THE SINGLE MOTHER AND
THE GREAT WHITE WHALE
Michael Alexander Allen was born on November 30, 1979, sole survivor of a twin conception, to a twenty-three-year old single mother who lived with her sister, Roslyn, and her sister’s lover, Brenda. Two older siblings also welcomed him into the world.
Michael had such a huge head when he was born that the doctor thought there was water on his brain. But he came out smiling and laughing and so was introduced to the family as the baby with personality and charisma. This was a baby we all wanted to cuddle.
His mother, Karen, hadn’t been a single mother for long. Just the previous summer, she had left the father of her three children, whom she had met the summer after her junior year in high school in Fernandina Beach, Florida, where she was born, a little fishing village on Amelia Island, the southernmost of the Sea Islands running along the Atlantic Coast. Karen was the baby daughter of a fishing boat captain and his second wife, a midwife and informal community nurse. Karen was twelfth in a big brood; seventh to this mother. During the decade of the 1950s, African Americans entered the professional workforce in dramatic numbers. The number of black nurses in the country doubled from 3,500 to nearly 7,000. Karen’s mother didn’t have a degree, but she was among those serving her community as a nurse. This was a family with grit.
NEWBORN
Karen fell in love the summer after her junior year in high school. Paul Johnson was the lucky man, a construction worker, who was working on all the new condominiums springing up that would transform Amelia Island into a posh resort. He popped diet pills and took speed, and, to Karen, represented money, fancy cars, and drugs. She herself drank a little and smoked weed. Although cocaine was flowing into Florida in the 1970s, PCP was as fancy as it got with Paul. He was also married.
During Karen’s freshman year in college, in 1975, she dropped out at the start of the spring semester, started working at a bus station and later a nursing home. Then she moved in with Paul. Their first child, Nicholas, was born in November. Karen didn’t drink or smoke while she was pregnant because smoking made her feel nauseous. That was how she always first realized that she was pregnant, the fact that the weed made her feel sick. In November 1977, Paul and Karen’s second child, a daughter, Roslyn, was born, a quiet personality like her older brother who would grow up to be as big-hearted as her mother.
By the time that Karen was again pregnant, things had turned hard with Paul. He had consistently told her that he and his wife were divorcing but this never happened. Then, Karen learned that Paul and his so-called wife weren’t married after all. There had never been any legal impediment to their marrying, if Paul had only wanted to. This startled Karen into self-awareness. School was also deepening her self-confidence. Following in the footsteps of her mother, she was even preparing to start nursing school. Her sister Roslyn had promised to pay for it. Karen had a desire for education, and with Paul she also began “requesting and moving with more freedom.” The result was that “his jealousy just became incredible.”
Paul became “abusive, surprisingly”—surprisingly physically abusive. He accused her of infidelity, charging that this third pregnancy, this being Michael, was not his child. He pinched baby Roslyn. He beat Karen. “The first time he beat me, my face was unrecognizable. I tried to go to work,” Karen recalls, but her coworkers sent her home. On one occasion when Paul went after Roslyn, Karen got a knife. “That moment I found some strength within me and I said this is not going to keep going. I wanted to fight.” Paul tried to choke her. Somehow they resolved that altercation without injury, and thereafter they managed to avoid such severe physical fights, but the conflict didn’t stop. Karen began to express herself more vocally but also to play little tricks on him.
“I would bake sweet potato pies and I wouldn’t eat it, and he was thinking I was trying to poison him. That’s the kind of stuff I did.” There was a voice that was waking up inside her.
In her second trimester with Michael, Karen flew to Southern California to visit siblings who in the late 1960s and early 1970s had moved there, like so many other African Americans seeking opportunity outside the Deep South. This visit permitted an opportunity for conversation, especially with her sister and her sister’s girlfriend, and conversation brought clarity. She settled her mind on moving away from Paul and to Los Angeles. During her visit, she started to organize welfare, medical benefits, and food stamps. Returning to Florida, she packed impractically—books, tennis rackets, and dishes—and left, taking Nicholas and Roslyn. She says that if the violence hadn’t been there with Paul, she would be there still, living with Paul in tropical coastal Florida. She was committed to the idea of family. But instead Nestor Avenue in Carson, California, Big Roslyn’s house, was home when Michael was born.