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My mother’s older brother, Bill Bodkin, moved into an apartment on 107th Street and Central Park West. This was before he met his lifelong partner, Karlo Heinz Nicholl. At the time, he lived with my godmother, Esme, a lesbian, though that was never discussed—not because it was off-limits but because it wasn’t that interesting. In my family, you were who you were, and you were loved and accepted because you were that person.
However, their building was a topic of conversation. Jazz pianist Hazel Scott lived next door to them, and singer Sarah Vaughan had a place in their building.
One time when I was waiting for the elevator, the doors opened and there stood Sarah Vaughan. I recognized her immediately. She was already recording with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and was someone we listened to on the radio. I wanted so badly to say hello and tell her that I was a fan, but I was too shy to utter a single word.
My uncle Bill was a gifted singer and musician in his own right. At that time, he was singing with the New York Little Symphony at Carnegie Chambers Hall. I was in awe of the way he would sit down at the piano in our living room and entertain us, singing one song after another and telling stories in between. He had studied opera in Italy and had the personality to entertain. He spent most of his adult life playing piano and singing on the European hotel circuit, and making a good living at it.
Sometimes my mother sang with him. Her clear, lyrical soprano singing voice filled the room. The two of them smiled at each other as they harmonized, traded lines, and laughed if one of them lost their place or suddenly pretended to get too carried away. Singing brought out sides to her that we didn’t ordinarily see all at once—playful, serious, romantic, sassy. It depended on the song. Like my uncle, she was a great natural performer.
One night Uncle Bill brought his celebrated voice teacher, Madame Grete Stückgold, to our apartment for dinner. That was an interesting evening.
Madame Stückgold was a renowned soprano who’d made her American debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1927, after moving from her native Germany, where she first made a name for herself singing with the Berlin State Opera. Calling Madame Stückgold a strong personality doesn’t do justice to her. She entered our house with the air of royalty, which my uncle indulged out of the immense respect he had for her. All of us were intimidated by her—except for one person. The Queen Dowager. My grandmother.
The tension between the two women was apparent as we sat down at the dinner table. Madame Stückgold, stiff and formal, sat on one side of the table. Grandmommy took her place on the other side of the table. I kept waiting for Grandmommy to slip into the kitchen and call upon her West Indian obeah or voodoo to solve the situation. I’d seen her do it before. If someone she didn’t care for came into the house, she would slip into the kitchen, pour salt on the whisk broom, and turn it upside down. It was a spell to get unwanted guests to leave—and it seemed to work.
Madame Grete Stückgold, the great British American opera star and teacher
But she spared Madame Stückgold. Grandmommy was in her own home, and there was no question who was in charge. Her kindness and manners were relentless. If smiles and politeness could kill, the world would have been minus one voice teacher. At the end of the night, the tiny West Indian woman whose name was Annette Lewis Bodkin—or Miss Nellie, as everyone referred to her—left no doubt that she was an impressive, and if need be, intimidating, woman who commanded respect.
A Victorian beauty, Grandmommy was one of four sisters and a brother born and raised in a refined, upper-class household in Montserrat, a lush, mountainous island in the West Indies. In her day, young ladies going into the city of Plymouth for church services and music lessons wore white blouses and long white skirts. Once married, they switched to black skirts to indicate their change in relationship status.
To the dismay of her family, Miss Nellie fell in love with a handsome, dark-skinned man from a lower class. His name was Patrick Bodkin, and though he was poor, he had an innate sense of style and expensive taste. People called him Black Diamond Jim. “He was beautiful, with skin like black velvet,” my grandmother often said, before glancing at my father, who, as I mentioned earlier, was too light-skinned for her taste.
We had to laugh—and we did—because through her affection for Patrick Bodkin, my grandmother was being rebellious. Her mother was a regal Victorian beauty, and very light-skinned. “She looked like a white woman,” my grandmother said. Her family was as conscious of color as they were of status. My grandmother’s brother was a successful diamond merchant. They were upper-class.
Patrick Bodkin was surely not. He may have been beautiful, but he did not come from a family of means, and before Miss Nellie’s mother would allow him to marry her daughter, she wanted him to prove that he could provide for her. So, off went Patrick Bodkin to work on the Panama Canal, which was then under construction so ships could pass between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without having to go around South America and Cape Horn.
My loving and proper grandmother, Mrs. Bodkin
By 1910, he had earned enough money to marry my grandmother. Soon after, they immigrated to New York. My grandmother, then twenty-two, entered through Ellis Island, like nearly one million other new U.S. immigrants that year. Most of those people were white-skinned Europeans, but a small, overlooked—if not forgotten—percentage of them had dark skin, like my grandparents.
Back then, nearly everyone came from someplace else. Three-quarters of New York’s population was first- or second-generation immigrants. My grandfather became a U.S. citizen. My grandmother, though, remained a British subject, loyal to the monarchy, of which she could have been a member herself.
My grandfather, influenced by Marcus Garvey’s call for Black economic independence, opened a grocery store on East 133rd Street, and he and my grandmother lived behind it and saved their money. Within a few years, my grandfather acquired a shoe factory on Seventh Avenue. He specialized in shoes for women with small feet and men with extra-large feet and sold them to Wanamaker’s department store.
The business prospered, and they moved into an apartment on East 133rd and had three children: a daughter, Sylvia; a son, William (my uncle Bill); and my mother, Loretta, who was born in January 1916. In the 1920s, Patrick Bodkin, eager to earn more money to support his family, became a banker in a new game referred to as “the lottery.” It wasn’t the lottery as we know it today. The Cubans controlled it locally, but they let my grandfather work his neighborhood, like a franchisee. Miss Nellie was against the game because it involved gambling, but the money he brought home provided luxuries, like violin and piano lessons for my mother and her siblings, and even a chauffeur who drove them to school.
The family’s affluence ended abruptly, though, in the fall of 1932 when the notorious gangster Dutch Schultz moved into the area with his all-Black Blue Gang and forced the Cubans and Patrick Bodkin out of the lottery. Schultz recognized the profit potential of the game in Harlem and turned it into the numbers racket. Risking his life, my grandfather pushed back against the notorious gangster. If he was going to lose his stake in the business, he wanted to at least ensure his family’s safety.
That took guts. From what I heard about my grandfather, though, he did things like that, and as a result, he not only left that meeting with his life and a guarantee of protection for his family, but he also left with Schultz’s respect. The ruthless mobster issued a hands-off edict where Patrick Bodkin and his family were concerned.
Unfortunately, the reality of the Depression eventually caught up with Patrick Bodkin and family, and like so many others at the time, their comfortable lifestyle suffered a dramatic turnaround. The change in fortune weighed heavily on Patrick Bodkin, who, perhaps done in by his relentless effort to find a way back into business and prosperity, suffered a massive heart attack and died.
He left behind a safe, and many years later we hired a locksmith to open it. By then I was a teenager, and naturally I had visions of finding treasure that would make us rich. It was probably the same dream my grandfather had when he purchased the stocks we found inside the safe. He thought they’d make him rich. However, they were worthless; the companies had gone under during the Depression. What I did find of enormous value, though, especially as I got older, was the idea that my grandfather, Patrick Bodkin, was investing in a dream of a better life for his family.
He was a businessman, an entrepreneur, a family man, a dreamer, a futurist. And part of that was in me.
Now as for my mother, let me tell you a little bit about Loretta Bodkin. As I mentioned earlier, she was one of three siblings. Her sister, Sylvia, married, had two boys, and worked at Macy’s. Her brother, Bill, as I also mentioned, was a musical prodigy who played the violin beautifully at age four, dropped out of New York University, and toured with various music groups before spending most of his time in Europe. As the youngest and closest to her mother, Loretta stayed with Miss Nellie and they moved to the apartment on 110th Street.
When I look at pictures of my mother from that time, I see an all-American girl. She was pretty, talented, and athletic. She could look like a tomboy or strike a pose like a glamorous movie star. Her eyes sparkled and her dimples framed a smile that I have always thought belonged on the big screen. Or on the concert stage like her brother. When her girlfriend Lena Horne got a job dancing at the Cotton Club in Harlem, my mother saw a way into show business and tried the same thing.
My beautiful mother, Loretta, in her late teens
After school, she rehearsed with the chorus girls at the Cotton Club. She had the build and the looks, but she lacked that seductiveness of the club’s dancers, and after three months of trying, she was told that she was too sweet and innocent to sway her hips with the allure people wanted to see at a nightclub. In short, she was too nice.
And she really was. To me, my mother was the epitome of goodness and all the caring and loving a child is fortunate to have. Everyone who knew her felt the same way. Her smile. The sparkle in her eyes. The sound of her voice. She was light, my bright light, and irresistible. In case you can’t tell, I loved her.
In 1988, I painted a picture of a man atop a spirited horse, one hand holding the reins, the other twirling a lasso behind him, with the early morning sun breaking through the night sky. Titled Tribute to the Black Cowboy and rendered in shades of purple and black, it captured a man of strength, determination, dignity, and honor, getting up before sunrise to work—a hero. It was a tribute to my father.
My son, Corey, has on numerous occasions pointed to a photograph we have of my dad wearing a suit and sitting on a bench in Central Park and said to me, “Dad, people think that you’re laid-back and cool, but it’s nothing compared to Grandpa.” I absolutely agree. My father wouldn’t have understood what it meant to be “cool,” yet he was everything that makes a man special.
His family ventured west in wagon trains and on horseback to Texas as part of the emancipation exodus after the Civil War. Far ahead of the Great Migration, they wanted to escape the prejudices of the South and homestead on the new frontier, where they believed they would be judged on merit and not their skin color. They got jobs on the ranches as cowboys and cowpunchers, herding cattle across the Great Plains to market.
My great-grandfather married a Blackfoot woman named Easter, and my grandfather Darling Williams (a sweet, unusual name for a Texas sharecropper) married a Cherokee woman named Mary Louise, whose father was Irish. This mix of genes, blood, and history is where I come from: I am not just Black or dark-skinned, I am the full spectrum of human colors, or to paraphrase Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes, as do we all.
My father, William December Williams, was the oldest of thirteen children. He was six foot two inches tall and dressed with a dapper flair that often included wearing spats over his shoes. They called him “Big Bill the City Slicker.” Predictably, he didn’t care much for life on the Texas plains and headed for New York City when he was nineteen, just before the party known as the Roaring Twenties began.
One hot summer night in 1935, Big Bill was on his way to a dance club—wearing a custom-made Ivy League suit, a homburg hat, and spats—when he spied two attractive young women, Loretta Bodkin and her girlfriend Bea. The girls were walking to the corner drugstore to buy ice cream. Bill and Bea knew each other, and he got her attention.
“Who’s your girlfriend, Bea?” he asked. “I think I’m going to marry her.”
(Remember, my mom was irresistible.)
Instead of getting them ice cream, this personable gentleman—he worked as a perfume salesman and knew how to charm—took the two attractive young women to Mike’s Bar on 143rd Street, where the Cotton Club crowd hung out, and they talked over sloe gin fizzes. Afterward, he took them to Tillie’s Chicken Shack for southern Creole fried chicken. He made sure to sit next to Loretta, and thus began their courtship.
Loretta thought Big Bill was too tall for her, since she was only a little over five feet tall herself, but Big Bill persisted, and eventually Loretta took him home to meet her mother. It didn’t go well. Miss Nellie pronounced him “an illiterate-looking piano mover.” Undaunted, Big Bill bought an engagement ring, presented it to Loretta on the rooftop of her mother’s apartment building on West 110th Street, and asked her to marry him.
Miss Nellie did not give her blessing. She wanted her daughter to marry a doctor or a lawyer, which is ironic considering the way she fell for her husband despite Patrick Bodkin’s humble background. But that was irrelevant to Miss Nellie, and therefore she was not in attendance when nineteen-year-old Loretta Bodkin wed twenty-five-year-old Bill Williams on February 29, 1936, in the chapel at St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem.
My parents on the rooftop after they got engaged, in 1935
When Miss Nellie did not invite them to live in her roomy apartment after they were husband and wife, as was common then, the newlyweds moved to an apartment in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. They adored each other. They walked in the park, listened to music, danced, and treated themselves to movies. Only one thing was missing. Loretta was lonely without her mother. When she found out she was pregnant with twins—my sister and me—she hoped the news would heal the rift with her mother. It did not.
But she didn’t give up and, in fact, came up with a plan. Six months after giving birth to my twin sister, Loretta, and me, on April 6, 1937, my mother put us into our twin baby carriage and pushed us over to Miss Nellie’s apartment, rang the doorbell, and hid down the hallway. Miss Nellie opened the door, saw two adorable little twins looking up at her, and promptly fell in love.
“Where are you?” she called to her daughter.
My mother stepped into view, and they hugged.
Then Miss Nellie ordered Big Bill to move his family into her apartment. My mother could not have been happier. She was home, and so were we.
Miss Nellie was in charge. She planned our christenings, chose our godparents, and gave us our nicknames, Sonny and Lady. I was never happier than when my mother sat on the edge of my bed at night and sang Al Jolson’s song “Sonny Boy” to me. I have a selective memory when it comes to my childhood, I think. I see it through rose-colored glasses—even those times when, after I threw a tantrum, my grandmother shook her finger at me and scolded, “God don’t want you and the Devil don’t want you.”
She was fiercely protective of me and didn’t want anyone else criticizing me except her. “Only I can talk about my Sonny,” she said.
Every year on Mother’s Day and Easter Sunday, my mother bought us new outfits and my father brought us flowers to pin to our jackets. My mother always wore a white corsage, and the rest of us had a single red flower. Miss Nellie took our picture and watched from the apartment window as we strolled across the street into Central Park, as families did back then, except I didn’t think any were as good-looking as my family.
I don’t know how that ritual of dressing up started. I enjoy remembering the excitement that filled our home on those special days as we got into our fancy clothes and posed for family photos. We were still pinning flowers on each other when Lady and I were in college. I see meaning to it now that I didn’t fully appreciate then. We got ready together. We talked. We walked in the park as a family. Lady and I adored our parents. They loved us. Family time was the best time. The photos were proof.
It helped that both my parents were good-looking people with a sharp sense of style. They had taste and sophistication. They dressed with understated simplicity and elegance. My mother and sister looked great in anything they put on; they were beauties. Daddy had his work clothes, the rugged, sturdy, and practical pants and shirts that made sense for a building’s maintenance man. Then he had the clothes he wore on weekends to social gatherings and special events. Always a suit and tie. And spats, a fashion holdover from the early twentieth century. It was my father’s way of saying to the world, “I am a man of style and sophistication.”
He loved looking sharp. “Sharp” is a word that has gone out of favor, but it meant so much back then to hear him or someone else say, “You look sharp.”
My father rarely left the house without putting on a hat. It was the final touch. In that era, poor men—and especially poor Black men—wore hats. They sent a message to the world that was important to convey: I am a man of dignity and purpose. Rockefeller has nothing on me. His collection of homburgs and fedoras hung by the front door of our apartment. Even though they were too big for me, I tried them on in front of a mirror, adjusting the tilt of the brim until I got it just right, imagining myself a younger version of my father. Hats were the mark of a gentleman, he said. I wanted to be a gentleman, too.
My father put his hat on with one hand, swiftly but with grace and assurance, and then a slight adjustment to get it just so. He taught me how to put a hat on the same way, using two fingers and a thumb, grasping the brim in a way that prevented my fingerprints from smearing the crown.
“You take your hat off in an elevator and hold it against your chest,” he said. “And Sonny, you always tip your hat to a lady.”
When my father looked at us, his eyes filled with pride. This beautiful family was the fruit of his labor and, more importantly, why he labored.
He worked several maintenance jobs at the same time. Six days a week. He could never get all the dirt out from under his fingernails no matter how hard he scrubbed them, that’s how hard he worked, and he did it without complaint. Sunday was the one day he didn’t go to work. He could have rested or done whatever he wanted to recuperate from his arduous workweek. Instead, he spent the day with us.
My mother was the same way. She worked long hours at the jewelry store. Often, in the late afternoon, I would stare out the window, trying to spot her on the sidewalk as she walked home. One time, as dusk settled over the city, I saw her confronted by two thugs who wanted her purse. She fought back, reciting Psalm 23 loud enough for me to hear, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and growing stronger and larger with each verse, until she broke away and hurried home unscathed—and with her purse!
Sunday was our family day. We always had an outing, an adventure. We walked through Central Park. We visited the zoo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or the Museum of Natural History. We drove to Jones Beach, Coney Island, Bear Mountain, or Palisades Amusement Park. Every so often when my dad was in the mood, he took me to services at the Metropolitan Baptist Church; he liked the spirited songs and sermons. On Sunday nights, he cooked dinner for family and friends. Ham, chicken, and steak. Dessert was always my mother’s butter cake, covered with thick, old-fashioned icing. To this day, it’s still the best cake I’ve ever had. And no one ever left without my father giving them a kiss on the head.
I always say my mother was my first girlfriend. I adored her. From boyhood on I knew she was a rare and special soul. I referred to her as one of God’s angels. If she wasn’t, then I was sure angels didn’t exist. Her influence on me can’t be underestimated. “When it comes to womanhood and motherhood, you have exemplified all those qualities that every child should be fortunate to have as a foundation in their life,” I wrote in a letter I sent her on Mother’s Day in 1987. “I have always felt your presence has been a major guidance carrying me to a greater destiny.”
I was coddled, spoiled, and in love. I was happiest when she took me shopping. Watching her try on hats left me starstruck. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I was her date at the movies. We were regulars at the RKO and Loew’s. We admired the older Jewish women in the neighborhood who wore their fur coats even in the summer. We took the bus to Radio City Music Hall, the subway to Broadway theaters, and we listened to classical music and opera at night on The Voice of Firestone radio show.
Uncle Billy— my mother’s brother— a talented musician who spent most of his life living and entertaining in Europe
She told me about the NBC Orchestra and described its conductors, Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski, with such vividness and respect that when kids in school said they wanted to grow up and become famous baseball players and win the World Series, I was the oddball who said I wanted to “conduct like Stokowski.” Imagine that coming from a little brown-skinned boy in a Harlem classroom. How different—and wonderful!
I never fit a mold, and perhaps that was because I was never given a mold to fit. Uncle Bill and his partner, Karlo, were my ideals of sophistication and intelligence. They brought so much affection, erudition, joy, adventure, and entertainment into our house that I never considered two men living together and in love anything other than normal; and by the time I was old enough to hear people say otherwise, theirs and everyone else’s sex life took a backseat to my own.
I laughed when Uncle Bill said he switched to piano from violin as a little boy because his sister’s piano playing was so god-awful.
“Are you talking about Mommy?” I asked.
“No, your aunt Sylvia,” he said. “Your mother’s and my sister. She didn’t play the piano. She abused it.”
I was intrigued every time Uncle Bill talked about my aunt’s atrocious piano playing and lack of musical ability, because he was the opposite. As a child, he taught himself her music. In 1944, he became what the Afro-American newspaper described as “the first colored artist” to debut with the New York Little Symphony. Two years later, he sang an aria from the Verdi opera Simon Boccanegra at Town Hall. He debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1948, and in 1951 he went to Genoa as musical director for the Katherine Dunham Dancers.
He quit after three months but stayed living in Italy—or “the land of singing,” as he described it. I remember him telling us about seeing the opera at La Scala when suddenly he began singing it, his rich, full baritone filling the kitchen. My mother and grandmother beamed with pleasure, as if they were transported to Milan. The two of them asked about his voice lessons with Aureliano Pertile and Rosetta Pampanini. I just wanted to hear my uncle say those names, all those syllables trilling off his tongue. It was like music.
I was fascinated by the way my uncle Bill spoke about searching for his voice, talking about his range, wondering whether he was a baritone or tenor, and where he fit in. I didn’t understand what he meant by that—where did he fit in?—because he had Karlo and he had us, his family, and he had his work, and that’s where he fit in. Or did he? Was there something more going on? I wanted to know.
One night I asked why he lived in Europe.
“The people,” he said.
“You like them better?” I asked.
He glanced around the room. “Over there, they are correct,” he said.
My grandmother nodded in agreement.
I didn’t understand the layers of meaning in his response. I was a naive and relatively sheltered kid. I had no idea of the discrimination gay people faced, and believe it or not, I was relatively sheltered from the racism that would be hard to ignore later in life. Though I was six years old when the Harlem riot of 1943 erupted after a White policeman shot a Black soldier in a hotel lobby on 126th Street—resulting in six deaths, hundreds of injuries, and more than six hundred arrests—I was unaware of the violence, protests, and policing that went on only twenty blocks from our building.
When my friend Bernie told me his family was moving, I didn’t understand they were part of a larger exodus of Whites from Harlem, or that the reason for this large demographic shift, including Bernie’s family’s move, was people who looked like me and my family. They didn’t want to live among folks with dark skin. My parents were extremely protective, so unless they talked about something that happened in the neighborhood or to someone they knew, I was mostly oblivious to stuff like this. I just knew my best friend was moving, we said goodbye, and that was it.
Shortly after I left The Firebrand of Florence, Lady became seriously ill with a high fever that made her delirious. All of us were very frightened while we waited for the doctor, who came to our home, diagnosed Lady with rheumatic fever, and prescribed medication, assuring my parents that she would recover and live a long, healthy life.
In the meantime, I knelt by my twin sister’s bed and prayed for her fever to break. I repeated the Lord’s Prayer over and over for what now seems like hours, and indeed may have been hours or days, I can’t recall. What I do remember, though, is that her fever finally broke, and I had no doubt that God had heard me. I thought it was a miracle, and I have believed in the power of prayer ever since.
Our doctor suggested ballet lessons to strengthen her heart. My mother signed her up right away, and soon Lady was practicing her pirouettes throughout our apartment to the cadence of Miss Nellie reciting Longfellow. It was as if she’d never been sick. She went on to study with the American Ballet Theatre School and the Metropolitan Opera House ballet school.
In school, Lady was more outgoing and ambitious than I was. She excelled in class and on the playground, where she was always among the fastest runners. I was more laid-back, an observer, but still popular. I hung out with the Jewish kids whose families hadn’t moved to the suburbs. A lot of the other kids of various ethnicities and skin colors seemed to prove their toughness by getting into fights. But the Jewish kids were into reading books and telling jokes. That was more my speed.
My father was concerned whether I was tough enough to survive in the world—the world as he knew it, which could be hard on a quiet, sensitive kid like me. In his own caring way, he tried to toughen me up. Sometimes he hid from me as we walked through the park. Or he leaned into me a little harder than necessary when we played. He was just making sure I was able to bounce back from life’s hard knocks.
I had no clue of the indignities he must have suffered over the years, but I got a sense of what this was all about when I was about nine or ten years old and he sat me down for his version of The Talk. “If a White man tells you to do something, you do it and avoid trouble,” he said. “That’s the way of the world.”
That didn’t make sense to me. Why did I need to listen to someone just because he was White? I didn’t understand why that made someone my boss. And what kind of trouble would I get into if I said no? Was there a pecking order according to skin color? Where did the Puerto Rican kids fit in? What about Black people with skin so light they looked White? Did they also have to do whatever a White man told them?
It took me a long time to fully realize the pain giving me that talk must have caused my father. He was a man who knew he was more than people could see—Black, White, Native American. He believed in freedom, equality, and opportunity, everything Lady and I pledged allegiance to in school. Yet he also knew the painful, unfair reality of the world—and that was what forced him to tell me the facts of life as he had lived them. If a White man tells you to do something, you do it. That’s the way of the world.
Back in Texas, my father’s father—my grandfather Darling Williams—had once stood on his front porch with a shotgun, fending off the Ku Klux Klan, defying any and every one of them to step foot on his property. That was the kind of tough my father came from, and he wanted to make sure he passed that on to me.