Welcome to My Breakdown

by Benilde Little

  But when I got to Howard, any notion that we were “comfortable” went out the window. Many kids there were from families who were third- and fourth-generation college educated; their fathers were federal and state supreme court judges, surgeons, and boldface-name entrepreneurs. There were also the activist kids (some who came from those same types of backgrounds), the art kids, and the Greeks (usually Southerners who were legacies).

  The second student I met when I got to Howard was a girl I’ll call Linda. She was a transfer student from Boston College, and we met sweating it out waiting on the registration line. The building my roommates and I lived in had a pool, and I was planning to go home to get in it as soon as the process was over. Linda was outgoing and comical. She talked as if we had known each other forever, and she invited herself over. We began hanging out from that point till we graduated three years later. It took me a semester to get my bearings, and Linda, who was a native Washingtonian, served as my guide to local mores. She knew who was who in high-income DC zip codes, whose daddy was a doctor, and who lived on the Gold Coast, even though she lived in the more modest section of Northeast. I had no idea that Black people like this existed, and I was fascinated. Linda took me to parties where almost everyone looked biracial. Few natty dreads and kufis in these crowds, and some of the houses had indoor pools. It took me a while to notice that most of the girls and a fair number of the guys had light bone or beige or golden skin with straight or curly hair. They were considered the beautiful ones. I’d come from a place where beauty was more democratic. To Linda, my experience was just as foreign.

  The third friend I made was Monique Greenwood. We were both journalism majors and had a lot of the same classes. One day as we were leaving one class on our way to the next, we noticed we were both huffing uphill, heading toward main campus, or the “Yard.” Monique was a deep fashion diva who would wear yellow pumps with purple tights and a black and white striped miniskirt. She was also from “the District,” but unlike Linda, whose mother was a teacher, Monique was from working-class folk who lived not far from campus. She also was very light-skinned but oblivious to the world that Linda had been presenting to me. My friendship with Monique was formed based on our common major and ambition. She wanted to be a fashion journalist, and I wanted to cover hard news. Thirty-five years later, she is still one of my closest friends; her husband, Glenn, is my daughter’s godfather and my husband’s best friend.

  Monique and I became close with another classmate, Lynne Scott (later Jackson), another driven student, who convinced us to run on her ticket for president of the School of Communications student government. I would become vice president, Monique secretary, and we drafted a male student from Radio, TV and Film, Wendell Williamson, to be treasurer. We won, and that began my career as a student leader. We went on to run the college newspaper, The Hilltop, with Lynne as editor in chief, me as campus news editor, and Monique in charge of the supplement, “Extensions,” which covered, among other things, fashion. The Hilltop was then headquartered in an old house on Bryant Street, near the all-girls dorm, Bethune Hall. All of us editors were at the Hilltop house every day, and I loved every minute. It felt as if we were part of a TV version of college life. In addition to assigning and editing stories, I also had a column called What’s the Deal? that answered student questions about issues on campus, usually related to the poorly run administration.

  Some people say that Black schools don’t teach students how to deal in the real world. I no longer debate them. I’ve come to understand that unless they’ve been there, most people just don’t get it. Going to school with people who look like you, race becomes ancillary, and that is freedom. Freedom allows people to be who they are. Freedom allowed me to become who I am as a person, not just as a Black person or as a woman. It also helped me to be someone who is comfortable in her skin and with all kinds of people, Black, White, and other. I got to see, to recognize, to live the overarching truth that under the skin, all people really are the same.

  While I was serious about my work as a student journalist, I also had serious college fun. Partying was usually Linda’s domain. She had a boyfriend who was also from DC and who was a law school classmate of Danny’s, so most of the parties I went to were with law, medical, and dental students; hence most of the guys I dated were in one of those schools. One of them was Steve. I met Steve at the annual welcome-back-to-school party on the lawn of the law school. He was wearing a Brown T-shirt. He had squinty eyes, honey-colored skin, and very loose, dark curls. Linda didn’t know who he was, but she knew how to find out. She was intrepid that way. I had no idea what Brown was, but she did and knew that one of her boyfriend’s law school classmates, Donna, had also gone there. She gave me Steve’s dossier—from New Orleans, a medical student. She sent him over to me to introduce himself, and we dated off and on for two years.

  When I graduated on a hot, muggy day in May in Washington, DC, my mother was in the audience beaming in the white suit she’d made on her Singer sewing machine. In all the pictures, at the center, she is there, surrounded by Daddy; Marc and his then-wife, Judy, who was pregnant with my nephew Matthew; Duane and his girlfriend Willa; my nephew Kamal, who was three years old and dressed in a red blazer and bow tie; and me. I’d seen Mom that happy only a handful of times in my life. I should have handed my diploma over to her, but I didn’t understand then what I know now, that it was her force of will that had pushed me to this point. She had a belief that I could do something great, a vision that I hadn’t even imagined for myself until Howard. Instinctively and with the same bull-like drive, I would one day do the same with my own children, pushing them not just for the sake of it, but from a knowing that they possessed something unique in themselves that they couldn’t yet see.

  (Clockwise, from left) Tony Simmons, me, Monique Greenwood, Stephanie Harris, and Glenn Pogue.

  One of my mother’s big beliefs was in exposure. She felt in her bones that Black people could overcome any obstacle by getting out of their familiar worlds. She used to take us to plays, which we liked, and museums, which we didn’t. When she’d drag us through yet another museum, I’d ask her why we had to do this, and she’d say, “Culture.” Why’d I have to take piano and ballet lessons? Her answer: “Culture.” I didn’t know what that meant, and I’m not sure that she did, either.

  In addition to our summer day trips to Lake Hopatcong and two weeks at the Jersey Shore, our family took road trips. The farthest was to Montreal in 1967 for the World’s Fair. Mom also set an example for us by reading widely. I remember her laughing out loud at Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, who was not only a Newark native but from our neighborhood. She also read James Baldwin and Jacqueline Susann, and subscribed to Life magazine. I would lie on the floor looking at the pictures in Life, entertaining myself for hours, even before I could read. My future as a journalist was already calling me.

  Mom and me, circa 1985.

  After Howard, I was accepted to a very prestigious graduate school in journalism. I’m not sure my mother realized that it was a very big deal, although I’m sure she researched it afterward. The first and second quarters went well, but in the third one I had a tough time. It was the broadcast sequence of the yearlong journalism program, and each day we’d go out with a team of three, rotating as the on-camera talent, the cameraperson, and the sound person. We would then have to edit our tapes and present them in class so that the teacher and our fellow students could critique us. Every time it was my turn to show my piece, my tape would make a pop-like sound and stop midway. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, and no professor ever offered an explanation. The tape kept snapping each time I tried to present my story and I was completely at a loss as to why. This went on for the entire quarter. At the very end, during our final documentary project, I finally figured out that the problem had to do with tracking. I needed to run blank tape first, before laying down the sound and picture.

  I couldn’t believe the solution was such a simple thing
. Why had no one bothered to mention it? I completed my final project, a ten-minute documentary on gun control, in the middle of the night. There were only two editing machines, and we had to fight to get to the sign-up sheet first in order to secure a decent time slot. It was the first time I’d ever suspected that I had been treated differently because of my race. I didn’t even know how to talk about how I felt. I was confused and lonely even though I had a small group of friends who were all the misfits in the otherwise White-bread land of Protestants: two other Blacks, two Jews, one of whom was a gay man, and an irreverent closeted gay WASP from Edina, Minnesota. I had never before had to wonder if my teachers’ unwillingness to help me was racism. Until then my world had been nurturing and mostly Black, so I had no experience with this feeling. The two teachers who taught video and radio broadcasting were high school graduates. The broadcast class counted for two grades and I got Cs. According to the school’s grading system, that was one too many. I flunked out with only one more quarter to go.

  I remember the sick feeling I had when I met with the two instructors in a small, airless office. I forced myself to hold on, not to let them see me cry. I couldn’t help feeling that these two journeymen in the news business were gleeful at my failure. Both of them used to tell us proudly how they hadn’t even attended college. One had been a news anchor in Jacksonville, Florida, and had worked with my brother Marc, who was by then a sports anchor. Smugly, he told me to think of my flunking out as “$17,000 worth of therapy,” the amount I’d spent on tuition, room, and board.

  I left quickly, ashamed, walking away from the tiny, hot office, down the stairs and outside the building to a phone booth. I dialed home. I was crying hard, screaming in fact, when my mother answered the phone. I had dropped to my knees in the tiny booth. Mom was trying to hear me, to understand what I was saying, but I was sobbing too much. She told me later she was scared out of her mind. She thought something had happened to me, that I’d been raped or had had my life threatened.

  When I could finally speak and told her what had happened, she was relieved and even a little angry.

  “That’s all?” she said. “That ain’t no big deal. Come home. Just come home.”

  I think I felt as bad about failing as I did about having to tell my mother. I didn’t want to disappoint her. We’d been on such a high. I had finally given her the kind of success she could be proud of. I’d made up for my fresh-girl phase from high school, where I cut class, smoked weed, shoplifted. My shoplifting days during my sophomore year of high school ended when I got caught leaving Valley Fair with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On album tucked under my shirt. Instead of pressing charges, the store detective called my mother. She came and got me, and when we got home she made me get on my knees and beg God to forgive me.

  I’d come out of my rebellion, and better than most had expected.

  When I was in college, I recall overhearing Mom brag about my work on the college newspaper on the phone with her girlfriends, the same ones she’d previously fretted to about me. It used to thrill me inside. I hadn’t known how much I wanted my mother’s approval, although I always knew I had her love. I’d feel it in the way she kissed me on both cheeks and then rubbed in the lipstick stain on the mornings I’d greet her downstairs at the front door after her night shift at the hospital. Still dressed in her mint-green uniform, support hose, and white nurse’s shoes, she smelled of coffee and cigarettes and Avon lipstick. I always loved the way she looked in her uniform, so competent. “Now you have rouge,” she’d say as she rubbed the lipstick stain with a circular motion into my cheek. Then she’d safety-pin an ironed handkerchief onto my skirt before I left for school across the street.

  I was remembering all this as I exited the phone booth that day. As my sobbing abated and I dried my tears, I thought: This time, it’s my mother who is waiting. I understood then that no matter what happened, whatever I did or didn’t do, as long as Clara was alive, there would always be someone waiting to welcome me home.

  6

  Labor Day Weekend 1991

  Cliff and me after coming home from our St. Bart’s honeymoon, 1992.

  I MET Cliff at the end of summer on a beach in Sag Harbor, a community on the tip of Long Island, New York. Sag Harbor is part of a cluster of tony beach towns jointly referred to as the Hamptons. There was a time when Sag Harbor stood apart—a little like Quogue, Water Mill, and Sagaponack—as the un-Hamptons or the quiet Hamptons. Now it’s as crowded and as loudly entitled as the rest. The Hamptons are like Manhattan without the poor people, I once heard someone say.

  There is a Black enclave in Sag Harbor, where three strips of mostly modest houses converge onto a small, private bay. This area was established in the first part of the 1900s, but there were Blacks working as whalers in Sag Harbor as early as 1800. All the Black people pretty much know one another, if not directly then distanced by only one degree of separation. The majority of the natives, meaning the original summer people, came from the city—Harlem, Queens, and Brooklyn—and were doctors, teachers, municipal workers, and business owners.

  That summer, I had rented an attached cottage from my friend and Essence magazine colleague Audrey Edwards, who owned a house in Nineveh. I loved the beach. I could sit on the sand all day, even in dreary weather and read, think, or just stare at the water. When you live in the city, summer turns the cement and crowds into an unbearable crush of steam and bodies. For me, it was crucial to get away and see the sky and be with ocean, grass, and trees.

  At the beginning of my rental, Memorial Day weekend, I’d gotten clear enough to write a “Dear John” letter to my then boyfriend, let’s call him Bruce, ending our three-year on-again, off-again relationship. I’d finally run out of stamina.

  A few weeks into the summer, I had to leave my beach paradise for a week to travel on assignment for Essence, where I worked as a senior editor. I’d come to Essence from People magazine, which is a part of the behemoth publishing company Time Inc. It was the kind of company where benefits were plentiful and work was cushy and people stayed for a lifetime, but when I was offered a job at Essence, then only a single magazine—before the music festivals, multiple award shows, and long before Time Inc. owned it—I decided to take it. I would have much more responsibility there than I would have had if I’d stayed at People. At Essence I was involved in choosing cover subjects and responsible for all the artists featured in the magazine: singers, actors, authors, dancers, painters, and filmmakers. For five years at People, my attempts to move up were met with, “Just wait.” A lot of people thought I was crazy to leave Time Inc. for Essence. I didn’t agree then and I don’t now, although I do wish I’d taken advantage of Time Inc.’s stock options. But I hadn’t met Cliff yet and didn’t know the difference between a stock and a sock.

  My assignment that July would take me to Southern France to do a piece on the brilliant dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones. Bill wasn’t yet as famous as he would later become, at least not with a Black audience, and his people wanted that to change. I leapt at the chance to go, and when I finally met him, I was happy I did. Bill is a combination of grand and grounded. His diction is somewhat majestic but he never tried to distance himself from his migrant farming background. He owned all of himself and I remember feeling like I wanted to be able to do that; I fell under his spell. In those years, smoking was still allowed on planes. I was on Air France, seated in the last row before the smoking section, and I complained. To make amends, the flight attendants kept bringing me wine; even cheap wine from France tastes good. They kept bringing and I kept drinking, even though I wasn’t much of a drinker then. At some point I looked at my travel itinerary and realized that Bill wasn’t performing for three days after the dance festival began. I didn’t have to be in Montpellier for three days, which meant I could get off in Paris and spend the time there. With the encouragement of the wine and my seatmate, Flame (yes, that was her name), who was from San Francisco and who was going to Paris to spend three weeks with
an American expat she’d met once in a deli in Manhattan, I made a plan.

  I had the name of an inexpensive hotel where Mikki Taylor, the Essence beauty editor, had once stayed. Flame’s would-be lover met us at the gate and called the hotel for me, asking in French if there was a vacancy. I booked the room right then and there, they put me on a bus, we waved good-bye, and I was off on my adventure. It happened to be July Fourth, three days before my birthday. The detour was a glorious, spontaneous mini-vacation for me. It was my thirty-third birthday, and I celebrated it by doing one of things I most loved—wandering around a city, this one of light and love and all things chic, and where, at least then, Black Americans were still beloved.