Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (7 page)

Deep down, I believe Robert had to have had a good heart to marry a woman who had five children and—at least initially—to treat each of them like his own. He was also the father of my beloved baby brother Cameron, and I think he wanted to make his marriage work—for us to be a family. But there was such negativity and bigotry in his family, I think he succumbed to the pressure, and the ugliness that he’d grown up with began to ooze out of him as well.

I’d see bigotry again and again in my ballet career, and it would hurt every time. But after living with Robert it would no longer come as a surprise.

Like when I moved to New York when I was sixteen, and the other ballerinas would look at me, not sure that I was black but certain I wasn’t white, and proceed to ignore me.

Or when I tried out for six ballet companies’ summer programs, received invitations from all but one, and Cindy told me that the one rejection was because of the color of my skin.

“Save it,” Cindy told me, referring to the curt turndown that had come in the mail. “One day, they’ll be sorry.”

I don’t know if they ever were. But I still have that letter.

MOMMY STARTED COMPLAINING MORE
and more about Robert.

“He’s got his nerve talking about folks,” she’d say. “Lots of people don’t like Asians, either.”

Or “He’d better watch his mouth. One day he’s going to call somebody a name, they’ll hear him, and he’s going to wind up beat down to the ground.”

But that was all muttered behind Robert’s back. When he was home, screaming at us, making the boys fight, repeating a racist joke and howling with laughter, she’d say nothing. She’d nervously look down at her lap, like there was some safe harbor there. But she wouldn’t rebuke him. She wouldn’t protect us. We kids were on our own.

Sometimes when Robert wanted Mommy to hurry up and clean the bathroom or get Cameron dressed, he would grab her by the arm and yank her. I began to see bruises peeking out from beneath the camisole she wore under her blouse.

About four years after we’d moved in with Robert, my mother told us kids that she was beginning to fear for her life. And so in the fifth month of my first year at Dana Middle School, it was again time to pick up and go.

A few weeks before we left, Mommy huddled us all together.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mommy said, practically whispering, though Robert had gone out. “Robert can’t have a hint that we’re leaving. When it’s time, I’ll let you know. Be ready.”

Mommy could be very dramatic. If the situation wasn’t so tense, it might even have been comical or fun. I could almost pretend we were actors in a spy flick, or co-conspirators planning our escape from a penal colony.

Erica, Doug, and Chris had never really liked Robert. They
were devoted to Harold, whom we considered our real father (and whom we’d still see on many weekends). Years of being subjected to Robert’s yelling, name-calling, and sometimes violence had curdled my siblings’ dislike of him into hatred. Now that our getaway was being planned, they’d smirk when he screamed, knowing that they wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer. Mommy, too, would give us a knowing glance, almost a wink, during Robert’s tirades. Then she’d return her gaze to her lap and proceed to do whatever Robert told her to do.

One morning Robert got in his Jeep and headed to his office as usual. Mommy would usually leave about half an hour after he did and head to her job at an office products company.

But not today.

Lindsey, Erica, and I were buttoning our shirts and combing our hair when Mommy burst into our room and told us that we weren’t going to school.

“Today’s the day,” she said breathlessly.

We broke into a sprint, grabbing suitcases and stuffing them with whatever we could carry. With baby Cameron, there were seven of us now, but in most other ways we were leaving Robert’s home the way we had come, urgently, and with little more than the clothes on our backs.

About an hour later, a car pulled up in front of the house. There was a knock on the door.

“It’s time to go,” Mommy said, opening it.

Standing there was a tall, skinny white guy with wire-rimmed glasses and tousled brown hair. I’d never seen him before. He began carrying our suitcases to a Toyota I later learned he’d borrowed from a friend. It was parked behind Mommy’s gray Chevy Corsica.

“That’s Ray,” Mommy said hastily, filling her trunk with bags. Though the mysterious Ray was clearly playing a role in our escape, no one wanted to ride with him. Instead, we kids crowded into our mother’s car.

Mommy got behind the wheel, and my brothers, sisters, and I rounded those mountainous bends that seemed to leap toward the Pacific Ocean one last time.

I LOVE MY MOTHER,
but I’ve never really understood her.

She was beautiful. Like Mariah, our mother had a flood of chestnut curls cascading down her back. Mommy’s locks were flecked with ruby and gold, and they formed a halo of ringlets around her deep brown eyes and sandstone skin.

She and Mariah Carey could have been sisters. That much was clear. Maybe that’s why our family loved the golden-locked singer so much. Erica would one day name her only daughter after her. And we played Mariah Carey’s debut album almost as much as we watched sports. “Vision of Love” was even my baby brother’s lullaby. Cameron would cry until he heard Mariah’s five-octave voice; when we popped in Mariah’s CD, he would curl up in his crib and fall fast asleep.

Wherever Mommy went, she was bound to be the prettiest woman in the room, and I would beam, waiting for everyone to realize that the beauty in their midst was
my
mother. She was impeccable, too, refusing even to walk to the mailbox without a swipe of coral lipstick or sweep of mascara.

Mommy always worked, usually in sales, though she’d been trained as a nurse back in Kansas City. After getting off work in
the early evening, she’d drive to the Boys and Girls Club to pick up us kids. I think everyone there looked forward to hearing the staccato of her high heels clicking across the hardwood floors. They waited to greet her, from the teenage boy spiking a ball who would pause to give her a goofy grin to the male counselors who’d put their phone calls on hold, smooth their hair, and inevitably poke their heads out their office doors so they could say hello.

My brothers hated all the attention, especially Doug Jr. “Stay in the car and we’ll come out,” he’d grumble angrily just about every day. But she didn’t listen. I think the sweet asides felt too good. They were balms on tough days, a respite from what had too often been a tough, tragic life.

She wasn’t long out of high school when she married her first husband, Mike, who had a sky-high afro, Hershey-kissed skin, and a love for all things basketball. But a bullet took away his hoop dreams and all the other plans he and Mommy may have had for the future. He and Mommy had gone to Oakland, California, to help his younger brother, who they were afraid was involved in drugs, and Mike was shot and killed.

My mother cried and mourned with his best friend, Doug, and a year later they got married. That man, Doug Copeland, was my father.

I know that to survive such a childhood took resilience, and I always figured that my mother’s near-constant sorrow and loss helped fuel her devotion to my brothers, sisters, and me. With us, she had a family that wouldn’t fade away, that she could always carry with her. But as our lives began to repeat the rootlessness that had haunted her own itinerant childhood, I wondered why. Knowing what she had gone through, why didn’t she
try harder to give us the stability she herself must have craved? I wanted to claim her perseverance as my emotional inheritance, not her dependence on men, or her frantic getaways into the night.

When we first left Robert, we went to stay in downtown L.A. with friends of our mother’s. Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles, as we called them, were wonderful, opening up their small home to Mommy, my siblings, and me. But despite their hospitality, my usual, everyday anxieties took a backseat to a fear of real, palpable danger, just as they had on Robert’s worst days.

I’d never lived in a place like this before. Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles’s neighborhood was Crips turf, the battleground of one of L.A.’s most infamous gangs. The men wore blue do-rags to pledge their allegiance to one violent faction or the other and scrawled their graffiti on fences and stop signs.

The Kansas City Chiefs decal Mommy sported in her car window seemed to agitate some of the gang members. The L.A. Raiders were a big deal in the city, unsurprisingly, but besides the tension football could cause among gang members, the Chief’s color was a bright Bloods red. All I really know is that they would give us hard looks as we rode by, and we worried about a bullet piercing the windshield every time Mommy drove us home from school.

We were right to. One evening we were in the living room watching television. There was the
pop, pop
of gunfire, then footsteps, and a heavy thud on Uncle Charles and Auntie Monique’s front porch.

We ran outside. A man, probably in his early twenties, was writhing in pain, blood spreading like an inkblot on his blue jeans.

“I’m hit,” he sputtered weakly.

Auntie Monique ran inside to call 911 while Uncle Charles shouted orders.

“Get some water,” he yelled. I ran inside, shoved a pot under the kitchen faucet, then ran back to the porch, water spilling onto the carpet along with my tears.

“What’s that?” Uncle Charles asked incredulously, cradling the wounded stranger’s head and looking at me as if I was crazy not to understand what the victim of a drive-by shooting needed as he waited for an ambulance. “The man is thirsty! He needs some water to drink.” I ran back in the house and grabbed a glass, feeling shaken and helpless.

I can’t remember what happened to that man, if he lived or died. We stayed with Auntie Monique and Uncle Charles for several weeks more, and when Mommy told us we were leaving, I was glad for once to be moving on. But my relief was shortlived.

It turned out that we were moving in with Ray, Mommy’s new boyfriend, whom none of us kids could stand. He was a nerd who tried entirely too hard to be cool, blasting Ice Cube and EPMD from morning till night.

“Yo, Doug! Erica! Pete Rock and CL Smooth just dropped a new jam,” he’d say. “Come hear it.”

Erica would roll her eyes and go back to reading a magazine. Doug would get a look on his face like he was ready to explode and go outside to practice his dribbling.

Mommy also started to change in a way that unnerved us all. Instead of being our stern, if exuberant, mother, she seemed to revert to some version of her teenage self. She and Ray got matching tattoos of each other’s name swirled in black ink on
their shoulders. And Mommy would kiss Ray passionately in front of us, something she had never done with Harold or Robert. It made us sick.

My older siblings had begun to grow bitter toward Mommy when we lived with Robert, and now I started to get the same sour taste in my mouth. We wanted a mother who was responsible, who either stayed married or stayed single, and who put her children before some random man. In our sports-obsessed family we couldn’t understand how many marriages she had to fumble, how many relationships she had to lose, before she got out of the game. We couldn’t understand why she needed a man at all—why we children were never enough.

Ray worked at the office products company with Mommy, but didn’t seem to earn much. Mommy worked in sales, but her commissions ebbed and flowed. Robert had been the real breadwinner. So now money was tight. We subsisted on Top Ramen noodles, potato chips, and soda pop, with an occasional can of vegetables thrown in. Mommy had never been much of a cook, rarely touching the stove. And again, she seemed content to shirk her responsibilities, giving Doug or Erica a few dollars culled from her paycheck or Ray’s to go grocery shopping. Then Chris—who had been Robert’s best student in the kitchen but was barely fifteen—would prepare the family meals, whipping up tacos or spaghetti from a couple of pounds of ground beef that he stretched as far as he could.

We stayed with Ray for about a year before moving even farther away from our onetime home in San Pedro to a town called Montebello, where we lived in another cramped apartment with Mommy’s next boyfriend, Alex. He was Latino and seemed a little more at ease in his own skin than Ray, but he
wasn’t much more stable. We were never sure if Alex had a real job. And just like at Ray’s, Mommy and Alex slept in the one bedroom while we kids spread blankets and pillows wherever we could find a clear spot on the living room floor.