Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir

by Toni Braxton

  We finally left Pillar of Truth when I was ten. Mommy and Bishop Scurry got into a disagreement about something the bishop claimed.

  “Even Jesus was imperfect,” said Bishop Scurry. “Jesus was both spirit and man, wrapped in flesh. When he was young, He probably got in trouble for stealing cookies from the cookie jar.”

  “That’s not true,” Mommy said insistently. “Jesus was perfect.” That difference of opinion escalated into a full-blown conflict. Whatever led to our departure a few Sundays later, I don’t think Bishop Scurry was sad to see us go—I got the feeling she didn’t like my mother very much.

  We may have moved to a different church, but we didn’t stray from our extremely religious lifestyle. My parents began attending the church of a minister who’d already left Pillar to start her own congregation in the basement of some building. Our new pastor, Bishop Bellamy, was just as strict as the former one—and we were only there for about a year before another argument erupted. My parents owned a living room set that the bishop disapproved of. “The colors are red and black,” she told them, “and that makes it like the devil. You have to get rid of it.” The bishop told her exactly which Dumpster she should dump it in. That’s why Mommy believed that the pastor simply wanted her new couch and love seat—and rather than giving it up, she and my father left the congregation.

  Once I was grown, I finally asked my parents why they first joined Pillar of Truth. “When they greeted us for the first time, they just showed us so much love,” Mommy said. “They always made us feel like part of their family.” But what is true in many families was also true at Pillar: The ties that bound us together became the ties that strangled us.

  As traumatic as that whole experience was for me, I believe that my parents were doing what they thought was best for our family. In the seventies—a decade when so many Americans got caught up in various religious doctrines—my parents became convinced that staying loyal to a set of bylaws would keep all of us on the path to God. Yet in the years after we left both of those congregations, even my parents would come to realize what my aunts already knew—our family had fallen into religious extremism.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Homey Toni Braxton”

  I call it the “covered wagon syndrome”: What happened in the Braxton house stayed in the Braxton house. My parents, who have always been very private, didn’t want their children talking publicly about our family issues; the years we spent inside that church reinforced that tendency. That’s one of the reasons I never felt like I could relate to other children—especially at school.

  During my elementary school years, my teachers would organize a Halloween march; all the kids would excitedly put on their costumes and parade around the halls. “Where’s your costume?” one of my classmates asked me when I was in fifth grade. “Oh, I didn’t bring one,” I said. The truth was that my family didn’t acknowledge any holiday, even after we left Pillar of Truth—but since I already felt like an oddball, I certainly didn’t want to admit that. Thankfully, my teacher always brought extra costumes for any child who had forgotten one, so I pretended this was the case for me and put on the princess tiara and skirt she handed me. Once I was home, I didn’t dare reveal to Mommy that I’d worn the costume because I knew I’d be in trouble.

  My classmates teased me mercilessly. “Hey, homey Toni Braxton!” they’d yell out in the hallways and on the playground. Not only did I wear a dress every single day of the year (yes, even when it was snowing . . . ), but my outfits were unstylish (as in homely and frumpy . . . or, as my classmates put it, “homey”); what’s worse, Mommy usually swept my fine, pressed, and curled hair into a little ponytail that sat squarely on top of my head. And it didn’t help that my family had so many children—the year I was ten, my sister Tamar, the youngest, had already arrived. That made us look like the weirdo religious family who apparently didn’t practice birth control. In the tree-hugging seventies, you can imagine how many stares we got.

  My homework was often neglected. We spent so many hours in church that there just wasn’t enough time to complete all of my assignments. “Why aren’t you getting your work done?” my parents would ask, making a fuss. I’d shrug and take the licking that came next. On the one hand, my parents didn’t play when it came to requiring my siblings and me to do well academically; but on the other hand, they didn’t make our schoolwork a priority. The priority was memorizing scriptures and attending services to focus on my studies. At church, all of us children were given batches of twenty-six scriptures to memorize, organized from A to Z; every Thursday night in our testimony service, we each had to stand up and quote that week’s designated verse. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,” I’d recite from Psalm 23. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters; He restoreth my soul.” By the time I was twelve, I could recite literally dozens of scriptures perfectly from my memory. Yet I was a C student.

  One day when my class was scheduled to take the Maryland School Assessment, the state’s standardized test, my teacher noticed that I wasn’t eating lunch at school. “Why aren’t you eating?” she asked. “Because we’re fasting at church,” I told her. A couple of times a year and especially during Lent and Passover, we refrained from eating for a week or two (though Mommy would always break down and give us dinner). We were told that fasting was a way to draw closer to God. When I explained this to my teacher, her eyes widened, and I could see the creases form on her forehead. “Well, you need to eat in order to be ready for your test,” she said. She then reached into her bag and gave me a vanilla bar. “Thank you,” I murmured. With every bite I took of the bar, I felt more and more guilty. I never told my parents that I ate the bar, because I knew they’d be upset.

  My favorite subject was reading. I loved a series titled The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I must’ve read every book in the set dozens of times. In it, the writer tells the story of four orphaned children who create a home for themselves in an abandoned boxcar in the forest; their grandfather eventually discovers them there and rescues them. Every summer, the children then go on all kinds of adventures together and solve mysteries. My parents usually only read the Bible to us when I was small, so I read the books on my own. I’d curl up on a fluffy pillow on my bed, turn the pages one by one, and imagine that I was the fifth boxcar child.

  Other than excelling in reading, social studies, and chorus (which was effortless for me!), I was an average student. When I was in fourth grade, my homeroom teacher once sat me in the back of the class, in a corner by myself, because I hadn’t completed my homework for the third time that month. I sat quietly and stared out the window as she taught at the chalkboard. Later, all the other kids pulled out a packet she’d apparently given them earlier, when I was out sick with asthma (yes, I had that, too). I didn’t have a packet to review—but since I was already in trouble, I was scared to raise my hand and ask for a copy. Over the next two weeks, the teacher continued reviewing the packet that I was missing, and I just fiddled with my other papers and pretended that I was following along. Of course, I didn’t tell my parents about it, though I knew that falling behind would get me in more trouble. But if I’d gone home and mentioned the missing packet, my parents would’ve been like, “Why didn’t you get the packet in the first place? You must’ve done something wrong.” It was easier to stay silent.

  My best subject was math—I consistently earned B-pluses. So like some of the other students in my fifth-grade class, I wanted to begin algebra early, which would’ve been in the fall of sixth grade. “Can I try algebra next year?” I asked my teacher. “No, Toni,” she said, hardly even glancing up from the papers she was grading at her desk. “You need an A to start algebra early.” In that instance, I should’ve marched right home and told Mommy what happened—she probably would’ve gone up to that school and acted a fool in order to get me into that math class. But I could never gauge when my mother would be upset with me. I was so conditioned to believe
that everything I did was somehow a sin. I was always hearing that God was a God of wrath—and that meant He was judging everything I did.

  I’ve always known that both my parents would do anything to protect me. Yet my childhood was filled with so many gray areas: Should I bring someone else’s behavior to my parents’ attention so that they could step in, or would I be accused of doing something wrong? Most of the time, I feared that if I spoke up, a situation would be declared my fault. I walked around with this feeling in my gut that I was about to be punished for something. In church, I often prayed that God would forgive me for a list of “sins” I probably never even committed. And of course I couldn’t tell anyone outside of my family what I was experiencing. In the covered wagon, the Braxtons lived by a single commandment: Shut your mouth and suppress whatever you feel. I didn’t know it then, but that was the perfect preparation for the life that awaited me.

  ONCE WE FLED those two repressive churches, we joined Truth Foundation on Charles Street in Baltimore. I was about twelve then. We’d attended that church sporadically up until I was about six and a half, and my parents had remained friendly with the head minister, Pastor Doughty. Though the church was also Apostolic, the pastor wasn’t nearly as strict as Bishop Scurry had been. So when we returned there, I could exhale—but only halfway, because we brought some of our habits with us. My parents had been so influenced by Pillar that they still wouldn’t allow us to listen to secular music, celebrate holidays, or wear pants.

  By the time we became part of Truth Foundation, Mommy had realized her children could harmonize. You might’ve heard the story about the day that Tamar—who noticed that we’d run out of toilet paper—sang out from the bathroom, “Somebody bring me some toilet paper!” I wasn’t actually there that day, but one by one, my other sisters gathered and turned Tamar’s refrain into a perfect harmony. My mother overheard this and decided she should organize us into an official group. So at home, Mommy, who served as the choir director at every church we attended, began lining us up near her piano and making us practice for hours. Then on Sundays, we’d perform songs like “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” as well as hymns. Mommy made sure our harmonies were flawless.

  My mother is Joe Jackson’s first cousin. I’m joking, of course, but only a little—because Mommy sure was serious about our harmonizing. If we sang a chord wrong, for instance, she would let us know—and for some reason, Towanda got it the worst. To avoid Mommy’s disapproving eye, I practiced a lot on my own . . . And did I mention that my mom’s maiden name is Jackson?

  When I was ten, we moved from our town house to a ranch rambler. In that house, I began taking piano lessons—we had a French provincial upright piano trimmed in gold. Mommy was breeding me as the piano player for the Braxton family. My piano teacher was David, a man from our church who recognized my potential as a musician and simply wanted to help me. My parents would give him three or four dollars when he stopped by for our lesson each week. Sometimes, he didn’t ask for a dime—or else he’d say to my dad, “Can I just get a few dollars for gas?” He was the nicest man.

  At first, I didn’t want to learn to play the way classically trained musicians do, which is by practicing scales; instead, I wanted to jump ahead and play the chords that I heard pianists in church playing. But I did continue my lessons for about four years, and along the way, I started picking things up naturally. When my sisters and I performed around town, I always served as our accompanist. I didn’t play all that well at first—that’s why we often sang a lot of a cappella harmonies, in a similar style to those of the gospel group Take 6. And since I couldn’t yet play and sing a solo at the same time (that takes years of practice!), I was really just one voice in the mix of five. The first song I later learned to play and sing simultaneously was “Goin’ Up Yonder.” From there, I got good at gospel songs like “God Is” and “I Am Grateful.”

  During those years, I fell in love with music. Because so much of it was forbidden in our household, I’d sneak and listen to secular songs on the radio. I could tell you anything you wanted to know about a song—the bass line, the drum line, the harmonies on the top and the bottom. And I loved all kinds of music: I relished the Fleetwood Mac tunes our bus driver played as he drove us to school. I even practiced singing when I was by myself. I’d grab a ketchup bottle from our pantry and practice in the mirror. “Shame!” I sang, trying to mimic Evelyn “Champagne” King’s voice. “Burning, you keep my whole body yearning! You got me so confused, it’s a shame!” I’d shake and swivel my body across the bedroom in the same way that she did onstage. I wanted to be exactly like her.

  The first time I heard Anita Baker sing, I just about fainted. One morning while I was standing at the bus stop, my neighbor across the street began playing a record from the soul/funk band Chapter 8, which featured Anita as a lead vocalist. “Can I borrow that record?” I later asked my neighbor. I then smuggled it into my house, waited till Mommy was at the store, and played the entire vinyl on our record player. “I just want to be your girl,” she crooned in her smoky, molasses-tinged, androgynous tone that sounded as if it had been in a compressor. It was the first time I’d heard a soloist whose voice had the same texture and timbre as mine. I didn’t ever want to return the vinyl to my neighbor.

  Grease was also big for me. When that musical hit theaters in 1978, I couldn’t go to the movies to see it because our religion considered that a sin—surprise, surprise. But I still caught a few pieces of certain songs because everybody around me was singing them. In front of my bedroom mirror, I practiced the big hit by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John: “You’re the one that I want—ooh, ooh, ooh!”

  The songs of the seventies infused the entire country with a certain vitality and joy—yet for me, music did far more than that. Hearing it made me sure that I wanted to be part of creating it. I could literally lose myself in the chords; a great song had the power to transport me to another place—to make me remember the best of who I was and to forget the things that brought me pain. All at once, I felt this amazing sense of profound fulfillment, as if an unscratchable itch had suddenly been relieved. Whenever I sang the first note of a song, I was hopeful. I was no longer that square religious girl who wore skirts down past her knees. I instead became the person I yearned to be. The cool girl. The popular kid. The beautiful one. The star.

  OUR FAMILY GATHERED for dinner every night at six. Mommy began preparing the meal around the time I got home from school at three P.M.—and I was always her little helper. “Set the table,” she’d tell me. I’d carefully pull down our stack of plates (olive green trimmed in blue . . . hey, it was the seventies!) and place each one around our table. The aroma of savory meatloaf with gravy, garlic potatoes, sautéed cabbage, and homemade butter biscuits rose from the oven and wafted throughout the house. Two Maxwell House cans sat atop Mommy’s gas stove—one for pork grease, one for chicken. She’d use the leftover oil to flavor everything from pork chops and vegetables to smothered chicken. It may not have been totally healthy, but it was the best Southern cooking you could find. “Is your mama making cheese biscuits tonight?” a neighbor would often ask me. In Severn, my mother’s recipes were legendary.

  As Mommy finished dinner, I helped my younger sisters with their homework. I was around ten when my older cousin Kimmy left our home and returned to live with her family—and that’s when I really began to feel like the eldest. I became the second mom: I helped my mother chop and dice vegetables, I washed dishes (I was the official dishwasher—and let me tell you, we had a ton of dishes!), and I vacuumed the house. I also oversaw my younger siblings. “Did you finish your math assignment?” I’d ask Traci or Towanda. Because I was so much older than the other girls—I am five years older than the next sister, Traci, and a decade older than the youngest, Tamar—I felt more like their parent than their sibling. Mikey and I are only two years apart, but since he’s a boy, he got out of some of the domestic chores. That was considered women’s work. He did at least have t
o take out the trash.

  Just before six, my father arrived home from E.J. Korvettes. We all lived on my father’s one income—which means my parents were very clever about how they used their money. Every Sunday when the newspaper arrived, my siblings and I would sit at our table and clip out all the coupons. We were far from wealthy (Dad once told me it would take him six years to earn $100,000), and yet we always seemed to have everything we needed, mostly thanks to how well my parents economized. My mother managed the weekly budget and used about $100 a week for groceries. Mom would go to this store called Maurry’s Steak House and buy what seemed like a quarter of a cow and store it in our upright freezer. She bought a lot of food on sale and froze it—which is how we saved a lot of money.

  My parents also had very good credit—so they were able to get a loan for the town house. As for the extras we always seemed to have, Dad’s job came with plenty of perks: The employees at E.J. Korvettes got household items like televisions and microwaves at a steep discount. It didn’t hurt that my parents had inherited a piece of land and a house when they were married. That left them with enough money to care for our family, give to the church (my parents tithed 10 percent of their income), and even save up for a few luxuries (like our piano). By the way they managed their money, my parents passed on one lesson to me early: As important as it is to save, you should also spend and enjoy a portion of what you have. For instance, even when things were tight in our house, my parents would still set aside enough money for our family to go to an amusement park or on a road trip. And every week after Mom had written out the checks for all of our bills, she’d always leave herself with a few dollars for something she wanted for herself—like a new pair of panty hose.