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Chapter 11

Jacqueline Bennett Carter

New York City, May 2015

Uptown, Jacqueline was sitting at her dining table with her chief of staff, overseeing the plans for her husband’s birthday party. The theme that she had settled on was “Zoo-phoria,” and she’d been working for several weeks on securing permits to have endangered animals on the premises. She’d contacted the chef at one of William’s favorite restaurants to work on a custom soul food–inspired menu. Guests would also dine on caviar, lobster, and oysters from both coasts, but the soul food would do the job of demonstrating to all in attendance that the Carters definitely had souls.

The entertainment was the hardest to manage. William Carter Jr. was widely known to detest music, but the guests would be expecting something magnificent in terms of entertainment when attending the birthday party of a billionaire. Some suggestions the team had put forth: a hologram performance from a digitally reincarnated Whitney Houston or Prince, or a huge critically acclaimed orchestra that would play twentieth-century jazz classics, giving the venue a big band feel. But Jacqueline knew that the only person who’d be acceptable to her husband would be Stevie Wonder, whose music William actually tolerated. But everyone had a price. As it turned out, someone asked Mr. Wonder’s people what his price was and the response came back ... $10 million, after taxes. “Book it,” Jacqueline said. She would spare no expense on this party that was going to be attended by governing dignitaries, Academy Award–winning actors and directors, other CEOs, industry “thought leaders,” and Mike Tyson for the tech crowd because he came with psychedelics.

This feat of hers was astonishing, especially when she considered her own humble beginnings. It was a miracle how far she had come and all she had learned to do just by being in this world over the last few decades. William had coached and molded her to the woman she was today, the woman who could be proudly on display as his partner. She’d been primed for a life of being seen, though it hadn’t happened in the way she’d hoped.

Jacqueline had her own version of her autobiography, which she’d been working on for some time, and the way she told this story was second nature. She was good at saying other people’s lines at this point, but she was the best at withholding information. As a child, Jacqueline Bennett was famous for keeping a secret. Jacqueline began cultivating her interior world quite early and nursed her need to conceal things from everyone. For her, like most things, this started out as an acting exercise, something that she learned in a book on craft that she checked out from the Elkin Public Library. But as she found it useful for her life, she kept her thoughts and aspirations confidential. They were unknown to her parents, siblings, or even to Helen. So when Jacqueline boarded a bus bound for New York upon her high school graduation, she told no one, not willing to risk any external influence potentially changing her mind. She left a note for her family that she would write and call upon her arrival, but there were no additional details since she had none to share.

Her bus pulled into the Port Authority Bus Terminal after nineteen hours of travel. After getting off, the first breath she took was a deep, slow inhale that felt like a culmination of every single pageant title she’d ever won. She thought of the bedroom she’d left behind, bursting with her spoils, and how much all that had once meant to her. But if the trade-off was feeling this free and full of possibility, she was fine with never setting her eyes on a crown or trophy ever again.

Jacqueline had discovered the Hitchings House Dormitory in the classified ads in the back of Mojo , a Harlem-based paper. It advertised itself to be a respectable home for Black girls who were residents of New York City, students, unmarried, and under thirty. To qualify for residence, one had to be accepted and follow the code of conduct put in place to deter potential conflicts. The rent was charged weekly—fifty dollars, pricey—but Jacqueline was armed with her plan. She’d arrived in New York with $7,000 in savings from pageant wins. She had enough to get by, at least for a little while.

Jacqueline interviewed with the Hitchings House mother, Miss Pat, a thin senior citizen with gray natural curls and a preponderance of gold jewelry. Miss Pat was clearly a chain-smoker and tended to gesture wildly with her hands, sprinkling ash over every nearby surface. She was a lifelong Harlemite who took her housemother duties extremely seriously.

“This ain’t no brothel,” she said, squinting her eyes at Jacqueline, who sat opposite her in one of two chairs facing a large oak desk. “This is a house for proper young ladies.”

Jacqueline nodded and slipped into her pageant persona. She raised her voice one octave before replying, “Of course. Hitchings is so highly recommended, and I’d be so honored to have a place here.” To really sell it, she flashed her winning smile.

This seemed to satisfy Miss Pat, who provided Jacqueline with an overview of the house rules. No male guests were permitted to stay overnight. All guests must sign in and out of the building. All residents had to check in before 11:00 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends. No guests past 9:00 p.m. No drugs of any kind. No solicitation of any kind. No fighting. No stealing. No children. Chores were divided up evenly among residents and completed without complaint. Jacqueline was only half listening to the lecture, which was feeling like a revised version of the Ten Commandments.

Jacqueline handed over $400 to cover the first month of rent and security deposit as Miss Pat explained that their contract was on a month-to-month basis.

“Failure to comply with any of these policies will result in immediate eviction from the facility,” Miss Pat wheezed out before dissolving into a coughing fit.

“I understand,” Jacqueline said, eager to be let out of the small office, the air quite hazy from all the cigarette smoke.

“We have four openings right now, so I can show you the rooms, and you can select one as you like,” Miss Pat said after another round of throat clearing.

“Please,” Jacqueline said with a practiced smile, thinking it best for her to keep her words to a minimum. The less said, the better. It was easier to let people write their own story. Any good actress knew that the audience should be able to see themselves in her, that she was a mechanism for their own projection.

They walked together out of the office into the spacious foyer of the building. A onetime single residence, the dormitory had been converted to a home that could house up to twenty women at a time. The common spaces were downstairs as well as a large industrial kitchen.

Jacqueline decided then and there that she’d be playing the part of the sophisticated city girl, and like a snake shedding worn-out country skin, she worked to ditch everything about her old life. About two hours later, when the other girls returned home from their various engagements and obligations, the dorm surged with energy. Jacqueline was delighted to be among the sparkling young women of New York City. She met girls who were students at Hunter College and others who were dancers, or poets, or teachers, or secretaries trying to figure out what to do and where to go next. Each person she introduced herself to filled Jacqueline with eager anticipation. I’ve really arrived, she thought.

Jacqueline briefly considered calling home but thought that it might be better to wait until she had secured her first real role so that she might impress everyone in her family and inspire them to come see her in New York. So she decided to wait.

Even with the luck of getting a room at Hitchings, Jacqueline still needed to find steady work, something that would allow her to have income without impeding her ultimate goals. She decided to canvass the neighborhood to inquire about waitressing jobs. One of her dorm mates, a gorgeous secretary named Anita, discouraged this, saying, “The real money’s Midtown. The tips ain’t shit up here.”

This is how Jacqueline found herself poring over a subway map to get herself to Midtown. The West Side was closer to Broadway, which increased her chances of potentially encountering a producer or a director who could give her a big break. When she got there, she was disheartened to find that she wasn’t the first person with this idea, and after walking to seventeen different restaurants and cafés that had no openings, she turned her attention east. The East Side, from what she could tell, was extraordinarily corporate. Most people wore suits and seemed to be in a frantic rush. Thankfully, a diner on Forty-Eighth between Lexington and Third hired her on the spot for $3.50 an hour, with Marty the manager exclaiming, “Jeez, you look like a movie star!” (Jacqueline thought this a portentous sign she’d found the right spot to work.) The agreement was that she would submit her requests for time off when she received an audition or callback and make up any missed hours at another time. She shook her future boss’s hand and was fitted for a uniform.

The servers at the diner, all women, wore crisp white dresses and short red aprons tied around their lower halves. On her first day at work, Jacqueline felt like a movie star indeed, her dress starched to perfection, her manner easygoing with customers, her spirits soaring. To be free and independent, already earning her own money in the greatest city in the world. But about two weeks into her job, Jacqueline’s feet and legs were swelling with the stress of being on them for hours at a time, the inflammation wreaking havoc on her young body. Her roommate Jillian, a nursing student, volunteered to show her where she could find shoes that would support her new physical needs, admonishing her for wearing heels while waitressing.

Jacqueline was able to read and study scripts on her way to her job on the subway. She gradually became totally unfazed by the things she saw on the streets of 1970s New York that she walked every day, including, but not limited to, nudity, masturbatory acts, drug use, arguments, physical fights, and various stages of emotional distress. Her veins had turned icy, running a frigid stream right to her heart, which calcified against any tender feelings that might become a distraction.

After twelve months of big-city living, her funds almost depleted, Jacqueline needed to work overtime shifts. This also meant that while she was working so hard at the diner, she wasn’t going out on auditions, which was fine with her because apparently the thing that she needed most was an agent. An agent could pitch her directly for roles and circumvent some of the industry red tape. Then she wouldn’t have to deal with these open cattle call auditions, sometimes standing in line for hours with other women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five (and some had been twenty-five for a while). The problem was that some agents weren’t willing to represent Black girls, whom they considered too specialized, not in enough demand, and not guaranteed cash cows.

In her first few months of living in the city with no agent, Jacqueline went out for every role, but sometimes she would see in bold letters at the end of a casting document things like blondes needed, slender brunette, feisty redhead ... and she knew that meant not her . Jacqueline wanted to rename the city “No York,” since that’s the most consistent phrase she heard.

Like any good apex predator, when she learned new information, she changed tactics, going after agents aggressively. She had to pay to have professional headshots done, which she did at a weird old man’s apartment on the Upper West Side. He said that he would comp her session if she went topless and gave him the photos. She handed him thirty dollars instead. She enrolled in acting classes, another investment in herself that would require time and money, which were in short and dwindling supply.

The girls in the acting classes were the ones with all the tips. It was a mixed group, Black and white and Latina and Asian actresses alike. For the most part there was a resigned sisterhood that kept some of the inherent jealously neatly contained, even though it was always there. In acting class, Jacqueline was asked to do all kinds of exercises that had nothing to do with acting. She assumed that she would be learning how to do accents and stage fights. Instead, she was asked to do things like find an emotional anchor, exploring something that had happened in her life that might help her better connect to a character.

“Jacqueline, that delivery was stale,” her teacher said after she did a scene from The Crucible . “I need you to dig deep. There’s real pain in this monologue. Have you ever been hurt? Disappointed? Heartbroken? I need you to reach back in there and pull out what needs to come forth. The emotion in acting is never fake.” I am digging, Jacqueline wanted to say, but she swallowed her comeback. Her teacher came over to touch the center of Jacqueline’s chest, and she recoiled.

“Jacqueline, where’s your anchor?” would be the question she would hear week after week. Her notes were to express vulnerability, to mine her own past for traumas and pain so that she could use it. It was uncomfortable realizing what she’d buried and shoved aside, the stony wall that she had built up to protect herself from countless rejections, the degradations she’d sometimes endured from customers at the diner, the way she’d become a walking mannequin with artificial emotions so she could win pageant after pageant. She’d placed so much importance on achieving this dream of getting onto a screen or the stage but really hadn’t completely understood her motivations. An actress not having a clear sense of motivation, the most tragic of ironies.

As Jacqueline sat in that acting class feeling lost and unsure after hearing for the umpteenth time from her instructor that her performance was flat, she wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake coming to the big city.

It had been years now, and she’d made her peace with her decision to press on, to stay. When she married William, she gave it all up anyway. Now she did not have the challenge of having to find emotional anchors to find the depth of a character. She was always playing one. Right now, she was a perfect party planner, and the idea was to have his seventieth birthday executed flawlessly. She hadn’t prepared for all the replays of all the secrets she had been keeping for years for the sake of herself and William to come rushing to the surface.