Boss Lady
Authors: Omar Tyree
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Dedicated
to all the old and new flyy girls
who can relate
and to those
who only dream about it
Black America, 2003
It's high stakes now when she rolls
the highway tolls have been taxed by Jones's inflation
a proud Black Nation no longer exists
and although the boot straps of evidence still persists
the honest effort is no longer relevant
only eight figures pay the new cost of rent
forcing fast, luxurious cars to keep pace in haste and ignore the dents
until the green, silver, platinum, and gold is all spent
causing superstar Negroes to holla, “Damn!
Where all my money went?”
while in need of cool-headed, financial consultation
and less heated, overemotional stimulation.
Copyright © 2002 Tracy Ellison Grant
H
i. My name is Vanessa Tracy Smith. I'm Tracy Ellison's oldest second cousin on her mother's side. Many of you first read of me in Tracy's sequel book,
For the Love of Money.
But some of you are a little confused now. That's okay. I'll explain everything.
My big cousin Tracy became famous ten years ago after publishing the story of her life in a book called
Flyy Girl,
as told to author Omar Tyree. She finished undergraduate school at Hampton University in Virginia, and continued school to receive a master's degree in English. Mission accomplished, she moved back home to Philadelphia, passed all of her teaching certificate exams, and found a job as a junior high school English teacher. However, my cousin could never be satisfied as a schoolteacher. Not the flyy girl. So after thinking it over, she decided to quit her job as a schoolteacher and move to Hollywood, California, to chase her dreams as a poet and screenwriter. She had already written two volumes of unpublished poetry.
Out in Hollywood, Tracy took a few courses in screenwriting at UCLA, made friends in the television industry, and worked herself from an assistant writer position for a science fiction show on cable, into a proven staff writer and a freelancer for some of the major networks. But my cousin didn't stop there. In perfect flyy girl mode, she attempted to create her own sitcom,
Georgia Peaches,
about a southern girl trying to break into the music and entertainment industry. Failing at that, she penned her first feature-length screenplay entitled
Led Astray,
about an African-American woman who exacts revenge on several Hollywood players who betray her.
While continuing to make new friends in high places, my cousin not only found a producer and a studio to develop and green-light her first film, but she walked away with the starring role and an associate producer credit.
Led Astray
went on to triple its budget in ticket sales at the box office, my cousin became an instant star, and she was able to sign on the dotted line for a lucrative, three-film deal worth millions of dollars.
Pretty unbelievable, isn't it? I would say. But that's when I come in.
I had been told about my big cousin Tracy ever since I was a toddler. But what I heard of her was rarely a good thing. My mother would beat me over the head with negatives about my cousin as if it was a punishment.
“Girl, you think you're so damn cute. You act just like your cousin Tracy. The world don't revolve around you!”
Granted, I barely even knew who Tracy was at the time. It wasn't as if she visited me, my mother, and my sisters while we relocated like nomads to different run-down apartments and houses in North Philadelphia, with my mother chasing her crazy ideas of love. All I knew was that Tracy was my mother's first cousin, and that she was raised in a stable home in the better parts of Germantown. However, I had seen pictures of her, and if my mother believed that naming me Tracy and berating me with how similar I was to my namesake would somehow stop me from trying to emulate my cousin, she was wrong.
All of my mother's name-dropping only made me think of Tracy night and day, whether she visited us in North Philly or not. My cousin soon became the focus point of my constant daydreams of a better life. Then her first book came out.
You would think my mother would have known about the book as much as she seemed to despise Tracy. But my mother was never much of a reader. So she didn't know about the book that had her name, my aunt Marie, my grandmother Marsha, and my great aunts Patti, Joy, and Tanya in it until I had first started to read
Flyy Girl
at age eleven. It had been out for a few years by this time, and it had not been published nationally yet. It was still kind of underground.
I hid the book from my mother and read it day and night for three days straight until she finally caught me with it in my room. I was all the way at the end and had gotten a little careless with it.
She asked me, “What's that you readin'?”
I didn't even notice my mother when she walked into my room. I was just so into that book. It had me hypnotized. It was that good. But
I got so nervous from being busted that I fumbled the book out of my hands and dropped it on the floor.
I mumbled, “Ummm . . .”
I was terrified and didn't know what to say. My mother could read the surprise all over my face. I was sure she knew about the book. I tried to pick it up and hide it from her, like a fool.
“Gimme the damn book, girl,” she told me.
“Mom, it's just a book,” I whined.
“Vanessa, if you don't give me that damn book, I will break your damn hands!”
I was still hesitant until my mother reached out and snatched it from me.
“Gimme this damn book, girl!”
My little sisters looked at me as if I was nuts.
“All that over a book.”
They didn't get books like I did. I had a lot more to dream about, I guess.
Anyway, my mother read the title out loud.
“Â âFlyy Girl.
Inside the big city there's a mad obsession for gold, sex, and money.'Â ” She looked at me and asked, “What are you doin' readin' this? And who gave this to you? Is this some kind of X-rated sex book?”
My two younger sisters began to eye me in alarm with hushed silence and wide eyes.
I was confused as I don't know what. Didn't my mother know about Tracy's book? I had given her the benefit of the doubt, but maybe she didn't know. Then she studied the artwork on the cover, with the gold earrings that read Tracy in script, and she just froze.
“What in the world . . .”
My mother was as shocked as I was. I was shocked that she didn't know about it, and she was shocked that she was just finding out.
Then I got slick and tried to downplay it.
“It's just a book about some girl growing up in Philly, Mom.”
My mother ignored me and began to flip through the pages after reading the back cover summaries.
“Where did you get this book?”
I didn't want to tell. Tracy's book was quite mature for an eleven-year-old girl to read. It was detailed with graphic sex and hard language.
So my friends had all been hiding it from their mothers. We all realized that it was hard-boiled and secretive material.
“You better tell me, girl,” my mother warned me.
“Friends,” I answered.
“What friends?”
“Just friends, Mom.”
She was headed for the third degree, and it was beginning to look like a very long night.
“I want names, girl.”
By that time, my sisters were no longer silent.
“Uuueww, Va-nes-sa.”
“Shut up!” I screamed at them.
I was irritated by the whole thing.
My mother said, “No, you shut up, Vanessa. And you tell me what I wanna know. Right now! I want names!”
To make a long story short, my mother got me to tell on my circle of friends, who had all realized before she did that the book was about our cousin.
So my mother got to calling around to all of our family members, and they all confirmed it, which gave me an even lower level of respect for her. I mean, how could she not know?
Anyway, that drove an even bigger wedge between my cousin Tracy and I ever meeting and getting to know each other. My mother was convinced that I would run around and try to be flyy in the same fast ways that Tracy had. But I was already my own person. I could see where letting guys have their way with a girl had led my mother into having three girls from three different daddies. So I was in no way ready to allow a book to influence me to do something that real life had already shown me an ugly reflection of. My girls and I all knew better than to live how Tracy had; we all read the book as a tale of what we shouldn't do, as opposed to how many of our parents felt about it. They were not giving us much credit for our intelligence.
A few years later,
Flyy Girl
was picked up by a major publisher, and it was in bookstores everywhere. My mother had given up on trying to keep me away from it, along with thousands of other teenaged girls' mothers. And a powerful thing was beginning to happen; girls who wouldn't be caught dead reading a book were all of a sudden
swearing by my cousin's book. I was so proud of her that I didn't know what to do with myself.
I realized that Tracy had attended Hampton University, and I wanted to go to a black college, too. Tracy wrote poetry, and I wanted to write poetry, too. Tracy had lived her life the way she wanted to, and I wanted to live and learn from her mistakes and not make them. And when I finally got a chance to hang out with my cousin after years of dreaming about her, I wanted to make sure I kept my cool. I didn't want to come off as a geek or anything. I had read what she thought about Girls High and Central being “nerd schools,” and my high school, Engineering & Science, was in the same vein as those. But I was also certain that Tracy would feel differently about education as an adult, and she would be proud that I attended E&S and had maintained good grades. Even her brother Jason had graduated from E&S. I just wanted to make sure that my cousin would be nothing but proud of me when I finally met her.
