“Oh, my God!” I said. “He’s got a shotgun.” I figured he was about to shoot the picture window.
“Get away from there!” my mother shouted.
D’nette ran and hid in the closet. I thought, “My daddy’s here and he’s going to kick his behind!” and kept on peeking out the window. But Daddy went and stood over by the closet next to D’nette. Teddy’s outside and Daddy’s inside, but there was no protection nowhere! Fortunately, it was just the long part of a car-jack that Teddy pulled out of the car. Did he throw it? It’s now been so long, I can’t remember.
That fall I was bussed to Boca Ciega High School. Race relations at Boca Ciega were a whole different story from Disston and Azalea. The black kids and white kids there had been having altercations so Mr. Kreiver, the former sergeant, was transferred to Boca Ciega. The school paired him with a black vice principal, Mr. Anders. They squashed the race problems from day one and won the respect of all students because they were fair. No one felt unjustly treated. My mother got tight with Mr. Anders. He was like a father figure to everyone. Between Mama and Mr. Anders they had their eye on me. “You make sure she’s doing what she’s supposed to,” my mother told Mr. Anders and he stayed on the case. He would tell Mama, “Miss Betty, Angela can be this. Angela can be that. Angela can go to college.”
In the meantime, my mother was laying down the law: “A is excellent, B is above average and C is average. I don’t have no average children. Don’t bring home no Cs,” she’d say in her usual melodramatic way. Mess up academically, and you’ll be off of cheerleading, off of this, off of that.
“I ain’t average,” I started thinking. I hadn’t considered this before. “I’m above average—excellent!” My mother implanted such high academic expectations in me that I began to believe her. It was a real turning point. She had prepared me to be independent. “You’re going to college,” she would say. She thought fly, fly, fly, little bird. Drop the eaglet out of the nest and she’ll flap her wings before—splat!—she hits the ground. And then she’ll pick herself up and try to fly again. I think that was her intention from the beginning.
So I did well in school—I was the first black person in my high school to be admitted to the National Honor Society. But I didn’t work too hard—I did my academics enough to impress the teachers and Mr. Anders. I was popular and hung out with everybody. When I got off the bus in the morning at school I’d go to Bible study with the good, straight Bible kids. Then I’d hang out in the dining room with the nerdy kids. When I started reading poetry and performing monologues and doing little plays, I’d hang out with that crowd. I also hung out with the cool kids—I was a cheerleader until I pulled a hamstring and couldn’t do the splits anymore. I hung out with all different groups of people. I wanted to be good, but I also wanted to hang.
But all this monitoring by Mom, Mr. Anders and even Mr. Kreiver made me feel like, “Ugh, I can’t do anything!” Unlike D’nette, who back then was a goody-goody, a drag—she’s the life of the party now—I was the kind of kid who wanted to get my foot up to the edge, hang it over and then come back before it got too dangerous. My mother smoked, so I would steal her cigarettes and hide them in the tears in the sofa cushions. When D’nette wasn’t home, I’d smoke my mother’s Winstons. My head would be swimming. Mom didn’t have any liquor around so I didn’t drink. I wouldn’t try reefer even though I was around it a lot because of something my mother told me.
“Do you know what grass is?” my mother would ask.
“Noooo,” I’d answer, knowing full well I did.
“Grass is not the stuff outside. It’s called marijuana and kids smoke it,” she’d say. “Once my cousin Connie gave me some and I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground.”
I thought that was amazing—that she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. What did it do to you? I wondered. But then she’d go on this long talking jag with you—it could be for hours—about smoking marijuana. She’d be in the kitchen cooking and you just had to sit there at the table and listen. I didn’t want to try grass after that.
At parties I’d be around people smoking reefer, which most of the kids were doing at the time. D’nette, who my mother made me take everywhere, would sit there with both hands over her nose and mouth—at the party!—trying not to breathe.
“They’re smoking reefers in here!”
“Yes, they are, but we’re not,” I’d whisper. “Why do you have to act like that? Can’t you be cool? You’re gonna embarrass me.”
I also started to straddle Mama’s rules concerning boys. In tenth grade I got a new boyfriend, David, and we liked each other a lot. During this time my mother, who had always told me not to get pregnant, tried to be close to me. She started talking to me about men. I remember that she’d warn me, “The ones you don’t love will love you, and the ones you love won’t love you.” She also started talking about the first time I’d have sex.
“Angela, I want to know. I want to be there,” she’d say to me.
“Really, Ma—physically?”
“No, not physically. But I want to be there for you.”
The morning after I lost my virginity I told my mother about it.
“Ma, I did it,” I said while we were at the breakfast table.
“You had sexual intercourse! With who, David?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? Why?” she demanded. “Did he threaten to break up with you?”
“No, Mama!”
“Come on, let’s go for a ride.”
“Ma, can I come?” D’nette asked.
“No, D’nette, you stay home,” my mother told my little sister.
Then we drove around and she talked to me for what must have been seven or eight hours—until I was blue in the face. All that openness up front, then after it happened, “Oh, no!”
After that I decided having sex was not worth braving my mother’s tirades. I thought, “Forget this. I’ll wait and have sex when I go to college!”
In eleventh grade there was a little college boy who liked me. I’d tell my mother that I had to go to rehearsal for a play I was in. I’d go to rehearsal and do my four lines then my boyfriend would pick me up. We’d go back to his dorm room and start kissing, kissing and hugging and rubbing and kissing. Oh, I could kiss like crazy, but there was no way I was having sex! Each night it would be kiss, kiss, hug, hug, rub, rub and then, “Stop! Take me home.” This went on for night after night. The young man was nice. He wouldn’t push and he always took me home when I asked him to.
When I was in high school, I also participated in Upward Bound, an academic and cultural enrichment program for underprivileged kids. We didn’t see ourselves as underprivileged. In fact, in St. Pete’s we were the cool kids. David Davidson was captain of the football team and very smart. He wanted to be a lawyer. Kenny Leon had a mom and a stepdaddy and he was in the program. Today he’s a Broadway director. He directed the version of A Raisin in the Sun with P. Diddy in it. In Upward Bound, I got to meet kids from around the city and different high schools. We did African studies, little plays, read poetry, got tutored—that kind of thing. When I was fifteen, George Langhorne, the program’s director, informed me that he had handpicked and submitted me for a special program. I was being invited to attend the Presidential Classroom for Young Americans. It was supposed to be a great honor, and it was a total surprise! Mama and Miss Mattie got my wardrobe together, bought me a coat and sent me up to Washington, D.C. I lived in a fancy hotel room for a week with three white kids from around the country and around the world. I had never been away on my own, I had never stayed in a hotel and, other than going to North Carolina, I had never really gone anywhere. It was a rite of passage of sorts.
The Presidential Classroom program was about government, government, government. “When there’s a war, inflation goes up, down or whatever….” “I have a question, Mr. Senator….” Political, political. Well, I didn’t have any questions. I was just sitting there thinking, What the
heck are we talking about? This is boring. Are we gonna see some monuments? Then we’d go look at monuments. I took a lot of pictures. Later, I showed them to Mama, who has a way of describing things that could hurt your feelings if you took it that way. “It looks like a stick in the ground,” she said about the Washington Monument.
One night they took us to the Kennedy Center to see a play, Of Mice and Men, starring James Earl Jones. I was touched and moved by the play, and James Earl Jones, who played his character so beautifully. It was just great! And when he, as the character Lenny, got shot on that stage, I cried. The theater had emptied, the people were gone and I was just sitting there, boo-hooing. “How can these people just leave?” It was like a spark had gone off inside me. If I could make people feel as passionately as I feel right now, I thought, that would be a wonderful thing!
After that I started participating in the drama society at school, if you want to call it that—we didn’t really do a play or anything. When I was a senior, the society held an evening of monologues. I remember doing one from A Raisin in the Sun of Mama talking to Benita.
…when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they gone and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning—because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so!
I put on my great-grandmother’s blue-and-white dress, stuffed the bosom full of paper and made up my hair and face to look old. I remember people applauded and received my performance well. It touched them. I thought, Oh, maybe I’m good at this! I’d perform at church in the talent contest, I’d get with Kenny and we’d do a scene from a play together, and we had arts nights at Upward Bound—that kind of thing. I’d read Langston Hughes poems: “Madam and the Rent Man,” “Madam and the Phone Bill,” “Madam and the Minister.”
At the library I found a recording of Ruby Dee reciting the poetry of Langston Hughes. You know, Ruby Dee is good—she can do poems! So I just copied her and was good at copying her. I really connected with the sentiment of one poem in particular that she did entitled “Final Call.” It was powerful and had a great rhythm.
I performed “Final Call” at a CME Church conference one time. I was so nervous after my recitation that my knees buckled. But then people started applauding. I received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than one thousand people. Experiencing the rush of applause from so many people almost blew me backward—it made me feel good. Later I entered and won a oratorical contest put on by Optimist International. Experiences like these made me feel validated and assured and confident in my abilities. I had a sense that God had given me a gift. The works of these great black artists that I read and performed heightened the sense of excellence my mother had implanted in my spirit. They also connected me to the rich cultural legacy of African-Americans, and made me aware of black people’s strength, struggles and accomplishments.
At the beginning of my senior year, my mother received a letter on a yellow legal sheet of paper from Mr. Langhorne, my old Upward Bound director. He had gone on in the world—he was in the army and had been stationed elsewhere—and hadn’t been in contact. But he sent my mother a letter telling her where to have me apply to college.
Dear Betty, I know it’s time for Angela to start applying for college. Have her apply to the University of Virginia, University of Miami, Harvard, Yale, University of California at Berkeley…
Until then, I had been thinking about going to Howard, since it was a very prestigious black institution and I had visited D.C. before. Then somebody suggested that I apply to Mount Holyoke, an all-girls’ school in Massachusetts.
I didn’t know what other schools to apply to. I’d been to Florida A & M University; that was okay. I liked the food—they had greens and fried chicken—but the dorms were kind of old and they had roaches in them. I didn’t think I wanted to go there. Where should I go? Close by? Far away? California seemed kind of far…. The counselors at school were no help. If you didn’t ask them to get in your business, they didn’t get in it and you went wherever you went.
Since Mr. Langhorne had sent this letter, I applied to the schools he suggested, along with Mount Holyoke and Howard. I got into Miami first, and was awarded the Martin Luther King Scholarship and only had to pay four hundred dollars to attend. Then I got into Howard but had to pay five thousand dollars, which seemed like a million dollars. I got into the University of Virginia but not U.C., Berkeley. I also got into Mount Holyoke.
“That’s a girls’ school and there are two kinds of lesbians—born and made,” my mother warned.
I didn’t know what she was talking about; we’d never had a conversation about lesbianism. But I figured she didn’t want me to go there.
When I got the acceptance letter to Yale my mama started screaming, “My baby’s going to Yale! My baby’s going to Yale!” She fell onto the bed, started kicking her feet into the air and having a fit. I was just sitting there reading, “You have been accepted out of nine thousand applicants….” All I had to do was get a thousand-dollar loan—from them. So I guess I’ll be going to Yale and not Howard, I thought. But I was very intimidated. I remember trying to push to the back of my mind the thought “they’re supposed to be smarter in the North. I may not be able to cut it.” I did, and decided, Well, I’ll go for a year. But if I can’t cut the mustard and get kicked out, then I’ll go to Howard, which is where I wanted to attend anyway.
Of course, after I told my counselors I got into Yale they were proud and thought it was wonderful. I remember one of them saying, “You’re going to Yale! That is the best drama school in the world!”
Ah hah!
Chapter 2
Where the Heart Is
I come from a family that took what life dished them and made the best out of it. My father, Conroy Vance, was from Chicago, where he was raised in a foster home. His biological parents had given him up when he was three or four—old enough to remember them and to have been traumatized. I don’t know why his folks didn’t raise him and don’t know if he did, either. He never recovered from the abandonment, yet he lived a full and meaningful life.
My mother was the oldest daughter of Lloyd and Virginia Naomi Daniels. She had one sister, Lois Ann, right behind her in age, then eleven years passed before her brothers Lloyd and then Lee were born. My maternal grandfather—everybody called him Pappy but I called him Granddad—was president of the longshoreman’s union in Chicago. Between his income and my grandmother’s clerical work for the Chicago Department of Treasury, they and their children lived decently, as the lives of black folks in the 1930s and 1940s went. Working on the waterfront was difficult and dangerous, and in the winter when Lake Michigan would freeze over there wasn’t much work. As head of the union, Pappy would tap into the treasury to help members out during those frigid months. To hear family members tell it, when my mother was in her late teens, Aunt Lois’s new husband insisted on working on the docks. Pappy didn’t want that for his son-in-law. But he gave my grandfather an ultimatum: “If you don’t let me work, I’ll sit at home.” Pappy relented, and apparently, one winter, gave him some money to tide him and Lois over. Someone reported Pappy to the authorities. The police came after him. Pappy evaded the cops for six months. But while he was on the run they harassed his family, banging on the door of my mother’s childhood home at all hours of the day and night. After a while, my grandmother couldn’t take it anymore. She packed up the kids and moved to Boston, where she had grown up (she was born in Washington, D.C.). When my grandfather turned himself in, he was locked up for two years. Once he was released, he went back to work on the docks, but my grandmother and the children stayed put in Boston. Yet it wasn’t a split in the traditional sense. Grandmother and Grandfather spoke several times a day and Grandfather was always in Boston for the holidays. However, the separation had a deep impact on the family, especially the boys, who had been very young when my grandparents split.
My parents got married in 1955. My father wanted to have five children—he wanted a big ol’ family. My mother didn’t want to have children immediately. Because of the age difference between my mother and Aunt Lois and their two younger brothers she felt that she and her sister had had to raise their two younger brothers. Despite these reservations, Cecilie was born in 1958. A year or so later they moved to Detroit, when Daddy was offered a job managing a low-income housing development, which meant we could live there at reduced rent.
Right after they arrived in Detroit and while my mother was pregnant with me, someone tried to kidnap my sister, Cecilie, whom people say was an “exceptionally pretty baby.” Mommy was shopping and turned away for a moment to look at some groceries. Cecilie, then a toddler, started to wander—until a woman said, “Ma’am, is that your baby?” My mother turned around just in time to see a man holding Cecilie’s hand and walking toward the door. Mom started screaming. The man dropped my sister’s hand and kept walking out the door. Thank God, my mother got Cecilie back. I was born in 1960. Shortly thereafter someone else almost took Cecilie. My folks weren’t about to let anything else happen to their children. They were determined to get Cecilie and me into environments where we could grow up unscathed.
Friends: A Love Story Page 3