You Don't Know Me

by Ray Charles Robinson, JR.

  Jeff and Herbert started calling around, trying to find out what had happened. It turned out that when they reached the hotel, my father had remembered that his stash was still on the plane, and called a cab to take him back to the airport. He didn’t want to ask Herbert to take him because Herbert didn’t use drugs, and my father always tried not to involve him. The cab took my father out to the tarmac, and he got out alone to retrieve his stash. It wouldn’t be difficult; he knew every inch of his plane. He didn’t need help finding his stash. He let the back stairway down and went on board to retrieve the drugs. The only light on the field was the headlights going up to the plane. When the airport police saw a figure getting off the plane at two in the morning, they thought someone was breaking into the plane, so they went to investigate. As soon as they saw that it was my father, they immediately became suspicious. Customs had already been put on alert because of my father’s previous arrests. The officers asked my father what he was carrying. There was nothing he could do but admit it was heroin. He had been caught dead to rights. It was Halloween night. While I was falling into a candy-laden sleep after trick-or-treating with my friends, the FBI was arresting my father on federal drug charges.

  Though he had been arrested several times by then, this arrest was different from all the others. What made it so serious was that my father had brought the drugs across the Canadian border in his private plane, and by returning to remove the drugs from the plane himself, he had shown that the drugs were brought from Canada with his full knowledge. Bringing drugs across the Canadian border made it a federal offense. If convicted, my father would go to federal prison, probably for decades, and given the evidence a conviction was almost certain.

  When my mother received the call at home from Jeff, she didn’t immediately realize how serious the situation was. After all, my father had been arrested before. But by the time my father got home a few days later, it was clear that he was in terrible trouble. This case wasn’t going away. This time my father’s arrest was international news. The New York Times ran a lead article on it. Three weeks later the results of the lab tests on the heroin came back, the federal agents testified, and the case was sent to a grand jury. In February 1965 the grand jury indicted my father on four counts of heroin possession and trafficking drugs across the border. In March he flew back to Boston to face the judge and plead not guilty while his lawyers went into a rush of negotiations. When he returned home, he confessed to my mother that he was afraid. There was a good chance he would go to prison for twenty years.

  My father canceled his tour starting that spring. Instead he tried to bury himself in his music. Although he had canceled his road schedule, we didn’t see him more than usual. We moved to our new house on Southridge Avenue in April, but there was little joy in it for either of my parents. Once again our family was living in suspended animation, waiting for the courts to decide my father’s fate. The lawyers argued, and my mother worried, and as the weeks went by, my father began to do some soul-searching. For nearly twenty years he had looked to heroin for escape and pleasure, just as he had in his women. Many years later, my father spoke to me and explained to me how he loved the way heroin made him feel. He never believed heroin was hurting him, since he had been able to build a successful career despite his using. He had always considered his heroin use a personal matter.

  Now, though, everything had changed. He knew that if he continued using, he would lose his music, his family, and most likely his life, for he didn’t think he would survive in prison. My mother said that for the first time, he faced up to what his addiction was doing to his children. He told my mother that he was going to stop using heroin for me. My dad made a strong and courageous decision to get clean.

  That July he flew to Boston to talk with his lawyers, who told prosecutors that Mr. Charles was going to kick heroin to demonstrate how seriously he was taking these charges. The prosecutors were skeptical. After all, how many addicts ever really quit? By the time my father got back to Los Angeles, preparations were already complete. He came home just long enough to pack a few clothes and tell my mother that he was checking in to St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood that night. He decided to quit heroin cold turkey. If he could survive withdrawal, it would be over with and he could get well. His intentions were to get clean as quickly as possible and stay clean.

  My mother insisted that he be the one to tell us he was leaving. She wasn’t going to do it for him. Dad waited just long enough for us to get home from school. As soon as I got home he asked me to come into his bedroom while he was getting ready to leave. He sat on the side of the bed, packing his socks and underwear in a leather bag while talking to me. He told me he had to go away for a while. When I asked him why, he said, “Daddy has to go get well, baby.” I didn’t understand what was wrong. I only knew he had to go to the hospital to get better.

  An hour later he was gone. On July 26, 1965, he checked himself in to St. Francis. It would be months before he came back to live in our beautiful new home. Meanwhile, I worried. When my mother had gone to the hospital three years earlier, she had nearly died. My next thought was, what if my father never came home? The fate of our family was still in limbo.

  If I had seen my father those first two weeks in St. Francis, I would have been even more afraid. His physician, Dr. Frederick Hacker, suggested my father take methadone to make the withdrawal easier. My dad refused. Years later he wrote, “I wasn’t weaned. I didn’t take pills. I refused to fool with their sedatives and their tranquilizers.” He detoxed from heroin without methadone or any other drugs to alleviate the vomiting, diarrhea, tremors, hallucinations, and other effects of the poison coming out of his system. As the Scriptures say, once he put his hand to the plow, he never looked back. He was determined to see it through and come home to us a clean and healthy man. I still can’t fathom the strength it took for him to do that.

  My parents had agreed that they would keep life as normal as possible for me and my brothers while my father was in the hospital. Before they knew he would be going into St. Francis, my mother had made reservations for us to go to the World’s Fair in New York for two weeks, starting the last week of July. My mother’s education was limited but she always made sure that we had every opportunity to receive the best education. She even made us read the encyclopedia at home to ensure we were well-rounded. The World’s Fair was an ideal opportunity for us to learn about the world. At first she thought about canceling, but the reservations were already in place, and my father wouldn’t be allowed visitors for a while anyway. They agreed that she should go ahead with her plans. So my mother and brothers and I boarded the plane and left for New York. My mother’s heart must have been heavy, but as always, she turned her attention to taking care of us.

  Going to the fair turned out to be a wonderful experience. Nothing could completely take away the knot in my stomach, but the fair was an amazing place, and once we got there, the excitement shoved the anxiety into the back of my mind for a while. We spent days touring the exhibits. The theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” symbolized by a twelve-story steel globe surrounded by flags of all nations. The fair was dedicated to man’s achievements on the shrinking globe and in the expanding universe, and the exhibits offered a view of the future guaranteed to capture the imagination of a ten-year-old boy. Some of the exhibits were amazing. The Vatican sponsored a pavilion and, incredibly, put Michelangelo’s Pietà on display. There were also numerous space exhibits that opened up a world far beyond our globe. Like all children in the sixties, I was fascinated by the exploration of space. Men were already orbiting the Earth, and the Apollo missions were right around the corner. I stared enraptured at the Space Age exhibits, watched the new IBM inventions called computers work their magic, and glided through the future in Futurama. Ford introduced the first Mustang at that fair.

  My favorite exhibits were those by my hero, the great visionary Walt Disney. Disney had recently perfected audio-animatronics, putting computers to work to animate
humanlike creatures. I watched Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address in Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, an eerily real simulation, and I saw child-size dolls dance in what would later become the Disneyland ride It’s a Small World. The Carousel of Progress showed us how far the world had come technologically, its theme song promising “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow,” composed by the Sherman Brothers, who wrote so many of the Disney musicals. We went to the memorial for John Kennedy, who had been assassinated less than two years before. The memorial saddened me. I wasn’t ready to remember that dark moment in our history yet. The fair showed me my heritage and the future. I was moved and excited by what I saw.

  Even at the time, though, I understood that the fair was a paradox. Walt Disney showed us a utopian society there where all people lived in harmony. The fair also served as an example of President Johnson’s vision of the Great Society. Yet outside the confines of the fair, our nation was going through the greatest civil unrest it had ever experienced. Civil rights protesters were marching on Washington and being knocked down with fire hoses in the streets of the South. The Vietnam War had escalated, with thousands of military casualties and protesters being thrown in jail. The fair was a financial failure, in part perhaps because of the stress of the times. But while we were there, it was a magical place in which to forget about all the pain in our own lives.

  Two weeks later we flew home, and before we even landed, reality hit again with a thud. We had heard on television that there was some rioting in Los Angeles, but we had no idea how serious it was until we returned there. As our plane circled to land at the airport, we looked out the window and saw fires burning below, miniature spots of flame in the darkness. As soon as Vernon Troupe, my father’s valet, picked us up, my mother turned on the car radio. The first words we heard were “Burn, Baby! Burn!” echoing the Magnificent Montague, a popular KGFJ disc jockey. He used the phrase when he became excited by a good piece of music, but rioters had hijacked the phrase and made it into the war cry of the arsonist. We stared out the car windows in disbelief as we wound through the dark streets toward home. Our city was burning.

  Until that week I don’t think racial conflict seemed real to me. I had always heard the stories about what was happening in other states, other neighborhoods, and my parents talked to my brothers and me about our heritage and what it meant to be black in America. My perception of the world was that it was a white world and we were just visitors with a pass. Being black in America in the sixties was a struggle. We were surrounded by forces that sought to control and marginalize us. We were looked upon as second-class citizens in our own country. My dad worked hard to survive, to rise out of the humiliation of the South, and to build a future for himself and his family.

  Despite the consciousness in our country, most black families I knew were thriving. My father was more successful than most men dreamed of being. Our neighborhood, first on Hepburn and now on Southridge, was populated by highly successful, well-educated African Americans who were thriving in the midst of civil unrest. And not just as musicians or celebrities. Our neighbors, my mentors, were doctors, lawyers, judges, teachers, and entrepreneurs. Major General Titus Hall, who became one of the first black generals in the United States Air Force, lived in Baldwin Hills. Our friend Mr. Ramirez was an aerospace engineer. Mr. Kaiser was an entrepreneur and Mr. Maurice Hill was a sales executive. These were successful men, formidable African American role models. They were pioneers, African Americans who were given the opportunity to excel in corporate America.

  I knew about the civil rights movement, and I was aware that my parents knew Martin Luther King Jr. personally. Like other African Americans, I grieved for those who suffered for our race and celebrated each triumph of the civil rights movement. During our last summer on Hepburn, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, a landmark moment for African Americans. One year later, shortly after we moved into our home on Southridge, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which finally made the rights promised in the Fifteenth Amendment a reality by eliminating discriminatory practices that prevented African Americans from voting. Our family’s move from Hepburn to Southridge paralleled a much larger social revolution for African Americans throughout the nation. We were part of a growing number of black families who were “moving on up.”

  Yes, I knew about racism, but I had never really experienced it personally. For as long as I could remember, I had lived in neighborhoods that, while predominantly African American, included families of all races. Most of the kids I went to school with were white, as was my beloved teacher Mrs. Reynolds, who loved and mothered us all like her own. When my father built our home on Southridge, it was a group of our African American neighbors who had filed a petition to stop construction, claiming the house was too large and would block their views. It was the white family across the street who refused to sign the petition and was the first to welcome us to the neighborhood. There were white families scattered throughout View Park. Most of them still live there. In many respects, I was living in a bubble. Ironically, it was my own people who brought the power of racial anger home to me.

  For my children, the Watts riots are something they read about in our history, but for me, the riots were painfully real. When our plane from New York landed that night, Los Angeles was already burning. The riots were the worst in Los Angeles history to date. They had begun on August 11 with a white policeman stopping a black motorist for drunk driving. A crowd quickly gathered to watch the arrest of the motorist, who failed the sobriety test. The arrest was the catalyst, but the violence that followed had little to do with the original traffic violation. Mob mentality set in, and by morning a full-scale riot was in progress. Watts community leaders urged calm, doing everything in their power to put an end to the violence, but by then the rioting had a life of its own. Thousands of people had taken to the streets, setting buildings on fire, looting the business district, assaulting police and white motorists trapped in the danger zone. Rioters threw Molotov cocktails into local businesses, and when the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to the fires, rioters attacked the firefighters. As Vernon drove us up the hill from the airport that night, we could see the fires burning in the city below. When the sun came up the next morning, we stood on the upper terrace and all we could see—from South Central, to the Coliseum, to downtown LA, up into Hollywood Hills and east toward the San Bernardino Mountains—was thick black smoke. It would be there for days. At night we could see the blaze from our den. I couldn’t believe it was happening.

  The pictures on television were terrifying, but the news circulating through our neighborhood was even more frightening. Word had reached us that rioters were planning to set fire to View Park and Baldwin Hills, two of the wealthiest black communities in the nation. “We’re going to the hills where all the judges, the black judges and doctors and businessmen are. We’re gonna’ go burn ’em out.” I was petrified and confused. We were home alone with my mother. What would we do if they tried to burn our house? What if my dad came home and they threw Molotov cocktails through our windows? My father was blind. How would we protect him? The governor had to call in the National Guard to protect us—a black neighborhood, not a white community—against our own race.

  My father was furious about what happened and quite disappointed. Later on, he talked to me about the Watts riots. “Son, it made no sense. I know what racism is. I’m from the South. I had to stand in the middle of a country road after being abandoned by a white police officer. I know how it feels to be disrespected. I’ve been banned from Georgia—from my own state, where I was born. Martin Luther King has faced tremendous trials. The people around him have been beat down with clubs and sprayed with fire hoses, and they walked for miles just to be able to drink water from somewhere. Now they want to come burn us down for our hard work. I’ll be damned. My people. I don’t understand it. This is our own people, and everything that we’ve gained, we just took fifty steps backward. How can anyone
honor something like this?” He just sat there with his head down.

  We all understood the source of the community’s anger, but none of us understood why the rioters wanted to come after us. And what did they think they were gaining by burning down their own people’s neighborhoods? It made no sense to me. They started rioting because of the action of someone white and now they want to burn their own people down. I believe the rioters just got angry and took it out on everybody around them. It wasn’t about black and white anymore; maybe it was about the haves and the have-nots.

  As historians have commented, the Watts riots turned a spotlight on the racial tension between black and white Americans in Los Angeles, but they also revealed a huge division within the African American community. Black community leaders from inside and outside of Watts were appalled by the violence, but the words of local preachers and teachers were widely ignored. Nothing made the problem clearer than the visit of Martin Luther King. He flew to Los Angeles to meet with residents in the riot zone, hoping his message of nonviolent protest would have a calming effect, but if anything, his visit backfired. During the first meeting he had scheduled in Watts, he was surrounded by nearly three hundred people who angrily insisted that they were not sorry for taking part in the violence. Someone shouted, “Burn, baby, burn!” and a crowd gathered around Dr. King, chanting and jeering. He eventually got the crowd under control, but he was so disturbed by what he experienced that he canceled the other visits he had planned in the area. It wasn’t safe for him to be there. He left the area that day, citing security reasons. I felt like Martin Luther King had gone through all the pain and struggle in the South for nothing. The Watts riots did not represent the consciousness of Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.