Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire

by Bailey, Philip

  I believe our essence is revealed the moment we’re conceived and then growing inside the womb. As a young child, I assumed that everybody nurtured the same inner musical spirit that I felt. But then I realized that music was my special gift, and not necessarily a calling that everybody else heeded inside his or her inner consciousness. I can’t think of a time when music wasn’t the Pied Piper of my soul, leading me places, beckoning me, Over here, over here. Come this way. I’ve learned always to follow the music, and so far it’s served me well.

  My mother, Elizabeth Crossland, was born and raised in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and had one brother, Lilmon, whom we visited in Oklahoma numerous times while I was growing up. My grandparents on my mother’s side, Lydia Scott and James Crossland, split up when my mother was young. She was raised by her mother alone. Times were especially hard for black folks in Oklahoma in the pre- and post-Depression eras. A lot of African American families were sharecroppers, and my great-grandparents had certainly experienced slavery in their day.

  It was especially a struggle for black working folks to raise more than one child in the 1920s and 1930s. Uncle Lilmon and my mother were raised together until the hard times hit, and my grandparents struggled economically. My mother and uncle would then have to live apart, staying with different relatives over long periods of time. As a result, my mom and Uncle Lilmon had two distinctly different life experiences growing up. Lilmon got the “higher road” over my mother, partly because he was lighter-skinned. Lilmon stayed with relatives who were prominent pastors and teachers, while my mom lived with an aunt and my grandmother Lydia, who weren’t nearly so well off.

  Uncle Lilmon remained attached to his newly adopted family. He later went on to college, just as his only son later went to college, too. My mother, in contrast, took off during her early teens as soon as she could independently fend for herself. She first moved to Denver to settle in a climate that was more suitable for her asthmatic condition, as mountain air was thought to be a better environment for asthmatics.

  In addition, she renewed contact with her father, James, who was stationed in Denver as a member of the air force, where he also worked as a barber. After my mother settled in Colorado, she created an expanded family with various friends and acquaintances, and Denver became her home for the rest of her life.

  I was born Philip James Bailey on May 8, 1951, in what was at that time Denver General, but what is now called Denver Medical Hospital. I was raised in Denver by my mother, along with my sister, Beverly, who is one year older than me.

  Because of the times in which we were raised, my mother was ostracized by her peers, as both my sister and I were conceived out of wedlock. I have only vague memories of my biological father, Edward Alverna Bailey. Eddie Bailey already had a wife and children in Denver, not far from where we lived. Back in 1950 my father’s wife invited my mother to stay with the two of them. Soon my mom and dad ended up getting involved sexually. As a result, my mother felt guilty, though after Beverly was born, Elizabeth and Eddie’s relationship continued, and a year later I came along! Elizabeth gave birth to both of us while she was in her thirties.

  In 1951 having children out of wedlock carried a social price. Eddie had three daughters with his first wife, the youngest girl being just a year older than Beverly. As a result, my upbringing was disjointed. I could not resolve the strangeness of my parents’ relationship. Plus, there was the awkward circumstance in which Eddie’s wife had befriended Elizabeth. Everyone in town knew that Elizabeth was involved with a married man with children. Not only was there shame attached to my mother’s good name, but Eddie’s original family also had to endure a lot of the scandal and gossip as well.

  I was a “miracle baby”—as in, “it’s a miracle he survived.” I was born premature. In fact, my mom told me that the hospital had noted on my birth certificate that I was probably not going to make it. My situation was so touch-and-go that the doctors told my mother not to get her hopes up too high. I was sickly throughout the early years of my childhood. I remember having to go back and forth frequently to the doctor, because I suffered an acute form of spinal meningitis. I also inherited respiratory problems as a result of my mother’s chronic asthma. There were many times when my mother had to rush me to the hospital. Sometimes she would have to call an ambulance. Most of the time, because we didn’t have a car, we would take the bus to Denver General. During those frequent visits to the emergency room, I felt uneasy about my frail condition. The smallest incidents could affect my stomach, and I would vomit if I became too emotionally upset. The doctors gave me shots to treat the meningitis. I don’t remember the injections being too painful, but we did have to wait for ages in the hospital lobby. One of my earliest memories of being in the ER was when the police brought in a shackled woman. I remember she looked like Lena Horne. She must have been a “lady of the night,” and seeing her in irons upset me so much, I started vomiting.

  My illnesses lingered until I was nine or ten, when the spells became fewer and less severe as I got older and stronger. Up until then I was bound to catch the flu once a year, and when I caught the flu, it caught me! I would get so deathly ill that my shoes would be too big by the time I got well again.

  Elizabeth worked as a domestic, cleaning and ironing for the household of Denver oil tycoon Marvin Davis and his wife, Barbara. My mother also worked for Ms. Peggy Crane, a member of another prominent wealthy family in the city. We moved around a lot in Northeast Denver. I remember one time I kept a count: Between the first grade and high school, my mother, sister, and I moved more than fifteen times before Mom bought a house of her own for $9,500 on Pontiac Street, near the old Stapleton Airport.

  My mother later adopted Eddie’s last name, Bailey. Eddie stayed with us off and on, and my sister and I went through our early lives confused as to whether or not my father and mother were ever legally married. Turns out they weren’t.

  —

  African American migration made a significant impact on areas like Colorado. Many African Americans, especially those who had been living in the South after the Civil War, began to spread around the country, particularly after the American Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The African American population shifted to the urbanized Midwest, the North, and the West Coast. Blacks left rural sharecropper lives and migrated to city industrial centers like Detroit and transportation hubs like Denver and Chicago. (More than 60 percent of African American migrants to Colorado ended up in Denver, not counting the black men who became cowboys, working the range and the ranches throughout western states like Colorado and Texas.)

  Black families like the Crosslands came to the Denver area to work for the railroad. Throughout 1914 and 1915, during the First World War, black workers filled the labor void created by the cutoff of cheap European immigration into American urban centers. Even black women could get jobs for two to five dollars a day by filling positions in meatpacking houses in Chicago or automobile factories in Detroit.

  Improved health care and better jobs were also offered in states like Colorado, as opposed to the squalor in Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi. Racial violence against African Americans, which occurred in cities like East St. Louis and Chicago from 1917 to 1919, confined blacks to certain neighborhoods. Denver was a small city at that time—and even smaller in terms of its black population.

  The African American community in Denver remained fairly concentrated compared to those in other big cities in the United States. In 1957, when I was in the first grade, my sister and I were the only black children in our grammar school. Later, once we moved to Park Hill in the northeast section of the city, I attended a mixed primary school called Columbine Elementary (not to be confused with the Colorado suburban school of the same name that was the site of the 1999 student massacre). At the time the city had one black junior high school, Cole Junior High; and one black high school, Manual High School.


  The most popular social gathering point for African Americans in Denver was the Five Points neighborhood, where five streets converged in the northeast corner of the city and formed a vital central community. By the 1890s a viable black middle class had arisen there. The area was home to many churches and black businesses, restaurants, drugstores, saloons, newspaper offices, barber shops, doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, and other establishments. Every Sunday after worship, if a person had a car, he would drive down to Welton Street in the Five Points and make sure he got a primo parking spot, because the district was a mob scene every Sunday afternoon. After church you could hardly get through the area because of the number of people sitting in their cars, watching the world go by, or parading around wearing their Sunday best, cruising and just hanging out. It was a family affair, and after the sun went down, the kids would go back home while their parents returned and partied for a few more hours.

  A lot of the men who lived in the Five Points worked for the railroads. Some were Pullman porters; others were in the military. Schoolteachers, preachers, shopkeepers, businessmen, and other elders and respected members of the black community congregated in this small sector of commerce. There were at least a dozen bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, and most people patronized all of them. As a result, everybody knew everybody else’s business; so once you gained a reputation, they knew about you.

  During the I Love Lucy decade of the 1950s, families in Denver, generally speaking, had a very simple set of moral values—especially regarding fatherless children like me. In the neighborhoods where I grew up, people would think nothing of asking me, “Philip James, where are your mom and dad?” Unless your mother was a widow (or possibly divorced), some families wouldn’t let you play with their kids if you came from a “broken” home.

  I was raised mostly around women. As a kid, I had lots and lots of “aunties,” although they weren’t real aunts by blood. Elizabeth’s friends were people much like her—single women who liked to drink, dance, entertain boyfriends and have a good time, and tip a few on the weekends.

  One of my earliest childhood memories, a vivid recollection that’s indelibly etched in my psyche, involves my mother and Eddie Bailey. At the time I hadn’t started kindergarten, so I must have been about three years old. There was constant emotional turmoil in their relationship, and as I later found out, it was mostly because Eddie was wavering as to whether or not he would leave his other family for ours.

  It was a cold, wintry night during a bad blizzard, and my sister and I were huddled in the backseat of the car. At the time, Eddie Bailey was finishing up another hitch in the air force and was stationed at a nearby military base in the city. In those days black airmen lived in segregated shacks. He had just been stationed north to Idaho, and had made the major commitment to leave his first family and take us there with him.

  I recall my mother screaming hysterically at my father, telling him that she was not about to uproot her children to Idaho to live in some military tenement and freeze to death. As a result, Eddie completely lost it and got out of the car to grab a crowbar from the trunk. My mother locked the door and wouldn’t let him back inside. My father stood outside in the frigid air, screaming and waving the crowbar. After this fight, Eddie Bailey left for Idaho, and their relationship ended.

  I recall another incident when one of my mother’s boyfriends came over to the house late one night, cut up from an encounter at a card game. Back then, you could easily get cut or robbed while gambling. A guy would make fifty bucks and want to double or triple his cash by shooting craps in the back room of a pool hall. If you played around with the wrong guy, he’d rob your stash or take you out with a knife. My mom didn’t take up with too many rowdy men. In fact, this guy was a pretty nice fellow, though a bit country, like me.

  You never quite knew what you were getting, psychologically or otherwise, with my mother. She displayed a wide range of moods, ranging from loving to extremely short-tempered. Beverly and I had grown used to our mom’s erratic behavior. She had two sides to her personality. One was the sentimental, loving side; the other was governed by a very unstable disposition, which meant she could lash out at any time. Looking back, I suspect that she might have been manic-depressive, or bipolar. One minute she’d sob and cry, and the next, she’d be tender and affectionate, smothering us children with kisses and hugs.

  I was very close to my mother as a child. Sometimes when “Bevvy” and our friends would get into mischief or throw rocks, I would be the one to break ranks and tell when my mom wanted to know who had misbehaved. Then my mom would hug me affectionately and tell me what a good boy I was.

  But Elizabeth was rough on my sister. When I was twelve years old, she threw a pan of hot water at Beverly. Maybe she saw a lot of herself in her daughter. The two would argue furiously, and Mom would call Beverly a bitch and a whore. Later, my sister got pregnant and had a child at the age of fifteen.

  In the midst of the volatility, we did our best to cope with everything that came our way. Unlike my sister, I didn’t suffer abject abuse from my mother—verbal or physical—although as kids, we both received vigorous whippings. By today’s standards, these were whippings that would have resulted in a parent’s drawing heat from a child-protective agency. But as was common practice among traditional African American families at the time, I often had to go outside to the tree in the yard and select my own switch. On more than a few occasions, I would go off to school sporting some serious welts.

  My mother encouraged us to speak our minds, and we felt free to voice our opinions or feelings. She had a bizarre sense of humor and displayed a strange way of parenting. Mom said some very cruel things to me and my sister—and I wonder if she realized it at the time. Once, when Beverly and I were getting on my mother’s nerves, she threatened to put us up for adoption! We had a “play” auntie who had adopted a boy—he was a few years older than us—so we had heard firsthand scary stories from him describing what it was like to live in foster homes and to be on your own.

  My mother didn’t know when to let up. “All right, you kids! Pack up your stuff because you’re both moving out! The adoption people are on their way to come get you,” she once threatened, and Beverley and I ran outside to the swing set, crying our eyes out. I made a solemn promise to my sister that day: “I’ll come and find you.” Foolishly, my mother didn’t come out and tell us that she was kidding.

  Another time, when I was very young, my mother warned me that if I didn’t finish my dinner, I would die of leukemia. Once again, she didn’t take back the comment, so I believed her. That night I sat in my bedroom, terrified, sobbing and thinking that I was mortally ill. We were going to a Catholic church at the time, so I recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over until a strange spiritual presence settled in the room, giving me assurance that there was a God out there looking over me.

  We didn’t live in any tenements or in rundown apartments and only spent a brief period in the Denver projects when I was very small. On occasion, though, when times were tough, we’d move in with my grandpa Crossland until Elizabeth could get back on her feet again. My mother had a fierce common sense ethic. She called it “mother wit.” Elizabeth would say, “That person may be smart, but they don’t have no damn mother wit.” My mother had acute common sense. As a result, her employers loved her, and the Davis and Crane children would often confide in her, almost as if she were family. Elizabeth could talk to anybody, and despite her hot temper and shortcomings raising us, she was a very gregarious person to socialize with.

  While my mother worked for the Davis and Crane households, there were many times that Beverly and I would have to stay at home by ourselves—especially when Elizabeth’s employers were out of town. My sister would have to take care of me on her own—and she was only a year older. At other times, when the Cranes went out of town or on vacation, Mom would take my sister and me to work with her. Bringing us along was as much about showing us
how the “other half” lived as it was for her maintaining peace of mind, knowing that we weren’t stuck at home by ourselves. During that time, I picked up a childhood phobia—a fear of abandonment—after being left home alone too long.

  I did have a distant friendship with a man my mother was married to from the time I was nine years old until I was seventeen. Robert James Combs was a short-order cook and chef for the railroad who loved to play the saxophone but who had forsaken a career in music in order to help provide for our family. I don’t think my mother loved Robert but had married him in order to survive. I never had a single in-depth conversation with the man. It wasn’t that Robert was mean. On the contrary, he was a taciturn and remote fellow. At home at night—when he wasn’t drunk—he would walk through the door, sit down, nod at me, and routinely ask, “How ya doin’?” We had so little to say to each other, only once did he raise his voice at me.

  “Did you hear what your mother said?”

  I was so shocked to hear his unexpected outburst that I wet myself. His deep male voice scared the hell out of me! I remember one time he showed me and my sister how to slice vegetables without cutting ourselves. Apart from that, there wasn’t a bonding moment between us. Robert was a goofy guy. Although he was a professional cook, he didn’t prepare a single meal for me or my sister at home. Many years later, he came to visit me in Southern California and nearly drowned in my swimming pool—in the shallow end, in only three feet of water! Robert James Combs was not the sharpest guy in terms of either intellect or charisma.

  Robert tolerated my mother’s violent moods, never raising a hand to her, even when the pressure of her tumultuous behavior got to be too much. One night he came home late, a little tipsy, carrying a set of bongo drums and a small puppy under his arm. And then the shouting began. In an outburst of rage, my mother pulled out a carving knife and slashed at Robert and threw him out of the house.