Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (8 page)

My experience in Dad’s church was nothing like it had been at Pillar of Truth: I regularly wore pants and lip gloss to school, and long gone were the days when the congregation would gather to cast out demons. And yet even as my parents gradually became more lenient, in some ways, they were still very stern. One night, I fell asleep listening to Rick James—I had hidden the cassette recorder under my pillow. The next morning when my mother noticed the music, she confronted me. “If you keep listening to that devil music, that rock and roll, you’ll mess around and you could die in your sleep next time. You don’t want to go to hell listening to that music.” That scared me. Even now, I don’t listen to music before bedtime.

As I share this and so many of the other episodes from my childhood, my intention isn’t to shame either one of my parents—it is to finally free myself by standing in my own truth. Healing begins with acknowledgment. I absolutely know that Mommy and Daddy love me. They always have and always will. But here’s what I also know: The people who love us the most can also unintentionally wound us.

S
inging has always been my Plan A. By the time I graduated from Glen Burnie High School in 1984, my sisters and I were seasoned singers who’d performed at just about every church in our area. I had a solo part here and there, but mostly, I continued to sing with the group and play the piano. Yet more and more, I longed to become a famous soloist. And if that dream didn’t pan out, I had a Plan B: After college, I’d marry a doctor or a senator and become a strong wife. That sounds a little crazy to me now, but at seventeen, it somehow made perfect sense.

After high school, I stayed with my family and enrolled in community college. As a high school graduation gift, Dad bought me a blue Honda Civic CRX with gold and silver highlights on the sides. I had “TOO CUTE” put onto the license plate because I thought the car was just adorable. I was ecstatic to get my own wheels—if I couldn’t live on my own, at least I could drive myself around.

During my last year of high school, I’d started dating a guy who was a few years older than me—in a moment, you’ll understand why I’ll simply call him Trevor, which is not his real name. Given the childhood I lived through, I’m sure you can see why just the mention of sex filled me with guilt. It felt like a dirty word. In our house, nice Christian girls kept their grades up and their dresses down, and of course, we didn’t talk about physical intimacy. Of all the sins you could commit, I was somehow convinced that sex was the ultimate one. So at 18, I was still a virgin. But as my romance with Trevor progressed—and as I started suspecting that I might be one of the few among my classmates who hadn’t yet experienced sex—I began thinking about what it would feel like to do it with my boyfriend. At long last, I wanted to know what I’d been missing out on. What was everybody talking about? Trevor seemed like a nice enough guy to show me—and in the summer before I enrolled in college, I decided he was a safe bet. I still wasn’t sure when it would happen—but one summer evening as our kisses grew deeper, it finally did. I concluded that sex was overrated. Highly.

Afterward, Trevor was a perfect gentleman—he called and even gave me flowers the next day. We waited a few weeks before we tried it again, and with each attempt, I became more comfortable with physical intimacy and even began to enjoy it. But that pleasure came at a price. First of all, I felt as guilty as I thought I would—and then some. I thought,
Will God send me straight to hell for sleeping with a man who wasn’t my husband?
And that leads me to the second point: Since I’d been taught that sex and marriage go hand in hand, I really believed that I should at least consider marrying Trevor simply because we were having sex. Don’t get me wrong: I liked him as a boyfriend. Yet I wasn’t even close to wanting to exchange vows with him. So when he brought up the topic of a lifelong commitment, I was pretty torn. “What do you think about us getting married?” he asked. I paused. “Well,” I said, “I really want to be a singer. How can I be a singer with a husband and kids?” That wasn’t exactly the response he was hoping to hear—but it was the only way I could think of to hold him off. Part of me was flattered that he was even asking: Many girls dream of getting such a proposal. And though I’d once fantasized about marrying and settling down, by this point, I was very focused on one thing—finding my way to the stage.

Meanwhile, I suspected that Mom had figured out that Trevor and I were sleeping together. “You can always tell when two people is having sex because they got a darn attitude,” she’d often say when I was in earshot. That was as close as Mom ever came to directly addressing what I’m sure she knew was happening.

One Sunday after church, my parents, Trevor, his parents, and I all went out to eat together at a buffet restaurant in Glen Burnie. Toward the end of dinner, just as I was about to raise a spoonful of rice to my mouth, Trevor looked over in the direction of my parents and said something in passing like, “Because you know, I was thinking that Toni and I would get married.” My parents froze. “Toni’s too young for marriage,” Mommy finally said. I shifted a bit in my seat and eventually excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. I couldn’t believe he’d actually broached the topic with my family. Talk about an awkward way to end dinner.

That evening, I chose to ride back to Severn with my parents rather than with Trevor. In the car on the way home, Dad didn’t talk much. Mom, on the other hand, said plenty. “I don’t understand why people think that just because you’re having sex, you’ve gotta get married,” she muttered. That’s when I had my big Aha moment:
I don’t have to get married to him—even my mother doesn’t think so
. That settled the topic in my mind.

After that night, Trevor never again brought up the subject of marriage. And the more I talked about making it as a professional singer, the further we seemed to drift apart. Our relationship eventually ended, and I can’t exactly say I was heartbroken because I was never really in love with him in the first place. But if you’re just going to lose your virginity to someone, you could do far worse than Trevor. One pretty decent guy—and for me, one giant step toward womanhood.

I ALWAYS KNEW
I’d go to college—my father is a graduate of Bowie State, and my parents both value education. But what I didn’t expect was to see Mommy sitting right there in the classroom with me. That’s right: My mother went to college the same year I did—during my first two semesters, she signed up for classes so that she could work toward her undergraduate degree.

I took a full course load, and Mommy was in three of my courses: “Intro to Psychology,” “Intro to Sociology,” and aerobics. I’m like, “Are you kidding me—my mother is taking gym class with me, too?” On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—the days when our shared courses were scheduled—occasionally, I even had to let her ride to school with me. “There’s no use in spending extra gas money,” she said. I’d sometimes sit on the other side of the classroom because I felt uncomfortable having my mother so close. Then again, my whole childhood was the perfect training for how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. “I understand you’re embarrassed to be seen with your mom,” my father scolded me one day. From then on, I always sat in the desk right next to Mom’s.

When I wasn’t either studying or dodging my parents, I was rehearsing. My sisters and I were trying to get a gospel album deal, so my parents had us auditioning all over the place. I wasn’t the lead singer—Trina was. The tone of her voice was beautiful. We performed everywhere, including at the Kentucky Fried Chicken Gospel Music Competition. We entered the contest four years in a row, and during the final year, we wore matching purple and green neon outfits. Though I wasn’t the lead singer (we each had at least one solo), I did lead two songs—“God Is” and “I Know It Was the Blood.” Trina sang “Uncloudy Day” by Myrna Summers (and by the way, Trina actually did a duet of that song with Myrna years later). Tamar’s solo was “One Day at a Time,” the Kris Kristofferson country song that we changed into a gospel style. Because that song contained the lyrics “I’m just a woman,” Mommy made Tamar change it to “I’m just a child.” “There are no darn women over here!” Mommy told us. We never won the competition—but in our last year, we did make it as far as the semifinals.

Around Maryland, I also sang on my own. I entered a local competition for a chance to perform at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night in Harlem. I learned a big lesson that night: You’ve got to know your audience. In the finals, I sang “At This Moment.” I’d fallen in love with the song (by Billy Vera and the Beaters) when it was played during a love scene with Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan on
Family Ties
. The song might’ve sounded like a hit on a sitcom episode, but it flopped with a crowd of black folks! I should’ve chosen an R&B number. The second lesson I learned was this one: Winning is sometimes less about being talented and more about bringing along enough people who can cheer loudly when your name is called. You guessed it—I lost.

I grabbed every opportunity that I could to sing. Between classes, I earned extra money by performing at nightclubs, at fashion shows, at weddings, in competitions. The back of my Honda looked like a suitcase: I packed it with all kinds of dresses and heels, so I could quickly change into the right outfit if somebody called me for a gig at the last minute. In the backseat, I had my Anita Baker outfit (a black dress that I paired with a gold chain and a big belt) and my Spanx-tight “Do Me, Baby” booty dress (the eighties version of an Hervé Léger knockoff, which I wore with stilettos to make me look tall—hey, you’ve gotta dress for your audience). On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, I did gigs on my own. Every Sunday, I sang with my sisters or played piano for the church choir—yep, I did that, too. I got paid $25 a month for that—$5 a week for the months with five Sundays, and $6.25 a week for the months with just four.

Around town, I became known as the girl who sounded like Anita Baker. In fact, if Anita was coming to our area for a concert but couldn’t visit a radio station to do her own promos, DJs like Randy Dennis from V103 in Baltimore would call me in to record the first line of “Sweet Love,” Anita Baker’s 1986 hit. I made $50 here and there singing jingles and lead-ins for Anita, and people really believed that I was her. I also hustled up any chance I could to be seen or heard: I was even that person who always tried to be the third caller when a radio station hosted a competition. “If people could just hear my voice, I might get discovered,” I kept saying to myself. I was doing my own social networking long before anyone had ever heard of Facebook or Twitter. I was always ready to perform: I would sing at the opening of a Band-Aid.

I also held down a thousand other jobs—that’s how I scraped together money for my tuition. For a short time, I worked as a court reporter. During another semester, I became a telemarketer. Later, I was an assistant at a finance company. And if you think that sounds like a lot of skipping around, there’s more: I first majored in sociology, then in psych, and finally, at Bowie, in music and in elementary education. At one point, I even thought I wanted to be a pharmacist.

I also transferred a lot. Once I finished a couple semesters at the community college, I enrolled at Morgan State. I then went on to Fleet Business School. My last stop was Bowie State. The truth is that I didn’t really want to be a college student at all—I wanted to be a student of music. That’s one big reason I moved around so much.

At one of the colleges I attended, I took a job (yes, another one!) in the dean’s office. A couple of my friends, Penny and Jackie, worked in the same office with me. One of the guys who worked there always brought in Chinese food, so one afternoon when there wasn’t much to do, we all sat around talking and eating. The assistant dean walked in and started chatting with me. “Why do you want to be a singer?” she asked. Everyone knew I was an aspiring musician. “The chances are one in eight million. You should continue your education.” I stared at her but didn’t respond—I didn’t dare say anything back because she was the assistant dean.

I’m sure that woman meant well—but she had no idea just how much passion I had for music. Every time I performed, I felt an immeasurable sense of peace and assurance. In a world in which I could control little else, the one thing I could control was how I expressed myself through song.

From the moment I sang my first solo in church, I felt liberated. I’d often been told that I would never be the lead singer because my voice was too androgynous at a time when soprano soloists were celebrated; I also didn’t have a wide vocal range—damn near contralto and on the brink of baritone. “You’re more of a background singer,” people would often tell me. Even in my family, I was the arranger and the pianist. Trina usually took the lead.

And yet what others said about my voice didn’t change my desire to be out front—if anything, their words deepened my resolve to be a soloist and increased my love for music. In a way, I didn’t choose music; music chose me. So why did I want to be a singer? Because even with odds that sounded so impossible to my assistant dean, I really couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.

“
DAD, CAN I
borrow a few bucks?” On a Tuesday morning in 1987, I was trying to round up some gas money to get to my class at Fleet Business School in Annapolis, Maryland. My father handed me a $5 bill, and less than a minute later, I was out the front door of our house and revving up the engine of my Honda. I had just enough cash to make it through the day—$2 for lunch, $3 for gas.

I always got my gas at Amoco. It was the closest to my school and the cheapest I could find—when you’re a broke student, every quarter counts. The gas station was on the opposite side of the street from Fleet, so I had to take a slightly different route on the days when I wanted to buy fuel. When I pulled into the lot, I drove onto the full-service side. In those days, when you went over a little bump on the full-service side, a bell rang
(ding, ding!)
to alert an attendant. Once I realized that the full-service gas was twelve cents more per gallon, I pulled out and reparked on the self-service side. I then lifted the nozzle for the unleaded and started pumping. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an attendant wearing a blue jumpsuit—he’d heard the bell I’d mistakenly rung the moment before. The man walked toward me.