by Mariah Carey
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Table of Contents
About the Author
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Copyright Page
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To my legacy, my children, Roc and Roe,
You are the physical embodiment of unconditional love.
To my lineage, my ancestors, all of them …
You may have come from two different worlds
that were often in struggle with each other,
yet the best of you lives on inside of me, finally, harmoniously.
And to Pat, my mother, who, through it all,
I do believe actually did the best she could.
I will love you the best I can, always.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things yet unseen.
Hebrews 11:1
PREFACE
I refuse to acknowledge time, famously so. I’ve made a lot of jokes and memes about it, but it’s a very real belief for me. I cried on my eighteenth birthday. I thought I was a failure because I didn’t have a record deal yet. That was my only goal. It was as if I was holding my breath until I could hold a physical thing, an album that had “Mariah Carey” printed on it. Once I got my deal I exhaled, and my life began. From that day on, I calculated my life through albums, creative experiences, professional accomplishments, and holidays. I live Christmas to Christmas, celebration to celebration, festive moment to festive moment, not counting my birthdays or ages. (Much to the chagrin of certain people.)
Life has made me find my own way to be in this world. Why ruin the journey by watching the clock and the ticking away of years? So much happened to me before anyone even knew my name, time seems like an inadequate way to measure or record it. Not living based on time also became a way to hold on to myself, to keep close and keep alive that inner child of mine. It’s why I gravitate toward enduring characters like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Tinker Bell. They remind me we can be timeless.
It is a waste of time to be fixated on time. Often time can be bleak, dahling, so why choose to live in it? Life is about the moments we create and remember. My memory is a sacred place, one of the few things that belong entirely to me. This memoir is a collection of the moments that matter, the moments that most accurately tell the story of who I am, according to me. It will move back and forth, up and down, moment to moment, adding up to the meaning of me now.
But then again, who’s counting?
PART I
WAYWARD CHILD
AN INTENTION
My intention was to keep her safe, but perhaps I have only succeeded in keeping her prisoner.
For many years, she’s been locked away inside of me—always alone, hidden in plain sight before masses of people. There’s significant evidence of her in my early work: often she can be found looking out of windows, dwarfed by a giant frame, barefoot, staring at an empty rope swing swaying from a lone tree against a purple dusk sky. Or else she’s two stories up in a brownstone, watching the neighborhood children dancing on the sidewalk below. She’s shown up in a school auditorium in OshKosh overalls, holding a ball on the sidelines, waiting and wanting to be chosen. Sometimes she is caught in a rare moment of joy, on a roller coaster or flying by on skates with her hands in the air. Always she lingers, though, as a dull longing just behind my eyes. She’s been scared and alone for so long, and yet through all the darkness, she’s never lost her light. She has made herself known through my songs—her yearning heard over the airwaves or seen on screens. Millions of people know of her, but have never known her.
She is little Mariah, and much of this will be her story, as she saw it.
Some of my earliest memories are of violent moments. Because of that, I have always carried a heavy blanket with which I cover up large pieces of my childhood. It has been a burden. But I can no longer stand the weight of that blanket and the silence of the little girl smothering beneath it. I am a grown woman now, with a little girl and boy of my own. I have seen, I have been scared, I have been scarred, and I have survived. I have used my songs and voice to inspire others and to emancipate my adult self. I offer this book, in large part, to finally emancipate that scared little girl inside of me. It is time to give her a voice, to let her tell her story exactly as she experienced it.
Though you cannot dispute someone’s lived experience, without a doubt, details in this book will differ from the accounts of my family, friends, and plenty of folks who think they know me. I’ve lived that conflict for far too long, and I’m weary of that too. I’ve held my hand over the mouth of that little girl in an attempt to protect others. Even “those others” who never tried to protect me. Despite my efforts to “be above it all,” I still got dragged and sued and ripped off. In the end, I only hurt her more, and it almost killed me.
This book is a testimony to the resilience of silenced little girls and boys everywhere: To insist that we believe them. To honor their experiences and tell their stories.
To set them free.
EXISTENCE
Early on, you face
The realization you don’t
Have a space
Where you fit in
And recognize you
Were born to exist
Standing alone
—“Outside”
There was a time in my early childhood when I didn’t believe I was worthy of being alive. I was too young to contemplate ending my life but just old enough to know I hadn’t begun living nor found where I belonged. Nowhere in my world did I see anyone who looked like me or reflected how I felt inside.
There was my mother, Patricia, with paler skin and straighter hair, and my father, Alfred Roy, with deeper skin and kinkier hair, and neither had faces with features just like mine. I saw them both as riddled with regret, hostages of a sequence of cruel circumstances. My sister, Alison, and brother, Morgan, were both older and darker, and not just in terms of the hues of their skin, though they were slightly browner. The two of them had a similar energy that seemed to block light. They had an approach to the world that made little room for whimsy and fantasy, which was my natural tendency. We shared common blood, yet I felt like a stranger among them all, an intruder in my own family.
I was always so scared as a little girl, and music was my escape. My house was heavy, weighed down with yelling and chaos. When I sang, in a whispery tone, it calmed me down. I discovered a quiet, soft, light place inside my voice—a vibration in me that brought me sweet relief. My whisper-singing was my secret lullaby to myself.
But in singing I also found a connection to my mother, a Juilliard-trained opera singer. As I listened to her doing vocal exercises at home, the repetition of the scales felt like a mantra, soothing my frightened little mind. Her voice went up and down and up and up and up—and something inside me rose along with it. (I would also sing along with the beautiful, angelic, soulful Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” and follow her voice up into the clouds.) I would sing little tunes around the house, to my mother’s delight. And she always encourag
ed me. One day, while practicing an aria from the opera Rigoletto, she kept stumbling on this one part. I sang it back to her, in perfect Italian. I might have been three years old. She looked at me, stunned, and at that moment I knew she saw me. I was more than a little girl to her. I was Mariah. A musician.
My father taught me to whistle before I could talk. I had a raspy speaking voice even then, and I liked that I sounded different from most other kids my age. My singing voice, on the other hand, was smooth and strong. One day, when I was around eight years old, I was walking down the street with my friend Maureen, who had porcelainlike skin with warm brown hair and a sweet face like Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz. She was one of the few little white girls in the neighborhood who was allowed to play with me. As we walked, I began to sing something. She stopped suddenly, frozen in place on the sidewalk. She listened for a moment in silence, standing very still. Finally, she turned to me and said, in a clear and steady voice, “When you sing it sounds like there are instruments with you. There’s music all around your voice.” She said it like a proclamation, almost like a prayer.
They say God speaks through people, and I will always be grateful for my little girlfriend speaking into my heart that day. She saw something special in me and gave it words, and I believed her. I believed my voice was made of instruments—piano, strings, and flutes. I believed my voice could be music. All I needed was someone to see and hear me.
I saw how my voice could make other people feel something good inside, something magical and transformative. That meant not only was I not unworthy, valid as a person, but I was valuable. Here was something of value that I could bring to others—the feeling. It was the feeling I would pursue for a lifetime. It gave me a reason to exist.
CLOSE MY EYES
It took twelve cops to pull my brother and father apart. The big bodies of men, all entangled like a swirling hurricane, crashed loudly into the living room. Within an instant, familiar things were no longer in my sight—no windows, no floor, no furniture, and no light. All I could see was a chaotic mass of body parts in motion: dark pants and strong arms bursting out of dark sleeves, enormous hands grabbing, fists punching, limbs tangled together and tearing away, heavy, polished black shoes scuffling and stomping. There were quick flashes of shiny things: buttons, badges, and guns. At least a dozen pistol handles, stiff and sticking out of dull leather holsters, a few cradled in palms and thumbs, sat on wide black belts around broad hips. Chaos filled the air with the sounds of cursing, grunting, and howling. The entire house seemed to be shaking. And somewhere in the eye of this storm were the two most important male figures in my life, destroying each other.
I always thought of my brother’s anger as weather—powerful, destructive, and unpredictable. I don’t know if it was a singular act or an ongoing illness that made him so volatile, but it was all I had ever known.
I was a little girl with very few memories of a big brother who protected me. More often, I felt I had to protect myself from him, and sometimes I would find myself protecting my mother from him too.
This particular fight with our father had escalated more quickly than most, however. A shouting match became a tornado of fists in what seemed like a matter of seconds, banging through the room, knocking things over, and leaving havoc in its wake. In that moment, the rage between my father and brother was so forceful that no one person could have stopped it. No one would have dared.
By the time I was a toddler, I had developed the instincts to sense when violence was coming. As though I was smelling rain, I could tell when adult screaming had reached a certain pitch and velocity that meant I should take cover. When my brother was around, it was not uncommon for holes to be punched in walls or for other objects to go flying. I never really knew how or why the fights would begin, but I did know when tension was turning into an argument and when an argument was destined to become a physical fight. And I knew this particular one was going to be epic.
My Nana Reese was there, which was a bit odd because it was rare that she or anyone from my father’s family, who lived in Harlem, was at our house. We were in Melville, a predominately white, affluent-adjacent town in Suffolk County on Long Island, New York, though I would eventually move thirteen times growing up. Thirteen times to pack up and go, to try to find another place—a better place, a safer place. Thirteen new starts, thirteen new streets with new houses full of people to judge you and wonder where or who your father is. Thirteen occasions to be labeled unworthy and discarded, to be placed on the outside.
Pastor Nana Reese, the Good Reverend Roscoe Reese, and their African Methodist Pentecostal Church were where my father came from. Roy was the only son of Addie, Nana Reese’s sister. My father never lived with his father, and there was always a potent distance between them, a mystery that inevitably held a misery. These people, living in the village of Harlem, were his people. They had come up from Alabama and parts of North Carolina and other regions of the South, bringing with them traditions, traumas, and gifts—some of which were ancient, African, and mystical in origin.
Nana Reese and I found each other right before all hell really broke loose. The thunder of profanity, fists, and feet drowned out all other sounds, so I didn’t hear when the cops burst in.
I didn’t know if they had come to save us or kill us. It was Long Island in the 1970s, and two Black males were being violent—the appearance of the police almost never meant that help had arrived. On the contrary, their presence often complicated and elevated the existing terror and escalated violence. That hasn’t changed, but this was my first encounter with the fact. I had no benefit of experience; I had no benefit of any kind. My cousin LaVinia, Nana Reese’s daughter, always said, “You kids had all the burdens of being Black but none of the benefits.” It took me a long time to understand the reality of her observation.
This, of course, was not the first vicious fight between my father and brother—for as long as I could remember, their relationship had been a war zone. But it was the first time the troops had been called in. It was also the first time I witnessed the possibility that a member of my family could brutally die in front of my eyes. Or that I could die too. I wasn’t yet four years old.
* * *
Before my mother and father found their marriage unbearable, they lived together in Brooklyn Heights. Though the neighborhood had seen a stream of bohemians arrive as early as 1910, and the 1950s brought in a wave of urban activists—liberal folks with money who loathed the suburbs—in the 1970s it was still a pretty eclectic mix of mostly working- and middle-class families. It was pre-yuppie and ungentrified. If there was a tolerant place for a young mixed-race family in that era, Brooklyn Heights was probably the closest you could come to it.
Throughout my childhood, I would live in many obscure places, mostly on Long Island, and feel very much like a castaway on this island-off-the-island of Manhattan. Both my parents worked very hard so we could live in neighborhoods where we could glimpse that elusive “better life” and feel “safe.” Conventional wisdom, however, suggests that “better” and “safe” are synonymous with white.
We were not a conventional family. Was it better to live in a place where my white mother would often walk alone through the front door first, ahead of my Black father with her mixed kids—for their safety? What does that do to the psyche of a man who is supposed to be the head of the household? How can such a man keep his family safe, and what does such an indignity signal to his Black son?
* * *
After the squad of policemen managed to separate my father and brother, though there was still a considerable amount of yelling, everyone was alive. The truly dangerous part of the storm was over; the thunder had stopped. The next thing I knew I was cradled in Nana Reese’s arms, crying and trembling. She had scooped me up like a sack of laundry and set me close beside her on what the kids used to call “the rocking couch,” a cheap, flimsy structure the color of dirt, rust, and olive, dotted with flecks of mustard. Sometimes I think it was th
at couch that planted the seed of my eventual preference for Chanel. We kids called it the “rocking couch” because it was missing a leg, and if you shifted your weight back and forth it would, well, rock. This was a noble attempt to find humor amid broken things, a talent I shared with my brother and sister. In the midst of the violence and trauma, a great comfort came to me on that sad sofa.
Nana Reese held me tight until my little frame stopped shaking and my breathing became normal. From disorientation I returned to the room, I returned to my body. She turned my face up toward the light and made sure my eyes were focused and locked on to hers. She placed her delicate hand firmly on my thigh. Her touch immediately steadied any aftershocks still pulsing through me. Her gaze was unusual—not that of a great-auntie, a mother, or a doctor. It was instead as if she looked directly into the essence of me. In that instant we were not a frightened little girl and a consoling elder but two souls, ageless and equal.
She told me, “Don’t be scared of all the trouble you see. All your dreams and visions are going to happen for you. Always remember that.”
As she spoke, a warm and loving current spread out from her hand to my leg, gently coursing through my body in waves and rising up and out the top of my head. Through the devastation a path had been washed clear; I knew there was light. And somehow I knew that light was mine and everlasting. Before that moment I hadn’t had any dreams I could remember. I had very few memories either. I certainly had yet to hear a song in my head or have a vision.
From around when I was four years old, after my parents’ divorce, I didn’t see my Nana Reese much. My mother and my father’s families remained locked in conflict, and since I lived with my mother, I was largely cut off from Nana’s life of healing and holy rolling in Harlem. I did later learn that people called Nana Reese a “prophetess.” I also learned that she was not the only healer in my lineage. Beyond all that, I believe a deep faith was awakened in me that day.