Friends: A Love Story (4 page)

After that I started participating in the drama society at
school, if you want to call it that—we didn't really do a play or anything. When I was a senior, the society held an evening of monologues. I remember doing one from
A Raisin in the Sun
of Mama talking to Benita.

I put on my great-grandmother's blue-and-white dress, stuffed the bosom full of paper and made up my hair and face to look old. I remember people applauded and received my performance well. It touched them. I thought, Oh, maybe I'm good at this! I'd perform at church in the talent contest, I'd get with Kenny and we'd do a scene from a play together, and we had arts nights at Upward Bound—that kind of thing. I'd read Langston Hughes poems: “Madam and the Rent Man,” “Madam and the Phone Bill,” “Madam and the Minister.”

At the library I found a recording of Ruby Dee reciting the poetry of Langston Hughes. You know, Ruby Dee is good—she can do poems! So I just copied her and was good at copying her. I really connected with the sentiment of one poem in particular that she did entitled “Final Call.” It was powerful and had a great rhythm.

I performed “Final Call” at a CME Church conference one time. I was so nervous after my recitation that my knees buckled. But then people started applauding. I received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than one thousand people. Experiencing the rush of applause from so many people almost blew me backward—it made me feel good. Later I entered and won a oratorical contest put on by Optimist International. Experiences like these made me feel validated and assured and
confident in my abilities. I had a sense that God had given me a gift. The works of these great black artists that I read and performed heightened the sense of excellence my mother had implanted in my spirit. They also connected me to the rich cultural legacy of African-Americans, and made me aware of black people's strength, struggles and accomplishments.

At the beginning of my senior year, my mother received a letter on a yellow legal sheet of paper from Mr. Langhorne, my old Upward Bound director. He had gone on in the world—he was in the army and had been stationed elsewhere—and hadn't been in contact. But he sent my mother a letter telling her where to have me apply to college.

Until then, I had been thinking about going to Howard, since it was a very prestigious black institution and I had visited D.C. before. Then somebody suggested that I apply to Mount Holyoke, an all-girls' school in Massachusetts.

I didn't know what other schools to apply to. I'd been to Florida A & M University; that was okay. I liked the food—they had greens and fried chicken—but the dorms were kind of old and they had roaches in them. I didn't think I wanted to go there. Where should I go? Close by? Far away? California seemed kind of far…. The counselors at school were no help. If you didn't ask them to get in your business, they didn't get in it and you went wherever you went.

Since Mr. Langhorne had sent this letter, I applied to the schools he suggested, along with Mount Holyoke and Howard. I got into Miami first, and was awarded the Martin Luther King Scholarship and only had to pay four hundred dollars to attend.
Then I got into Howard but had to pay five thousand dollars, which seemed like a million dollars. I got into the University of Virginia but not U.C., Berkeley. I also got into Mount Holyoke.

“That's a girls' school and there are two kinds of lesbians—born and made,” my mother warned.

I didn't know what she was talking about; we'd never had a conversation about lesbianism. But I figured she didn't want me to go there.

When I got the acceptance letter to Yale my mama started screaming, “My baby's going to Yale! My baby's going to Yale!” She fell onto the bed, started kicking her feet into the air and having a fit. I was just sitting there reading, “You have been accepted out of nine thousand applicants….” All I had to do was get a thousand-dollar loan—from them. So I guess I'll be going to Yale and not Howard, I thought. But I was very intimidated. I remember trying to push to the back of my mind the thought “they're supposed to be smarter in the North. I may not be able to cut it.” I did, and decided, Well, I'll go for a year. But if I can't cut the mustard and get kicked out, then I'll go to Howard, which is where I wanted to attend anyway.

Of course, after I told my counselors I got into Yale they were proud and thought it was wonderful. I remember one of them saying, “You're going to Yale! That is the best drama school in the world!”

Ah hah!

I
come from a family that took what life dished them and made the best out of it. My father, Conroy Vance, was from Chicago, where he was raised in a foster home. His biological parents had given him up when he was three or four—old enough to remember them and to have been traumatized. I don't know why his folks didn't raise him and don't know if he did, either. He never recovered from the abandonment, yet he lived a full and meaningful life.

My mother was the oldest daughter of Lloyd and Virginia Naomi Daniels. She had one sister, Lois Ann, right behind her in age, then eleven years passed before her brothers Lloyd and then Lee were born. My maternal grandfather—everybody called him Pappy but I called him Granddad—was president of the longshoreman's union in Chicago. Between his income and my grandmother's clerical work for the Chicago Department of Treasury, they and their children lived decently, as the lives of black folks in the 1930s and 1940s went. Working on the waterfront was difficult and dangerous, and in the winter when Lake Michigan would freeze over there wasn't much work. As head of the union, Pappy would tap into the treasury to help members out during those frigid months. To hear
family members tell it, when my mother was in her late teens, Aunt Lois's new husband insisted on working on the docks. Pappy didn't want that for his son-in-law. But he gave my grandfather an ultimatum: “If you don't let me work, I'll sit at home.” Pappy relented, and apparently, one winter, gave him some money to tide him and Lois over. Someone reported Pappy to the authorities. The police came after him. Pappy evaded the cops for six months. But while he was on the run they harassed his family, banging on the door of my mother's childhood home at all hours of the day and night. After a while, my grandmother couldn't take it anymore. She packed up the kids and moved to Boston, where she had grown up (she was born in Washington, D.C.). When my grandfather turned himself in, he was locked up for two years. Once he was released, he went back to work on the docks, but my grandmother and the children stayed put in Boston. Yet it wasn't a split in the traditional sense. Grandmother and Grandfather spoke several times a day and Grandfather was always in Boston for the holidays. However, the separation had a deep impact on the family, especially the boys, who had been very young when my grandparents split.

My mom attended DuSable High School before she moved to Boston. That's where she met my father. Daddy planned to go to college. His biological parents had left him a sum of money that he was to use to further his education. He had dreams of becoming a lawyer. But when the time came to go to school, the money was gone. His foster father had spent it, thinking it was “money for me to raise the kid.” Dad saw that as a tremendous betrayal. Believing he had college money, he had messed around in high school. He had to go into the air force instead. He was bitterly disappointed. For a while he was stationed in Alaska, then Maine. When he got out, he went to Boston University on the G.I. Bill. At that point he and my mom hooked up.

 

My parents got married in 1955. My father wanted to have five children—he wanted a big ol' family. My mother didn't want to have children immediately. Because of the age difference between my mother and Aunt Lois and their two younger brothers she felt that she and her sister had had to raise their two younger brothers. Despite these reservations, Cecilie was born in 1958. A year or so later they moved to Detroit, when Daddy was offered a job managing a low-income housing development, which meant we could live there at reduced rent.

Right after they arrived in Detroit and while my mother was pregnant with me, someone tried to kidnap my sister, Cecilie, whom people say was an “exceptionally pretty baby.” Mommy was shopping and turned away for a moment to look at some groceries. Cecilie, then a toddler, started to wander—until a woman said, “Ma'am, is that your baby?” My mother turned around just in time to see a man holding Cecilie's hand and walking toward the door. Mom started screaming. The man dropped my sister's hand and kept walking out the door. Thank God, my mother got Cecilie back. I was born in 1960. Shortly thereafter someone else almost took Cecilie. My folks weren't about to let anything else happen to their children. They were determined to get Cecilie and me into environments where we could grow up unscathed.

Cecilie (I often call her Cec, pronounced “Cess”) and I were very close. She was the big sister, charged with looking out for me. I was her “little brother.” My mother would tell her, “Make sure you take care of your brother.” Most times that was cool, but, of course, sometimes she didn't want to.

“Just make sure to do it,” my mother would say.

During the first few years of my life we moved around the Detroit area about every two years. We lived in a small house in Inkster, Michigan, across the street from a small park. Cecilie and I would play on the playground. One time Cecilie climbed
feetfirst through the handrail at the top of a sliding board. Her lower body got through but her head got stuck.

“Help me, Court!” she cried. I looked up. Her feet were dangling in the air and she was hanging by her hands. But I was too small to help her.

“DADDY!” I screamed as I lit out for the house. When Daddy and I returned, Cecilie was barely hanging on and her hands were trembling. She couldn't hold on anymore. He pushed her back through the bars and basically saved her life. He was so proud of me that day!

I was a very curious child—I just liked to see how things worked. But Daddy wasn't very happy with me when I put my blocks in the toilet to see what would happen. It stopped up the toilet on Fourth of July weekend so they had to pay a plumber triple double time to repair it. My mother and father took turns “beating” me. They were so hot they probably even let Cec get in a couple of licks! Then there was the time my father took Cec and me up into the attic. “Stay on the beams,” he told me. Curious about what would happen if I stepped off the planks, I ventured onto the pretty, pink insulation. It gave way. I grabbed onto Cec. Next thing you know, we were both falling through the ceiling. Cec landed first and “cushioned” my fall. Needless to say, she was very unhappy with me. My mother was mad at my father for taking us up there. Another time I sprayed Lysol on the concrete basement floor and lit a match.
Whoosh!
I just wanted to see what would happen.

When I was about six, my parents moved into Detroit proper onto West Grand Boulevard, one of the main drags. We lived in a formerly all-white moneyed area that black folks had come to inhabit, where huge houses had been subdivided into two-family and four-family homes. If you had a two-family you had an entire floor. I think we lived in a four-family house. Still, to us it was really big. The lawns were fifty to eighty feet deep. “Hitsville,” the headquarters of Motown, was about eight doors
down the street. We used to sit on the stairs of the house next door to Motown and watch the people come and go. We were too young to know who they were but old enough to know we should watch them.

As long as I wasn't causing minicatastrophes, my mother encouraged my curiosity. When I was six years old, she read me a book called
Henry the Explorer.
It was about a little boy who read a story about polar bears, then set off to explore his town with his dog, Laird Angus McAngus. I loved
Henry the Explorer!
It taught me to be curious about the world—that whatever I could read in a book or dream, I could go visit. When I was little, the only world I knew was my block, so I explored my block. My mother would make me a peanut-butter sandwich and tie it up in a bandanna. I'd tie the bandanna to the end of a long stick and carry it over my shoulder, just like Henry did. Then I'd go to the parking lot two doors down the street, where snowplows had created huge mountains of snow. She always kept a close eye on me. “Don't look! Don't watch me,” I would tell her. (Of course, she watched me through the window like a hawk.) When I got to the corner I would climb one of the mountains of snow, sit down and eat my sandwich, then go back home.

Although Cec didn't always feel like being bothered with me, she'd beat you up if you tried to mess with her “little brother!” I remember a time when we went trick-or-treating and some bad boys swooped down on us to take our candy. As I cried, “They stole my candy!” Cecilie took her flashlight and started hitting them to protect me. She gave them so many bumps from her big flashlight that they let her keep her candy and ran off. Daddy was so proud of her that night.

But during the summer of 1967 life on West Grand Boulevard changed. I stood on the front porch of my family's home as a long line of army tanks rolled down the street. I didn't know what was going on—I was just excited because G.I. Joe was on my street. “G.I. Joe—there he is!” I'd shout as National Guard
tanks rumbled by. G.I. Joe was my favorite toy—I loved G.I. Joe. I had all the G.I. Joe figures and stuff. The troops were headed toward the Twelfth Street area of Detroit, where black people were rising up against the lack of jobs, horrible housing and widespread police brutality. Their neighborhoods were being bulldozed to make way for I-75. The Detroit Riots changed the city—and our lives—forever.

During the five-day uprising, I could feel the tension and apprehension in the air. Sometimes G.I. Joe would stand guard along our street. One day I walked up to one of the soldiers to say hi. He turned and pointed his bayonet at me! I was shocked and traumatized. That night, my parents powwowed and decided to get out. They didn't want us in the middle of all the mess. Making matters worse, the riots deprived Daddy of his livelihood. The Bi-Lo grocery store he managed farther down West Grand was one of the businesses burned to the ground.

As was his habit, my father rolled with it. He found a job as a foreman at the Chrysler plant. For the next eighteen months he and Mommy socked away money so they could buy a house. For a while we stayed in a very small apartment on Dundee Street, until June 1969, when we moved into our family's new house, a five-bedroom dwelling on Appoline Street.

Until that point we had lived in a segregated, all-black world. Racially, Appoline Street was mixed—predominately white and Catholic with a few black families. My parents were ecstatic and felt they had made an incredible move. They wanted to be a part of integration and to raise Cecilie and I in a multicultural environment where we could learn how to deal with living in a “white world.” Now we lived between two white families. To Cecilie and my delight, one of them had ten kids!

The neighbors on Appoline Street were tight and looked after each other and all of us kids. Our house was in the perfect location. We were one block up and across the street from the public school we went to and the playground where we played
“pom-pom touch.” Pom-pom was a game where you raced from one side of the fence in the schoolyard to the other side while you tried not to get tagged by whoever was “it.” If you got tagged you had to go to the center of the field with everyone else who got caught. The kids in the center would call “pom-pom” and everyone who hadn't been tagged yet would race to the other side. The goal was to be the last one touched. On top of playing pom-pom, my friends Clarence, Greg and Darren and I played touch football in the street. The driveways were the first downs and two light poles were the touchdowns. You couldn't keep me out of the street!

We all played together without incident—black children and white. I don't ever remember being called “nigger” or any other racial slur. But the adults around us were going through it. Black folks were all about “black power.” White folks were scared and moving out of the city in droves. That June, when we moved into the neighborhood, “white flight” wasn't happening on our street. By the time we went to school in September, the neighborhood had “flipped.” The white folks who could get out, got out. By the first day of school the neighborhood had turned predominately black. Only a handful of whites remained. We couldn't leave at that point. My parents thought, “What have we done?” They knew they'd never get their money out of the house. In just three months their dreams of raising us in a mixed neighborhood had gone up in smoke.

But from my nine-year-old perspective, I didn't see “white flight,” I just got new friends to play with. The neighborhood was still a great place for Cecilie and me to grow up in. The street stayed very neighborhoody, and black and white families looked after each other. Cecilie and I were the neighborhood's little “stars”—everybody loved us. We were quick and could run fast, but we were also cool and got good grades. When we played pom-pom we never got caught—and if we did end up in the middle, we were quick enough to catch everyone else.

 

In spite of all the hard knocks he'd endured, my dad worked hard at his job at Chrysler. Daddy was wise. He liked to read though he didn't have much time. He was also very gregarious—he was the center of attention in any room, a life-of-the-party type of guy. My father loved to talk and explain and debate and look at things five and six different ways. He really should have been a lawyer. I didn't like all that debating and arguing. When I would try to keep up, he would talk me down. I would just get confused and get mad. Cecilie could hang with him; her mind was nimble like that. But while they were debating and arguing, I'd say, “This is boring. I'm gonna go play some ball.”

On weekends my father hung out with his family and fixed things. Dad was very handy. He could fix anything. He'd read fix-it books and might take a couple of weeks to figure the thing out, but he would figure it out and then head to the hardware store. He was the kind of man who wanted to have the tools in the house
just in case
he needed to fix something. I was Daddy's boy—he used to drag me all around. “Courtney, roll with me.” We'd go food shopping and run all kinds of errands, but we'd always end up hanging out in the hardware section at Sears. When he was ready to tune up the car or fix whatever, I was his helper. He didn't show me how to fix anything myself, but I knew all the tools to hand him. He'd tell me, “Courtney, hand me the Allen wrench,” and I'd give it to him.