Becoming a Dangerous Woman

Chapter 1

Falling Forward

“WAIT!!”

But it was too late. The New York City cabbie peeled off in the driving rainstorm, taking with him the purse I’d left on the seat. The purse with all my identification, maxed-out credit cards, and the cash I’d only just borrowed to pay my rent.

The signs were clear: time to give up, pack up, and head back to Georgia.

My big break had finally come—I’d been assigned a story for LOOK magazine on Chinatown’s hidden gang wars—but I’d just found out it wasn’t going to be published because the magazine was bankrupt. And so was I. The dream of a big-city journalism career that inspired me to jump at the opportunity to leave my secure job as a college teacher and move to New York City was fading fast.

I was twenty-seven years old, a single mother with a five-year-old son, and no prospects for a new job. Well, except one. I had a tentative connection to television through a political reporter from WNBC-TV named Gabe Pressman. Gabe is the one who had delivered the news to me that LOOK was going out of business.

“Magazines are dying,” he’d observed on the early morning call to tell me I was unemployed. “Maybe you ought to try television. We need writers, and I hear the station is looking for women, too.”

Within days after the farewell Bloody Marys were passed around at LOOK’s offices and television crews had come to cover the closing party—for me, more like a wake—Gabe came through for me, setting up a meeting with WNBC’s news director.

“Any television experience?” the news director asked without smiling. I’d been sitting outside his office all day, and out of pity or his promise to Gabe, he finally motioned me in.

“No, but I know how to tell a story,” I said, hastily handing him a photocopy of the Chinatown story.

He glanced at the provocative title, read a few paragraphs, and asked, “Can you do this story for television?”

“YES” was my answer, although I had no idea what that meant.

I was back in Chinatown the next day, with a full television news crew who had to show me how to hold the microphone when doing an interview, how to do a stand-up on camera, even how to pretend to be listening during the cutaways, another new term I filed away for future use, as I was hopeful I would be doing this again.

The story got almost three minutes, an eternity in television news, and I was hooked! Immediate gratification. No waiting for publishing dates. The story was seen by a much larger number of people than would have read it in a magazine, and I had produced and reported it for NBC News—with a lot of help, of course. My total time on camera was less than thirty seconds, but former colleagues at LOOK called to congratulate me on landing a new job—and career—so quickly.

I waited for the next assignment.

What I got instead was this advice from the news director: 1) become a blonde, 2) lose some weight, and 3) find a small town somewhere and learn the business. “You don’t start in New York,” I was told with a distinct note of finality.

So I made the rounds to every TV station that took my call or request for an interview.

“Already got a brunette; would you become a blonde?”

“Just not ethnic enough… we need twofers… woman and minority.”

“You’re too young to be credible.”

“Too old” (at twenty-seven!). “Too inexperienced.” “Too educated”—painful to hear as I was still paying off my student loans for my graduate degrees.

It was three months after my TV debut, after a long string of “not quite right” rejections and waitressing for cash, that I was watching the red taillights of that NYC taxi flicker in the downpour as it disappeared down the street with my rent money in the back seat.

Dejected and drenched and fighting tears, I told my five-year-old son, Mark, “Time to pack up and head back to Georgia.” Then the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Rabbi Goldberg. I got in the taxi after you, and I have your bag. Your number was inside. Would you like me to return it now?”

Within a half hour, there he stood, handing over my small, black bag with the borrowed money and with it, the chance to keep moving forward—at least for another month. When I tried to explain how meaningful his act of kindness was, he took my hands and said, “Well, Patricia, at some point in everyone’s life, they need a rabbi, and tonight, you got yours.”

I got something else that night, too. I had experienced the singular goodness of another human being whose gift of showing up at my door, giving me back my bag, and restoring hope and possibilities inspired me to make a silent promise to be someone else’s rabbi, mentor, sponsor, and advocate.

Each time I have had that opportunity in the many decades since that stormy, life-defining encounter, I remember my promise and think of Rabbi Goldberg with deep gratitude.

IT’S BECOME ALMOST a cliché that life journeys begin with grandmother stories, and as I referenced in the preface, so does mine. My mother and I spent my earliest years about eighty miles west of Savannah, Georgia, with my grandparents on that small farm without electricity or indoor plumbing. My father was overseas in the army during World War II.

I have warm and wonderful memories of those first three years with a doting grandfather who would feed me homemade biscuits and sing me back to sleep and a grandmother whose long, raven-black hair I loved to brush as she told me stories next to the pot-bellied stove that provided heat in the kitchen, where we spent most of our time. She had only finished sixth grade and had never lived anywhere but small tenant farms, but her stories seemed to come from deep in her memory and contained special meanings for me. One story stands out in my memory, a story that I later found exists in many forms in many cultures.

Her version went something like this:

No matter how often I stumbled or fell, which was often, as I seemed always to be in a hurry as a child, and even now, I would hear Grandmother comforting me with that familiar line adapted from the story: “Falling on your face is at least a forward movement.” I never thought of slowing down or stopping—that was never her advice. She just gave me unconditional love through the falls and the failures—something it would take me nearly a half century to find again.

My grandmother had to hide her American Indian heritage—which her papers, discovered when she passed, indicated was Creek-Cherokee. There was little information about her family, but it’s likely that her mother, like many other Creek and Cherokee women in the Southeast who were landowners in those matrilineal cultures, had married a white farmer to avoid extradition by the US government’s 1838 Supreme Court decision—a decision that forced relocation of the American Indian communities in the South to newly formed reservations in the West. Because so many died on what was truly a death march, history refers to this movement as the Trail of Tears.

I knew none of this until my grandmother’s death, and however distant this connection to her heritage, the discovery of my grandmother’s background led to a personal interest in the history of the American Indian nations, an interest that would play a big role later during my years of working with Ted Turner and Robert Redford. I also believe that my grandmother’s legacy of storytelling as well as her personal strength and resilience gave me an early portrait of what a woman could do and be, even with very limited resources. Imagine how pleased I was to discover that my grandmother’s native language, which I never heard her speak, has no gender pronouns, no hes or shes to distinguish what is male or female.

One day, a tall, dark-haired he appeared in the yard, a stranger dressed in a green army uniform. My grandmother hugged him, clearly overjoyed. Granddaddy said, “Patsy, honey, this is your father! Go welcome him home!”

My father approached and tried to hug me, but I turned away, and even today, I can remember feeling sad while everyone else, especially my mother, seemed so happy about this stranger’s presence. Each time he would reach for me and say, “Come, hug Daddy,” I would run to the more familiar arms of my grandfather or grandmother.

It was not an easy homecoming. A few days later, in spite of my tears and begging to stay, we left the farm in his borrowed ’45 Ford and headed for Fort Stewart outside of Savannah, Georgia, where this man who said he was my father would continue his military service.

FOR THE NEXT several years, we moved to a succession of army bases, averaging one or more moves a year. Mother soon tired of the moving, but I thrived on being the new girl at school and in the neighborhood, making new friends fast because no sooner were they made than we would move again. Finally, Mother convinced my father to leave active military service, and they decided to settle in Swainsboro, Georgia, a small town just thirty miles from my grandparents’ farm.

Swainsboro (population then and now around five thousand) was once called “The Crossroads of the South” because the north-south and east-west national highways actually crossed there. When Interstate 15 was built to connect Atlanta and Savannah, bypassing Swainsboro altogether, there were even fewer reasons to visit a town that had once been named Paris. The Swains family, who had a lot of influence in the town’s early days, had thought that Paris sounded “too foreign” and changed the name. What didn’t change for me from the beginning was the feeling that I didn’t belong there.

Except once a year, when the excitement of the annual Pine Tree Festival parade suspended my complaints about small-town boredom. I would arrive early for the best spot along the parade route, and as the high-school band approached, trying to play in tune and march in step, and accomplishing neither, my heart raced, anticipating the colorful floats to follow. I fell in love with parades and their disruption of routine, their movement forward—although in the case of this parade, the forward movement was transiting the ten blocks from the county courthouse to the city limits sign. From that first parade encounter, I had a strong urge to be in parades, not just standing on the sidelines, watching them—and life—pass by. I couldn’t have articulated why at that age, but I must have realized that being an observer, even to something as transitory as a parade, just wasn’t enough. Not for me. Then or now.

To get into the Pine Tree Festival parade, I entered the beauty pageant for Pine Tree Festival queen as soon as I was old enough—fifteen—and I won! I was delighted at the time, but looking back, winning a beauty pageant at such a young age wasn’t such a good move. It seemed to set me apart from the other girls my age, and I spent a lot of the rest of my high-school years battling the beauty-queen stereotype and all that it meant in the South of the fifties, where being pretty was valued much more than being smart.

I felt pretty in the royal-blue, off-the-shoulder, full-skirted evening gown based on a photo of a former Miss America’s gown that my mother had stayed up night after night sewing for me to wear on the big day of my ride in the parade as Miss Pine Tree Festival. The skirt was so large that it took five heavily starched crinolines (please google crinolines if born after 1960) to hold it up in a huge circle.

Suddenly, the tractor driving the float jerked to a stop, and the abrupt jolt threw me off my pine-box throne. I fell forward on my face, my royal-blue evening gown skirt falling forward too, like a deflated balloon.

Laughter floated up from the crowd in the streets, and I was mortified. The first face I saw when once again upright was, of course, my grandmother, who was visiting for the big day. At the end of the parade, as she helped me dismount from my throne, she whispered, “Well, honey, at least falling on your face is a forward movement.”

I wanted to laugh, or at least smile conspiratorially, but I was too sad. The magic of the day had faded, and the Pine Tree Festival queen’s parade ride felt shorter that day, and the town felt smaller, a phenomenon that I’ve observed other times when the reality didn’t quite live up to the expectations.

I WAS DETERMINED to get past the expectations of what was possible for a young girl who was told she was pretty enough to get by without money or connections—past the emotional scars of a mother who displayed my pageant trophies as if they could have been hers. And they could have been, had she not abandoned her own dreams to marry my father. While I struggled with the tension between what I valued in myself and what my mother wanted me to become, I lived in fear of my father, whose silent anger hung like a heavy cloud over our house. My brother, who was born when I was seven, was too young to be my confidant, and his relationship with our parents always seemed easier than mine.

School was always my happy place. I loved learning and my report card reflected my determination to be as close to number one in every subject as I could. Straight As meant I might qualify for a college scholarship, and I intended to go to college, even though my parents had not gone beyond high school and only three in their large farm families had gone to college.

I had big plans but no idea how I was going to implement them… until Miss Shirley Roundtree swept into my eighth-grade English class at Swainsboro High School wearing a full-skirted dress that swayed as rhythmically as Loretta Young’s did during her dramatic descent down the staircase every Sunday night on The Loretta Young Show. Miss Roundtree was beautiful by anybody’s standard, with shining dark hair that was perfectly coiffed, bright red lipstick that I soon learned was her signature, and gorgeously coordinated outfits.

Beyond Miss Roundtree’s stylishness, however, I loved the way she commanded respect, clearly the boss from the moment she set foot in the classroom. I didn’t just want to look like her; I wanted to be her.

I didn’t have any other role models, so I pursued Miss Roundtree after class, day after day, with endless questions: “How can I get into college? What do I need to do to make that possible? Can you help me get a scholarship?”

“If you could do anything you wanted, what career would you choose?” she asked one day, realizing that I was not going to stop asking her questions.

“I want to be an actress—like Vivien Leigh!” I said, thanks to annual showings of Gone with the Wind at the one movie theatre in town.