by Mariah Carey
Still, to this day, what she said haunts and hurts me. I don’t know if she meant to cut me down to size or it was just her bruised ego talking; all I know is that those words that shot out of her mouth pierced my chest and were buried in my heart.
These words were there in my heart in 1999 when I was acknowledged and respected for my voice and my compositions by two of the greatest opera talents of all time. I was invited to join Luciano Pavarotti in “Pavarotti & Friends,” a prestigious annual fundraising concert for children in war-torn countries, hosted by the great tenor, the maestro, in his hometown of Modena, Italy. (The concert was directed for TV by Spike Lee, ya dig?) It’s an ancient town known for producing fancy sports cars like Ferraris and Lamborghinis as well as balsamic vinegar—and I’m sure whatever indulgences the maestro desired were imported. I brought my mother and my wonderful little nephew Mike with me. I was proud and happy to be able to treat her to a glamorous trip and to introduce her to one of her idols. In a strapless pale-pink silk taffeta sheath gown, my mother watched me share a grand outdoor stage in front of fifty thousand people with one of the greatest and most famous opera singers of all time. Not only did we sing together, he sang my song: Pavarotti sang an Italian version of “Hero” with me, for the whole world to see. For my mother to see.
Then, in May 2005, I met the phenomenal soprano Leontyne Price (the first Black woman to become a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera and the most awarded classical singer) when she was being honored at Oprah’s illustrious Legends Ball, which celebrated twenty-five African American women in art, entertainment, and civil rights. The historic weekend began on Friday with a private luncheon at her Montecito home, where the “legends” were greeted by the “young’uns,” including Alicia Keys, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Mary J. Blige, Naomi Campbell, Missy Elliott, Tyra Banks, Iman, Janet Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, Debbie Allen, myself, and many more.
And throughout the extraordinary weekend, we young’uns paid homage to the legends for their great contributions. My mother would often boast, “Oh yes, Leontyne and I had the same vocal coach,” and here I was hanging out with her (at Oprah Winfrey’s house no less)! Madame Price remembered my mother, and she also validated my talent.
On the day after Christmas that year, on the most elegant, thick, eggshell-colored stationery I received a letter from her:
“In the difficult, demanding business of performing arts, you are the crown jewel of success. To achieve your level of success as a multi-dimensional artist is an outstanding measure of your artistic talent.” It went on to say,
It was a pleasure to visit with you during the Legends Weekend and to tell you in person how much I admire you and your artistry. Your creativity and performances are superb. You present your compositions with a depth of feeling that is rarely, if ever, seen or heard. It is a joy to watch you turn all of the obstacles you faced into stepping-stones to success. Your devotion to your art and career are praiseworthy. This brings you a standing ovation and a resounding Brava! Brava! Brava!
*Dead*
I guess to my mother, I may not have been half the singer she was, but I was the whole singer and artist I was.
This was my first glimpse into how misguided words from a mother can really affect a child. What a simple difference a laugh along from her would have made. Whatever had connected us before, a fragile mother-daughter bond, was shattered in that moment. There was a distinct shift: she made me feel like the competition, like a threat. In place of our previous bond grew a different tie, a rope tethering us through shared biology and social obligation. In no way did my mother crush my dreams of being successful that day; my faith had grown too strong by then.
Having people you love be jealous of you professionally comes with the territory of success, but when the person is your mother and the jealousy is revealed at such a tender age, it’s particularly painful. I was going through some heavy shit then, and for her to expose her insecurity to me in that way, at that time, was damaging. I’d already had so many years of insecurity around my physical safety. Though a subtle, brief moment, this was the first big blow in a long line of times when people close to me would try to put me down, put me in my place, underestimate me, or take advantage of me. But she, above all, was the most devastating, because she was the most essential. She was my mother.
DANDELION TEA
A flower taught me how to pray
But as I grew, that flower changed
She started flailing in the wind
Like golden petals scattering
—“Petals”
She called herself Dandelion—the hearty, bright-yellow wildflower with small tooth-shaped petals that gives the early signal that spring is near. After its flowering is finished, the petals dry and the head becomes a ball of lacy dust feathers carrying seeds. The legend goes that if you close your eyes, make a wish, and blow the feathery pieces into the air, your wish will scatter into the world and come true. The English sometimes call them Irish daisies. And the tea made from the root and leaves is widely believed to have healing benefits. But these wildflowers can also be a menace, poisoning precious flowers and growing grass—weeds to be uprooted and discarded.
When I was a little girl, my older sister seemed to live on the wind. She was always somewhere far away. Childhood memories of her exist in my mind as flashes of lightning and thunder. She was exciting but unpredictable—her torrential gusts always carried inevitable destruction with them.
The distances between my mother, my father, their first daughter, and myself are far reaching. Unlike her, growing up, I never spent any significant time as part of a whole interracial family. Most of my experiences were with one parent at a time—me with my mother, or me with my father. I have no recollection of them as a happily married couple. It is bizarre to me that they were even married, not just because of race, but how different they were as people. But before I was born, the Carey family consisted of a Black father, a white mother, and a mixed boy and girl. The four of them would walk down the street, and people would know. This rebel Carey quartet experienced the spectacular ignorance and wrath of a society woefully unprepared to receive or accept them; Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down the law banning interracial marriage in the United States, wouldn’t happen until three years after my mother and father’s marriage. As a result of the hostility from their community and country, Morgan and Alison were instructed by our parents to refer to them as “Mother” and “Father,” in the hope, I imagine, that the formality might elevate their status to respectable. My parents seemed to think that if neighbors or other onlookers heard their girl and boy say, “Good morning, Mother” or “Hello, Father,” they wouldn’t perceive them as disgusting.
Morgan and Alison were beautiful children and were very close when they were young. Alison had skin like creamy butterscotch pudding, with a head of thick, deep, dark curls and eyes to match. She was extremely intelligent and curious and she loved to learn. I was told she brought home good grades, got into good schools, and loved music too. But she lived firsthand the discomfort and animosity directed at her and her offbeat Black and white family. She saw their neighbors throw raw meat studded with broken glass to their dogs, and their family car blown up. She saw things inside the family too, things a child should never see and I will never know. I do know that what she experienced damaged and derailed her girlhood.
She was fully aware when the family unit unraveled and our parents turned on each other; she absorbed the full pain of a family coming undone. She also saw another daughter come into the clan, breaking the symmetry and changing her status as the only girl and youngest. I was the new little one. When my mother and father could no longer live together without emotionally torturing each other, they tore themselves apart to survive separately. The three of us children would be plagued by pain, resentment, and jealousy for a lifetime.
Alison and Morgan both believed I had it easier than they did. Our father was very strict with them. H
e was not harsh with me because three or four years old was the oldest I had been when we were all together. During one of their countless fights, I vaguely remember my mother yelling at him something like, “This one is mine! You will not beat this one.” I was her little one. She often said she “didn’t have the strength” to challenge my father’s aggression when my siblings were growing up.
I only have one memory of all of us having dinner together. It was a sort of “restorative dinner”—my parents trying one more time to see if we could pull it together and be a family. We were all sitting around the table, and I started singing.
My father said, “Children should be seen and not heard.”
The entertainer in me took that as a cue, so I got up from the dining table, walked the few feet to the living room area (which was in plain view and well within earshot), stood on top of the coffee table, and continued to sing at the top of my lungs. Alison and Morgan dropped their heads, ducking before the wrath of our father that they were certain would inevitably ricochet around the room. But my mother gave him a look, and he didn’t say anything. My sister and brother were flabbergasted. I was not hit, yelled at, punished, or even stopped. They would have never, ever dared defy our father. No wonder they hated me.
Needless to say, the dinner didn’t save us. Divorce was inevitable. My mother and father made the final decision to break up before all was broken. I remember I was taken to our neighbors’ house, and they gave me popcorn while my family was next door discussing the dismantling of the Careys. After several violent encounters involving the police, by court order my father and brother could not live together. At one point Morgan had been taken to Sagamore Children’s Psychiatric Center, a care facility for seriously emotionally troubled children and families in crisis. Morgan was a crisis. I also heard a psychiatrist had concluded that a significant contributing factor in Morgan’s behavioral problems was Alison, who had a talent for instigating and manipulating Morgan to his breaking points. Alison is very clever. So Morgan had to live with my mother, and she had made it clear to my father that he would not have me. That left Alison scattered.
* * *
I’ve heard Alison express that she felt like my mother tossed her away, that she clearly loved Morgan and me more than her. I’ve also heard my mother say Alison chose to live with our father because she felt bad and didn’t want him to be alone. There is likely some truth in both of their perspectives. I was too young to really understand.
I don’t really know what life was like for my sister living with our father, just the two of them, broken and angry. It must’ve been dangerously claustrophobic—a constant clashing of feelings of abandonment and resentment toward my mother under their roof. They had no real space to resolve, no chance to heal. Order and obedience was how my father tried to make sense out of the chaos of society and the rubble his family structure had become.
The child now in his sole care was a bitter, broken teenage girl, and he had no tools to deal with her dysfunction and hurt. Eventually my father and Alison did form a bond, united in their disdain for my mother. I believe they also bonded over the inevitable visibility of their Blackness.
Predictably, Alison turned to boys and sex in an attempt to fill the family-sized hole of rejection in her heart. At fifteen she met a handsome Black nineteen-year-old military “man,” and Alison got pregnant. Our mother wanted her to have an abortion. Our father told her she could have the baby if she got married. The young man was stationed in the Philippines, and with our father’s permission Alison followed him, and they got married there. Before she left, I recall sitting on the bed with her in her room at our father’s house. What I remember of her room was that on her wall was a shelf of books and a shelf of fancy dolls—the ones with big, poofy lace quinceañera-type dresses. I would look up at those dolls, far out of my reach—there for show, not for playing.
I was staring at them when she pointed to her belly and said, “There’s a baby in there.” A baby where? In her stomach? I was too young and didn’t understand at all what she meant. I didn’t understand much about Alison then.
I’ll never forget her bizarre combined baby and bridal shower at my mother’s house. They put a little girl on the cake—a doll, not one that looked like a grown woman but a little baby doll with dark brown hair like my sister’s. The whole thing was so confusing to me. I was a little girl, wondering, Is this a baby-is-coming party or a girl-is-going party? I couldn’t tell if it was a festive or tragic occasion. My mother was pacing and pissed off. My teenage sister had a swollen belly, and she kept pointing at it and saying to me, “There’s a baby in here; look, there’s a baby in here.” And there was this weird cake with a little doll on it. How was a little girl supposed to understand all of this?
And so, for a long time afterward, I always thought, “Okay, so I guess at fifteen is when people have kids and get married.”
It twisted my reality. But it also focused me. I made the promise to myself that was not going to be me. My sense of self-worth, or rather, my sense of self-preservation was born at that bon voyage/bridal/baby shower. I vowed I was not going to be promiscuous ever. This promise to live a different life led me to become a very prudish person. I knew then—suddenly finding myself an auntie before I was eight years old—that Alison’s path was not going to be my life. Once the last slice of baby-bridal cake was gone, my sister was gone too, for several years.
I will never understand what happened to her in the Philippines. But I do know when she left my father’s house, the remainder of her fragile childhood was left behind.
After a few years in the Philippines, Alison returned to Long Island. I was about twelve years old, and she was twenty. Whatever had happened to her over there, or on Long Island, or in a back room somewhere, had taken its toll on her. That super-smart, beautiful girl with the dark curls who was my big sister had hardened into a strange kind of absence. Something, or many things, must have happened to her to lead her to barter her body for money and drugs, as she went on to do for years. Back then, there was so much I didn’t know, but there also was so much I should have never found out, certainly not so young. The years between us might as well have been centuries.
When Alison came back, she would drift from place to place and man to man, occasionally crashing with us at my mother’s house between the many random relationships with men she collected and discarded. There was one older man—I guessed he was about sixty. He had half a head of hair, all of which was gray. He was polite to my mother and would sometimes fill our refrigerator with food, so I guess she trusted him? One evening at the shack, Alison and my mother got into one of their innumerable epic arguments, and for some unknown reason Alison took me with her to this older gentleman’s house. There’s little of his house, or that night, that I remember because when we arrived, Alison sat me down on a light-brown couch and handed me a little chalky ice-blue pill with a crease carved down the middle and a glass of water.
“Here, take this,” she said.
I took it. Within minutes (I think) I was in a heavy, scary darkness, pushed down into a place beneath sleep, and I couldn’t pull myself out. I don’t know how long I was knocked out. I felt like I’d been absorbed into the couch (the only reason I remember the color). It was harrowing.
At twelve, I probably weighed eighty pounds soaking wet, and Alison gave me a whole Valium. I don’t know why my sister drugged me. I don’t know why my mother let me go with her and this man. Perhaps they both wanted me out of their hair for the evening, but my life was in jeopardy in her hands. This may have been the first time that year she could have seriously hurt me, but it certainly wasn’t the last.
* * *
Even though by her twenties Alison had already gotten married, given birth, gotten divorced, traveled thousands of miles away, and done dreadful things, she could still be zany and spontaneous. The worst had not yet happened between us, so I was genuinely happy for the wild stray visits she made to my mother’s house. On her good da
ys she was a bright burst of energy in our often-bleak little dwelling. She seemed mature and had a hollow kind of glamour. She took a new interest in me as a preteen now rather than a little girl. She paid attention to the obviously neglected outside of me, swooping in and correcting my disastrous attempts to make myself pretty, which to a twelve-year-old means everything. After I accidentally made my hair all kinds of shades of ugly orange, she took me to get a toner for my hair and made it one color. She took me to a place that made my eyebrows beautiful. She took me shopping for my first bra. She and I would make earnest attempts at being normal. We were trying to be sisters—or so I thought.
Even though I was young, I knew my sister was doing things that were not good. I mean, she had a beeper, and only drug dealers, rappers, and doctors had beepers back then. She wore a nice manicure—bright-pink nail polish, sometimes decorated with rhinestones. Once, as she was dropping me off in front of my mother’s house, she dipped a sharp pink nail tip into some white crystal powder and held it up to my face, saying, “Just try it, just try a little bit; who cares?”
I knew it was cocaine, and it scared me to death. Thank God, I didn’t take the sniff. I played it off and calmly replied, “No thanks! Bye; see you later.” I shudder to think what could’ve happened if I’d walked into her trap and then that house. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d snorted cocaine right before seeing my mother, or ever in my life.
It was all such a setup. Alison began bringing me around her friends, and I started looking forward to our secret outings—though for all the initial glamour and excitement, it was a very scary time in my life. Even though it was a long time ago, I still have nightmares about it. Alison did not choose how her life began, and I know she went through trauma too. It seemed as though she’d turned completely away from the light.