I can accomplish. And anything I have accomplished, I did so not in spite of being a black woman, but because I am a black woman.
This is not the message that assimilated people of color in Hollywood want to hear. In exchange for a temporary pass that they think is permanent, these ones who’ve “made it” then turn and yell back to the others, “No, keep going! Assimilation is the key! Deny your victimhood! Let go of your identity.”
Better bring your mittens, that’s what I know.
eighteen
BIG BANK TAKE LITTLE BANK
Dwyane and I have a ritual involving our favorite show, Nashville. I guess I should say our favorite show that I am not on. No matter what, we have to watch it together, preferably at home in Chicago. We have these twin chaise lounges in our theater room, and in winter, we each have a blanket to curl up in, fuzzy on one side, quilted on the other.
We always assemble our snacks beforehand because we don’t want to get up during the show. It’s all about being able to barrel through the episode. Lately we’ve been doing Garrett’s popcorn in the tubs, half cheese, half caramel corn. Then I have my alkaline water and he’s got the bottled water he likes. And of course we have our phones beside us, too, so we can tweet about Nashville, which is almost as good as watching Nashville. We even have our own phone chargers ready—go big or go home.
If you don’t watch the show, just understand that Deacon and Rayna were everything. Through all their ups and downs, their love endured and we adored them for it. I’m writing this in a hotel in New York City, and D and I have signed in under the alias Deacon Claybourne. (I also check in stealth as Cha Cha diGregorio from Grease—the best dancer at St. Bernadette’s with the worst reputation—but that is another story.)
Without giving anything away, one of Deacon and Rayna’s issues as a couple in country music is that she is the huge singing star and earner in the relationship. When Deacon told Rayna, “It’s your world, I just live in it,” that was the most honest description I have heard about the inequity of fame and finances in love. I know it rang true for me. That’s how all my relationships were before Dwyane. I paid for everything.
The first time my father ever met Dwyane, it was at Dad’s house in Arizona. We successfully navigated the whole awkward first meeting, but at the very last second, just as we were leaving, Dad pulled Dwyane back into the house.
“What do you want with my daughter?” he asked, suddenly gruff. “She’s got her own shit. She’s got her own house. She’s got her own money. What do you want with my daughter?”
He wasn’t saying, “What are your intentions for my daughter’s heart?” He meant, “We have been down this road before and she’s come out poorer.”
Dad didn’t believe that a professional athlete wasn’t hiding some problem that would prove a drain on my savings. “I’m doing all right by myself,” D then awkwardly explained. “I’m not going to try to use her.”
He doesn’t need my money, but sometimes I’m Deacon and it really is Dwyane’s world. I often work around his life, because I have more flexibility. Because the basketball schedule is the basketball schedule, amen. And, at the end of September, that schedule is our schedule. On top of that, he has many brand and partnership obligations. Then there are the team obligations, the NBA obligations, and in between that there’s our family. And then there’s us as a couple. A lot of times I am like, “Whatever, just tell me when I can see you.”
We are lucky in that we have homes in many cities now, because we’re all over the place for work, and that’s where I can plainly see the lines of division. I make it clear to people that there is a house I am financially responsible for in L.A., and there is the Miami home Dwyane built when he played for the Heat. “Don’t judge the black actress home that I pay for in Los Angeles,” I say when folks visit. “I know you’ve seen the black athlete home in Miami, but this is what I can afford.”
D thinks the disparity is funny, probably because he’s loaded. There are times when we go to restaurants and D will purposefully forget his wallet so I have to pay. Once, at the end of a large, boozy gathering, I texted him under the guise of answering a question from my publicist. “I wouldn’t have said, ‘Let’s invite your whole team out!’ if I knew this was going on the black actress AmEx that you don’t chip in for.” He loved that one.
When we were designing the Miami home, my husband kept saying things like “Well, I didn’t want to sign off on that until you saw it.”
“At the end of the day it’s your money,” I would answer, “so do whatever you want to do.”
“But you’re the woman of the house,” he’d say. “You’re my partner, you’re here with me.”
That was lovely, but in all negotiations, whether it was about wallpaper or if we really needed to get an eight-foot-tall Buddha statue in the Miami house, I have learned this lesson: big bank take little bank.
It’s a simple rule dictating that whoever has more money wins. Whatever your income bracket, whoever has the power of the bigger purse in the relationship usually has the final decision. In my first marriage, I made more than my husband, so I was big bank. Now, I was decidedly little bank. The sanctity of this rule was never more apparent than when we worked out the prenup. On paper, it’s an adult thing to do. Grown-ups with a certain amount of money who care for each other say, “You know what, just in case we gotta jump ship, let’s make clear while we really like each other exactly what we’re going in with and what we leave with.”
The negotiations went on for months before our August 2014 wedding. We started with the right intentions, mind you. My team and I were adamant that we have a prenup to protect myself, because I got taken to the cleaners in my first marriage. Dwyane’s team was all in because he had been to the cleaners with his first wife. We both basically bought our respective cleaners, plus the deli next door, and built a new wing on the library across the street. That’s how bad those divorces had been. It wasn’t that either of us planned on getting divorced. But we also didn’t plan on getting cleaned out again, either. Better safe than losing all your money, you know? My first thought was that I wanted to leave the marriage, should things go that way, with whatever I came in with. I wanted Dwyane to know I didn’t need his anything if I didn’t want to be with him. I will give blow jobs in a leper colony before I take a dime from a man I am no longer in love with. That’s who I am. I will cut off my nose, or my lips I guess, to spite my face.
But Dwayne felt differently. His team kept pushing. “No, no. We want to give you something, throw out some numbers.” So finally, I gave in. It was like they said, “You can have whatever salad you want,” and I asked for a kale salad.
“Actually,” they replied with a note of apology, “it’s just iceberg let
tuce for you.”
“But you said I could have whatever I wanted,” I answered. “I want kale. Why would you offer me anything if you only wanted to give me iceberg? Don’t you care about my health and wellness?”
This was all coming from Dwyane’s team, yes, but the person who had proposed to me was now, in theory, lowballing me. It wasn’t even about the money, really. The question for me was “What does this man think I’m worth?” There were literally pages going back and forth, detailing my potential worth as a wife. The money went up if I had a child, and then there were even weirder conversations about my own earning potential. When my attorney eventually had to say, “Fuck you, these are her quotes,” meaning what I am paid to do a job, I realized we were negotiating my marriage the same way we would a sitcom deal at NBC. My team had to provide examples of my past worth, then factor in my social media power to come up with a number that I needed to protect as my future earnings. And then Dwyane’s team came back with, “No, actually, that’s not her value. She is worth less than that.”
“Worth less.” I tried that on in my actress voices. “I am worth less. Worth less? Worthless. Ah, yes, I am worthless.” My number was based off my own work, whereas his angle was just “This is what I want to pay.”
Big bank take little bank.
It was hell, especially when you’re supposed to be marrying your best friend. Finally, three days before the wedding, he became Dwyane again. You know why? Because I signed. He was like Jon Snow, morphing from “Winter is coming” to “I’m in Miami, bitch!” He became ecstatic, throwing off all the layers of anxiety, and there I was underneath them, the woman he loved. He was freed. But I was resentful. Hell, I am still resentful. Which is why when I make him my #ManCrushMonday on Instagram, I say, “As per the prenup, my forever man crush Monday.” Does he regret playing hardball? Not in the least. He played to win.
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