Is You Okay? Read online

  CHAPTER 1

  EVERYONE’S A LITTLE DIFF-UH-RENT

  Q: Is “GloZell” your real name?

  A: Yes. When I was younger I used to tell people my name was French, because that sounded more refined and elegant. But really, it is a combination of my parents’ names: Gloria and Ozell. Get it? GLO-ria and O-ZELL. It’s actually a pretty common practice in the black community, and I’ve grown to really love it.

  My sister’s name is DeOnzell. She’s named after the amazing singer Dionne Warwick (my mom changed the spelling a little), and my father. It’s pretty fitting that she was named after an awesome diva, because she’s an opera singer now. Takes one to know one, I guess.

  I have always been different.

  As long as I can remember, even as a little girl growing up in Orlando, Florida—especially then, actually—I felt different. For a start, I never wanted to be what other kids wanted to be when they grew up. Boys wanted to be firefighters or astronauts or football players; girls wanted to be princesses or veterinarians.

  I wanted to be the tooth fairy.

  I’m deadly serious—I actually went around telling people I wanted to replace the tooth fairy when she retired. I thought that would be the greatest job in the world—and you know what, I still think that, kind of. You get to travel all over the world, you can FLY (hello?), you get to go into people’s houses and look at all their stuff and you don’t get in trouble. Plus you get to leave them some money. You’re like a guardian angel with a bank account. That’s why everyone loves the tooth fairy. Who wouldn’t want that?

  When I asked my mother, Gloria, how I could apply to be the next tooth fairy once she got tired of flying all those miles, my mom laughed and dismissed it, but not in the way parents do when they think you’re just being a silly kid who doesn’t know any better. She did it like she already knew what I was going to be when I grew up, and it didn’t involve a pair of wings or dental work.

  “Oh no, GloZell, you’re going to be a corporate lawyer.”

  Corporate lawyer? I had no idea what that meant—I was five years old. That didn’t matter to my mom, because she was a teacher, and as a teacher, success for her kids meant doing things that involved a lot of school. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist. Why corporate lawyer? I have no idea. Maybe it was because “corporate” means business and business means lots of money? Who knows—when you’re young, all that really registers when you hear the words corporate lawyer is “not tooth fairy.” I thought, I will never get to fly, and I will never see what toys the neighbor kids have that I don’t. It was a dark day.

  Of course, I’m much closer to being a tooth fairy now, as an adult, than I ever was to being a corporate lawyer. It’s why I like to wear a green tutu at my public appearances.

  Is the green tutu a bit weird for a grown woman? Maybe. If it is, I blame it on my mom—the weirdness, I mean. (The tutu was my choice.) That woman is diff-UH-rent. She’s one of my best friends now, but growing up she confused me more than just about anyone else in my life. She could have spoken to my little sister, DeOnzell, and me entirely in Japanese and we would have been less confused.

  My mom is one of those people who have a lot of strange ideas about things that often leave you shaking your head. The stranger the idea, the more right she feels about it. And the more right she feels, of course, the less right she tends to be. What’s worse, though—at least when it comes to arguing with her—is that there’s always a little kernel of genius inside each of her cray-cray ideas.

  A couple years ago, for GloZell Fest she made a bunch of church hats (we call them “church crowns”) out of household items—a KFC bucket, a trashcan, a lampshade, a pot and a frying pan, stuff like that. Her plan was to have my YouTube friends model them in an impromptu fashion show. Now I can see my mom’s logic with the KFC bucket: to church folks back home, where GloZell Fest was happening to church folks back home in Florida, fried chicken is like the Holy Bird. We eat it so much at church events that of course making a formal hat from a KFC bucket would make perfect sense to her. The rest of it, I have no idea, but the KFC bucket? At least I could see the kernel in the Colonel. (And here’s the thing: the hats were good. Colleen was one of the models in the fashion show, and I think she actually really liked hers. My YouTube friends still ask about those hats. . . .)

  See, it’s not that my mom is a crazy person; she’s very smart, actually, but in unconventional ways. She’s like a mash-up of Martha Stewart and Bear Grylls. The thing is, something happens between the time a little kernel of genius plants itself in her brain and when it grows into a fully formed idea. That “something” makes the moment of genius blossom into “something that makes no sense,” which in turn makes arguing about it with her impossible.

  Like I will never forget the time in sixth grade when one of her brilliant ideas left a family friend named Dr. Almont looking like a hockey player. Dr. Almont was a pharmacist like my dad. My dad loved his pharmacy and he cared a lot about his customers, so if he ever had to be away, he would only trust someone he knew well—like Dr. Almont—to take over in his absence. And since Dr. Almont didn’t have his own pharmacy anymore (he was older than my dad), he would happily fill in from time to time.

  So on the occasion in question, my dad had a week of pharmacy training and certifications to do some place far enough out of town that he called in Dr. Almont.

  Nothing really changed at the pharmacy when Dr. Almont filled in for my dad. My mom worked the cash register (when she wasn’t giving piano lessons, that is); Dr. Almont filled prescriptions all day, and after school, if DeOnzell and I didn’t have choir practice or piano lessons ourselves, we’d come hang out, pretending to do our homework while we watched the TV that sat on the floor behind the counter. If there were a lot of customers, we could watch cartoons or reruns of Laverne & Shirley. If it was slow, Dr. Almont and my mom would join us and then they got to choose what we watched since they were the adults.

  This particular afternoon we all got to watching Jeopardy! Dr. Almont sat in a little chair against the wall, my mom stood leaning against the counter in case any customers walked in, and they went back and forth trying to beat each other to the answer. It seemed like they didn’t care if they were right, they just wanted to be first. Dr. Almont would start in before Alex Trebek even finished reading the clue:

  Alex: “This sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer—

  Dr. Almont: “Who is . . .”

  And then his answer would trail off because he had no idea, and he had to reread the clue on the screen that he’d just talked over. This would always give my mom the time she needed to give her answer—which was wrong, like, oh, I don’t know, 75 percent of the time?

  At one point there was a clue about the royal family and Dr. Almont was silent. No half guesses, no jumping the gun, nothing. The royal wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana had taken place only a couple years earlier—everyone had been obsessed with it—so how could he not have at least one name on the tip of his tongue to be wrong about? I looked over, expecting to see him thinking hard—instead, I found him with his eyes rolled back in his head and his whole body shaking to one side. He was foaming at the mouth, his jaw was clenched, and his arms were bowed out in front of him. Imagine Frankenstein trying to hug a tree, and you’ll get the picture.

  “Mom, Mom, Dr. Almont is having a fit!” I yelled. Back in the day where I come from we called what was happening “having fits.” The correct term I learned when I got older was “seizure.” Dr. Almont, it turns out, had epilepsy, and sure enough was having an epileptic seizure right there behind the counter of the pharmacy.

  My mom started shouting, “It’s okay! I know what to do! I know what to do!” Even by sixth grade I knew whenever my mom said, “I know what to do,” what she really meant was that she had no idea what to do.

  “Don’t worry, I know what to do! I know what to do!” she shouted again. “We gotta lay him flat on the ground and put something hard in his mouth so he doesn’t bite off his tongue!” She seemed so sure of herself, that’s what we did. My sister and I got Dr. Almont flat onto the floor and just stared at him while my mom ran to the back of the store to find something to put in his mouth. Let me tell you, it’s very weird to hear the countdown theme music to Final Jeopardy in the background while an old man you’ve known your whole life shakes on the ground like he’s possessed by demons.

  I’ll take “Please Make This Stop” for $1000, Alex.

  My mom ran back after what felt like forever holding a large metal spoon—the kind you see in the pan of scrambled eggs on a breakfast buffet. Now I have no idea why there was a large serving spoon in the back of a pharmacy, but whatever—she got down on the ground holding that thing like it was the Jaws of Life, pinned Dr. Almont’s arms down with her knees, and then spent the next two minutes trying to jam the spoon through his clenched teeth. My mom is not the physically strongest lady in the world, but she’s no quitter. That spoon was getting in there one way or another.

  Dr. Almont came to three or four minutes later. We were all freaked out, but he had been living with epilepsy all these years so he was calmer than us—right up to the point where he ran his tongue over his teeth and looked in the mirror behind the counter. In my mom’s panic to get something into his mouth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue, she’d broken off his top two front teeth. He looked like a jack-o’-lantern! Dr. Almont was completely confused, and I’m sure he wanted to be mad, but how could he be? My mom was just trying to do the right thing.

  And that was the thing with my mom: she was always kind of right . . . sort of. You are supposed to get someone suffering an epileptic seizure onto their side, and you are supposed to make sure you move any harmful objects away from them. But it’s a myth that people having seizures can bite off and swallow their tongue, so you’re not supposed to put anything in their mouth. Even if they could, you shouldn’t use something stronger than teeth to prevent it, let alone try to jam it in there like you’re chipping ice off a windshield. In the Old West, when they had to amputate a limb or remove a bullet, they’d give the guy some whiskey and then have him bite down on a leather strap or maybe a broomstick. Not a piece of metal, and certainly not a huge spoon!

  But that’s my mom. The kernel of the idea is right, and the execution is all sorts of diff-UH-rent.

  My mom’s tendency toward being different doesn’t stop at emergency triage medicine; it includes far less critical things like, oh I don’t know, where she sent my sister and me to school!

  The idea was to give us the best education and the most opportunities to succeed. The execution involved putting us in a place called the Calvary Presbyterian School. I absolutely loved where I went to school—I’m not trying to hate—I’m just saying that if you’ve never been to any place with “Presbyterian” in the name, it’s usually about as white as the screen or the paper you’re reading this on. From kindergarten through eighth grade at Calvary Presbyterian, DeOnzell and I weren’t just the only black girls, we were the only ones with a tan.

  Growing up in a big family—my dad was one of eight kids, my mom was one of six—you spend most of your time in the same houses, in the same neighborhoods, going to the same churches, and you don’t realize how different things can be (or how different you are) until you’re taken out of those familiar places and forced to spend most of your day some place new. I didn’t even realize I was black, for instance, until my first day of kindergarten and all the other parents dropped off their children—my new classmates. I was the first one to arrive, which by itself was a miracle since my parents were not prompt people. They always managed to get me to school on time, so I’ll give them that, but they never picked me up on time. (It’s why I’m so crazy about being on time as an adult.)

  So there I was, the first person in class, sitting on my own waiting for school to start. The next person to come into the classroom was a boy named Joey Garratt. I took one look at him and thought, I’m going to be his friend, because something is wrong with this poor child. His hair is yellow, his eyelashes are yellow, his eyes are blue. Kids are going to have a field day with this sick little boy. Then a little girl and another little boy came in, and they had the same problems as Joey. Is everybody in this class sick? That’s really what went through my mind. I wasn’t scared, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch whatever they had. If it were contagious, they wouldn’t be allowed in school, right?

  Finally, with all of us seated at our little tables and our teacher totally ignoring the fact that she was standing in front of a classroom full of sick children, I realized that they weren’t sick. All these little kids my age with their pale skin, light eyes, and straw-colored hair—they weren’t sick, they were just white. And I was . . . not.

  Ohhh, I’m the one who’s different.

  I know how odd that sounds today, but I also know as an adult thinking back on my first day of grade school in 1977 that those white kids probably felt the same way about me. They didn’t hate me, or anything crazy like that, they just didn’t know what to make of me. They saw as many black people in their neighborhood as I saw white people in mine. I thought they all had some disease that made their skin lose color and their hair turn to hay. Maybe they thought I got overcooked in my mommy’s tummy and that’s why I was extra brown, or that my skin was a giant birthmark. I don’t know, we didn’t talk about it—we were five-year-olds.

  Regardless, the differences were very real, and they lasted my entire time at Calvary—all nine years—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

  On the plus side, I learned that I could make people laugh as early as that kindergarten class, and I think being different had a lot to do with it. Because I acted, sounded, and looked different than all my classmates, the things that I said were naturally just funny to them. And because I could make them laugh, they accepted me. That was huge, and it was something that has stuck with me ever since: that comedy and laughter have the power to break down a lot of barriers.

  On the negative side, it couldn’t break down their parents’ barriers. I was never allowed to go to a lot of my friends’ houses. My best friend, Abby, and I spent every possible second of the school day together—up until she switched schools at the end of fourth grade—but we never once went to each other’s houses. I guess the amount of time we spent together seemed like enough, so it wasn’t an issue, but even if it had been, I was too young to ask why. Our parents knew why, though. My parents knew that her parents would say no if the subject of a visit came up, and her parents knew my parents probably wouldn’t ask.

  Throughout the rest of my years at Calvary, my other friends’ parents wouldn’t allow us to have at-home playdates, either. This was the 1970s and early 1980s in the South, you have to remember—black kids and white kids didn’t spend a lot of time together outside of school, or off the playing field. Eventually I got old enough to notice it was an issue, but I was still too young to fully understand it, so getting turned down hurt my feelings.

  My parents, on the other hand, weren’t surprised at all. They grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Forget about going over to a white person’s house or having a white friend back then—you weren’t even allowed to go to the same restaurants, ride in the same train cars, use the same bathrooms or drinking fountains . . . the list went on and on. Though the racism I faced was a more subtle kind, it was nothing new—same old thing in a different form.

  That’s why, when I was finally going to have my first sleepover in sixth grade with my friend Patrice, my mother was certain it would never happen. I told her the plan on a Monday: Patrice would come home with us after school that Friday and she’d stay over. We’d go to the water park all day Saturday and she’d sleep over again that night. Then, we’d take her home Sunday before church. I was so excited I talked about it all week on the drive to and from school, and every time I brought it up my mom would try to prepare me for the inevitable:

  “You know GloZell, it’s okay if she can’t make it this weekend.”

  “I just want you to know that if she can’t come, it’s not your fault.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, honey.”

  “If she’s not at school on Friday, don’t be sad.”

  My mom clearly thought that at the last minute, Patrice’s parents would have second thoughts, come up with some excuse for why she couldn’t stay over at my house, and then they would be spared the embarrassment of their child being seen in the company of a black child. It sounds horrible when you say it out loud, but it was a very real possibility. So when Patrice hopped into the backseat of our car with me after school on Friday, it was like my mom had just seen a ghost. (C’mon, Mom—Patrice is white, but she’s not that white.)

  In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t gotten so excited and talkative about the sleepover, because when my mom’s cautious, protective side gets triggered, that’s when the diff-UH-rent side comes out in full color. Like a sixty-four-count box of Crayola crayons, where all the colors are shades of “Huh?” This time it came out on Saturday, in the middle of the night, after eight hours at Wet ’n’ Wild Orlando.

  Saturday at the water park was like most other days in Florida: warm and sunny. We got there early, like you always do when you go fun places as a kid, and made a beeline to claim the best spot for our stuff and maximize the number of rides we could get to with the minimum amount of walking. Adults don’t usually give kids a lot of credit, but if they’re inspired, kids can be little baby Einsteins when it comes to choreography and planning. (Don’t believe me? Go search YouTube for tribute videos to Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy” and count the number of videos submitted by groups of eight-year-old girls cracking off synchronized dance moves like they’re on an episode of So You Think You Can Dance. I hope you have a calculator.)

  Patrice and I had on our totally cute sixth-grader swimsuits. They were modest enough that we didn’t look like a couple of “those girls,” but nevertheless they exposed enough skin that we’d get one of those good tans that always screwed up your pictures when you wore a strapless dress to the Spring Dance. . . . Who am I kidding? I wasn’t getting any kind of tan; that was all Patrice. She was a tanning expert, as far as I could tell. When I asked her if she needed to put on any of that lotion that white people use when they go to the beach, she said she didn’t have any.