Every Little Step: My Story (2 page)

Boston kids in the 1970s and ’80s grew up fast—in retrospect, much too fast. When we were still in elementary school, no more than eleven or twelve, we had the freedom to roam the streets. Of course, that meant we were always just a half second off trouble, just inches away from the backseat of a squad car. But we also had the space to explore the things that interested us. For me, of course, it was dancing and music. After my first win, I wanted to do nothing but talent shows, those little showcases and contests where you got the chance to experiment with this thing called show business, even before you understood that it was part of a business. Almost every weekend, my sisters and I would be onstage at some show, delivering a performance. Although violence was always around us, one of the main ways I bat
tled back then was not with my fists—it was with my dance moves. I wasn’t necessarily confident about my singing yet, but I knew I could whup anybody’s ass in a dance battle. I was all over Boston, challenging other dancers to battle me. Break dancing, pop locking—man, I was unbelievable. The battles would usually take place at block parties. My crew would hear about a block party going on at another housing project, in nearby neighborhoods like Dorchester or Mattapan, and we’d roll over there. My crew would go up and challenge the best dancer in another crew: “I bet you can’t beat him,” they’d say, pointing to me.

My go-to song was “Scorpio” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. When the DJ put that record on, with that dope beat and the strange robotic-sounding voice, I would just wear everybody’s ass out. When New Edition hit it big and I got a chance to meet Grandmaster Flash and his crew a few years later, I was so impressed that I started dressing like them, wearing the leather, the spikes, the hats. I just knew I was the shit at all times back then.

I’ve always been drawn to style, figuring out how to present myself in a way that’s different from everybody else. So with rap, I think it was the style of the rappers that drew me in before the music, which is ironic considering that I had dreams of becoming a performer. The style and culture of rap were so profound that it soon became a global force, deeply influencing people on nearly every continent (I say
nearly
because I’m not so sure about Antarctica). Seeing these young
black men who had created their own musical genre and an all-encompassing style to go along with it was transformative to my eleven-year-old brain, particularly since I was a kid who was already drawn to creativity and self-expression. I was the kind of kid who, when I got a new pair of sneakers, would bring them into my room and sprinkle glitter all over them.

One summer when I was down in Alabama at my grandmother’s house, where my father grew up, I was watching
Soul Train
and saw this dude doing the moonwalk. So I went outside and put some sand on the ground and started practicing sliding backward while looking like I was moving forward. When I came back to Boston, I showed the move to my friend Ralph Tresvant. His response was memorable: “Damn! Did you see what Bobby Brown just did!”

Once I added the moonwalk to my repertoire, it was over; I couldn’t lose a dance battle. My sisters and I would go back to Boston from Alabama on the Greyhound bus, which always stopped at the Port Authority in New York. If you’ve ever been there, you know all kinds of seedy characters hang around the Port Authority. In the late seventies and early eighties, you’d see a lot of dancers and dance crews there, entertaining the crowd, trying to get people to put money in a hat. When our bus hit the Port Authority, my older sister Leolah, whom we called LeeLee, would cut out, walking around the city in her hot pants, thinking she was Donna Summer, but I would head straight for the dancers. The first time I saw them, I thought,
Oh God, let me in on this!

Sometimes I would battle other dancers or just put my own hat down and start dancing to collect money. I would pick up some moves, but most of the time I would be showing them moves they had never seen, like the moonwalk. When I realized even these guys in New York couldn’t beat me, that’s when I really knew I had something special.

On the way back to the bus, I’d usually have to steal something too. It was like I couldn’t help myself. I’d snatch a couple of T-shirts, maybe some hats from one of those street vendors. I guess they have a name for that—“klepto.” When we got back to Boston, my little sister, Carol, would snitch on me, tell my mother what we had been doing, that we had abandoned her in the bus station. Just a year younger than me, Carol copied everything I did, tried to follow me everywhere I went. But I could always count on her to squeal on me too.

Carol was even in a group with me for a minute—me and four girls in a quintet we called Bobby’s Angels. I’m sure the name came from the popular television show at the time,
Charlie’s Angels
, which debuted in 1976. We were tiny, just eight and nine or so, performing in a few showcases around town, doing more dancing than anything else. There were so many little kids forming groups back then; it just seemed like the thing to do. We were coming out of the doo-wop and Motown era, when black singing groups dominated the charts, so it was only natural that when we thought of a path to fame and fortune, it was through a singing group.

Though singing groups and talent shows were everywhere in the 1970s, we didn’t really have a lot of big success stories to emulate in Boston—until the emergence of Donna Summer. For a few years there in the mid-to-late seventies, Summer was riding high on top of the music industry with hits like “Love to Love You Baby,” “Last Dance” and “MacArthur Park.” She was from Mission Hill, a neighborhood right next to Roxbury, and her enormous success was thrilling to little black kids like us. We were paying particularly close attention to her rise in my family because we were told we were related to her by marriage—her mother at some point had been married to my uncle Robert Williams, my mother’s brother (the one I was named after). I don’t think the marriage ended well, so her side of the family never had much of a connection with my side. But that didn’t stop me from informing Donna that we were related when I had the chance to meet her a few years later.

New Edition was at an industry event in New York City when I spotted her. I was hesitant at first, but then I decided that I wanted her to know about our connection. After all, we were perhaps the most successful black acts ever to come out of our neighborhood, so this meeting needed to happen. This was in 1984 or so, when her video for “She Works Hard for the Money” was still in heavy rotation on MTV—the first black female artist to achieve that feat (my future wife was still a few years away from becoming an MTV staple). New Edition was riding high after the release of our second
album, which included the hits “Cool It Now” and “Mr. Telephone Man”—one of just a handful of New Edition songs that featured me as the lead singer.

“Hello, Miss Summer, I’m Bobby Brown from New Edition,” I said when I walked up to her. “Do you know the Browns in Roxbury?”

Surely as a Boston native, she was aware of New Edition. But I couldn’t be too sure of anything judging by her reaction. I saw a look on her face that might have been confusion. Or maybe she was a half second from calling security. But I pressed forward, telling her of the connection between our two families.

“Oh really?” she said politely.

I kept talking, not wanting to stop until she acknowledged our bond. I got some nods from her, which I decided was perhaps all I was going to get. That was the first and last time I ever talked to her. I was really sad when I heard she passed in 2012, just three months after Whitney died.

One of the dance groups that had a huge impact on me during this time was a local crew called the Funk Effects, led by dance pioneer David Vaughn. Every time I saw them, the Funk Effects would blow me away. Not only were they incredible dancers, but Vaughn would turn their performances into these elaborate stage productions that he called “Broadway.” The dancers would come out wearing intricate spaceman suits, with dramatic lighting illuminating them as they danced. This made a big impression on my young mind,
demonstrating to me that staging and spectacle were just as important in creating an unforgettable event as talent. Vaughn would later work with New Edition and he would hammer that message into our heads too, while choreographer Brooke Payne was constantly pushing the importance of practicing. These were two lessons I never forgot.

Trauma Shakes My Soul

Though my father, Herbert, was the family comedian, my mother also had her own brand of comedy that would keep her kids giggling. Usually her humor came at my father’s expense. She loved to mess with him, tease him, make fun of him. Like a lioness on the African plains, she pounced on his greatest weakness—his fear of snakes and spiders. She would go out and buy rubber snakes and toy spiders and strategically hide them around the house, in places where she knew he’d come across them and damn near have a heart attack. She’d hide them in drawers or put one next to him on the couch while he was watching television. Sometimes she’d even hide a little fake snake in his food and bring him his dinner plate with a big smile on her face. The lively chatter of the family dinner would be interrupted by a sudden jolt coming from my father. We’d look up and see my father staring down at his plate with a mix of anger and horror on his face.

Then we kids and my mom would bust out laughing. My
father would commence to cursing. He’d get mad at her, but he had no choice but to roll with it. He was a grown-ass man; he wasn’t going to make a federal case out of somebody scaring him with a toy. But he wouldn’t be happy about it either. I remember seeing her walk up behind him with a shoestring and slowly put a rubber spider on his neck. He’d scream out and smack at his neck to get it off.

“I can’t take this shit!” he’d grumble, getting up to storm outside, the laughter cascading behind him.

When I think back on it now, I’m struck by how rare and outside-the-box my mother was—a middle-aged black woman in the 1970s scaring her husband and entertaining her kids with toy snakes. It’s like something out of a sitcom.

When I was about ten, I found out that my mother was even more outside-the-box than I realized. At one point she was selling dinner plates to people in the projects to make some extra cash. But one fateful day I found out that food wasn’t the only thing she was selling: it turned out my mom was also a dope dealer.

I can trace my realization back to when I noticed that she had gotten a heavy black metal door installed in our apartment. But at the time, in my mind, the heavy metal was put in to protect us from the Jehovah’s Witness missionaries who were constantly knocking on our door. My little sister and I thought my parents were petrified of the Jehovah’s Witnesses because of how they scurried whenever the missionaries came knocking. In the mind of a small child, any
one prompting such behavior must have been bad news. And that’s why I acted out so ridiculously when I was about eight and my sister Carol and I were walking up the stairs toward our apartment. We looked up and saw a pair of missionaries in front of our door.

“Aww, so cute,” they said to us. “Do you live here? Are your parents home?”

I looked up at them. I’m not sure what devious thoughts crossed my mind, but what I said next had them gasping for breath.

“Yeah, those motherfuckers is home,” I said. I started kicking on the door. “Ma, open this fuckin’ door!”

I heard my mother on the other side of the door, laughing hysterically.

The missionaries pushed past us and ran down the stairs in a flash, I’m sure thinking,
Oh no, we can’t help them! They’re too far gone.

My mother was such a great cook and food was such an important part of my family culture that at a very early age I was excited that she had started to teach me how to cook. And this led me to my first inadvertent encounter with my mother’s side hustle. When I was ten, I decided that I was skilled enough to make dinner for my family. My father was still at work and my mother was hanging out at a local club called the Parrot. Sometimes she would stay there far into the night. So I decided I would use the large block of flour I found in the freezer to make some fried chicken.

I got the chicken parts out of the refrigerator and covered a bunch of pieces in the flour. Then I dropped them in a pan of sizzling oil. I was ten, so I didn’t recognize the strangely pungent smell emanating from the pan. When the chicken pieces were nice and brown, I figured I was done. After I had taken a few bites, feeling weirder with each bite, my mother walked in the door. At first she was smiling at the idea that her little Bobby had made dinner. Then her gaze swept across the kitchen and she got hit by the full brunt of the scene—the smell, the mess, the powder. With horror, she realized what I had done: I fried the chicken in her cocaine. A radical new addition to the family’s culinary offerings: cocaine chicken.

“Bobby!” she yelled.

Though she explained that the powder I had used was not flour, it wasn’t until months later that I truly understood what was going on in my home, what my mother was really selling through the heavy black door. A couple of the local thugs had been sleeping on our floor for a few days. These guys were very friendly with my mother. On this particular afternoon, police officers knocked on the door and said they were looking for the same guys who were staying with us. My mother told the cops they weren’t there. The cops left and went downstairs. My mother went downstairs as well. When I looked out the window, I saw my mother in an angry confrontation with the police. One of the officers lifted his billy club and hit her in the face with it. He busted her eye and she staggered back. I remember vividly that she was stand
ing next to a green Cadillac that belonged to a guy who lived on the first floor. I started crying hysterically as I watched them put her in handcuffs and whisk her away in the back of a squad car. I was deeply upset by what I had witnessed. I mean, I was only ten and I had just seen the police beat my mother in the face. From that moment on, I would harbor a serious dislike of the police.