there was a comforting clarity. I recognized that the weight of my challenges helped shape the successes I hold dear.
* * *
Before Michelle Obama forced America’s consciousness to accept black female intelligence as more than science fiction, I was a precocious little girl in the Lakeside Housing Project, sensing a larger life beyond it. I developed the strong conviction that I would be somebody in life and achieve things that most people around me only dreamed of. In the midcentury environment into which I was born, I had few light posts en route to my destination. I saw no black people like the person I am today. To be sure, there were smart people, hard-working people, talented people, and accomplished people. Yet, none of them lived in the buttermilk churn of big-league advertising, where, like a pesky and resilient fly, I would survive and become part of the mix.
Pretending, for me, has ever been the ultimate creative act and a form of self-salvation. Early on, I became adept at imagining a life I could not see, and then acting “as if.” Like irrationally ambitious little Eddie Murphy, who performed the entirety of Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden in the family basement while his brother stood shaking his head and saying, “You crazy!” Or like young Marguerite Johnson pretending Maya Angelou, my hero, into being, I was given the gifts of blindness to obstacles and of making a fool of myself without surrendering to shame. While pretending to be that successful, creative person, I began to become her.
Pressure Makes Diamonds is meant as a beacon to my fellow foolish dreamers. Though every journey is different, and there are parts of mine that I would not wish upon another, I have every confidence that pretending leads to believing and belief creates reality. My journey is about seeing oneself winning the race from wherever the starting line might be, even if that place is a project on the wrong side of a muddy Michigan lake.
These days, Pontiac is being tested as I was in my youth. When I was growing up, the city was a thriving municipality. Tax dollars poured in from factory workers’ pockets and corporate coffers. That abundance built a new downtown city hall, library, and police station. The sprawling new Pontiac Mall bustled with optimism as customers purchased everything from kids’ clothes to riding mowers and boats. Young people had the option of going to college or taking abundant factory jobs right out of high school. The streets reverberated with the throaty roar of Firebirds, GTOs, and Camaros that were bought on the ninety-first day of employment, when young men completed probation and received the almighty union card. Young people from as far away as affluent Grosse Pointe came to hang out and car hop at a Pontiac drive-in hamburger joint called Ted’s.
Then, when the auto plants closed and GM’s Tech Center relocated, Pontiac moved steadily to the brink of extinction. The city is now broke, and nearly broken. Almost every municipal building is up for sale, with no takers. The finances of Pontiac are in the hands of a state-appointed manager. The Silverdome that hosted a Superbowl is a ruin that recently sold for a relative pittance. Plan after plan to revitalize the downtown core has sputtered and stalled. Saginaw Street, the main drag that was home to two banks, multiple department stores, two five-and-dime stores, and five movie theaters, is so deserted that a tumbleweed would hardly look out of place. The last great hope, a parking structure, office building, and train station called the Phoenix Center, seems destined to fail. Pontiac is a city that no longer pretends good things will happen.
* * *
Waiting for the ceremony to begin, I looked across from the stage to the audience of hometown faces. Many were people I had all but forgotten. A handful were central to the evolution of my dream.
Right up front was Ruth Ann, my best friend of more than forty years and my doppelgänger in this place where we bonded as teenagers. I left; she stayed. She married early and later divorced; I married in my thirties and remain with the same man. She has been a career social worker; I have changed companies and cities chasing advancement. We have remained close, vicariously living the choices we did not make. Our sons are our mirrors. Her son Burt has forged a stellar career as a Ford Motor Company executive; my son Brian has followed his heart around the country, working his dream job as a sales executive with NBA teams.
Next to her sat my mother, a constant of my life whether near or far. Always too cool and too Christian to brag or lose her composure over the straight-A report cards of my childhood or the recent six-figure salaries, her presence reminds me never to think that mere achievements make me better than anyone else. My eldest brother, Gary, serious and still handsome, was also in the house. Gary taught me a lot about falling and getting back up. As a youth, his classmates called him the Sidney Poitier of Washington Junior High. After college, youthful rebellion and drugs led him to prison, like so many black men. Yet he quickly found redemption through his Islamic faith. After his release he rose to become imam of his mosque.
Hubert Price Jr., the former state legislator who made his way to the stage to officiate the proceedings, was a fellow smart kid who saw something special in me, and the respectful, loving relationship we developed after the birth of my son reminded me who I was and helped bring back my self-esteem. Long after we amicably parted and he married his wife Carolyn, I was grateful for the two years we were together.
Without Pontiac and its people, I might forget that my life today was once the dream of a little black girl trying to see past a polluted lake. I might not remember that their expectations helped create my own. I might lack the resilience to punch out the dings of life like an auto repairman envisioning something shiny and renewed. I might have no useful words for teenage mothers, black women, or people of color wrestling with corporate demons on the road to getting “somewhere.”
I searched my grateful heart for something I could say to give hope to the people of Pontiac. I decided to speak about Harlem, my classic New York neighborhood that has risen from disrespected no-go zone to vibrant, desirable enclave. What I really wanted to say is what my straying life has taught me: Believe you are meant for great things. Dream big, pretend accordingly, and nothing can keep great things from you. But without knowing my life story, who would believe the answer could be that simple?
Prologue
“Was It Something I Said?”
I could feel the Thing gaining momentum as it came around the table and headed for me. I felt my anxiety rising and briefly wished I’d had another drink instead of stopping at one. I hadn’t thought it wise to get too high, but now that my nemesis was coming my way, a little liquid courage wouldn’t have been bad to have. The Thing had the guys in the room in a frenzy, each one trying to best the man who had spoken before him, and avoid the wrath of the Thing. The Thing was the ferocious one-upmanship my white male colleagues called on to cut each other down to size, to carve out the pecking order. The Thing was an unexpected guest at the big ad agency dinner. Like the popular TV series Mad Men, the advertising agency was a clubby drama full of anxious, driven white men seeking money and power of every sort. Power in the marketplace. Power with clients. Power over colleagues. Power over the few women who had managed to find their way into the business. The quest to gain and wield influence had long since taken on a life of its own. The Thing was its weapon. Tonight, I was the least powerful entity in the crowd: a black girl trapped with the Thing in a room full of madmen.
I racked my brain for something to say that would show I could hold my own. I felt like a schoolmarm in a frat house. In the office, I could opt out of this competition and let my work—created with time and thought—speak for itself. In this intense, liquored-up room, the new girl—in 1976, the office’s only black—had no choice but to show and prove on the spot. As I scanned the crystal and china–laden room, I could see the tension in the bodies of the white-uniformed, brown-skinned waiters and female attendants who looked like my cousins and great-aunts. All evening I had tried to read their averted eyes as they quietly went about their jobs. Now those eyes were all on me, the only black person in the room not serving canapés or drinks. Would mine be the cringe-worthy words of a happy-to-be-here Uncle Tom, or some militant mess that would make the white folks scared and mean? No one knew, least of all me. I was about to perform live at the Bloomfield Open Hunt Club, direct from the Lakeside projects on the shores of Mud Lake. The Thing picked me up and threatened to throw me back into that polluted pond. “Go for what you