Every Day I'm Hustling Page 2

  Now, all families are different. This is how Sug does it. Some people like them a bit sweeter and they put in sugar. Sug is sweet enough.

  •  1½ cups Aunt Jemima Self-Rising White Corn Meal*

  •  1 egg

  •  About ⅔ cup of boiling, scalding, super hot water

  •  Grease or lard—you could also use leftover bacon fat

  Get that grease or lard nice and hot in the pan. Use enough.

  Meanwhile, mix the corn meal in a bowl with the egg. Slowly add the hot water, stirring with the back of a fork until it’s cakey like Play-Doh. If it’s too loose and mushy, you put in too much water. Just add more corn meal. Too dry, add more water.

  Spoon or pour desired amount pancake-style into the hot grease or lard. Flip them when you see the edges begin to brown. When both sides are golden brown, you’re done.

  * Okay, there are areas that are deprived of self-rising corn meal in grocery stores. Amazon will hook you up! Order it Prime and rush it over.

  The cornbread is so nice on a plate of black-eyed peas, which Sug always cooks up on New Year’s Day. It’s a traditional food that welcomes a prosperous new year. Here’s how she does it:

  SUG’S CROCK-POT BLACK-EYED PEAS

  First things first: Soak the beans overnight. It’s worth it. Nobody suddenly says, “I’m going to make black-eyed peas this instant.” No, you plan for it. It’s an event.

  •  16-ounce bag of dry black-eyed peas (soaked overnight)

  •  1 pound of meat (salt pork, smoked ham shank, smoked turkey wing, turkey leg, etc.)

  •  1 small onion, diced

  •  Water

  •  Lawry’s Seasoned Salt to taste

  Before you soak the beans, do a quick sort-through to make sure there are no little stones or rotten beans. Soak the beans overnight, leaving a few inches of water covering them. Once the beans have soaked, drain and rinse them.

  Place the meat in the Crock-Pot, then add in the beans and diced onion. Pour in enough water to cover everything. Liberally salt with Lawry’s.

  Set the Crock-Pot to low for about 4 hours. Taste and add more Lawry’s if needed. Discard the bones and break up the meat. Serve and welcome abundance.

  As you welcome abundance with gratitude, know that I am so grateful for the blessing that is my sister. I adore Sug. She loves with all of her heart. Every single time I play a mother, whether I’m in the kitchen in Soul Food or running through the desert in Independence Day, you can see some Sug up on that screen. I even had a big roller-skating scene in Soul Food during a flashback. And yes, that was me falling on cue. More than that, in Soul Food, I used the way she talks to her beautiful daughter, Sharday, to capture that mix of love, concern, and bemusement when I had to sweetly keep my on-screen son in line. In fact, after she saw it, Sug called me.

  “Angie, you were playing me in that movie, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was, Sugie.” I wasn’t sure how she would take it. “You inspired me because you have always been the glue that holds the family together.”

  “Well, you did a good job,” she said. “You skated real nice, too.”

  That meant the world to me. Growing up, Sugie definitely became my surrogate mom. She provided structure and accountability in a house that could have gone kind of wild if she had shrunk from the responsibility of caring for us. When we speak as adults, I can give her all the gratitude I have. But back then I took her for granted. At a young age, she was not asked to be our shadow parent. It was assumed she would step in. Sug had to not only demonstrate maturity to us, her three siblings, but also be an example of leadership in the absence of parents. Through her day-to-day actions, she taught me that you can say “family comes first” all you want, but you have to do the work to back it up. She’s still doing it to this day, keeping all of us “kids” tied together no matter where we go in the world. And now she and her daughter have the close relationship I wish that my mother and me could have.

  *   *   *

  A little while ago, a camera crew went with me back to Indy, wanting to see where I grew up. I took them to see my mom, who still lives in my childhood home. And this rude woman from the crew straight up said, “Why do you have your mother still living in such a little house?”

  She doesn’t know Everlyena Fox. Here’s the answer every time I ask my mom if she’d like to move: “When I separated from your father, my brother helped me get the down payment. I bought this house, Angie. I worked hard to pay it off, and this is my house. And I like it here.”

  That person from the crew just saw a three-bedroom house with one bathroom and a little driveway in the middle of what she considered nowhere. She was looking down on the woman that I have looked up to my whole life. I say this to you and I mean it: Don’t let anybody dim the shine of your accomplishments. If they’re not paying your bills, why in the hell would they validate your worth? I watched my mom work so hard to have the money to raise four kids by herself without ever again depending on a man. She was always juggling two jobs—a nursing gig here, a school thing there. When she was home, my mother didn’t have time to be anything but a disciplinarian, making sure that we were clean, getting good grades, and always going to church.

  We lived across the street from our church, Breeding Tabernacle. My mom’s feeling was, “If those doors are open, y’all is gonna have your asses in there.” Sho’ nuff, as she would say, and with no lip. “Go on over there.” If we ever said we were bored, her response was, “Are you being lazy? Because I don’t have no lazy children.”

  My happiest memories of my mother are in the kitchen on the Saturdays she could be home. She would be in there cooking all day while she put us to work cleaning the house. She had everyone up and at ’em with Pine-Sol and bleach, scrubbing everything. To this day, I have to have that Pine-Sol smell in my house. That’s how I know it’s clean. But now I have a housekeeper, okay?

  Even with four kids, my mother stretched the generosity of her heart to take in another from time to time. My dear cousin Dana from South Bend used to spend the summers with us. We were born two days apart, and she was like the baby sister I never got to have. Mom has this ceramic set she uses as decoration, hanging in the kitchen for all to see. A giant fork and spoon arranged with the Lord’s Prayer on a plaque in the center. It’s like Jesus’s coat of arms, I guess. We weren’t supposed to even touch it.

  “Y’all running around this house playin’,” Mom yelled at us. “If y’all break my ceramic set … Lord, there will be nothing left of you.”

  We were running, and Mom was at work. Dana did this whirl and bumped right into the spoon. It was slow motion: The ceramic set teetered, and tottered, and then finally fell forward. Miracle of miracles, Dana caught it. But we were all screaming so much that the poor girl got scared. In slow motion, we saw her lose hold of the spoon, and the whole thing fell to the floor with a crash.

  The Lord’s Prayer popped out, and with it our lives, we were sure. There was a dent in the wood. “You are gonna get a whipping!” my brother Marvin yelled.

  Dana burst into tears, hyperventilating and making a sound like “Vitt vitt, vitt vitt.” We were certain we were all dead. Mom came home that night, and was sure enough furious. She didn’t whip anyone. It was like her heart was so broken she couldn’t bear to do it. Mom had, and still has, a gift for making sure you know if she is disappointed in you. Dana didn’t get that whipping, but she got a new name. To this day, we still call her Vitt Vitt.

  When I was about ten, Mom got a really good job working at Eli Lilly, the big pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis. She was proud of working there as a tech, getting to the plant early, staying late. She still wasn’t able to give us as much time as she would have wanted to, but she was a provider. That was how she showed her affection, making sure we were secure. And she wanted us kids, especially me and Sugie, to know that no one would ever give us anything. I am thankful to this day that she instilled her work et
hic in me. My friends make fun of me: “Why do you work so damn much, Vivica? You can pay that light bill.” Yes, I can. And I always want to have that financial freedom, just like my mother did.

  But that work ethic does come with a price. And maybe you’re paying it in your own life. It’s really hard for me to let people do things for me sometimes. Does that sound familiar? Whether it’s the weight of emotional baggage or a carry-on suitcase, I’m always saying, “I got it, I’m strong. I can do it.” It’s only recently, as I’ve grown more comfortable in my skin as a single woman, that I have been able to simply say a gracious “Yes, thank you” to an offer of help.

  *   *   *

  We Fox kids threw ourselves into every extracurricular activity there was. At Arlington High, I wanted to be the best at track, volleyball, and cheerleading. And, of course, basketball. I was also very open to finding surrogate parents in my teachers, like Mrs. Fletcher, the teacher mom of my friend April. She spoke in such a dignified, kind manner. Her husband was also a teacher, and from six years old to senior year of high school, I spent a lot of afternoons in their home after school. It was the biggest, nicest house I’d ever seen black people have. They were always in teaching mode, and taught me to really notice my surroundings. When you went for a walk with them, you didn’t just go by a tree.

  “What do you notice about the tree, Angie?” Mrs. Fletcher once asked me.

  “It has yellow flowers.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “It’s a tulip poplar, the state tree of Indiana.”

  I’d walked by that tree countless times. Now it was special.

  My daddy moved around a lot, but we spoke on the phone weekly and he came to all my games. He had a way of getting my attention and quietly coaching me, especially during basketball. I played power forward, where you have to be tough and play offense, but also make a quick turn to defense and shut down an opposing player. I had so much energy and took every game so seriously that he could tell before anyone else when I was getting too hyped. “Hey, chill out,” he’d say. “Chill out.” The phrase he used was “Attack intelligently.” If I got too hyped out, the other team could capitalize on that. So whenever he saw me spaz out, his “Chill” was code for “Play your defense, listen to your coach. Attack intelligently.”

  I will never forget the time he showed up once with a pair of high-top gold Converse sneakers for me. I was so proud of them shoes. He started buying me more shoes for sports to encourage me. He got me so many sneakers that I once packed two left shoes in my gym bag for an away game at another school. It was a big basketball game—one that could get us into the Indianapolis Girls City Championship—so I panicked when I opened my bag just before the game and saw what I’d done. But I put them on and tried to make a joke out of it with my team. What could I do but do my best?

  And it was one of the best games I had, maybe because I had to prove to the other team that I wasn’t a damn fool with two left feet. My coach, Miss Maxine, she said after, “Foxy, you need to wear them two left shoes more often.”

  We went on to win the city championship. Indianapolis did us right, making a huge deal of our school’s victory with an award ceremony. My father came, but not my mother, and all I remember is that I was a bucket of tears. I was so proud of the team. I also wished my mom had come.

  Years later, I took Dad to a Pacers game and we got to sit right on the floor. He looked up behind him and put his arm around me. “Wow, from way up in section nine to down here sittin’ on the floor.” I also took him to the Super Bowl in 2012, the first time it was ever held in Indiana. I was thrilled, but unfortunately my dad ended up flirting with the lady beside us. I was like, “Dad, can you please focus on the damn game?”

  He was always a ladies’ man. Always. I definitely got my horndog nature from him. Because we were of like minds, I could always talk about boys and even matters of sex with my dad. I remember when I was in my twenties and dating all six-feet-eleven inches of Elden Campbell from the L.A. Lakers, I turned to my dad for advice on some concerns I had about fidelity. It was my first kind of public relationship, and I didn’t want to look stupid with everyone watching. I would ask him, “Dad, what does it mean when he does this?” Or tell him, “He disappeared on me for a little while.” And my daddy would say, “And did you two get into it? Okay, then he might be doing a little somethin’ somethin’, but you stay strong. If he really like ya, he’ll come on back. And if he don’t, you a good-lookin’ girl—you my child.” My dad’s approach to trouble in a relationship was simple, and this is a direct quote: “The best way to get over that is with another pair of thighs. Keep it movin’. If he don’t like you, he don’t get you. Keep it movin’.”

  My mother’s approach to disappointment in relationships was to do a love lockdown on her heart; my dad’s go-to was to find the next person. They each decided the goal for me in love: Don’t get hurt. My parents simply had different ways of showing me how to go about it. For better or worse—for richer or poorer (LOL)—in relationships, we can unconsciously repeat the patterns that we saw growing up.

  *   *   *

  Our little corner of Indianapolis was all I really knew of life, but my brother Marvin was about to spark the beginnings of my plan to see the world. We ended up calling him Sarge because he enlisted in the military as soon as he turned eighteen. It was during peacetime, thank God, 1978. We have the same July birthday four years apart, so I’d just turned fourteen. Since we share a birthday I sometimes joke that we’re twins. He has my energy but goes about it in a quieter way.

  The army came to get him so early in the morning. I watched from the front window, seeing my mom hugging him and kissing him good-bye. And she was crying, barely able to speak. It was sad, and yet we were so proud of him in that uniform that we were happy, too.

  “I’ll be back,” he kept saying. “And I promise I will stay in touch and I’ll write.” Marvin and I always wrote to each other wherever he was in the world. It was so exciting for me to get his letters, filled with stories about being in Germany and Turkey. He went everywhere.

  He was still in the army a few years later when I was trying to make it in California. Some new girlfriends wanted to show me a good time, so they took me to Soul Train. I did the line, dancing my heart out in a gray dress I thought would look cute on TV.

  I got a letter from Marvin a little bit after the episode aired. “WAS YOU ON SOUL TRAIN?!?” were the first words, huge. He said he was watching TV with some of his boys and he started screaming, “That’s my sister! That’s my baby sister! Oh my God, it’s Angie.” That was the first time I was ever on TV, and I thank God I was able to share that moment with my Marvin.

  But for now I was still in Indiana while Marvin saw the world. I started to see a little bit of it, at least. When my mom did get time off, we would take road trips down to see her family in Mississippi. It was country as hell. Huge acres of good ol’ corn and greens and tomatoes. Her family always had lots of land. They had horses and cows and they rode on tractors and all that craziness. And I never felt more citified than when I was standing in Aunt Katherine’s cow pasture with my cousins Baba Sue and Darryl. “Hmm, this is cute, Mom,” I’d say. “When are we leaving?”

  It was the trips to see family in Chicago that I loved, particularly to visit my aunt Corinne, or, as I and everyone else called her, Madame King. She owned a salon on the South Side, Madame King’s Hair Fashions. She was fabulous and one of the first African Americans in Chicago to own her own salon. She loved makeup and had that hair, honey, with the blond highlights in it.

  And she turned out to be my fairy godmother. It was in Madame King’s storefront salon, a palace to a kid, that I first started reading movie magazines. There were tales of beautiful people doing extraordinary things with their lives. Ebony magazine’s ads featured gorgeous black women looking right at the camera—right at me.

  I was reading one of Madame King’s magazines the summer I was thirteen, just before star
ting high school. Her big eyes suddenly shone on me.

  “Angie, do you want to be in a fashion show?”

  I didn’t give her a half second, in case she changed her mind. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then come here, baby, we gonna cut your hair.”

  I put myself in Madame King’s hands and was never the same. She cut my hair short, a pixie with a little bit of a shag, leaving it a little bit longer in the back. Oh, I was fine with that hairdo. And I walked in that fashion show, moving my arms exactly the way Madame King had told me. I can’t for the life of me remember what I wore, but I remember smiling at the audience, and all of those faces smiling back. I got bit by the entertainment bug, compliments of Madame King.

  I decided then and there that I was going to be a model. What was there not to like? You got onstage and everyone was looking at you. And you got to wear great clothes and be in magazines. You were fabulous. Why not be fabulous for a living?

  I started high school with that haircut and I made the cheerleading team. They were like, “Ooooh, Angie Fox, that haircut is bangin’.”

  “Got it in Chicago,” I would always say demurely, with a pat to my hair.

  It was then that I started telling people, “I’m going to be a star.” The response was not encouraging.

  “Angie Fox, you ain’t going nowhere.”

  But I kept telling people, “I’m going to be a star. You’ll see.” I just needed to figure out how.

  Now, here’s what I want to warn you about setting a goal. The bigger the dream, the more likely people will tell you not to try. There are three types of people who will try to hold you back. There’s the basic motherfuckers who don’t want to see you succeed—that’s one group. They’re the easiest to ignore, and actually you can use their “power” to inspire you to show them how wrong they are. (We’ll talk about them later in Lesson 8. They can take a seat until we call for them.)

  The second group doesn’t want to see you get hurt, and so they want you to lower your expectations for what life can hold. These are the toughest to handle, because they think they are doing the right thing. They truly do care about you and are afraid to see you stick your neck out and get hurt. You have to be grateful for their concern, but you can’t allow them to limit you.