sponsored in part by
Page 2 I guess all of us are somewhat racially mixed up in America, whether you like it or not. My father was five foot three, very jealous, difficult with my mom and us children, very strict, and a hard working man. He controlled my mother's life totally from the day that she married him. They had both married very young. I would later learn that he kept her from pursuing her one dream. My mother, Rebecca, secretly yearned to sing. She was afantastic singer and a good woman, but my dad's jealousy of her beauty kept her life unfulfilled. Dad wouldn't allow her to sing. My mother's mother was a full blooded American Indian and her dad was black. Mom stood five feet ten and had a regal, almost mystical aura about her. In those days, she was called a high yellow girl. She was shapely and extremely well built, with long straight black hair that only helped to increase her beauty. If she were a young woman today, I'm sure she could strut down the runways and catwalks of Europe and America with the best of the exotic models. My mother taught us faith as children. There were five of us that she had todeal with, myself, who was the middle boy, Richard, the oldest, Howard, the youngest boy, and then my two sisters, Iris and Carol Gardner. I always thought Carol was my dad's favorite. He would call her "my little chicken". Mom found her strength through the hard times that we all had to endure in her religion.She was a devoutly religious person throughout her life, but when need be, she could be incredibly bold and incredibly defensive about her family, especially her children. I lived under dirt poor conditions as a child growing up. I remember to this day, some of the rash and sickening hard times that my family and I had to endure. WhenI look at youngsters these days, even those that live in the inner city and are incredibly poor, they would have no understanding of how poor we really were living in that little shotgun house in Tyler,Texas. Poor or not, my dad provided for us the best he could. When I say he was strict,what he did to us would have been considered child abuse in this day and time. We didn't get simple beatings, we got good beatings. We were sent out into the yard behind the little old raggedy house and made to cut our own switches. A switch is something that dad would use to beat us with. Not only would he beat us with this switch, that wasn't good enough, he had to keep us from running. Dad would tie us to the beating chair, hands, legs and body, and then he would beat us while we sat in the chair. You know, I would get mad about some of the things that happened to us, but there wasn't anything much that you could do about it. It seems that if dad wasn't always on our case, it was the white man always on my ass from day one. Even now, as I try to remember, I cannot for the life of me, recall one single, solitary time that dad or even mom told one of us kids that they loved us. They never hugged us, they never held us, and never once told their children "we love you". I started singing around the house in the neighborhood and at school when I was about five years old. I played with my brothers and my sisters, and oftentimes I would wander off on my own just to be alone. I would sing and skip through the fields or the street in the hot Texas sun. I began then to plot my way out of Tyler, Texas. I knew that there had to be some place better than this.
CHAPTER ONE
BLACK GOLD TEXAS TEA