You Don't Know Me Read online

  To the memory of my father, Ray Charles Robinson, and all that you were to me and all that you dreamed you wanted to be.

  I love you come rain or come shine.

  To my loving mother, Della B. Robinson.

  To my daughters, Erin Brianne and Blair Alayne.

  My prayer for all of you is that God continues to bless you, heal your hearts, and answer your prayers. I am so blessed to have you in my life.

  I love you.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY ANDREW LAKEY

  1 Mother

  2 I Got a Woman

  3 Hallelujah, I Love Her So

  4 Moving to the Outskirts of Town

  5 What Kind of Man Are You?

  6 Mr. Charles Blues

  7 Pray On, My Child

  8 In the Heat of the Night

  9 All Night, All Day

  10 Move On Up

  11 A Song in My Soul

  12 Trouble the Water

  13 Dancing with the Devil

  14 From the Heart

  15 Sinner’s Prayer

  16 If I Could

  17 Unchain My Heart

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  I FIRST MET Ray Charles Robinson Jr. on the first anniversary of his father’s death, June 10, 2005. At that time I was working on the series “Silhouettes & Shadows,” and I welcomed the opportunity to paint Ray Jr. Nearly fifteen years earlier I was introduced to his father, who had shown an interest in my art. I had developed a relief style of painting, and Ray Charles was fascinated with the textural surface of the canvas and artwork he could feel with his fingertips. It was ironic that a blind man would take to my work—using senses other than sight. Ray Charles responded to my paintings with insights that were astonishing.

  That Friday afternoon, Ray Jr. was calm and focused as I traced his silhouette on the paper taped to the wall behind him. We spoke about my encounter with his father, and soon we were taking on deeper issues that connected our lives—like drug addiction and sobriety. Ray Jr. had been struggling to stay clean, and I shared my similar struggles with drugs and how they nearly cost me my life. My nexus to father and son was as much about breaking the chains of addiction as it was about the creative process. When we were done with the sitting, Ray Jr. left for the cemetery to visit his father.

  You Don’t Know Me is an extraordinary personal story full of heart, heartbreak, and healing. Ray Jr. shares his dreams, his struggles, and a dysfunction inherited, in part, from his father. It is also a shocking and gripping story of Ray Charles that could only be told through the autobiographical lens of his namesake. This is a family history that is conveyed with honesty and tenderness. This is also the chronicle of a man who overcomes despair, and it renders all of the other biographies, films, and accounts of Ray Charles’s personal life and public persona meaningless. Ray Jr. is fearless in his frankness about his humbling journey and a forgiveness he finally adopts.

  You Don’t Know Me is an elegy delivered by the prodigal son of a prodigal father.

  Andrew Lakey, Artist

  CHAPTER 1

  Mother

  My mother told me …

  There’ll be hard times.

  —RAY CHARLES

  DELICIOUS AROMAS FILLED THE HOUSE. MY MOTHER HAD been cooking all day. Barbecued chicken, sweet potatoes, biscuits and gravy, food for the body and the soul. My brothers and I were squirming with excitement, trying unsuccessfully to concentrate on the toy soldiers scattered across the den floor. The sound of a car door slamming brought us running past the living room toward the front door, and I heard my mother call out, “You slow down, you hear me? You all are going to break your necks!”

  I skidded to a halt in the entrance hall, my younger brothers piling up behind me like train cars on a railroad track. We heard the rattle of a key ring and the door opened. The man who walked into the foyer wore a white shirt, black suit, and dark sunglasses. I glanced back at my mother, who had come up behind us, and she smiled and nodded at me. “Go on, now.”

  As I ran toward the open door, the man’s dark face split wide with a brilliant grin. “Baby,” he murmured, as he knelt down to meet me. His fingers sought my head, feeling its shape, then moved gently over my eyes and down my face. He gripped my shoulders, running his hands down my arms, squeezing my wrists, feeling the shape and the height of me. He nodded, saying, “All right, then. You’re gettin’ big.” Only then did I throw myself into his arms, his silk shirt liquid against my face, his cheek rough as he turned to kiss me. I breathed him in, that trademark blend of Brut and cigarettes that was my father. Daddy was home. Nothing else mattered.

  I spent most of my childhood waiting for my dad to come home from the road. It always felt like he was never coming back. It has been six years since he passed away, but I still feel as though I’m waiting. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him—each time I look in a mirror, each time I introduce myself, each time I remember who he was, each time I wonder who I am. My father was Ray Charles, and I have the honor and the burden of carrying his name. I have never been certain what I was supposed to do with that name. When he left us for good, I knew it was time to figure it out. If I am to have a future, I must begin by understanding the past.

  MY FATHER WAS BORN in Albany, Georgia, on September 23, 1930. His mother, Aretha Williams, was only fourteen when he was born, and she had been sent away to relatives to have her baby, where the gossiping neighbors couldn’t reach her. She returned to her hometown of Greenville, Florida, a few weeks later with my father in her arms. She named her tiny son Ray Charles Robinson. My grandfather, Bailey Robinson, had given his son a last name but little else. He was already married to another woman named Mary Jane, and there would be other women and other children as well. I don’t know much about my paternal grandfather. My father never spoke to me about him unless my brothers and I asked questions. I’m not sure how much he even remembered. My grandfather had passed by the time my father was ten. He remained in my father’s memory as a shadowy figure, a tall presence that showed up in my grandmother’s tiny home every now and then to be with her, leaving before the sun rose the next day.

  Greenville was no more than a speck on the map when my father was growing up there. The entire town was less than a mile and a half wide, and everyone was poor. It was just a question of how poor. My father’s family was at the bottom of the economic ladder. As he put it, there was nothing between him and the bottom but dirt. Still there were blessings. A year after my father was born, my grandmother gave birth to another son, George. George and RC, as everyone called my father, were inseparable. Wherever my father went, neighbors recall, George was right behind him, a small shadow struggling to keep up with his big brother. And they went everywhere their feet would carry them. My father still had his eyesight then, and he and George loved to explore, running barefoot down the dirt roads, through the fields, and in and out of the small jumble of buildings that made up the town. George was a whiz with numbers, and by three years old had such a remarkable ability in math that people came just to watch him do problems. The brothers had no toys, so George made little cars and gadgets out of scraps of wood and wire. He had a gift, my father said. George could make anything.

  Then there were the Pitmans, the couple who owned the Red Wing Café and general store. My father called Wylie Pitman “Mr. Pit.” He loved to run through the little town to Mr. Pit’s store, sometimes to fetch things for his mother, sometimes just to see Mr. and Mrs. Pit. He still spoke about Mr. Pit when I was growing up. It was Wylie Pitman who taught my father his notes on the old upright piano in the store. I don’t know if the Pitmans recognized my father’s musical ability or if they j
ust liked him. Either way, it was Mr. Pit who gave my father his start in music when he was just a little boy.

  Most important, my father had his mother, and he also had the woman he called his “other mother,” Bailey Robinson’s wife, Mary Jane. Mary Jane and Aretha could easily have been divided by jealousy, but that was never the case. Mary Jane loved and watched out for young Aretha, and she watched out for my father and George, too. Mary Jane had lost her own son shortly before my father was born, and Aretha’s small boy helped fill the hole in her heart. Much older than Aretha, Mary Jane became the only grandmother my father ever knew. She nurtured him, bought him little presents, and was lenient with him. My dad said his mother was the exact opposite of Mary Jane, very strict, always trying to instill discipline in him. He would tell us about his mother if we asked him. He spoke of how strong she was in her spirit, how beautiful she was, how he loved to touch her long, soft hair. It seemed like his mother was my father’s world when he was a child. My grandmother didn’t have money to buy her sons shoes or much else, but she gave her boys freedom to explore and a safe place to come home to. Those first years were dim in my father’s memory, but the memories were all good ones.

  When my father was five years old, his small, safe world began to fall apart. The first blow was one he would never recover from—the death of George. My grandmother was working inside the cabin one afternoon while my dad and George played outside. The big tubs she used when she took in washing were next to the cabin, and she had already hauled the water and filled them. The boys loved to splash around in the rinse tubs on a hot day, pretending they were swimming. She had told my father, as she always did, to watch out for his little brother. That afternoon four-year-old George climbed into one of the big tubs to cool off. My father didn’t think anything of it at first since they both splashed around in the tubs all the time. Within minutes, though, my father realized something was wrong. George had begun to flail, gasping for air and trying to scream. My father froze in panic for a moment, but then he ran to the tub as fast as he could. By then George was upside down in the water. My father grabbed George’s ankles and tried to pull him out. He pulled with all his might, but my father wasn’t much bigger than George. The tub was bigger than both of them, and my dad didn’t have the strength to pull his brother out. My father began screaming for help, and his mother came running out of the cabin. She pulled George from the tub, laid him on the ground, and tried to breathe life back into him. Sobbing and praying for God to save George, she screamed at my father, “This is your fault! You were supposed to be watching out for your little brother!” The last thing my father remembers about that day is the sight of his mother, her face streaming with tears, carrying George’s lifeless body into the cabin.

  There was a funeral, a time of mourning, visits from neighbors, but my father was never able to remember any of it. He knew his brother was dead, and his mind went dark. In that inner darkness, his mother’s voice echoed endlessly. He could hear her screaming and begging God for help as the words “This is your fault!” burned more deeply into his heart each day. I doubt my grandmother remembered telling him that, and I do not think she really meant it. In a moment of unbearable grief and pain, she had lashed out at him. But the damage was done. My father blamed himself. Decades later, near the end of his own life, he still suffered from the belief that it was his fault his little brother had died.

  Not long afterward my father’s outer world began to go dark, too, for his eyes started to fail him. He did not lose his sight all at once. First the objects around him blurred. Gradually, it became harder and harder to see into the distance. People in town thought maybe his sight was failing because of George, that watching his brother die had been so painful that my father could no longer look at the world. His eyes would crust over with mucus, and his mother would have to wash them gently with a cloth so he could open them in the morning. Knowing he would not be able to see much longer, he started to memorize colors. When his mother saved the money to take him to a doctor, the doctor shook his head sadly and told her that her son was going blind. There was nothing the doctor could do to help. Soon my father could tell the difference between dark and light but nothing else, and before long, even that distinction seemed to fade. Many years later doctors told my father it was severe glaucoma that had stolen his sight. No matter, for there was nothing that could be done. My father says that except when George drowned, he never knew his mother to cry out against God or weep with despair. Stoically, she accepted the news that her surviving son was losing his sight. She had barely left her teens behind her, and she had already lost one son and now the other one was going blind.

  But my grandmother was a remarkable woman. She refused to feel sorry for herself or to let my father give in to self-pity. My grandmother had never been strong physically. Her health was already failing, and I think she knew that she might not be there to see my father through to manhood. She knew for certain that he was not going to have a father around. There was a job to be done. If her son was to go through life sightless, she was going to make sure he was well prepared.

  So despite having no education herself, she taught him what little math she knew, and, most important, how to truly take care of himself, how to be self-reliant. Long after his sight was gone, he continued to do chores—to clean the house, to chop wood, to cook, to run errands, to bathe and dress himself. People in town criticized my grandmother, thinking she expected too much of her poor blind boy. She ignored them. In a time and place where the most a blind man could aspire to was a banjo and a tin cup, she wanted more for her son. I don’t know if she realized how gifted he really was. I do know that whatever his gifts were, she wanted him to use them.

  It was because she loved her son that she made the hardest decision of her life. She knew that she could never teach my father all the things he needed to learn. So she enrolled him in the Colored Department of the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine, Florida. It was funded by the state, which would pay all the expenses. My father was seven years old, and he didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave his mother and Mary Jane and Mr. Pit and everything he knew and loved. He begged his mother not to send him away, but she stood firm. When fall came, my grandmother put him on the train and watched as he was carried far from home, alone and terrified. It was the best thing she could have done for him, and it gave him a life, but I am not certain he ever forgave her. My mother believes the hurt of that separation stayed with him for the rest of his life.

  It was at this school that my father learned to read and write and make music, to do all the things that he would need to live his life. He was there for seven years, coming home only for summers. And it was while he was there that he suffered two more significant losses.

  The first loss occurred during his first year there. By the end of winter, the pain in his right eye had intensified. The doctors couldn’t find a way to relieve the pain, and eventually his suffering became unbearable. The school doctor told my father that the only way to stop the pain was to remove his eye. He was terrified, but there was no help for it. Eight years old and all alone, my father was admitted to the hospital, where doctors removed his right eyeball. No one even told his mother about the surgery.

  The second loss was the one that transformed his life, even more than blindness. My father was fifteen years old when one of his teachers came into class one day and told him he was going home. His mother was dead. With no warning, he was informed that his mother had died. My father never spoke to us of that moment, not even to my mother, but years later I read about it in his own words. He said that in that moment, the world became a series of shadows, of silhouettes, and he sank into a sort of trance. He could not comprehend his mother’s passing. It was unthinkable that she was no longer there to stroke his face, to soothe him, to hold him when he was afraid. The last thing he remembered was the school putting him on the train for home. He had no memory of the remainder of that week. He could neither speak nor eat
nor respond to anything around him. Modern psychologists would say that he was in deep emotional shock, but he simply said that for a while he went crazy, and he almost didn’t come back from the darkness. It was a Christian lady in town named Ma Beck whom my father credits with saving him. She came to him and spoke of his mother, reminded him of all the things his mother had taught him, had hoped for him. She admonished him, reminding him of what his mother would say to him if she were there—that he had to carry on. Ma Beck was somehow able to get through to him. He collapsed into her arms and sobbed for hours, and afterward he went with her to his mother’s funeral to see her one last time, stroking her face and her long, soft hair.

  I wish I could have known my grandmother. She probably never knew that she had birthed a prodigy in Ray Charles Robinson, but she did know that he was special and that she probably would not be there with him for long. She never had the chance to get an education herself, but she showed her own genius in the way she raised him. She only had him with her for seven years, but somehow my grandmother knew she could shape his life at an early age. She taught him to be independent, not to rely on others to help him through life. She taught a blind son how to succeed in a seeing world. She taught him everything he needed to know—except how to say good-bye to her.

  Two years before he died, facing his own mortality, my father wrote a song about his mother. He also spoke of Ma Beck, for he firmly believed that God had sent her to save his life in the midst of unbearable loss. I have no doubt that she did save his life that day, but the truth is that my father had been given a death blow nonetheless. He never recovered from the emotional trauma of that loss. He never recovered spiritually, either. Everyone told him that Jesus had taken his mother away. He hated Jesus for taking her, but he feared Jesus, too. Who was this Jesus that he would take a boy’s mother? And why? People at church said one should not love the things of the world too much. Is that why Jesus took her? Because he loved her too much? At the end of his life, he told Mable John, a close spiritual adviser and friend, that he was afraid of loving anyone that much again. If he did, Jesus might take them, too. When his mother died, she took a part of him with her that we never got back.