This Is Just My Face

by Gabourey Sidibe

  I was twenty-four when I finally got my first weave. It was a gift from the hairstylist on the set of Precious. I loved it! It made doing my hair so easy. I’d flat-iron my weave, comb it down, and leave the house, swinging my hair just like those girls in high school. I’d toss my head and twirl my weave around my finger, and that’s when I started to figure out how to draw confidence from my hair. All I had to do was give up the ability to scratch my scalp. (It’s impossible to even touch my scalp with two layers of hair—mine and someone else’s—and a net to keep everything down.)

  Weaves have been a godsend. Shooting for film and television requires hair continuity. I spend weeks filming a ton of scenes in the same outfit, and my hair has to be exactly the same as well. On average, I probably get my hair done six times a day. If my own hair was flat-ironed or curled that many times, it would fall out. But if the weave falls out, they just sew in a new one. I always wear them when I’m working, and they make me feel normal. (I just wish that word normal didn’t hold so much weight for me.)

  My gray hair has been gone for years. I can’t explain what happened. In my twenties I suddenly started to notice less and less of it until there wasn’t any at all. Perhaps I’ve run out of luck or wisdom. Maybe I’m the real-life Benjamin Button and I’m growing backward so the older I get, the younger and more beautiful I appear to be. That’s explanation enough for me.

  My hair and I have been through a lot (it’s been on fire twice). There are many more hair battles to come, but I know my strength and beauty start at the roots. I’ve realized that black women have the most beautiful hair: long hair, weaves or natural; bobs, cut straight or asymmetrical; braids; dreads; Afros; shaved bald; faded with a flat top. Our hair can be anything! Choose a color, choose a texture, and our hair can do it. There’s an entire Black Woman Hair Universe of Possibilities. I’ve always felt like I was on the outside of that universe looking in and longing to be bold enough to be a part of it. My hair has been through so much trauma that I’m afraid to venture out into the vast terrain of the beauty my hair could be. I’m working on it! I’m just starting to figure out the wonder of each curly tress.

  6

  Make a Wish

  Do you sing like your mom?

  —fans of my mother’s

  I’VE BEEN DOING THIS THING with my mom where I ask her really personal questions. I’m no longer a teenager so I see the value in her words and experiences. Her grandmother was born a slave! My mom’s filled with interesting things to say. I always feel like a real adult when I sit across from her and ask her horribly intrusive questions and then she answers them honestly. For this conversation, we were sitting around my dining-room table in my small yet expensive and kind of fancy apartment in New York City. The last time the two of us sat at this table, we were trying to mend fences after a fight. I had hurt my mother’s feelings, but apologizing wasn’t enough since she thought I’d hurt her on purpose. The fight had dragged on for months and was still pretty alive. I remember yelling at her, “You see these walls? You see these ceiling-to-floor windows? This apartment that I live in alone? It’s EXPENSIVE! I pay for it all by myself, and when you need my help, I pay for your walls, too! I don’t have the time to plan out something terrible to do to you! I’m not plotting on how to purposely hurt your feelings. I’m a grown-up and I’m too busy working to keep roofs over our heads to take the time to try to hurt you!”

  That fight was pretty intense, but on this day Mom and I were fine. Neither of us were mad, and I was realizing how little time we actually got to spend with each other. I thought, Now’s a great time to get to know her as a person instead of just a mom.

  “Do you think you have more money than your parents had?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” she answered. “Daddy hauled lumber and MaDear cleaned white folks’ houses for a dollar a day. I didn’t know we were poor, though. MaDear would get stuff from the people she worked for. They’d give her a broken TV or broken chairs, and we would fix them up. MaDear made our couch! And Daddy was so smart. He gave the whole neighborhood electricity. Daddy fixed a broken TV, and we were the only family in the neighborhood who had one. People used to come over every night to watch. House was always full of people so . . . I didn’t know we were poor. We were popular. I had a great time!”

  I envied her childhood. I envy her adulthood sometimes, too. Once when Mom and I were in a different fight, different yet the same as that other fight (Moms! Am I right?), she said to me, “I guess it’s harder to raise children in New York City. I had a great life growing up in Georgia. It’s too bad you didn’t get to experience happiness like I did as a child.”

  Aunt Dorothy was my mother’s sister. She was the only person I knew who had a staircase in her house like people on TV. The rest of my mother’s family, who lived in one-level homes in the South, didn’t have staircase money, but Aunt Dorothy did.

  As for us, when we left my father, we went from a three-bedroom apartment to just one room in that house, so the staircase turned out to be beside the point. My brother and I weren’t really allowed out into the rest of the house, so our one room was where we lived. My mom bought a TV and a microwave for our room. It dawned on me that finally we were poor. Actually poor! No matter how little I asked of my mother, no matter how much I worried, we were poor anyway. My nightmares had come true.

  I was always worried about money as a child. At the age of seven, I’d be really excited to go get the mail, and I complained that the only people who got any mail were my parents. My dad joked that he should put the electric bill in my name. I didn’t get my dad’s humor back then as it so rarely showed its head. I panicked. I had never thought about paying bills before, but all of a sudden I was responsible for keeping the electricity on in the entire apartment! Again, I wasn’t. But I was forever changed and made aware that everything had a cost.

  While I didn’t yet know that we were poor, I knew we weren’t rich because we weren’t white. Back then I thought that being rich was only for white people and Michael Jackson. We lived in a three-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms and a terrace in Brooklyn. Of course we weren’t poor! Duh! But I started asking how much everything cost. I was worried about what we could afford. I stopped begging for things, and started asking, “Can you afford to buy me this?” while ready to accept the answer if it was no. (I don’t remember if I ever got an answer at all. I probably didn’t.) When my parents asked what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would comb through the Toys“R”Us catalog in the weekly paper for toys I didn’t necessarily want, but that I felt were inexpensive enough. I was just doing my part to keep us from being poor. Maybe I am a good person?

  After we moved, I blamed our new poverty on my father, who was still in our old three-bedroom apartment that was basically a mansion compared to our new standard of living, and I was pissed. As an adult, as soon as I figured out I didn’t want to grow up in Brooklyn anyway, I assigned less blame on my father, at least moving-wise, but when I was a child, it was really comforting to place blame on him for our situation. I had worried myself into believing that if I wasn’t selfish I could keep my family from living on the streets. I’d conned myself when I was just a child into being responsible for an entire family. Fuck that noise. It was really nice to come face-to-face with my fear and get to blame it on someone else. I truly hated my father then, and that hate brought me a calming joy for a while. A peace of mind. It wasn’t my fault. It was his. Now I can just go back to being a kid!

  Then my mom quit her job as a teacher. Technically, she went on a leave of absence. I can’t remember my outward reaction to this, but my inside reaction was a constant scream of “ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY? YOU QUIT YOUR JOB????????!!!!!!” I can’t imagine I said that aloud, but I was worried again. When we left my father, I assumed I was going to have just one parent supporting us now. My mom. What the fuck was that one parent doing quitting her job? She was going to make money singing in the subway and maybe get discovered there. My uncle Roger had
been a subway performer for years at that point. He was a big man with a powerful voice. Uncle Roger played guitar while singing blues covers and Motown standards. He made his own schedule, was his own boss, and raised his three children pretty well. After sometimes going to sing with him in the subway and seeing that he made enough money to survive, my mother was going to follow her brother Roger’s example and do it on her own.

  The great thing about this very scary plan was that my mom is a phenomenal singer. The terrible thing about this plan was that not every phenomenal singer gets discovered. I was worried my mom didn’t have enough that was special to set her apart from all the other great singers. She had two kids, a broken marriage, and lived in her sister’s guest room. That’s not how Whitney Houston started her career. I was very pessimistic. I didn’t believe in my mother then because I didn’t believe in dreams coming true then. The irony of me as a grown-up being a fat black woman on prime-time television isn’t lost on me. I’ll get to that, but first I’ll remind you that being on TV wasn’t my dream then. At the time, it seemed like my mom was expecting a miracle, and I just didn’t believe in those.

  My mom pretty much decided her own hours, and she made money exclusively in cash tips. On average, she made between $200 and $300 a shift, and worked between four and five days a week. So that’s $800 or $900 a week. This was as much as she’d made in a month working for the New York City Public Schools. But this did nothing to alleviate my fears. I was afraid because she had no insurance. She couldn’t work every day because her instrument was her throat. If she sang every day, she’d go hoarse and be unable to sing, meaning she’d make no money at all. I lived in constant fear of her getting sick and losing her voice. Who would take care of us? Certainly not my dad. As far as I was concerned, he no longer had any responsibility toward us. We weren’t family anymore.

  My mom paid rent to my aunt Dorothy. But Dorothy was often annoyed with us. I didn’t put it past her to kick us out of her house. As an adult, I don’t think she would have, but as a kid, I couldn’t and didn’t trust her. I knew she didn’t want us around. I can’t say I blame her. I was a smart-mouthed asshole of a kid, and my brother was an angry child who drew patterns in her carpet with dish soap.

  My mom would take us with her when she sang in the subway on weekends and in the evenings because my aunt didn’t like us in the house by ourselves. Ahmed and I would sit together on a bench on the platform and watch people commute to and from work. Commute to and from their homes. Commute to and from fancier lives than ours. My mother could always command a crowd to stand around and watch her in awe. Some people would miss their trains to listen to her sing their favorite song. People would dance and sing along. She made them forget about their long days in the office. She made people happy. I watched her work her magic on everyone. Everyone but me. I watched her and I was scared. I was scared of more than just being evicted by my aunt, more than just my mom getting sick. Watching all those people put money in my mom’s bag as she sang made me worry that someone was watching her and waiting to knock her down and steal that money from her. From us. I was afraid that she would get hurt. I was also afraid that one day I’d have to do what she was doing. That I’d have to grow up and become a singer in the subway like her but that I wouldn’t be as good as her because I wasn’t as good as her. That’s a lot to worry about as a child.

  If my brother was worried like me, he didn’t show it. I think he thought we were doing pretty well; he could see the money she made. Also, Ahmed was super into trains as a kid, so he loved watching the trains come in and out of the stations. A lot of times, he would get on a train, ride around for a few hours, and then come back. This was before cell phones. Can you even imagine a nine-year-old riding the subway by himself for hours at a time? They don’t make kids like they used to. Ahmed and I were scrappy! I didn’t dig being on trains as much, so I would wander around the train station. Whenever our mom played Penn Station, I would stroll from store to store checking out magazines and books. I usually brought my own books or my homework, but I was always in the market for a new book to read. There was a bookstore down there called Penn Books, and I loved it. I was in there all the time, and the people who worked there would turn a blind eye whenever I picked up a book and sat on the floor to read it. It was quiet there, which I liked. I couldn’t hear any trains, I couldn’t hear any crowds, and I couldn’t hear my mother singing to pay the rent. As long as I couldn’t hear it, I didn’t have to admit that it was happening.

  If Ahmed and I stood where my mom could see us, and we could see her, eventually people would notice us and come over and want to talk about our mom. I think that made my brother feel kind of famous, but I hated it. I have always had a hard time with strangers, as I’ve definitely mentioned, but strangers who just wanted to talk about how wonderful and talented my mom was were especially unwelcome. They’d say, “Your mom is incredible!” and I’d reply, “Yeah.” It felt like I should say, “Thank you,” but I knew I had nothing to do with my mom’s talent so that felt wrong. “Yeah” was the end of the conversation. Also, speaking as a grown-up, Um . . . so? Like you think Lourdes is just a little bit tired of hearing how amazing her mom Madonna is? I feel this is something only a child of a celebrity understands. People would talk to me about how amazing my mom was and how they didn’t know why she wasn’t signed to a label or on the radio and how she made them so happy and how her music changed their lives. What was I supposed to do with that? I was proud of my mom, but I still went to bed in the same room she and my brother did and was too scared to ask her for money for a school trip because I was afraid we could be put out on the streets. (Actually, now that I think about it, Lourdes probably has it pretty good on the money-anxiety front.)

  My mom didn’t always take us with her. A lot of times, she was still at work when we got home from school. Ahmed and I didn’t have keys to our aunt’s house so we would stand outside ringing the doorbell and praying that someone was home. A few times, no one was, so we’d stand on the steps outside waiting for what felt like hours. Nothing makes you feel poorer than waiting outside in the cold of winter for your single mom to show up and let you in. We didn’t know the neighbors well enough to knock on their doors and ask them if we could wait there. My brother was always down to do that, but I was never willing to burden anyone else with us latchkey kids without a key. To make things worse, I always had to pee, so . . . ya know. Uncle Roger lived five blocks away, so occasionally we would walk over to his house and stay there until my mother got home. Eventually, Mom gave us her house key, but we couldn’t let my aunt know we were in her house alone. I guess she thought we’d break something or maybe we’d like join a cult and sacrifice a body in her kitchen. I’m not sure what she was afraid of. Maybe just of letting a nine- and ten-year-old alone in a three-story house. I’m actually too jaded to know if that’s something to be worried about or not. Either way, the worst thing we ever did was fight over the TV. We weren’t allowed to pick up the phone in case it was Dorothy checking to see if we were alone. My mom came up with a signal for us. If the phone rang once, stopped, and then started ringing again, it was Mom, calling us to ask what we wanted for dinner and say that she was on her way home. Wasn’t the world crazy before cell phones?

  As an adult, I see that I shouldn’t have worried so much. I should’ve had some hope that our situation would get better. I should’ve believed that one day my mom would be discovered singing down there in the subway. She knew how to walk into a room and make people fall for her. Even if that room was Grand Central Station. She believed in a bigger life for herself and her children. She was truly happy when she was out there singing for an audience that would become her fans. I’m sure she had rough moments when she didn’t know how she would take care of the three of us, but she never let Ahmed and me see her worry. She believed in her magic. I wished then that I was more like my mother. I wish I was more like her now.

  My mom wasn’t wrong about things working out. Soon after
she began singing in the subway, she started getting hired to do private gigs. She would sing at weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate parties, birthday parties, and whatever else people wanted to celebrate. This was a good thing because she made more money doing private gigs. Not just tips like in the subway.

  Once she was hired to sing at a fair for families who lived in homeless shelters on Long Island. She took Ahmed and me with her, and we met the families and played games with them. My mom sang and everyone enjoyed her. I saw that our situation could be much worse. My mom reminded me that day to be grateful instead of fearful, and it worked for a while.

  Once my mom got a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation. There was a girl with a terminal illness who’d seen my mom singing in the subway, and now it was her dying wish to hang out with her. Mom met with her and took her singing in the subway. The girl was a few years older than Ahmed or I. She was a teenager, she was dying, and she just wanted to sing with my mom before she died. I remember Mom calmly and cheerfully agreeing to this last wish over the phone. She didn’t seem saddened by it. I was ready to throw myself off a roof just so I didn’t have to think about a dying kid, but Mom saw this as an opportunity to share her gift with a fan and make her happy. She always sees opportunity where I see only fear and death. I stayed awake for days thinking about that girl who in her last days probably liked Mom more than I did. I never spoke to my mom about her. I didn’t ask all the questions I wanted to ask to alleviate my fears. I remember the girl dying. As of a conversation I had with Mom ten minutes ago, one of those conversations where I ask her really personal questions, she doesn’t remember the girl at all. But Mom wasn’t surprised to hear that hanging out with her was someone’s dying wish. I can’t tell if that’s being aware of one’s gift or evidence of a severely narcissistic ego. It’s probably a pretty thin line.