Alice came to me when I was at a Howard homecoming football game, as Monique and I were every year. Sitting in the bleachers, I was struck by some of the families around us. There were two and three generations of Howardites and other legacy college graduates. I knew these people were, for the most part—the Cosby Show and A Different World notwithstanding—invisible to the larger culture and to other ethnic groups.
I wanted to write about these people, upper-middle-class Blacks, and their traditions and lives.
Alice started out as me, but she wasn’t me. I envisioned what I would’ve been like had I gone to the all-girl Catholic high school my mother wanted me to attend. What I might’ve become if I’d gone to a women’s college, such as Wellesley or Mt. Holyoke. I needed for her details not to be completely my details, although she was also from a working-class family and her childhood was based on mine. When creating characters, in order for them to come alive, they cannot be you but separate, breathing entities. Otherwise the work is stagnant.
Jack was a third-generation Harvard grad, a descendant of free Blacks. In addition to showing his milieu, I wanted to talk about class conflicts among Black folks, which I became aware of while at Howard.
I told Cliff I wanted to quit to write full-time. I figured I could accomplish my long-planned dream and have much-needed quiet time before he came home from work. He wasn’t on board with this plan and didn’t understand why I couldn’t write on the weekends. “Because weekends are ours, not mine,” I argued, “and we just got married, and I want to spend that time with you, and we don’t have any big bills, no mortgage. Now is the time.”
He didn’t like it, but a few months later, I quit anyway. At home, I wrote all day, every day. The only break I’d take was to run two miles and eat lunch. Cliff would come home and read what I’d written that day. It kept me honest. I didn’t want to disappoint him or myself.
While I was working on the novel, I was also writing freelance magazine articles, and I wrote a chapter for my friend Linda Villarosa’s book, a definitive work on Black women’s health titled Body & Soul. The chapter I wrote included information about fertility. In doing my research, I learned that after age thirty-five, the risk of having a baby with Down syndrome went up by 25 percent. I was already thirty-five. I started pressing Cliff to agree to us getting pregnant. He wanted to wait until I finished my book. He was afraid that my dream would fade if a baby came along too soon. To this day I’m grateful to him for his insight. After eight months, I finished the book, and after another six, my agent, Faith Childs, sold it.
I couldn’t have been happier when I became pregnant with Baldwin during this period. Cliff wanted us to move immediately to the suburbs; he said that our unborn baby needed to have a backyard. I’d wanted to move back into the city, but after quitting my job, I lost my bargaining chit, which was the need to be within walking distance of or a short subway ride from work. So we pooled our money and bought our first house, a lovely, yellow four-bedroom center-hall Colonial with black shutters, on a quiet street in South Orange. Baldwin was born four months later. I was thrilled to have a daughter, and my novel Good Hair was going to be published the following year. We had little extra money. We had one car, a Toyota that Cliff would usually drive to work, but things were good—except for the fact that I detested living in the suburbs.
I felt as if I were the only creative person in town. I felt surrounded by women who were married to investment bankers, home full-time, and had no interest in doing anything other than being a wife and mother and carrying the latest Prada bag to the Short Hills Mall. I craved conversation about the human condition, I wanted the spontaneity of city living, and I wanted . . . something else. Then I met Belinda, who lived up the street, and she and I would take her son Marcus and Baldwin around. We’d buy them baby clothes, get ice cream, go to lunch. I met Gale Monk, who lived a few blocks west, who I could always drop in on while I was out walking and feeling dismayed at not seeing a soul on the sidewalks. She’d always have “a nice white” in the refrigerator, and that helped when I was feeling so lonely.
As I waited for my novel to be published, I was in a holding pattern. And then I met my friend Lynne Toye at a newcomers’ picnic that South Orange hosted. It was held on a big field in the center green where tennis courts, a pool, and the community center converged. Cliff and I were standing in the field among lots of new homeowners. I was holding Baldwin, who was about six months, on my hip, and I was talking to someone. Lynne’s husband, Vince, overheard me say that I worked three days a week from home and told Lynne, a marketing consultant who also worked three days a week from home. She came over, all cheerful smiles, bouncing her ten-month-old son on her hip.
“Hi, I’m Lynne, and this is Chester.” She put her hand out to shake mine.
“And who’s this?” she asked, admiring Baldwin, whose giant brown eyes were peering out, her head topped with wild curls, perched on my shoulder.
I shook her hand, told her our names. She was so bubbly and happy; I retreated, thinking again that I was stranger in a strange land. We exchanged numbers, and she said she’d think of something fun for us to do with the children.
And a few days later she called: “How about the pool?”
“Nah.”
She called again: “How about the farmers’ market?”
“Um, no.”
“Why don’t you and Baldwin come to my baby group?”
No way, I thought, but I was beginning to feel bad because she was so earnest. I said yes.
I met her at an Indian woman’s house in Summit. There on the floor with their toddlers were an assortment of used-to-be’s: a lawyer, an architect, an engineer. I tried plopping down with Baldwin, who wouldn’t let me put her down, wrapping her legs around me like a cobra. She didn’t want to be there any more than I did.
Lynne’s next invitation was for a casual family dinner al fresco. I hated cooking and really couldn’t, so I jumped at this invite. Cliff and I packed up Baldwin, the diaper bag, and a bottle of wine and headed five minutes away to Lynne’s large Victorian. An Audi with a “Virginia” sticker emblazoned in large letters on the back window was in the driveway. A table set on the porch, complete with shabby chic tablecloth and a pitcher of homemade lemonade, was waiting for us. It was August. I was touched and charmed by this smart, welcoming, unpretentious woman and her handsome, down-to-earth husband, whom she’d met while they were studying engineering at the University of Virginia.
Lynne’s persistence and belief that anything was possible restored my sanity and showed me a way to appreciate this life I’d made. She always had a plan for something to do with the babies, even if it was just playing with a watering can in a small plastic pool in the backyard. It was unusual to enter her home and not smell something baking, and she was always in a good mood. She had worked briefly on Wall Street (she also had an MBA), but after she’d had Chester, she said she couldn’t imagine going back to work and leaving him for twelve hours a day. I was constantly grilling her about where she’d put all her ambition.
She said she wasn’t conflicted about being a homemaker; she was happy and fulfilled; she had two adjunct teaching jobs at local colleges and was still doing the marketing consulting part time. She was so excited about my book coming out and convinced me that I needed something to do in the interim, in the year before the novel would actually be on the shelves. One day we were in her upstairs home office.
“Okay,” she said, rolling her office chair to mine so that our knees were touching. “What do you want to do?”
I’d written the novel and sold it. I did what I wanted to do, and now I was in a holding mode. I didn’t know what else.
She persisted, basically telling me that I couldn’t just sit and wait for a whole year. I told her how much I missed being in the company of other writers, of other creative people. How much I’d loved the writing workshop I had taken in the city.
“Well then, create one.”
I looked at her
blankly. Yeah, uh-huh.
“No, really. We’ll make up some flyers, put them around town, and see what happens.”
Lynne literally took me by the hand, helped me type up flyers, print them out in large print, and post them on bulletin boards around town. My friend Wendy put one up in an independent bookstore in Montclair.
Seven people signed up; six women, one guy. Three of the women were lawyers, one was an editorial assistant at Essence, one a homemaker. Then there was Wendy, and the guy, Frank, who worked in the town library. I taught once a week in my living room, baked Duncan Hines brownies, and charged $125 for six weeks. I designed my class based on the one I’d taken with Abby Thomas, my workshop teacher in the city. After I’d quit my job at Essence to work full-time on my novel, Lucy, a friend from my previous job at the Newark Star-Ledger, had told me about Abby’s workshop. I’d gone once and was hooked. Abby had gotten us to just write, giving us short exercises. We met weekly; I went for a year and made major progress on my book. I would never have done my own workshop without Lynne. My life lesson is that people are always more than we initially think. If we give it time, we may find that we all have many more facets than we initially imagined.
8
The Slippery Slope
The late E. Lynn Harris and me at a party after the San Francisco Book festival. (Photo by Vicki Hughes, 1996)
SOON AFTER my novel came out, I stopped running the workshop so that I could promote the book. Good Hair was, in publishing parlance, a big book, meaning big sales, tons of media attention, a movie deal brokered by big Hollywood agents, and a fat three-book deal. The novel centered on Alice, who was simultaneously confident and insecure about who she was, and didn’t fit into any of the prescribed boxes Black women are expected to fit into. The novel spent months on bestseller lists and was optioned for a movie by Natalie Cole, the Grammy Award–winning daughter of legend Nat “King” Cole. She said she had related to the story of “otherness” as a child growing up in affluent Hancock Park in Los Angeles during the ’50s and ’60s, when the only other people who looked like her family did housework for White families.
For three years she renewed her option for Good Hair, and eventually she got a deal with Regency Films, a respected Hollywood studio, which had taken the books A Time to Kill, Fight Club, and Marley and Me and made them into movies. Regency had also produced Man on Fire, L.A. Confidential, and Heat, among many others. When my novel made it to preproduction, which meant there was a script, a director, and an executive producer attached, I began to think that maybe it would actually happen. While the film didn’t get made, and the option rights were returned to me, the process got more attention for the book. I was featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, Jet, People, and on and on. That kind of attention was very unusual for a first novel, particularly in the pre-social-media days, and it catapulted me to the top of the fiction food chain. My career trajectory was going exactly as I’d planned: newspaper reporter at the Star-Ledger in my hometown, Newark, then a move to New York to work at People magazine, then a coveted job as senior editor at Essence magazine, and now my glamorous new life as a successful author with a royalty checks arriving regularly in the mail.
For Cliff and me, after six or seven years of living on a modest but increasing income, our financial and emotional life had become more comfortable. We could take nice vacations and buy much of what we wanted without a lot of thought. Within five years, we moved to a six-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom house in Montclair, New Jersey. I was living every writer’s fantasy.
And yet I can’t say it was a dream come true, because when I wrote my first book, all I wanted to do was get the feelings into words. I didn’t think about anyone actually reading it. I remember being on the phone with the writer Jackie Woodson while I was writing at home, feeling isolated after having left my job at Essence, where I had a tight-knit circle of work friends. Jackie was the best friend of my Essence best friend, Linda. During the course of the conversation, Jackie asked me who the audience for my novel was.
“Audience?” The thought sickened my stomach. “I never envisioned people actually reading it.” I know this sounds silly, but it was true. When the book was published in September 1996, friends who had suffered through the long process of writing it with me gathered round to throw me a string of book signings. Cliff asked clients, the ones with whom he was friendly, to host parties in various parts of the country. After interviewing me to test my publicity-worthiness, the head of publicity at Simon & Schuster decided to send me on a book tour, increasing the initial four cities that Cliff and I would pay for to ten.
At my kickoff party, given by Monique and Glenn in their 1860s Italianate mansion in pre-gentrified Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, all the Simon & Schuster heavies came out, including the then publisher and trade president, Carolyn Reidy (now president and CEO). I was pulled aside by a publishing insider, who whispered, “Carolyn never goes to book parties and certainly not outside of Manhattan.” That night, after Monique introduced me, I read from my novel in public for the first time. Afterward, my editor, Dominick Anfuso, got up and announced that even though the book had just been published, it had already gone into a ninth printing. He came to the party with a three-book contract the size of a small-town phone book for me to sign. After dealing with my agent, Faith, they had offered a very nice sum.
It was so much to take in; I think my way of dealing with it all was to not. I simply packed my bags, kissed Cliff and my two-year-old Baldwin, and hit the road. It was incredibly hard to be away from her because she was so young and we’d never been apart since she was born—except for a long weekend getaway to Bermuda Cliff and I took when she was eighteen months. Mom stayed with her. I had insisted that I not be booked for signings or appearances on the weekends, so I could fly home.
The tour lasted for eight weeks, with interviews, book parties, and signings piling on as I traveled the country. It was exhilarating and grueling. My brother Marc, who had run respectably for Congress in Jacksonville, Florida, said it was just like running for political office. When my second novel, The Itch, was published two years later, I was also on NPR, PBS, BET, and many local TV stations. Again, I didn’t process that this was highly unusual, especially for a novel—any novel. I just did what had to be done to sell books.
When I came back home to South Orange, I cuddled with my Baldwin and Cliff and caught up on sleep, blissful to be in my own bed. I also spent some time with my mom and dad before it was time to hit the road again. One of the best things about being on the road was catching up with my friends from Howard who were spread out across the country and who happily hosted Good Hair book parties: Jocelyn Winston gave me a party in DC; Danny, who was in Philly at the time, also hosted a book signing; and Alvin Kendall did one in Atlanta in a client’s nightclub. My former South Orange neighbor Cardy Jones did a beautiful ladies’ brunch in her home in Naperville, Illinois; Lynne and Lori Woolridge hosted one in our town; and my mom did a big one at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, where my eighth-grade teacher, Willie Hutcherson, introduced me. And there were others: Michelle Terry in Seattle; her mom Mercedes Terry along with Bob and Joan Austin in Houston; and Joni in Los Angeles.
Someone I’d never met, Ken Reynolds, who had a connection to my publisher, also did a book signing for The Itch in LA. He hired beautiful young boys dressed only in loincloths to serve all the women guests, which included actresses C. C. H. Pounder, Hattie Winston, and Denise Nicholas, who did readings from the book. All this wasn’t counting the parties that were thrown by friends and colleagues at home. Nina and Ted Wells hosted a party for more than a hundred people. The support was outstanding and overwhelming, and as much as I was swept up in a wave, I never really stopped and thought about all that was happening to me.
For all the glamour of the book tour, I would discover that being a published author is not for the faint of heart. I was in San Francisco for their book festival. I was on a panel with Eric Jerome Dickey, Tavis Smile
y, and Christopher John Farley—all of us a first-time authors, none of us with big audiences yet, except maybe Tavis, whose talk show was new on BET. That night Marcus Books—the oldest Black bookstore in the country—held a party for us. A bunch of big-name authors were there, including E. Lynn Harris, Iyanla Vanzant, Tina McElroy Ansa, and Michael Eric Dyson. I had invited a childhood friend from Newark who now lived in Oakland. She came and ended up knowing lots of people there and having a good time. When she was leaving, we hugged and she said in my ear, “You know they’re mad at you back home.” No, I hadn’t known that; in fact, I had no idea what she was talking about. I made her sit down and tell me exactly what she meant. She told me that one of our two best friends from back in the day was angry at my portrayal of the main characters’ neighborhood because I’d said everyone had had plastic on the furniture except us.
I called this friend as soon as I got home and asked her about what our Oakland friend had said. She denied it, saying she didn’t know what our mutual friend was talking about. Okay, I said, and dropped it.
The next year my friend turned forty. We didn’t talk often but always spoke on our birthdays and would usually see each other around the holidays. I called her for her birthday, asked what her plans were to celebrate, and she said her sister had given her a birthday party. My heart sank. I hadn’t been invited. Now I realized that no matter what she’d told me, she and her sister really had been angry and they had cut me out. Hurt, I got off the phone.
I wrote her an angry letter in which I accused her of being a “hater.” I told her I was shocked that she hadn’t invited me to her birthday party, and that it must have been because she was jealous, and how could she be, after all we’d been through? She wrote me back an equally angry letter accusing me, essentially, of having not been a very good friend because I had not supported her home-based framing business.
Welcome to My Breakdown Page 7