The neighbors stared at us from their yards and through their windows. My mother, not out of any distrust but out of disposition, had kept her wealth guarded, not spending more than would seem ordinary. What she did spend her money on was hardly perceptible to those outside our home: books, music, and language lessons for me, and really good, sensible, and therefore ugly, shoes. She would spend hundreds of dollars on a pair of shoes that no one suspected cost more than thirty. My white and blue Oxford shirts came from London’s Savile Row, she told me, though I had no idea why that mattered. All I knew was that I hated the shirts that no one else wore, longing every day for a T-shirt or a jersey of some kind.
Turner clicked his tongue against his impossibly white teeth and surveyed the neighborhood. He seemed comfortable in his skin and that made me comfortable with him. “Your mama’s quite a businesswoman, yessireebobby, quite a business mind.” I kicked a couple of toys away from the center of the floor. “Is that Lego you’re playing with? I love Lego. Didn’t have Lego when I was a boy, had an erector set. You’ve probably never seen one. Used to cut my poor fingers to kingdom come, blood all over the little screws and bolts. Always loved building things. Are those brownies I smell? Don’t tell me your mama can bake brownies too? Don’t you love them when they’re just out of the oven, all warm and gooey and smelling to high heaven? Chocolate all over those screws and bolts. Yep, some businesswoman, your mother.” That was what he was like and I have to say I liked him, and he genuinely liked my mother and loved the fact that she had had such faith in his business. And she liked him, called him Teddy, as I said. When he asked her why the kids had called me Elephant Boy, she told him that they were just jealous. He chewed his brownie and stared at me; her answer seemed to satisfy him.
“Tell me, Portia, just what kind of name is Not?” he asked.
“It’s Not Sidney,” my mother corrected him.
Turner was puzzled momentarily, then nodded his big head and laughed. “Oh, I get it.”
Then it was my mother’s turn to look puzzled. I never knew the story of my name. One might have thought that my mother imagined that our last name, rare as it was, was enough to cause confusion with Sidney Poitier, the actor, and so I was to be Not Sidney Poitier. But her puzzled expression led me to believe that my name had nothing to do with the actor at all, that Not Sidney was simply a name she had created, with no consideration of the outside world. She liked it, and that was enough.
My mother died shortly after that visit from Ted Turner. An illness came over her. That was how it was put to me. An illness has come over your mother. Within weeks death came over her as well. She passed away in her sleep, and I was told that was a good thing — no suffering, no pain. Even then I wondered why that was a good thing. We had no family, and certainly no one in the neighborhood would take in the abject spawn of the crazy lady, the product of such a strange and probably demonic, prolonged gestation. Had they known I was worth millions of dollars Elephant Boy might have been slightly more attractive, but they didn’t know and they wouldn’t have believed it if I or anyone else, even Ted Turner, had told them, even if they had known who Ted Turner was.
Enter Ted Turner once again. Turner saw my mother’s substantial investment in his dream as a kind of symbol and charm for his success. My mother was the kind of grass-roots, if not proletarian, person he wanted to imagine his media world touching, however tangentially, on his way to great and obscene wealth. Anyway, Turner showed up and, to the drop-jawed bewilderment of the neighborhood and city, took me away to live with him in Atlanta. To say that I lived with or was raised by Turner is misleading and simply or complexly untrue. I lived at one of his houses and was left pretty much to my own unformed devices. The staff of my part of the household, mostly black women, prepared my meals and took care of my needs, and my teachers, mostly black women, came to the house to educate me. I hardly ever saw Turner or his family, though for a while, during puberty, I found a place to secretly watch his leotarded wife, Jane Fonda, perform her disco exercises by the pool. Her ribs jutted from beneath the spandex, and I felt more than a little lust, though I held no crush.
To Turner’s credit even he was not comfortable with the scenario of the rich do-gooding white man taking in the poor little black child. Television was polluted with that model, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that something was wrong with it. My situation was somewhat different as I was in fact extremely wealthy as a result of my mother’s business acumen.
I was supposedly free to make decisions concerning my own life. The house staff was run by a statuesque woman from St. Lucia. Claudia, with her massive afro and keen stare, made it clear to me, on more than one occasion, since she had decided: that, though sweet, I was a bit of a numbskull; that it had been made very clear to her that I was paying the bills out of my own pocket and not Ted Turner’s; that she worked for me and not for Ted Turner; that her job was to please me, not Ted Turner. She liked the truth of that; I could tell by a certain tilt to her afro. And so did the two women who took care of my part of the house along with her. My teachers were a string of girls from Spelman College who thought I was either simply adorable or a stinking pariah, a pathetic social abomination better left unhandled, if not unconsidered. One, however, Betty, was a raving socialist who liked me, liked teaching me, and liked especially the fact that I had money to burn, real money she called it, and I trusted her because she spoke of it openly. She imagined that one day I might use my wealth for good. Still, she had some difficulty accommodating the reality of my residing in Ted Turner’s house. I was eleven when I told her that I actually paid rent to live there and so really wasn’t being cared for by Turner at all. Technically I was paying rent, but the money was being funneled back to me through some kind of manipulation of stock options. I understood the concept if not the machinations. I was slightly precocious, and Betty liked that about me. Betty was my first crush, though I never imagined her working out to disco music the way I did with Jane Fonda. Betty called herself “big boned,” and she was even in my eyes a little plump, but I thought she was beautiful.
She taught me about Marx and Lenin and Castro and the ills of American democracy and the fall of the Roman empire and about how the British lost their empire because they were likely as not to stand around in sheer amazement upon recognizing that they were not loved by their colonized peoples. She taught me that America preached freedom yet would not allow anyone to be different. She usually told me all of this while stuffing her face with big greasy sandwiches from Hardee’s and greasier chicken from Popeyes. Wiping her mouth the while and sighing, she was likely to say, “This is why I’m big boned,” and then she would let out her rather endearing snorting and loud laugh.
“Multinational and defense corporations, those greedy bastards, they are the real powers of this country,” she said. “The mass media and the oil, they’re the movers, the facilitators. Politicians are just tools used to make us think we have some choice and a little power.”
I was rubbing my shoulder under the coarse white fabric of my karate dogi. A bigger boy had roughed me up the day before, and I was awaiting the as-usual, one-day-too-late visit from my martial arts instructor.
“Ted is in the media,” I said.
“My point exactly.” She looked around the room as if to be sure no one was listening. “He’s precisely the kind of pestilential, poisonous, pernicious parasite I’m talking about.” She often gave in to some inexplicable and strange, but I thought quaint, alliterative urge.