Ray, age 7
"I didn’t lose my sight till I was seven."
“It happened gradually. So I have years of pictures of country places, country people, animals in my mind.” Musician Ray Charles was born with perfect sight in 1930 and grew up in Greenville, Florida. In 1978, Ray Charles and David Ritz wrote Ray’s memoir Brother Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story.
A month after Ray Charles turned 7 years old, his mother put him on a train going to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, a boarding school about160 miles from home. He was torn away from all he knew. “I was just a seven-year-old kid. It didn’t seem possible that I had to leave. None of it seemed possible.”
He reported feeling self-pity and despair he’d never felt before. For the first time ever he wasn’t the only blind kid, but it help the loneliness and homesickness. “Deep down inside, I hurt bad.” To make matters worse, he couldn't afford to travel home and spent Christmas alone at school. In the second-half of the year, his right eye was removed because of severe pain.
Charles recalled that “going blind didn’t seem half as bad as actually losing an eye.” It makes sense to me; I imagine the blindness as a part of him—rising from his own body much like music that he described as “a force already within me.” But the surgery was losing a piece of himself in the most literal way. A child’s typical first loss of a body part, losing teeth, can be distressing, but there is some reassurance with the arrival of a replacement tooth. Ray would never get his eye back. Still, in that first year at school, Ray eventually did what most children. He made friends. He learned to read. “[Braille] was easy; in fact, it only took ten days or so.”
I had imagined that a year that began with a huge change in environment and ended with permanent blindness would build a giant wall between selves—Ray, forever changed at the age of 7. But Charles very directly stated that when he returned home after the first year at school, “I wasn’t that different. I was still the same little RC.” He went on to describe navigating his town with ease, playing music whenever or wherever people would let him, and doing (or avoiding) chores just like before.
In his memoir and in TV interviews Charles explained that people often assumed a child going blind would be filled with fear. But he wasn’t. Partly because it happened slowly and partly because of his mother’s response to his fate. But I also wonder if it wasn’t related to his younger brother’s death.
“The two of us were little free spirits. We ran off into the woods, threw pebbles, and rocks into the streams. We picked blackberries and we laughed when mama yelled at us to “get outta that berry path ‘fore a rattlesnake up and bites your head off.’”
When Ray was 5 years old, he watched his brother George, age 4, drown. As an adult, Charles wrote, “I can see it almost too vividly.” He described in detail the location, the action, what he saw, what he heard, what he screamed, and the fear that he felt. Then his adult reflection stalls.
“Don’t ask me why, but now my mind goes blank. I know there was mourning and weeping. I know there was a cemetery and a grave. I know I was there when it all happened, but for some reason I can’t see it. I can’t remember even crying.”
A few months later Ray experienced the first signs of vision problems (mucus in his eyes, now assumed to be glaucoma). When the doctor’s verified he’d go completely blind, he had a sense of acceptance—not in a defeated way but in a practical way. His mother Aretha made sure of that. Yes, he was losing his sight, but there were still chores to do before he could go exploring the woods or learning piano with his beloved mentor Mr. Pitman.
Throughout his life, Charles expressed gratitude for his childhood that was rich in nature because it gave him a catalog of visual images to see in his mind’s eye the rest of his life.
“I can see the landscape—the pecan, the chinaberry, and pine trees, the pigs and cows and chickens. And during storms I waited for the lightning. Most kids were frightened of lightning, but to me it was beautiful. The white steak running across the black sky thrilled me.”
Sadly, that also means one of the last full-color images was witnessing the death of his brother. The 2004 film Ray (made with input from Ray Charles) connected the need to block out this trauma as one source of Ray’s drug addictions.
As I delve into childhood memoirs and essays, I look for how children do it. How do they respond to good and bad events (and those that can’t be categorized so easily) After all the child Ray Charles did not have access to drugs to numb the pain.
There was music: “from the moment I learned that there were piano keys to be mashed, I started mashing ‘em trying to make sounds out of feelings.” And also crying: “I know men ain’t supposed to cry, but I think that’s wrong. Cryings always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing I often cry.”
But I keep circling back to the timeline of events. The fist two years of losing his sight were the same first two years that he lived with the trauma of his brother’s death. The same “first two years” existing in the world without his brother. What is fear of the world going dark if you’ve just lived through a fear you cannot attach to words?
Children want to understand things: why does the grasshopper hop, what makes lightning, how do I get from home to school and back without getting lost (Ray would count the railroad cross-ties.) Perhaps his mind found solving the puzzles of living with blindness a distraction from the impossible puzzle of grief.
Sources
Brother Ray: Ray Charles’s Own Story by Ray Charles and David Ritz. Da Capo Press. 1978.
Ray. Director & Producer Taylor Hackford, Screenplay James L. White. Universal Pictures. October 29, 2004
Interview on The Dick Cavett Show. 1972.
Interview of Lucille Day by Jordan Lee www.dazewithjordanthelion.com Jul 9, 2021
Photos: PBS The Genius of Soul & IMDB for Ray
I’d love to hear your thoughts on my theorizing and your own stories from when you were seven.