Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir Read Free Page B

young. Of course, back in those days, “dating” usually meant dropping by to sit in the living room and watch television while the grown-ups sat right there in between you! There wasn’t much trouble they could get into.
    After weeks of talking on the phone, they went on their first date outside the house. My dad took my mother out for dinner and a movie. Afterward, he brought her back to the front door of Aunt Juanita’s trailer and gently kissed her on the lips. They said good night and Mommy slipped inside. A second later, Mom heard a knock. It was my father—and he stood there holding her wig in his right hand! The Dorothy Dandridge–style wig had somehow slipped off my mother’s head while they were kissing. When Mommy spotted her wig in Dad’s hand and realized he was staring right at the stocking cap on her head, she let out a scream, grabbed the wig before Dad had a chance to say anything, and then slammed the door. That must’ve been a real good kiss!
    Before my mother even finished high school, she and the other girls in her singing group caught the ear of a Motown rep. The rep offered to sign only my mother, but she blew that opportunity because she refused to leave the group. By then, Mommy already had her heart set on another passion—marriage.
    Soon after my mother’s seventeenth birthday in 1966, my father traveled down to South Carolina to get my grandfather’s permission to marry his daughter—in Maryland, you need parental consent to marry when you’re under eighteen. My mother was eager to take her vows so she could get out of Aunt Juanita’s house. She loved her aunt, of course, but she sometimes felt that Juanita was possessive. Mommy once even wrote a letter to her mother and asked if she could return to South Carolina; she sealed the envelope and gave it to Aunt Juanita to mail for her. Months later, Mommy found the unsealed letter in her aunt’s room. She had never sent it. A few years later, we all discovered one reason my aunt might’ve held on so tightly to my mother: Juanita had realized that her husband was having an affair.
    Back when my uncle was a young man in Severn, he had a hometown sweetheart. He eventually joined the army and left for a post in Arizona—and while he was there, he fell in love with my aunt Juanita. My aunt got pregnant, so my uncle married her. My aunt lost that child, and over time, my uncle began cheating with his first love. In 1970, Uncle Ro Ro was on top of his mistress—and right then and there, he died of a heart attack. At the time, I was too young to even know what sex was. Yet when I overheard my mother telling that story, I became paranoid that the same thing could one day happen to me.
    When my father made his way down to South Carolina to ask for my mother’s hand in marriage, my grandfather—the Reverend John Jacob Jackson Jr.—gave his blessing. A few months later at the Metropolitan United Methodist Church at the end of Queenstown Road, my parents had a “rainbow wedding”—Mom’s bridesmaids wore a variety of colors, like red, blue, and sea-breeze green. But my parents don’t have any pictures from their wedding day: The film got ruined, or at least that’s the story they told me. So a few weeks after the wedding, Mom put back on her dress, Dad put back on his suit, and they posed for a photo with Aunt Juanita and Uncle Roland. After the marriage, my aunt and uncle gave my parents two acres of their land, and Mommy and Daddy put a trailer on the plot.
    On October 7, 1967—less than a year into their marriage—my parents brought me home from the hospital and settled me into our white, two-bedroom trailer with the turquoise shutters. I’ve often wondered why Mommy gave up her chance at a singing career to become a wife and mother—and because my mother is still so guarded about her childhood, I may never know the reason. But in a way, I’m here today because she made that choice.
    I ADORED MY aunt Juanita. As a toddler, I