Thicker than Water: A Memoir

In February 2018, Kerry filmed her last scene in Scandal with Bellamy Young, who played Mellie Grant. Over the years, Kerry grew unexpectedly close with Bellamy, who was initially cast as a “day player,” or a role meant to be filmed in one day, but Bellamy’s character had grown to a major part in the show. They stood on a set mimicking the White House’s Truman Balcony. Kerry once had brunch on the real Truman Balcony with Michelle Obama and Sarah Jessica Parker. Filming the final scenes, she thought about the many places her life had taken her.

Bellamy’s Mellie asked Kerry’s Olivia what she was going to do, and Olivia responded, “Whatever I want” (16), encapsulating what both she as a character and Kerry as an actor felt. They shot the scene over and over, and the directing producer asked Kerry to try saying the line less happily, leading Kerry to think about her grief over the show’s end. She wondered who she would be if she was not Olivia.

Flashing back to the late 1960s, Kerry describes how her parents met. Her mother, Valerie, met Claudell Washington in high school, and they became good friends. Claudell was from Brooklyn, while Valerie was from the Bronx, but both were high-achieving students, so they were invited to attend Washington Irving School in Manhattan. Valerie went to college at Hunter Uptown (now Lehman College), where she met her first husband. They divorced after a few years. Not long after, Claudell invited her to a party, where Valerie ran into Claudell’s brother Earl, an Olympic athlete. They met up again the next day at the beach and soon fell in love.

Valerie’s parents, Mancle and Isabelle, had each immigrated to the US from Jamaica in the late 1920s. Mancle passed away when Valerie was 15. Kerry describes how Valerie grew up more enmeshed in Caribbean culture than American Blackness, and while some of her siblings could pass for white or were racially ambiguous, she could not. She experienced a lot of colorism (in which having lighter skin is valued more) within her family, inspiring her to be independent and to rely on her intelligence.

Earl’s family had roots both in New York and in the Gullah Geechee of St. Helena Island, off the coast of South Carolina. This island, along with others nearby, were havens for enslaved Africans, who built their own communities and traditions. Kerry and her family once visited, staying on Hilton Head Island, a resort town, and renting a car to explore their family’s heritage. They found the land still owned by her family. It was overgrown, though her father was clearly still proud. On the way back to the resort, they had to stop and ask for directions, and Kerry overheard one of the people comment on how they were rich to be staying on Hilton Head. From this, Kerry learned that appearing to be wealthy or powerful carries just as much weight as actually being wealthy.

During her first marriage, Valerie had a stillborn child. It took five years for her and Earl to conceive Kerry, who remembers being told how much her parents wanted her. She often went to the college where her mother taught in the education department. In addition, they often went on educational trips within the city. Earl, in comparison with Valerie’s commitment to learning, was creative and a dreamer. Kerry thinks it’s clear why she became an actor, blending the real world of her mother’s perspective with the magic her father saw in it.

However, Kerry always felt like she was disconnected from her parents while she was growing up. She once asked about a sibling and learned that it had been hard for her parents to have her. Another time, she asked why her father’s mother, LT, didn’t like her. Her mother asked why she thought that but did not answer her question. LT was not close with Valerie either, and Kerry speculated that her grandmother associated her with her mother.

Changing to focus on her dad, Kerry describes how Earl worked in financial services, opening his own realty company after the IRS investigated one of his former employers. Kerry remembers how, at other jobs, her father experienced racism and prejudice, so he was proud to have his own business, though he slowly grew more frustrated with the business. Kerry also remembers how her father wanted a son and how she struggled to live up to his expectations for her.

When Kerry was 16, she had dinner with her Aunt Daphne and mother in the Bronx. The conversation that day was about how her mother was frustrated with her father and how her aunt suggested that her mother get a divorce. Knowing how difficult his work was, her mother sighed, explaining that if she left him, he would have nothing.

Kerry grew up in the Bronx on Pugsley Avenue, which had long before been Maeneppis Kill, a waterway used by the Indigenous Siwanoys. While the creek was gone, she and her family still had water all around them. They lived in the Jamie Towers in a two-bedroom apartment.

Kerry and her family loved the water and spent much of their time at the Jamie Towers pool. She remembers her mother trying to get her to use her arms when she swam because she propelled herself with just her legs, causing the lifeguards to call her “Fish.” Initially resistant to her mother’s critique, Kerry learned that using her arms made her faster and stronger.

Valerie had lived with her first husband, Mike Godfrey, in the apartment Kerry had grown up in. He was an artist and, after their stillborn, painted portraits of pregnant women with empty wombs, as if punishing Valerie. When they divorced, she turned the nursery into an office, and nine years later it became a nursery again when Kerry was born.

The apartment was on the top floor, and planes would often fly right overhead on the flight path to LaGuardia airport. Kerry wanted to travel, often feeling alone. When she was in kindergarten, she walked to school, not knowing that her mother secretly followed her. Her mother was very involved in her schooling. When a plan to bus the gifted children into another neighborhood developed, Valerie understood that because white families did not want to send their children into a Black and Latinx part of the Bronx, students of color would be sent to the white school instead. The school board waited until Valerie and one other parent were absent from a meeting to vote on the measure, passing it in their absence.

The switch to another school made Kerry feel especially othered. When she auditioned in sixth grade for Bye Bye Birdie, she knew she wouldn’t get the lead role, because she wasn’t white. Instead, she got the role of Rose Alvarez, and while it was a significant one, it was still a supporting role.

Kerry felt like everyone in her family was a performer, trying to portray themselves to one another as successful and happy. They followed the rules, and Kerry reflects on how she felt like swimming at night—which she could not do in the pool at Jamie Towers—as the ultimate expression of rule breaking. She hopes her children feel safe swimming during the day and the night.

When Kerry was young, she didn’t sleep well and sometimes heard her parents fighting. However, in the morning, everyone pretended nothing had happened. Most arguments were about money, though sometimes they were about her father’s failures or her mother’s contentedness with her job. Kerry started to think she was the only thing holding them together. She also “learned that appearances matter, and what mattered most was the appearance of being OK” (57).

Her father drank often, and neither she nor her mother liked it, though it somehow helped her father feel like he was successful. As Kerry grew older, she sometimes went to bars, using a fake ID or because a bouncer flirted with her or her friends, and she worried she would run into him. Then, she started to wonder if maybe it would help for her father and her to see each other breaking the rules and not pretending that everything was alright. He loved her, but he didn’t know her.

When he came home inebriated, she hid in her room. Her mother became stoic, putting on a mask and hiding her anger. Kerry grew to resent her father’s drinking, never able to compete with the affection he felt when he was at a bar. However, she also knew he wanted to feel close to others. When she realized that her parents fought less when she wasn’t asleep (because they wanted to hide fighting from her), she started to stay awake when he came home.

Kerry once asked her mother when her parents were happy, and her mother said that they were happy before she was born and when she was too young to remember. Their early life together was filled with dreams; when they fought, those dreams felt out of reach. The IRS, she came to realize, was a large factor, as they had been investigating Earl for much longer than Kerry initially knew.

At age seven, Kerry started having panic attacks at night, and sleep was difficult. She tried to cope by thinking positively, but the panic attacks often made her feel terrified. This feeling increased when her parents fought because she felt unsafe in her home. One night, she went out and yelled at them to stop. Her mother started crying, feeling like she was failing at having the life she was supposed to have with a happy family. When she finally said something, she explained that she thought about taking a bath when she thought they were done fighting and that she would use the homemade spa machine he had given her. However, she didn’t, worried that Earl would throw the whole machine in the water.

The next morning, no one said anything about the night before. Kerry decided to stay in her room more. She resolved to be the perfect child to make them love each other more.