The Face That Changed It All

by Beverly Johnson

  Right before I entered junior high school, the girls and their beef with me hit fever pitch. One day, an entire group of them met me at the bus stop on my way home and beat me up. Dada, my one and only friend in the whole wide world, was there by my side and went down swinging with me. We got our butts kicked real good that day.

  The entire neighborhood was buzzing for days about the incident. My parents were pretty angry, but what could they do about other people’s kids? What could anybody do? My ego might have been hurt a little, but I played it cool, as was my way, and made a plan to get revenge as soon as I could.

  It was important for me to make certain those girls and their hateful pranks didn’t haunt me throughout my junior and high school years. I had to find a way to put a stop to it. I wouldn’t live with that kind of fear, so with Dada along for the ride, we figured out where every girl would be over the following few days. Then we worked out how we would approach them individually to return the ass-whupping in kind.

  We didn’t have to go find Betty Ann. She literally walked past my house one afternoon while my family and I were all sitting outside on the front porch talking and enjoying the day. It was my lucky day! I bolted inside the house to get myself ready for a good old-fashioned girl fight!

  Fighting black girl–style takes some preparation. For me at least, it meant earrings off to avoid torn earlobes (very unattractive, not to mention painful) and a significant amount of Vaseline evenly applied all over my face to prevent unsightly dark marks and scars. Though I had absolutely no idea then that I would become a model one day, I always protected the face.

  Vaseline applied, I hurried back downstairs, passed by my parents and siblings, and yelled, “I’ll be right back.”

  Halfway down the block, I screamed out Betty Ann’s name, but she kept on walking—in fact, she actually had the nerve to pick up her speed after glancing back and seeing me closing in on her. All of her sassy boldness was nowhere to be found that day. With my long legs it didn’t take me long to catch up to her. When I did, I landed the first blow to the top of her head and she hit the ground with a loud thud. And that was it—it was all over! No blocking or ducking required. Though I’d wasted a good dollop of Vaseline, it was worth it. I never had a problem with Betty Ann, or any of those girls, again.

  If only I could have slain all my childhood demons so easily.

  Like any young girl wanting to earn some spending money, I would often babysit for families on my street. One family I worked for, the Browns, were pretty good friends with my parents, particularly Mrs. Brown. I was quite comfortable in the Browns’ home, so things usually ran smoothly when I babysat there. I did my homework while the kids played, and I made sure they were sound asleep by the time their parents returned from a night on the town.

  Most evenings, when I heard the Browns’ car drive up, I readied my things for Mrs. Brown to drive me home. Mr. Brown would usually come inside first to ask if all was well and to pay me. But one particular evening, Mr. Brown, a short and stocky man, walked through the front door and with a strange look on his face headed directly toward me. I was dressed in a white turtleneck, jeans, and boots, and I had my coat in one hand. Before I knew what was happening, he reached out and grabbed me, knocked me to the floor, and began to grope my breasts. I was twelve years old. I was horrified. Wasn’t this man a friend of my family’s? How could he do this to me?

  Dazed and upset, I fought back and managed to get Mr. Brown off me with one big shove. I ran out of the house as quickly as I could and into the car with Mrs. Brown. I was out of breath, with my hair scattered all over my head. Mrs. Brown asked me if I was OK. All I could say was a quiet “Yes,” as I tried hard to fight back tears while she drove me home.

  When I think back, I really believe Mrs. Brown knew what had happened to me inside her home that night. Sometimes women look the other way when their husbands do unspeakable things to other women. Sometimes they look the other way because they feel helpless to do anything about it. Sometimes they are just grateful it isn’t happening to them.

  Molestation wasn’t a topic discussed with your parents, friends, or anyone else in those days. There wasn’t anyone I felt comfortable enough with to talk to about the nightmare that had just happened to me. I didn’t know what self-esteem was at twelve years old, but what Mr. Brown did that night ripped away whatever I had of it. I had to find my own way of coping with an incident that I didn’t even fully understand.

  A few days later at another babysitting gig, I filled an empty baby bottle with some Scotch from the family’s home bar and quietly sipped on it all night. I hadn’t done that before, but I needed something to help me forget what had happened and drinking seemed to do the trick for everyone else—why not me? I even took the bottle to school the next day and took sips whenever I thought no one was looking. Why drowning my sorrows with alcohol made sense to me at just twelve years old, I’m not completely sure. But I’d watched my father enjoy his own libations long enough that I figured anything that lifted his mood could surely do the same for me. For a short period that day at school, I felt like I was on top of the world, but by lunchtime, I’d thrown up all over my desk and felt like my head was floating away from my body. The school called my mother and she came to pick me up early. I silently thanked God that she didn’t ask why or how I had gotten so sick. A part of me will always believe she knew the answer already. We drove home in total silence.

  (Years later, after I had gained some fame as a model, I would have the opportunity to confront Mr. Brown. I was home one day when he and his wife came over to visit my parents. They congratulated me on my success and made small talk. I looked Mr. Brown in the face and asked, “Molested any young girls lately?” If a black man’s face could turn red, his would have that night. He was shocked and ashamed, and both he and his wife rushed out of our house without saying good-bye. That felt pretty good, I must say.)

  But that feeling of vindication was years away. At just twelve years old, being molested by a neighbor was one more reason to avoid the prying eyes all around me. There was one exception to that rule however. Though I kept my distance from most other people out in the world, due in part to the bullying and the abuse, I always longed for the attention of one person in particular—my father.

  I yearned for more time with my dad, quite possibly because he worked such long and grueling hours at the local steel mill for most of his life. My father was one proud former military man. He stood six feet, three inches tall, and was blessed with glistening bronze skin, strong chiseled cheekbones, and a powerful sense of self-worth that stayed with him to his dying day. My father always paid his dues, and nothing stopped him from providing for his family.

  I really can’t say for sure if my father’s stringent work ethic was directly connected to his own parents. My paternal grandparents made for quite the awkward pair. My grandfather was a small Native American who stood only about five-foot-three. My father got his considerable height from his mother, an African-American woman who was, like my father, almost six-foot-three. I remember thinking at her funeral that her coffin was the longest one I’d ever seen.

  My dad was raised up north in New Jersey and was in many ways the polar opposite of my mother, who hailed from the Deep South. Gloria, despite her proper pedigree, saw the world for what it really was—cold, hard, and oftentimes mercilessly unfair to those with darker skin tones. My father, more often than not and much to his own detriment, saw the world through rose-colored glasses. He thought life could be fair and just. Sadly, he had his heart broken many times because of that overly optimistic point of view. I’ll always believe the reality of racism wore him down and caused him to begin drinking more heavily over the years. My parents’ conflicting views about life would dramatically influence each of us children in vastly different ways as we all grew into adulthood.

  Rarely would we kids ever have the chance to discuss with our parents the horrors of slavery, the injustices of Jim Crow, the evolving work of Dr. Mar
tin Luther King Jr., or the work of the NAACP. We were living in the middle of the civil rights movement, yet my parents simply went about life as if those historic events—like integration, or the bravery of Rosa Parks—were occurring in an alternate reality.

  On a few occasions I even heard my father chastise Dr. King for bringing more trouble black people’s way. In my father’s convoluted way of thinking, Dr. King was just stirring an already boiling pot. He couldn’t see the larger picture or the positive changes that would eventually come for people of color as a result of Dr. King’s stance on racial equality. My father was brilliant, and full of love, but he also had flaws.

  Despite those flaws, my father was still my hero, and if you ever caught him at 5:00 a.m. on any given school morning during my childhood, you’d know why. I still vividly remember my father lovingly preparing our school lunches while at the same time methodically checking all of our homework assignments. I treasured every moment of our predawn chats. We would talk about life; I would tell him about my previous day at school, my progress on the school swim team—anything, in fact, to keep him focused solely on me. For thirty minutes every morning, everything in my life was fine.

  CHAPTER 3

  Girl on Fire

  Things got much better for me once I entered high school.

  I became the first black cheerleader at my high school, even though it hadn’t been a real goal of mine. Alas, it didn’t last long in any case, thanks to my darling baby sister, Joanne.

  During one game night, little Miss Joanne got into a brawl with some other girls. Joanne was as cute as a button and could get any guy she wanted anytime she wanted, but she couldn’t fight worth a damn. Being the big sister, I couldn’t just let her get beaten up right in the middle of my spelling out letters. So I left my cheerleading post and ran up into the stands to help her so she wouldn’t get pummeled.

  The day after the fight, I was thrown off the squad for leaving my post and fighting. They had never wanted a black girl on the squad in the first place so they gladly welcomed any opportunity to get rid of me, whatever the reason. My dear mother, bless her heart, promptly challenged the decision, but it didn’t change a thing. I was off the squad after just three games.

  I tried not to let my short-lived cheerleading career get me down, or, for that matter, my uninspiring love life. My romances, such as they were, were with my sister Joanne’s rejects. She would tell me that she’d broken up with some guy, and then give me his number to call. And like a true fool, I would! That’s how badly I wanted somebody, anybody, to like me.

  But besides boys, my main concern was getting accepted into a good college after high school. The importance of higher education was something my parents talked about all the time. I think most black people in my parents’ generation thought the same thing. Education was the be-all and end-all, the great equalizer for people of color.

  Even though Tim and Gloria refused to discuss the civil rights movement with us, I made sure to follow it at every turn. One day I’ll never forget is April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. My entire high school was in an uproar. After everyone gathered in the gym, I was given the microphone as the only black member of the student council so that I could speak to the student body. Usually, when I appeared on stage it was to a chorus of boos—that day, I pleaded with my fellow students to remain calm and respectful in the wake of this horrible tragedy. Instead of boos this time around, the kids paid attention to me, and there were no further disruptions or outbursts until the buses arrived to take the students home early that day, though there were riots on the streets of Buffalo in the days that followed.

  Then there was the day Robert Kennedy visited Buffalo after announcing his run for president in 1968. His motorcade drove right past our high school, and we all ran behind the red convertible as he waved and shook hands. Call it fate or just sheer luck, but I was one of the few students he reached out to, and he shook my hand. I realized I had just touched the hand of someone ready, willing, and able to take his late brother’s place in history, so it broke my heart that Robert Kennedy’s life was cut short before he ever got that chance.

  The summer of 1969 was my last at home before leaving for Northeastern University in Boston. My mother got me a summer job in a ritzy women’s store. Who knows why Gloria Johnson thought her second-oldest daughter should work in a clothing store. I wasn’t a clotheshorse of any kind, and we couldn’t afford the clothes sold there even if I had been.

  The Jenny Shop was located in the center of town and featured expensive, high-end designer apparel that only the most well-paid and elite people could afford. That was not my family. Adding to my unhappiness was the fact that they rotated the song “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (the theme from the popular 1969 Paul Newman and Robert Redford movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) nonstop throughout the day. I heard that song so many times that summer I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown if I heard it again. But though I really would have preferred to be working my old job teaching swimming at the YMCA, Gloria Johnson knew what she was doing. The job she secured for me selling fine women’s “rags” would change the course of my life in a matter of months. I was the only black salesclerk in the upscale boutique, a fact that spurred me on to work harder than everyone else. In almost no time, I became the top-selling clerk. I gained that title despite being shady whenever Dada and her family came in to shop. When I say they shopped, I actually mean they came in and purchased the least expensive items they could find in the store. That’s really just browsing. That’s where I came into the mix.

  For instance, Dada would buy a five-dollar headband or a ten-dollar handkerchief. Then I would go into action and throw in a few extra trinkets of much more value free of charge! Now, my guess is the manager was aware of the five-finger discount I was providing my friends and family. But since Dada and her family were pretty much the only blacks who ever walked into the store for months at a time, she figured it wasn’t worth the fuss to mention it. And I figured since I was forced to hear that damn song all day long, it was a fair exchange.

  The manager of the Jenny Shop was a French woman called Mimi. Because her accent was so strong I could barely work out what she was saying, so I would just nod my head. But there was one thing she said to me regularly that I understood clearly:

  “You should think about becoming a model.”

  No one had said that to me in all my seventeen years, and the thought had certainly never crossed my mind. Fashion was never discussed in the Johnson home. Ebony was the only magazine found on our coffee table, and we read it for the news articles on black history, not the fashion. Mimi’s suggestion was meaningless in my world at that time, so I didn’t mention it to my mother, my sisters, or Dada. I was going to become a lawyer, and that was that.

  Mimi kept at it, though. On my last day at work before leaving for college, she hurriedly jotted down the name of a woman in New York who could help me get started in modeling if I were ever to change my mind. I just smiled and tucked the piece of paper in my wallet and headed off to college in Boston, where a brand-new world of higher learning, girlfriends, boyfriends, and life experiences was awaiting my arrival.

  Northeastern wasn’t exactly my first choice for where to spend the next four years, but it was the school that gave me the most scholarship money, and that was the real determining factor. Also, I enrolled sight unseen, because with several college educations to pay for, my parents just didn’t have the financial resources for travel to check out different campuses with their children. It was a shock to arrive and find out just how huge the place was.

  The beauty of the campus, with its wide, rolling lawns, wasn’t matched by what I found inside. My white roommate clearly hadn’t imagined she would be sharing living quarters with someone of a much darker hue, and she wasn’t very pleased. She didn’t utter one word to me the entire first year. That wasn’t all—she would see me reading my history book and turn off the light anywa
y!

  That was my life during my freshman year, and it was pure hell. Tim and Gloria Johnson had to hear about it via very expensive collect phone calls from the hallway of my dorm every week. My father got such an earful one week that he yelled through the phone, “Beverly, just come on home! You hate it that much there, just come home.”

  But I couldn’t just give up and run back to Mommy and Daddy like some big baby loser. Fortunately, a bunch of older and much wiser female students (a mixed group of both black and white) overheard my tearful exchanges with my parents on the phone and were kind enough to take me under their wing. They taught me how to navigate the massive campus more efficiently and also brought me along to all the best parties, at Northeastern and on nearby Harvard’s campus, too. Things were finally beginning to look up for me. I loved my new girlfriends with a passion. I had no idea this was only the appetizer!

  CHAPTER 4

  New York, New York

  As my first year of college came to a close, I was looking forward to my summer job as a swimming instructor at the YWCA in Roxbury, Boston. That is, until I heard the news that it had been axed due to city funding cuts.

  Now what was I going to do, without employment and with little time to find a new job? Go back to Buffalo? Not on your life! Leave it to my “girls” back at the dorm to think of something. Sitting in our room one day, cramming for end-of-the-year exams, one of my girlfriends, Beverly Gamble, casually said, “Why don’t you try modeling?”

  The familiar sound of those words sent a chill down my spine, but this time, given the fact that I desperately needed a job, I wasn’t so quick to dismiss the idea.

  “Will somebody please explain what this modeling deal is all about?” I said.

  My friends pulled out a fashion magazine and pointed to a picture of a tall, skinny white girl wearing a gorgeous dress. Well, if that’s all there was to modeling—holding a pose, wearing fabulous clothes, and taking pictures all day—I could do that easily. And I still had that little piece of paper in my wallet from Mimi at the clothing store, the one with the New York contact on it. Let the modeling begin!