Ray Charles

Man and MusicBy Michael Lydon

Routledge

Copyright © 2004 Michael Lydon
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780415970433

Chapter One

I was born with music inside me.
Like my ribs, my liver, my kidneys,
my heart. Like my blood.

Ray Charles

Greenville
1930-1937

For a hundred miles west of the Atlantic coast,the land of northern Florida lies flat as a floor covered by a thick rug ofgray-green vegetation. In fertile fields, venerable live oaks, bearded bySpanish moss, bend grandly to earth. Bright green palmettos bunch cheerfullyaround slender brown trunks in the piney woods, and creepers tangle everythingin flowered variety and profusion. East of the Suwannee River, the land ismarshy; lakes and ponds and lazy creeks abound. West of the Suwannee, the landstarts a gradual rise, and the old east-west road, U.S. 90, begins to undulateto the rhythm of mountains eroding into plain, a rhythm that accelerates slowlyinto rolling hills and pastured valleys over the sixty miles to Tallahassee.Atop the first real hill in the rhythm stands the Madison County courthouse.The six windows of its silver cupola survey the territory in all directionslike six bright eyes.

In 1776 that territory was a wilderness. Then white settlers brought slavesto fell the virgin forests and to plant cotton and tobacco, wresting the landfrom the Indians and the Spanish, until in 1821 Spain ceded the whole peninsulato the new United States of America. Sandy Ford, at a ford on the AucillaRiver, was the first settlement to spring up in Madison County’s westernreaches. The second was Station Five, the fifth stop from Tallahassee on theFlorida Central and Western Railway.

In 1876 an ambitious settler, Elijah James Hays, bought a huge tract of landsurrounding Station Five and began using the station to market his plantation’slivestock, cotton, tobacco, and timber. Hays owned a general store, abrickyard, and a turpentine still; he sold his cotton direct to W. W. Gordon,exporters in Savannah. Hays’ enterprise drew tradesmen and their families, andthe railroad village prospered as Sandy Ford declined. By 1887 the town’sLadies Aid Society had decided that Station Five needed a more genteel name.Mrs. Morgan, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, suggested that Greenvillesounded nice and refined. Their husbands spit skeptically at the notion that anew name would change rough-and-ready Station Five, but the ladies prevailedand Greenville the town became.

Greenville grew with the infant century. In 1912, the town passed a”milestone,” as a local history put it: an ordinance forbidding hogs to roamthe streets. World War I and the booming twenties provided eager markets forall the lumber, cotton, and cattle Greenville could bring to rail, and othermilestones followed: the first electric power company in 1923, the first highschool graduation in 1926, and the first town well, 195 feet deep, dug in 1927.

Busy North Grand Street, Greenville’s main drag, along the east-west railroadtrack, was still unpaved as the 1930s began. On the station side, portersloaded trains from stacks of freight brought in by mule wagons and gasolinetrucks. Ladies and children stepped off passenger coaches, back from a week’svacation with relatives on the Atlantic coast. On the store side, planters inbroad-brimmed hats signed bills with clerks in the shaded interior of Mr. Hays’Bank of Greenville, talking among themselves about the price of cotton and thetroubles on Wall Street. In the warehouses, farmers with cotton to sellbargained for harnesses and nails, canvas and candles, while their wivesshopped for sundries at Reams’ department store. White teenagers spooned atKing’s pharmacy, dawdling over their Cokes, and little colored boys, barefootand in ripped overalls, hung on hitching posts and watched the world go by.

Hot humid summer gripped Greenville in September 1930. Through the still aircame the puffing of trains, the screech of tenders trundling to and fromwarehouse depots. Smoke rose from the Prince Veneer and Southern Lumber mills,where sweating black men, stripped to the waist, wrapped iron chains aroundtheir wrists to tug raw trunks to the screaming blades that sliced tall yellowpine into board feet of lumber and skinned short white pine into orange-cratestrips. Greenville’s business district extended a few blocks north of NorthGrand through drab streets lined with barbershops and cafes, a blacksmith andstables, to the Andrews Hotel, the biggest building in town. Behind itsawninged windows the Porkchop Gang, rural politicians and their landownercronies, met over bourbon and cigars to plot control of the state legislature,a discreet fifty miles west in Tallahassee. To the south of North Grand, theland rose in a slight hill, where stood the big white Baptist church and thehouses of the town’s leading white families, unpretentious frame dwellings onstreets canopied by spreading oaks.

West of town, North Grand soon wore down to a double wagon track, andsongbirds and buzzing bugs drowned out the sawmills. Wild morning glorieswrapped green vines and blue trumpets over sagging fence posts. Rickety shacksperched on tiny lots squeezed between forests and farms. Across from the bigwooden New Zion Baptist Church, a nameless smaller road turned south across therailroad tracks and past a second wooden church, the modest New ShilohMissionary Baptist. A half-mile farther a cluster of small houses and shacksstood under tall pines and oaks, a black quarter everybody called Jellyroll.

The name, rightly, had a raffish air. Colored folk who had lived inGreenville for years lived in Blackbottom, the black quarter in town watchedover by the white folks on top of the hill. Jellyroll was out from under whiteeyes, a sandy clearing in the woods where transient workers had thrown uptar-paper shacks when work held through more than one season. Nobody had livedin Jellyroll long, nobody knew where the others had come from or might go next.The men and women of Jellyroll were by and large greenhorns from theplantations, drawn by the promise of cash for menial labor. Living close toGreenville felt more like town than the sharecropper cabins they had left, butJellyroll was still country. On Sunday the people prayed hard, all week theyworked hard, and Saturday night they found a bit of the free and easy at Mr.Pit’s Red Wing Cafe.

Wiley Pitman was a jovial brown-skinned man, fat, with a wide grin, and knownfar beyond Jellyroll as a fine piano player. With his wife, Miz Georgia, heowned the Red Wing, a wooden plank building facing the road from North Grand.The cafe doubled as a small general store where Miz Georgia sold kerosene andmatches, flour and salt, cold beer and pig’s-foot sandwiches. A few tablesfilled the middle of the floor, and against one wall stood a jukebox and apiano. Out back stood a boardinghouse where Mr. Pit had rooms for thewatermelon pickers who overflowed the place in summertime, and rooms, as onelongtime resident put it, “for husbands going with other men’s wives.” Behindthe boardinghouse stood several shacks.

Time has swept those shacks and the Red Wing Cafe into “the limbo of thingsthat disappear,” as Dreiser wrote. Decades later, under gray December skies,only the tumbledown boardinghouse remained, a fading specter in a tangled woodof weeds and baby trees. Yet in September 1930, the Red Wing was the lively hubof a village, and the shacks out back housed a family: Margaret Robinson, hergrown son Bailey, his wife Mary Jane, and an orphan girl they had adopted,Aretha Williams.

Bailey Robinson and his mother had come to Greenville from Albany, Georgia, ahundred miles to the north, in the 1920s. That much two elderly Jellyrollnatives, Bessie Brown and Mrs. Mary Clemmons, remembered clearly. Neither knewwhere Mary Jane came from, and the deeper roots of the Robinson family may belost forever. Jellyroll respected Margaret, called “Muh,” as a nice old ladyand Bailey as a big, rough man, six feet tall or more and heavily muscular. Heworked at a mill pulling logs into the skids; sometimes he laid track for therailroad. Mary Jane, a plain, thickset woman, worked at a mill too, stackingplanks, “uneducated but a good person,” remembered a neighbor. Aretha was aslip of a girl, lovely to look at, with long wavy black hair. Her mother haddied a year or two before. Her father, a man Bailey worked with, couldn’t keepher, and Bailey and Mary Jane took her in as their ward. Williams was hersurname, but everybody called her Retha Robinson.

That September 1930, the goings-on at the Robinsons’ had all Jellyrollgossiping. Little Retha was pregnant, there was no way such a skinny girl couldhide it. She wasn’t stepping out with anybody as far as anybody knew. Who couldthe daddy be? Bailey blamed a boy named Jack Wilkerson, because, as BessieBrown remembered, Jack had gone with the two girls into the fields one day whentheir mamas sent them out to cut straw for brooms. Bailey told Jack he’d haveto marry Retha. But Bessie told her aunt Eliza that Jack and Retha hadn’t doneanything out in the fields. Instead, a few weeks before, Bailey had taken a fewkids for a ride in his car down to Petty Springs. The group had gottenseparated in the woods, and when Bessie and her friends came back, they foundBailey lying with Retha. Aunt Eliza spread that word about the quarter, Baileystopped denying he was the daddy, and Jack was free to go.

Few in Jellyroll had time for high and mighty attitudes, yet to judge by ZoraNeale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, set in a West Floridaquarter just like Jellyroll, tongues must have wagged about swollen littleRetha, just as they wagged over Janie when she came back from her adventurewith Tea Cake: “What she doin’ coming back here in dem overhalls? Can’t shefind no dress to put on?–Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in?”

To still such tongues, Margaret and Bailey sent Retha back to relatives inAlbany late that summer to have the baby. Toward the end of September she gavebirth to a baby boy. No birth certificate exists, but the baby, when grown,always declared his birthday to be September 23, 1930. After a couple of monthsto get back on her feet, Retha returned to Jellyroll with her son. She namedhim Ray Charles Robinson.

* * *

Retha came back to Jellyroll with little Ray, RC everybody called him, butthere was no going back to how things had been. Bailey and Mary Jane soonseparated, and Bailey moved south to Shamrock, another small town, where hetook a new wife, Stella, by whom he had several children; he seldom came backto Greenville and had little to do with raising the boy. Retha and Mary Janeremained close–Mary Jane had lost a son, Jabbo, and doted on RC—but Retha,no more than sixteen and with a baby in diapers, was on her own as never before.

“What was life here like in the Depression?” said one Greenville man in hisseventies. “Bad.” In 1932, Loomis King, the town’s leading doctor, took in only$450, much of that in hams or eggs. The Bank of Greenville survived the worstdays, but out in Jellyroll, Jim Crow and poverty, like twin pitiless gods,decreed the destinies and daily lives of Retha, RC, and their Jellyrollneighbors. One Christmas the town police shot a black man near Mr. Pit’s cafe.”He hadn’t done nothing,” Mrs. Clemmons remembered. “After it happened, it waslike it hadn’t happened at all.” Dinner in Jellyroll was a dish of homegrowngreens; when they had no fuel to fry or boil their sweet potatoes, the peopleate them raw. Folding money was as scarce as shoes on children.

To keep abreast in this struggle, physical strength was a must, and Retha,in the memory of all, was weak. No one remembered just what was wrong withher–Mrs. Clemmons blamed it on giving birth so young–but she was “sickly,””walked with a cane,” and “had a sore on her leg.” She couldn’t handle thebetter-paying mill work as Mary Jane could, nor could she run a laundrybusiness, as many black women did, with white clients on the hill. Retha and RCwere among the poorest of the poor in Jellyroll, yet there was little chancethey’d starve or be forced to move on. Everybody knew Retha and her story, andthey liked her and her bright-eyed boy. The other women sent her their extrawashing and ironing. Mary Jane became RC’s second mother, glad to watch himwhen Retha was working or had to lie down, and she loved to buy him sweets atthe cafe.

RC grew, a healthy, happy baby. By his first birthday he had a brother,George. No one remembered who George’s father was, but all remembered that Mr.Pit and Miz Georgia, who had no children of their own, adopted George to takethe added burden off Retha. As soon as RC could run about, little Georgetoddling behind him, the brothers were inseparable, a tiny Tom and Huck playinghide-and-seek in the woods, throwing rocks and stomping on bugs like boys fromtime immemorial. RC loved to play with matches, lighting them in the blacknessof a moonless night and holding them before his face, feeling like he was”lighting up the whole world.”

Retha believed in strict discipline, and by the time RC and George were fiveand four, she had set them to their chores, chopping wood and hauling water.Every Sunday she took them to the New Shiloh Baptist Church back up the roadtoward Greenville. Founded before the Civil War as a mission to “our blackbrothers and sisters” from Greenville’s white Baptists, the New Shiloh hadbecome a full black church, with fiery preachers stirring the spirits of thefaithful to tears and shouts of joy, to songs and beating tambourines, swayinghips and clapping hands. Sometimes Sunday meant chicken for dinner, and everygreat while, for sure once a year on May 20, the old maypole day colored folkstill celebrated, all Jellyroll gathered for parties that lasted deep into thenight, feasts when they barbecued whole hogs and goats over open pit fires, andthe moonshine flowed free. Other nights Muh tucked the boys into bed and toldthem stories of the bad old days when hooded white men bearing torchesthundered through the quarter, and they fell asleep shivering in fear andwonder.

When still too young for school at Greenville Training, the town’s publicschool for colored children, RC and George began to evidence gifts ofparticular intelligence. George amazed Jellyroll with his skill at arithmetic,his inventiveness in making toys from bits of wood and baling wire. RC showed asimilar curiosity in mechanical things, poking his head between the men as theybent over sputtering Model T engines, tinkering with broken bikes and farmmachinery. Most of all, RC began to demonstrate an unusual interest in andaptitude for music.

“Either RC was playing the piano or he was listening to the jukebox”–that isGreenville’s universal memory of the young Ray Charles, and the grown man’smemory fully agrees. “I was a normal kid, mischievous and into everything,”Charles recalled years later, “but I loved music, it was the only thing thatcould really get my attention.” One day when he was about three, RC was playingby the shacks when he heard Mr. Pit break into a driving boogie-woogie on theRed Wing’s battered old upright. Magnetized by the clanging chords and rockingbeat, RC ran up the alley past the boardinghouse, pushed open the batteredscreen door, and stared amazed at Mr. Pit’s flying fingers. Seeing him, Mr. Pitlaughed, swept the boy onto his lap, and let him reach out his hands to thekeys, run his fingers up and down over their warm ebony and ivory textures.

From then on whenever RC heard Mr. Pit playing, he’d race into the cafe and,as he remembered years later with gratitude, “the man always let meplay.” Wiley Pitman was no amateur, as Ray Charles recalled him, but a stridepianist who, had he not chosen the simple life in Greenville, could have dukedit out with giants like Pete Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith. That may be astudent’s exaggeration, but Mr. Pit did prove to be a superb teacher, showingRC first how to pick out a melody with one finger. “Oh no, son, you don’t playlike that,” he said when RC banged too hard on the keys, but when out ofawkward fumblings the boy got a beat going on his own, Mr. Pit encouraged himwith noisy shouts of “That’s it, sonny, that’s it.”

Near the piano stood the cafe jukebox, a marvel of flashing lights and movingmetal. For a nickel, a mechanical arm would lift a black platter from a drum ofrecords and set it spinning, the steel needle falling into the groove with ascratchy hiss, filling the room with electric sounds magically recorded longago and far away. RC soon had a special place on a bench beside the jukeboxwhere he sat for hours, his ear pressed up against the speaker. Sometimes whenMary Jane gave him a few coins for candy, they’d end up in the jukebox instead.More often RC didn’t have the money to pick his own songs, so he listened toeverything anybody played: boogie-woogie piano by Albert Ammons, gutbucketblues by Tampa Red, the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington.

Work and music, running in the woods, church on Sunday–life flowed on for RCand George, Retha and Mary Jane, with little to mark one day from the next,until one terrible afternoon in 1935. “I can still hear the women shouting forhelp, the sound of their cries,” remembered Mrs. Clemmons’ daughter Elesta,then a girl of six or seven. The scene seared itself irrevocably into RayCharles’ mind, leaving a scar that would never fully heal.

The afternoon was hot and sunny. To cool off, the two boys splashed in andout of a big washtub behind the cafe. Retha was inside ironing. George climbedinside the tub, ducking under the water for a shiny penny, shouting andlaughing. Suddenly RC realized that George’s splashings had a frighteningurgency. His baby brother wasn’t playing, he was in trouble. For a moment hefroze in terror, then he lunged to the tub to try and pull George out. Hecouldn’t; George was kicking and flailing his arms and legs, and RC, only ayear older, didn’t have the strength. He ran to the shack screaming, “Mama,Mama.” Retha dropped her iron and came running. She lifted George from the tuband tried to shake, rub, and breathe life back into him, but it was too late.George had drowned. RC burst into tears, and Retha started wailing in pain.Neighbors came running. All Jellyroll mourned the little boy, and even whiteGreenville heard about the colored child who had died so sadly.

To have a beloved brother die at any age is a bitter, wrenching blow; tohave that brother die while you and he are still infants, to see it happen andbe powerless to prevent it, can only be a primal experience that willreverberate through a lifetime. Grief, guilt, anger, fear, loneliness, abewildered sense of innocence crushed by fate–all must have coursed throughRC’s little-boy spirit.

A second blow followed on the heels of the first. A few months after George’sdeath, mucus began to ooze from RC’s eyes like thick tears, and he woke everymorning to find his eyelids stuck shut. Retha bathed off the crusts, but itstill took the boy ten minutes to adjust to the light. Over months the breadthof his vision began to shrink, and he found he could see less and less distanceinto the world. People and things became unfocused blobs. Retha took the boyinto Greenville to see Frank McLeod, the doctor who saw the colored people intown. Dr. McLeod peered into RC’s eyes with bright lights, prescribed drops andointments, then sent Retha and the boy on to a clinic in Madison, fourteenmiles away, RC’s longest trip to date. The clinic doctor examined him and toldRetha what Dr. McLeod hadn’t dared say: RC was losing his eyesight and in timewould be stone blind. There was no cure. “I understand,” said Retha. She tookRC by the hand, and they went home to Jellyroll.

Years laters doctors guessed that congenital juvenile glaucoma had causedRC’s blindness. If so, only coincidence connects the illness with George’sdeath; the boy’s emotions didn’t contribute to his loss of sight. As an adultRay Charles has described going blind matter-of-factly, “not as bad as you’dthink,” he has said. “I was never too frightened.” Yet when the thick tearsbegan, RC was still in shock over George’s death, and the pain of the firstloss may have numbed him to the fresh pain of the second, both tragedies fusinginto one life-changing event. Losing his sight may have seemed to RC a darklyfitting sequel to losing his brother. “I saw something bad, now I can’t see; Idid bad, now bad is happening to me”–these may paraphrase the wordlesswhispers, such whispers as we all hear, that little RC heard way down deepinside.

The two blows hit Retha hard too. Two sons, so bright and full of promise;one dead, the other handicapped for life. Childish pleasures could still divertRC, but Retha, no more than twenty-three, faced unrelenting grown-up problems:How could she, penniless, uneducated, and ill, provide for her blind son’sfuture? What could she give her boy to equip him for life? In answering thesequestions, Retha Robinson more than proved her mettle; she rose to quietgreatness.

As Ray Charles and others remember her, Retha had an old head on youngshoulders, a character flinty and tough. “Retha was weak in body,” recalledGertrude Riddick, another of RC’s playmates, “but strong in mind.” Her owntrials had taught Retha the cost of depending on others, and though no woman ofthe world, she could imagine the blighted life a blind black man might lead inthe South if he had to beg help. Penury or prison, vagrancy or a vegetablestate at a charity home were all likely fates. Retha would not let blindnesscripple Ray Charles Robinson. Fools wait for just rewards, she knew; the Lordhelps those who help themselves. RC must be armed with the weapons to defendhimself. The dangers were too great to let a moment be wasted.

Retha kept RC at his chores. Whether he tripped on a tree root on the way tothe pump or bruised his shins with kindling sticks flying off the choppingblock, the boy must learn to do for himself. Neighbors tsk-tsked to see a blindboy scrubbing floors, and Mary Jane wanted to coddle him, but Retha would havenone of it. Pity could only harm the boy. RC must be kept as busy as any otherchild, and he couldn’t stay at home all day either. He needed to know his wayaround Jellyroll, learn the mile of dirt roads and sandy shortcuts to the busystreets of Greenville proper. She must teach RC, teach him something every day.”I won’t be here forever,” she told him again and again.

Retha taught RC his letters and sums, but she knew he needed more educationin order to develop the talents that blindness hadn’t taken away. He couldn’tgo to Greenville Training; they didn’t know how to teach blind children there.Where could he go to school? How could Retha find out?

For answers to questions of that kind in the South of 1936, colored folkshad to go to white folks, and that’s what Retha did. She talked to the lady atthe post office and to Dr. McLeod, and soon all Greenville knew about the blindboy in Jellyroll and his determined mother. Dr. McLeod told her there was astate school for the deaf and blind in St. Augustine that took a few coloredchildren. Retha didn’t read or write well enough to apply to the school, butMitty King, a Jellyroll neighbor, cooked for the Reams family, who lived on thehill. Mr. Reams owned the big store in town and Miz Ruth was a nice lady. Maybethe Reamses would help.

Reams is still a common name in and around Greenville, twenty-one listingsin the 1994 Madison County phone book, all descendants of Albert Reams, asettler contemporary with Isaac Hays and a cofounder of the bank. Mitty King’sReamses–Albert’s son Albert Dupree, his wife, the former Ruth Scruggs, andtheir three children–ranked among Greenville’s first families, and the MadisonEnterprise Recorder respectfully noted their comings and goings. Yetthey lived more like plain folks than aristocrats. A.D.’s knack for businessmade him rich, but he remained a farmer at heart, and Ruth, known affectionatelyas “Ma Pop,” taught Sunday school at Greenville Baptist and kept busy on civicprojects sponsored by the Women’s Club. “A.D. and Ruth lived the countrytradition of helping your neighbor,” recalled a neighbor who grew up playingwith their children. “They tried to act on what they heard in church.”

Retha, with RC by the hand, walked up to the Reamses’ white house on thewestern slope of the hill. Mitty King, smiling encouragement, met them at thekitchen door. In the living room, RC played for the company on Miz Ruth’spiano, and Retha told her story one more time. A.D. and his wife were takenwith the bright boy and his forceful mother, and, yes, if they could help ablind child get his chance in life, they’d do all they could.

Dr. McLeod told A.D. whom to write to, and soon word came back: the FloridaSchool for the Deaf and Blind did have a department for colored children. Thefall 1937 term had begun September 7, but RC could begin school whenever he gotthere. The state paid room, board, and tuition, plus train fare to and from inthe fall and spring. It wouldn’t cost Retha a thing. She could put RC on atrain, the conductor would keep an eye on him, and a teacher from the schoolwould meet him at the station in St. Augustine.

Retha knew at once that RC would go to the blind school, no doubt about it.This was her son’s only hope; she had to make him take it. Little RC, barelyseven, knew just as certainly he didn’t want to leave Mama and Mary Jane, hisplaymates Johnnycake and Elesta Mae, all of Jellyroll and Greenville. “Mama,”he cried, “don’t make me go, Mama. I wanna stay with you.” He ran and hidbehind Mary Jane’s skirts as she argued on his side against Retha. How couldshe send RC so far from home, alone among strangers? He’d be better off herewhere folks knew and loved him.

Retha didn’t budge. The morning came, and the little family walked up theroad from Jellyroll to town. The locomotive steamed into the train station,eastbound from Tallahassee. RC had never been on a train before, and this onewas no more than a black blob to his failing eyes. This was RC Robinson, Rethatold the conductor, going to the blind school. The conductor said the boy wouldbe fine. “All aboard!” With a last hug and kiss from Mary Jane, a last “Mindyour teachers, son!” from Retha, RC climbed up the metal steps and took a seaton a hard wooden bench in the colored car. The other passengers gave the blindboy a passing glance, then paid him no more mind. RC sat by himself, as unhappyas a little boy can be, and didn’t say a word. From Madison County the trainran clickety-clack out of the low hills, east into the rising sun, over thebridge across the Suwannee, and on to the flatlands and the coast.

Continues…
Excerpted from Ray Charlesby Michael Lydon Copyright © 2004 by Michael Lydon. Excerpted by permission.
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