Alfred Roy was a man who lived his entire life under threat of humiliation and dehumanization as a result of his identity. He placed all his hope in the notion that societal respect would be awarded him through his discipline, diligence, and excellence on traditional institutional tracks like academics, service to your country, and respectable work. His other two children had all the makings of great students. When they were younger, he demanded that they produce all As on their report cards, and mostly they did (yet he would still sometimes question why each A wasn’t accompanied by a plus). The only class I excelled in was creative writing, in which I was always in the advanced groups. But I was tragic in mathematics and really couldn’t connect with most other subjects or material.
The two potential academics took terrible turns in their teens, fulfilling a Black father’s greatest fears. The boy had been “institutionalized,” placed in the precarious “care” of the state, the first stop on a dangerous fast track to becoming a statistic. And the girl, pregnant before her sixteenth birthday, had already arrived at one. And I, the baby, who wasn’t a wild one, rejected the traditional, “safe” route to a secure career and began to pursue what he saw as an improbable, mysterious, and dangerous path. My father was extremely strict with my siblings, and they would often complain or joke about his tight and eccentric ways to my mother. However, in an effort to shield me from their harsh perspective, I often overheard her tell them, “Don’t say that in front of Mariah.”
There were moments when my father did disappoint me. After Alison was no longer living with him, he went from being a divorced single father to a true bachelor. There were times he wouldn’t show up for our dates.
As a child, there were them times
I didn’t get it, but you kept me in line
I didn’t know why
You didn’t show up sometimes
On Sunday mornings
And I missed you
—“Bye Bye”
So, over time, our Sunday ritual became sporadic. My music was driving so much of my time and energy by that point. I worked on it every moment I could. I was determined to rise above my conditions, rise above all the people who didn’t believe I was going to make it, rise above the sad place my sister had fallen into, rise above my brother’s angry dysfunction. I was going to rise above it all—even if that included my father, the one stable family member I had. After paying for one summer at a performing arts camp, the most my father ever did for my career was to warn me about how uncertain and treacherous the entertainment business could be.
Years later, I called my father and played “Vision of Love” from the recording studio, putting the phone receiver right up to the Yamaha speaker.
“Wow,” he said, “you sound like all three Pointer Sisters!” He wasn’t a big music man, so this comparison was high praise coming from him. It meant he had noticed all of the layers of the background vocals, in addition to the strong lead. He was really listening to my song. And I could tell he was happy with it and with me. After all those years, it was truly validating.
Yet, even after all I had accomplished I wasn’t immune to the perfectionism he had projected onto his other children. After I had garnered two Grammys within my very first year in the industry, he remarked, “Maybe if you were a producer you could win more, like Quincy Jones.” That same year, the legendary Quincy Jones took home seven Grammys for his epic project Back on the Block, which spanned the entire history of Black American Music and featured giants from Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis to Luther Vandross.
I had done astonishingly well as a new artist (who had written her own hit songs), and here my father was, comparing me to arguably one of the greatest musical giants the industry has ever known, with decades of experience and endless accolades and honors to his name! I was immediately thrust back to my childhood, as if my two Grammys were two A’s on my report card and he was asking me what had happened to the pluses. I think my success in music scared him because he had no idea about, and seemingly no influence on, how I’d arrived. He didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.
Gradually, “next Sunday” turned into a month of Sundays. I had to let go of our Sundays so I could manifest my own day in the sun.
COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES
It’s hard to explain
Inherently it’s just always been strange
Neither here nor there
Always somewhat out of place everywhere
Ambiguous without a sense of belonging to touch
—“Outside”
My first encounters with racism were like a first kiss in reverse: each time, a piece of purity was ripped from my being. Left behind was a spreading stain, which seeped so deeply inside of me that to this day, I’ve never been able to completely scrub it out. Not with time, not with fame or wealth, not even with love. The earliest of these encounters happened when I was about four years old and in preschool. The activity for the day was to draw a portrait of our families. Laid out on the table was a stack of heavy-stock construction paper the color of eggshells and small groups of crayons for us to pick from. While I much preferred sing-along and story time to coloring, I was excited about the project and determined to do my very best. I thought if I did a good job maybe the teacher would decorate my drawing with a gold-foil star sticker.
I chose my supplies carefully, found a quiet corner, and got busy with the assignment. At that point, our family of five had not yet fractured. For a short time, I had a father, a
