When Robert was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for his father to hit him. Robert was thrust into the role of fathering five kids, and I think he was trying to raise the boys the way he’d been brought up. He was hard on my brothers, especially Chris, who was rambunctious and loud.
Once when Chris was boiling the rice for dinner, he burned the grains into a thick crust in the bottom of the pot. Robert literally dragged him back to the kitchen by his ear. “Clean it up!” he screamed, and Chris quickly obeyed. Another time, for an infraction I can no longer remember, Robert hit Chris with a frying pan.
Sometimes Robert encouraged violence rather than inflicting it.
Chris and Doug were arguing with each other one Saturday like they often did, this time about whose football team would have a better season.
“The Forty-Niners!” Chris shouted.
“You must be crazy,” Doug yelled. “Do you know what Randall Cunningham has done for the Eagles this year?”
Suddenly, Robert intervened. “Since you guys can’t agree, you’ll have to fight it out.”
Robert made the boys walk behind him out to the backyard. Then he got some of the rags he used to buff his Jeep from inside the garage. He wrapped my brothers’ fists.
“Now,” Robert screamed. “Fight!”
It was an awful ritual that we’d see again and again, a battle royal that seemed designed to showcase his power over us all. Mommy would stand to the side, watching and crying. But she never stopped it. The fight would usually end when one of my brothers would say he gave up and both were in tears.
We grew to be terrified of Robert. When we heard his Jeep barreling around the corner, rumbling into the long driveway, we’d scramble, picking up toys, straightening up magazines, afraid that if the house wasn’t clean and organized the way Robert liked it, there would be hell to pay. Erica began to spend the night at a friend’s house as often as she could. And Doug and Chris spent a lot of time in their room.
I’d often join my brothers there, crawling into Doug’s top bunk, where we’d listen to tapes of New Edition, or the latest rhymes from MC Hammer and LL Cool J.
“Mr. Telephone Man, there’s something wrong with my line.” Doug and I would bop our heads to the beat. We felt safe there together, just us and our music.
But we could avoid Robert for only so long, and we didn’t have to do much to make him angry. And though he was tough on the boys for acting out, Lindsey didn’t have to do anything at all to earn his wrath.
Lindsey, our baby sister, was the spitting image of her father, Harold, with skin the color of caramelized butter and a tight tuft of dark brown curls. She looked more African American than any of our mixed-race clan, and it seemed that whenever there was a glass broken, a toy in the middle of the floor, or too much yelling on a Sunday morning, Lindsey was always, always to blame.
Often, when he was angry, he would call Lindsey a nigger.
It stunned me. That was a word I’d heard only in black-and-white documentaries about the bad old South. I knew it was a terrible thing to call my baby sister.
We’d hear that slur and many more often over the next few years. The Arab guy at the store was a “sand nigger.” Robert talked about smelly Indians. He’d use the N word when a black man cut him off on the freeway and talk about spics when he saw Latino teenagers hanging out on the playground.
Things just got worse between Robert and Mommy. She began to confide in us kids, telling us stories about Robert’s family that we really had no business hearing. Like how they didn’t believe our baby brother Cameron was Robert’s child, though by the time Cameron’s newborn smoothness disappeared and his features came into focus, it was clear he was the mirror image of his father.
Looking back, it’s clear that Robert’s family didn’t trust my mother. And as hateful as some of them were, in some ways I don’t blame them. Robert had a comfortable life on his own, and then all of a sudden this woman moved in with her five children. She was older than him, still married to another man, and they lived together a year and a half and had a baby before they finally headed to City Hall and became husband and wife. It was all very shady, and now, with the perspective that comes with distance and time, I can understand why they were wary.
But it was shocking to realize that for certain of them the main reason for hating my mother, for not wanting my brothers and sisters even to visit, seemed to be because we were black. It was the first time I’d felt any negativity because of the way my family looked or because of what we were.
Deep down, I believe Robert had to have had a good heart to marry a woman who had five children and—at least initially—to treat each of them like his own. He was also the father of my beloved baby brother Cameron, and I think he wanted to make his marriage work—for us to be a family. But there was such negativity and bigotry in his family, I think he succumbed to the pressure, and the ugliness that he’d grown up with began to ooze out of him as well.
I’d see bigotry again and again in my ballet career, and it would hurt every time. But after living with Robert it would no longer come as a surprise.
Like when I moved to New York when I was sixteen, and the other ballerinas would look at me, not sure that I was black but certain I wasn’t white, and proceed to ignore me.
Or when I tried out for six ballet companies’ summer programs, received invitations from all but one, and Cindy told me that the one rejection was because of the color of my skin.
“Save it,” Cindy told me, referring to the curt turndown that had come in the mail. “One day, they’ll be sorry.”
I don’t know if they ever were. But I still have that letter.
MOMMY STARTED COMPLAINING MORE and more about Robert.
“He’s got his nerve talking about folks,” she’d say. “Lots of people don’t like Asians, either.”
Or “He’d better watch his mouth. One day he’s going to call somebody a name, they’ll hear him, and he’s going to wind up beat down to the ground.”
But that was all muttered behind Robert’s back. When he was home, screaming at us, making the boys fight, repeating a racist joke and howling with laughter, she’d say nothing. She’d nervously look down at her lap, like there was some safe harbor there. But she wouldn’t rebuke him. She wouldn’t protect us. We kids were on our own.
Sometimes when Robert wanted Mommy to hurry up and clean the bathroom or get Cameron dressed, he would grab her by the arm and yank her. I began to see bruises peeking out from beneath the camisole she wore under her blouse.
About four years after we’d moved in with Robert, my mother told us kids that she was beginning to fear for her life. And so in the fifth month of my first year at Dana Middle School, it was again time to pick up and go.
A few weeks before we left, Mommy huddled us all together.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mommy said, practically whispering, though Robert had gone out. “Robert can’t have a hint that we’re leaving. When it’s time, I’ll let you know. Be ready.”
Mommy could be very dramatic. If the situation wasn’t so tense, it might even have been comical or fun. I could almost pretend we were actors in a spy flick, or co-conspirators planning our escape from a penal colony.
Erica, Doug, and Chris had never really liked Robert. They were devoted to Harold, whom we considered our real father (and whom we’d still see on many weekends). Years of being subjected to Robert’s yelling, name-calling, and sometimes violence had curdled my siblings’ dislike of him into hatred. Now that our getaway was being planned, they’d smirk when he screamed, knowing that they wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer. Mommy, too, would give us a knowing glance, almost a wink, during Robert’s tirades. Then she’d return her gaze to her lap and proceed to do whatever Robert told her to do.
One morning Robert got in his Jeep and headed to his office as usual. Mommy would usually leave about half an hour after he did and head to her job at an office products company.
But not tod
ay.
Lindsey, Erica, and I were buttoning our shirts and combing our hair when Mommy burst into our room and told us that we weren’t going to school.
“Today’s the day,” she said breathlessly.
We broke into a sprint, grabbing suitcases and stuffing them with whatever we could carry. With baby Cameron, there were seven of us now, but in most other ways we were leaving Robert’s home the way we had come, urgently, and with little more than the clothes on our backs.
About an hour later, a car pulled up in front of the house. There was a knock on the door.
“It’s time to go,” Mommy said, opening it.
Standing there was a tall, skinny white guy with wire-rimmed glasses and tousled brown hair. I’d never seen him before. He began carrying our suitcases to a Toyota I later learned he’d borrowed from a friend. It was parked behind Mommy’s gray Chevy Corsica.
“That’s Ray,” Mommy said hastily, filling her trunk with bags. Though the mysterious Ray was clearly playing a role in our escape, no one wanted to ride with him. Instead, we kids crowded into our mother’s car.
Mommy got behind the wheel, and my brothers, sisters, and I rounded those mountainous bends that seemed to leap toward the Pacific Ocean one last time.
I LOVE MY MOTHER, but I’ve never really understood her.
She was beautiful. Like Mariah, our mother had a flood of chestnut curls cascading down her back. Mommy’s locks were flecked with ruby and gold, and they formed a halo of ringlets around her deep brown eyes and sandstone skin.
She and Mariah Carey could have been sisters. That much was clear. Maybe that’s why our family loved the golden-locked singer so much. Erica would one day name her only daughter after her. And we played Mariah Carey’s debut album almost as much as we watched sports. “Vision of Love” was even my baby brother’s lullaby. Cameron would cry until he heard Mariah’s five-octave voice; when we popped in Mariah’s CD, he would curl up in his crib and fall fast asleep.
Wherever Mommy went, she was bound to be the prettiest woman in the room, and I would beam, waiting for everyone to realize that the beauty in their midst was my mother. She was impeccable, too, refusing even to walk to the mailbox without a swipe of coral lipstick or sweep of mascara.
Mommy always worked, usually in sales, though she’d been trained as a nurse back in Kansas City. After getting off work in the early evening, she’d drive to the Boys and Girls Club to pick up us kids. I think everyone there looked forward to hearing the staccato of her high heels clicking across the hardwood floors. They waited to greet her, from the teenage boy spiking a ball who would pause to give her a goofy grin to the male counselors who’d put their phone calls on hold, smooth their hair, and inevitably poke their heads out their office doors so they could say hello.
My brothers hated all the attention, especially Doug Jr. “Stay in the car and we’ll come out,” he’d grumble angrily just about every day. But she didn’t listen. I think the sweet asides felt too good. They were balms on tough days, a respite from what had too often been a tough, tragic life.
She wasn’t long out of high school when she married her first husband, Mike, who had a sky-high afro, Hershey-kissed skin, and a love for all things basketball. But a bullet took away his hoop dreams and all the other plans he and Mommy may have had for the future. He and Mommy had gone to Oakland, California, to help his younger brother, who they were afraid was involved in drugs, and Mike was shot and killed.
My mother cried and mourned with his best friend, Doug, and a year later they got married. That man, Doug Copeland, was my father.
I know that to survive such a childhood took resilience, and I always figured that my mother’s near-constant sorrow and loss helped fuel her devotion to my brothers, sisters, and me. With us, she had a family that wouldn’t fade away, that she could always carry with her. But as our lives began to repeat the rootlessness that had haunted her own itinerant childhood, I wondered why. Knowing what she had gone through, why didn’t she try harder to give us the stability she herself must have craved? I wanted to claim her perseverance as my emotional inheritance, not her dependence on men, or her frantic getaways into the night.
When we first left Robert, we went to stay in downtown L.A. with friends of our mother’s. Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles, as we called them, were wonderful, opening up their small home to Mommy, my siblings, and me. But despite their hospitality, my usual, everyday anxieties took a backseat to a fear of real, palpable danger, just as they had on Robert’s worst days.
I’d never lived in a place like this before. Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles’s neighborhood was Crips turf, the battleground of one of L.A.’s most infamous gangs. The men wore blue do-rags to pledge their allegiance to one violent faction or the other and scrawled their graffiti on fences and stop signs.
The Kansas City Chiefs decal Mommy sported in her car window seemed to agitate some of the gang members. The L.A. Raiders were a big deal in the city, unsurprisingly, but besides the tension football could cause among gang members, the Chief’s color was a bright Bloods red. All I really know is that they would give us hard looks as we rode by, and we worried about a bullet piercing the windshield every time Mommy drove us home from school.
We were right to. One evening we were in the living room watching television. There was the pop, pop of gunfire, then footsteps, and a heavy thud on Uncle Charles and Auntie Monique’s front porch.
We ran outside. A man, probably in his early twenties, was writhing in pain, blood spreading like an inkblot on his blue jeans.
“I’m hit,” he sputtered weakly.
Auntie Monique ran inside to call 911 while Uncle Charles shouted orders.
“Get some water,” he yelled. I ran inside, shoved a pot under the kitchen faucet, then ran back to the porch, water spilling onto the carpet along with my tears.
“What’s that?” Uncle Charles asked incredulously, cradling the wounded stranger’s head and looking at me as if I was crazy not to understand what the victim of a drive-by shooting needed as he waited for an ambulance. “The man is thirsty! He needs some water to drink.” I ran back in the house and grabbed a glass, feeling shaken and helpless.
I can’t remember what happened to that man, if he lived or died. We stayed with Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles for several weeks more, and when Mommy told us we were leaving, I was glad for once to be moving on. But my relief was shortlived.
It turned out that we were moving in with Ray, Mommy’s new boyfriend, whom none of us kids could stand. He was a nerd who tried entirely too hard to be cool, blasting Ice Cube and EPMD from morning till night.
“Yo, Doug! Erica! Pete Rock and CL Smooth just dropped a new jam,” he’d say. “Come hear it.”
Erica would roll her eyes and go back to reading a magazine. Doug would get a look on his face like he was ready to explode and go outside to practice his dribbling.
Mommy also started to change in a way that unnerved us all. Instead of being our stern, if exuberant, mother, she seemed to revert to some version of her teenage self. She and Ray got matching tattoos of each other’s name swirled in black ink on their shoulders. And Mommy would kiss Ray passionately in front of us, something she had never done with Harold or Robert. It made us sick.
My older siblings had begun to grow bitter toward Mommy when we lived with Robert, and now I started to get the same sour taste in my mouth. We wanted a mother who was responsible, who either stayed married or stayed single, and who put her children before some random man. In our sports-obsessed family we couldn’t understand how many marriages she had to fumble, how many relationships she had to lose, before she got out of the game. We couldn’t understand why she needed a man at all—why we children were never enough.
Ray worked at the office products company with Mommy, but didn’t seem to earn much. Mommy worked in sales, but her commissions ebbed and flowed. Robert had been the real breadwinner. So now money was tight. We subsisted on Top Ramen noodles, potato chips, a
nd soda pop, with an occasional can of vegetables thrown in. Mommy had never been much of a cook, rarely touching the stove. And again, she seemed content to shirk her responsibilities, giving Doug or Erica a few dollars culled from her paycheck or Ray’s to go grocery shopping. Then Chris—who had been Robert’s best student in the kitchen but was barely fifteen—would prepare the family meals, whipping up tacos or spaghetti from a couple of pounds of ground beef that he stretched as far as he could.
We stayed with Ray for about a year before moving even farther away from our onetime home in San Pedro to a town called Montebello, where we lived in another cramped apartment with Mommy’s next boyfriend, Alex. He was Latino and seemed a little more at ease in his own skin than Ray, but he wasn’t much more stable. We were never sure if Alex had a real job. And just like at Ray’s, Mommy and Alex slept in the one bedroom while we kids spread blankets and pillows wherever we could find a clear spot on the living room floor.
The neighborhoods where Ray and Alex lived weren’t dicey like the streets where Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles lived, but their apartments were meant as basic, temporary housing for young men who partied all night and woke up at noon, not for a family with six children. And in those cramped spaces, the scraping back of a kitchen chair or the ringing of the telephone seemed louder, as if the smallness and clutter amplified the sound.
We were coming undone. Mommy had always been a neat freak, but there were too many people and too little room to bother tidying up much. And she no longer wore her high heels and stylish suits. She had no reason to. Sometime between living with Ray and then Alex, Mommy had lost her last job and was struggling to find a new one. Our gray Chevy Corsica was gone now, too.
We kids were still a unified tribe, more so now than ever. I was never alone in riding the bus or walking home. But the distance between us and Mommy continued to grow.
Then, a few months after we began living with Alex, he lost his apartment. Again, we moved, this time into a motel. He came with us.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 5
