As Raye became the in-house authority on manufacturing technology and became more involved with ship design, she met a man named James Parrott, a manager in the weapons systems division of the Naval Ship Engineering Center.
“One of the guys, an engineer, knew him and said both of us were at the top of the line in the command, so he thought we’d be good with each other,” Raye said. “I didn’t date people with whom I worked, but this guy sang his praises and so I met him. I worked with the wife of the guy who was trying to set me up with James, and I told her to make sure this guy wasn’t married.”
Raye’s coworker told her James was married, but in the process of getting a divorce from his wife Mabel.
Raye decided to give James a chance, and he took her to the theater for their first date. A week later, James called Raye and told her that he was going to California, and he wanted to see if she could drive him to the airport. She told him she would. James had a brand-new Lincoln Continental, and when he got to the airport, he gave Raye his credit card so she could fill up the car with gas.
“When it came time for him to come back from California, I went back to the airport to pick him up, and he told me the car was mine,” Raye said. “I told him I couldn’t accept the car. He had not held me. He had not kissed me. Nothing. I didn’t consider myself going with him. So I said, ‘Just like that, you’re going to give me a car?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you like it?” I had two cars already. I had one car, and my mother had another. But he was insistent and I said OK.”
Raye had been staying home with her son, David, who had chicken pox. While she was taking care of him, James asked to come by for a visit. It was near Valentine’s Day, but Raye told him she didn’t date during the week. Again, he was insistent, and he brought her a card that said, “If you decide you don’t want to be my Valentine, would you at least do me one favor …” on the outside, and “Marry Me” on the inside.
“I told him I didn’t like him and didn’t want to be with him and didn’t even know him,” Raye said. “I told him he had to be crazy. But he said he loved me. Next thing I know, he’s got David, who was six years old at the time, in his arms. David’s grinning. I said I can’t do that. My mother was entertaining her bridge group downstairs and James went downstairs to ask her for my hand in marriage. My mother told him, ‘Raye doesn’t love you, and you don’t want to marry her, because she’s not going to let you manage her money. And you’re not going to change her. What you see is what you get. She can’t cook. She can’t keep house. She is strong-willed. You do not want to marry her.’ He came back to me, and he said, ‘You married everybody else and you’ve been hurt. Maybe you should let somebody love you for a change.’”
Raye stood firm and said no. But James was undaunted. He asked again, and Raye told him she didn’t want a wedding or reception, but a ring and a piece of paper.
“What kind of ring?” he asked her.
Raye told him she loved diamonds and had lots of them, but she always wanted a two-carat solitaire.
“If you can’t get that, forget it,” she said. Raye said she believed she was raising a bar that James couldn’t possibly clear. But he took Raye, Flossie, and David to a jewelry store and told her to pick a diamond, any diamond.
“I looked in the case and told him which stone I wanted. They took it back and reset it in a Tiffany setting, and then James put it on my hand,” Raye said. “He said he was sorry because it wasn’t exactly two carats. It was two and a quarter.”
James not only wouldn’t take no for an answer, he also wouldn’t honor Raye’s desire not to have a formal ceremony. He arranged for a wedding at the Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Completed in 1540, the coral limestone edifice is the oldest cathedral in the Americas, and, at the time, was said to house some of Christopher Columbus’s remains. It was a colonial showstopper, full of dark mahogany, silver, and jewels, and it was designed to convey that the Spanish were there to stay in the New World. But would James be there to stay in Raye’s life? That was the question. He was doing everything he could to whisk her away and sweep her off her feet. Yet, here he was, doing his damnedest, on an island that held the belief that anything bearing the name Columbus was cursed. James would tie the knot in a church that held the explorer’s bones, but he would reserve a luxury hotel suite that overlooked the sea, perhaps in hopes that he and Raye could look out over the horizon and see a beautiful new future, instead of doom. The morning after her wedding, Raye called her mother to let her know that she and James were husband and wife.
“She told me to enjoy it for as long as it lasts, because it wouldn’t last,” Raye said.
Six months later, Raye would have James committed to a mental institution. “I asked the psychiatrist what I did to him, because I had only been married to him for six months,” Raye said. “He told me I didn’t do anything; James had something coming on for years.”
According to Raye, James had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. It can involve delusions, hallucinations, problematic thinking, and behaviors that harm daily functioning. James had been obsessed with Raye for years, and had pinned up pictures of her everywhere that he could. According to the psychiatrist, James believed that if he associated with Raye, then her successes would rub off on him.
“I had no idea,” Raye said. “But the doctor told me again that it wasn’t my fault. I recalled one day after we married, that one of the navy captains went up to James and said, ‘So you’re the one who married Raye. You better treat her right, or else you’re going to have to answer to the navy.’ I think that sent him off the deep end.”
Raye plunged into work once again. She enrolled in ship design courses, though she never went to engineering school. Raye’s successes roiled James when he came home after a month in the mental hospital. Then Raye discovered that James had been seeing his previous wife, who had given him a lot of money after their divorce. This windfall was how he flew Raye to the Caribbean for a posh wedding and honeymoon. When those funds dried up, James focused on how he could spend Raye’s income. He tried to buy an expensive car in Raye’s name, attempted to get Raye’s name removed from their shared accounts, and endeavored to change the beneficiary of her life insurance policy from her son, David, to him.
Given the situation, Raye said she grew afraid for herself, David, and Flossie. James left, and David later said that he wasn’t sure whether James left without putting up a fight, or whether it was a restraining order that kept him away. But once he was gone, Raye changed all the locks on the house—“It was my house, that I had bought before I met him”—and filed for divorce.
Both parties finally appeared in front of lawyers in Prince George’s County, Maryland, about divorcing and dividing their property on August 26, 1980.
In Raye’s deposition, she said that she and James married on May 11, 1973, the day after his divorce from his previous wife, Mabel, was final. Raye had met James three months earlier at work, and he began asking her to marry him two weeks after that. At the time, Raye said, James told her that he was separated from his wife and in the process of getting a divorce. Raye said she never knew for a fact whether James was separated from his wife, but she did agree to marry him a month after they first met. They began living together in March or April of 1973, in the house Raye jointly owned with her mother in Hyattsville, Maryland. Parrott’s grown son lived with them for two months and celebrated his twenty-first birthday with them at the house. Raye baked a cake and threw a small party for him, she said, because he told her he had never had one.
“I was trying to be a good mother,” she said.
James, meanwhile, said that Raye treated his son poorly and could not provide him with suitable accommodations. He said that she pressured him to adopt her son, David, who was then six years old. Raye disputed that, saying that it was James who wanted to adopt David so that they could all share the same last name. She said James began the paperwork but never finalized it.
Just as there was disagreement about what James’s intentions with David were, there were also conflicting accounts about whether Raye gave James a gilded diamond ring that once belonged to David’s father. Raye told attorneys it was a loan, and that the ring was meant for her son when he grew older. James said that Raye told him that after his death, the ring should be returned to her son. James had done work on it, he said, and even though he wanted to divorce Raye, he intended to keep the ring.
Both sides battled about gifts given and taken away, and thousands of dollars that Raye believed James took and that he believed belonged to him. That money belonged to her aunt and uncle, Raye said, a promise she made to them about investing in their liquor store in Little Rock. James took the $5,000 that Raye had promised her family, transferred it to an account in his name, then withdrew the cash and closed the account.
“That money belonged to me,” James said.
“How could it belong to you if your wife deposited it in the account?” one of the attorneys asked.
James couldn’t answer the question.
Raye pointed out that James had retired from the US Navy on psychiatric disability, and that he could be moody, difficult, and hostile without justification.
“First he wanted everyone to have full family meals together,” she said. “Then he wanted no part of it. He would come downstairs at two or three in the morning, cook a meal, and then leave the kitchen dirty.”
James acknowledged that he had an “equilibrium problem,” but he attributed the collapse of their marriage to “problems of relating to one another that ended up in dissent and arguments.” He said his ex-wife, Mabel, had taken care of his father and son while he was married to Raye. Then on August 11, 1974, James had told Raye he was going to spend a little bit of time on a cattle and pig farm he owned. According to Raye, he never returned, but she continued paying his automobile policy for the next few years, because their finances were so tangled at the time of his departure. In the meantime, James said that although it was not his intention to get back together with his ex-wife, Mabel, he was currently living under her roof, and had been for the past few years. When the divorce was finalized, James agreed to pay Raye the $5,000 he took from her. He also returned Dave Montague’s ring.
“Mom always felt bad that she had three failed marriages,” David said. “But it was not her fault that [James] had issues with her. He thought he needed to be the successful one. He was in good position, but he felt like he was second fiddle. The advice I’ve heard her give other women, especially women of color, is that a lot of men of color have issues with women being more successful. It takes a special person to be cool with a woman’s success.”
After Raye and James fought over the investment in her aunt and uncle’s liquor store, Raye became a silent partner in the business. David recalls going down to Little Rock with his mother to visit family, and he would be put to work stocking candy and doing inventory in the store. “My great uncle ran that store until he couldn’t,” David said. “My mom’s involvement in the store was how she was able as a single parent to send me to college and put some money away for herself. A lot of people were always curious about that, but she never told anybody what she was doing for years.”
Raye was committed to her family, and David saw her loyalty to them growing up. It’s a loyalty that he harbors to this day. Still, he said he looked around at other families in his neighborhood and saw people who seemed to have strong marriages. He said he wouldn’t know what a real father-son relationship should be until later in life. Like Flossie, Raye was discreet about her romantic life, especially with David. That was easy to do when David was younger, but as he grew older, David began understanding that some of the men who visited his mother at home were her boyfriends.
“Sometimes it was difficult for me, because I didn’t understand why she was going out with this person,” he said. “I knew she liked going dancing and to fancy parties, so I know that part of this was that she wanted someone to go with her.”
One of the men who stepped into Raye’s life after her divorce from James was George Brown, a former air force police officer who got a mailroom job with the US Navy after he was discharged. Brown learned nautical drafting at night and was hired by the navy as a draftsman a few years later. That’s when good things started to happen for him, he said. The navy sent him to classes, he was promoted to electronics technician and, after that, program manager. Then he met Raye Montague, who was a program manager, too.
“She was in another division, but because of my ability with drafting and other matters, she was always asking me questions,” Brown said. “That’s how we became close.”
Brown was responsible for giving parameters for interior communications and navigation on ships. Raye took those parameters and put them in the computer to create a ship design. If she wasn’t sure about something with the design, she’d catch people in the hall and ask them questions, Brown said.
“She was a strong individual,” Brown said. “I’ve never met anyone in my life that strong, and that would include my mother and father. If she made up her mind to do something, there wasn’t anything or anybody that was going to stop her. That’s my whole concept of Raye. She was inspirational, too. I don’t care what your job was, she was always with you, improving you in some way or another.”
Brown said “the racial issue was always there” in the office, and the few Black employees that worked there were very close. “As a group, we worked through it by helping each other and holding each other to a standard,” he said. “You always had to be a little bit above average to get any recognition. As a group, we supported one another to make it through it. All of us had to compare notes about what was going on around us so we could be sure of what was really going on. It could be isolating, but Raye just led us. She was like the Pied Piper.”
Brown had also been through a divorce by the time he and Raye met. Although their relationship began on friendly, professional terms, in time it developed into something more. Brown said at some point “it felt like I had been knowing her all my life.” Maybe the sparks flew at a Christmas party, maybe it was at a meeting. Whatever it was, they began spending time together outside of work.
“In every way, she made my life a lot better,” Brown said. “She was a beautiful woman, bright and fun. If we had gotten married, I probably would have ended up being a doctor.”
Brown said he and Raye had discussed marriage at one point, but because of their previous experiences, they didn’t want to take that chance again. They got along well, had fun together, and maintained what would become a close friendship over time. Although David said it could be difficult for him to tell when his mother was dating someone, Brown became a kind and gentle presence in his life, occasionally taking him to school events as a father might.
After David finished sixth grade, Raye enrolled him in St. John’s Military Academy, where he was accepted because of his high test scores. A neighbor boy drove David to school for a little while, but then stopped, “because I guess he thought it would bring his cool factor down to be seen with me,” David said.
Or it could have been that the neighbor’s German shepherd charged at David one day, knocked him down the front steps of the family’s home, and then bit him on the face. “I tried to fight him off, but a neighbor had to help me,” David said. “I had teeth marks on my head for a while after that. They had to have the dog tested for rabies, and then I never saw the dog again. I don’t know if they had him put to sleep or what. After that, the neighbor didn’t drive me to school anymore.”
By ninth grade, David was unhappy at the military academy. His teachers told him and Raye that he was not college material. “I said, ‘What do you mean he’s not college material?’” she said. “‘He scored ninety-fifth percentile when I brought him here. What have you done to him in three years that he’s not college material?’”
According to David, St John’s had a history of telling people from single parent households, most of whom were Black, that they weren’t qualified to go to traditional colleges. The school then told these students that they should go to a vocational school, a community college, or not go to college at all.
David said he did have a problem remembering when assignments were due, and he knew he wasn’t the best student. He also knew he had terrible handwriting, so for one report assignment, he decided he would type it instead. When he turned it in, his teacher gave him and F and sent him to the principal’s office.
“I didn’t know why they sent me there, but then they told me I had been cheating,” he said. “So they called my mother at work and she told them she’d be right there. They accused me of not being capable of typing my reports,” he said. “But my mom had a Smith Corona typewriter at home, and I would get up super early to type my reports. She would see me doing it, because she was getting ready for work as I was trying to crank out the last part.”
David said his mother listened to the principal as he sat there disbelieving “I remember her looking down for a second and then asking, ‘Did y’all ask him if he typed his reports?’ They told her no, but then they said I hadn’t demonstrated that capability before. So she said, ‘Yeah, well did you ask him?’ They said no again. So she said ‘Well, ask him.’”
Raye was at an impasse with the principal. “She said, ‘Well what kind of typewriter does your secretary have?’” David said. “The secretary was right there and said she had a Smith Corona. I told her that was the same type of typewriter I used at home. They were surprised that we had one. Mom told them she brought it home from work, because it was just like the one she had the office. Then, she looked around, grabbed a piece of paper, and told me to go over to the typewriter and type.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” the principal asked Raye.
“You accused my son of cheating, so he’s going to go over there and show you that he actually knows what he’s talking about,” Raye said.
David went to the typewriter and typed. The principal apologized. And then Raye told them she was taking David out of the school.
Raye took David to the Kingsbury Testing Center. On the way there, she told David that she knew he was smart, and that’s why she was taking him to see some people who would test him because she didn’t believe what the people at St John’s said about him. She told him if he did have a problem, they would deal with it. But there was no way they were ignoring it.
“I told the people at the testing center that if I was pushing him too much to let me know,” Raye said. “But if there’s nothing wrong with him, I’m gonna keep my foot in his behind and put him in all the right schools. They had him in there for two hours writing essays, doing math problems, everything. He did fine. St John’s tried to destroy that boy, because they knew he was going to be a leader.”
David said he remembers scoring high in several areas that day, but he discovered that he had a problem paying attention because he was interested in a lot of different things. “Paying attention to a lot of different projects seemed like a normal thing to me, rather than focusing on one,” David said. “They told my mom that I would probably have a hard time figuring out what I wanted to focus on and that it would be frustrating for a while. They were right. I don’t remember what I did for the next few days, but my mom found small private high school called Cromwell Academy, and that was the best thing I think she had ever done for me. It was a much more nurturing environment where I could be myself.”
As a teenager, being himself meant a growing interest in girls.
“David was young and silly at the time,” Brown said. “He would get into little things with some of the neighborhood kids, little aggravating things that they’d wind up laughing about at some point. And I seem to recall that eventually there was this one young lady that was leading him in the wrong direction.”
David said the girl in question went to the Duke Ellington Performing Arts School. She was very talented and very beautiful, so the duo spent a lot of time together. “One night I went with my mom and grandmother to support her at this fashion show she was in,” David said. “I remember we were walking toward the building where the event was and [this girl’s] mom was in front of us. So her mom and my mom start talking and somehow the conversation heads into them talking about how we were spending a lot of time together. I don’t know what led up to what, but her mom said, ‘Just make sure your son doesn’t get my girl pregnant,’ and then my mom said, ‘Well you need to tell your daughter to make sure she isn’t screwing without a rubber.’”
The two moms started arguing, and David said he couldn’t bear to look at his grandmother because he knew she had to be mortified by the exchange. The girlfriend’s mother spoke ill of David, and then said she had to be more careful about who she let in her house. She was always talking about the nice things she had, from her house to her Cadillac and other possessions, and David said he didn’t understand how she had all of those things because she was a single mom and he never saw her working, especially the way his mother did.
“She was always at the house, eating, all the time,” David said. “She would send us out to get her food. I don’t know whether she had an inheritance, or what. And I didn’t ask. But I knew something wasn’t right. She was focused on stuff and people taking advantage of her. I remember my mother telling her, ‘We have our own stuff. We don’t need your stuff. If you’re going to be this way about your stuff, then don’t let David in your house.’”
Like a mother lioness, Raye protected her boy. No one was going to villainize him, no matter how hard they tried. Then again, as David began dating, she also wanted to be sure he didn’t make the same mistakes in love that she did. After the inter-mama skirmish, David’s relationship with this girl continued for a little while longer, but eventually things petered out, as most teenage love affairs do.
“When I was dating, especially as I got older, Mom talked to me about being sure someone was ‘the one,’” David said. “She probably envisioned me trying, and trying, and trying again, just like she did.”
On the other hand, she had to respect a young man who continued to try, whether it was romantically or academically. Raye herself had spent a lifetime of trying, always with her mother’s support, no matter the outcome. It’s little wonder that, in gratitude, she supported the people and places that nurtured David as he came into his own. She donated her time and money to the Cromwell Academy because it welcomed David and empowered him to become who he was meant to be. “She even wound up being the speaker at my graduation,” David said. David excelled at Cromwell, and because his graduating class was so small, he was able to speak at his graduation too.
“[David’s] father and grandmother from the other side showed up at his graduation,” Raye said. “None of them had ever played a part in his life. David got up to speak and he said, ‘I wanted to thank my mother and grandmother who made everything possible for me.’ And that whole side of the family is setting there, and I never told him to say that.”
At the time, Dave was living in a housing project, and Raye would put together care packages full of food and ask David to deliver them to him. He had fallen on hard times, and as empathetic as David tried to be about that, it was difficult given his father’s lack of involvement in his life. David’s half-sister Debra said she dropped Dave off at his graduation, and Raye wanted to know why she wouldn’t just come in. Debra said she could not be in her father’s presence. He was just too hard to get along with, and so she left. Raye had purchased David a brand-new Volkswagen Scirocco for graduation, and Dave wanted to go for a ride in it once he saw it.
“Dave was down on his luck, but he didn’t support David,” Raye said. “He was going from woman to woman, making good money but fanning it out to everyone. So he had nothing, and he wanted to ride in David’s car. David took him to a bus line and the rest of us rode home in my car. But his father should have gotten him that car. He’d done nothing else for him. I paid cash for the car because it was what David wanted.”
Thinking about Dave’s absence in her son’s life, Raye got angry that David took his father for a ride in the new car. “Normally I didn’t let things bother me,” Raye said. “But when David came in, I said, ‘What’d your daddy give you for graduation?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘You mean he didn’t give you a car or anything?’ And David said, ‘Well, Mom, you know his health hasn’t been too good.’”
Despite being forgiving in this instance, David habitually referred to Dave as his “sperm donor,” which upset Raye. “He would say that, and I would say, ‘Well I loved your father very much, and he loved me…. God sent you what you needed David, even if the devil had to bring it,’” Raye said. “‘I could have married someone else and had a child, but it wouldn’t be you. I thank him for you. You are very special.’”
It is certain that David felt the same way about his mother. As for Dave, the sicker he got, the more people abandoned him, including his girlfriend at the time. But no matter their history, Raye did not turn her back on him.