Friends: A Love Story (6 page)

On weekends and over the summers I continued to hang out at the Boys' Club. I went to Boys' Club camp and even became a youth counselor. The adult counselor, Mr. George Browne, was a teacher and the track coach at a prestigious and expensive private school called Detroit Country Day School. One day he told my father, “Your son is pretty smart. He should apply for a scholarship.” I did, was accepted and got a partial scholarship. My father delivered the surprise.

“It's going to be a sacrifice but you're going to Country Day,” he told me in the basement just before school began.

I was very excited! Ever since I had seen the campus I had wanted to go there. Country Day was located in the suburbs. The campus was huge to me. There were a lot of fields, it was open and the people were nice. They had glass backboards on their basketball court, which was a big deal back then to a little jock like me. And the fact that I now would have to travel twenty miles to school each day had activated the “Henry the Explorer” in me. As I got older my world got a little larger, and I would explore my neighborhood on my iridescent yellow, single-speed bike with the banana seat.

Now that my world would include a school located twenty miles away, I was intrigued about the route out there. Riding in the car with my parents, I observed that the service road along the highway went all the way out to the suburbs. It made me want to explore on my bike. I couldn't ride on the freeway but I could take the service road, I thought. That summer between middle school and high school I went exploring. School was out, so there was no big hurry. When I'd come to a place that was unfamiliar, I'd say, “Hmm, how am I going to do this? Well, I can go over there…” I didn't read maps; I plotted it until I figured it out. Once football practice began in August, I knew how to ride my bike to school. My parents said, “Call us when you get there, boy.” Thinking back on it, they were pretty brave. They could have said, “Stay in the neigh
borhood.” Once school started, my parents paid a student who drove to take me to school. When I turned sixteen they handed down our little clunker station wagon to me and I had my first car and my freedom!

On top of exploring the route to Country Day, while I was a teenager I explored all of Detroit. I became a bike-riding fool! I'm still a bike-riding fool today. I'd tell my parents where I was going and what route I was going to take. Then I'd pack a lunch, get on my bike and call them when I got there. They let me ride around the whole city, which is pretty amazing. I guess they knew that I liked to explore and wasn't gonna do nothing—I just wanted to ride around. It was pretty dangerous, though. I always stayed on the sidewalk but I could have gotten hit by a car or truck—and it wasn't like there were cell phones back then.

Looking back on it, I realize that “Henry the Explorer” changed my life. “Henry” was huge to me because it was all about dreaming. And letting me explore the world around me was a wonderful gift my parents gave me. The things I discovered as I explored reinforced the things they were telling me about how whatever I could see in my mind, I could be. It also meant that when I could, I would be leaving Detroit.

 

If ever there was a kid who was excited about going to a high school, it was me. I was really excited and thankful that my parents were allowing me to go to there. I loved going to school at Country Day because there were all these great classes and a lot of activities and there was no peer pressure about clothes or fighting. I became a Country Day boy—I took advantage of everything! Academically, I was a B/B+ student. I struggled with math and science because my Catholic-school curriculum hadn't been as rigorous. But the teachers tutored me and didn't abandon me and made learning fun and exciting. And by my junior year I
got
it and ended up with an A in chemistry, my most difficult subject.

On top of my academics, I played football, basketball and ran track. Eventually, I captained all three teams and became three-sport All State. Mr. Browne, the track coach who had been my boys' club counselor, became a good friend and mentor and grew very close to my mom and dad. When I was a freshman I was given the chance to make an announcement about a tennis tournament. I had never heard or seen foreign names like Pancho Gonzalez before, and the fact I couldn't pronounce the names became a funny thing to everyone. After that tournament, I started reading the homeroom announcements. I did lunchtime skits and parodies of teachers with the other kids. I did student council, I sang in the choir—I did everything you could volunteer for. I did so many things when I was at Country Day that my parents, who came to practically every event—my dad often left work early—practically lived at the school.

Compared to the white kids with their precise way of speaking, when I arrived at Country Day I guess I talked kind of “country.” But the more I spoke in public at school, my diction, English and vocabulary improved. I stopped sounding as country, but after being around so many white kids for so long, I started getting a little confused. After a while my sister asked, “Courtney, why do you talk ‘white'?”

“What?”

I didn't understand what she was talking about. “I don't talk ‘white'!” I'd tell her.

It was a confusing time, and I could have used a little assistance from my dad to help me with these very different worlds I was navigating. Cecilie went to Catholic school with white kids for a few years, then went to Cass Tech, the best public high school in Detroit and an integrated, although mostly black, environment. She had a big Afro, was all about black power and wore POW bracelets. I wore a shirt and tie to school. I had been a black boy in white schools since the fourth grade. Yet I lived
around black folks. Nobody had talked to me about how to hold on to my sense of myself as a black child immersed in a world of white folks. Nobody had ever asked me, “Courtney, how do you feel going to an all-white school?” I was a child. It was just, “This is where you're going to school.” Back then integration was a big thing and our parents wanted us to go to integrated schools. And black parents weren't talking to kids about that kind of stuff—how to be a black kid in a “white” world—least of all my father, given his background.

So there I was in the classroom every day, dealing with being the only black kid. I had no one to talk to about how I felt about it, nor did I know that it was even something we could have been talking about. My parents had raised me with such love and confidence that wherever I was, I liked everyone and everyone liked me. It wasn't until I got older that I began to have a real hard time dealing with the feeling that I wasn't wanted.

My black friends with wealthy black parents who were Country Day “lifers” didn't share my enthusiasm for the school. They thought, “I don't know why Courtney is doing all those things. I'm just trying to finish, I'm tired of Country Day.” I didn't understand why they weren't into it. But they had been there forever and knew the negative kinds of things that were going down and could go down behind the scenes.

It wasn't until my senior year that I got a taste of what they may have been talking about. I had been playing three sports for three years and I was exhausted. I wanted to play football, prepare for and take the SATs, then run track. When I announced that I was not going to play basketball for my senior year, word got all the way to the headmaster of the school. He called me into his office.

“Courtney, I hear you're not going to play basketball this year,” he said to me.

“No, I'm going to rest and focus on my studies and get ready for track.”

“Well, Courtney, we want you to play,” he responded.

“But I don't want to play,” I told him.

“We
want
you to play.”

“But I
don't want
to play.”

“
Courtney,
we
want
you to
play.
”

“Well what if I
don't
play?” I asked.

“We will revoke your scholarship,” he said as he stared at me over the top of his bifocals.

“What do you mean?!”

“We
will
revoke your scholarship if you
don't play.
”

“I didn't know I had an athletic scholarship.”

“Well, you do.”

I walked out of the office in shock. I had made Country Day my whole life—I was a Country Day boy! Now the headmaster was trying to intimidate me. When I told my parents what had happened they couldn't believe it. They thought I had a needs-based scholarship, too. The headmaster may have been lying—I don't know. My family had a powwow. We probably could have pushed it but it was 1977 and my parents were hard-pressed to pay what they were paying. We didn't want to risk what could happen if the school took any money away from us. We agreed that we'd put the incident behind us and I'd suck it up and play. Needless to say, it was a long season. On top of that, our team wasn't very good. But I didn't get an attitude—I played and played hard.

That year I had a girlfriend, Kristin. Because there were very few black students, we had known each other the whole time. But all of a sudden during senior year it was different. “Wow, it's you!” Kristin and I both lived in Detroit but didn't see each other outside of school. We practically lived at Country Day; we were both there for fifteen hours a day. I would see her during the school day, when we were studying, when she would come by practice and at Country Day parties. We were tight. This was
when I first learned that sometimes when the timing is right a friendship can turn into a love relationship.

I kept doing my thing and keeping my eye on the sparrow—I had decided I was going to Harvard. My mother's brother Lee had graduated from Harvard back when I was eleven. That's when I decided I wanted to go there. Now, I didn't know anything about Harvard—Uncle Lee had gone there so I wanted to go there. But as far as Country Day was concerned, I decided, “Y'all can try to do to me what you think you're going to do. I'm going to Harvard and I'm not letting anything get in my way.”

Neither my college counselor, nor the teacher who was the Harvard rep at Country Day, thought I would get into Harvard. He focused on helping the white kids. My counselor tried to steer me toward applying to smaller, less prestigious schools. The lack of confidence they had in me really did not make me question myself. I applied to Harvard, Brown, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania and Michigan, even though my counselor told me I had a very low chance of getting into any of them due to my test scores. But as the acceptance deadline loomed, I did play with the idea of applying to one or two “safety schools.” That April, my mother called me at school to tell me that an envelope from Harvard was waiting at the house. That same day there was a big invitational track meet after school. And all of a sudden the Harvard rep was acting nice to me. He was handing out the first-place tabs for the preliminary, semis and final races (of course I was coming in first in my heats of the hurdles). That's how I knew I had gotten in. I was admitted to every school I applied to. We talked about it as a family. I got more financial aid from Brown than Harvard. But my mother's people were in Boston. My parents felt more comfortable with me going there. Once again, even though it would cause strain, they decided they would make the sacrifice. Kristin was going to Swarthmore, outside of Philadelphia. We decided we would
wait for each other. My dad told me, “Courtney, that's going to be tough; you're going to college now. But do your thing.”

After all my hard work, solid academic achievement and school spirit, at graduation I got an incredible surprise: I was awarded the Headmaster's Cup, the highest honor a Country Day student could receive! Everyone stood up and clapped for me. My mother told me later that my father had been in tears. That summer I got a little parchment with my name written in calligraphy in different colors, saying I'd been admitted to Radcliffe, Harvard's former sister school for women—someone obviously thought that with the name Courtney I was a girl! Later they sent the parchment for Harvard. I got them framed and still have both.

T
hat summer of 1976, I visited Aunt Golden and Uncle Grover in North Carolina then she took me to Yale and deposited me there. That was the first time I had seen the campus. Before classes started I attended the two-week preregistration orientation program for minority students, so I had friends and knew my way around the campus before everyone else invaded. I definitely felt intimidated when the other students arrived, though not as much as I might have. When I heard where these other kids had gone to school—prep schools like Andover and Exeter—I started thinking again that they were smarter. Everybody seemed to have taken years of ballet and flute and piano. They were all so talented and said they were majoring in subjects like premed and political science. I was the only person thinking about being a drama major, and I was fighting that at the time. I remember thinking, Well, they say schools in the North are better than the schools in the South. But then I'd see how the kids acted and say, “But they don't seem to have much going on in the common-sense department.”

I had three white roommates. They were nice enough. The young woman who shared my bunk bed was from Chapel Hill,
North Carolina. I remember thinking they washed their hair a lot. And I had to get used to the whole climate thing—I didn't know anything about layering. I remember freezing, and lying on top of the radiator and waiting for that
tick, tick, tick
as it warmed up. When I bought boots, I got the wrong kind. Everybody kidded me as I trudged through the snow in my yellow rain galoshes. For my work-study job I washed dishes in the cafeteria and tutored kids from the community in math and English. I didn't have much money and Mom didn't have any money to send me, yet I came home every Christmas. One time I brought my roommate Deedee with me. Her mother had passed away while we were in school, so I said, “Come on, Deedee, and come home with me!” After we bought our tickets we only had seven dollars between us.

Academically Yale was difficult. I never needed a tutor or anything but I remember having a lot of self-talks in the mirror.

“Are you gonna quit? Are you gonna drop out?”

“If you drop out you can say that you came and you stayed for a year.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Are you gonna stay up all night? Then stay up!”

“Well, go on and cry if you want to cry. But then what's that gonna help?”

“Okay, now get up and wipe your face.”

But then I got my first A or did an all-nighter and got a B. Then I felt okay.

Socially I was popular, but dating was pretty hard. There were certain girls the guys liked. We'd call them the “stars.” They'd usually be fair-skinned with long pretty hair. I didn't look like that. After the “stars” were taken, the boys might look over our way a bit. But when you were a lowly freshman, you couldn't get nobody. When I was a sophomore, I dated a freshman. Then he broke up with me. It just seemed that for some reason the black girls and guys couldn't get together. The
boys were up and down the road going to different schools. We girls had to scheme to get kisses from them.

“You like him? All right, let's see how we can help you get into a romantic situation.” I guess none of us seemed as provocative as the girls somewhere else.

I remember one time I was talking to Mama about some guy whose attention I was trying to win or keep. She was just not impressed.

“Shit,
you
the prize!” she told me. “He ain't shit, he ain't all that.
You
the prize.”

I hadn't thought about that before, but it stuck—it resounded. It resounded.
I'm the prize!
I recall thinking, “Oh, that's a good way to think of myself”—not that I was better than anyone else, but that I was worthy of being respected and treated nicely and loved and thought highly of and taken care of. Since my father hadn't been around to tell me I was his beautiful little girl, his princess, or to model how a good and proper man should look and behave, I hadn't had an example—well, at least nothing that felt warm and familiar. So when I went out into the world I hadn't already seen a good man or known what he looked and felt like. Still, I wasn't out there looking for it, trying to make up for it. I didn't have a brother, uncle—nothing. Just my great-grandfather, Slater Stokes—and Granddad Leroy, whose girlfriend lived right across the street, but that was a bit of a mixed message. Then there was my mother's uncle who ran the beer garden, but I was young and couldn't go up in there to see him running his business. The other men in my family who were good and up to something lived someplace else. On a daily basis, I saw my teachers, the principal, the pastor of my church, my best girlfriend's daddy—one of them had a daddy.

The idea that I was a prize was very new to me. I practiced it to varying degrees. I remember one boy asked me not to be mad at him for something he had done. I recall thinking, You poor
nothing, you unintelligent person. You're not worthy of my time. Don't even think of me—don't think of me at all. Don't even look my way! I was definitely overreacting but that's how I interpreted valuing myself, being the “prize.” Plus, I was proud that I had come so far with fewer resources than the average person; at one time I hadn't had anything and now here I was at Yale—not that I was consciously trying to be more than I was. My male friends called me on my stuff, though, which wasn't too hard to do. It was like I was wearing a miniskirt but my judgment “slip” was showing all the way down to my ankles.

But in spite of my academic challenges and lack of a love life, I have to admit I partied in college. We partied—literally—from Wednesday to Sunday, whether playing bid whist (I was a lousy fourth hand for someone desperate), going to a house party where one student's brother was the DJ or hopping the train to New York City. My roommates and I would go to the latest and hottest clubs. We could dance all night long in our four-inch heels. Then we'd nearly fall asleep in Grand Central Station waiting for the train home and get back with our feet hurting and back all out of alignment. Our counselors wondered how we were going to graduate. We burned the midnight oil—both ends of the candle and the middle, too.

Once I got to college I started to perform in a lot of plays. There are twelve different colleges at Yale. Each had its own drama society and would put on different productions. Then there was the University Theater, which was beautiful and reserved for the biggest plays. I was doing plays every semester—myself and one other black girl, Cheryl Rogers. Our friends would come see us in
Hedda Gabler, Uncommon Women
and other plays they ordinarily wouldn't have come to see, and enjoy them. I also performed at antiapartheid demonstrations to pressure Yale into divesting from South Africa, which were going on all the time. I didn't know a lot about the politics. I couldn't run down the statistics. But I could find poems that
would relate and get up and perform them in the Commons area of campus. It would go over very well and when I was performing, I was in my element!

At one point Auntie Golden advised me not to waste a Yale education on a theater degree. By then I was aware that it was the graduate drama school, not the undergraduate theater program, that was the best in the world. Still, I thought, I'm here and the drama school is right up the street! Thank you, Lord! And I'd walk down the street and—Hey, that looks like James Earl Jones! and it was. He was performing at the Yale Rep in
A Lesson from Aloes.
So for the first three years I tried not to major in theater. Instead, I studied administrative science—business. That seemed to be more practical. But I was just not into statistics and trigonometry and math that looked like artwork—squiggle, squiggle, triangle, equals sign. At one point I told myself I needed to put my priorities in order and focus on my studies. I didn't do any plays that semester, but I found myself still doing all-nighters. I thought, Well, I might as well do my plays if I'm going to do all-nighters anyway.

Eventually I went down the list in the Yale course directory: classical studies, women's studies, history, molecular biophysics…None of those seemed to be much more practical than theater, and it seemed like a B.A. or B.S. didn't get you too far and that everyone would need an advanced degree. Otherwise, what were you going to do with political science or economics? I wondered. I had heard that you could get into business school with a degree in any major, so I decided to throw myself into theater. If it didn't work out at least I'd tried, then perhaps I'd apply to Wharton, a prestigious business school.

By the time I figured all this out, it was too late to change my major to theater. So I majored in African-American studies/ theater, which caused my appreciation of black people, our culture, achievements and struggles—some of the most dramatic of which had unfolded during my childhood—to deepen. My
knowledge of our history and culture would shape my attitudes and beliefs about the opportunities I would later seek and accept. I also squeezed in a lot of drama courses and did a performance thesis in addition to my regular thesis on the history of the Negro Ensemble Company, down in New York, the first major theater company to focus on black life, and offer black writers, directors, producers, actors, playwrights and craftspeople the opportunity to produce works that reflected their cultural values and determine their own destiny. Lloyd Richards, one of its founding members, had just come to Yale to become the dean of the drama school. I got to meet him and asked him to get me an introduction to Douglas Turner Ward, head of the Negro Ensemble Company. The folks at NEC opened their files to me.

 

I didn't get the chance to come to New York often; however, as I traveled in and out of the city during my college years, I did get to spend a little time with my father. He lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Several times I spent the weekend with him and his longtime, live-in girlfriend. We'd usually travel over to Teaneck, New Jersey, where Uncle Jerry lived, and we'd all hang out. They'd put on music, drink Crown Royal and we'd laugh and shoot the breeze. The first time we got together, Dad tried to suss out where I was and act cool.

“What do young folk do today?” he asked me. “Want some reefer?”

“I don't smoke reefer! I don't do drugs.”

I noticed he didn't offer D'nette reefer when she came to visit—he'd had a velvet picture painted of her; he didn't have one drawn of me. I remember feeling closer to Uncle Jerry than my dad.

As one such weekend was drawing to a close and I was about to return to campus, I remember having a conversation with my father about our relationship.

“Yes, you are my father,” I told him, “but I haven't spent time with you. Getting to know each other is a process. After nineteen years I can't just run and jump on Daddy's lap.”

Well, that did not sit right with him. He said, “No, I am your
father!
I'm your dad.” To me, his response felt like “Bullshit! No, it doesn't take time. I'm the father, you're my daughter. Daddy, daughter—we are close!”

“Yeah, you're my father and I love you and you're half of why I'm here. But to have a relationship, it takes time to get to know each other.”

He said, “No, it doesn't.”

He was drinking and it wasn't going so well, so I figured I'd let it go.

“All right, Dad, I'm leaving,” I told him. “Give me a kiss.”

When I went to kiss him, he put his tongue in my mouth. I pulled back—I
shot
back! I was
shocked!
I was
mortified!
I was
FUCKING MORTIFIED!
My father had kissed me like a woman—that crossed the line! Your boyfriends put their tongue in your mouth, I assume my father put his tongue in his woman's mouth, but—drunk or otherwise—a father shouldn't put his tongue in his daughter's mouth—
EVER.
If I had known what was going to happen I would have had the presence of mind to slap the
shit
out of him. I would have slapped him sober! But I was shocked. I didn't say anything. I just got out of there as fast as I could.

On my trip back to New Haven, I began to process what had happened. I was furious! That was
fucked up!
I couldn't believe it. Then again, he
was
drunk—he had drunk a lot. I didn't know if he thought that was okay to do or whether maybe in his drunken state he was confused about who I was. It really didn't matter though. My rule about drinking is: you control it; it doesn't control you. And drunk or not, in my mind that was just more evidence to me of the lack of the relationship between my father and me. His relationships had never been
father/daughter; they'd always been man/woman. Perhaps in his very inebriated state he reverted to what he knew. Whatever was going on with him, it was some kind of interesting human nature something or other. I wasn't going to let it fuck with my head for too long. Life with my dad was just what it was. I came to the conclusion that this was just part of what happens when a family isn't at its best—the way God designed it to be: a mother, a father, the children. Some men just don't know how to be fathers. My dad was one of them. He didn't have a clue. I never brought the incident up—we never talked about it. But I paid a price for my silence. Between not having a father figure and having so many men try to take advantage of me, it definitely colored the landscape of my relationships. I don't think I was as strong as I could have been in saying no to men whose behavior didn't measure up to the standards I had in mind. Thank goodness I had acting to channel all these emotions into.