Having It All: Black Women and Success - Couverture rigide

Crystal Ashby is the textbook image of a sister on the move. At 40, she’s an antitrust lawyer for a major Chicago oil company. She enjoys the fruits of her labor—wears designer clothes, drives a late-model sports car and enjoys jet set vacations. A native of Detroit, you could say that oil is in her blood. “I came from a car family,” she explains. “My mom worked for General Motors and my dad worked for Ford.” A bright student, she quickly outpaced her classmates at her Detroit elementary school. The principal wanted to skip her two grades. Her mother took that as a sign that the public school system wasn’t good enough for her little girl. She searched for a school that could challenge and stimulate her daughter—preferably one that offered scholarships. She found it in The Grosse Pointe Academy, a tony private school in the old-money suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
When it came time to choose a high school, Crystal picked the Academy of the Sacred Heart. By the age of 14, she was well schooled in the art of self-improvement; Sacred Heart had educated Michigan’s debutante set for generations. The combination of these two elite private schools gave Crystal a sense of comfort in the mainstream that was foreign to many of her peers in Detroit’s inner city. Her education also heightened her sense of entitlement. From an early age, Crystal remembers thinking “Why not me? I always believed that someday I could live in a house like the ones I went to school around, that I could live that lifestyle. For me, it was a reality because I saw it every day. I just wasn’t living it every day. But if I was exposed to it, there was no reason to believe I couldn’t have it.”

She’s the only sibling to have attained a professional degree: Crystal’s sister works at a medical facility, her brother manages a glass company. While her mother was the architect of her early educational career, mother and daughter inhabit two different worlds. At 40, Crystal is divorced and childless. At the same age, her mother was married with three children and had been working for 20 years. “I probably have more money than my mother ever dreamed of earning,” she muses. “I’ve done things in my life that my mother has never done. And my grandmother? My life fascinates her. Absolutely fascinates her.”

A few weeks before our first meeting, Crystal had traveled to London for her company. Her mother, by contrast, spent her entire career in the international division of GM and never once took a business trip. “I travel two or three times a month on business,” Crystal says, over cappuccino at an upscale Chicago cafe. “It’s nothing for me to get on a plane. I live a lush lifestyle. I have enough money to do the things that I want to do, go to places I want to go, buy the things I want to buy. I live very differently from my family.”

Chicago is only a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Detroit. But to Crystal’s family, she didn’t fly the coop, she jetted away on the Concorde. “My mother lives 20 minutes from my grandmother who lives 20 minutes from my great-grandmother,” Crystal tells me when we first meet; it’s as if this quick lesson in her family geography should tell me all I need to know about what she’s left behind. What surprises me about our subsequent conversations is how much of a comfort Crystal’s family is to her, how much she values the fact that theirs is a limited arc of movement and change.

“Part of my job is getting past the color issues, the prejudices and biases,” Crystal says. But it’s also true that her early years of attending white prep schools has given her a lifetime of training in keeping the peace. “The reality is a lot of my friends are white and a lot of my friends are black,” she says. “I work in an environment where my exposure is primarily white. You can either be a loner or assimilate. These are the people that I spend my days with and I like my days to be pleasant.”

Her stop-gap against the bitterness and frustration is the time she spends with her family. At work, she says, she is constantly called upon to give the black point of view and to be the bigger person when confronted with a colleague’s ignorance. But at home, “I’m just me. None of this stuff goes home. I still bake cakes and cookies at Thanksgiving. I have nieces and nephews to tend to and my mother is still my mother. She still cracks the whip when she needs to. What I do is what I do, it’s not who I am.”

There’s No Place Like Home: The Amazing Career of Sheila Bridges

She is, according to a CNN/Time magazine survey, the best interior designer in America. Although she has decorated homes for a wide range of clients from Andre Harrell and Puff Daddy to software giant Peter Norton to former President Bill Clinton, it is the type of home that Crystal Ashby talks so lovingly about that prompted Sheila Bridges to embark on her ground-breaking career in residential design. Sheila grew up in Philadelphia with parents whose spirited weekend puttering could have given Martha Stewart and Bob Vila a run for their money. Sheila’s parents built with their hands what couldn’t be assured for many black girls growing up in the 1960s: a safe haven. When she goes home, even at the age of 38, she sleeps in the same room that she has slept in her entire life. Her mother is a retired teacher, her father still tends to a dental practice he built more than 30 years ago. Bridges says, “This isn’t what my parents did professionally, but my parents always really cared about our home. They were constantly decorating, redesigning or building something. My father was always very, very talented with his hands. He would re-tile the bathroom. My mother always had a knack and interest in color. My brother and I gained an understanding that it was important to have a place you call home: to value what you put in it and how you treat it.”

As Americans, we’ve turned into a nation of movers. Extended families that live in the same town are rare; generations that abide under one roof are even rarer still. There’s no place like home, the saying goes. Say it aloud and it hangs in the air as quaint and unreal as a needlepoint message hanging on a kitchen wall. But none of us can deny, especially after the September 11 tragedy, the importance of home and how it defines us. What has made Sheila Bridges a pioneer in her field is that in the early 1990s, she watched the growing numbers of middle-class blacks, the civil rights babies who were living the dream, and she figured out that eventually this new elite would get tired of spending their hard-earned dough on nice clothes, nice cars, nice vacations to the Caribbean. With the right guidance, this group could develop a new passion: the desire not only for the right address, but for a truly beautiful home.

After graduating from Brown University with a degree in sociology, Bridges began to work for an architectural firm, which led to her going back to school to get a master’s in interior design from Parsons in New York City. She started her business, Sheila Bridges Design, in 1991. “I wanted to perform, for African Americans, the same services I saw at the firms I worked at,” she says. “We never had any black clients. We never used any resources, tradespersons or vendors that were African American. And I felt like I knew all these people, including myself, who cared a lot about home. It seemed that there was this huge void. That was something for me, there’d be a lot of personal fulfillment in being able to fill that void.”

What she didn’t want to do was to swath her clients’ homes with the kind of In Style meets Roots relics that were so popular at the time. Just because her clients were black did not mean that they should lounge on zebra-striped sofas or invest in an array of African sculptures. “People always want to trap us into this box of things looking ‘Afrocentric,’” she says, patiently but wearily. “I didn’t really grow up with kente cloth, not to say that I don’t like it. I think there are other ways for us to represent our culture and who we are without necessarily having to use those kinds of things that I think white people have decided represent us. I really draw inspiration from a range of different things: it may be Egypt, it may be Europe, it may be something out of hip-hop culture. It really depends on who it is.”

We are sitting in the living room of her Harlem apartment and office. I keep looking around the room with an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu when I realize that I know these rooms so well because I’ve pored over them on the pages of design magazines, where Sheila’s face would be the sole image of a nonwhite person, of any color. I’m startled because being in her apartment is a little like meeting a movie star. I only think I know these rooms because I’ve seen and admired them so often. I recognize the details the way people recognize Julia Roberts’s grin or Benicio Del Toro’s deep-set eyes: there’s the unusual Hercules sculpture, the book cases that curve, ever so slightly, like décolletage, on the top, and the fireplace, tiled with the most unusual shade of green. Up close I realize that there are several different greens among the tiles, ranging from leaf to pine. No wonder the fireplace seems to glow: the colors are so wonderfully layered, it’s like staring into an amazingly verdant patch of trees. Ten minutes into our interview, I feel unbelievably serene.

When we meet, Bridges has just published her first book, Furnish-ing Forward and is about to begin production on her new television show. Her business has grown so much, and she has become such a well-known arbiter of style, that she only takes on a few clients a year. Still she hopes to continue on television what she has, for so long, done in her career. “It’s all about exposure and education,” she says. “A lot of the choices we make, as African Americans, are because we haven’t had the exposure and because we don’t know. I tried to write my book in a way that’s very anecdotal and personal. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I try to give examples in my homes so people can see. I’m trying to put it out there in a way that’s a lot less intimidating.”

She hopes that more African Americans will discover what her parents always seemed to know. “My feeling is that wealthy people treat themselves well,” she says. “They feel that they’ve earned the right to have beautiful homes and nice things. My point is that all of us work hard and all of us deserve to treat ourselves well. It doesn’t mean that you have to spend a million dollars. It just means that there’s nothing wrong with surrounding yourself with things that you love and things that inspire you.”

Sheila Bridges has a soft spot for Italy. She studied in Rome during her junior year at Brown University. While completing her master’s, she studied decorative arts in Florence. She began to understand what a leap of imagination it takes to choose a career such as hers. “In Italy, kids that are on the school bus pass by the Duomo every day,” she says. “Every day they go home for lunch and pass by the Vatican. There’s such an incredible level of exposure that starts at a very, very young age. If you can see that someone designed this incredible building, you think, that’s something I can be when I get older. For us, we don’t have those sources of inspiration. The kind of things that little black girls pass by on their way to school don’t make them say, ‘Wow. I can really do this.’”

It’s Not Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At

For successful African-American women, the definition of home is ever shifting because the places we call home are so stark in their differences. Is home the black neighborhood where you were raised or the white prep school where you came of age? If you grew up an “Only” in a predominantly white neighborhood where you often felt isolated, does home become smaller in scope and represent only your literal house and the people who lived there? Among rappers, there’s a phrase designed to put those who boast dubious street credentials in their place. “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at” is the refrain of many a hip-hop song. But for successful black women, the reality of those words can sting. When you find yourself in a walnut-paneled conference room with tufted leather chairs, priceless Persian rugs, a Picasso hanging to your right and a Pollock hanging on your left; when the air-conditioner is running at full blast and nobody at the table looks even a little like you—where you’re at can be a very cold, isolated place. At the same time, where you’re from begins to take on mythic qualities—when you’re a black professional woman in a world as foreign to you as Oz, the ’hood can seem as sweet as Kansas.

In Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids..., Peggy Orenstein writes about a young medical student named Shay, who lived in the inner city but was bussed to a prep school. Twenty years after that first bus ride, now at an Ivy League medical school, Shay feels more connected with her black world than the white world she travels in every day. “I may have known the kids I went to school with from the time we were seven,” Shay tells Orenstein. “But friendship-wise, my real life was always once I got home, with my black friends.”

It doesn’t help that the very notion of a black world and a white world is steeped in stereotypes and value judgments. Too often, the black world is assumed to be one of poverty and tragedy, the inner-city visions of the local nightly news. Conversely, the white world is held up to young blacks as being a world of academic achievement and financial success, with little discussion of white poverty or illiteracy. The ambitious young person who takes the stereotypes at face value can end up with a fine education, a good job and an unhealthy mixture of self-loathing and cultural schizophrenia.

A generation ago, every black community had a need and a place for black doctors, lawyers, accountants and the like. But with few exceptions, young black women studying for those degrees today don’t expect to work in the black community. The highest goal, always, is to conquer the mainstream world. Many black middle-class women find themselves utterly lost, when even after their best efforts they can’t make a place for themselves in the mainstream. In her powerful memoir, Trespassing, Gwendolyn Parker describes how disillusioned she became with her unrelenting status as an outsider in corporate America. She’s moved from strength to strength: an exclusive boarding school, Harvard, the most conservative law firm on Wall Street. Yet after eight years as a director at American Express, Parker had had enough. “These halls were my home now,” she recalls. “I had sojourned for over ten years in them—centers of power and prestige in white America. I’d been trained in their very own breeding grounds, made my career at institutions that were overwhelmingly white and male....As a black female, I was the perpetual outsider, persistently viewed as a trespasser on private preserves at the same time [that my success] was a role I’d been groomed for since birth.”

It’s that constant feeling that one is “trespassing” in the white world that makes it so important that we find the place, the people, who represent home. How well professional black women negotiate the space...

"HAVING IT ALL? portrays (at last!) the joys, dreams and concerns of successful black women but it is not only for them. Women of all races will see themselves reflected in Chambers' subjects--they may also be fascinated by the differences. This book is a much-needed contribution to the conversation we all have---with our friends, sisters, mothers, daughters--about how, as a woman, to lead a truly full and satisfying life."
-Peggy Orenstein, author of Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, & Life in a Half-Changed World

"With verve and personal insight, Veronica Chambers charts one of the most important but under-covered social movements of our time--the rise of black women to their rightful place in American professional life. It's a coming-of-age story not just for these women, but for the whole country."
--Jonathan Alter, Newsweek

"A fascinating and enlightening glimpse into the lives and minds of successful black women today. The book, culturally rich and eminently readable, is one every reader–black or white, male or female, would do well to immerse herself in."
-Cathi Hanauer, Editor of Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage

"HAVING IT ALL? is the real thing.  These are women in real situations -- Veronica Chambers has written a fascinating and wonderfully researched book."
-Gail Buckley, Author of American Patriots

“Veronica Chambers is smart and brave. HAVING IT ALL? should be required reading for any woman, Black, White or myriad other, who dares to break out of the box and define herself.”
- Benilde Little, Author of Acting Out and Good Hair

"Veronica Chambers' HAVING IT ALL? is more than a collective biography of successful black women. The book is a history lesson about women who've transformed the cultural image from Aunt Jemima to uber-mogul Oprah Winfrey--and transformed America in turn. Most importantly, Chambers reveals the moments of self-transformation that happen in every black woman's life, through the stories of some of the most fascinating and accomplished people in America."
-Farai Chideya author of THE COLOR OF OUR FUTURE
From the Hardcover edition.