The Bold World Read online

  While my parents kept their eyes fixed on Ramona, their “problem child,” I started quietly rebelling, stepping away from good behavior for an afternoon, or an evening, in search of whatever lay beyond. They didn’t know that I smoked pot for the first time with my three best girlfriends by the Hudson River boathouse, or that I sat in the back corner banquette at Mikell’s jazz club on Columbus Avenue and Ninety-Seventh Street, getting drunk on white wine while I listened to Whitney Houston belt out “Saving All My Love for You” on the small stage. I didn’t tell them that I lost my virginity after school one day to Claude, one of only three Black boys I knew, on a neat pile of blankets on Ramona’s bedroom floor, minutes before my mother came home.

  Outwardly, nothing changed. I remained the steady hum to Ramona’s big, loud bass. But those secret experiments—setting aside who they thought I was to try out whatever else was inside me—loosened something. I wanted more than stolen moments at the boathouse or in my sister’s room. I wanted a whole world to get lost in, an environment where no one knew me and I could try things out on my own.

  * * *

  —

  At eighteen, Ramona was spending most of her evenings and weekends traveling downtown to the Village with her friends to shop and socialize and sometimes dance the night away. Hearing her come in after a night out, I fantasized about the adventures she was getting into.

  By 1987, downtown New York had become an amazing mecca of music, style, dance, and decadence. The neighborhood was only a quick subway ride from where we lived on the Upper West Side, but to me it felt as far away from my reality with my family as I could get without purchasing a plane ticket. Downtown could be the playground that I’d been looking for.

  Ramona had started going to Nell’s, a new nightclub on the edge of Greenwich Village that everyone was clamoring to get into—and only a handpicked few were allowed in. In the year since it opened, Nell’s had become more than a club, it was a culture. It represented what New York aspired to be: a beautiful, egalitarian oasis where Black and white, straight and gay, young and old, rich and poor all gathered. I desperately wanted to go. My sister, being an eccentric extrovert, had friends who were artists and actors and dancers, and the first in line to pass through Nell’s doors. For me it wasn’t that easy. Although our parents allowed me to go out on the weekends without a curfew, I knew that getting inside Nell’s would be difficult. Without Ramona, I’d have no chance of making it in on my own.

  One Friday night, without any advance warning, Ramona invited me to tag along.

  “Stay close and follow me,” she directed as we walked toward a posh crowd corralled by red velvet rope.

  On any given night, there were no less than fifty well-dressed people gathered around the entrance, hoping to get picked. Skintight Azzedine Alaïa dresses were the style—body-hugging minis with stitching that accentuated every curve. Sleek, sexy, and expensive was what everyone was going for, in the mode of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” music video featuring the girls playing instruments, stone-faced and swaying from side to side like pretty zombies.

  Because I was a high school kid who didn’t have an account at Bergdorf’s or Barneys (although many of my peers did), Alaïa wasn’t an option for me. Instead, I paired my favorite black tube skirt with a little black tank top I’d found in the back of my closet, and put on some sheer black stockings. The only designer things on me were the red Chanel lipstick I’d stolen from Mama’s vanity and my shiny lace-up Doc Martens. Not exactly sleek and sexy, but they had attitude—and that’s what mattered most.

  “Let Ramona in…and that pretty one,” the doorman announced to the bouncers. In order to make it past the front door, one had to either be someone or know someone. Celebrities rolled through the club all the time—Mike Tyson, Lisa Bonet, Prince—but Nell, the club’s owner and namesake, didn’t cater to celebrities. She preferred the painter and the architect, the restaurateur and the fashion stylist, the start-up music label executive and the up-and-coming comedian. And—luckily for me—if you were “cute, female, and underage,” you, too, were considered somebody.

  Walking through the unlit vestibule two steps behind Ramona, I was immediately enveloped by the sounds of Soul II Soul reverberating throughout the club’s interior: “How-ever do you want me? How-ever do you need me?” echoed throughout the hall. My shoulders started bobbing before I could stop myself—it was electric.

  Taking in the scene before me, I kept my head low and mimicked whatever Ramona did. When she moved, I moved. When she smiled, I smiled. And when she smoked a cigarette, I asked for one, too. She led me through the velvet curtains and into the performance room. There was a small stage and a grand piano, and banquettes lining the walls. We made our way down the narrow staircase at the back of the room and into the main lounge.

  The setup downstairs was dimly lit and cozy, like an old library, with people draped over worn leather couches and area rugs—talking, listening, leaning into one another. Then there was the dance floor. It wasn’t a fancy space, more like someone had cleared out all the furniture and turned off the lights in their living room late at night, dancing with their friends until the sun came up. In this room, it was only the music and the movement that mattered. Time was irrelevant, names were unnecessary, and there were no barriers between people. That first night at Nell’s, I took it all in, absorbing every last detail.

  Going out on a Friday night, coming home Saturday morning and sleeping all day became routine. I danced and downed cranberry and vodkas and experimented with drugs in club bathrooms. I held secrets from Mama, things I would never want her to know. Things no one asked me about because I’d never given anyone cause to worry.

  If my parents had looked closely, they would have seen that I wasn’t just the put-together one, the in-control one—the daughter Ramona was not. But I was never punished, or even spoken to, about my behavior. My parents were consumed with Ramona’s consistently loud rebellion, and with the demise of their own relationship—which later ended in divorce.

  My late nights out and early morning returns went unnoticed, and the assumption remained that it was only Ramona who needed minding.

  During my senior year and the summer that followed, I spent much of my babysitting money on finding freedom—in boys and clubs, and after-after-hours parties in dingy dens in the East Village, where I laughed with Boy George and Madonna look-alikes. Towering drag queens, scruffy artists, cocky B-boys—for that exhilarating summer, those people became my people.

  To own my identity, I was starting to feel I had to touch it, feel it on my own. And so, night after night, I reached my arms out into the smoky, strobe-lit dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of myself in the shadows.

  TWO

  The Women

  IN LESS THAN A YEAR, I’d be off to college—finally on my own. Freedom to me looked a lot like an East Coast women’s institution like Smith—or maybe even Wesleyan, where my mother studied French in graduate school. Some place where uninhibited women walked around untethered, with fierce intellect and wild spirits. I wanted to be among unpossessed and unaffected people who refused to alter themselves for anyone. It was that kind of freedom that I aspired to. I was looking for my tribe.

  “The world is yours, baby girl,” Daddy said one morning, winking at me in the rearview mirror of his car, a smile in his voice. I cracked my own smile thinking about how freeing that sounded. Soon I’d be in college, without the weight of my family pushing down on me.

  “But here’s the thing, Jodie,” he continued, looking straight ahead as we made our way toward my high school. “I’m only paying for a Black college.”

  Like all things, it appeared that we’d be doing my college experience John Patterson’s way, or no way at all.

  I looked out the window, barely listening as he continued his speech, watching the trees recede into a blur as we crossed Central Park into another world.
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  Moving from the West Side of Manhattan to the East Side was like being transported. My parents chose to raise us on the Upper West Side primarily because, while it was predominantly white, it was also home to people of all walks of life—Blacks, Jews, Dominicans, Asians, musicians, actors, professionals, educators, both the rich and the poor—all living together between Ninety-Sixth and Seventy-Second streets. Yes, people still acted on their prejudices. Black boys might be followed in a neighborhood store, Black girls mistaken for babysitters instead of residents in their own buildings—but those same people were forced to confront the truth: that this neighborhood belonged to us all. Eventually, we had to think beyond race, class, and religious lines and allow for diversity. The East Side, by contrast, had none of that rub between cultures. It was glaringly white, wealthy, and Christian, with the largest percentage of brown people being nannies, doormen, and chauffeurs.

  Reluctantly, Dad had allowed me to be among the “tony East-Siders” at the all-girls private school Convent of the Sacred Heart mostly because of my determination—I’d applied and gotten a scholarship without his help or his approval. Although he wasn’t pleased with my choice of schools, he appreciated my willpower and effort and allowed me to attend. But he was constantly, every day, every moment of his life, battling that Upper East Side white world, and what he thought it might do to me if left to its own devices.

  On our way to school, driving through the park toward Fifth Avenue, we’d talk about the impressive prewar buildings that hovered above the treetops. He’d point out all the places over the years where he wasn’t welcomed, the co-ops that denied him access, and the people who had surpassed him in their careers, all white men. The East Side reminded him of things he didn’t have, and of limitations that were forced upon him.

  To me, those same buildings looked beautiful—they reminded me of the places I planned to live in one day with my own family, places where a lot of my friends from school lived. But Dad never had any friends who lived in those buildings while he was growing up on 145th Street. He’d never visited anyone there as a kid, never had lunch overlooking the Metropolitan Museum, never sunbathed on terraces with his classmates.

  He hadn’t even entered any of those buildings on Fifth Avenue until he was well into his forties, while visiting an old friend from his early career days who’d gone on to make a fortune. He took the elevator all the way to the top floor, and when he walked out after the visit, he knew he wanted that for himself, and for us one day. The space, the high ceilings and long hallways, the sunlight that came into every room, the doormen who took your bags and watched out for your kids walking home from school—he wanted all of that.

  Daddy did try to buy all of that once, in the form of a penthouse on Ninety-Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. But the mostly male co-op board, none of whom shared our skin tone, said no—No, you may not purchase this penthouse. You may not have this view, this plot of land, this level of power. No, you are not one of us. Not because of what he did or didn’t have, but because of who he was. So he took his money across the park and bought a home on the Upper West Side instead.

  “The world is yours, baby girl” was his brilliant opening line to me that morning as we drove to school. But Daddy knew that for Black people, grabbing what you want in this world is not easy. And more often than not, the effort it takes will break your spirit in two.

  Going to a Black college, to Dad, meant fortifying ourselves for that journey. It meant going where you are wanted first, to gain strength, before battling a world that doesn’t want or choose you.

  And so it was that I ended up in Atlanta, at Spelman College. Trading in my image of northeastern feminism for something else entirely. A foreign land where, rather than being one of the few, or the only, I would be face-to-face, shade-to-shade, with hundreds of my kind—a skinny Black girl among the many.

  * * *

  —

  Walking onto Spelman’s campus for the first time, in 1988, I began to truly understand how little I knew. Going to a mostly white high school, I understood a certain standard of beauty and wealth. Is your hair straight enough? Is your frame petite enough? Do you have a doorman, a nanny, a housekeeper? Do you vacation? Where do you vacation? The rules of the Upper East Side were quite familiar to me.

  But at Spelman, in this new arena where everyone was a shade of brown, I knew that each part of me would be scrutinized from a million different angles, in ways I’d never conceived of before.

  Plus, I was a northerner, and I’d already had an idea of how poorly that translated while visiting my grandmother in Georgia over the years. No one down south wanted to be like, dress like, or act like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, two of my icons. I liked their imperfections and quirkiness, but down south those things didn’t go over well. I learned that lesson while visiting my aunt Vicky’s hair salon in east Atlanta one summer. Her place was in an all-Black neighborhood, situated at the center of an outdoor mall way past its prime. I walked into that shop sporting rolled-up jeans and a collared shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, thinking I looked cool—but I was immediately met with raised eyebrows.

  “Girl, what are you wearing?” Vicky always had a streak of eccentricity in her, and I could tell she at least got a kick out of my taste—but her customers, it was clear, thought differently. I could see them scrunching down in their chairs from underneath hair dryers so they could get a better look, then shaking their heads in disapproval after properly taking me in.

  In those initial weeks on campus, I did all the wrong things, beginning with inviting a friend from home to help me settle in. Monique was half Black, with hazel eyes and wavy dark blond hair down to the middle of her back. Together, we walked through the long corridors of HH—or, more formally, Howard-Harreld Hall—the school’s biggest dorm and my new home, where we were greeted with cold stares from everyone who passed us. As we approached, gaggles of girls grew quiet, tightened their faces, and rolled their eyes in our direction. I later discovered that people thought Monique was white, and that I was crazy—crazy for bringing a white girl with me for support during a time when the sisters were supposed to be bonding over our greatest achievement thus far: entering the holy ground that was Spelman.

  Mistake number one of one thousand.

  Every girl at Spelman seemed to be at the top of the mountain. They were smart and well put together. Pretty and outspoken. Eighteen-year-olds who spoke about themselves in bullet points, each new sentence punctuated with a “Top of” this, “Best of” that. Their résumés made their way into each conversation, and it was all you needed to understand that they had been preparing for this moment all their lives. While I was still poking skeptically at my self-understanding, it seemed that everyone else was well acquainted with their best assets, and not only that, they knew how to package those assets to the world.

  The classroom was a place teeming with a kind of confidence I’d never seen before. In a very basic way, these women, my classmates, were impressive. They communicated more self-possession in a raised hand than I had been able to muster in all my years combined.

  Theirs was a necessary confidence—a confidence that I had yet to tap into. One that was built on something our parents and grandparents tried their best to teach us—that there are no safety nets, no institutional elevators that take us to the top. That we have only ourselves. We are the only ones who can determine our worth. These women understood that self-worth was to be our greatest tool.

  I’d been raised on these ideas, too. I heard my parents’ lessons in confidence and self-love, and I understood those lessons, in theory. But at Spelman I saw, up close, what those teachings looked like in practice. My classmates had ingested the wisdom and knew our power: that we are equally smart, beautiful, and capable of anything.

  On campus, your confidence was displayed in your appearance as much as it was in class. The expectation was to come correct in every de
tail. It meant always stepping out with a made-up face and a good shoe—a pretty heel or a pump, never anything that looked worn or raggedy. It meant “night styling.” Girls spent the hours right before bed wrapping their hair with bobby pins or twisting it into curlers, pinning each roller into place before moving on to the next. After dark, the dorm hallways smelled faintly like a beauty salon, of setting lotion and hot curling irons.

  You were never to be spotted in public smoking a cigarette, or uttering a swearword. And your greatest accessories were the baubles on your key chain—a sorority emblem, a simple silver cross, a small framed picture of your grandmother—plus keys to the car you obviously had. Key chains were the Grown Black College Woman’s crown jewels. Dangling yours from a bag or the crook of your finger announced that you, the Grown Black College Woman, had arrived.

  Then there was me. Without a car, still in my downtown club kid phase. Clunky Doc Martens, layered strands of fake pearls around my neck and wrists, and a plaid miniskirt gone askew was the cool New York teen’s standard uniform. But here, down south, it was awkward. A month or so into my time on campus I remember sitting on the quad steps with my lips pursed around a cigarette, thinking I was finally grown and free, when I was approached by one of my older schoolmates. “We don’t do that here,” she said, waving the smoke away from her face. Then she turned around and disappeared into the crowd.

  I was starting to understand the signs—that the protocol was real, and the nuances of this campus culture ran deep: The language. The hair. The clothes. The academic excellence. It was the cadence and vibe of a people all operating under a set of rules I didn’t know.

  As much as I wanted in, as much as I wanted to be part of this magic, this community of confident women, I was ill-equipped. Everyone seemed to be chanting the same mantra—“We’re here for a reason! For a purpose!”—while I was still without words, without direction, and without the faith to understand what I was capable of.