You Don't Know Me

by Ray Charles Robinson, JR.

  Sometimes David and I were allowed to leave our street to go to the playground at Windsor Hills Elementary School, just a couple of blocks from our house. We didn’t go very often during the school year, but in the summer we would meet our friends every day and play softball, football, or dodgeball on the blacktop. When we got tired, we would play caroms on the little wooden boards they had there. Caroms was a kid’s version of pool or golf. If we grew tired of the playground, we could walk to the church down the block and play in the sandlot.

  The best thing about playing outside in the summer was the ice-cream man. When we heard the music of his truck coming up the street, we’d race to meet it. The ice-cream man was always nice to us, even giving us credit if we didn’t have money with us. We would pay him back the next day. In the fall and winter, the Helms Bakery truck came by. I would buy these wonderful golden doughnuts with chocolate icing. The Helms man was good to us, too, always extending credit if we didn’t have all of the money. He always greeted us with a smile. Nothing ever tastes as good as the treats we bought as kids from the magical trucks rolling through our neighborhood.

  At first we rode our bikes around the neighborhood, but as we got older, we would take our minibikes and dirt bikes into the oil fields, riding up and down the dirt trails between La Brea and La Cienega. These days there’s a park there, named in honor of Los Angeles supervisor Kenneth Hahn, but in those days there was nothing but dirt and scrubs. We had to have spark arresters on our minibikes to ride in the area or we’d get a ticket. We were not supposed to ride in there at all because it was private property, but we couldn’t get permits to ride our minibikes on the street, so we took our chances. There was a hill in the fields called Devil’s Hill, and we used to try to go up it with dirt bikes. I had a few accidents over the years and on one occasion I was injured.

  I continued to get into trouble on Southridge the same way I had on Hepburn, usually because I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to. One evening I was out in the oil fields with my friend Chris Harris. I was riding my minibike, and Chris was riding his motorcycle. The time crept up on us, and we were racing back, trying to get home before dark. We would both be in big trouble with our mothers if we were out late. I was in the lead with a light on my minibike to guide the way. It was dark by then, and I was saying to myself, “I’m in trouble. We both are in trouble.” We came up onto Southridge, and when I started to turn left, Chris hit me broadside. My bike went one way, and I went the other. I slid on the pavement, taking skin off my knee to the bone and breaking my wrist in several places, and landed in oncoming traffic. It’s a miracle we were not killed. Chris went headfirst over the handlebars into the pavement, slicing his chin open and knocking out his front teeth. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, he would have had serious injuries. He was bleeding badly, lying there in the middle of the street. When the ambulance arrived, his brothers, Tolly and Billy, and his father, Dr. Harris, rode with Chris to the emergency room.

  He had to have all of his front teeth replaced. Eventually the accident became his favorite story. He would take his false teeth out and say, “Listen, this is how connected Ray and me are. We have been friends since Hepburn, our memories shall bind us forever.”

  My mother took me to the emergency room, where Dr. Foster met us and they x-rayed me and told me I had a compound fracture of my left wrist. He put a cast on my arm and when my mother was certain I was all right, she told me, “I’m goin’ to whip your butt.” Never again would someone have to tell me to be inside before dark!

  The best thing about Southridge, though, wasn’t our house or even our friends. The best thing about Southridge was my father. On Southridge our family found a new home, a new life, and most important, a new bond with my father. The father who came home to us from St. Francis wasn’t the man who had come home to us on Hepburn.

  After rehab my father found his smile again. It seemed as though his soul had been lightened, relieved. His body was relaxed, the constant twitching and jittering a thing of the past. Until then I had never seen my father in repose, without the continual erratic movement my brothers and I thought of as “just Daddy’s way.” It was a beautiful sight to see him sitting quietly, relaxed, not moving. With the heroin out of his system, his movements became more natural. He still rocked back and forth like many blind people do, and the occasional twitch remained, but the sweating and spasms were gone. He became more animated, smiled more often. His face would light up, and he seemed more responsive. He even quit smoking for a while. I was used to always seeing him with a cigarette in one hand, but now both his hands were free, and he rested them on his waist when he stood. Now that he was no longer using, he rubbed his arms with a special salve to help his veins heal and over time his arms cleared up. He could roll up his sleeves and go to work again.

  It took awhile for my father to get adjusted to our house on Southridge after he came home from the hospital. He had lived there only a few weeks before he went into rehab. The house was extremely difficult for a blind man to navigate because there were so many rooms, so many levels. He had to memorize every room in the house and every piece of furniture in the rooms. I watched him adjust to his new surroundings with the same amazement I had always felt when I watched him move around. Within weeks of returning from rehab, he had familiarized himself with our new house and moved about more freely than he had on Hepburn. On Hepburn he was either in the kitchen or upstairs in his office most of the time. On Southridge he was in every room. He played the piano in the living room and read braille magazines in the den. He moved from level to level at the same pace as a person with sight. Before long he could run up and down the stairs, touching the wall or railing as a guide every now and then to keep himself oriented. Our new neighbors were astonished by the way he navigated our home, and some of my new friends, like my old friends on Hepburn, were convinced that he could see.

  I only saw him make a mistake once. Shortly after we moved in, he accidentally stepped in the small garden in the foyer. He made a point to identify its exact position after that, and he never made that mistake again. He would let himself in the front door and walk confidently through the foyer, missing the garden by an inch. It was clear that he knew exactly where it was.

  Within no time he had learned the outdoor layout as well and was racing his beloved Vespa around the tennis court at full speed. A few months later, he knew the neighborhood well enough to take the Vespa out on the street. Our neighbor Mrs. Rogers still remembers coming up the hill on Southridge and seeing my father pass by on his Vespa. She nearly had a heart attack the first time it happened. Before long the kids weren’t the only ones wondering if my father could see. He eventually ran into a pole on the tennis court and wrecked the Vespa. He was all right, but the Vespa never recovered. It was a miracle he and the motorcycle lasted as long as they did.

  Even after watching him all my life, I still couldn’t understand how he got around the way he did. I thought back to the first time I saw View Park, flying over the neighborhood in my father’s plane. We circled the hills and the oil fields, then the pilot banked right over Southridge and my father pointed down to our new place and said, “There it is!” Then the pilot banked sharply left so the rest of the family could see out their side, and once again my father pointed right at the construction site. I remember thinking, “How the heck does he know where the house is?”

  The preoccupation that had characterized my dad on Hepburn dissipated as his drug use became a thing of the past. When he came home from Boston after getting a suspended sentence, he seemed more conscious of us boys than he had ever been. Maybe it was the realization that he had almost gone to prison for two decades. Even if he had survived prison, we would all have been grown men by the time he got out. Or maybe it was just the passage of time that made him want to be around us more. We were growing up, and he was aware of it in a new way. For every parent there are those moments when you wonder, “Where did the years go?” When he bent over to kiss us now aft
er a trip, he would put a hand over our heads to see how tall we were. I think he dreaded the day we would be taller than him.

  Sometimes I heard him when he came home from the studio late at night, after we were in bed, and I would quietly walk to the stairs to see him. Often when I got to the top of the stairs, I would look down and see him standing alone in the hall in the middle of the night, perfectly still, absolutely silent, listening to the house. I would sit down and be as still as I could, watching him, wondering what was going through his mind, trying to hear what he was listening to. There’s a pulse to silence in the middle of the night. If you really listen, silence has its own rhythm, just as noise does. If I listen closely enough, I can almost hear the house breathing. The walls creak and settle around me. A car passes quietly in the distance. The clock ticking. You feel the pulse of stillness. My father loved that pulse when he could finally hear it. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find him standing in the foyer in his robe, listening as the house slept around him, the house he had built. When you’re under the influence, nothing stands still, especially your mind. I think that he was getting accustomed to hearing things that he hadn’t heard for a long, long time.

  Sometimes when he stood there in silence, I wondered if he was praying, thanking God for his deliverance from heroin. He went to church with us in the months following his release from rehab. Before, when he came with us, he would be quiet and withdrawn most of the time, humming softly to himself while the choir sang. Now, though, it was different. Now when the choir sang, the music seemed to penetrate his soul, and sometimes he would sing along. Reverend Durham would say, “I heard, I heard Jesus” like he always had, but now my father would nod and say, “Amen,” and he would say, “I heard Jesus,” too. Tears would run down his face, and he would reach up and wipe them away.

  For most of his life my father had believed that he could not be saved, but sitting in church, feeling the Spirit within him, I think he knew that wasn’t true. God had saved him, time and time again, with His grace and mercy. God saved him as a boy when his eyes failed and his parents left him. He saved him as an adult by waking me in the middle of the night and sending me to the room where he was dying. It was God that gave him the strength to beat heroin and go on with his life. I believe that once he had a firm grip on life again without heroin, he never looked back. What an incredible accomplishment. The demons in his life were the painful memories that haunted him. Those memories never went away, but somehow he found the strength to live with them.

  Most people believe my father’s greatest gift was his music. I don’t believe that is true. I think my father’s greatest gift from God was his inner strength, and his ability to apply that in his life. That strength enabled him to overcome all obstacles. During that first year of recovery, my father poured his emotions into his music and recorded five songs with the word “crying” in the title, the most famous being “Crying Time.” Without the escape that heroin had once provided, music became the refuge for his pain.

  I watched the changes in him closely in the months after he came home, taking them all in. I had always watched my father closely. I was captivated by him as a child. Some of it was fascination, but much of it was fear. I never told my parents, but from the day I found him bleeding to death when I was six years old, I feared something would happen to him. When he came home from St. Francis, I worried. Would he fall? Would he hurt himself? I was always roaming around, checking on him. I would go downstairs sometimes and peek in to see if he was in his office. I always had to know where he was. I woke up in the middle of the night if I heard the slightest noise. I would hear someone close a bathroom or bedroom door, and I would get up to investigate. I understood by then what had happened in St. Francis. My father was different now. He was better. But would he stay better? Would he relapse? Would he feel different about us? Would he fall out of love with my mother? It took me five years to stop worrying about him, to realize he really was all right. My little brother Bobby grew up never knowing the man that our father used to be.

  It was on Southridge that the Sunday chess games started in the big office downstairs. My father had passed time in rehab learning chess and became fascinated with the game. He was a natural. Chess is a game of concentration and memory as well as strategy, and my father had both of those in unusual amounts. He could keep track of all the chess pieces without seeing them. A few months after he came home, he started holding chess games every Sunday for his friends. I never got to attend one of the Sunday games, but I sure heard about them. The band members would come, along with family friends and a long line of celebrities and musicians, including my dad’s old friend Quincy Jones. The games would start in the morning and continue long after my brothers and I went to bed. As she had on Hepburn, my mother cooked and carried food to my dad and his friends all day. Everyone had a story about playing chess with my father. Bill Cosby says that one time he made a move late in the game, and my dad shouted, “Ah hah!” My dad couldn’t see the move, but he knew where all the pieces were, and he knew he had him. In fact, my father didn’t even need a board. Herbert Miller still laughs when he talks about it. Someone would say, “Pawn B to knight four,” and the next thing you knew, there’d be an argument. My father would shout, “Wait! You can’t do that, man!” and soon everyone would be yelling at one another, pointing at the chess pieces, and all the time there would be no chess board. Newcomers would look at them moving the pieces around the imaginary board and think they were crazy. But those moments were special for my father, and as long as he was happy, I was okay.

  My mother was the center of everything that happened on Southridge, just like she had been on Hepburn. Southridge was her domain, her private sanctuary, and she controlled it. She was a taskmaster where the help was concerned. She made sure the house was kept clean at all times. The sheets had to be ironed. Maids in white uniforms served all our meals. My mother wanted them to share the cooking, too, but that never worked out very well. A great cook herself, she tried to teach them how to cook in the same manner that she did. She would have the maids cook with her, giving them the recipe and showing them how to prepare the foods we liked. Most of the time it didn’t work, and she ended up cooking our meals.

  One of the maids, Eleanor, was like a member of the family. You can see her in many family pictures. Eleanor’s main duties were to help keep an eye on us and to make sure my mother’s rules were followed. She did everything from keeping the house immaculate to helping fix our bikes. Eleanor was from British Honduras (Belize), so she spoke with a strong accent. Even her Spanish seemed to have a British accent. She had to learn English while she was working for us, and she had a hard time communicating clearly. When she got upset with us after a frustrating day, parts of her sentences would come out backward, which I found very funny. “Okay, you kids. Come upstairs back!” She was almost as strict as my mother. Eleanor’s responsibility was great and she took care of us with love. When my mother’s health was failing, Eleanor was always there. I miss her.

  Despite my father’s fame and affluent surroundings, my mother never thought of herself as a celebrity wife. The phrase I heard about her over and over again was “down to earth.” She was a strong and beautiful woman, and when she dressed for an evening out with my father, she looked like his queen. She was very reserved with people she didn’t know, and could be intimidating until you got to know her. Right after the Rogerses moved in, their dog bit David, and my mother called Mrs. Rogers. She told Mrs. Rogers that she needed to come over and talk to her about it, and Mrs. Rogers panicked, thinking, “Oh, my Lord, I just moved here and I’m about to get sued by Ray Charles.”

  When my mother got there, though, she immediately reassured Mrs. Rogers, telling her, “Oh, Ruby, it’s nothing, everything’s fine. I just wanted to make sure the dog had his shots. David is all right. You never know, the boys were probably doing something to the dog.”

  Mrs. Rogers was very surprised. She had expected Mrs. R
ay Charles to behave like she was someone special. But despite the furs and jewels my father had bought her over the years, my mother remained Della Robinson, the church girl from Texas.

  Neither of my parents ever forgot where they came from. People who only knew them as Mr. and Mrs. Ray Charles didn’t really know them at all. They forgot that my parents came from humble beginnings, and even when they were reminded, they didn’t understand what that meant. My parents understood how blessed they were because they knew what it was like to have nothing. There’s an old adage: “Once I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.” They knew what hardship was.

  They also knew what racism was. There were no bowling alleys for black people when they were starting out, no golf courses, no swimming pools. If they wanted to swim, they had to go to the lake, the river, or the beach, and even there they could only swim in the designated area. In my father’s early years on the road, they had to drive all night because African Americans were not allowed to stay in many hotels, and much of the time, they were not allowed to eat in the restaurants. During a decade of civil rights challenges and victories, my father taught us to have great respect and admiration for Martin Luther King and his tireless pursuit of equality. My father knew all too well about the inequality, unbalanced scales, and injustices suffered by African Americans. Even when I was young, black patrons had to sit in the back rows at my father’s concerts when he performed in the South. It made no sense to me. Why would white fans buy my father’s records and pay for expensive tickets to see him perform, yet refuse to let my dad’s own people sit in the seats next to them? My father used his voice to support civil rights and Dr. King’s mission. He would pay a heavy price for doing so and was banned from the state of Georgia, where he was born. My father would use that action against him as motivation to fuel his tireless pursuit of perfection in music and to raise him to another level in society. He knew his music was a universal language, and he created music that bridged the hearts of all races. The only way my father could fight his way through the racial divide in our nation and around the world was through his music. Eventually, the state of Georgia apologized and honored my father in the state legislature, proclaiming his version of “Georgia on My Mind” the state song.