My father’s mother, Addie, and Nana Reese were close as sisters but far apart in temperament. While Nana was sweet, Addie was strong-willed and set in her ways. She and my mother had issues, to say the least. I remember a time when my mother threw her out of our house. Because of their conflicts, my mother kept me away from this part of my father’s family, and my knowledge of them mostly came from spectacular and contradicting stories. I clung tightly to the sketchy scenes and the precious pictures my grandmother saved for her son, Roy. I rescued them when my father died. I love them and I protect them.
So there I stood, that sunny morning, in front of 73 West 131st Street, posing for a picture, just like the pastor, my great-aunt, my blood, had done fifty years before. Only I was hardly in a choir robe; I was most likely wearing a dress the size of Nana Reese’s sweat towel—boobs propped up and legs for days, diamonds twinkling. And the man with the camera was one of the flyest and flashiest rappers in the world, leaning against a one-hundred-thousand-dollar whip while he snapped the photo.
This dignified and decaying brownstone I stood before was the site where my mother and father were married. Their wedding was another drama, another story I was told in mismatched pieces. Most of my family can at least agree on this: my mother fainted during the ceremony. Exactly why she fainted is still up for debate. Cousin Vinny was there, and although she was a child at the time, she clearly remembers how beautiful my mother looked on that day. She describes her dress as a “pretty, shiny blue,” satin perhaps, and it is in that blue wedding dress that my mother collapsed to the ground, her new groom having to slap her face to revive her. I had once been told my mother lost consciousness after seeing a large rat scurry across the floor during the service, but later I learned that she was pregnant at the time. In either scenario, it’s appropriately dramatic for an opera diva’s wedding in a Harlem basement church.
As we pulled off the block, I thought about what kind of strong, faithful, and resourceful sisters Reese and Addie had to have been back then. These two Black women—armed with little education—owned four brownstones in Harlem. In addition to the church on 131st Street, Nana Reese also owned a brick church in Wilmington, North Carolina, so big it had its own baptismal pool. Its size and strength (at the time it was the only brick building in Wilmington’s Black community) also made it a neighborhood sanctuary: it was the place where all the Black folks would gather and seek refuge from the tornadoes that regularly pummeled the coast.
Nana Reese and the church were a fixture in their town in so many ways. Every morning the choir, called Voices of Deliverance, would sing on the local radio. She was such an influential leader in the community that she was a threat to some, particularly in the days of segregation and violence in the Jim Crow South. One day Nana Reese was visited by some white men in uniform: police and a fire chief. Cousin Vinny remembers their large, imposing bodies towering over her small five-foot frame. Immediately after this “meeting,” and without saying a word, she packed up the kids and left her brick church and the congregation it served faithfully for so long, never to return again.
I thought about those women as I posed for my photo, just before climbing back into the passenger seat of a car that cost more money than they’d ever made in their entire lifetimes. My women elders, who made something from nothing. They had a vision beyond Jim Crow, beyond third grade, beyond fear. I wonder if they ever had a vision of what was in store for their little Roy’s baby girl?
So much of the pressure from the recent past had been lifted: I had a new record deal. I had people who were excited and enthusiastic about my comeback. I had thought that Glitter would be the death of me, but it gave me new life. I took it as an opportunity to retreat, rest, and renew my purpose. If Rainbow was a bridge to safety, Charmbracelet was a cocoon, a place of shelter, healing, and growth that made it possible for me to bloom again.
THE LATIN ELVIS
One year, for Christmas, I took a whole chosen family of close friends to Aspen. Unbeknownst to me, the real-estate agent who handled my Aspen rental had gotten together with a coworker to set me up on a blind date. It was a simple scheme: they told the mystery man that I really wanted to meet him, and they told me that he wanted to meet me. He turned out to be international megastar Luis Miguel, the “Latin Elvis.”
Our first date was at a restaurant, and it was hardly a date, for me. I was like, Who is this guy? He was drinking a lot, and his hair was blown out and all over the place. But a small part of me was intrigued. He
