You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  There was no Quiet Storm to be found at the club in Montreal, but we made do. In Canada they don’t use bills for dollars, they have coins. There was a little something lost in the translation of currencies as I sat there with my stack of coins like Scrooge McDuck. Also, the guys walked around with these step stools, which they stood on to give lap dances directly in front of you. Then some other woman would hold a coin in the air and they’d mosey on over to that person with their step stool. One guy put the coin in the top cleft of his butt cheeks and dropped it out. He was so earnestly sexy about it, but we had to hold in our laughter.

  Essence was right—a strip club will cheer me up every time. First of all, at Black strip clubs there’s some bomb-ass food. That’s always important. At the male strip clubs, the clientele tends to be more of the bachelorette type, even when there’s no bride. It’s women letting loose, getting to look at fine-ass dudes who have rhythm and amazing bodies. They feel, for some bit of time, that they are the only women in the world. The clientele at those places is mainly women, but at the strip clubs that have women dancers you can have a more mixed clientele—male and female, gay and straight—because it’s basically an after-hours club. While the bachelorette girls are having the main event of their night out at the male strip club, here, this is just part of the night. Or morning.

  But oh, I hear you, the minutes are ticking by, aren’t they? That bomb is going to go off any minute.

  When Hype, Chaka, and I got to Magic City, I was again shocked by how small it was. It’s a tiny place with no windows, painted white to catch the neon lights shining on it. I was greeted with open arms, Norm at her Cheers, and we were led to my usual spot in the way back, a slightly elevated area catty-corner to the entrance, across from the square ring of the stage. The darkest part of the club, it’s where the celebrities sit, except for the ones who want to be seen. We got our stack of money to tip the dancers, dollars shrink-wrapped by the hundreds. At Magic City, the dancers were stars and kingmakers, all Black and of every body type. If they liked a new song you knew it was going to be a hit. Artists came to test out music, even songs in progress, just to see how the women reacted.

  Adult dancers have always been kind to me, and it’s mutual. I show all love and respect and praise, and it’s returned. I always had conversations with the women who danced at Magic City. I wouldn’t say I made friendships, but we made connections. There was something about each one of them to compliment, even their hustle. I’ve heard people say demeaning things like, “You’re too good for this,” or, “What do you really want to be doing instead of this?” Show me jobs where you can make ten thousand dollars a night. I never asked questions like that.

  We settled in, bottles everywhere, the money on the floor like carpet. After a while, a pretty young woman about my age started dancing on me, giving me a lap dance to the Ying Yang Twins’ “Salt Shaker.” We weren’t doing this for the enjoyment of the men around us. This was the give and take of two powerful women. I was moving to the beat with her . . . feeling that groove.

  . . . and it hit. The first symptom was a complete flop sweat, like a sudden fever. Oh no, I thought. I was, like, crowning. I needed a bathroom or instant death from humiliation. But . . . I have always had a thing about shitting in public restrooms. And I had an idea of how the women’s room would be at Magic City—packed to the gills. I was not close enough to my hotel to get back in time.

  When she turned to face me, I met her eye and lifted my chin to be closer to her ear. “Um, I’m sorry,” I said. “I really, really need a bathroom. Can I . . . can I use yours?”

  There was a moment, maybe a half second of stillness in her gaze, even as her hips continued to move. She understood the severity of the moment, and nodded like we’d worked out a plan. She asked another dancer, probably someone junior to her, to collect the money I’d already thrown.

  “C’mon,” she said, taking my hand to lead me through the club to the stairwell and down to the dancers’ locker room. As we descended, the noise of the club dissipated until it was mostly the bass.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “I think I did a colon speedball. Jesus.”

  She turned to laugh, but not in judgment. She opened the door to the locker room, and it felt like I was sneaking into someplace . . . sacred isn’t the word, but private. I have been in strip clubs all over the world, and I never once had seen the dancers’ personal space.

  “Hey, ladies,” I said, managing to temporarily still be me even as I sweated and clenched every part of my being. There were about a dozen girls in there, mostly nude, sorting bags of money or getting ready to go back upstairs. G-strings hung on hooks on the wall. They were all excited to see Gabrielle Union popping in to say hi. Some started to come over to hug me, when a woman came out of the tiny bathroom behind me. “I’m just gonna . . .” I started to say, trying to sound casual as I raced in. “I’ll be right back.”

  Oh, God. Once I was safely there, I made sounds like explosions. There’s no getting around it. It was an endless barrage of my body releasing a cauldron of demons. Constant flushing in the hopes of signaling an end. How long was it? Fifteen minutes? Thirty? What day was it now?

  Finally, I felt a calm, a tentative easing of relations between my bowels and my soul. I knew I was tying up the one bathroom in their small private space. I had to give these women a chance to pee.

  I came out of the bathroom, dreading their faces. Maybe they had fled. But no, there they were. These naked women of every body type. Students, professionals, mothers, and hustlers, young and older. Every kind of woman, staring at this actress, who had a self-induced problem and needed help at that moment in time.

  I told them about taking the Ex-Lax, and how it kicked in sooner than I anticipated. I apologized profusely for taking over their lone bathroom. “I know this is your space,” I said.

  They rallied in sympathy around me, with smiles and head shakes. I sat down, and one woman rinsed a rag in cold water and went to put it on my brow.

  “You don’t have to—” I said.

  “I want to,” she said, pressing the rag to my head. I relaxed. Had the roles been reversed, I would have judged someone who came in and took over the limited private space I was allowed at work. But not them. I started cracking jokes, and we shared stories, so many starting with “One time . . .” Because this would someday be a “one time” for me to share.

  These women were completely naked and I was at my most vulnerable, living a nightmare of humiliation. You would think we could not be more open with each other than that, and yet they let me in even closer, to the intimacy of compassion.

  When I hear people talk shit about strippers, I go back in my mind to the locker room at Magic City. A cold rag on my forehead, telling jokes, and sharing the mercy of true sisterhood. The demeaning myth is that these women must have had something go wrong in their life to be there with me in that moment. An abusive dad, a nasty ex—pick your cliché. But we were all women who made choices, none of us better than the next. I wish I didn’t have to emphasize that you can be a “good” woman and do this work. You can be a good mother, a good wife, and work as a stripper.

  In that moment, I needed them to be human and to have compassion for me. And they had it in spades. We know that doesn’t always happen outside Magic City. People can judge them for what they think strippers are or aren’t, but I ask those people: If the time bomb goes off and a person’s ass explodes, what kind of woman are you? Will you be there for her? Wouldn’t you want someone to be there for you?

  5

  Good Soldiers

  I dialed my dad’s number, realizing I hadn’t done so for a while. It was the summer of 2013 and I had been invited to D.C. to stand with Congressman John Lewis as the U.S. Postal Service introduced a stamp commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Congressman Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders and at just twenty-three he helped organize the march—the start of a life of service. When they aske
d me to appear alongside him, my immediate answer was, “What? Me?”

  Maybe when I called my dad I wanted to brag, but I also realized I didn’t know where our family fit in that moment in ’63. I am a compulsive planner, and I wanted something to talk to the congressman about, some connection. Two hundred fifty thousand people filled the National Mall to bear witness to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of the United States. So, where were the Unions in all this? Probably in Omaha, but surely they were on the front lines of change in some capacity. I pictured them sitting in at lunch counters, sprayed by hoses. They raised me to do the right thing, so where were they when it counted?

  “Well, uh, I was in the military,” my dad said. “We were overseas.”

  “Hunh,” I said. That was right, he would have been nineteen. I had a vague notion that my dad would have been stationed in Europe at the time. “Did they pipe in the speeches?”

  “What?”

  “Did they have it playing for people to hear?”

  He chuckled, and I realized the absurdity of my question. “They weren’t really wanting us to be involved with that,” he said. “The more into civil rights you were, the more they thought you might be radicalized. We might realize, ‘Hey, we’re here fighting for freedoms that we don’t actually have in the United States.’”

  I know a lot of us imagine our parents not just on the right side of history, but making it. I didn’t do a good job of hiding my disappointment. “Oh, so, did you at least hear it?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Mainly the Black guys crowded around to listen to it. But you couldn’t have a reaction. Couldn’t even nod. Otherwise they might think you were a troublemaker.”

  I pictured telling John Lewis, then the last surviving speaker at the freedom march and the man who popularized the phrase “Good trouble,” that my father was not a troublemaker. I don’t know what I expected, but definitely not my dad as an impassive statue.

  “Okay, cool, cool,” I said, hurrying off the phone for my next call. Now, my mom, she had to have a story. She was still doing good works in Omaha, full of stories about how she and her friend Father Ken went around ministering to the real-life needs of homeless people and sex workers. Father Ken was considered a rabble-rouser by Catholic Church standards, but they wanted to reach people they thought needed nonjudgmental fellowship. Surely, I thought in my loftiest internal voice, she was up to stuff in 1963.

  “I was in high school,” she said.

  “Yeah, but things were happening around you, right? You were aware.”

  “I was aware, of course,” she said. “But I was in school.”

  Sacred Heart Catholic High School was about creating reasonably intelligent ladies who followed doctrine, not change agents. “But still,” I said, “what was happening in Omaha at the time?”

  “Well, you know, there were sit-ins at the lunch counters and I really wanted to do them,” she said. These were acts of passive resistance to protest the criminalization of Blacks utilizing public spaces. “My friend Janet went and she did the sit-in at the Woolworth’s downtown.”

  Janet was one of my mom’s best friends. They did everything together. There was no way Janet went somewhere without taking my mom.

  “So, where were you?”

  “Well, like I said, I wanted to, but . . . Grandma said no.”

  “Grandma said no,” I said, deflated.

  “Yeah, Grandma said no,” she said. “They were televising these things and publicizing the names of people who took part. These were young people, but their parents and family members could lose their jobs. Grandma was like, ‘I’ve got seven kids. I can’t afford to lose my job because you wanna go sit in somewhere.’”

  I had pictured my mother as a Freedom Rider, the one organizing the sit-ins. The cool girl looking back in a black-and-white photo. Maybe not named in a history book, but on a page somewhere.

  “So, Grandma said no and that was that,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, quick as a breath with no regret. “It’s how it was.”

  “Well, this story sucks,” I said, laughing.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but it’s a true story,” she said, meeting my laughter with her own. “We all understood that there was a lot more at stake for the future, but that day my siblings and I needed to eat. We needed to have a home and we needed to have clothes, and we couldn’t live without one of our parents having employment. It just wasn’t on the table for us.”

  “I asked Dad and he didn’t have anything good, either . . .”

  “Did he mention what happened to him in the riots?”

  “In Omaha?”

  “It’s his story,” she said, with the voice of someone who’d been divorced nearly two decades. “See if he’ll tell you.”

  I hit my dad’s number again and didn’t waste time. “So, tell me about your experience with the Omaha riots,” I said as a greeting.

  He coughed, a little surprised. “Wow, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.”

  I shifted in my seat, ready for a story about my dad leading some brave charge.

  “I’d just got out of the military,” he said. “Just gotten home. And I was running to the store to get something when the riots broke out.” I realized he had to have been talking about the Fourth of July weekend uprising of 1966, when a large group of Black teens stayed out late to escape the 103-degree heat wave, hanging out in the parking lot of the Safeway supermarket. I spent summers in Omaha as a teen decades later, so I know the feel of that oppressive heat. How finding community is sometimes the only way to get your mind off it. Cops came, demanding a dispersal. A fight broke out, and more and more cops showed up who escalated the scene with brutality. It sounds so simple—“A fight broke out”—but of course it was the result of decades of brutality against Black people, and corrupt, racist housing policies that choked off North Omaha. Redlining made home loans unavailable to Black people, marking their neighborhoods as hazardous and unworthy of investment. In the distance of streets, not miles, there were two Americas. That July night was just an igniting of years of indignities stacked upon each other, an explosion of violence.

  “As I was coming home from the store, police rolled up on me and threw me to the ground,” he said. “They had guns on me, and I kept saying, ‘I just got out of the military. Army. Army.’ Basically, ‘I fought for my country. I’m one of the good guys.’”

  He paused. “In that moment, it didn’t matter.”

  All that mattered was that he was Black. I pictured him on the ground, groceries strewn next to him. Then back to him listening to the March on Washington, trying not to have a reaction so he could be seen as a good soldier. You can do all that to not be considered a problem, but you can never assimilate yourself out of harm’s way.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “They moved on,” he said. “I got up. Went home.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that story.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Ready to change the subject. I let him.

  My father served his country proudly abroad and got back only to be treated like a criminal. His patriotism didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was he was Black at the wrong time. But when has there ever been a good time to be Black in America?

  Throughout my life, my parents were always the ones who took people in. We had aunts and uncles, mine and theirs, come and stay with us while they got on their feet. If you were a cousin or a longtime friend, they would literally take in your kids while you got your life together. Loan folks money, get them a job, pay toward someone’s schooling . . . My mother had a long run in telecommunications, but before and after the corporate world she devoted her life to helping people as a social worker. She started first at a nonprofit community action center focusing on impoverished Black people in Omaha, then as a Child Protective Services worker with a drive to keep families, or at least sibling groups, together. The whole poi
nt of her fostering and adopting my three siblings as infants when she was past sixty was to keep them together. My parents found ways to be part of the solution without always having to put their heads on the chopping block.

  They didn’t get a public acknowledgment for what they did, and they didn’t give me a good story to impress people in D.C., but what they did, what they endured, was just as important. When I finally did meet Congressman Lewis, I realized that he probably wasn’t interested in talking about what my parents did in some black-and-white montage of memory. His directive, “Get in trouble. Good trouble. Necessary trouble,” was, and remains beyond his death in 2020, for the present. What risks am I taking, large or small, with the luxury of privilege that I have?

  That’s what I think about when I give talks, and inevitably there is someone who raises their hand and meekly asks, “How can I be a better ally even though sometimes I don’t feel strong enough to speak out?” I can’t snap my fingers and say, “Do it anyway.” Especially these days, when so many people’s jobs are at risk and they are a hot second from the unemployment line. Not many people feel that luxury of speaking up when they’re living paycheck to paycheck, just grateful to have any kind of employment.

  Sometimes you see problematic behavior and if you’re not comfortable calling it out and being at the forefront, there are other ways to help. When somebody else is brave, back them up. Don’t negate their experience or find some means of explanation. Just say the simple phrase, “Yeah, that happened.”

  It’s even better to build up your integrity beforehand. Let people know you are not the one to come to with racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic “jokes.” Don’t do the polite chuckle or the quiet “sheesh, that’s bad.” Be clear that you’re not a safe space for oppression. They’re trying to give you a secret handshake, hoping for strength in numbers to shore up problematic power. Don’t take the handshake.