by Terry Crews
Again, my hand was the only one in the air.
It reached the point that our youth minister would come to me when she needed a volunteer from the congregation. She knew I’d always say yes, and that I would do whatever I’d been asked to do perfectly, so I’d make the church look good. And I always did. Because I was such a pleaser, I was always down to do whatever I was asked. I also knew it was a way to make my mother like me, to make people in our church like me, and to make God like me. And that was all I wanted. I lived so much of my life scared, and I really wanted to please God so he would protect me and take care of me. I also had a very long-term mind-set about who I wanted to be, and I didn’t want any bad decisions I made now to catch up with me later in life.
When I was in the fourth grade, I started playing the flute during our church services. It was Mama Z’s idea to give us instruments.
“Baby, what instrument do you want?” she asked.
I considered my options. The only musician I knew was my Uncle John. He was a cool guy, a jazzman, and he played flute and saxophone. I decided I would play flute, too. Marcelle asked for a guitar. I didn’t grasp the significance of this conversation, or think about it again, until the following Christmas. Underneath the tree was a guitar for Marcelle and a flute for me, compliments of Mama Z. As soon as I saw Marcelle’s guitar, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. I should have asked for a drum kit. But it was already too late. I was a flutist.
For the next four years, once a week, I went over to John’s house every Wednesday after school for my flute lesson. On top of that, Trish made me practice for an hour every day. Soon enough, I was a pretty good flute player. And so it wasn’t long before they recruited me to start playing the flute in church at the Sunday service. So there I was, in my little red suit and my big black Afro, standing in front of the congregation, playing along with the organ. While we played, people kept jumping up to holler and scream, but I kept playing, and Trish and our pastor beamed at me. I felt a moment of peace. I was a good kid.
OUR CHURCH FELT PEOPLE WERE BEING TOO worldly if they listened to secular music, wore makeup, went to dance clubs, played sports, or went to the movies. The Exorcist was huge around that time, and our church used its success to prove “the devil” was in the country’s movie theaters. The only thing that was permitted was to eat, and there were more obese people at our church than in all of New Orleans.
I didn’t like these rules, but I mostly got along fine. It helped that Big Terry once broke ranks and took Marcelle and me to see The Apple Dumpling Gang, although he snored through the whole thing. Now, whenever I nod off during a movie with my kids, it cracks me up. We really do become our parents. Also, although we couldn’t go to the movies, when a film was shown on TV, we could see it. I always thought this was strange, but no one could ever give me an explanation.
Trish was a big television fan. Marcelle and I were allowed to have a television in our room from my third-grade year, when we moved into our house on Winona Street, until we grew up and moved out. On hot summer nights, Marcelle and I watched TV with a fan blowing on us, drinking cold Kool-Aid and eating Paramount potato chips and bologna sandwiches with mustard, followed by glazed crullers from Dawn Donuts down the street, until Trish commanded us to bed. We watched all of the prime-time shows, including Good Times, The Jeffersons, and Sanford and Son. And then, on Saturday nights, we watched The Love Boat. African-American kids didn’t have many role models on TV at that time, and Isaac on The Love Boat was our guy, as were the characters on the predominantly black sitcoms. We really held on to them. It was like, Wow, maybe we are just like on TV. Maybe we’re actually worth something.
Marcelle and I playacted out the scenes we’d just seen, faking heart attacks and get-rich-quick schemes, and singing, “If I didn’t care …” with candy rings on our pinkie fingers. Anytime anyone did something stupid—except for Trish, of course—we borrowed the line from Sanford and Son and said, “You big dummy.”
My favorite character was also from Sanford and Son. Aunt Esther, played by LaWanda Page, as a bible-toting, gospel-preaching, purse-swinging crusader who suffered no fools. This character reminded me of so many women I grew up with that I thought the writers must have gone to our church.
I actually got much of my sense of comedy from TV, but from a source that might surprise you. It wasn’t Richard Pryor, even though I loved him, too, and faithfully watched all four episodes of The Richard Pryor Show. It was Carol Burnett. The Carol Burnett Show was my absolute favorite. She didn’t care about being cute—even though she was—because she was so committed to her comedy. She could sing, dance, and tell a joke. I was in awe of her, and she still means a great deal to me.
So even though I felt like I was missing out when the other kids at school talked about some movie they’d seen, I had plenty to keep me entertained at home. And then, in 1977, a few months before my ninth birthday, I was exposed to something for the first time that impacted my life in the most profound way possible: Star Wars. This was different. Even though movie trailers back then never actually gave away what the movie was about, we knew from the television commercials that this was the best movie ever.
Marcelle and I didn’t dare ask Trish, but we were desperate to go. And then we experienced the kind of miracle I could believe in: Aunt Paulette asked if she could take us to see Star Wars at the drive-in. Marcelle and I begged and begged for Trish to let us go. I think we would’ve collapsed into a heap and never recovered if she denied us, and Trish knew it. Finally, after a long protest, she acquiesced. We couldn’t believe it! We were going to a real movie at a real drive-in movie theater!
Marcelle and I were ecstatic as we piled into Aunt Paulette’s purple Pontiac Monte Carlo with the landau top and drove to the Miracle Twin Drive-in Theater in Burton, a suburb of Flint. When the sun set, the whole parking lot buzzed with excitement. This was more than a movie. This was an event. I was so glad to be a part of it. The John Williams score hit, and the Star Wars logo snatched me into its vortex. For the next 125 minutes I was so enthralled I couldn’t move. It was like I was actually there among the aliens, warriors, and Stormtroopers.
It was as thrilling as any experience I’d ever had. In fact, that movie changed everything. Immediately, I knew this was what I wanted to do. It never occurred to me to be an actor. But I was definitely going to make movies someday. I was an artist, so I figured I could be an animator or a special-effects person. But first I had to get out of Flint. And I had no idea how I was going to do that.
THERE WAS A MUCH MORE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCE OF attending a church that strict. It was an open secret that many people in our congregation led double lives. We knew it was happening all around us, but we never talked about it. There were known homosexuals who sang in the choir but chose to keep their lifestyle quiet to retain their membership. There were men who had second families across town. And it was later revealed that our pastor was using cocaine, frequenting prostitutes, and even attempting to sell drugs while still preaching.
Because I saw supposedly virtuous adults behaving in these ways, I believed a hidden, subterranean life was normal, and my own secret side bloomed around this time. When I was nine, I was at my Uncle John’s house for my flute lesson one day when I went down to the basement to play. In one corner, not even all that hidden, I came across a bunch of pornographic movies and magazines. At first I just stared at the images of naked women in disbelief. I knew it was wrong. But I was already excited. Even though it was bad—or maybe because it was bad—I was tempted to look, just like JoNathan and I did with the Escapade channel. I opened a magazine and examined a picture. I was too young to do more than stare, but I liked how it made me feel. I got a rush from doing something I wasn’t supposed to do.
And then, suddenly, I was afraid. I threw down the magazine and looked up quickly. The basement was empty. No one had seen me. But God had seen me. If he’d come down to earth at just that moment, I would have been left behind for sure. I had to pray
to be forgiven and swear never to look again. I ran back upstairs feeling nervous and uncomfortable, hoping if I kept my promise I’d avoid getting in trouble.
I WANTED SO MUCH MORE. I HATED THE DRINKING AND STUPIDITY I saw around me. The divide between all I wanted for myself and the limitations of my surroundings pressed down upon me. There was Uncle Jesse, who drank so much he developed gout and lost both his legs. And still, he got us kids to bring him drinks in his wheelchair, even though he was already slurring so badly he could hardly speak.
My step-grandfather, William, who once told my mother I was the ugliest baby he’d ever seen, put on overalls every Saturday and detailed his Cadillac for hours, paying more attention and care to that car than he ever did to his own family. When finished, he dressed up and rode around in that highly polished car until early Sunday morning, leaving my grandmother at home.
Even my own father had a double life. We sometimes received strange calls at our house from some woman telling Trish what her husband was up to on the side.
“Who are you?” Trish hissed into the phone. “Leave us alone. You’re gonna have to bring that up with him. I don’t care.”
She slammed the phone down. But she couldn’t make it go away.
Another time, Marcelle and I were standing in front of the church with Trish when some lady came up to us from out of the crowd. She scowled at Trish.
“You know your husband ain’t no good, right?” she said.
The three of us stood together, glaring back at her until she was gone.
“What was that?” I asked Trish.
“Nothing,” she said.
Big Terry had too much silence about everything, and he wouldn’t talk about anything. He just got drunk, and cried, and listened to his records.
“Man, I messed up,” he said.
We knew he was making penance somehow, but we never knew for what. I didn’t want to be like any of these examples, but they were the men I saw around me. So if I wasn’t going to be like them, how was I going to be?
I tried to glean information about the other men in my family. The stories were colorful, but not very clear. The only photo I ever saw of my paternal grandfather, James Crews, was a mug shot from when he was arrested for drunk driving. He had died in a car crash, which was all I knew of him, and I never met him.
On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather, General Simpson, and his brothers, Buddy and Arthur, were not to be played with. My great-uncle Arthur had quite the reputation. A very handsome man, he had ladies of all kinds competing for his attention. One time, he was having an affair with a man’s wife. When the husband found out, he beat his wayward spouse. Arthur then went over to the man’s house, beat him up in front of his wife, and told him if he ever put his hands on her again he’d kill him. The man never touched his wife again.
Arthur was not the subservient black man, either. When he lived in Florida, a white man once threatened him. He knocked the guy out cold in the street and was promptly arrested. This not being the first time he’d behaved in this way, a mob of concerned white citizens formed outside the jail. A police officer sympathetic to Arthur’s plight sneaked him out the back door to safety. Arthur quickly made his way to Flint, knowing that if he stayed down south, his days on earth were numbered.
My Uncle Buddy had the biggest biceps I’d ever seen. He had a job cleaning and servicing planes at the Tampa airport, and his arms were unbelievably huge. He often flexed his biceps and asked Marcelle and me to try to make it go down. We punched, squeezed, even hung on it, but it was no use. It was like hanging on a tree branch. I wanted to be that strong, and I also wanted to be as funny and personable as my Uncle Buddy. But for all the fun he was, he also had a flip side. He’d been known to yank a man out of his seat with one arm just for looking at him wrong, and it was understood that many a man had been on the wrong side of his punches. But he was my uncle, and he loved me, and I always saw his good side.
My grandfather, General Simpson, lived in a small house on the outskirts of Flint. He and my grandmother, Mama, had been married for a few years when my mother and Aunt Paulette were born, but they divorced soon after. He worked in a fish market and had a gentle toughness about him that I loved. He was never harsh with Marcelle or me. When he smiled, wrinkles formed at the corners of his eyes, making them sparkle. It took a while, but I now see the same wrinkles around my own eyes when I smile. When we were small, he picked Marcelle and me up in his long, boxy Buick, a toothpick pointing to and fro in his mouth as he worked it around in his cheek, and a tan straw fedora slightly askew on his head with a small feather in its band. He took us to his latest girlfriend’s house, and we hung out with their family until it was time for us to go. Not a lot of conversation, or a buckled seat belt on any of these trips, just an appreciation for the fact that he actually wanted to spend time with us. He was lonely, and I’d like to think having us with him helped.
My grandmother, Mama, later bought the duplex next door to my family’s house as an income property. General had become very sick, and my mother was the only one looking after him, so he moved into one of the two apartments. One day, he and my Aunt Paulette got into a heated argument about how he was not there for them when she was a little girl. He tried to defend himself, but she hauled off and slapped him across the face as hard as she could. Everyone stopped and stared. He held his face and looked at her incredulously, then silently walked out the door.
To this day, the memory of that scene hurts me. Maybe he had not been the best father, but I had never seen him be violent or abusive to anyone, and even my grandmother never told tales of domestic violence or abuse. In fact, he still loved her, and often told her so when she visited him on his deathbed.
THE TRUTH WAS, I WAS MORE LIKE THE MEN IN MY FAMILY than I would have cared to admit. It was definitely difficult to be good all of the time. When I felt anxious, my thoughts whipped back to the moment I’d stood in my Uncle John’s basement, and how the pictures I’d found there had pushed everything else out of my mind. When it was time for my flute lesson, I snuck down into his basement again and again. I still wanted very much to be the good kid at church, and to be right with God, but I was soon creeping away to look at pornography whenever I could.
When Trish and I ran errands, I told her I was going to the drugstore to look at comic books, but I knew they kept copies of Playboy and Penthouse out with the rest of the magazines, and I stood there and flipped through the images for as long as I could get away with it. More than once my reverie was interrupted by a familiar scolding voice, and my blood seemed to freeze in my veins.
“Boy, I sent you in here to get something for me,” Trish said. “And you’re looking at that stuff?”
I quickly tossed the magazine back on the shelf and pretended I had no idea what she was talking about. She never really disciplined me because, to do so, she would have had to acknowledge the content I’d been exposed to, and she wasn’t about to sit down and have a real conversation with Marcelle and me about sex or anything else. Plus, it would have been impossible for her to restrict our lives much more than she already did. We couldn’t watch secular movies in theaters or listen to secular music, and we were forbidden to date or go to dances. And by that point, my interest in pornography went way beyond just a passing curiosity. The next opportunity I had, I snuck back into the drugstore. And I found other ways to see such images.
Ever since JoNathan and I had learned how to fix the cable box so the adult channel, Escapade, came through, we looked at it every chance we got. I’d seen pornography before, but this was the first time I’d viewed pornographic movies, and they captivated me completely. Looking back, I can see why. Not only were they full of sex, which thrilled me, but also, most of them were warped versions of children’s stories: Jack and Jill, Alice in Wonderland, Goldilocks. Here we were, two “saved” kids, sneaking peeps at adult movies in between church services. Guilt made me think twice, but I’d soon figured out that our cable box at home worke
d the same way.
Marcelle and I were in our room one afternoon when we heard Trish leave the house. As soon as her car door slammed outside and the engine noise grew faint, I looked up from my comic book to where Marcelle was studying on his bed.
In unison, we both jumped up and hurried into our parents’ bedroom, where they had a cable box on their TV. I quickly moved the channel indicator up to the right spot, my heart beating fast, even though I knew Trish would be gone for at least an hour, and there was no real danger of getting caught. As soon as I found the sweet spot, an image of two naked bodies moving together on a bed came into view. I felt all of the tension within me release.
I soon established a pattern where, anytime I was dealing with anxiety, I acted out with pornography. On the one hand, I felt bad because I knew I shouldn’t do so, but at the same time, it was exhilarating, a rush, like taking a drug. And it was a way to rebel against my incredibly strict mother.
Once I had access to pornography in our house, that’s when it first became a problem for me. I watched it every chance I got. Marcelle watched it, too. Until the day he came into the living room, caught sight of the TV, and stopped short.
“Man, I’m not doing that anymore,” he said. “I don’t need it.”
I stared at him for a long moment. I knew I should stop, too. But I couldn’t.
“Shoot, you can go ahead,” I said. “I’m gonna watch.”
I felt guilty as he went upstairs without me, but I didn’t turn it off.
And then, one afternoon when I was about twelve, I was sitting on the couch alone, watching the Escapade channel, when I heard a noise behind me. Trish had crept downstairs and snuck up behind me.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I looked back and forth between her furious expression and the screen.
“Oh my God, what are you watching?” she said, her voice growing more and more agitated as she realized what was on the screen. “What are you watching?”
