Everything I Wanted to Take

...an excerpt from Whoopi Goldberg’s 2024 memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me.

I had saved up a lot of my Broadway money, and I really wanted to keep my mom around me. I also needed help looking after [my daughter] Alex. Mom was still teaching preschool and was living back in our apartment in the projects. I didn’t know what she would want to do. She had worked hard to get her master’s degree, and I didn’t know if she would want to leave her place in Head Start behind. But I’d thought I’d ask.

I called her from California with my proposition. “Ma, would you ever consider coming to California? I’m going back and forth to LA and New York to audition, and Alex is in school, so I need some help.”

She didn’t hesitate for long. “Yes. When do you want me there?”

“I got to tell you, Ma. It may be a while you’ll be here.”

“I don’t have a problem with that.”

“Great. Great. I can buy you a plane ticket as soon as you can come,” I told her.

I went to pick her up at the airport after a few weeks had gone by, and she walked off the plane carrying two brown shopping bags.

“What’s in the bags?” I asked her.

“Everything I wanted to take.”

“So, where are your suitcases?”

“This is it,” she said. “This much is what I brought.”

“But did you close up the apartment? What will happen with that?”

She stopped walking and faced me. “Listen. I left everything. I took what I wanted. I dropped the house key into the incinerator, and I left.”

“Wait! You did what?”

She repeated, “I dropped the key into the incinerator and left for the airport.”

I still couldn’t grasp it. “Well, what about all the stuff still in the house? What about your books, the Beatles albums, and everything else?”

“I’m looking at this as a fresh start,” she told me. “There’s no point in bringing all that with me. Besides, you didn’t ever say that I should save you the albums or anything in that apartment, did you?”

She was right about that, so I couldn’t say more. “Okay, I get it. But . . . what about stuff like our birth certificates?”

Ma got in the front seat of my Volkswagen Bug. “You can always get another one.”

I still couldn’t quite understand what she was telling me. “Ma, what happened to—”

She stopped me in the middle. “Caryn, I don’t know what you want me to say. I brought what I wanted, and I didn’t want to bring the rest. I can get what I need here in California. I didn’t want to bring that old life into this one.”

That was it. That’s all there was to be said about it. She never returned to the projects, and I have no idea where anything from our old apartment went. I’m sure somebody scored some cash on those first-run Beatles albums. I keep waiting for my birth certificate to pop up in a tabloid magazine one day, but it never has.

Years and years later, after she had told me the secret about her memory loss after Bellevue, it made sense. The move to California was probably the first time she had felt safe, like nobody was going to show up and take her back to Bellevue. I got it. She wanted to be free. It became clear to me.

I knew I had a goal. From then on, I felt like my life’s calling was to take the load off my mom, to give her a good time. She had carried it long enough. ■

Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me was published by Blackstone Publishing in 2024.