Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (7 page)

AS I TRIED
to leave my “Homey Toni Braxton” days behind, I studied fashion. One of my aunts kept a stack of
Ebony
magazines in her living room, and I often leafed through the issues. In those days,
Ebony
was known for an event called Fashion Fair—a traveling runway show that featured black models wearing vibrant outfits, flawless makeup, and chocolate-colored lipstick; when the magazine’s editors included coverage of Fashion Fair in their pages, I cut out my favorite looks. All the teasing I got from my classmates had left me with something to prove—that I could be stylish. I’m not really a vengeful person, but in the back of my head, I was always thinking,
I’ll show them
.

And yet the change in my image happened
veeeeery
slowly—which means the cruelty from my classmates continued. “I ain’t sayin’ no names,” one girl would spout off to another in the hallway, “but somebody was talkin’ ’bout you.”

“You’d better tell me who it was,” the other kid would shout, “or I’m gonna beat you up!”

Somehow, the finger of blame would always end up pointed directly at me; the irony was that I wasn’t talking to anyone about anything, because I’d always been in the out crowd. Even still, girls would randomly come up to me and hit me in the head or push me down and say, “I heard you was talkin’ ’bout me!” I might’ve been under five feet and scrawny, but I wasn’t a punk. “I don’t know you well enough to talk about you!” I shot back. They probably knew that—but they picked on me because my presence irritated them. Once when I came home and told Mommy how the other kids were treating me, she said, “Nobody is greater than you but God. They’re just jealous.” I really believed that. I might’ve been the odd girl out, but I still had an air about me, and the kids at school could sense that.

Later, when some of my other classmates went up to a girl named Tammy—a school bully—they told her that I’d been talking smack about her. She goes, “Toni Braxton? She doesn’t talk to anybody! Ya’ll lying on that girl!” From that point on, my classmates began giving me a little less of a hard time.

My best friend was Kim White. Actually, our friendship began on a sour note: Back in fifth grade, Kim was teasing me at school one day because of the way I was dressed. “You’re so country!” she shouted, snickering. Kim was one of the cutest and most popular girls in school, and that made her teasing even more painful. “Where did you get that dress from—your mama’s closet?” That evening, I went home and told my mother what happened. “Kim White said that to you? I know her mother,” Mommy said. Kim’s mom was in my mother’s wedding. “Let me call her and handle this.” The intervention apparently worked. The next day, Kim was suddenly nice, and we’ve been friends ever since. We came from similar backgrounds: all her siblings’ names started with the letter K, like the Kardashians: Kim, Kelly, Kristy, and Kia. And like me, she was the eldest in her family, so we bonded over that. When it came to fashion, however, Kim and I were worlds apart: She dressed her butt off. She also had great hair and a very cute face. Boys always liked her—and even if a guy did look at me, everyone was like, “Wow—I can’t believe he likes Toni over Kim.” At first the comparisons bothered me, but I learned to ignore them. Plus, I was just happy to be hanging out with a popular girl. Of course, that didn’t exactly make me popular—but it did mean that I was seen as little more acceptable (and slightly less teasable!) in the eyes of my other classmates.

I didn’t have a boyfriend at that point—I was in junior high before I started really noticing boys. This girl named Tammy had a cousin that I thought was
sooooo
cute—and I confessed my crush to her. “He kind of likes you, too,” Tammy told me. The following spring when we were all at a pool party (my parents only let me go because they knew the other kids’ parents were church folk . . . ), the boy and I started flirting around. At the end of the evening, we kissed—and a few seconds after our lips met, he stuck his tongue in my mouth!
What the heck was that?
I thought. I’d seen my mom and dad kiss, of course, but there was never any tongue involved. “You can’t kiss,” he said to me afterward. I was mortified. Later, when I told Tammy what happened, she said, “You have to learn how to kiss.” She pulled a doll from my little sister’s bed and said, “Here, let’s practice on this.” Tammy then slowly stuck her tongue in and out of the doll’s mouth.
Ick.
I didn’t even want to try that.

Among my classmates, I was usually the last one to do anything, so of course, I was also the last one to get my period. As I awaited its arrival, I started reading
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
. I absolutely loved Judy Blume’s book, and I read it over and over again. I could relate to everything that twelve-year-old Margaret, the main character, was going through: waiting and waiting for her period to come, wearing her first bra, being part of the itty bitty titty committee, having a crush on boys, and eventually dealing with a maxi pad wedged between her thighs. In a nutshell, that was my life. My mother had talked to me about my period a little (“When you get your menstrual,” she’d say, “it makes you a woman”), but for the most part, I learned about it by reading an encyclopedia. The day I finally spotted red in my panties, I went to my mother.

“Mommy, I’m bleeding a little bit,” I said.

“Where?” she said.

“Down there,” I said, pointing toward my crotch.

She paused. “You haven’t been messing around with any little boys, have you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head and wondering what the heck she was talking about.

“Well congratulations,” she finally said as she pulled me close for a hug. “You’re becoming a woman.”

Soon after, Mommy showed me how to use pads. The huge maxi pad was a little awkward, but wearing it made me feel very grown-up. “You have to be responsible with your things,” said Mommy, who went on to explain that I’d have to carry a purse to school with my pads in it. And the instructions didn’t end there: A couple days later when she saw me take a bite of a tuna fish sandwich, she stopped me. “Uh-uh—you can’t eat fish of any kind while you’re on your menstrual cycle,” she said. “The smell will come through your pores. Don’t take baths either—only showers. And don’t eat anything cold because it’ll make you cramp more.” And then there was the most important rule of all: Tampons were 100 percent prohibited.

“What do you got this for?” Mommy asked when she once found a tampon in my room.

“My friend gave it to me,” I said.

“That’s ’cause that child’s doing other things!” Mommy said. By the time I wore my first tampon, I was in college.

To this day, I have no idea where Mommy’s rules came from, but here’s one thing I can tell you—my mother was doing her best to prepare me for womanhood. Her little “You haven’t been messing around with any little boys” comment was probably born of fear—she didn’t want her little girl, her firstborn, to grow up too fast or lose her innocence too early. No mother has a handbook on parenting; most of us are just repeating what our mothers passed on to us. Now that I’m a mother myself, I understand that. If only I’d known that at fourteen.

THE SUMMER BEFORE
I entered high school, I got my first job—I worked as a custodian at a school. I only earned minimum wage (a whopping $3.35 an hour!), but I was thrilled to have my own money coming in. When I got my second check, I went out and bought new towels and accessories for our bathroom. I put the rest of the money into a savings account. A few weeks before I started high school, Mommy said I could use some of that savings to buy school clothes. So I went to a fashion store and picked out a pair of white argyle pants—by this time, Mommy had eased up enough for me to risk bringing home pants. I also bought myself a pair of brown leather penny loafers, a huge trend by the early eighties. I really wanted to slide a quarter into my loafers but my shoes were too small for that—size five and a half.

Once I got to high school, I started noticing boys. My first boyfriend was Ferron. He had fair skin and gorgeous green eyes, and though he was bowlegged and not very tall, I thought he was handsome. Plus, he was preapproved: He lived two houses down, and my parents knew his parents. In fact, our families were related through marriage: My uncle Ro Ro and Ferron’s grandfather were brothers. That didn’t surprise me, because everybody in our neighborhood was related in some kind of way. And since we were neighbors, we’d known each other for years—in fact, he teased me at school until my mother called his mother, and his mom told him, “Stop teasing that Braxton girl.” He did—and by ninth grade, I had a crush on him.

When Ferron eventually asked me to be his girlfriend, I giddily accepted. We kissed and made out while our parents were out of sight, but we both knew it wasn’t going much farther than that. While we were fooling around, he’d touch my butt and boobies—not that I had any boobies at the time. “Stop it,” I’d say, pushing his hand away. He always did. But over time, he got frustrated that we didn’t go farther—so he broke up with me. “I’m a growing boy,” he told me. “I have needs.” I was devastated. I even turned to Mommy for comfort. “Ferron and I broke up,” I told her, my eyes welling with water. “It’s all right,” Mommy said, embracing me fully. Once I gave her the details, I’m pretty sure my mother wanted to kill him.

During high school, I actually started to feel somewhat normal. In tenth grade, I befriended Angie Buck, an athletic type who was very popular on campus. Angie’s cliques became my cliques—and I suddenly got a whole new group of friends by association. But even after Angie introduced me to some of the cool kids, I was still seen as a little geeky—old perceptions die hard.

In eleventh grade, Ferron and I began dating again—but we broke it off again a few months later. By the time the senior prom rolled around, we had a little bit of a rekindle—which is why we decided to go to the senior prom together. Do you want to hear something cheesy? We actually discussed who would pay for the prom. “I’ll rent the car,” he said, negotiating, “and buy the pictures. We’ll split the cost of the tickets.” I ended up paying for much more than the pictures, but for some reason, I went along with it.

I designed my own dress. It was a taffeta number that had sequins, a belt, and a big fan on the side—just like the one I’d seen an Ebony Fashion Fair model wear. I saved $75 to buy the fabric. Miss Margaret, a lady in my neighborhood who was like an aunt, sewed the dress for me. I completed my look with a pair of elbow-length white gloves, white stockings, and some $60 heels I bought at the Wild Pair. In 1984, everybody wanted to look like Madonna—and in that dress, I felt like the black version of her. You couldn’t tell me I didn’t look good!

Ferron pulled up to my house in a Cadillac that he borrowed from his father—so much for paying to rent a car. Once inside, he greeted my parents, and then he turned to me and said, “You look nice.” The night went downhill from there. At the prom, we only danced with each other for a few songs before Ferron went off to dance with another girl—and not just any girl, but Sharron, the girl he’d dated on and off since junior high. I told Angie what was happening, and much to my alarm, she said something to the girl. “I’m not trying to take Ferron away from you,” the girl later told me. “We just danced when our song came on.” Her explanation only made me feel worse—and I was very upset at Angie for telling her what I’d said.

My curfew was midnight—my father had made that clear. So when I realized that I might not make it home in time (the prom was kinda far out in Baltimore), I called my dad at eleven
P.M.
After the usual third degree (“Where are you? Who are you with? What’s happening?”), Daddy finally agreed that I could get home a little late. All my other friends were planning to hang out for the rest of the night and then drive to Kings Dominion amusement park the following morning. Ferron was also going. Even my friend Kim was going—and my parents would sometimes allow me to do things if Kim was involved. But not this time: During my last year of high school, Mommy and Daddy were in a “no” phase. I think they were afraid that I might have sex—and they regarded my vagina as theirs. Ferron dropped me off at my front door at 12:17
A.M.

A couple days later when I saw Ferron at school, he came up to me. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” But that didn’t change the reality: My first love had become my first heartbreak. And on top of it all, I had to shell out my hard-earned cash for our hideous pictures and even for the tickets—Ferron was supposed to give me his half for our tickets, but he never did. Unbelievable.

DURING MY SENIOR
year, my father became the pastor of Mount Tabor, a United Methodist church in Crownsville, Maryland. In the months leading up to his appointment, Dad had already been preaching sermons all over town; my sisters and I were his opening act. By then, my brother, Mikey, had found a way to get out of singing with the family. Once he was in high school, he signed up for a vocational medical program, and that meant he had to work on the weekends. Lucky him.

The inside of our new church looked exactly like the one in
The Color Purple
. The sanctuary was small, with two sets of pews lined up on either side of a prominent middle aisle. There was even a little balcony. A couple summers before when my father had visited this church to preach, I remember saying to myself, “This is so cute—I wish my dad could pastor a church like this.” So I was excited when he actually became the minister there. Up in the pulpit, my father looked so respectable in his clergyman’s collar.

Daddy was a great preacher. There wasn’t a whole lot of shouting or jumping around during his sermons—that wasn’t his style. He was more of a straightforward teacher, a Joel Osteen type whose messages were very informative and inspiring. My mother sometimes spoke in the church, too: She was an evangelist. The Sunday service often ended the way it began—my sisters and I stood to deliver a pitch-perfect version of an old hymn like “Blessed Assurance” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”