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Keisha Chiffon Crenshaw’s early years were a blur. In fact, there was no way her memory could possibly conjure them up and arrange them in any type of chronological order without referring to the albums of photographs her mother Cleona had assembled along the way. Keisha was a member of a unique sub culture called “military brat,” which meant that she never lived very long in one place before packing up for the next destination, Fort Where-am-I-Now or Camp Whatchamacallit. Her father, Walter, had been stationed in Germany when Keisha was born at the US Army hospital in Wuerzburg. Over the dozen years that followed, Keisha, her mom, and older brother Darnell lived in five different locations, all in the southern United States, from Louisiana to the Carolinas. Her dad had risen to the rank of Master Sergeant by the time they landed in Alabama, where he was assigned to repair heavy-tracked combat vehicles at the Anniston Army Depot.
Although Keisha didn’t realize it at the time, there were actual advantages to her upbringing besides discount shopping at the PX. Adapting to new surroundings made her more resilient and adept at coping with changing environments. Plus, always being the new kid in school meant finding friends in a hurry, without regard to their race, creed, or ethnicity. She could relate and bond with just about anyone, even though she knew that the next departure and inevitable good-byes were never more than three years away. That all changed the day her father slipped eight feet off the platform of an M1 Abrams tank and fractured his patella on the concrete floor below. After surgery and months of rehab to repair his damaged knee, and approaching his nineteenth year as a soldier—one short of full retirement benefits—Walter received a medical discharge. He appealed the decision, but was denied. Soon after, the Crenshaw’s headed north.
Keisha’s next home, New Haven, Connecticut, had been settled in 1638 by a group of five hundred English Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Quinnipiac tribe of Native Americans sold them the prime land, located on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. Just under two hours by train to New York City, New Haven had grown to become the state’s second largest city and the place where, as the legend goes, the hamburger was invented at a tiny diner called Louis’ Lunch in 1900. It was in this city of twenty square miles where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, that Walter found employment thanks to his brother, Earl, a shop steward in the service and maintenance union at Yale University.
While Walter helped keep the Elis (pronounced “EE-lies” and derived from Elihu Yale, a Welsh merchant and early benefactor for whom the college was named in 1745) warm in the New England winters and cool in the summers, his wife, Cleona, took a job as a domestic at a Courtyard by Marriott. After spending several crowded weeks vying for space at Earl’s modest house, the Crenshaw’s managed to find a place of their own at the Victoria Gardens, a low-income housing complex on New Haven’s near north end.
As was her well-honed style, Keisha transitioned to her inner-city neighborhood and school with relative ease. She was a ninth grader who just tried to blend in without attracting too much attention, and the strategy—as it always had before—worked. Few gave a second glance to the skinny girl with the braces and a funny way of talking. (It took several years and a concerted effort before Keisha was able to shed her southern drawl.) Some close friendships developed over time, a diverse clique that formed their freshmen year as a result of a shared status as newbies. No serious boyfriends surfaced except for Avi Nussbaum in her junior year, but his parents put an end to the courtship once they discovered their son was dating a “person of color.” For the most part, however, Keisha focused her energy on a burgeoning desire to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a performer.
Cleona, along with two of her cousins, formed a vocal trio in the mid-1970s and called it the Chick Fillets. They sang in local clubs and patterned their style after the classic groups of the 1960s like the Shirelles, Dixie Cups, Ronettes, and Crystals. Cleona’s all-time favorite though were the Chiffons, who shot to the top of the charts in 1963 with their hit, “He’s So Fine.” She was only three years old at the time, but Cleona knew all the words to the song and begged her mother to play the 45 rpm vinyl disc again and again until the grooves wore out. It was the reason Keisha’s middle name is Chiffon, in honor of this group that grew up in the same section of the Bronx as Cleona and became her inspiration. As for the Chick Fillets, they did cut one single—“IYD (In Your Dreams)” on the A side and “Catch My Drift?” on the B—that earned them a blurb in Billboard magazine and an audition with Motown executives. However, the combination of a shady manager (a swindler who pocketed their share of earnings and frivoled it away on failed daily doubles at Belmont Park Race Track instead of banking it as he promised), the unexpected arrival of pregnancies, and subsequent shotgun weddings, dashed their dreams of glory and led to the dissolution of the group three years after forming.
Keisha hadn’t inherited her mother’s gift for singing—although she could
more than carry a tune without embarrassing herself. However, Cleona’s stories of being on stage with the Chick Fillets motivated both her offspring. Darnell learned trombone and played in the US Army Band at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after he washed out of Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Keisha, meanwhile, headed to the Elm City Dance Academy (New Haven became known as the “Elm City” after it established the first public tree- planting program in America, many of them the shady elms) every day after school let out, where she took classes in jazz, tap, and ballet. Her instructor, Hi Kicker (there was considerable doubt that this was his real name, but no one could prove otherwise or bothered to), who regaled his students with tidbits of backstage intrigue from his Broadway days as a chorus-line hoofer and whose career “on the boards” had been curtailed by the gout, suggested that she attend a tryout for an annual production of The Nutcracker held at the venerable Shubert Theatre, a sixteen-hundred-seat venue downtown that first opened in 1914. Keisha dazzled the choreographer with her fluid movements and was cast as one of the Mouse King’s crew of mice, the first of many roles she played in area regional theatre that included Pepper in Annie and a street urchin in Oliver.
After a summer road tour with The Wiz ended abruptly when the promoter ran out of funds (or ran off with them, no one was quite sure) and cancelled the remaining dates on the schedule, Keisha applied for and was awarded a scholarship by the New Africa Coalition of the Arts (formed by a collective of minority-owned Connecticut businesses to sponsor promising students to pursue degrees in higher education) to study at Eisenhower College. There she was exposed to the dramatic literature of renowned playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett. Her roles included the maidservant Dunyasha in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Berniece in The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. In her last play—which closed the night before her audition with Stan for Letter 13—she performed in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as Perdita. Abandoned by a king at birth and raised by a shepherd, she fell in love and eloped with the Bohemian Prince Florizel, played in the final performance by the understudy of the lead actor (felled by a sudden and mysterious bout of food poisoning), one Bryce Fowler…