Unprotected a memoir, p.1
Unprotected: A Memoir, page 1
Copyright © 2021 Billy Porter
Cover © 2021 Abrams
Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934842
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4619-2
eISBN: 978-1-68335-954-8
B&N exclusive edition ISBN: 978-1-4197-6072-3
Signed edition ISBN: 978-1-4197-6074-7
The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals have been changed, and some dialogue has been re-created.
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We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins . . .
—PRIOR WALTER, IN ANGELS IN AMERICA, PART TWO: PERESTROIKA, BY TONY KUSHNER
PROLOGUE
This is not a coming-out story. It’s not a down-low story either. I never could have passed for straight, even if I’d wanted to, and so I never had the dubious luxury of living a lie.
By the time I was five, it was all too clear that something was wrong with me. Everyone knew it, and I knew it too. It was why grown-ups shook their heads and spoke in lowered tones whenever I was in the room. It was why I had to talk to a Nice White Man once a week, in his office in the big building up the street. The man and I played games, and he asked me a lot of questions. Sometimes I knew the answers and sometimes I was confused.
But I wasn’t confused about why I was there. The Nice White Man was a doctor. He was working to help fix me. I didn’t know the name of my mysterious affliction, but I did know that it had already manifested itself in many unacceptable ways.
For one, I was drawn to all the wrong pastimes. Double Dutch jump rope and hopscotch and jacks were for girls. It was wrong to want an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas, and therefore Santa was never going to bring me one. I would get a set of drums instead (but the noise would bother Aunt Dorothy and I would seldom be allowed to play them). It was wrong not to care about football, wrong to shun contact sports in general.
I was also taken with all the wrong clothing. I brightened at the sight of all the wrong colors, the deep jewel tones and soft pastels. I loved the wrong fabrics too: taffeta and lace and velvet and lamé, material that rustled and swished and swirled with every step. It was wrong to love all the glorious hats on the ladies at church. And the trimmings on those hats! Veils and feathers and flowers and sequins and beads and rhinestones and ribbons and bows. Paul the Apostle had decreed that women should cover their heads during worship, and Black ladies had turned this directive into an art form.
It was wrong to be mesmerized by Aunt Sharon’s shoe closet. To be excited by the rows of slingbacks and stilettos in silver and lilac and violet and mauve. To run my fingertips along their leather and satin and crocodile sides. It was especially wrong to slip on my very favorite pair—the candy-apple red pumps with the highest heels—and sashay back and forth before the full-length mirror, overcome by the splendor of them on my very own feet. It was why I was no longer allowed in her room.
Though I could not have articulated it back then, not even to myself, my fixation on fashion went deeper than mere aesthetics. I sensed that clothing was a potent signifier—that its import went beyond its visual appeal. Later I would come to understand that the finery donned by Black churchgoers was a powerful form of resistance. Many of them were employed during the week as domestic servants, or security guards, or custodians, and were required to wear uniforms meant to reinforce their status as less-than. To dress impeccably and regally on the Lord’s day, then, was to insist on their own dignity and worth in a world that sought to systematically strip them of both. It was a way to assert that they were God’s children too, and in His house, they would adorn themselves in a manner befitting the glory of the Lord!
I didn’t have the words for any of this at the time, just a child’s awareness that people carried themselves differently in different clothing, that fashion could effect a profound transformation, on the outside and inside both. The dazzling pageantry of Sunday worship filled me with delight, and I longed to be a part of it—but even in this, my desires were all wrong, for while I adored rockin’ a three-piece, reversible Easter or Christmas suit situation, I also longed to dress like the ladies, from spike heel to majestic crown.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To render a childhood in which I was continually urged to seek the Bible’s guidance in all matters, let us do as that Good Book does, and start in the beginning.
CHAPTER ONE
The luminous soul at the center of my genesis story is Cloerinda Jean Johnson Porter-Ford. My beautiful mother, who loved me into life, held on to that love through every trial and tribulation over the next several decades, and underwent her own tumultuous journey alongside my own. In my half century of life, I’ve never encountered another with a fraction of her faith, grace, courage, or endurance. If—as Christian tradition would have it—earthly suffering is a preparation for heaven, then my mother has earned the rank of archangel in the hereafter. But each morning she pulls herself back up and into this world, pressing on with nothing but gratitude in her heart. She has been my lifelong model of fortitude and faith. Every day I thank God for the gift of being her son.
My mother was born with a degenerative neurological condition that, to this day, no doctor or specialist has been able to name. Today we would call the cause of this condition medical malpractice, but in 1946, lawsuits were nothing more than a distant dream for Black folks. We couldn’t even sit at the same lunch counter as white people, so how were we gonna sue someone white for damages? Within the next two decades, the civil rights movement would stoke our hope, tantalize us with the promise of equality, but it would also show how ruthlessly brutal white society would be in response to that prospect. Beatings with billy clubs, vicious dogs straining to attack, fire hoses that could send a bitch hydroplaning up in these streets like a rag doll, and the systemic imprisonment and assassination of our leaders: These instances of white brutality would shock the world, but they would not shock us, for we never had any illusions about the way things were. This country was built on the backs of my ancestors, the enslaved, remember, so delusions of justice being served on behalf of my mother had been harbored by no one.
When my grandmother Martha Johnson went into labor, she was rushed to a hospital where there was no doctor on call to deliver her baby. In those days, medical professionals administered tocolytic therapy to mothers in premature labor, drugs that would delay delivery for up to forty-eight hours, allowing doctors to administer steroid hormones that could speed up the development of the baby’s lungs. The staff in charge of my grandmother’s care decided to pursue this course of action. There was just one problem: My mother’s arrival was not premature in the slightest. My mother was ready right on time, like she is in real life to this day. Suppressing my grandmother’s contractions and locking her baby back into her uterus made no more sense than stuffing a butterfly back into its chrysalis.
The doctor arrived soon after these drugs had taken their intended effect. He consulted the notes on my grandmother’s chart with an air of annoyed impatience, rebuked the staff for needlessly complicating and prolonging her labor, and then, with a few brusque and brutal motions, he yanked the baby from her constricted womb. The damage was extensive and irreparable.
A vast range of conditions are associated with birth trauma of this nature. Seventy-six years after the fact, we will likely never know the precise response of my mother’s body to the disastrous mismanagement of her passage into this world. Today, the steady deterioration of her nervous system has left her extremities immobile. She can’t wash, eat, or relieve herself without assistance. She relies on the kindness of the exquisite staff of the Actors Fund nursing home in Englewood, New Jersey.
But it wasn’t always this way. Though my mother was visibly different even as a child, with a compromised gait and bodily tremors, she once had much more mobility than she does now. Learning to walk was harder for her than for other children, but she managed it. She could hardly hold a pen and her handwriting looked like chicken scratch, but there was nothing wrong with her mind. Unfortunately, in the ’40s, educators were less discerning than they are now, and all disabled children tended to be treated the same way: as outcasts, freaks relegated to windowless basement classrooms, out of sight of mainstream society. My mother was no exception. Throughout her elementary school years, she was grouped and shamed with children who had severe cognitive impairments.
“I’m not stupid, just handicapped,” was her plaintive refrain, and it remains so even now.
My mother grew up in Lawrenceville in Pittsburgh in a modest three-story home—the Big House, if you will—under the punitive rule of her aunt Dorothy. My grandmother had relinquished her child-rearing responsibilities to her sister for reasons that remained a mystery throughout my childhood. But in the Big House, Aunt Dot’s word was law, and she laid it down with a hickory switch and an acid tongue.
Dorothy seemed to resent my mother’s very presence. It was as if she had wronged Aunt Dot simply by being born, like she owed her money or some shit. My mother’s younger twin sisters, Karen and Sharon, were allowed to take part in social activities—birthday parties, sleepovers, whole afternoons in the park with friends—while my mother was treated like some Black Cinderella, or, as she likes to say, Black-erella, before the ball, constantly put to work and seldom allowed out of the house. You cain’t do nothin’ anyways, and won’t ever be able to do nothin’, so why bother, was the message she received from Aunt Dot and very often everybody else. The world had given up on her before she even began.
Salvation seemed to materialize in the form of William Ellis Porter. He was a handsome, dark-chocolate babe with almond eyes and a sparkling personality. He was gregarious and sociable, an extrovert, a church boy with a job, who checked all the necessary boxes. Most importantly, when he met my mother, he seemed to see past her disability. He was the first man who showed her any romantic interest, and everybody on the planet wants to simply just be seen. My mother was smitten, and the rest is history.
Later she would learn that he had married her on a wager. That is, he had bet his best friend that he could seduce the “church cripple.” My mother was an easy mark: lonely, naive, a prisoner in her own home who would have done almost anything to get out. It’s harder to fathom her fiancé’s motives. Maybe he was enticed by the prospect of a woman he could control. I don’t think he expected his little game to go as far as the altar, but, as improbable as it seems, he followed through with wedding my mother.
“I left that house and vowed I’d never go back,” my mother told me later, sitting up in bed at her nursing home and chuckling at the memory.
“Why are you laughing?”
“ ’Cause I had to eat my words. We barely lasted a year. We moved to East Hills, into one of those brand-new affordable housing communities the government was building at the time. I got pregnant with you pretty quick, and things were good for those nine months. But as soon as I had you, that man turned on me like Jekyll and Hyde! He started drinkin’ and yellin’ and beatin’ on me. He went around telling the whole neighborhood that I was a voodoo witch and that’s why I was a gimp. Everyone believed him. No one would even talk to me.” Here she trailed off, her eyes sliding away from mine and glazing over.
“So how long did this horror—”
“Not long. You were about to have your first birthday when he came home from work drunk one evening. You were in your crib and crying because you had a fever. Don’t you know that man snatched you up, dangled you by one arm, then whipped you around and shook you so hard I thought your neck would snap.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I gotchu outta there in Jesus’s name! I most certainly did! I packed your diaper bag and a suitcase and called Aunt Dot to come get me.”
“But you hated—”
“I didn’t hate her. I just . . . I didn’t have anything or anyone else. Bill had become a danger to my baby. I had to protect you.” Her eyes welled up, recalling this.
“Don’t cry, Mommy. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. Because I vowed I would never go back. And here after barely a year Aunt Dot was looking at me with that I told you so smirk on her face. But she was right. I had to eat my words.”
It would be five full years before my mother was able to flee the Big House again. And so I spent those formative years in a home full of women: Mommy, Grandma, Aunt Dot, Karen, and Sharon. My mother and I shared the attic, which provided a modicum of privacy and the chance to bond as single mother and child, away from the toxic religiosity permeating the rest of that household and condemning our every human impulse and desire. This religiosity would form the bedrock of the internalized shame and self-hatred I would spend my life, up to this minute, trying to purge. The best way to hover above it is to focus on my art, to overwork myself, overbook myself all day, every day, so as not to find myself within the emotional chasm that only seems to widen as I age.
But you see, bedrock is almost impossible to displace—and if you dig down deep enough, you will always find it, lying beneath our every step.
* * *
In 1976, my mother and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. This neighborhood has been a center of Black life in Pittsburgh for more than a century. August Wilson, the Pittsburgh-born Pulitzer-winning playwright, immortalized it with his Pittsburgh Cycle, which was set there. Rumor has it that the television series Hill Street Blues was inspired by it too, as its creator, Steven Bochco, is an alum of the famed Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama just down the hill. In any event, this move represented a hard-won independence and new beginning for my mother.
It meant a new beginning for me as well. In just a few days, I would begin the first grade at a new school. Much of my childhood is hazy in my memory, but I remember that first day of school with searing clarity.
I was frightened. But I was also excited. I loved the new outfits Mommy had bought me the day before, at the Sears & Roebuck department store. The Garanimals brand made it easy for me to coordinate my own outfits—all I had to do was match the animals on the tags. She bought me four matching sets: the giraffe, the bear, the lion, and the tiger. I wanted the monkey set too, but Mommy said no. She said she didn’t want me wearin’ nothin’ ’bout no monkeys.
Mommy was sad. She was always sad. All I wanted was to protect her from the mean people who made fun of how she walked. She couldn’t help walking the way she did. It wasn’t her fault—she was born that way. And Mommy always said that God didn’t make mistakes, so she was born just as she was supposed to be. Why didn’t other people know that? Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?
“Bow your head, boy—we gonna be late, and you know I hate a late spirit!”
“I’m ready!” I said, grabbing her hand and bowing my head.
“Father, in the name of Jesus, we thank you, Lord, for our life, health, and strength. We thank you for the clothes on our backs and the roof over our heads and the food on our table. We thank you for blessing us to wake up and see yet another day. Oh, bless your name, Jesus!”
Mommy’s hands began to shake. Her whole body often shook. She had no control over it. The shakes just came. When she was sad, she shook. When she was happy, she shook. When she was nervous about something, she really shook. She was shaking all over today.
“Dear Lord, I ask you to bless my sweet boy on his first day of school. Give him strength, focus, and courage. Open his mind, Lord, and help him to learn and retain all of his studies—for we all know that education is the key to success in this life. And please keep him from all hurt, harm, and danger. These and all other blessings we ask in your name and for your sake—Amen.”
“Amen,” I echoed, giving her palm a final squeeze.
We walked hand in hand down Wylie Avenue to the school, a castle-like structure at the top of a sloping lawn. The kingdom was surrounded by a seafoam-green steel fence with spikes at the top and bottom. A lone baby doll dangled from the lower edge of this fence, its head impaled between the spokes and the ground.
As we made our way to the front entrance, where many moms and their kids were milling around, I could feel my mother’s tension. Mommy got nervous around crowds and her shaking intensified. I gripped her hand to steady her, and she gripped mine back for dear life. People gawked as we walked by, children and parents alike, whispering and pointing as if we were some sort of sideshow act.
“That lady walks funny!”
“Ewww . . . she look retarded!”
The crowd parted like the Red Sea. My mother ignored the ruckus; she’d gotten real good at blocking out the noise. When we arrived at my classroom door, she reached down to brush some imaginary lint from my shoulder, make one last adjustment to my collar. “Come straight home after school, okay?”
