That farm life in a large family with older brothers did not give you a free pass from their sexual curiosity. My mother had one solution for it all. “If your brother tries to touch you, you tell him the devil will take him straight to hell.” That devil must have worked overtime in our house, ready to spring into action whenever anybody did anything wrong. If I didn’t get to sleep right away, my mother had that same devil standing by. Maybe that’s why I still don’t sleep so well. I’m not joking—it took me years before I had the courage to watch Rosemary’s Baby.
“Come on, Florency, run faster, run faster.” I can still remember how Babby cried out. We were walking home one night, and a stranger was following us all too close. Terrified, I cried back, “I can’t run any faster.” Thankfully nothing happened. It is scary how much free rein we had to come and go as we pleased. On another night out past dark, when we were too tired to make it home, we crawled into the outhouse of a family we knew in town, the Berrys. We got up early the next morning and went home. Nowadays, a child protective agency would have probably intervened.
To my knowledge, no such entity of that kind existed in Rockport in the 1940s, with one notable exception, the truant officer. Babby and I would skip school sometimes, usually because we had no proper clothes to wear. So we’d take the day off and stay in bed. We’d hear the truant officers coming to the porch of our house on Eureka Road where we lived prior to moving to the two-story home. We’d hear them talking outside, followed seconds later by a knock on the door. With no answer, they’d walk around the house and look in the windows. We pulled the blankets over us and stayed very quiet until they left.
One silver lining of that house on Eureka was that it was located next door to an African American church. Their services were quite different from what I was used to in the Catholic Church. Instead of long liturgies, a young woman would sit down and play the organ, and the music seemed to take over from there. It was contagious. From the moment I would go into that church, I could not stop dancing. I learned there at a young age a valuable lesson on how to “get down” musically and otherwise.
Behind the church was a house where a black family lived, the Rowans. Mr. Rowan and Daddy would sometimes get drunk together. It was quite a sight to see them walking on the street, stumbling home together. His daughter would sometimes sit and kiss her boyfriend on the front steps of the church. I remember thinking, “Hmm, that doesn’t look like such a bad thing.” And the memory of Mrs. Rowan is still quite vivid. One night, I was supposed to take the garbage out. For whatever reason, I was afraid to go back where the garbage cans were, so I came up with the excellent idea of dumping it conveniently over behind the Rowans’ house. Well, Mrs. Rowan came over the next day. My mother didn’t bother to count to ten after the screen door closed behind Mrs. Rowan. With no hesitation, she beat the tar out of me.
Whether I was singing and dancing at the African American church or performing in the grocery store, people must have sensed a positive life force in me in spite of my circumstances. I was, as far back as I can remember, a “glass-half-full” personality type. I was optimistic even in the worst of times when nothing around gave cause to be so. Any kind of inner strength and confidence that were communicated through my singing voice perhaps stemmed from that optimism and the protective faith I felt. Despite my listeners’ tears, they were hopeful, as I was, that somehow I would persevere.
To my great delight, some of the people from that period of my childhood have turned up sporadically. A short time ago, a letter arrived from Missy Mason, the town doctor’s granddaughter. Back in the old days, I held her in high regard, “the cat’s meow,” and the real height of sophistication in my mind. “It was just so semi!” was her favorite expression, and whatever that meant, it had to be good. She wrote in this letter some six decades later, “I’ve seen you so many times on TV and always feel so proud of all you’ve accomplished. Who would have thought it way back when we were so young. Maybe you did.” Another unforgettable encounter was with Bananas, or ’Nanas for short, a tough African American kid whom I would say hi to on the street when he wasn’t being a terrifying bully (or so he seemed to me). Sometime in the 1960s, I was performing a concert for Oldsmobile in Flint, Michigan, with a wonderful choir made up of their workers. At that event, a very handsome black man came up to me. “Florence, I’m ’Nanas from Rockport.” We hugged each other with such joy. He took a step back with one of those “just look at us” looks. He laughed. “Yeah, we both got out.”
No doubt I rode out of Rockport on my mother’s galloping horse. As I mentioned before, Elizabeth Henderson was a survivor and a fighter, and give her credit, it was advice that worked for her for her whole lifetime. I didn’t recognize until much later on just how courageous she was. She dealt with her difficulties with a lot of grit and sheer determination. I followed her example without totally being cognizant of it, and it’s been one hell of a ride!
