The Legs Are the Last to Go

by Diahann Carroll

  I spent many happy summers on the porch of her big house, listening to the crickets and honeybees, looking out at all the children who were working, and hearing the screen door slam as the family came and went from the kitchen. I had to dress every morning and, after breakfast, sit on that porch in an ironed cotton dress, ramrod straight, with hands folded politely. It was hot in all those clothes, but my mother and grandmother were far too formal to consider changing the way a child should dress merely for comfort.

  There was only one day my grandmother let me pick cotton, and only because I asked.

  I walked out into the field with the others, who were smiling at me, the special child finally on the ground among them. “Well, look who it is,” one boy said. “Gonna make a dollar today, Miss Johnson?” I nodded. I had my burlap bag, and for once, I wasn’t in a stiff starched dress. It felt liberating in a way, but also completely alien to be in overalls. I bent down to pick my first boll. It made my fingers bleed. I knew cotton did that, but didn’t think it would happen to me. You couldn’t get blood on the cotton you put in your bag, and I didn’t know when I would stop bleeding. So I quit after picking about fifteen cents’ worth. I just wasn’t meant for the fields, not at all.

  “Oh, it’s fun to be on the porch,” I’d say when asked how I was doing.

  Just like in Harlem, I was aware of the fact that I was separated from other children. I was Miss Rebecca’s granddaughter, privileged and special. Both she and my mother made that clear. I once rode on a bus “down South” that was full of children, and they all stopped speaking when they saw me. They stared at me because I was the dressed-up girl from New York. It made me feel awkward, but good, too. My mother and grandmother wanted me to project a “better than” quality. And I did, but with that came a feeling of “separated from” that has stayed with me my whole life.

  I always felt I was on display. At night my thick hair, after being curled, was wrapped in brown paper so I would have Shirley Temple curls in the morning. What was a black girl doing with Shirley Temple curls anyway? Well, Shirley Temple was the biggest star in the world when I was little, universally adored. So why shouldn’t I look like her? It didn’t occur to me that we were different because of race. My elementary school was integrated, with Jewish, Italian, Hispanic, and black children. It wasn’t until junior high school that the kids took offense at my formal way of dressing. To some extent, I was a snob. That’s what my parents wanted me to be. “Carol Diann,” my mother would croon as she fawned over me, “let’s try to do better than that!” Across the street from our brownstone, people spilled out of an apartment building at all hours of the night. Children hung out on the corners and played loud games of tag, which my mother forbade me from joining. “Such a waste of time,” she’d say. Homework was to be done right away, piano lessons at Mrs. Carmen Shepherd’s Music School on Convent Avenue were relentless for eight years. Learning music was valued among the strivers of our community, and even in the poorer homes, you’d find a piano among the furniture.

  Hard as we worked, my mother (who helped my father manage his rental property when he was working as a subway conductor) found time for the kind of fun she thought would enrich me. Sometimes, on weekends, we’d take a break to see a puppet show or circus, or even take in a Broadway play from balcony seats. A high point was seeing Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. Her voice and confidence onstage were just awe-inspiring. I reveled in the spectacle. The heavy burgundy curtains hung in an ornate and gilded theater full of well-dressed white people. The lights went down and a spotlight would hit the orchestra leader in the pit. My heart swelled with the music. And when the curtains rose on sets so elaborate they took my breath away, it was hard to believe that the performers were real. But they were. Even if they weren’t in shows with elaborate costumes, I marveled at how an actress could just take the stage, open her mouth, and, without so much as a microphone, fill a theater with a song. I was lucky that my mother liked attending the theater so much. She made me feel at home there. Maybe too much at home. One time, she took me to see The Voice of the Turtle, which she assumed from the title would be a light, funny children’s show. In actuality, John Van Druten’s play was very adult, and included scenes of a black serviceman on leave employing prostitutes. Instead of pulling me out, Mother watched with me and, when it was over, told me, “Let’s not mention this to your father.” I have to laugh at this memory today because the prudish views she maintained her whole life—sex was not to be discussed ever—were always an issue for me.

  My father, meanwhile, was a man of such propriety that he even objected to the delicate amount of makeup that my mother wore to church.

  “It doesn’t look respectable, Mabel,” he’d say.

  “Oh, John, what do you know?” My mother would laugh.

  My own propriety made me a target in my young teenage years. “What is wrong with you, Johnson?” the kids in school asked. It wasn’t just my curls: it was the whole package. I didn’t smoke, wore oxfords and bobby socks (instead of heels with long socks stretched up to the knee and secured with rubber bands) and I never hung out on the street. I carried myself in the ladylike way my mother taught me, and I only associated with children she and my father deemed socially acceptable, such as Sylvia O’Gilvie, who lived nearby and came from a home (a brownstone) with two respectable parents and a car. Of course a mother like Sylvia’s had her own heightened sense of social hierarchy that was even more finely developed than my mother’s. One day when I came to visit, Sylvia’s mother told me Sylvia was out playing with her “real friends.” Somehow it became clear that that meant children whose parents were from the West Indies, not the South, and who had lighter skin and straighter hair than mine. My mother encouraged me not to be hurt, but rather to pay no attention to such unkindness.

  When Mom saw that a scholarship program was being offered through the Metropolitan Opera, she saw to it that I applied for it and enrolled at the age of ten. Each week she took me to lessons, where I learned to use my diaphragm to support my vocal cords. I learned about breathing, pulling down the tailbone, and all kinds of things about how the body works when it performs. It was overwhelming and all-consuming work, and I threw myself into it, delighted to know adults cared enough about me to want me to perform at my best level.

  Meanwhile, I prevailed as a little princess in public school. And it was enough to drive my classmates to some vicious acts of cruelty. One time, a gang of girls followed me all the way home, trying to beat me up and rip out my curls. My mother was shocked to find me arriving at our front steps out of breath and disheveled. “You girls go home now,” she called through our barred ground-floor window. “Leave us alone.” They thrust their hands through our window and tried to grab her and they didn’t leave until my mother called the police. It had never occurred to her that thirteen-year-old girls could threaten us on our own property. The next day at school, the bullying started again as we were filing up the stairs. I made it to the landing before a wave of bodies knocked me down. When the girls pulled my curls, my head hit the floor. I fought back, kicking, punching, and scratching with all my strength, and when they stopped, I was bruised and large clumps of hair had been torn out of my head. Not long after that, a guidance counselor named Mrs. Humphreys, whom I will always revere for her wisdom, recommended I apply to the High School of Music and Art. It was located nearby. But it was an entirely new world.

  I refused to go. Although I didn’t have a lot of friends at school, I didn’t want to leave behind the few I had. But my mother, like that wonderful guidance counselor, saw the opportunity. While my father had to be reassured that this would pave my way to acceptance at the revered Howard University, a place I’d heard about for years as the most prestigious black university in the nation, my mother knew that a high school for the arts would improve me in all kinds of ways, just as she knew the right clothes would broadcast to the world the kind of person I was. I can’t say her instincts did anything but serve me well and push me
up the social ladder she and my father found so daunting.

  I auditioned for Music and Art by playing piano and singing two songs. All my training as a Tiny Tot at church and with the Metropolitan Opera’s scholarship program for children paid off. I got in and found, to my absolute joy, teachers talking to students as if they were adults and students engaged in work at intellectual levels I had never seen before in my life. The school was a hotbed of creativity, one of the two schools that inspired the movie Fame years later. But you needed to apply yourself as a thinker, not just a performer. To that end, the school seemed to know no limits. Eleanor Roosevelt even came to our auditorium for a three-hour forum. Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, came to perform. We watched him, a little man, tap with his baton and speak so quietly to our student musicians that it was a real lesson in the power of keeping your voice down. I was thrown into thinking about music theory and all kinds of things I’d never thought about before. What was American music and where did it come from and why? Where were Gershwin’s origins? What about Duke Ellington? They took your brain at that school and really stretched it. Even your activities on weekends had to be accounted for. “Miss Johnson,” one teacher said, “what newspapers do your parents read at home?” When I told him which tabloids we had around the house, he insisted I buy the Sunday New York Times instead, and that I report to him on articles I’d read. This was really the beginning of a new life of the mind for me. I had to read the Atlantic Monthly, too. At first it was difficult, with so much to understand. But eventually I started to see how reading the Times and serious journalists could give me a broad picture of a fascinating world, all told in an erudite manner. Reading, I suddenly realized, could be so much more enlightening than I’d ever known.

  It didn’t take long for me to feel I was outgrowing my parents, even my mother, who had gone to such trouble to instill her taste and her values in my young soul.

  This uncomfortable feeling of becoming more worldly than your own parents isn’t uncommon among daughters of any generation. But it is something that was hard to reconcile with my earlier life, and it would temper the deep bond I had with my mother in our years ahead.

  But to their great credit, as I thrived in my first years at a great high school, John and Mabel Johnson continued to pursue a better life. They had property, tenants, and two sources of income. My father learned that it was wise to trade in his car every two years for a newer model. And while I was taking my work at the High School of Music and Art very seriously, in both performing and academics, my parents spent the mid-1940s realizing their dream of finally moving to the suburbs—to Yonkers, just north of the city. At first, my father had been looking for a house. But when realtors showed only inferior places down by the railroad tracks, he decided to build his own. He got a tip from a friend about a lot on Dunston Avenue in a nonintegrated area. “Just look,” the friend warned. “Don’t stop, don’t talk to anybody.” Heaven forbid the white neighbors would think that a black man might want to move in his family. In some ways, it was the same scenario Lorraine Hansberry wrote about fifteen years later in A Raisin in the Sun. But Dad bought the lot, found a contractor, and started building. Shortly after, someone, perhaps the KKK, stepped in and building supplies stopped arriving at the site. Then the contractor disappeared. Now, these days we have contractors disappear on us for all kinds of reasons. This was very different, and it took fortitude to overcome. But eventually, the house was finished and my father moved us in—me, my mother, and my brand-new baby sister, Lydia. He kept shotguns in the closet, “just in case,” he’d say.

  I didn’t pay any attention. If I had not been so preoccupied with my music and learning lines for my high school’s sophisticated productions, going to see MGM musicals whenever I could, and then reading about singers and actors in magazines, perhaps I would have heard my parents discussing how someone drove by early one morning and fired shots through our front window. I would have heard about how the local police came to investigate the incident, but—no surprise—found no leads and never followed up. I would have heard about how someone from the neighborhood piled kindling alongside our home and set it on fire. Fortunately, the facade of our house was brick, hard as our determination.

  And just as luckily, most of the movies those days were of an escapist nature that kept my anxiety level low. I considered myself, from a young age, a movie connoisseur. Though I was upset that, except for the occasional character actor, these films were devoid of anyone but white actors, I saw almost everything. I took it all in. I saw Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, and like many black girls of my era, I wanted to be Scarlett O’Hara. And although that was impossible, I knew when I saw her performance, which displayed the same composure and manners my mother had been trying to teach me my whole life, that I could also be an actress.

  The one black female performer in those days who truly inspired me was Lena Horne. I was thirteen when I first saw her in Words and Music, the 1948 MGM musical based on the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Lena had a “guest appearance.” This was Hollywood’s way of featuring black performers in white movies but not weaving them into plotlines so that their scenes could be cut from versions distributed in the South. It made me happy to know she was out there, and there was nobody else like her on-screen or onstage at the time. She just overwhelmed everyone with her beauty in a way that made race less relevant. Beauty and talent, it seemed, allowed race barriers to be relaxed.

  I have to laugh at how my mother went out of her way to keep me from seeing Lena on film. I’m not sure if she didn’t want me to compare myself to her or think that I didn’t have a chance, because there was only room for one genteel black actress. Later, as my singing began to draw reviews and critics began to call me the second Lena Horne, I told them that I preferred to be known as the first Diahann Carroll. That came from my mother, who had nurtured me to believe that all things were indeed possible.

  But that’s getting ahead of the story. When I was a young teen, the only person comparing me to anyone on the big screen (other than my mother of course!) was me. I took in all kinds of movies and held them close to my heart—dramas, comedies, and, of course, musicals. And I carefully studied the performances in them, taking in every detail, from costumes to gesture, diction, and the impeccable timing of dialogue. My father found this level of interest a bit intense. “You need to focus on your textbooks,” he said. “You’re going to college, not Hollywood.” But Mother was more complicit with my ambitions. She would always take the time, when she had it, to discuss the films we’d seen together.

  We were as close as any mother and daughter could be, but I wasn’t long for the racist troubles of Yonkers or a long commute to school in Harlem. To be able to maintain matriculation at the High School of Music and Art, I established residence with a single aunt in Manhattan. And every day in that school—full of the kind of intellectual curiosity and ambition I had never seen in classrooms before—I thrived. It made me question my mother’s insulation, and wonder if I couldn’t open her up to the world I was now reading about in Sunday’s New York Times. But she was too busy to pay much attention to the needs of an adolescent with worldly pretensions. “Reading the New York Times is your assignment, not mine,” she’d tell me. She had to decorate her new house in Westchester and care for a second child. She filled her days with shopping for furniture and making her new home as impeccable as possible.

  I filled my days with studying, music, and performing.

  One day, a friend in the city took a picture of me posing in my sister’s baby carriage and sent it to a fashion editor at Ebony magazine, one of the few national publications devoted to showing blacks at their best. I didn’t look anything like the sophisticated models in the magazine, but to my surprise, six months later, Ebony responded with a letter. Much as I spent my life shopping with my mother, who adored clothes, neither of us actually knew the first thing about fashion. That much was clear when I dressed
myself for a midtown Manhattan morning interview at Johnson Publications (Ebony, Jet, and Sepia were their magazines) in a gray taffeta cocktail dress that would only have been appropriate for evening. To make matters worse, I wore a lavender straw hat with a veil and matching lavender gloves. And instead of something as simple as stockings, I oiled my legs so they wouldn’t look too ashy.