One morning, with my money in my pocket, I told my parents, “I’m going out to ride my bike for a while.”
Then I went outside and set off like I always did, as if I were just going to the end of the street. This time, though, I kept going. On the major streets, I rode on the sidewalk. At each corner I got off my bike, walked it across the street, then got back on and rode to the next corner. I was very careful but in a hurry. I made it safely to Pep Boys, went inside, bought my horn and streamers, and then made the return trip home. I laid my bike on the porch and knocked on the door for my mother to let me in like I always did.
While I was gone, my mother had begun to wonder where I was. She was keeping an eye out the window, and she didn’t see me going up and down the block as I usually did. When I didn’t come back after a few minutes, she sent my brother David out to see where I was. I hadn’t realized it, but when I set off, my little brother Bobby had decided to follow me. He was just a toddler at the time, but he had gotten on his tricycle and followed me down the block. What made her realize that I had left the block was that Bobby was sitting on his tricycle at the end of the block pointing, wondering where I’d gone. When she saw that, she became hysterical, convinced that someone had kidnapped me. My father, who was home that day, was also frightened. He sent Duke Wade, his valet, out in the car to look for me. Then he and my mother walked up and down the streets for blocks, looking for me. The neighbors helped them search. Forty-five minutes went by, and there was no trace of me. They were just calling the police when I knocked on the front door.
I had no idea what was going on, of course, so I was surprised to see that my mother was crying when she opened the front door. She pulled me inside, clutched me tightly, and swatted me on the behind.
“Where have you been?” she asked me.
“I was just riding my bike,” I told her.
She shouted upstairs, “Ray, he’s here! He’s all right.” I heard my father’s voice rumble in response. Turning back to me, she said, “Where did you go?” While I tried to think of something to say, she noticed the Pep Boys bag in my hand.
Uh-oh. I decided to play dumb. “What did I do? I just went to Pep Boys,” I told her.
She was having none of that. She replied, “You know what you did.”
Then she went upstairs to talk to my father. I could hear raised voices. By the time she came back down, I knew I was in real trouble. “Your father wants to see you upstairs,” she told me.
Oh, boy. Reluctantly I dragged myself upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, where my father sat on the side of the bed waiting for me, fiddling with his keys. He looked very upset. As soon as he heard me come in the room, he said, “Son, you scared us all—you scared your mother nearly to death. Now, young man, why did you scare your mother like that?”
I stared at my feet. I didn’t know what to say. My dad kept turning his key ring over and over. “Your mama wants me to spank you because she’s too angry to do it.” My father had never spanked me before.
“But I didn’t mean to do anything, Daddy.”
“I know, son, and I don’t want to, but I have to spank you. You are never to leave this house without tellin’ your mother where you’re going, and you never cross a major street by yourself again. You could have been killed.” Then he said the dreaded words: “Son, this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.”
Grown-ups always said that when they were about to do something awful to you. The reality of what was about to happen began to sink in. “Oh, yeah? How’s it going to hurt you?” I replied. It was the wrong thing to say.
“Man, I have to do it,” he told me, taking off his belt and folding it in his hand. Then he grabbed me by the collar and wedged my head between his legs so I couldn’t get away. He felt for my behind to orient himself, then pulled his arm back and BAM! Then he did it again—BAM! He spanked me hard, and he didn’t stop for what must have been ten minutes. Every now and then I would wiggle out of his grip, and he would have to grab me and grope around to find my backside again.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. My mother spanked me all the time, but my father had never laid a hand on me. I cried, begging him to stop: “Please, Daddy! Please, Daddy!”
He kept on striking my backside until he was tired. Finally he told me, “I’m goin’ to take a break. Then I’ll be right back, and I’m goin’ to spank you again.” By then he had warmed to his task. He was angry, and so was I.
The minute he let go of me, I crawled as far as I could under my parents’ bed. I was furious. I already had blisters on my behind, and now he was telling me he was going to come back and do it again.
My father got down and felt under the bed, but it was a king-size bed, and I had scooted back where he couldn’t reach me. “You come out from under there!” he shouted at me.
“I’m not coming out! I’m never coming out!”
I don’t know how long I hid under that bed while my father shouted at me. Exhausted and frustrated, he eventually gave up and left the room. Silence fell. I stayed under the bed a good three hours. It was dark and stuffy and hard to breathe. Finally I heard my mother’s footsteps approaching.
“Son, come out now,” she said to me. “Come on out from under there. It’s time for dinner. You’re on punishment. I was going to let you go. I was going to have your father spank you and write it off, but you’re on punishment now.” Reluctantly I crawled out from under the bed.
For the next week, I had to stay in my room. No TV. Couldn’t go outside. Couldn’t talk to my friends. I was busted. It was one of the most miserable weeks of my life as a child. It was also the only time my father ever spanked me.
I got into plenty of trouble of my own, but nothing I did came close to my brother David’s exploits. He nearly burned down the house.
David loved playing with matches. Sometimes when I opened our bedroom closet to get something out, I would find matchbooks with burned matches. David would swipe the matchbooks from my parents and sit in the closet watching them burn. He was always playing around with matches when my mother wasn’t looking. I kept telling him he was going to get in trouble.
One evening my mother and I were sitting in the den when we smelled smoke coming down the stairs. We ran upstairs to find my bedroom closet on fire and black smoke billowing through the room. David stood watching the fire with his mouth open, going “Ooooh!” My mother grabbed David and hauled him out of the room while I ran next door for help. I pounded frantically on the Andersons’ front door, shouting, “Help! Help! Fire!” Our bedroom window faced the Andersons’ house, so they had already seen the fire and called the fire department. I could hear the sirens of the approaching fire trucks. My mother was frantic by the time I got back. She had David, but she didn’t know where I was because I had taken off running to the Andersons’ without telling her.
By the time the firefighters put out the flames, the fire had burned through our closet into the next room. The ceiling and walls of our room were black. From what the firefighters could tell, David had been burning paper in our closet, and the clothes had caught on fire. That night was taken up with getting the fire out, talking with the firefighters, and preparing someplace for me and David to sleep. Most of our clothes, along with our bedding, had been lost. My mother put us in the bed in the guest room, where we slept together for months afterward while our bedroom was being repaired and painted. The second level of our house smelled like fire and mildewed carpet for six months.
The next morning was a day of reckoning for my brother. I’m not sure he was sorry about setting the fire, but he was very sorry about the punishment he knew was coming. Our mother gave him the worst whipping he ever received. It wasn’t so much a punishment for the fire he’d set as her attempt to make him understand the seriousness of what he had done. He could have maimed or killed all of us. She made it clear to David that he could never, ever play with matches again. I think she put the fear of God in him, because it cured him of playing
with matches. I don’t know if he was afraid of playing with matches or just afraid of what my mother would do to him if he did.
WHEN IT CAME TO MISCHIEF, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. My father was incurably mischievous, and he loved anything that made a cool sound and went fast. He loved cars so much that he wasn’t going to let a little thing like blindness stop him from driving. My mother used to tell us how Jeff Brown would take Dad driving on the turnpike in Texas at night when there were no other cars on the road. My father would take the wheel, flooring the car and laughing as they roared down the road with Jeff directing him. They loved it. They thought it was the best thing ever.
When my father got the itch to drive our car, we would usually go to the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of us would pile into the station wagon, and my mother would drive us to the Coliseum parking lot. Unless there was an event that day, the big parking lot would be empty. Dad would sit in the driver’s seat, and Mom would sit in the back to guide him. She didn’t have to do much, since the lot was huge and there was nothing for him to hit unless he got too near the perimeter. We didn’t mind driving with my dad in the parking lot with no one around. David and I would tumble around in the back, laughing and shouting, “Daddy’s driving! Daddy’s driving! Oh, noooo!” as he cruised and swooped in big circles.
It was one thing to drive in an empty parking lot, but it was another thing entirely to drive on a city street. One night as we were coming home, my father decided he wanted to drive the rest of the way. We were coming down Hepburn with my mother at the wheel and my father in the shotgun seat when Dad announced, “I want to drive.”
There was no traffic on the street right then, so my mother stopped the car and got out while Dad slid into the driver’s seat. David and I looked at each other, petrified. My mom got into the backseat directly behind my father, looked around to make sure no cars were approaching, and told him he could go. She put her hands on his shoulders as he eased onto the accelerator. As we rolled down the street, she used his shoulders to guide him if he drifted out of the lane and told him when there was a stop sign. After what felt like an eternity, he came to a stop in front of our house. My mother got back behind the steering wheel and pulled the car into the driveway. Both of my parents were perfectly calm. It was obvious they had done this many times before.
When I was about seven years old, my father purchased a sports car. Dad and Duke were on the way home from a Dodgers game one afternoon when Duke noticed a beautiful Corvette. When he mentioned it to my father, my father wanted to see it, too. My dad got out and ran his hands over the car, feeling the sleek lines. He liked it so much that he went out and bought one the next day. He claimed the car was for my mother, though he had already bought her a lavender-and-white Cadillac. The problem was that my mother could not drive the Corvette with its manual shift. I still laugh when I remember the first and last time she tried. She took me with her to the grocery store in the Corvette, and we jerked the whole way there because she couldn’t get the car out of first gear. I thought it was hilarious. After jerking her way back home, she vowed she would never drive it again. After that, the car belonged to my dad. Duke would drive him around in it.
Inevitably, Dad couldn’t resist trying to drive the Corvette himself. One evening he and Duke were coming home when Dad decided he wanted to drive. I’m not sure if they were both absent of their senses, but Duke agreed. Duke was directing him, but Dad wasn’t really listening when they came to the intersection. Dad hadn’t had much practice with a stick shift, either, and he released the clutch. Two hundred feet from our house, he shot out into the middle of the intersection and hit another car.
My mother and brothers and I were eating dinner in the kitchen when it happened, and we heard the crash. We had no idea it was Dad’s car. A few minutes later, when we heard emergency sirens, we all trooped out on the front lawn to see what was going on. About fifty yards away, we could see my father’s Corvette, totaled, in the intersection of 39th and Hepburn. Corvettes were pure fiberglass, and they shattered like a tortilla chip if you hit them at a certain angle. All of us took off running down the street, with Bobby in my mother’s arms. We were scared to death. When we got a little closer, I could see my father leaning on a police car, talking to the officer. He was bruised and a little dizzy, but otherwise fine. The people in the other car also looked pretty shook up, but no one was seriously injured. Duke was talking earnestly to another officer. By the time we got there, the officer was putting handcuffs on Duke. They were arresting him for reckless driving.
I could hear Duke pleading with the policemen. “But it wasn’t me. Mr. Charles was driving. Mr. Charles.”
The officers exchanged a look. Yeah, right, it was the blind guy. They thought Duke was either drunk or lying. The people in the other car never saw who was behind the wheel, so they were unable to identify the driver. My father stood quietly by with his head down, listening while Duke pleaded. The police did not believe he could drive. He waited until the officers started to put Duke in the squad car before confessing the truth. My dad finally admitted that he was the driver.
I’m still not sure whether or not they believed him, but after a while, the police took the cuffs off Duke. No one had been hurt, and they thought the whole situation was peculiar. They were probably imagining the headlines: “Ray Charles Arrested for Reckless Driving.” It would make them look pretty silly. There was some more conversation, and I think my father arranged to pay any medical expenses and buy a new car for the people he’d hit. Whatever the exact nature of the arrangement was, I do know that the police let everyone go. I can only imagine what my mother had to say to my father when she got him in private, but whatever she said, it was better than going to jail.
My father’s favorite thing to drive, though, was the Vespa given to him by Hugh Hefner. The Vespa was his prized possession. It arrived in a giant crate. Dad and Herbert Miller assembled it in the backyard while we kids watched.
Dad liked nothing better than cruising down Hepburn on his Vespa with the wind in his face. He would get on it and ask us to tell him when it was clear. Then he’d pull out into the middle of the street while we kept watch. Sometimes he would just go in circles. Other times I would run alongside him down our block, and he would follow the sound of my footsteps. If David and I didn’t pay attention and went back up on the curb, Dad would hit the curb and fall down. That never lasted for too long, because Mom didn’t like me being in the street.
Other times Herbert would get on the back and guide him while Dad drove around the neighborhood. We would beg my dad to get on the back and ride with him, too, but he always said no to that because it wasn’t safe for us. Some people in the neighborhood were convinced that my father could see because they saw him riding up and down the street on his Vespa. Everyone in the neighborhood remembers that Vespa. Mrs. Anderson simply smiles when she speaks of it.
I ALWAYS KNEW my father wasn’t like other fathers. It wasn’t just that he was blind. My father was internationally famous. He seemed to be larger than life.
The move to Hepburn had been followed by a career-changing deal. My father left Atlantic Records and signed a deal with ABC-Paramount. In addition to receiving an unheard-of percentage of royalties, my father was able to keep 75 percent of the profit his records earned whenever he produced his own songs. Most amazing, he demanded and got ownership of his own masters—the original recordings of his songs. Record labels rarely gave up control of their master recordings of an artist. The revenue from a successful song is endless, as those from my father’s master recordings proved to be for over twenty-five years. My father demanded—and got—a contract that was the envy of the music industry.
In the small office upstairs in our house, musical history was made. I was too young to understand the significance of the procession of great musicians who graced our home. The men who gathered upstairs to compose, arrange, and play that remarkable music with my father were great musicians. During my most format
ive years, my life was enriched by their presence. There were so many of them—Marcus Belgrave, Leroy Cooper, James Clay, Henderson Chambers, Edgar Willis, Clifford Solomon, Gerald Wilson, Billy Brooks, Quincy Jones, and Sid Feller—each with a unique musical gift.
Among all of them, David “Fathead” Newman and Hank Crawford are the two who stand out the most in my memories from those years. The memories are as vivid in my mind today as they were fifty years ago when I played on the other side of the door in our home on Hepburn Avenue. My father used to describe Hank and Fathead as the heart of his sound. The bond my father’s early band shared was strong. These men respected and trusted one another musically. Fathead was Dad’s star tenor, and my father made sure Fathead’s distinctive sax was featured on Fathead: Ray Charles Presents “Fathead” in 1959. I was only four years old at the time. Hank composed and arranged my father’s music as well as directing his band. I remember the soft sound of Hank’s alto sax drifting into the upstairs hallway and whispering through the house. When I was five, Hank would put his saxophone around my neck and say, “Little Ray, maybe.” It made me burst into a big smile.
And I vividly remember Sid Feller. Sid was not only an arranger for ABC-Paramount but a close friend of my father’s as well. Sid had a gift for knowing what my father wanted and needed to hear. Even though my father had come into his own as a composer and vocalist while at Atlantic Records, his collaboration with Sid and ABC-Paramount would change the course of his career creatively and financially. The music created by Ray Charles and Sid Feller during those years was woven into the fiber of American music, and it secured their place in musical history. Though Sid initially opposed my father’s idea of fusing his signature voice with the string-laden sound coming out of Nashville, their collaboration was one of the most fruitful of my father’s career. Together they created a remarkable musical synergy. During these intensely creative periods, my father would be holed up in his office with Sid for days at a time. The musicians would come and go, and my mother would climb up and down the stairs several times a day to keep them supplied with food.
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