As someone who grew up belonging to many families, early in my acting career I was fortunate to make a handful of lasting friendships—starting with Kasi Lemmons, a colleague and sister who bore an uncanny and striking resemblance to me. Or so had been the rumor back in my early days of acting in New York City when casting directors and fellow actors kept talking about sightings of me that couldn’t have happened. From later reports, it seemed that Kasi was constantly being stopped on the street by strangers calling her by my name, almost as frequently as I had a different set of strangers greeting me by her name.
My take on this after a while was that whoever this Kasi Lemmons was, no two people could possibly look that much alike. That was until I arrived at an audition and saw, signing in with the casting assistant, my long-lost twin. We both did double takes. Built similarly, with the same heart-shaped faces, and almost exactly the same coloring, we absolutely could have been related. Just as I pointed at her asking, “Kasi?” she pointed at me, asking, “Victoria?”
From that meeting on, although we were in competition for roles, often taking turns booking them, we established a lasting wonderful friendship based on common bonds that we found went much deeper than our physical likenesses. Kasi had gone through a lot of parallel instability in childhood that included her parents’ divorce and being raised primarily by her mother. Interestingly enough, though she was originally from St. Louis, she had grown up in Newton, Massachusetts, and had found an outlet through professional training and performing with a Boston theater school.
As we talked about the many neighborhoods and the different worlds we both inhabited in the Boston area, we were amazed that we had never met before. Just as ballet had been my sole trajectory, Kasi had always been single-minded in her acting focus. But in the early 1990s, as we both bit on the Hollywood lure, Kasi decided to switch gears and to focus on establishing herself as a leading filmmaker—as a screenwriter and director. This didn’t come totally out of the blue as she had gone to NYU School of Social Research and had already made an award-winning documentary on homelessness. What took me by surprise was her conscious decision not to pursue acting during the period that she was trying to have the Hollywood boys’ club take her filmmaking seriously.
As it happened, I was presented with an opportunity for us to play sisters and thought immediately of Kasi. But when I told her, in essence, that the job was hers, she graciously declined. At first, I was baffled. This was saying no to a plum acting part and excellent pay.
Kasi explained patiently that to prove herself to the establishment and to even attempt to create rich, complicated stories and characters in film, especially women’s roles, she had to be seen as doing only that. Once this made sense, I was in awe. Moreover, it affirmed the choice I’d made to let go of the ballet barre and to focus on becoming a working actress. The truth is, as I learned from Kasi, we can’t always do everything. Definitely not at the same time.
Kasi’s focused approach worked spectacularly when her debut feature film, Eve’s Bayou, which she wrote and directed, made her the first African American female filmmaker to have a major studio distribute her work. Besides the opportunity that I had to play one of the several fascinating women’s roles in the movie, I was so proud of the depth and artistry of Kasi’s filmic storytelling.
Whenever I stepped out of the creative lane that I was supposed to stay in, Kasi would also encourage me in a very no-nonsense way. Whether it was tackling a writing project, making a documentary, or upsetting the status quo with undertakings related to my charity, her position was always, “Vicki, you can do this.”
Was she going to walk me through it? Whenever she could, Kasi lifted my soul by believing in me. I respected her as an artist, mother, a wife, and as a person. The generosity of her investment in our friendship was all the more poignant because she wouldn’t do anything she didn’t believe absolutely in.
For the rough patches ahead, I held on to Kasi in every way I could. She was heroic, when I didn’t always feel heroic.
I would never have to work a day in my life if I had a nickel for every time I heard my sisters wistfully wish they could just talk to their men in the heartfelt, open manner in which women could always talk to other women. That’s never been my desire, however, because I figured out a long time ago that if we could talk to men the same way we talk to each other, as women we would lose one of our most important topics of mutual interest: namely, men!
My closest female confidantes hashed out the tumultuous sagas of our love lives together. Selfishly I leaned on them and they leaned on me—because we knew we could. Not one of my sisters was stick furniture—by that I mean, I could actually lean and nothing ever broke. The way that Agatha raised me was to depend on home remedies and avoid hospitals, except for real emergencies. Agatha was biased against the idea of psychological therapy and airing personal strife. As is common in many households, Ma’s approach was that penance and pain were synonymous with God: and that was the only therapist anyone needed; if you had to go see anyone with M.D. after their name that meant you were a little special.
This was a heavy cross to bear for my sisters and me, given that we were already navigating the schizophrenic complexities of dealing with foster care. In adulthood, after conducting a successful search, simply by using the white pages, I reunited all five of my siblings, leasing a Victorian house on Peaks Island in Maine for a weekend. This forum gave each of us the opportunity to courageously show up, look each other squarely in the eye, and break bread, now with our own children playing in the backdrop. Sharing one mother, each of us of different paternity, we could finally determine in this intimate setting whether our relationships would flourish or not. The result: you have to be prepared for an unfavorable response; not everyone wants to face the excruciating pain of learning about one’s familial reality. We continued to live very different and separate lives, forever connected by that extraordinary weekend, assembled by the transcendental will of one woman, Dorothy, our mother, a mother of Maine.
How was it possible that the woman today, now pulling guns and slamming grown men against cement walls, was the same fragile blond-haired child that lay limp in Agatha’s arms as she ran to the nearest neighbor, a third of a mile away for a ride to the hospital? My sister, near suffocation, was allergic to goldenrod. In response to the chaos and uncertainty of foster care, Lori had amazed me when she became a policewoman and then a forensic photographer. That was the force of Lori’s will, a coping mechanism so singular that she followed one methodical, procedural focused line—from which there would be no veering and no adaptation. She followed her training too well, in fact, because that arrest actually injured her and caused her to be moved to a desk job in the forensics lab as a photographer. Nonetheless, her bravery in the line of duty made me proud, especially because I knew what Lori had to overcome. With that same cool unflappable singular focus, she married and became a mother to four daughters, with the only remaining allergy being her inability to accept any deviations from the set order of things.
Lori, now married for more than two decades, had her own way of dealing in the realm of emotional intimacy. Understanding her helped me know myself better. My sister also helped prepare me to encounter the many individuals, male and female, who were so much like her in not being able to deviate one millimeter from a set plan.
Miraculously, the loving affirmation that I’d always wanted and had never received from Lori came in an indirect form on one occasion when she took me to visit the crime lab where she worked. There was a real sense of pride as she introduced me around to her colleagues, who welcomed me as if she had talked about me more than she’d let on. I, too, felt incredibly prideful to see her in her element.
As the visit was coming to conclusion, I happened to notice bolts of cotton high on a shelf. They reminded me of my years in ballet when I used to pad my blistered toes against the friction of my pointe shoes. I turned to Lori and said excitedly, “That’s what I used as cushioning to
stand on pointe.” Lori, rolling her eyes, as if to say, Vicki, Still my weird, artsy-fartsy sister, corrected me, saying, “That’s just plain old cotton we use for bullet testing.”
She had made her point. In earlier times I might have been affected by her remark, but over the years I had learned to acknowledge that the differences in our relationship were perfect.
What was perfect with both Lori and Sheree was that we had attained a level of fierce independence, honesty, and a no-frills reality in our sisterhood. We didn’t have to pretend, or take each other to lunch, give one another gifts, remember birthdays, or talk frequently to make us feel like we were sisters. We knew it in the way Agatha sucked marrow out of a bone. No fat, no gristle, just a bone-to-bone relationship. We didn’t have to prove anything to anybody and certainly not to one another. We didn’t even need to have the approval of our respective choices in men, either.
Of the three of us, Sheree got the shortest end of the stick, most of all because early on she was pegged as the troubled one and had that beaten into her by Raymond Armstead. To this day I am haunted by the reverberation of the slat and plastered walls at our farmhouse in Maine, as Sheree was thrown against them. Her crime was coming home past curfew or sassing Ma. When I cowered in the kitchen and looked at Agatha, I realized that she knew she’d created a monster by enlisting him to dole out punishment, which she always regretted. Not once did I hear Sheree cry. I never stopped feeling guilty for not doing more to stop that abuse, not that Sheree ever blamed me.
It didn’t surprise me that my sister struggled in relationships; we both did, often staying in abusive situations simply because the fear of being alone was too great. Once, when I received a phone call from Sheree describing a problem she was having with her second husband, I realized her situation was more serious than I thought. I offered to cover the expenses of a divorce. She told me to mind my own business, that she would handle it. I knew then that my oldest sister, the warrior of Puerto Rican and English descent, had been unquestionably scarred by the abuse she had endured as a child and into her teenage years. I realized that no matter if you came from the same womb, all aren’t given the same innate fortitude to break a cycle. How can you break something that feels familiar, that you believe is all you deserve? Like many of us, it was important to Sheree to be Mrs. Somebody and she didn’t always have the ability to say, “Enough is enough and too much is foolish.” Meanwhile, the fact that she had already traveled parts of the world as a military wife, raising a son in the process, was extraordinary—a measure of her refusal to be a casualty of abuse and chaos that she had endured.
In my early New York days, I received an overseas package that Sheree had sent from Germany. No-frills as we were, sending gifts was something that we had rarely done before. To my surprise, inside was a miniature wooden carousel. It reminded me of the Flying Horses Carousel landmark in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard that we had ridden together as children, introduced to us by one of the Wooten sisters. I lit the birthday-sized candles. The heat of five delicate flames fed the wooden blades above, creating its own momentum, making the whimsical carousel spin. Like the carousel, fragile but strong, Sheree and I found a way to communicate, not so much through words but more by actions.
In her letter sent from Innsbruck, Austria, accompanying the carousel, Sheree wrote this regarding her first divorce and her future,
January 1985
Dear Sis
It’s beautiful here…Bought my usual Hummels. The future is uncertain…. Things will be difficult at first, starting over brings a lot of problems. When the year is up I hope to be independent and strong. There’s always time for happiness again. I hope you’ll be able to come to Colorado after I get settled in. The deal still stands, I’ll pay one way. Think about it.
Sometimes it isn’t easy just to come right out and say
That you often think of someone in a warm and special way,
So I’ve sent this wish to tell you I’m as proud as I can be
To have you as a sister, for you mean a lot to me.
—Hallmark Cards
Merry Christmas.
Love,
Sheree
If there was one sister who knew me better than anyone, that would have been Robyn Silverman Pratt. Not just because she had watched me in so many phases of my life, but also because of the proof of her skills at balancing career, marriage, motherhood, family, and self. In contrast to me and my constant struggle to avoid sand underneath my feet, Robyn was stability personified, yet never someone who played it safe. That effervescent, gorgeous, fearless teenager still thrived within her, as did her out-of-the-box, brilliant intellect and her refusal to give up on any undertaking, even when it meant hammering a square peg into a round hole—such as the time she, on a teacher’s salary, took her family to Belize for an educational workshop.
Robyn met the man of her dreams, David Pratt, while attending college. David came from a much different background than Robyn, yet their chemistry and values synchronized. David and I met in the middle, both wanting what Robyn had, both having grown up with too much shifting ground, both of us appreciating the constancy that Robyn gave us by offering her distinctive brand of stability, strength, and drive.
It would have been easy for me to idealize the choices that Robyn had made in creating the marriage and stable family life that she had established, but whenever we talked she was intent on reminding me that no relationship is perfect, that much like career success, hard work was required. Give and take. Compromise.
As the consummate teacher that Robyn had become, she didn’t preach or judge, but often was part of a process that led me to discoveries—such as the time that I had turned down a future with a prominent architect. He was stable, loving, funny, socially conscientious, interested in the arts, and interested both in emotional and lasting intimacy. But with hyperhidrosis, I couldn’t give my hand to anyone. Instead, we became close friends and as I stood there, at his wedding, I thought it could have been me.
Following surgery, my old defense mechanism no longer existed. Encouraged by Robyn and trusting the solid foundation she had, by the example of her own father, I was open, primed to fall madly in love with whoever crossed my path at any prophetic moment.
What were the chances that at this climactic moment in my life, in the anticipation of falling in love, I would meet a man who not only had no intention of falling in love, but would love only one woman, one muse—his trumpet. Silence. Hear the purity of that solo trumpet note bending up into the cosmos, then back down to earth. Powerful, lonely, sensual, manly, soulful, mysterious, angry, wise. Explosive, tender. Hearing Wynton’s incomparable virtuosity as he played Hummel’s Concerto for Trumpet in E Major blending into Satchmo’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” colliding with “Big Train,” which Wynton composed in honor of our son, Jasper Armstrong.
Falling in love was not in Wynton’s plans, in spite of a secretive romance that ensued. With a son and three thousand miles between us, I tried to accept life on his terms. No photographs, and on the rare occasion that we would be seen publicly there would be no displays of affection.
As Pablo Picasso was quoted as saying, “Women are either goddesses or doormats,” and I somehow managed to become both in order to maintain any semblance of a relationship. Both with dominant personalities, we had come a long way since our first date, meeting at the Lincoln Center Fountain—he in Nike gym attire, and me in my best dress.
To be in his life you had to accept life on his terms, which I didn’t always do. It wasn’t long before it became crystal clear to me that this was an all-or-nothing deal in Wynton’s favor. I thought I could convince myself to accept this situation—boarding planes, trains, and automobiles, meeting at various destinations. Off and on for five years, my last stop would be Kansas.
Wynton and I emerged from a thorny period, both of us agreeing to compromise, he becoming a paragon of fatherhood in raising Jasper.
“Son, you
stole my face,” Wynton would often affectionately say to Jasper, his spitting image. The duo often spent quality and quantity time together, touring South America and Europe and RVing across the United States. On one of the occasions that Wynton gave a lecture-demonstration at Jasper’s school, Wynton told the student body, “There is tolerance and then there is embracing.” Looking right at me he asked, “Do you know the difference?”
As the lesson from all my sisters continued to prove, no relationships were perfect.
If it seemed that I managed to survive my first attempt to love fearlessly and fully, don’t pin any awards on me just yet. Unable to face that I was exhausted from overworking, I tried to banish any unpleasant feelings by self-medicating in a variety of ways, and depending on my own prescription of champagne, sage, and rosary beads.
I had just run a marathon, completing two shows, the equivalent of fourteen consecutive years. Instead of feeling celebratory, I felt threadbare and utterly spent. Rallying for me was a cherished friend running her own long-distance race.
I met Lizette McBride in the early 1990s. She stepped into my point of view like a model strutting down a Parisian runway—radiant, graceful, perfectly coiffed, with the most meticulous manicure and pedicure I’d ever seen. Her looks happened to be familiar in Hollywood settings but unlike some of the women who turn themselves into brittle beings offering hollow hugs punctuated with stone breasts, Lizette was the antithesis of that.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 31