All the fear and fury I had bottled inside myself was now directed at my mother. She was in the center of the cycle I was desperate to break. My mother was finally experiencing the full bloom of my anger and was ill equipped to understand it or deescalate it. She couldn’t even get the joke—on the contrary, she felt threatened and embarrassed by it. She shook off her bewilderment; then an iciness consumed her, and she shot me a look that said, Oh really? You dare mock me? You dare threaten me? You have no idea who you’re messing with.
When my mother feels scared, her complete assurance in the historic evidence that whiteness will always be protected activates—and she often calls the cops. At various times, she’d called the cops on my brother, my sister, and even my sister’s children. My mother called the cops even when she didn’t necessarily feel threatened. One Christmas, I brought my family to Aspen. It was the first year after I left Sing Sing, and I decided I wanted to create my own ultimate Christmas tradition, so I took the whole Carey clan. For me, Christmas means family. I rented a house so I could decorate and have home-cooked meals and we could sing Christmas carols at the top of our lungs if we wanted to, and I put my family up in a fabulous hotel.
At one point we were all hanging out together at the house, and Morgan proceeded to get spectacularly inebriated. When he disappeared for a bit, my mother turned directly to her usual dramatics.
“Where’s Morgan?” she bellowed. “I can’t find Morgan!” Mind you, Morgan was a thirty-something grown man, but still my mother was in a self-induced panic. “I can’t find Morgan!” She called his hotel room repeatedly, but there was no answer. So, what did she do? She called the cops. My mother called the cops in Aspen, Colorado, to find my nonwhite, sometimes drug dealing, been-in-the-system, drunk-ass brother. The cops came to the hotel, and it was a whole big drama. She asked them to break down his hotel door, behind which it turned out Morgan was lying naked, butt up, passed out on the bed. The news spread like wildfire throughout the town, and that, ladies and gentlemen, was the last time Morgan and Cop Caller Mom were invited to spend Christmas with me in Aspen. I really don’t want a lot for Christmas. Particularly not the cops.
And so, that night in Westchester, she called the cops on me too.
The police arrived quickly, as they tend to do in white, affluent neighborhoods. My mother opened the door. I heard an officer ask, “Is there a problem, ma’am?”
“Yes, we are having a problem,” she replied, welcoming the two white policemen into the house. I could tell they kind of recognized me, though I was still in quite a state and looked it. I had been passed out, asleep, for the first time in nearly a week. In a tumultuous emotional whirlwind, I had quickly put my hair into a bun. I had on leggings and a T-shirt (as one would, in one’s home, when one is trying to rest). I had somewhat pulled it together, because that’s what you do when there are police involved. But I didn’t have on my superstar mask, which is how almost everyone knows me (except for the Lambs, of course). Without all the wardrobe and glam, I did appear troubled, perhaps a little wild or unwell.
Though the officers were technically in my house, their attention was directed toward my mother. She gave them an odd, knowing look, which felt like the equivalent of a secret-society handshake, some sort of white-woman-in-distress cop code. She had been defied, and I had dared to be belligerent. I was being aggressive toward her. I was scaring her. And they received her signal loud and clear. It was in their training. The code was in her culture. This was her world, her people, and her language. She had control. Even Mariah Carey couldn’t compete with a nameless white woman in distress. If I had been given just a day or two to rest, I would’ve woken up and been ready to make a video. But instead, here I was, standing in my mother’s (actually my) house with the cops.
The most terrifying part was that I was too worn out to feel my source. The negative energy of my mother, Morgan, and the police—the whole scene—blocked my light. I needed to see Tots. She had a big God in her life too, and if I couldn’t access mine, I thought maybe I could feel hers. I believed she could somehow keep me safe in a sisterly, spiritual way. I was trying to hold strong to her, but she was also really scared of the cops. And could you blame her? It’s totally understandable. She was the only visibly 100 percent Black person in the house. After successfully keeping out of trouble with police for years in the Brownsville projects, how could she explain to her mother that she’d gotten arrested in an affluent suburb and was in some upstate jail? Lord knows what they would have done to her in there (this was way before #BlackLivesMatter and cell-phone activism, although even a movement hasn’t stopped most of the brutality). So Tots was trying her best to keep herself and Mike away from the turmoil and out of sight. Against two white cops and one white woman, in upper Westchester, Tots knew she was out-privileged and totally out-powered.
Given his long, turbulent history with law enforcement, Morgan was lying low in the little den we called the “Irish room.” No one tried to explain to the police that it was just a family blowout—that everything was okay, and I was just overworked and had lost my temper. I needed care, not the cops. But no one defended me.
