Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (2 page)

“He was the
nicest
guy,” I cooed. “And actually, I’ve met him twice—I once talked to him backstage on
Soul Train
.” In 1998, I took a cross-country trip to Los Angeles and went to
Soul Train
. As the following two weeks snaked along and I awaited word from L.A. and Kenny through my manager, I could hardly contain my excitement. Every morning, I called Greg and said, “Have you heard anything?” He hadn’t. So on the morning when Greg actually did call me, my eagerness had already reached level 10.

“So I have some good news for you,” he said with hardly a pause between each word. “L.A. and Kenny thought you guys were great.” I froze. As that statement was sinking in, Greg followed it with another. “But I also have some bad news,” he said, continuing. “They don’t want to sign your sisters.” I stopped breathing for a moment.
Did I hear him wrong?

“Um, what do you mean?” I said once I’d recovered.

“They’re about to sign another girl group,” Greg explained. “And quite honestly, they don’t know what to do with you and your sisters because your age differences are so extreme. They acknowledge that all of you can sing, but . . .”

Long pause.

“L.A. and Kenny only want you.”

“Well,” I finally said, with hot blood racing through my veins, “I’m not going to do it if they don’t sign all of us. Let me talk to my mother about it.”

“Toni, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Greg said, lowering his voice by a full octave. “Let’s just sort through this and come up with a plan before we present it to your mom, okay?”

“No, no, no—I’m going to call Mommy,” I shot back. “She’ll know what to do. I’ll let you know and call you later.”

“You can’t say no to L.A. and Kenny—they can sign any artist they want!” said Greg. “You’re so close now, Toni. Don’t let this pass you by.”

I knew my mother would have the best answer—especially in light of a story she often told us. “When I was much younger,” she’d say, “I was in a singing group, the Viewettes. A rep from Motown wanted to sign only me, but I turned it down. There’s no telling where my life would be today if I had taken that deal.” So that evening, I picked up the phone to call the one woman I trusted more than any other in the world.

“They loved the showcase, Mommy,” I began. I paused. “But they don’t want to sign the other girls. They just want me.”

Total silence.

“Did you hear me, Mommy?”

“I heard you,” she said sternly. “So what are you going to do, Toni?”

“I don’t really know what I’m going to do,” I said, shrugging. “I’m just talking to you about it.” I wanted to remind her that she was once in the same situation when she was a young girl in a singing group.

“Well it sounds like you’ve already made up your mind!” Mom cut in. I told her I’d be over to talk to the girls about it.

My brain shifted into overdrive.
What just happened?
I thought.
What did I say wrong? Why was my mother so upset?
Immediately, I called my brother, Mikey, at my parents’ home and recounted the scene. “You’ve gotta do what’s best for you, Toni,” said Mikey, who was always the levelheaded one. “You’re never gonna get another chance like this.” I thanked him for his encouragement and then we hung up. Less than an hour later, he called again.

“Toni, you’d better come to the house right now.”

“What do you mean?” I said, my heartbeat quickening.

“Mommy is talking to the girls,” he said. “Just get over here fast.”

A half hour later, I came through the back door of my parents’ home; Mommy passed me in the kitchen and didn’t speak. The energy was so thick you could cut it. I darted into Mikey’s room and sat down. “So what’s going on?” I asked, pressing him. What my brother revealed still makes me shudder.

Right after I’d called my mother that evening with the news from Greg, said Mikey, Mommy had gathered the girls. “‘You’re about to hear something that’s going to vex you to your soul,’” she told them. “‘The devil is raging, and we’ve gotta bind that enemy.’” As Mikey told me the story, I stared at him in disbelief.

Once I’d regained my composure, I wandered through the house and asked each one of the girls to join me in the living room. Mommy sat off to the side with her arms folded. My dad joined her—and he had the same tense energy.

“Why don’t you tell your sisters what you told me?” she spat. I stood before them for what felt like an eternity before I uttered my first syllable. “Um, L.A. and Kenny really liked all of us,” I said. I stopped to inhale before I delivered part two. “But,” I mumbled, “they only want to sign me.” All at once, the room erupted with a sound that I hope to never hear again—all four of my sisters sobbed as they cupped their faces in their hands. Finally, after a full two minutes of bawling, Traci looked up at me. “Toni, maybe you can sign and then come back and get us after you make a name for yourself,” she said. I nodded and promised to do so. I hugged and kissed each of my sisters, and I tried to kiss my parents—but they turned away. So I then left the room, and drove home in tears.

Once at home, I sat in my apartment and stared into space. Years later, I would begin to understand my mother’s reaction—but on that evening in February, I didn’t at all see it coming. Yes, my parents have always been tough, yet I would’ve never anticipated that they would be so angry at me. As the sun descended on the best and worst day of my life, I had never felt more confused.
Maybe Mikey and Traci are right
, I thought.
Maybe I should just take the deal.
After rehearsing the episode over and over again in my head, I cried myself to sleep.

At ten the next morning, I finally called Greg.

“How did it go with your mother?” he asked.

“Not good,” I said.

“I told you it wasn’t going to be good, Toni,” he said. “So what are you going to do now?”

I drew in a breath. “I’m going to sign,” I finally said.

That was the beginning of my guilt. In the coming years, I did everything I could to help my sisters get their big break. I took them along with me to events and award shows. I hired them to be my background singers. I introduced them to other artists and music execs. I even helped them secure their own record deal on LaFace records. Yet in spite of how much I invested, they never experienced the same level of fame that I did. So I carried that weight through every part of my career. Through six Grammy Awards. Through sixty million records sold around the world. Through two humiliating bankruptcies, a heart-wrenching divorce, and an illness that still threatens my life. And at every major milestone along my path, my mother’s admonition echoed in the background: “Don’t forget your sisters.”

I didn’t. In fact, since the day Mommy made it clear that my success was to always be split five ways, I’ve fought to be sure that my sisters could share their voices. What I didn’t expect is that I’d somehow lose my own.

Until now.

My answer was yes to the solo deal—but it was the saddest yes I’ve ever given. Exactly one week after I signed, I traded the only home I’d known for an unfamiliar world just over the horizon. What I’d discover during my journey would change me forever.

M
y mother, Evelyn, was barely thirteen when her own mom sent her off to a new world. “You’re going to stay with your aunt Juanita in Severn,” my grandmother Beulah Jackson told her. Juanita—Beulah’s sister—had tried for many years to have children with her husband, Roland, but the couple was infertile. So in the summer of 1962, when Aunt Juanita drove down to visit her sister in Cayce, South Carolina, the two made an agreement: My aunt would take one of Beulah’s nine children back to Severn to raise. My mother—who was the second youngest among her siblings—was that child.

Mommy actually wanted to go. You’d think she would’ve been reluctant to leave her family and live in a different state—but she was eager to experience some freedom. Aunt Juanita had always been particularly fond of my mother, so it wasn’t all that surprising that she chose her to adopt. “You’re so lucky,” said Mommy’s sister Vernaree, who’d wanted to be picked. Earthaleen, who, unlike my mother, had actually visited Aunt Juanita in Severn, seemed unimpressed. “It was just okay,” she told Mommy when she returned from a trip there. But Aunt Juanita described her home so beautifully: “There’s a big house and a white picket fence, with red roses cascading all around it,” she said. Mommy couldn’t wait.

When my mother showed up on Queenstown Road in Severn, the “big house” turned out to be a small trailer. Aunt Juanita and Uncle Roland (I called him “Ro Ro”) had inherited a few acres from my uncle’s family right after they married, and on that land, they lived in a two-bedroom trailer; Mommy moved into their second bedroom. Though the surrounding neighborhood was mostly filled with Caucasians, all of Queenstown Road was owned by traditional African-American families—and many of those families were somehow related to each other. Like my family, a lot of them had moved to Maryland from down south. When they showed up in Severn, they brought part of their Southern lifestyle with them—the traditions of canning and pickling, the backyard gardens filled with collards and tomatoes, and of course, the soul food cooking. The residents on Queenstown Road were neither urban nor rural—they were what I call “country suburban.”

Once Mommy moved to Severn as the new girl in the neighborhood, Aunt Juanita encouraged her to be social. So my mother quickly made friends and joined her school choir. Mommy absolutely loved to sing, and in those days, opera was considered the proper music. Around the trailer, Aunt Juanita would often hear Mommy singing, opera style, the Motown and gospel songs she loved. Mommy was and still is a gifted vocalist, and she was chosen to be part of the Maryland state choir. Mommy also formed a singing group called the Viewettes, along with her friends Mary, Almeda, and Valorie. They won a few competitions and trophies.

Within months of moving to Severn, Mom’s social life had fully blossomed. One evening, my mother asked my aunt to let her attend an annual dance at the YMCA. “Aunt Juanita, can I go to the dance?” Mom asked.

“When is it?”

“It’s tonight.”

Aunt Juanita paused. “You can go,” she finally said. Mom dashed right to her bedroom, slipped on her prettiest outfit, and dashed off from the trailer. She met up with her two best friends, Almeda and Juanita (yes, there were a lot of Juanitas back then . . . ). The three of them showed up at the YMCA together.

That night, a fifteen-year-old young man from Baltimore spotted my mother on the dance floor. Mommy pretended not to notice as he meandered toward her. “Would you like to dance?” the boy asked.

“I don’t really feel like dancing,” said Mommy, who wasn’t attracted to him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“I’m Joan,” Mom fibbed. But throughout the event, several of Mom’s friends blew her cover when they yelled out her nickname: “Hey, Ev!”

Later, the young man made a second attempt to capture Mommy’s attention. “I thought your name was Joan,” he said, grinning. “So why is everyone calling you Evelyn?” he asked.

“My friends call me that,” Mommy admitted, blushing a little.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll call you that, too.” That’s how my mother met Michael Conrad Braxton Sr.—my father.

Race played a role in the arrival of my father’s family to Maryland. Dad’s mom, Eva, was nearly 90 percent Caucasian, yet she was still considered black in this country, thanks to the one-drop rule. Grandma Eva was born in New York, but when her extended family discovered she was partly black, her mother sent her down to Calvert County, Maryland, to be raised by one of her relatives. Eva looked as white as Edith Bunker in
All in the Family
, yet because she was biracial, she didn’t really fit in anywhere. When the teachers at her boarding school realized she was partly African American, they dipped her strawberry-blond hair into tea to make it darker, then braided her dark strands into plaits to signal her ethnic heritage. After Grandma Eva endured that painful childhood and grew into a young woman, she eventually met my grandfather, Frances Braxton—a descendant of Carter Braxton, the Virginia delegate who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. My grandfather Frances, who was half African-American and half Native American, had a dark beautiful skin tone. In part, Eva chose Frances as her husband because he was so dark—she didn’t want her own children to grow up with any questions or confusion about their racial identity. My father, Michael, was Frances and Eva’s second child and first son.

Fast-forward to that YMCA dance—which was the night Daddy fell for Mommy from the moment he first saw her. In the months to follow, my father would either hitchhike or take the bus to travel the sixteen miles from his Baltimore home to Mommy’s trailer in Severn. Aunt Juanita liked Michael right away, but she wasn’t all that pleased that Mommy was starting to date—my mother was still pretty young. Of course, back in those days, “dating” usually meant dropping by to sit in the living room and watch television while the grown-ups sat right there in between you! There wasn’t much trouble they could get into.

After weeks of talking on the phone, they went on their first date outside the house. My dad took my mother out for dinner and a movie. Afterward, he brought her back to the front door of Aunt Juanita’s trailer and gently kissed her on the lips. They said good night and Mommy slipped inside. A second later, Mom heard a knock. It was my father—and he stood there holding her wig in his right hand! The Dorothy Dandridge–style wig had somehow slipped off my mother’s head while they were kissing. When Mommy spotted her wig in Dad’s hand and realized he was staring right at the stocking cap on her head, she let out a scream, grabbed the wig before Dad had a chance to say anything, and then slammed the door. That must’ve been a real good kiss!

Before my mother even finished high school, she and the other girls in her singing group caught the ear of a Motown rep. The rep offered to sign only my mother, but she blew that opportunity because she refused to leave the group. By then, Mommy already had her heart set on another passion—marriage.