Andrea King Collier - Meeting Miles

 

I got married in 1982. We were so cute, but we could not have been more different. I was a privileged little only child, a princess of quite a lot. And my husband was one of six. When I first met his parents, I said, "How do you remember six names?" [audience laughter] And that did not go over well. [audience laughter] But we did have something in common. We were kids of the 1960s. We did civil rights marches. We helped register people to vote. We knew about segregation. And we knew that our folks expected a whole bunch out of us. We were their legacy. They had a script for us that we passed on to our two kids when we got married. 

 

Our whole family unit was The Huxtables before they were The Huxtables. [audience laughter] In fact, our motto was, "I brought you into this world and I will take you out." The kids knew it. My daughter followed the script. She got her dream job after going to her dream school, married her dream man and had her dream baby and then quit her dream job to take care of the dream baby. My son, on the other hand, had a script of his own. What he did though is his script involved living in the basement and never coming out. [audience laughter] And no matter how much we tried to get him out of the basement, it was not happening. We threw money at it. We threw exterminators at it. [audience laughter] Still in the basement. Except for one day, he just left. And he stayed gone for a couple of weeks.

 

Now, a young man goes off and does his thing, and you would not think anything about it. But without any notice, no texts, no phone calls, I, as his mother, got worried, because it is not a good thing for a Black man to go disappearing. It worried me. And just as I was about to call the police, he calls me and he says, "Mom, I need to come over, because I have something to tell you." Now, if you have a kid who is of a certain age and they say, "I have something to tell you,” what you know is, nothing good is going to come out of that conversation. [audience laughter] When these conversations come up, they do not say, "Mom, I hit the lotto [audience laughter] and I have enough money to move out. Mom, I got a new job and I have enough money to move out."

 

You see where I am going with the move out thing. [audience laughter] "Mom, I have met Beyoncé. She has fallen in love with me. She is leaving Jay Z and I am moving out." [audience laughter] None of that is happening. I start thinking about all the things that it could be and I get really worried. I go tell my husband that he is on his way over, and he says, "Well, it will not be that long." I am looking out the window, and he is pacing up and down the driveway. He is rehearsing. It is going to be a doozy. [audience laughter] 

 

So, he comes upstairs and he says, "Mom, we are going to have a baby." “Who going to have a baby?" [audience laughter] He has a girlfriend, but I have only seen her from the waist up in the car. Now, under ordinary circumstances, because this is not the script, got a simple script. Go to college, get a good job, do not go to jail. Do not get anybody pregnant. And they said, "We are going to have a baby." So, my head could have popped off my shoulders. But something happened. It was either the God voice, the good voice, or the crazy voice [audience laughter] said, “Ask him to say it again.” [audience laughter] And I say, "Will you say that again for me?" [audience laughter] And he says, "We had a baby yesterday." [audience laughter] You know, that could have gone all kind of wrong. [audience laughter] Instead, because I am in shock, I say, "How nice for you." [audience laughter] 

 

I am thinking in my head, calm this down, ask nice basic questions. “Are mama and baby fine? Are they home from the hospital?” And then, the thing that I want to know for some reason is, what is the baby’s name? Because millennials can come up with some hell of a names. [audience laughter] And Black millennials can really come up with some names. [audience laughter] You know, they could be Jack Daniels, Wakanda, Apple. "What's the baby's name?" "The baby's name is Miles." “Okay, that's good.” That was the best thing out the whole damn thing. [audience laughter] 

 

As I was trying to explain to him that we have colds, so we can't go that day to see the baby, he gets the hell up out of there before I figure out he's gone. He is gone. And so, what do you do when you are a new grandmother, there is no baby to see and you don't have a nine-month gestation period? [audience laughter] I get in the car and I go to Target. [audience laughter] 

 

Now, let me tell you something about Target. You could work out a whole lot of shit in the aisles of Target. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

So. I get there. I don't go to the baby section. I'm everywhere else. But the God voice says to me, “Call Gussie.” Now, Gussie is my mother's oldest friend. When my mother died, she and several of her other friends stood in a gap for me. When I need to figure out something, I call. So, I call. I'm fine until I hear her voice. I am hysterical. I am having a fit in the store. "He had a baby. I didn't know. I just saw it from the head up. [audience laughter] This is awful. He didn't follow the script," I'm just going. People are walking by me in Target trying to figure out what the hell is going on. "Lady, are you okay?" 

 

My mother's friend says, "Let me get this straight. Christopher has a baby." “Yes.” "Had it yesterday?" “Yes.” "You didn't know?" “Yes.” "Is the baby going to live with you?" “No.” "Okay, good. [audience laughter] Let's start with that." Then she says, "Okay, this is what you're going to do. You're going to stop crying, you going to put on your big girl pants and you are going to be the best damn grandma you know how to be, because that's what you had.” Okay. And then, I had questions, but she hung up the phone. [audience laughter] She had said everything she needed to say. So, she was gone, she was out of there.

 

So, what do I do? I start buying up everything in the baby section. I bought so much stuff that my husband had to go back and get the rest of the crap. But on the way home, I got really upset. So, I come in, and my husband is there and my daughter is visiting and I said, "Why the hell did anybody not tell me?" And my daughter says, "Well, you are really scary." [audience laughter] "What you mean I'm scary?" "You are Oprah scary." [audience laughter] And I'm thinking, Oprah? That's not bad. She says, "No, no, no. You get a car, you get a car, you get a car Oprah. You are Ms. Sophia Oprah. You told Harpo to beat me' Oprah." [audience laughter] I have a little problem with that, but she goes on to explain.

 

She says, "You know The Wiz?" “Yeah.” “You know, Evillene, who says, ‘Don't bring me no bad news.’” “Yeah.” “You, Evillene.” [audience laughter] “You are Claire Huxtable. From the day you were born, you got the Claire Huxtable side eye before she did.” There was not nothing I could say about it. Sometimes you just got to give it up. So, I waited and waited a few days so we could actually see the baby. We go to see the baby. I had never met her folks before. In fact, I had never had a conversation with her. 

 

So we get there, they bring the baby out, put the baby in my arms and my heartbreak broke wide open. I had never experienced anything like that, not even with my own kids. This beautiful baby. I looked at him, and I saw my husband and I saw my daughter. I saw me. But I also saw my son, the baby's father and I saw all the people in my life who had ever loved me in this baby’s face. So, I started looking at my purse, and I started looking at the baby and I looked at the purse again. [audience laughter] How long do you think it would be before I put the baby in the purse and left [audience laughter] that they would figure out he was gone. [audience laughter] 

 

So, my daughter had been texting me the whole time to tell me not to do anything crazy. And just as I was about to try to bust that move, I heard the text noise. I said, “Okay, I can’t do that.” But it was weird. So, I’m looking at the baby, and I’m thinking about Toni Morrison. When my kids were teenagers, I heard Toni Morrison say, "When the child walks into the room, does your face light up?" 

 

Okay, they were teenagers. Nobody’s face was lighting up for them. [audience laughter] But with Miles, my face was all lit up. I remembered the rest of it, which is, when your child walks into the room, does your face light up? Because that’s how they know how you feel about them. I was determined at that moment, for the rest of my life, whenever he walked into the room, my face was going to light up, because I want him to know he is just that loved. Thank you.