I don’t think my father understood how different we were from everyone in the neighborhoods I lived in with my mother. It was weird to be living in a makeshift apartment on top of a deli when everyone else lived in a house. We lived in a small commercial section of Northport where there was a strip of stores on the ground level of a cluster of Victorian houses. They were small-town businesses: a bicycle shop, maybe a general store, and then the deli. A staircase alongside the deli’s entrance led up to a small, dim railroad-style apartment where I lived with my mother and Morgan.
I had a room at the end of the hall, no bigger than a typical walk-in closet. The apartment was small, the floors were covered in pea-green carpeting, and the walls and doors were thin; the sound of laughing and voices often kept me awake at night. I had very few things in that tiny room that brought me comfort. The most precious, perhaps, were gifts from my father—a little ceramic bunny and a sweet molasses-colored teddy bear named Cuddles, which I kept until it was destroyed many years later after a flood in a Manhattan apartment that was on top of a bar and nightclub (apparently, there are levels to living on top of establishments, and I have gone through all of them).
I remember when you used to tuck me in at night
with the teddy bear you gave to me that I held so tight
—“Bye Bye”
Even with Cuddles by my side, I frequently had nightmares, and it was in that dismal apartment where my troubles with sleep first began.
I don’t recall anyone else living around there, and there were certainly no other Black people for miles. Morgan’s was the only Afro in sight. Once, after he got in trouble, my mother meekly admonished him to “stay in his room.” Shortly after, the owner of the deli downstairs called my mother to inform her that he was watching her son jump from rooftop to rooftop above the other stores. Morgan had climbed out of the window onto the roof and was making a daring escape. He eventually went through a phase when he shaved his head bald and would wear karate pants, with a snake casually draped around his neck. He would walk through the town looking like a punk ninja, full of anger, hoping to find a fight. Even without his hair he was impossible to miss.
My father might not have liked me calling the Careys weird, but weird things certainly happened to us. Every now and then, Alison would crash into the apartment like a meteor, and friends of hers and Morgan’s would hang out all night.
One night Alison booked me as the entertainment. Earlier that day she’d taught me the song “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. It was an odd selection for sure, but I figured maybe she liked it because the refrain of “Go ask Alice” sounded close to her name. When I was brought out to the living room to perform, all of the lights were out, and I was surrounded by burning candles and a circle of teenagers (as well as my mother). Watching Alison’s face for approval, I let out the first verse:
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that Mother gives you, don’t do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall
A song about taking drugs and tripping is not typical (or appropriate) lyrical content for a little girl. But I sang it because my big sister taught it to me. I loved nothing more than learning and singing songs, but this one was full of scary images (“the White Knight is talking backward /and the Red Queen’s off with her head”) and what seemed to me like creepy nonsense (“the hookah-smoking caterpillar”—what?).
Of course, I wondered what this song was about and why I was singing it in the dark. It was past midnight, and while all the other kids my age were nestled in their beds, I was belting out, “Feed your head!” for a candlelit gathering of wannabe-hippie teens conducting a pseudo-séance. Tell me that’s not weird.
“See you next Sunday!” That was our thing. My father and I gave that little promise to each other with a wave each week as I left him to return to life with my mother. But as I grew a little older, my seriousness as a singer-songwriter began to swiftly envelop my whole world. I was in the profession by the time I was twelve. My father did not see it or support it, largely because he did not understand it.
Music, as a career, was not logical to him. When I talked about writing poetry and singing, he would shift the conversation to grades and homework. He didn’t see the focus and discipline I was cultivating as an artist. He didn’t see how I was learning the craft, sitting in on jam sessions with accomplished jazz musicians with my mother and developing the skills of scatting and improvisation. He never saw how I spent hours writing, enriching my ear, and studying popular music trends on the radio. Above all, we had a fundamental difference in belief: I followed my heart, while he was guided by his fear of not being accepted. From that awful and auspicious day when Nana Reese laid her hands on me and spoke into my heart, I truly believed anything I wanted was possible. It was real to me. Absolute. My father did not believe anything was possible. On the contrary, he expected the world
