chapter one “ALL US RUG RATS”

OPAL JEWEL:

My sister, Pearl, and I grew up in Detroit. Our mother was Ruby Robinson. That’s right—she was Ruby, and she named her daughters Pearl and Opal. Since I was old enough to remember, Mama worked at the GM plant on Clark Street, but not on the assembly line; she was in the cafeteria. Slopping it out to the men as fast as she could when that bell rang for lunch. If one or the other of us was sick and couldn’t go to school, Mama would sneak us in and stack up potato sacks to make a pallet on the floor of the pantry, and she’d leave the door cracked so we could see out and so she could keep an eye on us too.

On those sick days, if I managed to doze off I’d wake right on up at noontime. The stampede, darling! From where I was, watching out the sliver of that cracked pantry door, I could only see feet: the backs of Mama’s white nursing shoes—I don’t know why the hell she wore those white shoes; every night she had to use a chewed-up old toothbrush to scrub the drops of gravy and sauce and whatever else off them—and then, facing Mama and lined up to get their grub, those rowdy men in their steel-toe boots. That’s all I could see. But I could hear all kinds of stuff. Even then I could pick out a sound and tune out the rest. If I wanted to, I could focus and hear the forks scraping against the plates, or the wet noises of mouths opening and closing. When they were all lined up I could hear the men rapping to Mama—you know, flirting—and then I’d hear the craziest thing: Mama laughing and flirting right back.

PEARL WELMONT, OPAL JEWEL’S HALF SISTER:^I

Opal and I were born two years apart and we had different fathers. You see how we look so different. We never were blessed to meet them, but if we asked nicely Mama would tell us whatever stories she could remember. Mine was a war hero they called Poker Joe—he got killed over in Korea, and oh, he just loved her butter beans. Opal’s daddy, I think his name was Paul, he was a much older gentleman who got sick and died when we were too young to remember. Poor Mama, having to deal with all that. Widowed twice with two babies to raise in a broke-down building on the East Side.

OPAL JEWEL:

We had different daddies, yeah. But both of them worked right there at that GM plant, I’d bet you money on that. I wouldn’t have judged my mother if she’d just come clean. Everybody deserves to know where they come from. But Mama never even gave us viable names to work with—just dumb stories Pearl could eat right up. What you gonna do? My sister loves to believe.

PEARL WELMONT:

A teacher from our elementary school lived the next street over, Mrs. Dennis, and in the summers when school was out she kept a bunch of us kids for a little extra money. And I mean, it must’ve been a little little—for one, because if I’m being honest Mrs. Dennis didn’t put a whole lot of effort into it, she just let us run kinda wild. And for two, because our mother really didn’t have much to give and neither did the others. All us rug rats had holes in the armpits of our T-shirts. Got oatmeal every day for breakfast, summer or winter, and had the shoes that could talk. You know what I’m talking about? Sneakers so cheap and worn down that the sole comes unglued and flaps around?

PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT, PEARL’S HUSBAND:

Amen! And your mama would just wrap some duct tape around the toes to shut them up. [Laughs]

PEARL WELMONT:

Mama would drop us off at Mrs. Dennis’s place before she caught the bus to work in the mornings, and then at night she’d pick us up after her shift. Those hours in between… Well, all I’ll say is, they were long. [Laughs] Mrs. Dennis didn’t like us to go outside. She kept all kinds of toys, but we about killed each other fighting over them in that hot old apartment. On any given day there would be about twelve of us, and if the boys were feeling generous they’d let us play with their green army men or with the set of checkers or jacks. If they were feeling stingy, that meant playing house or Mother May I? with the other girls, and, well, you know how girls can be.

OPAL JEWEL:

I started losing my hair when I was nine. First a dime-size patch of it just gone in the crown. Then the edges near my right ear started rolling back. At first I was furious with Mama, because she used to rake the comb through my hair so mean, and I just knew she was ripping it out by the roots. She washed my hair once a week, every Sunday afternoon, and then she’d sit on the sofa while I’d take the position of doom on the floor between her legs. And she’d yank my head back and cleave a part down the middle, and she’d wrestle all that thick hair into two of the tightest, fattest plaits you ever saw. My neck muscles got real strong from all that pulling, honey! And the whole time I’d just be wincing and stewing, you know, because if I even said one “ouch” I got a good smack on the head and a warning to stop acting like a baby. Pearl would go back to our bedroom terrified, because her turn was coming up next. But it was inevitable—Mama was always chasing after you with that damn red comb on a Sunday. If we don’t have much else in common, my sister and me, we bonded over that. We were both very tenderheaded.

So at first I thought my bald patches were because Mama was so rough, and I guess she assumed that too because suddenly on wash days she was gentler with me. The plaits got much looser, so loose they would barely last the week, and every night she rubbed extra Blue Magic into the spots where my hair was gone. That big tub of grease… I’ll never forget the sweet smell of it. Too bad it never could work a miracle.

PEARL WELMONT:

After a while it got hard to hide Opal losing her hair, and the kids at Mrs. Dennis’s wouldn’t let her play with them—they’d treat anything she touched like it was dirty. Hard to be dark-skinned and have a problem like that back in those days, if I’m being honest. At first Opal would get so mad. She’d be crying these furious tears, swelled up from the depths of her little soul, and I’d try to comfort her but she’d squall like the devil and shove me away.

OPAL JEWEL:

Oh, those hooligans called me out my name, honey. It was “Baldy-Scaldy,” “Patches”…. When Mama finally stopped sitting vigil for whatever strands I had left on my head, she’d send me to Mrs. Dennis’s with this bright red scarf on, so then I was “Pickaninny.” That’s the nasty little name that traveled with me back to school that fall and all the way through Eastern High. My sister tried her best to protect me but I was kinda feisty, if you can imagine. [Laughs]

I liked Mrs. Dennis, though. She never really refereed all that mess; she probably had enough of it during the school year, and who could blame her. But I was the only one she’d invite up on her sofa, and every afternoon while all the other kids were acting like ingrates, we’d sit together while she watched As the World Turns and The Guiding Light on her tiny black-and-white TV. Mrs. Dennis loved her stories, honey, and she made sure to hustle along our lunches—bologna sandwiches, always bologna sandwiches on white bread with yellow mustard—so she wouldn’t be bothered once they came on. And while she watched, she let me flip through the magazines she kept laid out on her coffee table. Ebony, of course, and Look, and some trash ones too, the throwaway movie magazines—you remember those. She’d switch them out a lot, but there was one Mrs. Dennis always kept on the table, and that was an old issue of Life that had Miss Dorothy Dandridge on the cover. Miss Dorothy had on her Carmen Jones outfit, the black and the red, with bare shoulders and a rose tucked into her curls and a look at the camera like… whew. Brow cocked up just so, and a flash in the eyes. I really liked her attitude. Her style. Maybe that was the first time I ever noticed anybody’s style, that the way you looked could make you into a different person, a character. So Dorothy was my favorite. But I also loved Lauren Bacall, because she always looked like she knew something juicy that you didn’t, and also like she didn’t take no stuff. You could say that I first learned about showmanship and mystique sitting on that couch in the summer, a balding little Black outcast.

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By 1961, Berry Gordy’s Motown was making Americans notice Detroit for more than automobiles, with big hits by the Miracles and the Marvelettes. That same year, Ruby Robinson sent her two daughters, then fourteen and twelve, on a Trailways bus heading south, to spend the first of three summers with relatives from whom she had been estranged.

OPAL JEWEL:

We were terrified to go. We’re talking about the South in 1961, baby! And not just any South. Alabama South. Bull Connor South. Mama had our plans all set, tickets bought, letters written. And then that May, not long before school let out, we saw all the news about the Freedom Riders. Pictures of buses burning, smoke pouring out the windows. Those kids were not much older than Pearl and me. I would glance at Mama’s face when the reports were on, and her jaw would be clenched, her brow scrunched up. I worked up the nerve one night to ask her, “Are the white folks gonna kill us?”

PEARL WELMONT:

“If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.” That’s what she kept telling us, and in that last week or so before we left she would make us repeat it after her. That might have been the first prayer I ever learned. [Laughs]

OPAL JEWEL:

At the bus station she pushed brown bags full of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches into our hands and ordered us to never step foot off that bus. She handed our one suitcase to an attendant, who put it under the coach, and then she watched as we boarded and sat our behinds in the back, just like she’d told us to do.

The whole thing felt like we were being drafted for some war, and on the other end of it were people who were complete foreigners to us. We had never met them, our own family.

PEARL WELMONT:

Opal and I didn’t piece it together till years later, when Mama was dying and the doctor was asking questions about her medical history, but that summer she had to have a hysterectomy. We found out it happened two days after we got on that bus. Bless her soul. She didn’t have a choice but to make arrangements for us.

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At the end of the eleven-hour trip from Detroit to Birmingham, the Robinson girls were met by their aunt Rose Broadnax, Ruby’s younger sister, and her husband, William, a minister.

PEARL WELMONT:

We stepped off that bus exhausted, and I guess you could say a little bit wary. Inside the station we saw this fine-looking Negro couple walking toward us. The woman had beautiful pressed hair with a neat bang across her forehead and a flipped-up curl on the ends. It was hot as blazes but she wore a cream blouse with delicate pearly buttons at the wrists and a royal-blue skirt with stockings. Heels too. Butter-leather kittens that clicked across the floor. And the man hung back behind her a couple steps, wearing a full suit and tie and shoes so shined I ’bout went blind looking at them. Clean. I looked at Opal and she was looking back at me like, Is this really them?

OPAL JEWEL:

We just assumed the Negroes down South wore overalls and picked cotton all day. Isn’t that terrible? But here come Auntie Rose looking like a bona fide lady, honey, like she had a walk-on spot on The Guiding Light. She gave us hugs and the next thing she did after that was run her hand over my patchy scalp. “Lord ha’ mercy, what is your mama doing with this head?” And don’t you know, the next day she took me to a Negro doctor who finally diagnosed it, and I had an answer.^II

PEARL WELMONT:

They had a house in Titusville, a pretty neighborhood where all the other Black folks as fine as them lived too. No more dark apartments, amen! Aunt Rose and Uncle Bill’s house was redbrick, with a sidewalk leading up to the front door that split the lawn in two. Plus a garage where Uncle Bill parked their Cadillac—forest green and big as a boat. Aunt Rose had planted azaleas on either side of the walk, and we weren’t allowed to play anywhere near them. But we made their backyard ours. I remember us running and laughing, throwing our heads back—just breathing in that soft, sweet air.

OPAL JEWEL:

For whatever sad reason, they couldn’t have kids of their own, but you could tell Auntie Rose wanted them bad by the way she treated us like babydolls. She didn’t waste no time taking us into town for new clothes. Next to her I guess we looked like real charity cases, true ghetto kids, but after an hour me and Pearl were brand-new. New underthings, new patent leather Mary Janes, those dainty ankle socks with the ribbon of lace around the cuff, a straw hat for me to cover up my head, and two nice dresses apiece—one of them she even let me wear out the store.

We were heading back to the Cadillac with all this loot, and I was feeling mighty happy in my hat and my yellow dress—yellow was my favorite color, still is—and I started skipping ahead down the sidewalk and singing “Shop Around” at the top of my lungs. I saw this tall white woman sashay down the sidewalk from the other direction, but I wasn’t paying her no mind. Not till I felt Auntie Rose’s hand on my arm, snatching me back so hard my pretty new hat flew off. She whirled me around to look at her. “Watch where you going,” she said, and she leaned down, real quiet but scary. Then she fixed her face and looked up at that white lady as if to say she was sorry, and she picked up my hat and hustled me and Pearl to the edge of the sidewalk, and her grip stayed tight on our shoulders till that woman strolled her ass on by. And even at that young age I understood. Oh. Okay, then. That’s why Mama left.

That’s what the South was like for me. Sweet on the first taste, but something gone sour underneath. It’ll try to trick you, now—the sugarberries and the quiet and those lovely spread-out houses. But after that day with Auntie Rose, I could smell the rotten too.

PEARL WELMONT:

Uncle Bill was the pastor at New Baptist Church in Birmingham, and so of course me and Opal started going to service every Sunday and to youth Bible study too. One night me and Opal were washing dishes after supper, and Uncle Bill heard us singing along with the radio—oh, I don’t know, probably something from Motown—and he brought us to the choir director.

OPAL JEWEL:

After this life I’ve led, I know it’s hard to imagine my ass in a church. [Laughs] But listen, church back then could be a different thing—a political thing, a place of organization and action, real philosophy. You had men in Birmingham like the Reverend Shuttlesworth, who gave shelter to the Freedom Riders over at Bethel Baptist, and, yeah, men like my Uncle Bill. Sometimes he would write his sermon on whatever was happening in the news and in the Movement, and those were the services I liked best. It wasn’t just about folks falling out on the floor and writhing, or pastors screaming out nonsense and threats from the pulpit. You had concerned citizens and educated leaders and a good number of them were about that business. To make it so that my pretty Auntie Rose didn’t have to use dirty facilities, you know, or move out the way of anybody coming down the sidewalk. I wanted to be part of that. Baaaaaby, let me tell you, I was a revolutionary at twelve years old! I wanted to join SNCC, CORE, SCLC, all of it! I even started reading Uncle Bill’s copy of Stride Toward Freedom [the first book by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.], until Auntie Rose took it away and told me I needed to just enjoy being a girl.

PEARL WELMONT:

That first summer, I got saved. Uncle Bill dipped me in an aluminum tub of water right at the front of the church, everybody a witness, and my relationship with the Lord was born. It felt good and right to have faith, and from that day on I carried it with me no matter what my situation happened to be, no matter what some folks in my own family thought about it. People ask me all the time, you know, “Weren’t you upset over everything that happened with Opal? Weren’t you passed over?” And I just say right back, “A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot.” That’s Proverbs 14:30, the Good Book. My faith still gives me joy, gives me life, and I take comfort in that, amen! I was blessed to have found my voice, literally, in that church—and it was a voice so strong I surprised myself.

PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:

I met Pearl and her sister one Sunday service in the middle of that summer, when I was seventeen. My family’s church home was being rebuilt after a bad storm, and so in the meantime we visited over at New Baptist. I played football back then. I was swole so big I was practically busting out my suit, and with the extra people squeezing into the pews… Well, you can imagine how hot it could get. So I was getting drowsy, my head lolling around. [Laughs] But then I heard this voice that snapped me wide awake. I looked up toward the pulpit and there she was, Pearl Robinson, singing the lead on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Mmmm! She had her eyes squeezed shut and stood still as a rock, just rooted to the music, with a voice that blew the roof entirely off and sent a chill down my neck in that sweltering room. I went back the next Sunday, and the one after that. All the Sundays till she and Opal went back to Detroit for the school year.

PEARL WELMONT, SMILING:

I could sing, now. I could sing.

OPAL JEWEL:

I’m not gonna lie—Pearl shocked the hell outta me. We used to sing together to the pop songs on the radio, just for fun, and the harmonizing sounded decent—nothing too special. But honey, once Pearl got in that choir? Once she learned how to press on her diaphragm and work that alto? The girl opened her mouth and the angels flew out.

PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:

That type of singing cannot be learned. That was the spirit hitting her, and that’s what I saw that first Sunday.

OPAL JEWEL:

The voice was there, but Pearl didn’t have any presence. She’d just be standing there, closed up like a fist. Even with that stacked body of hers. It was weird. You heard the rapture but you couldn’t see it.

PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:

While Pearl was out in front of the choir, filling up the whole house, here come something moving to her left. Tiny wisp of a thing, real chocolate-skinned and swaying side to side with a straw hat perched on top of her head. She looked so funny with that hat on in the choir. Little Miss Showboat. That was Opal. That is Opal.

I. Pearl, 69, and her husband entertained us over bear claws and apple cider in the living room of their large colonial in Pontiac, Michigan. During the course of the interview, even while discussing her often strained relationship with Opal, Pearl proudly showed off old childhood photos of her sister, as well as promotional materials she’s collected over the years related to Opal’s career.

II. Opal Jewel has a form of alopecia areata, an autoimmune skin condition in which sufferers lose hair from the scalp and sometimes other parts of the body. Though there are some treatments that may promote hair regrowth, there is no cure.