I often catch Song in a gaze staring into the sunset. She’s always deep in thought. I don’t disturb her. I know that place well. She’s so beautiful, so full of life, and yet somewhere behind her eyes rest heavy burdens. Bright eyes that were tired. Eyes that saw so many things, eyes that were robbed of innocence, youth stolen. Eyes strained from searching for hope. Hope deferred makes one weary. When you’re a small child, it’s so easy to dream. Children dream with no inhibitions or fear.
At age seven Song aspired to become a jockey and a veterinarian. She lived in a small country town, Gwendolyn, in California, about an hour away from Oakland. Song told her father she wanted to be a jockey, so he decided to get her riding lessons. He had a friend in Woodland who owned a ranch. Her name was Judy Kamecheeyak. She was a short, stocky Caucasian woman with short hair and wide hips. She used to be a professional jockey and fell in love with Song’s aspirations to one day do the same. Song immediately fell in love with a horse named Dealer Devil. He was an Arabian Appaloosa, all white, with black spots shaped like Mickey Mouse’s face. Ms. Judy taught Song how to care for Dealer. Song changed his last name to Edwards to match hers. With the help of her father, she built a stable for the horse in the backyard of their home. Dealer became her best friend. He was her happiness, her escape. When she rode him, her nightmares vanished. Over the years, he became her comfort. He listened to all her secrets.
Song’s father was a minister and had eight daughters. Two children with Song’s mother, and four from his second marriage. Song and her sister Spirit were the only siblings who shared both parents. The other two daughters were conceived during her mother’s hippie days before settling down. The other children were envious of the relationship the Hawaiian-featured, silky-haired, free-spirited children shared. Their mother was a beautiful woman and her daughters took after her strong features. Her hair was long, below her behind, full and curly. She was Hawaiian and black, skin brown, kissed with the sun, possessing the perfect glow. She was a singer with an operatic voice, which is the inspiration behind Song’s name. Her father was a heavyset man, had joy in his eyes, long curly hair with high cheekbones, and a loving smile. The couple were hippies when they met in Hawaii. He found his free-spirited wife dancing naked on a beach and brought her back to California. After years of love, trials, and testing, her father found Jesus and started a church in West Oakland.
The couple purchased a home together in West Oakland’s budding community. It was a beautiful Victorian two-story home, and Song and her sibling were born there. All her mother’s children were gifted with some type of musical ability, but Song was different. She told me about a time when she was driving in the car with her mother and her mother’s best friend. It was a perfect summer day, and her mom’s best friend just got a new red drop-top. The oldest of her mom’s two children were in summer school, so Song and her little sister Spirit got to go along for the ride.
“I always knew I could sing,” Song reflected. “But that day I fell in love with song. Mariah Carrey was blasting on the stereo. I think it was called “You Will Always Be My Baby” or something like that. I loved that song, and the notes belted out of me and took me to a place I never realized existed.
“My mother must have realized it as well, because as I sang she watched me in silence through the rearview mirror, like she had discovered something as well for the first time.”
After that day, her mother began teaching Song how to play the guitar. The children and their mother led the choir at church. One child on the drums, another on the piano, one on bass, and Song was the soloist. Spirit sang as well but she was mainly a poet. Some Sundays, their father would allow her to recite one of her poems while Song played the guitar. Those were the good days, when life was simple and innocent.
Just a couple months after Song’s twelfth birthday, her mother suffered a brain aneurism and passed away. Her father was devastated. The girls were devastated. The church was devastated. The sweet worship music was replaced with silence. Because the death was so sudden and unexpected, it placed a lot of pressure on their father. He was left to raise four daughters alone while maintaining a growing church. At the time of her death, the ministry was blooming. A school was developed, and the property was purchased. The church fed the community five days a week, gave away resources, and held an after-school program. The church took up the majority of their father’s time and left an opportunity for many things to go unnoticed.
One evening during a church meeting, the elders sat in the sanctuary while the children played outside.
“Little Sally Walker walking down the street….” The girls chanted the old school rhyme while another group turned double-Dutch ropes. The interchanging ropes hitting the ground created a perfect upbeat to the balls bouncing against the cement from the boys playing hoop.
“I’ll be back, Spirit, I have to use it.” Song’s voice traveled in the wind while she ran off quickly to the restroom.
Spirit waved her hands, halfway listening while writing in her notebook.
“Thank you, Jesus, I made it!” Song let out a sigh of relief as she relieved herself in the stall.
She didn’t even hear the sound of footsteps entering in the restroom.
When she opened the stall, three boys pushed her back in and began groping her body.
She became stiff as a board, her eyes glancing to the bathroom entrance where she spotted another teenage boy guarding the door.
She tried to scream, but the fear robbed her of the ability to speak.
Thoughts began racing in her mind. My daddy! She thought. Shame instantly covered her entire body, and a deeper level of paralysis crept over her.
In between her panicked thoughts, she felt one of the boys kiss her neck and she was able to whisper, “Please, stop.”
“Come on, somebody’s coming!” the door guardian yelled, and instantly the boys ran out of the stall, but not before one looked her in the eyes and commanded her not to say anything or else they would tell her father.
Song was a quiet girl. Pretty much low-key. The loudest she would get would be when she was signing. She was beautiful and didn’t know it. Often you would catch her looking down. She didn’t like to dress up much, her normal uniform consisting of Levi’s and a hoodie. Even though her hair was beautiful, she kept it wrapped up in a bun. She loved her daddy. She would sit with him and listen to his wisdom for hours. Spirit was more of a flowerchild like her mother. She was the radical. Hair wild and free. Always had something to say. Small in stature, but spirit loud and booming. Leather jacket, red leather skirt, Jordan threes, and African earrings dangling from her ears, first in the air marching to the beat of her own drum. She didn’t have much time to sit and listen to wisdom: she was busy living. The girls always stayed close, but Song was often home alone. Her other older sisters were college age by this time and out of the house. Her father was busy ministering, so Song had her mother’s guitar, her horse, and her sorrows she buried deep down.
When her mother was living, Song could remember singing in front of the congregation and locking eyes with a woman sitting in the front row. She’d always be sitting in the front row. She would stare at her father that got the child’s attention. When Song was thirteen, her father married this woman. At first she seemed wonderful. Spirit wasn’t very fond of her, but Song was excited to have a companion in the house, someone to look up to. The first few months of the marriage went smoothly, but things began to shift after that. She convinced Reverend to sell Dealer. Up until that point, Song pretty much made it through the turmoil she had to face through her friendship with the horse. He represented her childhood, her innocence, something pure.
The stepmother got pregnant and over the years ended up having four children of her own. She was abusive verbally, physically, and emotionally to Song and Spirit. She would pull the girls by their hair and call them out of their name. Spirit rebelled, but Song endured quietly. Spirit would try to tell their father, but between church business and trying to pay the mortgage, he rarely listened. The stepmother would spin the story and paint Spirit in a bad light. At this point, the two were in high school and Spirit wasn’t doing very well. She frequently skipped class and snuck out of the house, so it wasn’t so farfetched to think she was making the stories up. The constant fighting going on in the house was too much for their father to bear, so at age fifteen, Spirit was sent to Hawaii to live with relatives.
With Dealer gone and now Spirit, who not only represented strength but also a voice, Song fell into depression. She was seventeen at the time, and her step- mother started bringing up concerns about her not being interested in boys. “What are you, gay?” She would taunt Song daily, commenting on her clothes and her lack of interest in the opposite sex. After the bathroom incident, a few other similar incidents took place throughout the years, but she never spoke of them. Song had been molested by both men and women as a young girl. It haunted her. It made her numb. She was lost inside of herself, no voice. No way out.
Due to the fear her stepmother planted, her father decided to arrange Song’s marriage with another young man—the son of one of her father’s friends in ministry from another church. The couple were married at twenty. Song walked down the aisle numb. She cried during her first sexual encounter with her young husband. At the time, he was actually interested in another girl who attended his church. They were both young, afraid, and confused. In the midst of this, they had two beautiful babies. Their first was a healthy baby girl, Lyric, followed by a son they named Tyme. The young family lived at home with Song’s father and stepmother. The house was crowded and tensions were high.
All of their mother’s pictures were removed from the house. Even the sight of a picture made the stepmother jealous. She was a very demanding and controlling woman. Song would stare at the six-foot, slim, fair-complexioned woman, fixated on her beauty. She could never figure out how someone so beautiful could be so insecure. Everything had to be her way. She never cooked or cleaned the house. That was Song’s job. All she did was complain and shop. Her hair was always done: every week she had a hair appointment. Every two weeks were for her nails. She had a matching outfit every Sunday, with hat to match. If she ever caught Song asking her father for money to help with her children, she would give her the sharpest stare. She did not attend Bible study, however, or sing any songs. She didn’t participate in service at all for that matter.
The ministry began to suffer, and money would be missing. Song’s father ended up taking a lien on the family home to keep the doors of the church open. Although his eyes were still bright, you could see the pressure lying behind the sparkle. One evening, he went to the church to finish up some paperwork and walked in on his wife and one of his most trusted deacons in his office sleeping together. It was also discovered that this same deacon was embezzling the church’s money.
The scandal spread throughout the church and opinions were formed. Astonishingly, Reverend wanted to try to work things out with his second wife, mainly for his four small children, but the stepmother refused. She was looking for a way out of the crowed house, and decided to take her girls and filed for divorce, moving in with the deacon. Years late, they went on to start their own ministry. The stress from the turn of events weighed heavily on the reverend and he suffered a series of heart attacks, eventually passing away. Song was twenty- one at the time.
Although she had been through a lot up until this point, she didn’t know how to do much other than be a mother. Her husband worked and paid all of the bills. He handled all of the finances and actually was not home much. When her father passed, the couple struggled to make the mortgage payments but ended up losing the home. The couple didn’t really know each other, didn’t really know themselves, for that matter. The pressure was too much for the young father, and like most young men who don’t yet know themselves, he ran away. One day Song came home from the grocery store, Tyme on her hip and Lyric by her side, and waited for her husband to come to the soon-to-be foreclosed property. She waited for days but he never showed up. She called his phone and the number had been disconnected. She sat in the dark, in shock, wondering what she would do. Her panic was interrupted with the sound of Tyme’s cry. Her children kept her sane. Up until that point, she didn’t have much of a relationship with Jesus besides church and music.
Secretly, she always thought God couldn’t have been much help looking over her life up ‘til then. That night, though, sitting in the dark, no light because PG&E had turned off the power, she whispered, “Oh, God, please help me. What am I going to do?”
She prayed through the night, and the next morning decided she would ask church members if they could help her, or at least let her family stay with them until she found somewhere to go. Her desperation was met with judgment. She ended up moving into a homeless shelter for women. That’s where she met Ma ma.