In my memory’s sketch of early childhood, drawn by an artist of the impressionist school, there is one image that stands out above the rest—which when called forth is preceded by the mouthwatering aroma of pancake syrup warming in a skillet and the crackling, bubbling sounds of the syrup transforming magically into homemade pull candy. Then she comes into view, the real, real pretty woman who stands at the stove, making this magic just for me.
Or at least, that’s how it feels to a boy of three years old. There is another wonderful smell that accompanies her presence as she turns, smiling right in my direction, as she steps closer to where I stand in the middle of the kitchen—waiting eagerly next to my sister, seven-year-old Ophelia, and two of the other children, Rufus and Pookie, who live in this house. As she slips the cooling candy off the wooden spoon, pulling and breaking it into pieces that she brings and places in my outstretched hand, as she watches me happily gobbling up the tasty sweetness, her wonderful fragrance is there again. Not perfume or anything floral or spicy—it’s just a clean, warm, good smell that wraps around me like a Superman cape, making me feel strong, special, and loved—even if I don’t have words for those concepts yet.
Though I don’t know who she is, I sense a familiarity about her, not only because she has come before and made candy in this same fashion, but also because of how she looks at me—like she’s talking to me from her eyes, saying, You remember me, don’t you?
At this point in childhood, and for most of the first five years of my life, the map of my world was broken strictly into two territories—the familiar and the unknown. The happy, safe zone of the familiar was very small, often a shifting dot on the map, while the unknown was vast, terrifying, and constant.
What I did know by the age of three or four was that Ophelia was my older sister and best friend, and also that we were treated with kindness by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, the adults whose house we lived in. What I didn’t know was that the Robinsons’ house was a foster home, or what that meant. Our situation—where our real parents were and why we didn’t live with them, or why we sometimes did live with uncles and aunts and cousins—was as mysterious as the situations of the other foster children living at the Robinsons’.
What mattered most was that I had a sister who looked out for me, and I had Rufus and Pookie and the other boys to follow outside for fun and mischief. All that was familiar, the backyard and the rest of the block, was safe turf where we could run and play games like tag, kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek, even after dark. That is, except, for the house two doors down from the Robinsons.
Every time we passed it I had to almost look the other way, just knowing the old white woman who lived there might suddenly appear and put an evil curse on me—because, according to Ophelia and everyone else in the neighborhood, the old woman was a witch.
When Ophelia and I passed by the house together once and I confessed that I was scared of the witch, my sister said, “I ain’t scared,” and to prove it she walked right into the front yard and grabbed a handful of cherries off the woman’s cherry tree.
Ophelia ate those cherries with a smile. But within the week I was in the Robinsons’ house when here came Ophelia, racing up the steps and stumbling inside, panting and holding her seven-year-old chest, describing how the witch had caught her stealing cherries and grabbed her arm, cackling, “I’m gonna get you!”
Scared to death as she was now, Ophelia soon decided that since she had escaped an untimely death once, she might as well go back to stealing cherries. Even so, she made me promise to avoid the strange woman’s house. “Now, remember,” Ophelia warned, “when you walk by, if you see her on the porch, don’t you look at her and never say nuthin’ to her, even if she calls you by name.”
I didn’t have to promise because I knew that nothing and no one could ever make me do that. But I was still haunted by nightmares so real that I could have sworn I actually snuck into her house and found myself in the middle of a dark, creepy room where I was surrounded by an army of cats, rearing up on their back legs, baring their claws and fangs. The nightmares were so intense that for the longest time I had an irrational fear and dislike of cats. At the same time, I was not entirely convinced that this old woman was in fact a witch. Maybe she was just different. Since I’d never seen any white people other than her, I figured they might all be like that.
Then again, because my big sister was my only resource for explaining all that was unknown, I believed her and accepted her explanations. But as I pieced together fragments of information about our family over the years, mainly from Ophelia and also from some of our uncles and aunts, I found the answers much harder to grasp.
How the real pretty woman who came to make the candy fit into the puzzle, I was never told, but something old and wise inside me knew that she was important. Maybe it was how she seemed to pay special attention to me, even though she was just as nice to Ophelia and the other kids, or maybe it was how she and I seemed to have a secret way of talking without words. In our unspoken conversation, I understood her to be saying that seeing me happy made her even happier, and so somewhere in my cells, that became my first job in life—to make her feel as good as she made me feel. Intuitively, I also understood who she was, in spite of never being told, and there is a moment of recognition that comes during one of her visits—as I watch her at the stove and make observations that will be reinforced in years to come.
More than pretty, she is beautiful, a stop-you-in-your-tracks-turn-around-and-look-twice beautiful. Not tall at five-four, but with a stature of nobility that makes her appear much taller, she is light brown–skinned but not too light—almost the color of the rich maple syrup she stirs and heats into candy. She has supernaturally strong fingernails—capable of breaking an apple in half, bare-handed, something that few women or men can do and something that impresses me for life. She has a stylish way of dressing—the color burgundy and paisley print dresses stand out—with a scarf or shawl thrown over her shoulder to give her a feminine, flowing look. The brightness of color and the flowing layers of fabric give her an appearance I would later describe as Afro-centric.
But the features that most capture her beauty are her expressive eyes and her amazing smile. Then and later, I liken that smile to opening a refrigerator at night. You open up that door—smile—and the light unqualified up the room. Even on those nights ahead when the refrigerator contains nothing but a lightbulb and ice water, her smile and the memory of her smile are all the comforts I need.
When the recognition occurs exactly, I don’t recall, except that it takes place somewhere in my fourth year, maybe after she hands me a piece of candy, in an instant when at last I can respond to that look she has been giving me and reassure her with my own look—Of course I remember you, you’re my momma!
Ours was a family of secrets. Over the years, I heard only parts of my mother’s saga, told to me by a variety of sources, so that the understanding that eventually emerged was of a kind of Cinderella story—without the fairy godmother and the part at the end where she marries the prince and they all live happily ever after. The oldest and only daughter of the four surviving children born to parents Archie and Ophelia Gardner, Bettye Jean came into this world in 1928, in Little Rock, Arkansas, but was raised in Depression-era, dirt-poor, rural Louisiana—somewhere near the town of Rayville, population five hundred. With the trials of poverty and racism, life wasn’t easy for the Gardners. Bettye and her brother Archie—who cried grown-man tears when he recalled what it was like walking the long, dusty country roads to school in the thirties and forties in Rayville—had to keep their heads up as white children rode by in horse-drawn wagons or on horseback, looking down at the two of them, pointing, calling them “niggers,” and spitting on them.
Yet, in spite of hard times and hateful ignorance, Bettye’s childhood was relatively stable and very loving. Adored by her three younger brothers—Archie Jr., Willie, and Henry—she was, in fact, a golden girl of promise, a star student who finished third in her class when she graduated from Rayville Colored High School in 1946. But her dreams quickly unraveled the moment it was time to go off to college and pursue her calling as an educator, starting with the devastating sudden death of her mother. Like Cinderella, while she was still in mourning, almost overnight her father remarried, leaving Bettye to cope with a domineering stepmother—who went by the ironic nickname of Little Mama—and a new set of competitive stepsiblings. Just at a time when Bettye Jean was depending on the financial support from her father to go to college, Little Mama saw to it that the money went to her own daughter, Eddie Lee—who had graduated in the same class as Bettye but wasn’t among the top students.
Rather than giving up, even though her heart was broken by her father’s refusal to help, Bettye found work as a substitute teacher while she put herself through beauty school. But once again, when she needed financial assistance from her father to pay for her state licensing fees, he said no.
With all the talent, brilliance, and beauty that had been naturally bestowed on Bettye Jean Gardner, she had apparently drawn an unlucky card when it came to men—most of whom seemed destined to disappoint her, starting with her own daddy. There was Samuel Salter, a married schoolteacher who professed his love for her and his plan to leave his wife, but who must have changed his mind when she became pregnant. True to form, her daddy and Little Mama were no help. They let it be known that she had embarrassed them enough by being single at age twenty-two, but for her to be an old maid and an unwed mother was too much shame for them to bear. On these grounds, they put her out.
Thus began my mother’s four-year trek to Milwaukee, where all three of her brothers had settled. Along the way she gave birth to my sister—named Ophelia for her beloved mother—before crossing paths with a tall, dark, handsome stranger during a trip back to Louisiana. His name was Thomas Turner, a married man who swept Bettye Jean off her feet either romantically or by force. The result was me, Christopher Paul Gardner, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on February 9, 1954—the same year, auspiciously, that school segregation was ruled in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In keeping with other family mysteries, my father was a figment of the vast unknown throughout my childhood. His name was mentioned only once or twice. It probably would have bothered me much more if I weren’t so occupied trying to get to the bottom of other more pressing questions, especially the how-when-where-why my smart, strong, beautiful mother ever became entangled with Freddie Triplett.
Tall and dark, but not exactly handsome—at times he bore a strong resemblance to Sonny Liston—Freddie had the demeanor of some ill-begotten cross between a pit bull and Godzilla. At six-two, 280 pounds, he did have a stature and brawn that some women found attractive. Whatever it was that first caught her attention must have been a redeeming side of him that later vanished. Or maybe, as I’d wonder in my youthful imagination, my mother was tricked by a magic spell into thinking that he was one of those frog princes. After all, the other men who looked good had not turned out to be dependable; maybe she thought Freddie was the opposite—a man who looked dangerous but was kind and tender underneath his disguise. If that was the case, and she believed in the fairy tale that her kiss would turn the frog into a prince, she was sadly mistaken. In fact, he turned out to be many times more dangerous than he looked, especially after that first kiss, and after he decided she was his.
No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud. It started out with an anonymous tip, apparently, that somehow she was a danger to society because she was earning money at a job—to feed and care for her two children (Ophelia and me) and a third on the way (my sister Sharon)—and was receiving assistance at the same time. That anonymous tip had come from Freddie, a man willing to do or say anything to have her locked up for three years because she had committed the crime of trying to leave his sorry ass.
It was because of Freddie’s actions in having her sent away that Ophelia and I spent those three years either in foster care or with extended family members. Yet we never knew why or when changes in our living situation would take place.
Just as no one told me that it was my mother who came to make candy and visit us at the foster home under special, supervised leave from prison, no explanation accompanied our move when Ophelia and I went to stay with my Uncle Archie and his wife Clara, or TT as we all called her. Way back in Louisiana, the entire Gardner family must have signed an oath of secrecy because serious questions about the past were almost always shrugged off, a policy my mother may have instituted out of her dislike for discussing anything unpleasant.
Later on in my adolescence there was one occasion when I pressed her about just who my father was and why he wasn’t in my life. Moms gave me one of her searing looks, the kind that got me to be quiet real fast.
“But…” I tried to protest.
She shook her head no, unwilling to open up.
“Why?”
“Well, because the past is the past,” Moms said firmly. Seeing my frustration, she sighed but still insisted, “Ain’t nothing you can do about it.” She put a stop to my questions, wistfully remarking, “Things happen.” And that was all there was to it.
Even as my questions continued, while waiting for clarification to arrive of its own accord, I went back to my job of trying to be as happy as possible—not a difficult assignment at first.
The land of the familiar where I grew up in one of the poorer areas of the north side of Milwaukee was a world that I eventually viewed as a black Happy Days. Just like on that TV show that was set in the 1950s—in the same time period in which my neighborhood seemed to be frozen even in later decades—there were local hangouts, places where different age groups gathered to socialize, well-known quirky merchants, and an abundance of great characters. While on the TV show the only black color you ever saw was Fonzie’s leather jacket, in my neighborhood, for nearly the first dozen years of my life, the only white people I ever saw were on television and in police cars.
Some of the greatest characters in our Happy Days version were my own family members, starting with my three stubborn uncles. After both Willie and Henry got out of the Army, having traveled to many distant shores, the two returned to Louisiana long enough to join with Uncle Archie as each came to the simultaneous decision to get as far away from southern bigotry as he possibly could. Their plan was to go to Canada, but when their car broke down in Milwaukee, so the story goes, they laid anchor and went no farther.
The hardworking Gardner brothers didn’t have too much trouble making Milwaukee home. To them, the fertile, versatile city that had been plunked down at the meeting place of the Milwaukee River and Lake Michigan—which provided rich soil for farming and ample waterways for trade and industry—was their land of milk and honey, of golden opportunity. To put up with the extremes in the seasons, the brutal winters and scorching summers, you had to have an innate toughness and the kind of deeply practical, hustling ability that my relatives and many of the other minorities and immigrants brought with them to Wisconsin from other places. Those traits must have existed as well as in the descendents of the true Milwaukeeans—members of tribes like the Winnebago and Potawatomi. There was another local personality trait not exclusive to the new arrivals of blacks, Jews, Italians, and eastern Europeans or the families of the first wave of settlers from Germany, Ireland, and Scandinavia, or the area’s Native Americans, and that was an almost crazy optimism.
All that ambitious, pragmatic dreaming sometimes resulted in overachievement. It wasn’t enough to just have one brand of beer, Milwaukee had to have several. The region couldn’t just be famous for its dairies, it had to have the best cheese in the world. There wasn’t just one major industry but several—from the brickyards, tanneries, breweries, shipyards, and meatpacking businesses to the dominating steel factories like Inland Steel and A. O. Smith and the automotive giant American Motors (deceased as of the late 1980s).
It was mainly the steel mills and foundries and carmakers that brought so many blacks from states like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and all points south of the Mason-Dixon north to Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland. These blue-collar jobs were far and away preferable to a life sharecropping in the sweltering heat way down south in Dixie, in places where less than a century earlier many of our people had been enslaved. Seemed like almost everyone had family members that brought with them their country ways and who tended to stick together. Sam Salter—Ophelia’s father—ended up with his family in Milwaukee, as well as other friends from Louisiana. The Tripletts, some of the nicest, kindest folks you could meet—with the exception of Freddie, the bad seed—had come from Mississippi.
As hard as everyone worked all week, at least in my neighborhood, over the weekend they played and prayed even harder. No such thing as casual drinking in our part of Milwaukee. From Friday evening when the whistle blew at Inland Steel—where all three of my uncles worked, Archie and Willie until they retired from there and Henry until his dying day, which came much too early—the party began and lasted until Sunday morning, when it was time to go to church and pray for forgiveness.
Between the ages of four and five, at which point I was living with Uncle Archie and Aunt TT, I’d come to appreciate the familiar rhythm of the working week. My uncle and his wife maintained an easygoing, peaceful atmosphere without too many rules. A devout Christian, TT made sure we got that old-time religion in us. Every Sunday, all day, we spent at the Tabernacle Baptist Church, and in summers we attended Bible school daily, plus we accompanied her to any and all special midweek meetings and were present for the funerals of every member of the church who ever died, whether we knew them or not. Most of this I didn’t mind so much, considering all the entertainment value as I watched the various characters from the neighborhood I’d seen sinning all week now change their clothes and themselves. I loved the singing and shouting, the feeling of heat and passion, and especially the connection to community that I experienced at a time when I didn’t know exactly who or where my mother was.
TT never tried to be a substitute for Momma, but she provided love and comfort all the same. Nobody could cook like Bettye Jean, but my aunt did make an unforgettable hot-water cornbread that a growing kid like me couldn’t devour fast enough. Nor could I devour fast enough the books that TT seemed to have limitless funds to buy for me. My mother later reinforced the importance of reading, raising me with her own credo to spend as much time at our public library as possible. What she’d say to show me how powerful a building full of books could be was, “The most dangerous place in the world is a public library.” That was, of course, only if you could read, because, Momma explained, if you could read, that meant you could go in there and figure anything out. But if you couldn’t read, well….
It was TT, however, who first instilled in me the love of reading books and storytelling. Though I didn’t read yet, after TT read books to me, by looking at the illustrations afterward, I could partly remember the words and stories, and I felt as if I was reading already. There were books of Greek and Roman mythology, children’s classic fairy tales, adventure stories, and my early favorite genre—tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The story of the Sword in the Stone made a lasting impression on me, setting up the idea that someday, somehow, I would find the destiny that awaited me.
Books allowed me not only to travel in my imagination but to look through windows into the world of the unknown and not feel afraid. That was until TT brought me a book I had been dying to have, The Boys’ Book of Snakes. A big light green book, the color of a garden snake, it captivated me for days on end as I studied every minute detail of the snake world—from the friendly-sounding milk snakes and coral snakes to the deadly rattlers, cobras, and pythons. During waking hours I was fascinated, but at night, especially during one particular snake-infested nightmare in which my bed was full of writhing, hissing poisonous snakes, I regretted ever seeing those pictures.
Apparently so did TT and Uncle Archie, who woke up in the middle of the night to find me wedged in between them in the bed. “What in the…” Uncle Archie started up, but no amount of placating or chiding could get me to my own bed. In the end, they both went back to sleep, letting me feel safe and not making me feel too embarrassed—until later when I was a big, strong guy and they teased me about it mercilessly.
The other window into the world of the unknown was the black-and-white TV set, and the finest vision I ever saw on it was of Sugar Ray Robinson standing next to a Cadillac.
“Now I seen all,” Uncle Archie exclaimed, his hand on my shoulder, pointing at the TV screen. “Sugar Ray Robinson got himself a pink Cadillac!”
With black-and-white TV, we wouldn’t have known it was pink if the announcer hadn’t said so, but it was no less amazing.
Friday fight nights sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades was our time, me and Uncle Archie, to sit down together—without TT and Ophelia—and enjoy every minute, from our conversations beforehand where he’d tell me everything he knew about boxing history, and the moment we’d hear that suspenseful intro music leading into the announcer’s booming “Gillette presents!” to the match itself.
Uncle Archie had a contagious aura of calm that he maintained even during the excitement of the fights or when crises came up. A man in his late twenties at the time, he never had a son, and I didn’t have a father, so that drew us closer. Besides his hardworking ethic on the job, Archie used his quiet, strong intelligence to rise up through the ranks of his union at Inland Steel, setting an example for me about tenacity and focus. A very handsome guy who was the male version of Moms in looks—nut brown in color, slender, and on the short side but appearing taller than he was—Archie was an incredibly sharp dresser, something that influenced my later sense of style and the clothes habit I acquired long before I could afford it. Never overdressed, he was immaculate in his grooming, with his short haircut and neat trim mustache and clothes that weren’t showy but always impeccable. Always.
In Uncle Archie’s lore, no one could touch Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, the fighter he grew up following on the radio—hearing, feeling, smelling, and seeing every move, jab, swing, punch, and step, all on a nonvisual medium. As a result, Uncle Archie could narrate those fights for me as well as any announcer of his time. Now we were watching history unfold together, with Sugar Ray Robinson still going strong, including his fight with Jake LaMotta, which I’d never forget. Sugar Ray and the other boxers were larger than life, superheroes who could do and have it all, including a pink Cadillac. What that said to a poor kid from the ghetto like me was everything, a very early precursor to the red Ferrari. But Sugar Ray Robinson and his Caddy were on television. I had something closer at hand to show me the beautiful world beyond the ghetto: the Spiegel catalog.
Through those dream pages, Ophelia and I lived vicarious lives as we played a game we made up with the household’s catalog. We called it “this-page-that-page,” and it was played simply by flipping randomly to a page and then claiming all the treasures pictured on it as mine or hers. “Look at all my stuff,” I’d say after flipping to my page. “Look at my furniture—all these clothes are mine!” and Ophelia would follow, flipping to her page, singing, “Look at my stuff, my nice stove and my jewelry!” The Spiegel catalog must have been three hundred pages or more, so we never tired of this-page-that-page.
In the dead of winter one year, we changed the game in recognition of Christmas. When it was Ophelia’s turn, she flipped to a page and smiled her big-sister smile, announcing that this page was for me, pointing to all the stuff she was giving me for Christmas. “I’m giving you this page. All this is yours.”
Then it was my turn. I flipped to a page and exclaimed, “I’m giving you this page for Christmas. This is all yours!” I wasn’t sure what made me happier, getting a page all for me or having one to give.
In those hours spent playing this-page-that-page, there was no discussion about who Momma was, where she went, or when she was coming back. But there was a feeling of anticipation I recognized. We were biding time, waiting for something or someone to come for us. For that reason, it wasn’t a shock or even a memorable instance when, at last, I learned that Momma was leaving wherever she’d been—prison, I now know—and that she was coming to get me and Ophelia and our baby sister Sharon, who suddenly appeared on the scene.
Though Momma’s Cinderella story hadn’t worked out like in the storybook, I had the briefly held idea that a fairy tale was about to happen in being reunited with my mother. All the happy memories of the beautiful woman who made me candy filled me with wondrous expectation, and for one brilliant flash of time the reality of our being together made me happier than anything I could have dreamt. But those feelings were rapidly overshadowed from almost the first moment that Freddie Triplett bulldozed his way into my life. You would think that I would have had a honeymoon phase with the man who had become Momma’s husband and our stepfather, but he was my enemy from the second I laid eyes on him.
While I had no inkling of the violence he was going to cause in our lives, I must have sensed that he was mean and seemed to take pleasure in hurting my feelings. My hunch was confirmed when he launched the line he loved to throw at me every chance he got, which killed me every time he said it, stirring up the sediment of anger and resentment that would later erupt. Unprovoked, out of nowhere, he turned to me that first time I can recall seeing him and proclaimed in no uncertain terms, eyes blazing and voice blasting, “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!”