You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss by Vanessa Williams, Helen Williams

resolved. There were never big screaming fits. I grew up in a very calm, Zen-like household.
    My mom will say my dad is the only person who could have put up with her. She knows she’s a lot to handle, and she enjoys it. It’s not like she’s unaware of her strengths. If my dad’s Danny Kaye, my mom’s Joan Collins. She loves drama. She loves to be the center of attention. My mother is a spitfire, and she tells it like it is—she doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Ever.
    When I was about eight and riding the bus home from Westorchard Elementary, a girl and her brother called me “nigger” to my face. I had no idea what the word meant, but I knew it was ugly because they had said it with such venom. When I got home, I told my mother what had happened and then asked, “What does that mean?”
    I’m sure this was a moment my mother knew would one day come. She’d battled racism her entire life. “There are some people who have a problem with the color of our skin, so you’re going to have to be better than everybody else to be accepted as an equal.”
    When I think back to that incident, I’d have to say that the words my mother spoke to me had much more of an impact than what those kids on the bus said. This was the moment it dawned on me that I was different.
HELEN ON RACISM
I knew someday Vanessa would be called that word. I didn’t want her to have a prepared expectation of it. I didn’t want her to go around feeling different. However, I wanted to be prepared, so I always knew what I’d say when it happened. I didn’t want to stutter and stammer. I wanted her to understand that being called a name doesn’t make you what that name signifies. It doesn’t define you, but it does define the person saying it to you.
    I had felt so safe, so accepted; I didn’t focus on or really even notice my differences. Even at school, when I got older and a kid would tell a racist joke, they’d preface it by saying, “We can say this in front of you because you don’t act black.”
    Huh?
    I wouldn’t say anything, but I would think, What does that mean? I didn’t know what being black meant. My family was the only black family on my street. I was the only black kid in my class, and my brother was the only black kid in his. My mom understood what this meant in a way I couldn’t. Despite growing up in an idyllic suburban neighborhood with our perfectly manicured lawns, we weren’t immune to racism, Mom knew. And even though I felt I fit in perfectly, I was different.
    I wasn’t the only person of color in my class—there was Jacob, the Indian kid. But I’ve been told that I was the first black student to matriculate from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the Chappaqua School District. My mom would tell me that at parent-teacher conferences she could immediately spot my self-portrait because it would be the only one with dark skin.
    In second grade, I was heading to assembly with my class when some kids said to me, “Is that your sister?”
    They pointed to the third-grade class lined up across the hall from us. In their midst was a little black girl I’d never seen at the school before. She must be new, I thought.
    “No, that’s not my sister. I don’t even know her.”
    But I desperately wanted to know her! A few days later, I was shopping at the A&P, a grocery store in Millwood, with Chris and my mom. There was the girl!
    “That’s her,” I whispered to my mom. “That’s the new girl at my school!”
    Mom talked to her mom, exchanged phone numbers, and the rest is history—we became inseparable. Toni lived in Chappaqua, which was too far for me to walk or ride my bike from my house, although I did it once and my mom drove me and my bike home. So I was always begging Mom to drive me to her house, or she was begging her mom to drive her to mine. We played for hours and hours. We’d have tea parties and dress up in her mom’s elegant clothes. We’d set out to explore the woods behind my house or the