CHAPTER ONE
Johnny/Jimmy

She loved a good time. There were few of them in her short and wretched life.

Lucille Jeter shook off the gloomy blanket of wartime anxieties that troubled all the adults around her, and despite her family's admonitions, she ignored the tedious drip… drip… drip of the Seattle evening rain to go out and dance every chance she got.

The sweet-natured and naïve "baby" of the Jeter family, Lucille had a brother and three older sisters. Their parents, Preston and Clarice, were typical of many of the black residents of Seattle in the 1940s, men and women who had migrated west, seeking a better life but frequently disappointed. Born in Virginia, Preston Jeter possessed education but few opportunities. He worked, at various times, as a miner and as a longshoreman. His wife, Clarice, a native of Arkansas, brought in much-needed income toiling as cleaning lady and housekeeper. Welfare checks sometimes entered the picture. Mrs. Jeter's Pentecostal religion was both her rock and her social life; she worried and prayed about Lucille and her always fragile health. Lucille was inclined to overdo.

The sight of the pretty, tiny, pale-skinned black girl kicking up her heels and the sound of her giddy laughter as she was tossed into the air captivated Al Hendrix. It seemed that she would never get enough of the bright lights and spirited jitterbug rhythms. Lucille loved her music!

The exhilarating nights on the dance floor didn't last long. Weeks after the couple's first meeting, Lucille became pregnant and hurriedly married twenty-two-year-old Al, an attractive if not handsome bantam rooster of a man, standing barely five foot two. She told her mother that she liked the way Al smiled at her.

Her young husband was an American citizen raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, who had settled in Seattle several years before to try his luck as a lightweight boxer in the city's Golden Gloves competition. Al's father, Ross Hendrix, was an Ohio native who grew up to become a Chicago policeman and eventually, making an exotic switch, took a job as stagehand for a vaudeville troupe. He married one of the dancers in the company, Nora Moore, the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and an Irish father. Nora and Ross Hendrix decided to give up the traveling life and make a new start in Vancouver. In quick succession Nora gave birth to two sons, a daughter, and finally to James Allen Hendrix, generally known as Al.

Since his education had ceased in the seventh grade and he was unprepared for any skilled work, Al turned to the love of dancing he'd inherited from his mother to making a few bucks here and there in dance contests. His specialties were tap dancing, jitterbugging, and solo improvisations. Although Al later was to refer to himself as a member of an important show business family, Mama Nora worked long hours in the kitchen of a Vancouver restaurant after she left vaudeville; as a teenager Al was a waiter there.

When he married Lucille, Al had perhaps only three things in common with his sixteen-year-old wife: They both were the youngest children in their respective families, they each loved to dance, and they had a child on the way. Within days after their marriage on March 31, 1942, Al kissed Lucille good-bye. Drafted into the army, he was sent more than fifteen hundred miles away to Oklahoma, and then on to Georgia.

Lucille was barely seventeen when she gave birth to her first son, Johnny, on November 27, 1942. The birth took place at the home of Dorothy Harding, a good friend to Lucille's sister Dolores. Relatives and friends joked about how strange it was that these two short people had conceived such a graceful, long-limbed baby.

Raising a baby was no joke, and Lucille was unprepared to handle the transition from dropout schoolgirl to mother. Through an army snafu, she was not receiving any of Al's military pay. Not long after Johnny was born, Preston Jeter died of a heart condition. As a result, Clarice was plagued by financial problems. She loved Lucille's baby, but she couldn't take care of him and also work five days a week. Clarice and her daughter Dolores were deeply concerned about Johnny's welfare as he was shuttled around a circle of relatives, friends, and even complete strangers in homes in and near Seattle. Week to week Johnny never was quite sure who was "in charge"—a phrase that stayed with him. He slept on pillows, in baskets, and in other people's beds; a real baby crib was a luxury Johnny seldom knew. Lucille floated in and out of Johnny's life, the "Mama" he adored—even if the young girl couldn't support him or manage to take care of him for more than a few days at a time.

When he was almost two and a half years old, Johnny was taken in by a church acquaintance of his grandmother Clarice. This woman became ill and unexpectedly passed away; her sister journeyed from California to Seattle, where she met and was charmed by little Johnny. It was a fateful meeting, and while he eventually forgot her name, he never forgot her. She volunteered to take care of the boy in her wartime home in Berkeley, California. Lucille had no objections.

Johnny now lived in the finest house yet, a simple bungalow several blocks away from the University of California campus. He felt comfortable and secure, and he blossomed under the warmth and concern of the woman who had rescued him, not to mention the attention of her eldest daughter, who was approximately twenty, and two lively teenage children. He would later recall how he loved being read to, always eager for the next story. Johnny's vocabulary increased dramatically during this happy respite from the insecurities of Seattle. "They called me a little chatterbox," he said to me, smiling at the thought of those long-ago memories.

Al Hendrix had given some second thoughts to his marriage, particularly after he heard that Lucille had been seeing another man; he was considering divorcing his young wife. Weeks after his discharge from the army late in 1945, he traveled down the West Coast to Berkeley to take his first look at his son. Johnny did not quite connect the photograph of his father in uniform, prominently displayed in the living room, with the non uniformed young man who was inspecting him now. Al stayed with Johnny's guardian angels for a few days, met two of the boy's neighborhood playmates, and when Johnny apparently had become used to him, he packed up the boy's belongings. The two of them embarked on an exhausting, eight-hundred-mile train trip back to Seattle. Years later Johnny remembered how he cried and sobbed when this unfamiliar man he now was to call Daddy disciplined him midway through the journey: "I want to get off this train! I want to go home. You leave me alone! I want my family.

"I just bawled," he said. "I knew they loved me, that they would miss me."

Although the details faded, Johnny never forgot this substitute family. "They, that time has always been like a cozy little dream in my mind," he would say as an adult.

When Johnny was nearly four, his father applied to have his name legally changed to James Marshall Hendrix. It bothered Al that Lucille might have named the baby after a boyfriend. The boy was told that he was now to be called Jimmy. This disturbed and confused Johnny, who'd been learning how to sound out and spell "Johnny" from a child's alphabet book he'd been given in Berkeley. "The kid," as he was often referred to, was now loaded with names. His aunt Dolores, Lucille's concerned and supportive sister, had earlier nicknamed him "Buster."

Later Johnny/Jimmy spoke of the first years of his life as "full of confusion," and he did not easily discuss his childhood memories. There was a period before he started school when he and his mother and father all lived in Aunt Dolores's small home as part of her own growing family. "My auntie always tried to make things better," he said. The Hendrix marriage was an on-again, off-again union. Occasionally, to remove him from increasing parental tension, Jimmy was sent across the border to Vancouver, British Columbia, for brief stays with Al's mother, Nora Hendrix. In January 1948, when Jimmy was six, his parents produced another son, Leon. Not quite a year later, Lucille gave birth to a third son, Joseph.

Lucille felt trapped. She was too young to be the mother of one child, much less two and then a third; she couldn't handle being tied down. Al was increasingly bossy, short-tempered, and tight with money, always a problem for many residents of Seattle's Central District. There was no more romance—or jitterbugging—for this couple.

Jimmy's father was always telling him, "Don't get in the way" or "Don't make a fuss" or "No sassing from you!"

The boy swiftly learned that being quiet and dutiful occasionally helped to avoid loud, unpleasant volleys of fighting. Al told Jimmy, "That woman's a mess." He hated to hear his father talk ugly about his mother as much as he trembled at seeing her intoxicated, stumbling and shaky. Al was no teetotaler himself, and his eldest son often sobbed into an old pillow as he tried to sleep while ugly, noisy battles raged a few feet away from his bed. "Sometimes," Jimmy later told a friend, "I would lay there and ask myself over and over, 'Who am I? Why is this happening? What can I do?' "

One nightmare of an evening, Lucille left, never to return. "Jimmy baby," she told her son, "I have to escape this!"

Copyright © 2005 by Sharon Lawrence