by Toni Braxton
Though my father was officially the head of the household, we all knew that Mommy was really in charge, especially regarding anything related to the house or us children. She simply had the loudest voice and the strongest opinions. Yet once Daddy got home and we all took our places around the table, he did sit at the head of the table, say grace over the food, and lead the dinnertime conversation. “We put up a new display at the store today,” he’d tell us. After giving us the full update on his day and listening to Mom’s, he’d sometimes turn to me and ask, “So what happened at school today?” I’d mutter a couple of sentences before stuffing the edge of a biscuit into my mouth.
Once I cleared the table and helped Mommy put away the food, my parents would often call us into the living room. “We need to pray right now,” Mommy would say. We prayed about everything—from an issue happening in the church to some struggle that had arisen in my parents’ lives. Sometime during the evening, Mommy would use her favorite line at least once: “The devil is raging.” I think my parents really feared that Satan was right there in the room, trying to overtake us. During our days at Pillar of Truth, Bishop Scurry would often oversee exorcisms, during which we’d cast demons out of people. Afterward, we’d all gather, hold hands, and pray that the spirits that left those people’s bodies didn’t get into ours. In 1977, my parents might have physically moved on from Pillar, but spiritually and emotionally, they were still quite connected to what we learned there.
Before bedtime, Mommy would occasionally pull out her gospel vinyl records and play either a Mahalia Jackson or James Cleveland eight-track. “Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to me,” sang Reverend Cleveland in that thick, husky voice that sounded as if it came from another world; his accompanying choir called out their agreement with a flurry of amens. “Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to me.” I loved that style of music so much because it seemed closer to secular—and that made me feel closer to normal. What I didn’t know is that it was a remake of Gladys Knight’s song “You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me.” With every soulful note that lifted from Mommy’s record player, I was smitten. The piano. The drums. The tambourines. The spirit. It all filled a space inside of me that only music could. Even way back then, I somehow sensed that. I’m still certain of it today.
CHAPTER 5
Levi’s and Puppy Love
Designer jeans were all the rage in the early eighties—Jordache, Sasson, Calvin Klein. So you can imagine how excited I was when my cousin Felicia gave me a pair of original 501 button-fly Levi’s. I was fourteen—and my eighth-grade classmates had never seen me in pants, much less fashionable ones. On the day I got the secondhand jeans, I closed my bedroom door, slipped one leg at a time into the jeans, and quickly fastened each button. The Levi’s were a little big on me, which made them a perfect fit. Before Mommy could open the door and catch me wearing pants, I pulled them off and buried them in my bottom drawer. Every day for a week, I took them out and tried them on, just so I could practice what it would feel like to wear pants.
One evening in December 1980, a huge snowstorm hit Severn. As the temperature dipped into the teens, my big opportunity arose. “Mommy,” I whispered just before bedtime, “do you think I could wear pants tomorrow? It’s supposed to be very cold.”
“You got pants?” Mommy snapped.
“Yes, because Felicia gave me a pair,” I admitted. “I have them in my drawer.”
Mommy studied my face for several seconds. “No you can’t,” she said. “You know we don’t wear pants around here. Put on two pair of tights if you’re that cold.”
The following day, the snow continued falling. I don’t know where my courage came from, but I again asked my mother if I could wear the jeans. She ignored me. Then on the third day of the storm—on a morning when the wind chill factor was in the single digits—I repeated my request. My mother, who was combing Towanda’s hair for school, was in my room.
“Mommy, can I wear the pants today?”
She glared at me. “You want to wear the darn pants?” she finally shouted. “Then wear the darn pants!” She then stormed out of my bedroom and into hers—and I thought she was going to call my father.
Before Mommy could change her mind, I went over to the dresser and pulled out the Levi’s. As I put them on, I repeated to myself, “I’m not going to feel guilty.” Because of what I’d been taught, I truly believed I’d go to hell if I wore the jeans. But that fear wasn’t strong enough to eclipse my exhilaration. Once I buttoned the Levi’s, I then put on a plaid button-up top and brown leather boots with tassels on the front. I arranged my hair into a snatch-back, a layered style with two pink combs at the sides of my head. I then glided over to my bedroom mirror and peered at my reflection. For the first time in my life, I felt fashionable.
When Mommy spotted me on the way out the front door, she didn’t say a word—but her chilly gaze told me she disapproved. I rushed out and made my way to the bus stop. I saw a few of my classmates huddled together, trying to keep warm. “Who’s that?” someone said as I approached. Once I got close enough for them to see my face, one of them yelled out, “Oh my God—Toni Braxton got on pants!” All I could do was stand there and beam. Once I boarded the bus, everyone stopped, stared, and drew in a collective gasp. “Wow,” said a kid in the front row, “she’s wearing pants!” In that moment and for the rest of the school day, I felt famous. And above all else, I felt like I fit in.
The next morning, I put on the same jeans. In fact, I wore them every day until it was summer. At school, a girl named Cheryl came up to me in the hall. “I ain’t sayin’ no names,” she said, “but someone told me you wear the same pants every day.”
I smirked. “I have several pair of the pants,” I lied. She gave me a look that said, “Yeah, right.”
After I’d worn the pants for a whole week, Mommy intervened: “I said you could wear those pants for one day because it was cold.” That’s how my modeling spree ended.
In a sense, that episode marked a beginning. Six weeks later, my mother actually bought me a pantsuit. “You can only wear it when it’s cold outside,” she told me. Later that same year, she also bought me a tube of lip gloss and pale pink nail polish. “This is only for special occasions,” she said. I wasn’t sure what “special occasions” she had in mind, but I wasn’t going to argue it. Little by little, my mother was changing. For me—the awkward religious girl who’d never felt cute—that shift couldn’t happen fast enough.
I LOVED TELEVISION. By the time I was in junior high, our family owned four TV sets that Dad had brought home from Korvettes. We had one in the family room downstairs (a color console!), one in my brother’s room, and another in my parents’ room; the fourth was in the kitchen. I eventually moved the kitchen TV into my bedroom, which is where it stayed. By then, my parents still weren’t allowing us to listen to secular music, but they did let us watch television. They knew that by the time a movie appeared on TV several years after it had been released in the theaters, the cursing and other offensive material had usually been edited out. Yet once I had a TV in my room, I managed to sneak in some programs that my parents considered too worldly.
Like Solid Gold—a TV series that debuted in 1980. Every Saturday, I sat in awe of the show’s dancers, who pranced around in flashy costumes as the week’s top hits played. The first season was hosted by Dionne Warwick, and in the premiere episode, Irene Cara belted out her hit “Fame.” I was hooked from the first note. I also loved American Bandstand. The DeBarges, a family singing group, once performed on that show. The whole time I watched, I thought, Maybe the family-singing-group thing is okay. Maybe I could be cool after all.
My all-time favorite show was Soul Train. Every week, I saw black artists who looked like me—and watching them perform on TV was very different from just hearing them on the radio. All the big stars were on there: the Jacksons, Luther Vandross, Rick James, Johnny Gill, Stacy Lattisaw. Janet Jackson once came on the show to sing “Don’t
Stand Another Chance.” With every tilt of her head, her hair bounced like Tootie’s on The Facts of Life. I paid attention to those kinds of details, especially when it came to the young singers. And I never missed an episode. Every Saturday, my parents took a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore so they could go to the farmers’ market—and I knew that gave me two to three hours to watch Soul Train in peace.
By the early eighties, stars like Donna Summer and Diana Ross were on all of the music shows I watched. I wanted large eyeballs like Diana’s. I also imagined what I’d look like in the gaucho pants that Donna often strutted around in onstage. The big hair, the double-knit jersey fabrics, the cute sandals with the toes out—I longed for the glamour of the big stars. I also dreamed of becoming a famous soloist, but that didn’t seem possible because I was always singing with my family. In the African-American community, a certain idea has persisted for generations: If one gets, we all get. We’re all in the boat together, so we must all get out together. In my family, it was taboo to separate from the group. But secretly, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I didn’t simply want to be an extension of my parents and siblings. I wanted to be an individual. I wanted to be like Donna and Diana.
AS I TRIED to leave my “Homey Toni Braxton” days behind, I studied fashion. One of my aunts kept a stack of Ebony magazines in her living room, and I often leafed through the issues. In those days, Ebony was known for an event called Fashion Fair—a traveling runway show that featured black models wearing vibrant outfits, flawless makeup, and chocolate-colored lipstick; when the magazine’s editors included coverage of Fashion Fair in their pages, I cut out my favorite looks. All the teasing I got from my classmates had left me with something to prove—that I could be stylish. I’m not really a vengeful person, but in the back of my head, I was always thinking, I’ll show them.
And yet the change in my image happened veeeeery slowly—which means the cruelty from my classmates continued. “I ain’t sayin’ no names,” one girl would spout off to another in the hallway, “but somebody was talkin’ ’bout you.”
“You’d better tell me who it was,” the other kid would shout, “or I’m gonna beat you up!”
Somehow, the finger of blame would always end up pointed directly at me; the irony was that I wasn’t talking to anyone about anything, because I’d always been in the out crowd. Even still, girls would randomly come up to me and hit me in the head or push me down and say, “I heard you was talkin’ ’bout me!” I might’ve been under five feet and scrawny, but I wasn’t a punk. “I don’t know you well enough to talk about you!” I shot back. They probably knew that—but they picked on me because my presence irritated them. Once when I came home and told Mommy how the other kids were treating me, she said, “Nobody is greater than you but God. They’re just jealous.” I really believed that. I might’ve been the odd girl out, but I still had an air about me, and the kids at school could sense that.
Later, when some of my other classmates went up to a girl named Tammy—a school bully—they told her that I’d been talking smack about her. She goes, “Toni Braxton? She doesn’t talk to anybody! Ya’ll lying on that girl!” From that point on, my classmates began giving me a little less of a hard time.
My best friend was Kim White. Actually, our friendship began on a sour note: Back in fifth grade, Kim was teasing me at school one day because of the way I was dressed. “You’re so country!” she shouted, snickering. Kim was one of the cutest and most popular girls in school, and that made her teasing even more painful. “Where did you get that dress from—your mama’s closet?” That evening, I went home and told my mother what happened. “Kim White said that to you? I know her mother,” Mommy said. Kim’s mom was in my mother’s wedding. “Let me call her and handle this.” The intervention apparently worked. The next day, Kim was suddenly nice, and we’ve been friends ever since. We came from similar backgrounds: all her siblings’ names started with the letter K, like the Kardashians: Kim, Kelly, Kristy, and Kia. And like me, she was the eldest in her family, so we bonded over that. When it came to fashion, however, Kim and I were worlds apart: She dressed her butt off. She also had great hair and a very cute face. Boys always liked her—and even if a guy did look at me, everyone was like, “Wow—I can’t believe he likes Toni over Kim.” At first the comparisons bothered me, but I learned to ignore them. Plus, I was just happy to be hanging out with a popular girl. Of course, that didn’t exactly make me popular—but it did mean that I was seen as little more acceptable (and slightly less teasable!) in the eyes of my other classmates.
I didn’t have a boyfriend at that point—I was in junior high before I started really noticing boys. This girl named Tammy had a cousin that I thought was sooooo cute—and I confessed my crush to her. “He kind of likes you, too,” Tammy told me. The following spring when we were all at a pool party (my parents only let me go because they knew the other kids’ parents were church folk . . . ), the boy and I started flirting around. At the end of the evening, we kissed—and a few seconds after our lips met, he stuck his tongue in my mouth! What the heck was that? I thought. I’d seen my mom and dad kiss, of course, but there was never any tongue involved. “You can’t kiss,” he said to me afterward. I was mortified. Later, when I told Tammy what happened, she said, “You have to learn how to kiss.” She pulled a doll from my little sister’s bed and said, “Here, let’s practice on this.” Tammy then slowly stuck her tongue in and out of the doll’s mouth. Ick. I didn’t even want to try that.
Among my classmates, I was usually the last one to do anything, so of course, I was also the last one to get my period. As I awaited its arrival, I started reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I absolutely loved Judy Blume’s book, and I read it over and over again. I could relate to everything that twelve-year-old Margaret, the main character, was going through: waiting and waiting for her period to come, wearing her first bra, being part of the itty bitty titty committee, having a crush on boys, and eventually dealing with a maxi pad wedged between her thighs. In a nutshell, that was my life. My mother had talked to me about my period a little (“When you get your menstrual,” she’d say, “it makes you a woman”), but for the most part, I learned about it by reading an encyclopedia. The day I finally spotted red in my panties, I went to my mother.
“Mommy, I’m bleeding a little bit,” I said.
“Where?” she said.
“Down there,” I said, pointing toward my crotch.
She paused. “You haven’t been messing around with any little boys, have you?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and wondering what the heck she was talking about.
“Well congratulations,” she finally said as she pulled me close for a hug. “You’re becoming a woman.”
Soon after, Mommy showed me how to use pads. The huge maxi pad was a little awkward, but wearing it made me feel very grown-up. “You have to be responsible with your things,” said Mommy, who went on to explain that I’d have to carry a purse to school with my pads in it. And the instructions didn’t end there: A couple days later when she saw me take a bite of a tuna fish sandwich, she stopped me. “Uh-uh—you can’t eat fish of any kind while you’re on your menstrual cycle,” she said. “The smell will come through your pores. Don’t take baths either—only showers. And don’t eat anything cold because it’ll make you cramp more.” And then there was the most important rule of all: Tampons were 100 percent prohibited.
“What do you got this for?” Mommy asked when she once found a tampon in my room.
“My friend gave it to me,” I said.
“That’s ’cause that child’s doing other things!” Mommy said. By the time I wore my first tampon, I was in college.
To this day, I have no idea where Mommy’s rules came from, but here’s one thing I can tell you—my mother was doing her best to prepare me for womanhood. Her little “You haven’t been messing around with any little boys” comment was probably born of fear—she didn’t want her little girl, her fir
stborn, to grow up too fast or lose her innocence too early. No mother has a handbook on parenting; most of us are just repeating what our mothers passed on to us. Now that I’m a mother myself, I understand that. If only I’d known that at fourteen.
THE SUMMER BEFORE I entered high school, I got my first job—I worked as a custodian at a school. I only earned minimum wage (a whopping $3.35 an hour!), but I was thrilled to have my own money coming in. When I got my second check, I went out and bought new towels and accessories for our bathroom. I put the rest of the money into a savings account. A few weeks before I started high school, Mommy said I could use some of that savings to buy school clothes. So I went to a fashion store and picked out a pair of white argyle pants—by this time, Mommy had eased up enough for me to risk bringing home pants. I also bought myself a pair of brown leather penny loafers, a huge trend by the early eighties. I really wanted to slide a quarter into my loafers but my shoes were too small for that—size five and a half.
Once I got to high school, I started noticing boys. My first boyfriend was Ferron. He had fair skin and gorgeous green eyes, and though he was bowlegged and not very tall, I thought he was handsome. Plus, he was preapproved: He lived two houses down, and my parents knew his parents. In fact, our families were related through marriage: My uncle Ro Ro and Ferron’s grandfather were brothers. That didn’t surprise me, because everybody in our neighborhood was related in some kind of way. And since we were neighbors, we’d known each other for years—in fact, he teased me at school until my mother called his mother, and his mom told him, “Stop teasing that Braxton girl.” He did—and by ninth grade, I had a crush on him.