Aunt Shauneille’s enormous living room housed a tall avocado tree, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, paintings, and gorgeous African masks that mesmerized me. Shauneille named her daughter after her first cousin, Lorraine Hansberry, author of the immortal play A Raisin in the Sun, who served as inspiration for Nina Simone’s song “Young, Gifted and Black.” The first African American woman to have a play on Broadway, Hansberry was one of the leading lights of our literary culture. She died tragically of pancreatic cancer when she was just thirty-four. Her namesake and I grew up like brother and sister.
Writer Toni Morrison was another close friend. She had gone to college with Mom and Aunt Shauneille, where they were part of the theater group the Howard Players. I have sweet memories of being in her home and playing with hers sons Dino and Slade.
Mom and Shauneille had been in the prestigious Negro Ensemble Company, along with Godfrey Cambridge, Adolph Caesar, and Al Freeman Jr. I watched my mother costar with Carl Byrd and Graham Brown in Behold! Cometh the Vanderkellans, and in Jamimma with Dick Anthony Williams and Arnold Johnson.
My mother never pushed me into acting, but she suspected I might have talent. Still, she was ambivalent. Shauneille was not: she cast me in a Christmas special she was directing, featuring Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. I ended up going on to act in a Marx Toys commercial as well, where I played with a Johnny West action figure. And then my mom and I appeared as mother and son on a show called Pets Allowed.
In spite of these occasional gigs, I wasn’t bitten by the acting bug. I didn’t mind the attention, but I didn’t seek it. My feeling for acting was nothing like my feeling for music. Acting would not direct the course of my life. Music was my true north.
My third godmother was Diahann Carroll. Aunt Diahann embraced her success proudly. As a triple threat—actor, singer, dancer—she became a Tony winner (the first Black woman to win Best Actress) and then a movie star. Then she broke ground with Julia, the first-ever TV series centered on a Black professional woman. Aunt Diahann married four times, as well as having a decade-long affair with Sidney Poitier. I was nine in 1974, when my parents took me to the premiere of Claudine, a Black-consciousness film that starred Aunt Diahann alongside James Earl Jones. Mom had a role in Claudine, too. I was on the edge of my seat.
Fourth godmother: Joan Hamilton Brooks in Los Angeles, Mom’s oldest friend. The two had grown up in Bed-Stuy together, gone to Girls High together, and then both worked at NBC. Mom and Aunt Joan were joined at the hip. They would take the subway together every morning and run over to window-shop at Saks during lunch. They went to parties together and enjoyed the attention, but Joan was adventurous, more so than Mom. She liked living on the edge, and she could really sing. We connected. Later in my life, because Aunt Joan had such a youthful spirit, I could talk to her when I couldn’t go to my mother. With her, I could really let my guard down.
Fifth, Joy Homer. She looked like a Hollywood starlet. Aunt Joy and Mom were girlhood friends as well, and they remained sisters until the end. When I was born, the first place we went after the hospital was Joy’s, where we stayed for a week. Throughout our lives, Joy’s home in St. Alban’s, Queens, was an oasis. Countless weekends, Mom and I would take the Long Island Rail Road double-decker to Joy’s house, a lovely Tudor with a pool. Joy’s husband, Lee, owned a successful liquor store in Brooklyn, and they loved throwing lavish parties for family and friends. Joy was a character; she enjoyed her Benson & Hedges 100s and her crystal tumbler of vodka. Our stories would soon intertwine.
Cicely, Shauneille, Diahann, Joan, and Joy. Looking back, I think of them as a five-pointed star, and Roxie was there at the center. Their Black feminine energy is one of the reasons I’ve held on to my sanity through crazy times.
SAY IT LOUD, I’M BLACK AND I’M PROUD
Black people have historically been underrepresented or misrepresented in the media. That’s why my mom took me to every remote corner of New York City to find our people doing authentic artistic work. We saw plays, we saw dance, we read books, we heard poetry. Then came a new wave of Black movies.
In 1974, Aunt Diahann Carroll was coming out with her film Claudine. In it, she plays a hardworking single mother raising six kids. Claudine’s boyfriend, played by James Earl Jones, is a garbage man. Together, they struggle to overtake the barriers of urban life. Their social worker is played by Mom. Gladys Knight is the musical voice of the story, singing soulful songs written by Curtis Mayfield.
I really related to Mayfield. His score for Super Fly cemented his hero status for me. My parents owned the gatefold album whose cover featured Curtis’s face and, just below, the long-haired, white-suited Ron O’Neal, the “super-fly” Youngblood Priest—arms crossed, pistol pointed upward while sexy Georgia, played by Sheila Frazier, lies at his feet.
Like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Curtis’s album was funky but subtle: Marvin moaning “Mercy Mercy Me,” Mayfield embodying “Pusherman.” The songs and films of that era were telling the real-life news. They were voicing the fantasies and frustrations of their fans.
Films like Five on the Black Hand Side dramatized the deep divisions in the Black community: the conservative, uptight Black father; the taken-for-granted, overworked Black mother; the rebellious daughter; the militant son. Stories of Black life intrigued me, especially those with a strong father-son conflict. I related.
I also was into movies like Shaft, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Across 110th Street (with a theme by Bobby Womack that became one of my favorite songs), Hammer, Trouble Man, The Mack—and songs like Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City,” the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There,” Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me,” and the Pointer Sisters’ “Yes We Can Can.”
* * *
After seeing the Jackson 5, my second life-changing moment came when I was eight years old and Mom took me to the Apollo to see the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. We had all his singles and a half dozen of his albums at home, but they hadn’t prepared me for the Apollo. Mom thought it was important that I have the experience, and, as usual, Mom was right.
We rode the subway uptown. Walking down 125th Street, R&B blaring from the record stores, we saw folks stepping out in their finest. I felt good all over. I felt even felt better when we got to our fifth-row seats. The air inside the Apollo was thick with smoke. The color of the curtains and the stage lights were dark magenta and rusty red. There was no stage set. Bare bones. When James slid out and hit with “Super Bad,” the crowd got up and never sat down.
James never stopped moving. He wasn’t creating rhythm; he was rhythm. He sang; he hollered; he fell to his knees; he did the splits; he handled the mic like a magician. He hit us with “Soul Power.” He hit us with “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.” Bootsy Collins, his new nineteen-year-old bass player, had a big, lopsided Afro. That was the coolest look ever. The whole thing knocked me out.
After the show, Mom and I got to go backstage: musicians packing up their instruments, technicians packing up their gear. We went right up to James’s dressing room and peeked in. His shirt was off, his body covered in sweat, his hair all a mess. Mom waved hello. James waved back. She considered going in and introducing me, but the small room was already overcrowded. We walked out the back door and into the night, James Brown’s music still ringing in my ears, my feet still moving. Harlem was alive.