He learned about the engines in the planes he owned over the years and could repair them if he needed to. Herbert Miller told me that one night when Dad’s twin-engine Martin 404 was grounded in a storm for engine trouble, Dad completed a repair no one else could manage. The pilot and mechanic had struggled unsuccessfully for an hour in the pouring rain to get the newly repaired engine back into its compartment, but they couldn’t get it to clear the cowl flap properly. Finally my dad said, “Let me give it a shot.”
The pilot and mechanic gave each other a “Yeah, right” look as my father climbed under the wing and disappeared from view. They could hear him adjusting something, and a few minutes later he asked for a wrench to tighten the bolts, and they were ready for takeoff.
My father loved airplanes, perhaps for the sense of complete freedom they gave him. In the air, he didn’t need eyes. One of the most exciting experiences of my life was seeing and flying in my father’s airplane. I was five years old at the time. It was a twin-engine Cessna 310 that seated five people. He kept it at the Compton Airport. When he described it enthusiastically to my mother, she didn’t exactly react like he’d hoped. In fact, she says, she thought he had taken leave of his senses. She could not understand why he would want a small airplane. When we went to the airport to see it, though, she was pleasantly surprised. The plane was larger than she had expected and much nicer. David and I thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever seen. My father introduced us to the pilot, a young black man named Simon Barry. None of us had ever seen a black pilot. My mother privately wondered if Simon knew how to fly the plane. He seemed far too young to entrust her family with.
After the introductions, my father told us to get in the plane. We were taking a ride. My mother panicked, convinced that if we got in, it would be the end of us all. Eventually, though, my dad convinced her to give it a try. He lifted me into the pilot’s seat and then slid into the copilot’s seat next to me. He put my small hands on the steering wheel and then placed his hands on top of mine, the way he always did when he showed me things.
“This is the wheel,” he explained. “You use it to steer the plane.” Then he placed my hands on the throttle, once again covering them with his own. “This is the throttle. It powers the plane. You move it back and forth like this.” He proceeded to show me every button on the instrument panel, placing my hands on each one and then explaining the button’s function. I was so fascinated!
Then he put me in back where my mother and David were sitting, and Simon got on board and made sure we were all strapped in. By then my mother was starting to panic again. “Lord, have mercy,” she was praying. “Lord, have mercy.” I unbuckled my seat belt, stood up, and leaned over Simon’s shoulder. “Do you really know how to fly my dad’s plane?” I demanded. Everyone burst out laughing, including Simon. I guess we were all a little nervous. He buckled me back in, and we took off. It turned out that Simon really did know what he was doing. We christened the plane by circling Los Angeles for nearly an hour, taking in the shoreline and the buildings below. It was amazing. In 1960 how many black children had a father who owned his own plane and could take them flying over the city whenever he wanted to? How many blind men of any color had the vision to consider it, the talent to make it happen, and the technical knowledge to understand how it worked? There was no one like my dad. No one at all.
My father even learned to fly his planes himself. I loved flying, but it terrified me when my dad took over as pilot. He would sit in the copilot’s seat, put on the headphones, adjust the instruments, and talk to the tower like any other pilot. Pilots use the expression “flying blind” to describe flying in thick fog or under bad weather conditions where they can’t see where they’re going, so I guess what my father was doing was pretty much the same thing. He relied on the instruments on the control panel and Simon, along with the tower, to guide him. He could probably have landed the plane in an emergency, though, thank God, he never had to. Dad’s pilot explained to me that as long as you knew what the instruments said, you didn’t really need eyes. Maybe so, but flying with my father at the helm was an eye-opening experience.
IT WAS IMPORTANT to my father to teach me some of the things other fathers taught their sons. One of the things he wanted to teach me was how to ride a bike. My dad loved bikes. He had ridden an old beat-up bicycle all over Greenville as a boy, even after going blind. The Christmas before I turned six, he excitedly bought me my first bicycle.
I came downstairs that Christmas morning to find a candy-apple-red Schwinn with streamers and a horn under the Christmas tree. It was beautiful, exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to get me the perfect bike, my dad had bought one that was intended for an older child. I couldn’t get on it without help. And that wasn’t the only problem. My dad had put it together in the basement with Herbert Miller in the middle of the night, but my father’s mechanical expertise had failed him on this occasion. He prided himself on his ability to assemble almost anything, but for some reason, he had forgotten the fine details on my bike. The handlebars were crooked, the horn was upside down, and when I climbed onto the seat, it tilted straight up. I was puzzled.
“Mommy, what’s wrong with Santa’s elves?” I asked. “Were they drunk when they made this for me?”
My mother managed to smother a smile and said, “Son, just go on outside and let your daddy show you how to ride it.”
Dad asked what was wrong with the bike, and when I explained, he got out his toolbox and fixed the seat. Then we went outside. He walked my bike down the driveway to the sidewalk so I could climb on. My father didn’t seem to notice that the bike was far too big for me, and I was too excited to say anything. There were no training wheels, so my father balanced it while I got on. I struggled to climb on the seat, which was too high for me, and I could only reach the pedals when they were straight up.
Dad gave me a good push and told me to pedal. He trotted beside me, holding me up. I tried, but my legs weren’t long enough and my feet slipped off each time I pushed the pedals. I wobbled a few feet, then tumbled onto the grass verge running along the sidewalk.
“That’s okay, baby,” my dad reassured me. “Just get back on and try again.”
My father righted the bicycle and held it while I clambered back on. That Christmas he pushed me up and down the sidewalk for hours, trying to teach me how to ride. He would give me a push, then stand and listen so he could tell where I was. He was the only father playing outside with his child that morning. I fell off again and again, but I didn’t care. I savored every minute. I was proud to be with my dad.
After that day, bike riding became one of my favorite activities. I attached playing cards to the spokes with clothespins so I could make my bike sound like a motorcycle and it would be easier for my father to find me. I rode my bicycle everywhere, up and down the street, just like my dad had taught me.
LIKE MOST FATHERS, my dad also spoke to me about how to defend myself. “You have to decide: either you fight or you don’t,” he told me.
I needed his advice. My mother told me not to get into fights, but the truth was, I couldn’t avoid it. As Ray Charles’s sons, David and I were targets. Someone was always picking on us. Sometimes they tried to take things from us. It was my job to take care of my little brother. “Don’t let anyone jump on your brother,” my mother would tell me. I had to defend David all the time. I was always getting into fights, whether I wanted to or not. I tried to avoid it, for after every fight my mother would spank me, and the spanking was often worse than the fight itself. It was a no-win situation. Despite my best intentions, someone would pick on me or my brother again, and I’d be right back in the middle of another fight. I eventually had to stop avoiding the fights and put my father’s advice into practice. I had learned my father’s lessons well.
I became adept at protecting myself and my brothers from other children, but the dangers of the playground were the least of our worries. During the sixties, racists were still burning
crosses on the lawns of black families. Being black and rich could be fatal. Entire neighborhoods of wealthy, prominent African Americans were a new phenomenon in the sixties, so they attracted attention. Newspapers and magazines were publishing articles with titles like “The Richest Negro Neighborhoods in America.” My mother was hearing stories on the radio about wealthy people’s children being kidnapped. Sometimes the kidnappers would give the children back after getting a ransom, but other times the parents would never see them again. While I was still in elementary school, my father hired a driver whose responsibilities included taking us back and forth from school, but his real job was to protect us. It wasn’t until I became a father myself that I understood how hard the situation must have been for my dad. A father’s first instinct is to protect his family. He disliked being in public himself, for he was always hyperaware of his surroundings, alert to the possibility of a stranger approaching him unannounced, or being attacked. Hiring a driver as security was my father’s way of protecting us. It was the price of his fame.
During those years, my mother had a phobia that someone was going to take us. She never left us alone if she could help it, even with a babysitter. For safety she always carried a pearl-handled derringer in her purse. She was prepared to defend us and herself if she had to. Nobody got by my mother. If my father came home unexpectedly in the middle of the night, he sometimes got quite a greeting. Several times I woke up in the middle of the night to hear my mother shouting down at an intruder from the upstairs hall.
“Halt! Don’t move!” I could hear someone bumping and fumbling around downstairs. Gun drawn, my mother would shout, “Didn’t you hear me? Don’t move!”
This would usually be followed by the nervous jingling of a large key ring, and then my father’s voice would float up the stairs. “Bea, it’s me! It’s me!”
Lowering the gun, she’d reply, “How many times do I have to tell you to come in the front door? How am I supposed to know you’re not some intruder?”
She had good reason to be vigilant. Sometimes the danger did invade our home. My father had a female visitor who came to our home to give him what my mother called his “daily bread.” I saw her coming and going, but I had no idea why she was there. My mother wasn’t crazy about having the woman in her home, but it was less dangerous than having someone inject heroin outside our home. As long as the process was safe and none of us saw it, she tolerated it. On one occasion, though, the dosage she gave him was far too high, and my father had a violent reaction.
The next night, when this woman arrived at our home, my mother was waiting for her downstairs. We were already asleep upstairs. My mother says she told the woman she needed to speak with her for a minute. Calmly holding the derringer where the dealer could see it, she said, “I understand that my husband is paying you for a service. You are doing what he is asking you to do because that is your business. I understand that. But when you come into my home and almost kill my husband because of your carelessness, that is not acceptable. In the future, you will be more careful about what you do to my husband. Is that clear?”
The word went out that Mrs. Charles was not a woman to be crossed, and where her husband was concerned, anyone who harmed him did so at his or her own risk.
The painful truth, though, was that it was my father who brought the biggest danger into our home. As my mother has said, he was the one who ordered the heroin. He continued to deny that it was harming him, and until he faced the truth, there was nothing my mother or anyone else could do.
CHAPTER 6
Mr. Charles Blues
Will, I finally got a
break, baby,
Easy things are coming my
way.
—RAY CHARLES
THE EARLY YEARS ON HEPBURN AVENUE SHOULD HAVE been an age of innocence for me. My parents worked hard to make it that way. The parts of our lives that I saw could have been episodes of fifties family television programs. The world of our family and the world of the road were as clearly separated as the McCarthy hearings were from Father Knows Best. Eventually reality and fantasy would blend, and we would all suffer mightily for it. But when I was very young, the paparazzi were only a distant nightmare, and celebrity families could still live in relative peace. About the only trouble I ever had was the kind I made myself.
Like most little boys, I was fascinated with cars. I was always trying to get hold of my mother’s car keys. With no understanding of the consequences, I thought that starting a car would be the most fascinating thing ever. One day my mother put David and me in the car to run an errand and then realized she had left something in the house. She went back inside, and as soon as she left, I jumped into the driver’s seat and started playing with the gears. Somehow I managed to put the car into neutral. The emergency brake must not have been on, for to my surprise, the car started rolling back out of the driveway. As the car rolled, David stared at me, his eyes round and wide. Mine were even wider.
“Ooooh!” I said.
“Ooh-wee!” David replied.
The car kept rolling, straight into the middle of the street, and came to a stop. Luckily for us, there was no traffic. By then my mother had come out of the house and seen what was happening. It must have scared her to death, but at the time, all I could think was, “Boy, does she look mad!” She ran down the driveway, straight into the middle of the street, to retrieve us and her Cadillac. She drove her car back into the driveway and I received a good spanking right on the spot.
When it came to trouble, birth order usually ruled. As the oldest, I was given the biggest share of responsibility. I was expected to look after David and, later on, Robert. I had to be careful with David. He would follow me wherever I went and do everything I did. If I headed down the street, I would turn around and see him following me. If I was riding my bike, David would follow on his tricycle half a block behind me. If I went into the street, he went into the street. If I climbed the wall separating our house from the Andersons’, he would try to climb it, too. One time he scrambled up on the wall behind me and fell into the kennel next door where the Andersons’ boxers were kept. That time David was bitten, and I got into big trouble. But then having younger brothers also meant always having somebody else to blame. If I got into trouble, I would routinely say that David had done it, and when Bobby came along, David and I would say, “Bobby did it, Mommy.” Not that she usually believed us, of course. We would blame Bobby for things he couldn’t possibly have done, because he was far too little.
I was always going someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, seeking adventure. I wasn’t supposed to sit on the fence between our backyard and the Andersons’, but it was a great vantage point for throwing mud at my best friend. I periodically fell off the fence in the excitement of the moment, landing on Anthony’s side, where their dogs were roaming back and forth. The result was usually that I would be chased around the Andersons’ yard by their angry boxers.
I even went underneath the street in front of our house to play. My mother would have had a heart attack if she’d known. One time some workers left the manhole in front of our house uncovered, and some of the other boys and me climbed down to see what was under the street. I was uncomfortable going down there, but I didn’t want to be a chicken, so I climbed down after them. It turned out to be a great place to play army. After that first time, we moved the manhole ourselves. It took three of us to drag the heavy cover far enough for us to squeeze down inside, but we were so little that we didn’t have to drag it far. Jack, Alvin, and I would play army until we got tired, then sit and watch through the grate as cars drove over our heads. Our adventure was sneaky and dangerous. I was terrified that my mother would catch us and give me a whipping.
I really got in trouble for getting into my father’s things. I was always poking around in the garage. My father kept a lot of equipment in there, including a trailer that he pulled behind the station wagon when he was on the road. One day I was fooling around in the trailer and closed the door
s so I wouldn’t be seen if somebody came in the garage. The doors got stuck, and I ended up locked inside. Three hours went by. My parents didn’t know where I was, and when they couldn’t find me, they panicked. They were about to call the police when they finally found me.
I was always getting in trouble for going into my father’s office. I was forbidden to go in there unless he invited me, but the room drew me like a magnet, especially when my father had been gone for a while. It was where he kept his arrangements, expensive recording equipment, valuable memorabilia, awards, and—as I eventually realized—his drug kit. His office was the last place my mother wanted me and my brothers to go, but we did.
Usually my mother was the disciplinarian. On one occasion, though, I went so far—literally and figuratively—that my father spanked me.
When I was seven years old, I decided I wanted to have another adventure. The horn on my Schwinn had rusted through, and I wanted to buy a new one. I also wanted to buy more streamers for the handlebars. I saved my allowance until I had the three dollars I needed. To buy the things I wanted for my bicycle, I would need to go to Pep Boys at Forty-third and Crenshaw, almost ten blocks from our house. It was a long trip that involved crossing several major streets, so I planned it carefully. I would stick to side streets as much as possible to avoid traffic.
You Don't Know Me Page 8