I was so excited, so happy, that I burst into tears of joy. I named her Whitney Elizabeth—Whitney, the name of a TV character I liked, because I thought it was classy and a little different. And Elizabeth, after John’s mother.
I was beyond thrilled that I’d gotten my wish to have a girl, and I wanted Nippy to be a special kind of child. She was my princess, my perfect little jewel, and from the very beginning I wanted to protect her. I didn’t want my sweet baby ever to know hardship, if I could help it, because hardship was something I had learned plenty about in my own childhood.
As sweet as my Nippy was, I always had a harder shell, ever since I was a girl. I didn’t have much choice, considering all the things that happened to my family as I was growing up in Depression-era Newark.
My parents, Nicholas and Delia Mae Drinkard, came north to Newark from Georgia in 1923. The city of Newark had built wooden tenement houses for working-class black folks and immigrants, and that’s where they settled—on the top floor of a three-story building with a pull-chain toilet all the way down on the back porch. When they arrived, my parents already had three children—a son, William, and two daughters, Lee and Marie—and over the next ten years, they’d have five more: Hank, Anne, Nicky, and Larry, and finally me, in September 1933.
Our apartment, at 199 Court Street, was in the middle of a racially mixed working-class neighborhood. It had its rough edges, but there were also churches on just about every corner. Both of my parents were devout Christians, with deep roots in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, so my siblings and I grew up in the faith.
My mother was a homebody, a soft-spoken woman who rarely left the house except to go to church, where she served as a steward. Only three things mattered to her: God, her husband, and her children. And I never heard her complain, even though it was a constant struggle to keep eight kids neat, clean, and well fed on my father’s Depression-era salary of eighteen dollars a week.
My father did backbreaking work, first doing road repair in Newark, and then pouring iron in the blazing-hot foundry of the Singer sewing machine factory in Elizabeth. His was a hard life, but like my mother he had a strong faith, and he was never afraid to let it show. Daddy wasn’t a singer, but in church he would hum along during the testimonials—
a tradition in the black church in those days. My father praised God and prayed all the time, openly, without any hesitation. He once even got right down on his knees on the factory floor, to pray for another worker’s mother.
Tall and light-skinned, with penetrating blue-gray eyes, Daddy was an imposing man with strong beliefs—one look at him and you knew he didn’t take no mess. That was true not only within the church, where he was a trustee and a vocal member of the congregation, but also at home, where he taught us everything we needed to know about Jesus and faith.
And oh, he could be strict. He was determined to protect his children from corruption and temptations, so he kept a close eye on us, requiring us to be home before dark and say our prayers before every meal. Daddy usually led us in prayer, but every so often he’d direct one of us to do it. As my sisters and I came of age, he also demanded that we teach Sunday school—it was his way of making us learn through teaching. He wanted all his children to have strong Christian faith and walk the straight-and-narrow path, just as he had.
But as hard as my father tried to protect us from the world outside the church, he couldn’t fully insulate us from the temptations of the streets. My oldest brother, William, who was fifteen when I was born, fell prey in his teenage years to the allure of Newark’s darker side. He began hanging out in the streets, gambling, drinking, fighting, and doing who knows what else. William had a hot temper and a mean streak, and when Daddy confronted him about straying, he fought back. I was too young to know what was happening, but they clashed hard, and William left home to make his own way. Our family was close-knit, and it was devastating for my mother to see her eldest son walk out the door. At that time, I had no idea how hard it must be for a mother to watch her child stray into danger and temptation. Many years later, I would learn that feeling all too well.
My mother was already under tremendous stress, trying to feed and care for so many children. The pain of William’s departure only added to it, and after he left, her health got worse. She had other burdens to bear, too—in the years after I was born, she lost two sets of twins at birth. Losing four babies in such a short time, and losing her eldest son to the streets, proved too much for her. At age thirty-four, my mother had a stroke.
My mother’s life—and ours—would never be the same after that. The stroke damaged the right side of her brain, she lost the use of her left arm, and her left leg was also impaired. I was just a child, but watching my mother struggle to recover from her stroke taught me what suffering looked like. My sisters and I spent long hours massaging her leg to try to increase circulation and comfort her. Because it was hard for her to move around, she only left the apartment for emergencies and church. Every single Sunday, my father would lift her up, carry her down the three flights of stairs, then push her in her wheelchair to church. And when they came back, he’d carry her back up those three flights. Seeing my parents’ example, I grew up believing that no matter the hardship, you can overcome it with determination.
But there remained many more lessons to be learned, because our family’s troubles had only just begun.
Not long after my mother’s stroke, a flash fire broke out in the paint store on the first floor of our tenement building. The fire spread with a fury, and although we were all able to get out of the house safely, we had no time to save our possessions. We all ran across the street and huddled there, frightened, as the flames rose higher amid the shrieking of sirens and people’s screams.
My father held me in his arms, and as I clutched his neck in terror I watched the flames climb higher, engulfing our home and then consuming the entire block of tenement houses. I looked at my father and saw tears roll from his eyes as he watched years of our family’s memories burn. The fire destroyed not only our home, but just about everything we owned—our clothes, our books, family photographs, and what few playthings we had. And because our extended family—Daddy’s parents, Mommy’s sister and mother, and several aunts and uncles—had lived in that same block of tenements, their places burned, too. We’d all have to move.
The fire scattered the Drinkards all over Newark, but strangely, in other ways, it was a godsend. If it hadn’t been for that fire, it would have taken us years to save enough money to move out of the tenement. But afterward, with the help of city services, we were able to move into an apartment in a much better neighborhood. From the ashes of something terrible, something good was able to emerge—another lesson that imprinted itself on my young mind.
Once we settled into our new neighborhood, our family started attending St. Luke’s A.M.E. Church. At age five, I was too young to understand much of what was going on, but I was drawn to the joy and enthusiasm that seemed to swell up in that place. You could feel the force of the Spirit and the music the minute you stepped inside those doors.
St. Luke’s was more than just the place our family went to Sunday school. It was the place where my brothers and sisters and I learned to sing.
At first, I wasn’t all that interested in singing. But the music at St. Luke’s was different. At St. Luke’s A.M.E., they not only had a piano, they also had cymbals, tambourines, and even a washboard. This was where we learned to clap our hands in time, and where we learned syncopation, the offbeat rhythm that’s a cornerstone of so many musical styles. It’s where we learned to play the tambourine, and to harmonize. And it’s where I first began to experience music as something spiritual.
Inspired by the music in that church, my brothers and sisters and I started singing together. I don’t remember when we first started, but the minute we did, something just clicked—we could hardly believe what was coming out of our own mouths. We we
re blessed with some truly great singers in my family (all except poor Hank, who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket), and when my father heard us sing together, that was it—our carefree childhood days were over.
Daddy made us practice together every single day. I didn’t want to, of course—I just wanted to keep playing like all the other five-year-old kids. Sometimes I’d hide in my room, or I’d run outside and duck behind the car, and my father would threaten me with a beating to get me to come join the others. He never did actually spank me, because, as the youngest, I was his “baby.” But he surely did spank my brothers and sisters—Daddy was not one to fool around if he wanted something done.
My sister Marie, who we called Reebie, taught us songs and rehearsed us, and she was just as strict as my father. We’d learn the melody of a song from the hymnbook, then add in the harmonies, and then finally improvise. “Strike me up a tune!” my father would say, and we’d stand in a group, hold up a broom like a microphone, and start singing.
I could see the pride in my father’s eyes when we sang, but you know, he wasn’t training us to make himself proud. As we started performing in churches, and later in concert halls, he really saw us as junior missionaries—young ambassadors of God’s Word. He wanted us to be a positive influence on other young people, and to carry God’s Word and the family name with our own group: the Drinkard Quartet.
For a time, things were good. We might not have had much money, but we had enough—and more important, we had each other, our faith, and our music. But just as life seemed to be getting better, my mother had another stroke.
From that point on, my mother’s hospital visits became part of our family’s daily life. Every so often, sometimes in the middle of the night, she’d go to the hospital and stay there for a few days. After a while, we kids would hear from a relative or neighbor that she was coming home, and we’d crowd into the front window of our apartment to watch for her and my father coming up the street, him pushing her in her wheelchair.
We were always so happy to have Mommy home, but after those hospital visits she usually needed relief from taking care of the three youngest children—Larry, Nicky, and me. So, during these times, Larry and Nicky were sent to stay with relatives who still lived near Court Street, and I got shipped off to Newark’s Ironbound section to stay with my aunt Juanita. I hated staying with Aunt Juanita, not only because I missed my brothers, but also because she was a mean, nasty woman. She wasn’t like my other relatives—she dipped snuff and was always trying to get a rise out of everybody. Every day I spent at Aunt Juanita’s, I prayed for my mother’s quick recovery.
When Mommy was feeling better, and we could all be at home again—those were the happiest times of my young life. But they lasted only until one terrible night in May 1941, when I was eight years old. That night, my mother began having seizures, and blood started pouring from her mouth and nose. Daddy and my older sisters tried desperately to stem her bleeding and comfort her, but the blood was still gushing out when the ambulance arrived. Mommy was rushed to the hospital as my brothers and I slept through it all, unaware that anything was happening.
The next morning, we were told only that our mother had gone to the hospital. And later that day, when a neighbor boy yelled up to us that he saw Daddy coming up the street, Larry, Nicky, and I gathered in the window of our apartment, just like we always did, to watch for Daddy rolling Mommy up the street in her wheelchair.
That’s when mean Aunt Juanita yelled up to us, “Get out of that window, children! Don’t you know your momma’s dead?”
I didn’t even have time to take in her words before I saw my father walking up the street. His head hung down, and he was leaning heavily on Oscar, my mother’s brother. He was crying, and my mother and her wheelchair were nowhere to be seen. As it turned out, she’d suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage and hadn’t even made it to the hospital.
My beloved mother, Delia Mae Drinkard, had passed. She was only thirty-nine years old.
I didn’t know how to cope with the terrible feeling of emptiness that settled over me after my mother died. I didn’t think I’d recover from it, and I’m not sure I ever did.
I was only eight, and the very idea of death was hard to put my head around. To make matters worse, no one had the time or inclination to talk to me about it. I think my father, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles all assumed I was too young, so I was left to deal with it on my own. In fact, for years afterward, my sisters avoided talking about Mommy’s death, as the mere mention of her name brought tears to their eyes. And so I learned very early on to tamp down my feelings of sadness and just get on with life—because there
really wasn’t any other choice in the matter.
My mother’s quiet stability, her faith and love, had sustained all of us during those harsh Depression years. With that stability gone, we were adrift. And so we turned to the one thing that could ground us: singing the gospel.
Singing and rehearsing kept our family together after my mother’s death. We looked to Daddy for support, and he looked to us, burying his grief in his involvement with his children and the music. Daddy always urged us to practice more; sometimes, when he came home after we were in bed, he’d wake us and say, “Come on, now, get up and sing me a song!” Nobody wanted to disappoint him, so we always did it. And with all that practice, we started getting booked to sing in churches and gospel programs from New Jersey to New York and beyond.
I loved singing with my brothers and sisters, but, unlike my older sister Reebie, who had found the Lord and been converted at the storefront church, I didn’t know what I was singing about. Something definitely touched me when I sang, but I didn’t really understand it. For Reebie, who believed that true gospel singers had to have the spirit of God within them, I was just “half-steppin’.” And when you’re half-steppin’, if you’re not careful, that’s when you start down roads you shouldn’t be on.
Reebie and my father would sing and listen only to gospel, but I liked other kinds of music, too—and I loved to dance. On Saturday mornings, when Reebie and Daddy were out of the house, my sister Annie and I would play records on our old Victrola. She loved Billie Holiday and I loved Dinah Washington—who, I later discovered, had started out singing with a female gospel quartet we’d once shared a stage with. But on those Saturday mornings, Annie and I weren’t thinking about gospel music. We allowed ourselves to get lost in the romantic dreams and worldly desires described in those popular songs.
By the time I reached my teens, I was straying further into worldly temptations. I had my own little crowd of school friends, including my best friend, Jolly, who lived down the block from us. Jolly and I were pals, and sometimes we’d hang out in the after-school activity room, where kids could play ball or do arts and crafts. But Jolly also liked to go out to the neighborhood places where kids could dance.
I knew my father and Reebie wouldn’t approve, but I was tempted by the music and the fun everyone seemed to have dancing. Yet I was also frightened by some things that went on there. I’d lived a pretty sheltered life, and some of those places had hustlers and junkies lurking around. This was the world my brother William had gotten drawn into, and I’d seen what it did to him—and to my family. So, I knew I should stay away, but in the end I couldn’t resist the temptation.
Jolly and I started sneaking into one of the tamer teen spots—a place called the Green Lantern—and for a while, I had a good time drinking sodas and eating chips, dancing and playing the jukebox. That is, until one evening when Reebie caught me. She was furious, and she beat me hard for breaking the rules. I knew that it was my father who’d set those rules, and Reebie was only enforcing them, but she was just as upset as he was.
No one likes to get a beating, but in some ways I was relieved that Reebie had caught me. I had been straying from my family’s tight little circle, and although going out to those neighborhood joints felt exciting and new, I knew it co
uld lead to a darker place. Deep down, I understood that my father had set strict rules for a good reason—to keep us safe. He did it out of love.
That’s why, even into my teenage years, my father still kept us all to a rigid daily routine. After school let out, we were expected to come straight home and take care of our chores. We were allowed to go out for a little while after that, but we had to be back home before dusk and ready to have dinner by the time Daddy got home from work. After dinner, one of us would do dishes, and then we’d rehearse while Reebie and my father supervised. And on weekends, we were usually booked to sing at some church or another, so we’d be traveling under the watchful eyes of Reebie and my father.
Music kept us busy, and being busy meant we had no time to get into trouble. And that’s exactly the way my father liked it.
Around this same time, my father told us he was getting married again. His announcement came as a shock for all of us, but particularly for the girls—Lee, Annie, Reebie, and me. I guess it was partly because we didn’t want to share our father with anyone. But it was also because Viola, the woman Daddy planned to marry, was so different from our mother. My sisters tried to talk him out of it, but he’d made up his mind. Viola knew we didn’t like her, and she was jealous of the closeness between Daddy and his children, so she aimed to do something about it.
Soon after she moved into our house, Viola convinced my father to send Nicky and Larry to live in Boston with their uncle. Then Reebie, who was twenty-five, announced that she was going to marry the man she’d been seeing for years, and just like that, she was gone, too. Nicky and Larry didn’t stay in Boston for long, but soon after they moved back, my father informed us that he and Viola were going to move. Viola was just determined to break up our family unit, the center of all our lives.
I didn’t want Daddy to move away, but I felt secure knowing that at least I’d still be with my brothers and my sister Annie. But then Daddy dropped the bombshell. He told me that I’d be moving with him and Viola, since I was too young to live in a home without adult supervision. Live with Viola? Without my brothers? This was the last straw.
Remembering Whitney: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped Page 2
