My Voice: A Memoir (3 page)

No easy task—I was a crazy kid.

I broke my leg in seven places after jumping out of a tree at six years old. Then, a year later, I fell in the park and slit my arm open and needed eight stitches. And right before our move to Brooklyn, when we lived uptown on 207th Street, I was arguing with my cousin and banging on the French doors and my hand went through the glass. When I pulled my hand out, it ripped my wrist open. My mother—who happened to be in the other room playing her acoustic guitar, her latest interest—heard the screams and thought,
Oh God, what now?

That was until I come walking into her room and my wrist is wide-open. She calmly walks me to the bathtub, wraps my arm in towels, and one of the guys from the neighborhood rushes me to the hospital. The doctors said they could see my veins and I would need stiches inside and out. I still have a nasty scar on my wrist from that one. So yeah, all of this before the age of eight. It’s a wonder my poor mother didn’t have a heart attack.

Her solution was to keep a closer eye on me as she explored new avenues for growth and learning for herself. For example, she took me with her to various self-awareness meetings and Buddhist meditation groups where they would chant, “
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,
” attempting to awaken their deepest enlightenment. I remember sitting in there, in the back with a few other kids who’d been dragged along, too, all of us looking at each other like—
What are these crazy people talking about?

Even though at the time I might have thought they were weirdos, I
appreciate that my mother exposed me to different ways of thinking and believing. She also gave me a set of values that included the importance of splurging—when it mattered. We might have eaten ramen noodles or mac and cheese out of the box all week, but once in a while she’d find a way to take me to a really nice restaurant. We mostly shopped for bargains, but I also remember, now and then, her buying me a pair of expensive sneakers. Those instances were memorable because they were reminders that those experiences didn’t have to be out of reach. Lots of people I knew back then never even left the block where they grew up, mainly because they never could imagine themselves leaving and getting to travel the world beyond it.

In fact, it was while my mom was trying to evolve and remove herself from some of her childhood dysfunction that she decided to move away from our family uptown all the way to a one-bedroom apartment of our own in Brooklyn. And not just Brooklyn, but the end of Brooklyn, the farthest possible part of the city from Washington Heights—the third-to-last stop on the F train—Neptune Avenue, then known as the Van Sicklen stop. The train ride to get to our new neighborhood of Beach Haven took, like, two hours—an hour on the A train to Jay Street–Borough Hall and then another hour on the F train toward Coney Island. Despite the long subway ride, we would still manage to go back and visit family almost every weekend.

Brooklyn seemed cool. The proximity of Beach Haven to Coney Island was a plus. There was grass outside our building, which was a big deal, and it was directly across the street from this big tennis bubble that looked like some old monument, where people would play tennis indoors. I didn’t know anybody who played tennis uptown.

Best of all, there were lots of kids in the neighborhood. Shortly after we moved in, my mother and I were in the hallway of the building when we got to talking with another mom and her daughter who was
about my age—a pretty Jamaican girl who was tall and thin and who turned out to be Nikki, my future best friend. It all came from her mom and mine talking about how we were both eight years old and both going to PS 216. The moms decided that since the school was about a dozen blocks away, it would be nice if we could walk there and back together. And not only did we do that, but we did it every day for the next four years, sharing almost every experience.

Every morning we’d stop to get a bagel and two quarter waters for a dollar. That was our daily routine. All we needed was a dollar. Either she had the dollar or I had the dollar, or we scrounged change together to make a dollar. Nikki and I backed each other up, no matter what. She was the most reliable, honest, trustworthy friend any kid could have.

Nikki lived in 5H, on the fifth floor, with her mother and her two sisters and brother; I lived in 1H, so we’d constantly be running up and down the stairs to go to each other’s apartment. It didn’t take long for her family to become my family and my family to become hers. Now, Nikki’s family is Jamaican, so I’d be the little Puerto Rican girl at full-on Jamaican parties with their family, eating oxtail and rice and peas. That’s how I grew up from then until high school—being raised in part by a Jamaican family. If they were going on a family trip, the first question would be, “Is Angie coming?” And my family embraced Nikki just the same, and so she was raised eating rice and beans and
platanos
. For our mothers, both single working moms, having that extra support system had to have been helpful.

On top of that, since both of our mothers worked full-time, after school on most days Nikki and I hung out at the neighbor’s house, a West Indian woman from Trinidad named Ann Marie who had two daughters of her own. She did have a lot of rules though.

Rules? Oooh, not my favorite. Never a fan of too many rules
.

Ann Marie had a rule that if you wanted to drink orange juice, you
better not pour it straight out of the container. You better fill the cup halfway with water and mix the juice into the water. “How dare you drink orange juice just by itself?” I guess this was her way to make the orange juice last longer. She also had one of those living rooms that you weren’t allowed to go in and one of those plastic-covered couches that you weren’t allowed to sit on. She was a really good lady, only she was tough and very stern in her rules.

It was at Ann Marie’s house that I first heard Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball.” I remember getting such a kick out of it and thinking it was so funny that he would be “playing basketball without a basketball.” I needed to learn the lyrics immediately, so I got out a notebook and listened to it on repeat until I could write down every single word and memorize it. This became my thing. I had to know every word of it. And I had to know it better than everybody on the block.

While there were only a few kids on my block as interested in hip-hop as I was, it didn’t stop me from venturing out to find it. At night I would sneak out to make the ten-block walk from Beach Haven to the Coney Island amusement park—where I’d go just to hang out next to the Music Express ride because the music was so dope. Biz Markie, Audio Two, and—of course my favorite—Eric B. & Rakim. When I could convince Nikki to go, too, that was even better. She only went once or twice. The walk home—dark, deserted, and under the elevated train tracks—was not for her. Not the safest for two girls walking alone late at night, much less for one. But in the end that didn’t deter me. I went alone when I had to. There were a lot of kids like me there just to hear the music.

If you were a kid who came from nothing, and you listened to the radio or read entertainment magazines or whatever, you didn’t relate to any of that. None of it. So hip-hop became a reflection of real life. And over time, even if you didn’t come from the hood—or maybe your
circumstances were a little better or a little worse—you could still relate because what you heard was honest.

In the early eighties, I can remember Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel, not only with the “The Message” that talked about the jungle of ghetto life but also “White Lines,” which was the first of its kind to reference the coming crack epidemic. As a sixth grader, I was too young to really understand all of the themes, but the references felt familiar. It felt like I was getting the real story of what was going on in the city around me, the unedited version. And I loved it.

•   •   •

M
y growing love of hip-hop didn’t prevent me from trying my hand at musical theater. I use the term “musical theater” loosely.

I was in sixth grade at PS 216 with Mr. Devinoff, who had sort of an old-school
Brady Bunch
look and was known for putting on the best school plays. And for some reason I thought it was a good idea to audition for one of the leads in
Oliver!
That is, until I heard Mr. Devinoff say it was my turn to get up in front of the whole class and sing. Oh my God, all of sudden I was terrified. I’d never sung in public before, and as soon as I walked to the front of the stage and opened my mouth, I completely froze.

No sound came out at all. I couldn’t move. The only thing my body agreed to do was cry, so I did. Like a weird ugly cry. Inside my head I was screaming at myself
: This was the stupidest idea you’ve ever had!
You’re clearly not built for this. You’re terrible!

“It’s okay. You’re just a little nervous,” Mr. Devinoff encouraged. “You’ve got to shake it off.” He didn’t let me off the hook. He didn’t let me cry and then not do it.

Like a deer in the headlights, I just stared back at my teacher. I still couldn’t move.

“Okay, I just want you to calm down. Take a deep breath.” After I did, he insisted I sing the part that I had chosen to audition for.

And that second time, I kind of killed it. So much so that I wound up getting the part of the Artful Dodger!

I remember that moment, and I remember it mattered, like—
Oh! I see
.
I just have to get past the nervous energy.

That audition left a lasting lesson. It proved to me that if something happens to throw you off, you can’t curl up in it. You have to get past it. What sealed that message for me was the next day, when Mr. Devinoff pulled me aside during class.

“I went home last night and I was sitting with my wife,” he began.

That was weird to me. I’d never thought about my teachers as full people outside of the classroom.
Mr. Devinoff has a wife?

“I was showing my wife the video of the auditions,” he continued. “She thought you were so great after you pushed through being scared. She thought it was the greatest.”

How cool was it that I had a teacher who had the insight to know how much that would mean to me? I loved every minute of rehearsing and performing in that show, especially playing the Artful Dodger, who was coolest part of all anyway. And it was not lost on me that I could have missed out had I let my nerves get the best of me.

In the years to come, there would be plenty of times when I’d have to summon that same lesson to get past being scared. You just can’t pay attention to it. You have to know that’s only what’s happening to you in the moment. You have to choose not to let your fear keep you from whatever your intention is.

You really can get past it.

The lesson was well timed for me, too, because the following school year I was headed to junior high and all of a sudden Nikki and I would be attending different schools. This was the first time since the third
grade that we were to be separated. Nikki was going to the junior high school closer to where we lived, but I had tested into Brooklyn’s Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented. I happened to be really good at math. Go figure. There were kids who got into the school for gym or dance or other fun and creative talents, but not me. I spent my days doing math.

At the end of the school day, I couldn’t wait to get out of there and go home and hang with Nikki and my other friends. And it wasn’t just me. As soon as the bell rang we’d all fly down the halls and thunder down the stairs to get to the exit doors. One day as we were all rushing to go home, I’m on the stairs and this girl behind me is pushing her way out.

I turned around aggressively and shouted, “Yo! Watch who the fuck you’re pushing!”

She quickly responded, “I’ll push whoever the fuck I want.”

That was all it took. She said something nasty, and I said something nasty, and there we were, fighting on the stairs, pulling each other’s hair, dragging each other around. Mind you, the stairs were really steep, so we could’ve easily killed each other. Luckily, we didn’t. I learned a quick lesson that afternoon—to watch how I talked to people if I wanted to avoid this type of conflict.

Other than that, school was uneventful. But what was happening outside of school was beyond eventful. Hip-hop was on fire! That next summer of 1984, I was thirteen and spent a lot of time at my grandmother Livia’s. The movie
Beat Street
was out, and it changed my life. I saw that movie so many times, I could recite it line for line in its entirety. Still can. “
Your moves are wack . . . All your moves are wack . . . Your moves ain’t worth the bit, punk 
. . .” I’d never seen a movie with kids who looked like me and my friends and that told a story about how your obsession for hip-hop, dance, and art could actually take you places.

At this point, in my grandmother’s neighborhood uptown, and most inner-city neighborhoods, you could find pieces of linoleum or cardboard on almost every corner, where you’d see people breakdancing with big boom boxes blasting beside them. I’d listen to the radio every weekend to hear Kool DJ Red Alert on KISS FM and Mr. Magic on WBLS, and would tape their shows religiously. I had tons of tapes. Out on the fire escape, I’d sit for hours with my cassette player, listening to songs like UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne”—rewinding and playing it over and over to learn all the words:
Yo Kangol, I don’t think that you’re dense / But you went about the matter with no experience.
Then a rapper took on that name Roxanne Shanté and answered that record with one of her own called “Roxanne’s Revenge.” I memorized that in one sitting:
Well, my name is Roxanne, and don’t ya know / I just cold rock a party, and I do this show . . .
I was obsessed. I listened to my tape player religiously—until the damn thing wore out.

For the next couple of years, whenever I was uptown in Washington Heights at my grandmother’s apartment—like in the summers or on weekends—I’d hang out at a park with kids I knew in the neighborhood. We’d stay out late at night, smoking weed and listening to music, watching the breakdancing. We’d sneak into the train yard and write on the trains with big fat Magic Markers and spray paint. Yes, I was a B-girl and into all things hip-hop, graffiti included.