The Meaning of Mariah Carey

by Mariah Carey

  I wanted to re-create that rich, glamorous feeling in my home—to create a beautiful place where I could make an easy escape. Silk pillows everywhere, leather tufts, embellished little tables, hammocks, ornate lanterns. I brought in fabulous North African accouterments to make my own urban oasis, the exotic cherry on top of my beloved penthouse.

  It was the height of the ghetto-fabulous fashion era, and we were living it—diamonds and denim galore on all the boys. (Cam’ron was probably wearing a powder-pink leather and flamboyantly furry ensemble. He was in his pink phase.) I’m certain I was in some scandalous micro designer frock. So we’re all dressed up and sprawled out amongst a cacophony of cushions. It was almost dawn, and in the IMAX-like view from the wall of windows, the night sky was changing like a mood ring to shades of purple and pink. The whole aura of the room was purple; after all, Dipset (known formally as the rap supergroup the Diplomats) loves everything purple.

  All of a sudden, Cam burst out, “Let’s go uptown!”

  We were still feeling festive, so it sounded like an inspired idea. Cam’ron is Harlem, so we trusted he would know of the appropriate shenanigans for late, late night into early morning. Me and Cam got in his Lamborghini, which was purple, of course. Everyone else giddily hopped into their own exotic cars. My bodyguard, not so giddy, was trailing us in a big black SUV. There we were, a small convoy of rappers and dolls in unimaginably expensive cars roaring east across a sleepy Canal Street, which soon would be buzzing with Chinese and Senegalese vendors setting up their open-air market of knockoff luxury handbags and watches. But at barely 6:00 a.m., aside from a street sweeper or the occasional trash truck, it was just us, speeding down the wide street, being young and fabulous, cutting through the quiet of the gritty city.

  We were headed to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, which lines the entirety of Manhattan’s smooth eastern edge. The FDR doesn’t have traffic lights, so I knew Cam and the boys were ready to rip.

  * * *

  Back then—and to this day, for sure—it was life-threatening to be a young Black man in an exotic sports car speeding up the highway, especially on Manhattan’s east side. But we were high on a night of frivolity and other purple treats, tearing into the fresh morning. We were feeling young, sexy, and free; the fear of arrest (or death, for that matter) was nowhere in sight. We were chasing fun and freedom, and we captured it, if only for a few miles on a stretch of New York City highway.

  As one might imagine, much of my life has been monitored and measured by other people, and in this moment of exhilaration, I got the urge to try and lose my security. Cam eagerly accepted the challenge, shifted gears, and hit that gas. It was like being shot out of a cannon, and the big black vehicle with the big bad bodyguard instantly became a tiny speck in the rearview mirror. Cracking up the whole time, we felt as if we’d just pulled off the hip-hop version of a Little Rascals–type caper, with me playing Darla, of course. I’ve often felt it was a struggle to just have fun, to keep that inner child alive. But I remembered that promise I once made myself, that I would never forget what it felt like to be a kid. I would never let my little girl go.

  By the time we peeled off the FDR at 135th Street, the sun had risen. Good morning, Harlem! As we pulled up to the stoplight at the corner of Lenox Avenue, next to Harlem Hospital, I realized we were somewhere close to my great-aunt Nana Reese’s church. I only knew of it through stories and a single photograph, but I thought if anyone could help me find this brownstone basement church, it was Cam. And that’s exactly what he did.

  This wasn’t a paper picture in a frame—I was actually there. I could touch the bricks that my family once owned, in the place where they lived, prayed, sang, cried, praised, married, died, and caught the spirit: this is where they had church.

  I know much of my parents’ families through frozen moments in gilded frames. My family pictures are sacred—they ground me, reminding me who I come from and who has come and gone from me. These photographs are kept in a private little room off my Hollywood-style mirrored and marbled dressing parlor. Behind the endless rows of high heels, the racks of minidresses, floor-length ball gowns, glittering baubles, brooches, and bags, behind all that wardrobe opulence, there’s a hidden door leading to my little sanctuary—my personal church of family history. Each picture is a story, evidence that I am connected to all these other people, all different and beautifully complicated. I have them all carefully and strategically placed; I want to piece my family together, to hold them close to me through pictures. I mostly go into this room alone, to look at them and to be with them. In this room, I study my beautiful, fractured, fucked-up family and store their faces in my heart.

  * * *

  The picture that I stepped into that day on 131st Street is of my great-aunt, Pastor Nana Reese. It looks like it was taken in the 1950s. She’s tiny and elegant against the weathered brownstone wall: shiny brown skin, deep-set eyes, pressed black hair, no jewelry but a flower corsage near her shoulder. She is wearing a billowing white preacher’s robe, white sheer stockings, and square-toed church-lady shoes. She holds a big ol’ pocketbook—not a handbag, mind you, a pocketbook—with a towel wrapped around the handle, just in case the Holy Ghost busts out and brings the heat during service and she has to mop a sweaty brow. Propped up against the wall by her feet, in rough handwritten capital and small letters that are all the same size, is a sign in white chalk bearing a simple menu: BIBLE SCHOOL, PREACHIN’, Y.P.H.A., and NIGHT SERVICE, with corresponding times. Nana Reese was barely five feet tall; her head didn’t even come up to the molding on the windowsill. However, she loomed large in the picture and in her neighborhood, robed and ready to preach the Gospel to the congregation.

  My cousin Vinny, full name Lavinia, was raised by Nana Reese, so Vinny called her “Mama.” It is from Cousin Vinny that most of the stories from that time and that part of my family come down. Both sisters, Nana Reese and Vinny’s Aunt Addie, my grandmother, each had one son—Addie’s was Roy, my father, the only one who survived. No one ever spoke of Nana Reese’s son, but the story, according to Cousin Vinny, is that he died as a child from “consumption.” Such a crude-sounding diagnosis, isn’t it? Consumption.

  “Mama said he was disobedient, wouldn’t put on his coat, so he died,” Vinny says. Nana Reese was extra-crispy Christian. As a child Vinny lived in one of the apartments above the church. Nana Reese and her husband, the Good Reverend Roscoe Reese, owned the brownstone that housed the church and the one next door, while my grandmother Addie owned two more farther down the block. The church provided typical Pentecostal-style holy-roller storefront-type services on the ground floor, but as Vinny tells it, the real healing was done under the church, in the basement-basement. She recalls, as a child, witnessing a woman who’d come to see the pastor one day: “Her leg was tore up, looked like chopped meat,” Vinny claims. “Mama put spiderwebs on that lady’s leg and prayed over it, and when the lady came back her leg was perfect. Absolutely perfect.” Growing up, I heard of many such miracles happening in that basement. Nana Reese was God-gifted.

  * * *

  My father’s mother, Addie, and Nana Reese were close as sisters but far apart in temperament. While Nana was sweet, Addie was strong-willed and set in her ways. She and my mother had issues, to say the least. I remember a time when my mother threw her out of our house. Because of their conflicts, my mother kept me away from this part of my father’s family, and my knowledge of them mostly came from spectacular and contradicting stories. I clung tightly to the sketchy scenes and the precious pictures my grandmother saved for her son, Roy. I rescued them when my father died. I love them and I protect them.

  So there I stood, that sunny morning, in front of 73 West 131st Street, posing for a picture, just like the pastor, my great-aunt, my blood, had done fifty years before. Only I was hardly in a choir robe; I was most likely wearing a dress the size of Nana Reese’s sweat towel—boobs propped up and legs for days, diamonds twinkling. And the man with the camera was one of t
he flyest and flashiest rappers in the world, leaning against a one-hundred-thousand-dollar whip while he snapped the photo.

  This dignified and decaying brownstone I stood before was the site where my mother and father were married. Their wedding was another drama, another story I was told in mismatched pieces. Most of my family can at least agree on this: my mother fainted during the ceremony. Exactly why she fainted is still up for debate. Cousin Vinny was there, and although she was a child at the time, she clearly remembers how beautiful my mother looked on that day. She describes her dress as a “pretty, shiny blue,” satin perhaps, and it is in that blue wedding dress that my mother collapsed to the ground, her new groom having to slap her face to revive her. I had once been told my mother lost consciousness after seeing a large rat scurry across the floor during the service, but later I learned that she was pregnant at the time. In either scenario, it’s appropriately dramatic for an opera diva’s wedding in a Harlem basement church.

  As we pulled off the block, I thought about what kind of strong, faithful, and resourceful sisters Reese and Addie had to have been back then. These two Black women—armed with little education—owned four brownstones in Harlem. In addition to the church on 131st Street, Nana Reese also owned a brick church in Wilmington, North Carolina, so big it had its own baptismal pool. Its size and strength (at the time it was the only brick building in Wilmington’s Black community) also made it a neighborhood sanctuary: it was the place where all the Black folks would gather and seek refuge from the tornadoes that regularly pummeled the coast.

  Nana Reese and the church were a fixture in their town in so many ways. Every morning the choir, called Voices of Deliverance, would sing on the local radio. She was such an influential leader in the community that she was a threat to some, particularly in the days of segregation and violence in the Jim Crow South. One day Nana Reese was visited by some white men in uniform: police and a fire chief. Cousin Vinny remembers their large, imposing bodies towering over her small five-foot frame. Immediately after this “meeting,” and without saying a word, she packed up the kids and left her brick church and the congregation it served faithfully for so long, never to return again.

  * * *

  I thought about those women as I posed for my photo, just before climbing back into the passenger seat of a car that cost more money than they’d ever made in their entire lifetimes. My women elders, who made something from nothing. They had a vision beyond Jim Crow, beyond third grade, beyond fear. I wonder if they ever had a vision of what was in store for their little Roy’s baby girl?

  So much of the pressure from the recent past had been lifted: I had a new record deal. I had people who were excited and enthusiastic about my comeback. I had thought that Glitter would be the death of me, but it gave me new life. I took it as an opportunity to retreat, rest, and renew my purpose. If Rainbow was a bridge to safety, Charmbracelet was a cocoon, a place of shelter, healing, and growth that made it possible for me to bloom again.

  THE LATIN ELVIS

  One year, for Christmas, I took a whole chosen family of close friends to Aspen. Unbeknownst to me, the real-estate agent who handled my Aspen rental had gotten together with a coworker to set me up on a blind date. It was a simple scheme: they told the mystery man that I really wanted to meet him, and they told me that he wanted to meet me. He turned out to be international megastar Luis Miguel, the “Latin Elvis.”

  Our first date was at a restaurant, and it was hardly a date, for me. I was like, Who is this guy? He was drinking a lot, and his hair was blown out and all over the place. But a small part of me was intrigued. He had an undeniable passionate flair; I could see the potential for adventure in him. Though he needed to smooth the hair down first. (I did that for him and Tommy, by the way—smooth the hair down, figure it out; you know, Hairdressing 101. Five hundred hours!)

  After we had both had a few drinks and an awkward dinner, I still couldn’t get rid of him. I went to my nephew Shawn’s room and told him, “Shawn, you got to come help me figure this out.” I had just met this guy, and he was drunk off his ass! I was thinking to myself, We’re not going anywhere with this; it’s not going to work. So Shawn made up an excuse for me and got me out.

  The very next day Luis’s assistant showed up to my door with a spectacular Bulgari diamond necklace (diamonds aren’t my best friend, but we’re close). I was surprised—and yes, impressed—but in the back of my mind I was also thinking, What, does he just keep a bunch of diamond necklaces nearby in case he meets a girl? I know they have jewelry stores in Aspen, but I also knew to be cautious: he’d dated Daisy Fuentes, Salma Hayek—all of these incredibly beautiful and famous Latin women. I soon learned that was his way; he was an authentic, over-the-top Latin lover, for real.

  Luis was exciting and extravagant. We were both Aries, and we vibed energetically. He was incredibly romantic and spontaneous. We would go on adventures: ditch security and go for a ride, or pick up and go to Mexico City. He had a phenomenal house on a piece of pristine Acapulco beach, with real pink flamingos! His mansion was majestic, with dramatic carved wooden doors and porches and balconies everywhere. He would often have a full mariachi band serenading us while we had dinner outside on a warm Mexican evening. One of my favorite things to do was jump off the master-bedroom balcony with my beloved dog, Jack, into the sparkling pool below. (Me and Jack were the only ones who didn’t speak Spanish, which wasn’t always easy.) His staff was so devoted to him; he was like a god to them. Luis was beloved and cherished by all his people.

  One time I teased him for not having a hot tub (I got a pip penthouse with a sick hot tub / We can watch the flat screen while the bubbles filling up). So what did he do? He surprised me for Christmas with an entire planetarium-style hot tub that you can swim into! We threw a fabulous New Year’s Eve party there, going from 1999 to 2000, with the hot tub grotto as a main attraction. Luis didn’t hold back in his material displays of adoration. Once, he filled an entire private jet with red roses to surprise me. His dramatic romantic gestures spoke to the eternally twelve girl in me, because they really were like something you saw in the movies.

  It was all grand and exciting, but it was far from perfect. For one thing, our relationship was characterized by culture clash. Though we were both young and successful, he was a lot stodgier than me. Our friends were total opposites. His were more conservative, serious and uptight and boring, while I’d have Brat, Tots, Trey, and whoever popping all around. What was more difficult were the cultural gaps between us when it came to race. He would always insist that he didn’t see me as Black. We’d have these arguments, and I’d explain, “No, when your dad is Black, it makes you Black, so you’re going to have to accept that about me.” But in his mind, if I didn’t look Black, I wasn’t. For him it was simply skin deep. It was too difficult to explain that for Americans, it’s much more complicated. I think for him, easier was better.

  Though we made an effervescent couple, it’s always hard to live and love in the limelight. He may have been the Elvis of the Spanish-speaking world, but when he came to the United States, no offense, but for the most part I was the “star of the show.” He’d been through a lot and lost his mother at a very young age. From what I’d been told, his father was very difficult and controlling. I tried my best to support him emotionally, but I was going through my own shit, and it got to a point where I could no longer deal with it. We were not helping each other heal. At his best Luis was generous, spontaneous, and passionate, but at his worst he was erratic and anxious, and had a dark cloud hanging over his head.

  After three years, I knew it was time for us to part ways. We had a good run, and I still have fond memories, but ultimately, he wasn’t the one.

  As the great Cole Porter wrote, “It was great fun / but it was just one of those things.”

  Okay, so it’s five am, and I still can’t sleep

  Took some medicine, but it’s not working

  Someone’s clinging to me, and it’s bittersweet
>
  ’Cause he’s head over heels, but it ain’t that deep

  —“Crybaby”

  THE EMANCIPATION OF ME

  After Charmbracelet, circumstances forced me into a new place. I said to myself, I’m going to do what I want to do completely, and with that I began to work on my next album. I was going to do something from my heart, something empowering. In 2004, L.A. Reid became the CEO of Island Def Jam Music Group. I was so excited because we had always wanted to work together. He heard some of what I had been working on—“Stay the Night,” a song I wrote with Kanye West. He said, “If this is what you’re doing, I’m in!” One night L.A. and I were sitting in the Mermaid Room in my New York penthouse, talking about the essence of the album and how I felt it was going to be all about personal freedom, my emancipation. We discussed the meaning of emancipation—we even looked up the definition in the dictionary. I went on to tell him “Mimi” was a nickname a select few people called me. So, I suggested, “Let’s call it The Emancipation of Mimi.”

  L.A. had always loved what I did with Jermaine on “Always Be My Baby.” Even though there were already some very good songs for this album, and I had already worked with a bunch of incredible people, including the Neptunes, Kanye, Snoop, Twista, and Nelly, L.A. was inspired to bring the dream team of me and JD back together to see what our next level would be. I was like, “Let’s do it!” I called up Jermaine and said, “Let’s get to work.” We sat there on the floor at Southside Studios, Jermaine’s awesome creative oasis, and within a couple weeks we had written “Shake It Off” and “Get Your Number.” In a second session at Southside, we made “We Belong Together,” “It’s Like That,” and then, eventually, “Don’t Forget About Us,” which was on the platinum rerelease of that album.