Other people were astonished by my mother’s trust in him. Despite her protective nature, she never doubted his ability to take care of me. When I was six weeks old, we went out on the road with him. We stayed in a two-story hotel. Mother and Dad and I had a room on the first floor, and Tommy Brown and the boys were on the second. My father told my mother, “Bea, I’m goin’ up and play some dominoes with Tommy. I’m goin’ to take the baby with me so you can get some rest.”
My mother said, “Okay. Let me put him in a blanket so if he goes to sleep, you can put this little blanket over him.”
My dad said, “Okay.” They bundled me up, and my father carried me upstairs to Tommy’s room. He had already counted the steps and learned the hotel layout, so getting to Tommy’s room was no problem.
My mother thankfully fell into bed. A few minutes later the phone rang. She dragged herself out of bed, thinking, “Oh, my goodness, Ray calling already. I was just falling asleep.” She reluctantly picked up the phone, mumbling, “What is it?”
A woman’s voice on the other end cried out, “Mrs. Charles! Mrs. Charles!”
Mother said, “Yes, what’s the matter?”
The woman identified herself as the clerk at the front desk and said, “Did you know—did you know—oh my God, he’s going upstairs! Mrs. Charles! It’s your husband. Did you know Ray Charles has your baby?”
My mother replied, “Well, yes. That’s his baby, too, you know.”
The clerk replied, “Yes, I know, but he’s going up the steps, and he’s carrying the baby, and …”
My mother reassured her. “Yes. But he’s not going to harm the baby. It’ll be fine.”
She heard the clerk say, “Oh, my God,” then take a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. If you say so.” And the clerk hung up.
My mother was proud of my father’s ability to care for me. In a place and time when most fathers would never be seen caring for their children, my father willingly changed diapers and heated bottles. He never felt it made him less of a man. As my mother said, I was his baby, too. I have always wished someone had taken pictures of my father holding me, but my mother says she was never one for taking pictures. Instead, the only pictures that remain are in my mother’s mind, as vivid as the day I was born.
It was a happy time for our family, but even then, the troubles that came to haunt us were brewing. My mother was a family girl. She never wanted to be wealthy or famous. The height of her ambition was to find a husband she loved, have children, and have a home of her own to raise them in. That first year of marriage to my father gave her all she wanted and more. But for my father, it wasn’t enough. He needed excitement, craved carnal things. He loved my mother, called her his one true love until the end of his life, but his love for her did nothing to lessen his desire for other women, and it certainly did nothing to lessen his craving for drugs. Friends say he tried to be a good husband. He told my mother about his daughter, Evelyn, who was six years old when I was born. He was aware that she knew there were other women, though in his mind, he was in love. While he was on the road the other women fulfilled his sexual appetite, he said. They didn’t touch his heart. When he married my mother, he would tell his girlfriends to stay away, and he did his best to put a boundary around his family that no one was allowed to cross. He would cut back on hard drugs and rely more on pot for a while, both because money was scarce and because he knew how my mother felt about heroin. She could tolerate his drinking and smoking pot. But hard-core addiction—that was something else again.
He began his affair with Mary Ann Fisher the same month he married my mother, and within two years he was also involved in ongoing affairs with Margie Hendricks and Mae Mosely Lyles. What a double standard. My mother knew it, and she struggled with the knowledge of the affairs. She thought of leaving him many times. But she came from a generation where marriage was not taken lightly. She did not believe a woman was required to accept physical abuse under any circumstances, but the affairs were another form of abuse. In Sunday school she had learned about the Old Testament patriarchs, about King David and King Solomon and their many wives and concubines. These were men of God, yet God allowed them to have as many women as they wanted. Maybe some men were just made that way, she told herself. She decided her only choice was to accept it, as long as he didn’t bring other women around the family. There were boundaries of decency and dignity that could never be violated. Her children had the right to grow up seeing their mother treated with love and respect. What he did on the road, behind closed doors, was his business. She didn’t want to know about it. He understood the rules, and for many years was able to keep his two worlds separate.
He kept his heroin addiction from her as long as he could, but inevitably, she found out about it. He had tried to wean himself from the drug their first year together but had never really succeeded. To keep her from finding out, he used heroin at another friend’s home in town. My mother found out what was going on by accident. One day the friend was late getting the drug, so he brought the heroin to their home, knowing Dad would be going into withdrawal by then. It was the first time heroin was brought into my parents’ home. The friend expected my dad to be there, and when my mother told him Dad wasn’t home, the friend started to get nervous. An addict himself, he always shot up with my father and was getting desperate for a hit of his own. He paced back and forth for a while, saying, “I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know what to do.”
My mother repeated, “Well, he’s not here.” She wasn’t sure what was going on. She thought he was probably there to bring my father some pot.
After a while the friend became very agitated and asked her, “Can I use your restroom?”
A minute or two later my mother went in after him. He had some liquid mixed in a spoon. She asked him, “What are you doing?”
He said, “Well, I brought this for Ray, but I can’t be walking around with it. So I’m going to use it here.”
Then he took out a hypodermic needle and drew the liquid out of the spoon. My mother was horrified. It was obvious by then what was going on. “You know you can’t do that in my house—”
But he cut her off, saying, “I got to use it.”
By then he didn’t care what she said. He needed his hit. He tied off his arm and was about to inject himself. My mother was panicking and thought, “No, God, no, I can’t watch this.” And she turned to leave the room.
The friend said, “Hey, don’t leave. Come on. Take a hit with me.” She said, “I don’t do that.”
The friend replied, “Well, Ray says you don’t use but come on, try it, you’ll see how it feels. It’s okay, you’ll like it. I won’t give you much.”
Mother stiffened and said, “I think you better do what you’re goin’ to do and leave my home. Because I don’t appreciate what you’re doing.” And she left the room.
A few minutes later, the friend left. When he told my father what had happened, my father became very upset. He told the friend, “You shouldn’t have done that. You had no business doin’ that. I already told you, Bea is not into drugs. She didn’t need to know about that.”
My mother was very upset with my father. When he got home, she told him she did not appreciate what had happened, and she never wanted to see something like that again. He promised her that she never would. That was the end of the friend. He never came around our house again.
My mother still did not understand how serious the problem was, though, because heroin addiction had never been part of her experience. My father had already been arrested in a heroin bust while he was on the road in Philadelphia, but he managed to get the charges dropped, and the arrest was a well-kept secret. My mother had no idea. The tracks on his arms weren’t that visible yet, and he was determined to hide the truth from her. Heroin was still a luxury in those days, and apart from his concern for my mother, my dad couldn’t afford to get high very often. For all she knew, the incident with his friend had been a one-time thing. It had happened shortly before
I was born, but once they were married, it became impossible to hide the extent of the problem.
Money was more plentiful by then, so for the first time, getting high daily was possible. Even though the tracks were not that deep yet, the effects of the drug were obvious. My mother hated it, and my parents argued, but it was clear that heroin was a permanent part of my father’s life. He told her that he loved it, that it gave him pleasure like nothing else ever had, and that he was certain it wasn’t hurting him. My father was in denial like most addicts who won’t face their addiction; he honestly believed he had it under control. My mother was unwilling to break up the family over it, so she made a grudging agreement. She would live with the drug as long as he kept it away from the family. I was to grow up knowing nothing about it. If he ever crossed that line, that would be the end.
IT WAS DURING those years that my father stopped being Ray Charles Robinson, known by that name to a small group of jazz and R & B fans, and became Ray Charles, household name. After moderate success with “Mess Around” and “Don’t You Know, Baby?” in 1953, he began to assemble his own band in 1954, his first year with my mother. About the time she found out she was pregnant with me, he had his breakthrough: his own band, using his own arrangements, recorded his first huge hit, “I Got a Woman.” He had finally found his own voice, and the result changed music history. My parents’ fortunes rose faster than either of them had dreamed of. In less than two years, my father formed a band and recorded his own arrangements, brought in a girl group called the Cookies (soon renamed the Raelettes) to back him up, bought a station wagon for the band to travel in, promoted Jeff Brown from valet to band manager, and began churning out a series of hits that left the music world breathless. Between the time my mother fell in love with him and my third birthday, my father recorded hit song after hit song: “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” “Lonely Avenue,” and “What Would I Do Without You.” He had moved from the rural circuit to the epicenter of American music. It was time to move his family from rural America to the big city where he could take his career to the next level.
My mother was reluctant to move. Her roots were in Texas and though she had lived in Houston and Dallas since she was eleven, she remained a small-town girl at heart. Texas was familiar, her family and friends were there, and despite the size of the two cities, she moved within a familiar comfort zone. My parents talked about it repeatedly, and eventually she came to accept the fact that they would have to move. My father told her there were two choices: either New York or Los Angeles. All her memories of New York were painful, and the most vivid memory of all was the freezing weather. After a lifetime in southeast Texas, she couldn’t imagine living in that cold. So she chose Los Angeles.
In 1958, just after my brother David was born, the move was made. Jeff Brown loaded everything he could into the station wagon, and along with my mother’s dear friend Bernice, they drove to Los Angeles. The doctor wouldn’t allow my mother and David to make the trip yet, so we stayed in Dallas and followed a few weeks later. Meanwhile, my father looked for property, eventually purchasing a piece of land in rural Riverside County and a second property on Hepburn Avenue in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. He was excited about the Riverside County acreage, already planning to purchase a plane that he could land on his own property. When my mother heard his idea and saw the property, she thought he was out of his mind. She had no intention of living alone with two children in rural California several months a year while my father was on the road; and when she saw where he planned to land a plane, she informed him that if he could see the place, he would know what a crazy idea it was. They agreed that our family would live in the home my father had purchased on Hepburn. Within weeks the four of us had settled in. It was a fresh beginning for our family and my father’s career.
My parents had achieved the American dream. They had begun life as a poor girl from segregated small-town Texas and a poverty-stricken blind orphan who seemed destined to make brooms for a living. They grew up in the Jim Crow South and moved to California years before the civil rights movement had achieved any of its major goals. Yet they reached a level of success most Americans only dream of before either of them was thirty years old. It was extraordinary. Though shadows were already lurking in the corners of our beautiful new home, my mother resolutely ignored them. As she puts it, when you grow up, you reach for the stars but you settle for the moon. It was more than we ever dreamed.
CHAPTER 4
Moving to the Outskirts of Town
Let me tell ya, honey,
We gonna move away
from here.
—ROY JACOBS AND WILLIAM WELDON
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES SWIM INTO FOCUS LIKE IMPRESSIONIST paintings, blurred images of trees and gardens, of blue skies and children playing. Our street had a movie star’s name: Hepburn. It was beautiful there. It was a place where nothing bad should ever happen.
The house we moved into is in a suburb of Los Angeles called Leimert Park, a residential neighborhood built in the thirties and forties as one of the first planned communities in Southern California. Located in the southern part of the city, Leimert Park is bordered on one side by Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard (named Santa Barbara Boulevard when we lived there). The boulevard is wide, populated with Los Angeles’s iconic palm trees. It leads to one of the first malls in the nation. My mother regularly shopped for our clothing at the May Co. and Broadway half a mile down the road. Today the area is often referred to as the “Black Greenwich Village,” a tribute to the richness of the artistic community that thrives there.
When we first moved to Leimert Park in 1958, the neighborhood was racially mixed, a combination of Asian, white, and African American residents. Our neighbors were all successful professionals—doctors, lawyers, judges, entrepreneurs. It was a mecca for upwardly mobile families of all races. Some of the most successful African Americans in the nation lived there when I was growing up. Ella Fitzgerald lived just down the street. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley lived nearby. Though the Asian and white populations gradually dwindled during the sixties, our street remained stable. Many of the families I grew up with still live there.
The neighborhood is a mixture of two-story Spanish colonial homes, postwar bungalows, and art deco apartment buildings, many of them built by progressive architects. There is a sense of spaciousness despite the parade of homes lining every block and the numerous businesses only blocks away. The streets are wide and remarkably free of traffic, with plenty of room for children to play. Well-maintained sidewalks run along the blocks, with a grass border dividing them from the street. Girls can play hopscotch or jump rope, and boys can ride their bikes down the long expanses of cement. I spent much of my childhood riding my bike up and down our long block. The yards are large, too, with fifteen-foot lawns fronting most homes and large, grassy backyards with plenty of room to play or barbecue.
Our section of Hepburn Avenue had a personality all its own. The houses are large, nearly all two-story, gracious havens for the families that live in them. Nearly every house contained children. Its two blocks made up my world. What I loved the most about Hepburn, though, were the change of seasons and the color of the trees. Dense rows of mature sycamore, big-leaf maple, oak, willow, and ash trees lined the street and filled the yards, providing shade on hot summer days. In the spring jacaranda trees were covered with lavender blossoms, making the sidewalks slippery for skaters. Backyards were filled with lemon, avocado, and peach trees, ripe for the picking every summer. Boxwood hedges framed the houses and lined the driveways. Perfectly edged buffalo-grass lawns, with their coarse blades and dense turf, surrounded every house. The grass was perfect for running barefoot and playing ball. Every house had a gardener, and every housewife took pride in her flowers and manicured lawn.
I was three years old when we moved into the house on Hepburn, and my brother David was just an infant. It was a world away from the small house in Dallas, a universe away from the Florid
a shack where my father had grown up. Our house was a mild yellow-colored two-story stucco with a big bay window, white shutters, and ornate white metal trim. A tall leafy tree leaned over the second-story window facing the front yard. My father’s Pontiac station wagon, and later my mother’s lavender Cadillac, sat in the driveway next to the neatly trimmed front lawn. Like every other house on the block, ours was immaculate. Fallen leaves did not remain in the yard for long. Our house did have one unique feature, however. My mother disliked stepping from her car onto the grass in her high-heeled shoes, so my father had a strip of lawn bordering the driveway replaced with cement. My grandfather, who also lived in Southern California and had reestablished contact with my mother, did the work himself. For reasons that still baffle me, my grandfather painted the new strip of cement green, to match the grass it replaced. Why he didn’t match it to the rest of the driveway escapes me. That strip of green cement remains, to this day, a legacy of my grandfather’s unfathomable taste. The crack in the sidewalk from the tree’s roots, where I sometimes tripped running with my friends, is still there, too.
Downstairs the house was divided into roughly two sections: the entertainment area and the family area. The living room and the dining room formed the entertainment area. We seldom went in there unless we had visitors. The living room was where we kept my father’s baby-grand piano. He rarely played unless the band members were there, but he liked to noodle around on it now and then. Behind the kitchen was the maid’s quarters, with a room to sleep in and a half bath. The utility area was back there, too. We didn’t have a live-in nanny when we first moved there; my mother wanted her privacy.
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