by Mariah Carey
Alfred Roy was a man who lived his entire life under threat of humiliation and dehumanization as a result of his identity. He placed all his hope in the notion that societal respect would be awarded him through his discipline, diligence, and excellence on traditional institutional tracks like academics, service to your country, and respectable work. His other two children had all the makings of great students. When they were younger, he demanded that they produce all As on their report cards, and mostly they did (yet he would still sometimes question why each A wasn’t accompanied by a plus). The only class I excelled in was creative writing, in which I was always in the advanced groups. But I was tragic in mathematics and really couldn’t connect with most other subjects or material.
The two potential academics took terrible turns in their teens, fulfilling a Black father’s greatest fears. The boy had been “institutionalized,” placed in the precarious “care” of the state, the first stop on a dangerous fast track to becoming a statistic. And the girl, pregnant before her sixteenth birthday, had already arrived at one. And I, the baby, who wasn’t a wild one, rejected the traditional, “safe” route to a secure career and began to pursue what he saw as an improbable, mysterious, and dangerous path. My father was extremely strict with my siblings, and they would often complain or joke about his tight and eccentric ways to my mother. However, in an effort to shield me from their harsh perspective, I often overheard her tell them, “Don’t say that in front of Mariah.”
There were moments when my father did disappoint me. After Alison was no longer living with him, he went from being a divorced single father to a true bachelor. There were times he wouldn’t show up for our dates.
As a child, there were them times
I didn’t get it, but you kept me in line
I didn’t know why
You didn’t show up sometimes
On Sunday mornings
And I missed you
—“Bye Bye”
So, over time, our Sunday ritual became sporadic. My music was driving so much of my time and energy by that point. I worked on it every moment I could. I was determined to rise above my conditions, rise above all the people who didn’t believe I was going to make it, rise above the sad place my sister had fallen into, rise above my brother’s angry dysfunction. I was going to rise above it all—even if that included my father, the one stable family member I had. After paying for one summer at a performing arts camp, the most my father ever did for my career was to warn me about how uncertain and treacherous the entertainment business could be.
Years later, I called my father and played “Vision of Love” from the recording studio, putting the phone receiver right up to the Yamaha speaker.
“Wow,” he said, “you sound like all three Pointer Sisters!” He wasn’t a big music man, so this comparison was high praise coming from him. It meant he had noticed all of the layers of the background vocals, in addition to the strong lead. He was really listening to my song. And I could tell he was happy with it and with me. After all those years, it was truly validating.
Yet, even after all I had accomplished I wasn’t immune to the perfectionism he had projected onto his other children. After I had garnered two Grammys within my very first year in the industry, he remarked, “Maybe if you were a producer you could win more, like Quincy Jones.” That same year, the legendary Quincy Jones took home seven Grammys for his epic project Back on the Block, which spanned the entire history of Black American Music and featured giants from Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis to Luther Vandross.
I had done astonishingly well as a new artist (who had written her own hit songs), and here my father was, comparing me to arguably one of the greatest musical giants the industry has ever known, with decades of experience and endless accolades and honors to his name! I was immediately thrust back to my childhood, as if my two Grammys were two A’s on my report card and he was asking me what had happened to the pluses. I think my success in music scared him because he had no idea about, and seemingly no influence on, how I’d arrived. He didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.
Gradually, “next Sunday” turned into a month of Sundays. I had to let go of our Sundays so I could manifest my own day in the sun.
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES
It’s hard to explain
Inherently it’s just always been strange
Neither here nor there
Always somewhat out of place everywhere
Ambiguous without a sense of belonging to touch
—“Outside”
My first encounters with racism were like a first kiss in reverse: each time, a piece of purity was ripped from my being. Left behind was a spreading stain, which seeped so deeply inside of me that to this day, I’ve never been able to completely scrub it out. Not with time, not with fame or wealth, not even with love. The earliest of these encounters happened when I was about four years old and in preschool. The activity for the day was to draw a portrait of our families. Laid out on the table was a stack of heavy-stock construction paper the color of eggshells and small groups of crayons for us to pick from. While I much preferred sing-along and story time to coloring, I was excited about the project and determined to do my very best. I thought if I did a good job maybe the teacher would decorate my drawing with a gold-foil star sticker.
I chose my supplies carefully, found a quiet corner, and got busy with the assignment. At that point, our family of five had not yet fractured. For a short time, I had a father, a mother, a sister, and a brother, and we were all living together in what felt to me like relative peace. I wanted to create a family portrait I could be proud of. I wanted to draw all the different unique things about everybody—their clothes, their heights and proportions, their facial features—all the little details that would make my portrait come to life. Father was tall, and Mother had long dark hair. My brother was strong and my sister had her pretty ringlets. I wanted to capture all of it. The sound of crayons rubbing on thick paper created a dull hum as the faint, comforting scent of Crayola wax wafted through the room.
Deeply engaged with perfecting my masterpiece, I was curled over with my head down, nose nearly touching the paper, when I felt a tall shadow fall across my quiet corner. I knew instinctively that it was one of the young student teachers looming over me. At four years old I had already begun to develop a keen watch-your-back instinct, so I immediately stopped moving my hand. Tension rose up and stiffened my little body. For a reason I did not yet know, I sensed danger and felt suddenly protective. I held absolutely still until she spoke.
“How ya doin’ there, Mariah? Let’s see.”
Relaxing a bit, I lifted the paper toward her and proudly presented my family picture in progress. Immediately, the student teacher burst into laughter. She was soon joined by another young woman teacher, who also began to laugh. Then a third adult came over to join in the fun. The cheerful buzz of children working with crayons stopped. The whole room had turned to stare at what was happening in my little corner. A brew of self-consciousness and embarrassment boiled up from my feet to my face. The whole class was watching. I managed to speak through the stifling heat in my throat.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked.
Through her giggles, one of them replied, “Oh, Mariah, you used the wrong crayon! You didn’t mean to do that!” She was pointing at where I’d drawn my father.
As they kept laughing, I looked down at the picture of my family I had lovingly and diligently been creating. I’d used the peach crayon for the skin of myself, my mother, my sister, and my brother. I’d used a brown crayon for my father. I knew I was more like the color of animal crackers and my brother and sister were more like Nutter Butters, while my father’s skin tone resembled graham crackers. But they didn’t have any cookie-colored crayons, so I’d had to improvise! They were acting like I’d used a green crayon or something. I was humiliated and confused. What had I done so wrong?
Still cackling hysterically, the teachers insisted, “You used the wrong
crayon!” Every time one of them made the declaration the whole gang laughed, laughed, and laughed some more. A debilitating kind of disgrace was pressing down on me, yet I managed to pull myself up slowly, eyes burning and brimming with hot tears.
As calmly as I could, I told the teachers, “No. I didn’t use the wrong crayon.”
Refusing to even give me the dignity of addressing me directly, one of them said to the other snidely, “She doesn’t even know she’s using the wrong crayon!” The laughter and taunting seemed like it would never end. I stood glaring up at them, working very hard not to vomit from embarrassment. But despite my nausea, I did not break my glare.
Eventually the laughter started to subside, and one at a time they backed away from the picture and from me. I watched them across the room, huddled together and whispering. They had only ever seen one member of my family of five: my mother, who dropped me off at school each day. She was the color of the peach crayon. They had no idea and no imagination to suspect that the light toast of my skin, my bigger-than-button nose, and the waves and ringlets in my hair were from my father—my handsome father who was the color of warm maple syrup. His complexion was a crayon color they didn’t have; brown was as close to right as I could get. It was the teachers who had got it all wrong. But despite their cruel and unwarranted attack, they never apologized for the public humiliation, for their ignorance and immaturity, or for demoralizing a four-year-old girl during coloring time.
By the time I made it to first grade, my family of five had crumbled like cookies. My parents divorced, but although they were living a short car ride away from each other, racially their neighborhoods on Long Island were worlds apart.
In first grade, I had a best friend named Becky. She was cute and sweet and looked just like the Strawberry Shortcake cartoon to me. She had big blue eyes, smooth strawberry-blond hair that was naturally sun-kissed and hung perfectly straight down like heavy drapes, and reddish freckles sprinkled across her whipped cream–colored cheeks. In my mind, she looked like what little girls were supposed to look like. She looked like the little girls who were adored and protected; like the little girl my mother might’ve had with a man her mother would’ve approved of.
One Sunday, our mothers made arrangements for Becky and me to have a playdate at my house. I was delighted because Becky and I really had fun together. When Sunday finally arrived, my mother picked up Becky in whatever ragtag car she was driving at the time, and we headed to my father’s house. We pulled up to the brick town house, and Becky and I hopped out of the car. I grabbed her hand and skipped excitedly up the steps. Curiously, my mother hung back and watched—ordinarily she would have driven off. Just as our feet hit the top of the stoop, my six-feet-two-inches-tall, dashing father emerged through the door with a hearty grin. He looked like a movie star.
“Hiya, Mariah!” he called out, giving me my usual greeting. As he neared us, Becky suddenly released my hand. Her body froze stiff and, like a bursting raincloud, she exploded into tears. Confused, I looked to my father for help, but I could see that he was frozen too, and breathless, a mortified look twisting his strong features. In a state of shock, my mind scrambled as I tried to process the abrupt and painful turn of events. Becky in hysterics, my father in silent agony: how had we gotten here in a single instant?
I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck there, unmoving, for what felt like hours but was likely merely moments. Finally, my mother came up behind us on the stairs, to Becky’s rescue. Without even a glance in my direction, she gently placed her arm around the distraught little girl and wordlessly guided her down the stairs and into the backseat of her car. My mother sped off with the strawberry blonde, without ever making any attempt to clarify what had happened. There was no consolation, no mediation, no acknowledgment of the devastation to me or my father. In the wake of Becky’s storm, my father and I stood quietly together on the stoop and waited for the ache to pass. Nobody ever mentioned it after that, but we never played together again, and the moment remained with me forever. And, believe it or not, her name really was Becky.
No one ever outwardly questioned my ethnic background when I was alone with my mother. They didn’t dare ask about, or else could not detect, the differences in our hues and textures. Becky, and most likely her mother too, had probably just assumed my father was also white, or maybe something exotic—but certainly not Black. That day on the stoop I learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I was not like the people I went to school with or who lived in my neighborhood. My father was totally different from them, and they were afraid of him. But he was my people; I came from him. That day, I saw firsthand how their fear hurt him. And his hurt deeply hurt me too. But what was perhaps most painful, that afternoon, was that he saw that I saw their fear of him. He knew it would impact me forever. He knew I could never return to the innocence all children deserve.
HODEL
Singing was a form of escapism for me, and writing was a form of processing. There was joy in it, but it mainly was survival (and it still is). My voice was recognized as pure talent not only by my mother but also by my teachers. A friend of my mother’s was my music teacher, and she was exceptional. As a child I was in a few school plays, and I would sing for friends at random events. Singing onstage (or anywhere), imagining I was someone else, was when I felt most like myself. Walking around alone and coming up with melodies while singing to myself was when I felt the most whole. To this day, I escape to my private vocal booth to shut out all the demands of life and feel myself in my space, singing alone.
I was in the fifth grade when I first got the opportunity to attend an exclusive performing arts summer camp. This was a breakthrough! I could finally be around other young aspiring artists and hone my craft, undistracted by the confusion and chaos at home. I landed the role of Hodel, one of the five daughters in the camp’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. I lived to go to rehearsals. It was my favorite time and place. I was confident, quickly learning the songs and studying their meanings. The act of practicing came naturally to me; I liked to do things over and over again. I loved the experience of witnessing my performance getting better with each try, finding new and better ways to deliver a song.
The drive to practice music was also something my mother recognized and encouraged in me early on. She rehearsed the Fiddler songs with me at home, playing along on her Yamaha piano. Even as a little girl I was interested in exploring the details that made up a great song. And I was fascinated by the storytelling in the musical. I even managed to make a “camp friend” in the community of largely Jewish and mostly wealthy kids. We bonded through our love and seriousness of singing. We even kinda looked alike. She was Israeli with thick curly, almost kinky hair. So we both had tangled textures. We tried to dress alike when we could, we had the same pink onesie. Because people saw us together, saw some physical similarities, I think they thought I was a blondish Jewish girl from means.
I loved Hodel because she fell in love with a revolutionary boy and went to the ends of the earth to follow her passion. My big number was in the second act, a song called “Far from the Home I Love.” It was a well-suited song for my breathy tone, and I remember I sang it in a purely emotional way. The song opened with these lovely, memorable lines:
How can I hope to make you understand
Why I do what I do?
Why I must travel to a distant land
Far from the home I love.
My father was coming up to the camp for the show’s opening night, and I was thrilled. He was a practical man who wasn’t thrilled with my artistic passion, but he had reluctantly paid half of my hefty tuition for camp that year. So while he was certainly coming to support me, he was also checking in on his investment. I didn’t have the privilege of trying all different kinds of hobbies, like the kids I went to school with—it was this camp, or bust. So I knew I had to get all I could from it. There was no flitting from tennis lessons to guitar to dance class. Not that I would ever step foot in a dance class, e
ven if we could afford it. I was traumatized early on about dancing.
One time when Addie was at my father’s house, she looked at me, with my unruly flaxen hair and peach-crayon-colored skin, and said, “Roy, that ain’t your baby.” Then, as if to prove her point, she addressed me: “Girl, lemme see you dance.” While I was surrounded by music, there wasn’t much dancing in my childhood. My mother didn’t dance; I never saw my siblings dance. My father didn’t dance until later in the eighties, when he took hustle lessons.
In my mind, dancing became a measurement for Black acceptance, for belonging somewhere and to someone—for belonging to my father. I didn’t dance for Addie that day. I didn’t dance much at all after that. I just couldn’t recover from the fear of not dancing “right” for my father. I stood there terrified to move, fearing if I didn’t dance well enough or if I moved the wrong way, it would somehow prove that my father wasn’t my father.
That day at camp, as Hodel, I sang and smiled and pranced about the stage and sang some more. I sang in a very distinct lullaby style. I was good, and everybody knew it. I could hear the loud clapping as I took my bow; it was like another kind of grand music, giving me energy, giving me hope. As I raised my head I saw the widest smile on my father’s face. His smile was like sunshine itself. He walked up to the edge of the stage, his arms filled with a big bouquet of sunny daisies tied with a lavender ribbon. Beaming with pride, he handed me the flowers as if they were a prestigious award. At first we were both too giddy to notice that people were staring at us—and not in a way that felt good, not because I had given the outstanding performance of the night. They were staring because my father was the only Black man in sight, and I belonged to him. That night, the teachers, the parents, and all the other campers learned that my father was a Black man, and I paid the price for it. I got my thunderous applause and I got my flowers, but I never got another major role in a play at that camp again.