Chapter One:
TheFamily

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.”

—AnthonyBrandt

I was born on January 2, 1949, to Willie James and Hattie Mae Brown. My brother Herbert was two years older than me, but it wasn’t until many years later that I learned we had different fathers. Apparently, my mother had a relationship with someone else before she married my dad, and Herbert was born out of wedlock. By the time I came into the picture she was living full steam for Jesus. As time passed, she tried her best to make sure all of us kids spent enough time in church to avoid making that same kind of mistake later inlife.

I grew up with my parents and my ten brothers and sisters all living on Jacksonville’s Eastside in a tiny, 600-square-foot house with only one bathroom. Ours was an open house, where you could see all the way to the back where the bathroom was when you first walked in the front door. The only separate room was my parent’s bedroom to the left of the main room, but even their door was usually left open, so that the house was basically one big open room. It was a common style back then for wood-frame houses built in our part of town. Many of them have since been torn down orcondemned.

Like all of my brothers and sisters, I was born at home with the help of a midwife who was a part of our community. She delivered most of the children in our neighborhood right there in our own homes. That’s the way it was back then. Midwives were an important part of most Black communities in the South. In those days, hospitals below the Mason-Dixon Line were usuallysegregated.

First, there was Herbert Lewis Brown, the eldest of the siblings. He was born in 1947, and as I mentioned, he was really a half-brother. I didn’t know the full story until later on, but looking back now I can see that Herbert never really felt like he was a full-fledged member of the family. He was my mother’s son but not my father’s, though as far as I could tell my father treated him the same as the rest of us. Herbert died from esophageal cancer at sixty-eight after struggling for many years with what was clearly a family-wide addiction to drugs andalcohol.

I came in second in 1949, followed by my brother Willie James Brown, otherwise known as “Pumpkin.” He was born on March 25, 1950, and died in April of 1990 at the age of forty. Pumpkin became a heavy drug user and eventually was a dealer of some reputation in the Jacksonville area. He was killed by two crackheads who shot him because he wouldn’t give them some drugs on credit.

After Pumpkin was our sister Brenda, who came into the world in 1952. She died just a year later from pneumonia. I was only three at the time, and my memory of her is just what I was told over time by my mother, father, and other family and friends who had witnessed the short life shelived.

My sister Hazel was born in 1953 and was a real blessing to my mother. After losing Brenda to pneumonia and having had a miscarriage sometime between Herbert and me, my mother could probably see that raising a bunch of boys would have its challenges. When Hazel was born, I’m sure our mother saw having a little girl in the house as a gift from the