Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

by Houston, Cissy

  “Well, that’s not the way the world is, baby,” I told her. “Sometimes you have to just tell people to kiss your ass and keep on walking.” I had somehow always known this, deep down, from the time I was very small. But Nippy didn’t see the world that way, even in the face of mean girls and bullying. She was so trusting—she thought everybody was good. But I knew better. If people think you’re weak, they’ll go ten times as hard at you.

  I tried to explain that to her, but she’d just say, “Mommy, you don’t like anybody.”

  “Yes, I do,” I’d tell her. “But if somebody doesn’t like me, I don’t care a thing about them. I’d like for people to like me. But if you don’t, that’s your problem, not mine.” I tried so hard to teach Nippy that, because I was worried about her. I knew what kind of nastiness life had in store for her if she didn’t learn that lesson. But I never could get through to her.

  John didn’t worry like I did—he just didn’t get excited about things. If Nippy was really getting bullied, he’d just say to our sons, “Boys, take care of it.” Looking back, I think Nippy probably would have preferred that we all just let her deal with the problem in her own way, but there wasn’t a chance of that happening. She was the baby of the family, and her brothers and I were going to get up in there and protect her.

  And in the end, that’s exactly what Gary and Michael did. While Gary was gentle, like Nippy, Michael was no joke—he was like me, ready to take someone on if they got in his face. He was always getting into trouble, getting into fights, because he wouldn’t let anyone mess with his sister. He got suspended from school once because he went into a classroom, pulled a boy who’d been bothering Nippy out into the hallway, and started beating on him.

  Sometimes, groups of girls would even chase Nippy home and threaten her. Usually, Michael would confront them and they’d run off. But one afternoon, I was the one who was home when six girls came walking up to our house and said they were going to whip Nippy’s ass. I stood right up on our porch and called out to them, “You want to whip her ass? You got to whip mine first. Can you do that?” Those girls turned tail fast. They knew better.

  After that episode, I told Nippy that if she didn’t face those girls, they would never stop picking on her. “You have got to stand up for yourself!” I told her.

  The very next day, those same girls followed her home again, and this time a few of them brought their boyfriends. Nippy and Michael met them in our front yard, and Michael said, “All right, c’mon. She’ll fight any one of you, but I’m telling you right now that if you beat her, I will kick your ass.” And you know, Nippy actually could have fought, because her brothers had taught her how. But that day, she didn’t have to. Just standing up for herself worked, and the girls and their boyfriends went back to wherever they came from. Things eased up a little bit after that, although the bullying never really stopped—she had to deal with those girls all through elementary school.

  I was proud of my boys for protecting Nippy, and I did think at the time we were all helping her out. But years later, as Nippy struggled with the cruelties and hardships life threw at her, I found myself wishing she’d grown a protective shell of her own. As one of eight kids, I always had to fight and scrabble my own way growing up—no matter what kind of mess came along, I was ready to fight. I sometimes wonder what might have been if Nippy had developed that kind of tough skin herself.

  For as much trouble as she had with the other girls, Nippy was a good student, smart as a whip. During that time, she would talk about wanting to be a teacher, like her grandmother Elizabeth Houston had been. So, when she wasn’t making Michael and her cousins play the bucket and broom as musical instruments, she’d get them to play along while she pretended to be a teacher. She’d stand in front of them and scribble on a little chalkboard we’d bought her, and they’d sit there watching intently like good students. If they stopped paying attention, or started giggling and playing around, she’d walk right over and smack them upside the head with a ruler. The boys thought this was hilarious, but if they giggled, she’d just keep whacking on them and shout, “You got detention!”

  And I mean, you could hear those whacks all over the house. I’d hear this whack-whack-whack and come down the hallway—and when I saw those boys sitting there, letting Nippy beat them with a ruler, I said, “What the hell are y’all doing?” I looked at those laughing boys and said, “You all are so stupid—why are you letting her hit you?” But they just loved Nippy, so I guess that was the price they were willing to pay to play with her.

  By the time Nippy was eleven or twelve, she and I were spending a lot of time together. I’d take her to sessions with me, where she got a chance to hear singers like Chaka Khan, Aretha, Roberta Flack, and Luther Vandross. And the other place I took her was New Hope.

  At first, she fought me over going to church, saying she didn’t like it. After a while, though, I could see a change in her. I think the problems she was having with the girls at school made her more accepting of the church. At New Hope, no one made fun of her clothes, and no one seemed jealous of her.

  But it was at New Hope that Nippy got saved. I wasn’t with her at the time, but she told me later that she’d cried and accepted the Savior into her life and heart. And she never let go of that faith, even through all the turmoil and hard times to come. Nippy’s faith was a quiet one—as an adult, she didn’t go to church often, and she never did talk a whole lot about it. Yet she prayed often, and she always took refuge in gospel music, singing it to warm herself up before performances. I know her conversion was real and lasting, and knowing that gives me strength.

  Though her faith started to play a bigger part in her life, her education was becoming a cause for concern. When Nippy got to the sixth grade, John and I started to worry about the quality of the instruction she was getting. At Franklin Elementary, they’d started some kind of “open classrooms” curriculum, where students could wander around and study at their own pace. I didn’t like the sound of that—what kind of atmosphere was that for a child to learn in? A bunch of kids just doing their own thing, talking and wandering around?

  I’d told Nippy that John and I were thinking about sending her to Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a Catholic school in nearby Caldwell with a good academic reputation and more traditional teaching methods. She didn’t want to go, and she begged us to let her stay in public school. That is, until one day when I came up to Franklin for something and all the kids were running around in that “open classroom,” just cutting up and yelling. Nippy saw me coming and, as she always told the story later, “I knew my ass was on the way to Catholic school.”

  She didn’t want to go to Mount Saint Dominic’s, but we didn’t give her a choice. I was the mother and she was the daughter, and that’s just the way it was—when you’re a child, you don’t get to make all your own decisions. But around this same time, there was another decision Nippy was making for herself. And that one, I didn’t think I could stop.

  Nippy had been hinting for a while that she wanted to sing professionally, but at age twelve, she told me she was sure. I tried to discourage her, as I knew how hard and how cutthroat the music business was. I wasn’t sure if my sweet Nippy, the girl who wanted so badly to be liked and was so easily bullied by her schoolmates, could face the rigors and meanness of that world. No matter how much I tried to talk her out of it, she held firm.

  When I realized how determined she was, I finally said, “Okay. Then I’ll help you.” But I also told her there would be rules.

  If she really wanted to sing, she had to learn to do it the right way. That meant rehearsing every day and singing with the choir every Sunday—no exceptions. At choir rehearsals, I constantly pushed her to aim higher and be better. I was tough on her—tougher than I would have been with someone who wasn’t my own daughter. She’d get frustrated, and sometimes I felt bad about it. At the same time, this was the way I’d been taught by my sister Reebi
e—no playing around—and so that’s how I did it, too.

  “You have to know the melody,” I’d tell her. “There’s a reason the person who wrote the song wrote it that way, and you have to know it to sing the song properly.” Once you learned it, then you could ad-lib and create your own flourishes, but I made sure Nippy would always know the melody backward and forward for any song she sang.

  I also taught her to enunciate, to really pay attention to the words and make sure people listening could understand what she was singing. Because every song has a story—and if it’s not a story, it’s not a song. People write what they write for a reason. You owe it to them to perform the song in a way that puts their vision across. “Enunciate!” I would snap, if she was mealy-mouthing the words. I wanted her to really feel what she was singing—because otherwise, what was the point?

  In teaching, you’re often criticizing, because you want to help the person to do better. It’s not always enjoyable, for either the teacher or the student. Nippy would sometimes say to me, “Mommy, you make me feel like I want to go through the floor, like I’m never going to be good enough.” And I would say, “Baby, that’s not my intent. I just want you to be the very best that you can be.” And we’d keep hammering away.

  Gary had a beautiful voice, and I taught him, too, at least for a little while. Eventually, though, he couldn’t take it. “Mommy, you’re too hard,” he’d say, and eventually he gave up. Nippy thought I was hard on her, too, but really it was just that I wouldn’t let her relax and get lazy. “You gotta represent!” I’d tell her. “You wanted to do this, you are going to do it right!”

  She didn’t like it, but she hung in there, listening and learning when she could easily have spent her time out socializing or partying. She didn’t do much of that, partly because John and I didn’t allow her to date—though John was a little less strict than I was, so she’d sometimes try to get permission for something by going to him instead of me. But more than that, she was truly dedicated to singing, so she accepted my rules and stuck with it. Sometimes she’d get so mad that she wouldn’t even speak to me, but she was always ready for rehearsal the next day.

  After a few months of intensive teaching, Nippy made her solo debut at New Hope. I couldn’t be there that Sunday, as I had been called away at the last minute for an out-of-town performance. But John was there, and he, my sisters, Gary and Michael, and everyone else said Nippy absolutely tore that place down. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the church,” John told me.

  I was so sorry to miss her first solo in church, but I was there for the next one, and I saw what everyone was talking about. Let me tell you—in a black church, you don’t have to wonder how people feel about things. If they like something, they’ll be shouting and hollering and carrying on all the way through. And that’s what they did when Nippy sang. Because there was something in her voice that no one could teach—it was partly genetic, but it was something else, too. It was something unique.

  CHAPTER 6

  Training the Voice

  Nippy and I were as close as we’d been since she was a little girl, but our relationship was changing—now it was no longer strictly a mother-daughter thing. I was still “Mommy,” of course, her parent who would guide and discipline and love her, but now we had a shared purpose beyond that. I continued to worry that the entertainment business was low-down and doggish, but Nippy wanted to sing, so I was committed to helping her, and we spent many hours together working on her technique.

  At the same time, Nippy was having trouble adjusting to the Catholic school. She hated it and kept begging us to let her switch to the middle school in East Orange, where all the kids she knew were going. I made her stay right where she was, though. Mount Saint Dominic was different—smaller, with a more disciplined environment in the classroom—so I thought it would be better for her. And as we had hoped, her grades improved there.

  These were such good years—I had steady work, John and I were happy, and the kids were growing up. But just as I’d learned as a little girl, even if things are good, you never know what’s around the corner. And on one evening in September 1976, that proved as true as ever.

  John had driven me into Manhattan to sing at one of my regular places, a jazz club on the Upper West Side called Mikell’s. By the time we drove all the way back to East Orange, I was tired, so I went straight to bed. A little bit later the phone rang, but I didn’t hear it—I was already sound asleep. Nippy woke up, though, and she picked up the phone. “We think your father is here at the hospital,” the person on the other end told her. “We believe he’s had a heart attack.”

  Nippy figured it was someone playing a joke. “My father is in bed sleeping,” she said, then slammed the receiver down.

  Seconds later, the phone rang again.

  “Please, don’t hang up!” the same voice said. “I need to speak to someone there. We believe we have Mr. John Houston here in the hospital.”

  This time, Nippy tiptoed into the bedroom to check. When she saw that her father wasn’t in the bed, she hurried to shake me awake.

  “What are you doing?” I snapped, but as soon as I saw her face I knew something was very wrong. Her eyes were wide and scared, like she’d seen a ghost.

  “Mommy, something’s wrong with Daddy,” she said, and burst out crying. I got up and hurried to the phone, dreading what I might hear.

  When the voice at the other end told me John had suffered a heart attack, a bolt of fear shot right through me. As quickly as we could, Nippy and I caught a cab to the hospital—our car wasn’t in the garage, as John had apparently driven himself to the emergency room. All the way there, I just kept thinking that if John was dead, I didn’t want to keep living.

  Bae met us at the hospital, and a nurse took the three of us to see John in the emergency room. Nippy just broke down crying the minute she saw him, so Bae took her hand and led her gently out of the room. Lying there hooked up to all those tubes and monitors, John looked more frail and weak than I’d ever seen him. He had always looked so big, strong, and confident, but when he took my hand and tried to smile he just looked small and scared.

  I had only seen that look on his face once before, on a flight from Madrid to Lisbon during a tour with Aretha in the late sixties. John was sitting beside me, and the Sweets were behind us, asleep. We were halfway to Lisbon when I noticed that the plane was descending fast—way too fast. Across the aisle, a few people started nervously straining to look out the window.

  I turned to John and said, “Wake up, I think the damn plane’s gonna crash!”

  When I saw the expression on his face, it was obvious that he’d felt the plane dropping, too. John was already light-skinned, but now his face was pasty white, absolutely drained of color. And there were no tough-guy zingers or funny comebacks now—he just nodded and silently turned to stare out the window. A few seconds later, he looked at

  me and asked, “How does the rest of ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ go?”

  I thought he might be joking, but he was dead serious. We began reciting the twenty-third psalm together as the plane kept on falling. Suddenly, about halfway through the psalm, the plane jerked before leveling off and beginning a slow climb. John exhaled with relief and grabbed my hand, holding it so tightly it hurt.

  A minute later, one of the Sweets woke up. She leaned forward and whispered, “Cissy, I had a dream that the plane almost crashed.” I didn’t want to scare her, so I didn’t say anything. But later, I told her that, no, it wasn’t a dream—we had nearly crashed. After that, John and I rarely flew together. My worst fear was that something would happen to both of us, and our kids would be left alone.

  Now, looking at John’s scared face as he lay in that emergency room, I feared that our kids might be left without their daddy.

  Over the next few days, the whole family spent day and night at the hospital. Gary was away on a basketball scholarship to DePaul U
niversity, but Nippy, Michael, John’s parents, and my sisters were there practically the whole time and we all were praying constantly for John.

  After a week or so, John seemed to be getting stronger, and the doctor finally said he could go home, but when we got home, I could see that something was different. The doctors had told me that after the heart attack, John’s personality might change—and it certainly did. That’s when all the bad stuff started happening between us.

  John might have been fifty-six, thirteen years older than me, but he was not an old man. The heart attack came as a complete surprise, and it forced him to step back and review his life. I guess he might have been having a midlife crisis, but from that point on, John seemed to feel he hadn’t accomplished all that he should have. He was an ambitious, intelligent black man caught up in a world where black men weren’t permitted to achieve all they could. I think he felt cheated—robbed of the opportunity to really express himself. John always felt that if he’d been white, he would have made it big, but those who held the power just wouldn’t let people like him in. Like so many black men, he was angry at the world, bitter about being denied. While John was happy to be alive, that anger just sat boiling within him. And soon, he wasn’t just mad at the white establishment that had held him down. Soon, he began spewing his anger at me.

  John decided that stress had set off his heart attack—and that I was the cause of much of that stress. With Gary in college and Nippy in private school, our expenses had soared, so John had been forced to take a nine-to-five job at Newark City Hall to help out. This meant he was working all day, then driving me back and forth to gigs in New York, too. It was a lot on his plate.

  Making it worse, he always believed that I could have gone much further and earned much more—even become a star—if only I’d allowed him to push me as a solo artist. John believed that while background session work was fine, the real way to make money and beat the system was as a solo artist. He thought I was just being stubborn, not letting him push me to that next level.