“You made that up,” she snapped back. “Dad wouldn’t do that.” But she saw that I wasn’t joking.
“I’m going to wait outside the door, and we’ll see,” she said.
I went back in the room. My father grabbed me, trying to hold me too close. Pauline came in yelling and broke it up. Had she not come in, who knows what would have happened. I probably would have spoken up and told him to stop. I was about fifteen and as tall as he was, so if that didn’t work I could have probably overpowered him. He felt terrible because he was caught in the act.
Another time, Pauline and her husband and children were staying with us. Again, my father was not behaving, and my brother-in-law Charlie, who was a terrible drunk himself, took great offense at what he was witnessing.
“Pauline, we’re going,” Charlie announced and abruptly signaled for my sister and their children to pack up their things and get to the car. Babby and I begged them, “Please don’t leave us.” Pauline was painfully torn as she did what her husband asked. “I have to go with Charlie,” she called out to us as she was hurrying to leave. She said that she regretted her action that night for the rest of her life.
The trauma of alcoholism was not limited to within the four walls of our home. One hot summer night, Babby and I were staying across the river in Owensboro with my cousin, who had a house across the cornfield from her parents, my uncle Jim and aunt Loretta. They were closer family than most: Loretta was my mother’s sister, and Jim was my father’s brother. My aunt and uncle’s daughter was married to another raging alcoholic. He came home that night horribly drunk. Anticipating this, my cousin had locked all the screen doors on the windows that were left open because of the heat. Once he discovered he was locked out, he went on a rampage.
We heard him rip the screen door off its hinges as we were huddled together on the kitchen floor waiting for the hurricane to pass. Then he turned over a table covered with glass jars filled with food my cousin had canned that afternoon. With the sound of the smashing glass, I crawled over and opened the lock on the bottom of the kitchen door. We bolted out of there running for our lives, tearing across the cornfield petrified that he would catch us. Once at the farmhouse, we woke up Uncle Jim. He got his shotgun and went back after him. I don’t know what else happened that night, but this was hardly the last of these incidents my sister and I had to endure.
Even though I was just a young girl, I had developed a fairly thick skin. I had no other choice. Maybe it helped that I had nothing else to compare it to, so I accepted it in that spirit.
When I look back at pictures of myself from those early years, I see a lot of sadness in the eyes of that little girl. But there was also a lot of pride. I want to go back and hug that child. Remarkably, portraits of me taken in recent years seem to look more youthful than those from my childhood. I think it was because my spirit got lighter as I got older. I came more to terms with what happened. That was the way it was. This is the way it is now. Now, get on with it. I never wanted anybody to feel sorry for me. No different than children caught in the middle of a war zone who find a way to play even in the smoldering rubble, I found a source of inner joy. It came from the simple act of singing.
To her credit, my mother recognized from early on that I came into this world with a gift—a musical voice. In fact, I cannot remember a time in my life when I wasn’t singing. My mother loved music and played the guitar. She taught me lots of songs from age two, fifty songs, in fact, that I knew note perfect. It was mostly what they called hillbilly music back then, like “Down on the Levee” and spirituals such as “The Old Rugged Cross.” Years later, I found out in a rather unusual way that music was in the ancestry of my mother’s family. An aunt was touring the Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky when she saw etched on the wall of one of the caverns some graffiti from two Civil War soldiers who were hiding down there. They wrote, “Isaac and Henry Newton, musicians and composers.” They were on the family tree on my maternal grandmother’s side.
As a young child, singing was also an antidote for my shyness. I had the belief that if I closed my eyes the people around me would also not be able to see me. My mother made me get up and sing in public wherever there was a gathering of people (sometimes in the local grocery store). I was more afraid of her than of being shy. Quite often I’d pass the hat. So I guess it can be said that I’ve always been singing for my supper. Sometimes Babby would join in, and we’d fall easily into harmony. We even won a contest. Our prize was hot fudge sundaes at Wyndall’s Market.
I never had any musical instruction until the nuns put me in the church choir when I was eight. They taught me how to sight-read Gregorian chants. They had me sing two Latin masses on Sundays. If the tenor or bass didn’t show up that particular day, I’d sing their parts too. People started to recognize that I had talent. Had my mother stuck around, I’m sure she might have become a great stage mother.
Often when I sang, some people in the
