Introduction
I started going to therapy on a dare.
Dare might be too strong of a word, but at the very least, I was motivated by a challenge. A few years ago, my mother told me that she thought I was angry. At what, I asked? She believed I often expressed anger toward her, blaming her for my difficult childhood, and thus released all this unresolved anger not only on her, but the world.
Her observation, which ironically did make me angry, came the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, during one of the most tumultuous times in my life. My mother and I were in Orlando, Florida, where I lived full-time for eight years before moving to Bristol, Connecticut, in 2013 to cohost a daily television show on ESPN.
I had yet to sell my house in Orlando, so spending Thanksgiving there, rather than in the cold climate of either Detroit or Connecticut in the late fall, was a wise choice. But besides the frigid temperatures, I needed to escape Bristol. I was on the verge of leaving a high-profile job that was paying me millions per year. About a month before my mother and I met up in Orlando, I had served a two-week suspension without pay for violating ESPN’s social media policy for the second time in less than a month.
It all started on September 11, 2017, when I unleashed a series of tweets on how unfit Donald Trump was as a president. But the tweet that caught the most attention was when I hit send on “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” ESPN’s social media policy forbids its employees from personally attacking politicians or taking political stances.
But I here I was, a high-profile Black woman calling the president of the United States a full-on racist.
My tweets created a firestorm for ESPN at an inopportune time. Since Trump’s presidency began in 2016, the right-wing media had grown increasingly more vocal about accusing ESPN of being too liberal and political during Trump’s time in office. As far as I was concerned, this was coded racism as it happened to coincide with ESPN putting more people of color and women in high-profile positions. The more of us they saw on the network, the louder they got. Their complaints made ESPN sensitive to such criticism and even more determined to stay apolitical, though that seemed to be almost impossible during such politically divisive times. But my tweets forced ESPN to pick a side—and the side the network chose wasn’t mine.
I avoided a suspension or probably worse, even though Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary in 2017, voiced that what I had tweeted about the president was a “fireable offense.” Of course Trump tweeted about it, too, but never mentioned me by name. But he did tweet that ESPN owed him an apology.
Although those tweets became a huge national story, I thought eventually everything would return to normal and I wouldn’t be trending on Twitter for days. But almost a month later I was back in trouble for something I had tweeted about Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones regarding his public threat to his players if any of them took a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
This time, Trump did tweet about me and, not surprisingly, he couldn’t resist being juvenile and petty. “With Jemele Hill at the mike, it is no wonder ESPN ratings have ‘tanked,’ in fact, tanked so badly it is the talk of the industry!”
Hey, at least he spelled my name right.
Trump tweeting about me blew my life up. Suddenly I was being discussed on every major network. A barrage of think pieces were written about me, as people debated if I, as a Black woman, was being treated unfairly, and in the age of Trump, was it even realistic to expect journalists to be neutral about a president who constantly attacked the media and repeatedly called reports about his corruption and unethical and boorish behavior “fake news.”
By the time I got to Orlando for Thanksgiving, I had pretty much decided I was leaving ESPN and was plotting my exit strategy. But when I told my mother that I wanted to leave, I didn’t get the reaction I expected at all.
I had wanted my mother’s full support. Eventually that came, but it wasn’t there at the onset. I didn’t like my job as a SportsCenter host and when I told her why, it felt like she didn’t hear me at all. “We don’t let anybody run us off our job,” she said using an ain’t-that-right-girl kind of tone, but I wasn’t in a kee-kee’ing mood.
Of course, I expected my mother to be practical because Black folks usually don’t have the luxury of walking away from jobs like the one I had. I just didn’t expect that she would not only ignore my feelings but also accuse me of being brainwashed.
“Don’t let those people use you for their cause because you don’t owe them anything,” she had said.
I wondered immediately who she thought “those people” were. Did she mean Black people? As in, the same Black people who were speaking out in support of me all over social media and were a huge reason I still had a job at ESPN?
For my mother to suggest I was a puppet was not only hurtful, it was outright offensive. I was keenly aware that a deeper and larger struggle was taking place in this country that was way beyond my verbal spat with Trump. Black people were fighting every damn day for survival, freedom, and empowerment. As much as Trump inspired racists to be unrepentant, the feelings he stoked had been there since this country was born.
I felt intrinsically connected to that struggle because it’s impossible to be Black in America without feeling that way, unless you actively and willfully choose not to. I wanted to use my platform to make things better, not because I felt pressure to do so, but because it was my duty.
My criticisms of the president were just an extension of the reason I became a journalist in the first place. It may sound corny or naive, but I believe deeply in the journalistic credo that journalists are supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
My mother, however, interpreted my passionate pushback against her view of my situation as anger that stemmed from something that extended beyond the current moment. She did not understand that almost nothing triggers me more than when people try to tell me who I am.
In general, Black women hate being described as angry. If we’re not in the mood to be accommodating, if we want room to be unapologetic and stand on our principles, then people view that as anger. Instead, we’re really just exercising our right to avoid nonsense.
I had drawn a boundary with my mother, and we know how much mothers hate those, especially when these boundaries are drawn by their own children. I know my mother meant well, but I needed her support more than her pragmatism.
As my mother and I argued, there was this small, niggling whisper in the back of my mind. What if she’s right? What if there is some vat of anger deep inside of me that I’d overlooked all these years?
Chapter 1 Somewhere Between Boardwalk and Park Place
My mother’s favorite story to tell about me is the day I was born. It’s also my favorite story to hear her tell about me. In part because she tells it with such joy. But I can’t help but wonder: Is she happy to share the story of my birth because I’m her only child? Or is it because it involves her nearly beating my family in Monopoly?
On the morning of December 20, my mother started experiencing labor pains, which was concerning because I wasn’t supposed to be born until mid- to late January. When my mother arrived at the hospital she was told she wasn’t in labor and to go home.
My mother then resumed her normal Friday night routine. Every week, her, my father, my uncles Ted and Ross, and their significant others would get together to play bid whist, spades, or Monopoly, while drinking beer and brown liquor.
Monopoly has always been an important game in my family. At one point, we probably took it a little too seriously. It caused all sorts of arguments and grumbling. We like to talk shit in my family, and so with every loss or bad move, or anytime you were down on your luck in the game, somebody would gleefully remind you of your temporary despair. My stepfather James nicknamed my grandmother Naomi “Barracuda” because she was such a ruthless Monopoly player.
The armchair psychologist in me always has wondered if my family’s obsession with Monopoly is linked to our predominantly working-class status as a family. Most of the people in my family, on both my mother’s and father’s sides, have spent much of their lives living paycheck to paycheck. More than a few of them have spent considerable time living either right above or directly below the poverty line—including me. During my childhood, my mother was on and off welfare and never made more than $18,000 a year. My grandmother struggled to raise her three children on low wages, was once evicted three times in one year, and at one point my grandmother, mother, and uncle Norman lived in a shelter downtown called the Wolverine Hotel. People in my family know what it means to go without.
The $18,000-a-year salary my mother made when I was growing up is what I made working at my college newspaper my junior year. But like most people from Detroit, my mother was a hustler. My mother deserved a PhD for perfecting how to make a way out of no way. Even during those periods when she and I were on food stamps, she always was doing something else so that we could survive. She cleaned houses, worked in sales, was a property manager, and sometimes she sold her food stamps for cash, charging sixty-five cents for every food stamp dollar.
Too often my mother was reduced to using men to get us our basic needs. Any man she dated, either casually or seriously, understood that if they wanted to spend time with her, they had to put in on something. In other words, provide something other than their charming company—which wasn’t always as charming as they thought it was. They had to put in on the rent or utility bills. They had to put gas in her car, buy the groceries for the house, or give me a few dollars so that I could go to the corner store for treats. Sometimes, providing meant enabling my mother’s drug addiction. She once said to me, “It don’t make no sense to be laying next to a man with a wet cock when the rent ain’t paid.” It reminded me of something one of my ex-boyfriends used to say all the time: “No romance without finance is goddamn nui-sance.”
Because I basically grew up broke, I was conditioned to act broke even when I wasn’t actually broke. It was mostly silly things. In 2006, right before the housing crash and the recession hit, I bought my first home. I was living in Orlando at the time, and purchased a four-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family home in a gated community that had a two-car garage and a screened-in back porch. The house was close to two thousand square feet and it was bigger than any house I ever lived in growing up. There were four police officers who lived on my street and this neighborhood was so safe that sometimes I left my front door unlocked. I also occasionally saw deer in my backyard. I would often sit on my backyard porch smoking a cigar and drinking some tequila, thinking about that time my mother and I had to lay on the floor in my bedroom because some people were shooting at each other on our front lawn. Or about how my mother slept with a baseball bat and a twelve-gauge shotgun under her bed when we lived in this shitty, one-bedroom apartment on Detroit’s west side. To go from that to leaving my screened-in patio doors open all night was just mind- blowing.
Anyway, I was living in my new home for a few months when I noticed that the wall switch that controlled the ceiling fan in my office wasn’t wired right. When I turned off the ceiling fan, it also cut off the power outlets in my office. Since my Internet service was connected to one of the outlets, every time I cut off the ceiling fan, my Internet also shut down.
The solution was obvious: call someone to wire the room correctly. I was working at ESPN at that time, so I definitely had the money. Plus, I had a home warranty service. It would have cost less than $100 for someone from the home warranty service to come out and fix the situation. But I didn’t make the call. Instead, I got on a ladder and tugged the pull chain attached to the ceiling fan so that it would stay off, and kept the wall switch on at all times. It’s probably because growing up, I don’t recall my mother ever calling a service professional to fix anything that was wrong anywhere we lived. It either didn’t get fixed, or we just “nigga-rigged” it—which is what we nicknamed it when you made something usable that was previously unusable by using your own special brand of creativity. I’ve used pliers to turn the TV channels when the knobs broke. Because we didn’t have money for me to get new clothes for my Barbie dolls, I cut up old socks and turned them into skimpy dresses. My mother and I spent a lot of time in resale shops getting me “new” clothes for school. Sometimes, the resale shops were also where we got our sheets, towels, pots and pans, and other household goods. So once I became a homeowner I just did what I’d done growing up—I adapted, rather than fix the problem. I didn’t bother to have that light switch fixed until I put my house up for sale. In many ways, it was a metaphor for how I sometimes chose to cope with larger problems in my life. Navigate, not necessarily fix.
Which brings me back to Monopoly. It gives you a weird sense of empowerment and makes you feel smart. You must be a shrewd negotiator in Monopoly, especially if you wanted to defeat the sharks in my family. And I am not ashamed that there were times that I did get a sick pleasure out of bankrupting and humiliating my loved ones. If only the real world were designed like Monopoly, with everyone starting with an equal chance to build a fortune.
For my family, a competitive game of Monopoly wasn’t just for fun, it was how you earned respect. This is no shade to my mother, but she usually had a tough time beating my dad and his family in Monopoly—the early hours of December 21 being the exception. That morning, my mother hit it big. She successfully acquired the two most expensive properties on the Monopoly board—Boardwalk and Park Place.
Once my mother had hotels up on Boardwalk and Park Place, she showed my dad’s family no mercy. “I had ’em crying!” my mother hollers when she tells the story. “I was the winner. I was QUEEN.”
My mother was having the time of her life sticking it to them. She was drinking an ice-cold, forty-ounce Colt 45, which even now she’ll still drink on occasion. That’s right, my mother actually got to drink beer while pregnant. It was an unusual perk, but her doctor’s suggestion. Her doctor was concerned because she wasn’t gaining enough weight during her pregnancy, so he told her to drink beer to increase her appetite. What a time.
But just as my mother was becoming a wholly obnoxious, wealthy real estate tycoon, I disrupted her victory lap. She started having very painful contractions. She tried to tough it out for a while, but I was just too persistent. “That last pain hit and I knew I had to go,” my mother says, void of the joy she had when describing her rise to Monopoly supremacy. My dad and his family rushed her to Detroit’s Hutzel Hospital, where I was eventually born.
I wasn’t easy on my mother, but I guess that also was a precursor to what was to come. They had to do a partial cesarean section because apparently our blood types—she’s B-negative and I’m O-positive—were sworn enemies. The doctors told my father that my mother might need a blood transfusion, and that her life was at risk. They told my father he would have to choose which one of us to save. My father never shared this with my mother or my grandmother Naomi, and I have never asked him who he would have chosen. There wasn’t any need.
God chose to save us both.
* * *
Jemele wasn’t the name my mother wanted for me. She wanted to name me Jamilah, which is Arabic for “beautiful.” However, my grandmother and father conspired to shorten it and make it Jemele while my mother was recovering from birth. My grandmother gave me Juanita as a middle name because it was her mother’s first name.
When I was born, my mother was a practicing Muslim. She’d converted after she began working at a record store on the west side of Detroit that was owned by my godparents, who also were Muslims and introduced her to their faith. My mother regularly attended the mosque and wore traditional Muslim clothing. She was getting the things she had always craved from her newfound religion—structure, devotion, support, and belonging. Her being Muslim was a huge departure from the established religious traditions in my family. My mother was raised Baptist because that’s how my grandmother was raised, and so on. My great-grandfather Dezebee Crittenden was a deacon at a Baptist church in Ecorse, Michigan, a city that’s so close to Detroit that there are some parts where one side of the street is considered Ecorse and the other side is Detroit.
My mother had a lot of trouble fitting in when she was a kid, so it isn’t surprising she was drawn to becoming a Muslim. She was badly bullied growing up because of the way she looked, talked, and the school she attended. My mother is light-skinned and, at the time, had sandy, red hair. These features, in addition to her hazel eyes, made her an exceptionally easy target. On her first day as a seventh grader, my mother got beat up so bad in the girls’ bathroom that she cried to my grandmother that she wanted to quit school. My grandmother, who at the time was working as a secretary in downtown Detroit for former Michigan congressman John Conyers, used some of the connections at her job to pull some strings to get my mother and her best friend, Carol, into Murphy Middle School, which was then all white.
My mother couldn’t find her place in a Black world or a white one. The Black kids in my mother’s neighborhood believed my mother thought she was better than them—and not just because of her light skin. My grandmother was a stickler for good grammar, so my mother didn’t talk like some of the other kids. The kids harassed her so much that some afternoons when my mother got off the city bus in her neighborhood, a group of kids would be waiting for her and she’d have to run to escape them.
Meanwhile, the white kids intimidated and alienated her because she was Black. They taunted her about her hair and called her racial slurs. She wasn’t black enough for the Black kids, and by being Black, period, she was an enemy to some of the white kids. Two shitty rocks for my mother to stand between while she was just trying to get an education.
But what was happening in the outside world wasn’t nearly as bad as what was happening inside my mother’s home. Her relationship with my grandmother always was complicated. At times it could be troubled and volatile. Other times, it could be very loving and nurturing. But their relationship was never easy.
When my mother was four years old, my grandmother’s older brother, my great-uncle Edward, started molesting my mother, and the abuse didn’t stop until she was eleven. My great-uncle only stopped abusing my mother when Uncle Norman, my mother’s older brother, threatened to kill him if he ever touched her again. Considering my uncle Norman’s nickname growing up was “Savage,” I have no reason to doubt that he meant it.
However, before my uncle Norman intervened, my mother told my grandmother about the abuse—and my grandmother chose not to believe her. A horrible betrayal that set their relationship on a course that they couldn’t seem to steer away from. When my mother was eleven or twelve years old, my grandmother invited Edward to come live with them, even though she knew what he’d done. My mother retaliated by running away from home. Her fear of being abused again was greater than her fear of whatever loomed on the streets.
It was hard for me to grasp that my grandmother chose an abuser over her own daughter, but, sadly, what my grandmother did wasn’t uncommon. People often hide and make excuses for abusers in their own family. Survivors have been called liars by family members, friends, and others, who choose not to believe them because they often can’t face the unthinkable. My grandmother couldn’t accept that her own brother had sexually abused her child. She couldn’t face that the reason he had access to my mother, the reason his abuse continued for years, was because of her.
It was a betrayal that changed the direction of my mother’s life. Her prolonged drug abuse throughout my childhood wasn’t my grandmother’s fault, but there are painful mistakes my mother might have avoided if my grandmother had protected her and given her the emotional support she needed. Whenever my mother brought up what Edward did to her—which often happened when her and my grandmother were drinking together and I was just lurking around because when you’re a kid you are obsessed with adult conversations—my grandmother would shut down, or be incredibly dismissive. My grandmother wanted my mother to just forget what happened.
Copyright © 2022 by Jemele Hill
