ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS
A BIOGRAPHY OF JIMI HENDRIX
By CHARLES R. CROSS
HYPERION
Copyright © 2005
Charles R. Cross
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4013-0028-6
Contents
AUTHOR'S NOTE..........................................................................................xi
PROLOGUE: ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND April 9, 1967.......................................1
CHAPTER 1: BETTER THAN BEFORE SEATTLE, WASHINGTON January 1875-November 1942..........................8
CHAPTER 2: BUCKET OF BLOOD VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA 1875-1941......................................16
CHAPTER 3: OVER AVERAGE IN SMARTNESS SEATTLE, WASHINGTON September 1945-June 1952.....................26
CHAPTER 4: THE BLACK KNIGHT SEATTLE, WASHINGTON July 1952-March 1955..................................39
CHAPTER 5: JOHNNY GUITAR SEATTLE, WASHINGTON March 1955-March 1958....................................49
CHAPTER 6: TALL COOL ONE SEATTLE, WASHINGTON March 1958-October 1960..................................61
CHAPTER 7: SPANISH CASTLE MAGIC SEATTLE, WASHINGTON November 1960-May 1961............................75
CHAPTER 8: BROTHER WILD FORT ORD, CALIFORNIA May 1961-September 1962..................................84
CHAPTER 9: HEADHUNTER NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE October 1962-December 1963.................................96
CHAPTER 10: HARLEM WORLD NEW YORK, NEW YORK January 1964-July 1965....................................108
CHAPTER 11: DREAM IN TECHNICOLOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1965-May 1966................................118
CHAPTER 12: MY PROBLEM CHILD NEW YORK, NEW YORK May 1966-July 1966....................................130
CHAPTER 13: DYLAN BLACK NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1966-September 1966...................................142
CHAPTER 14: WILD MAN OF BORNEO LONDON, ENGLAND September 1966-November 1966...........................154
CHAPTER 15: FREE FEELING LONDON, ENGLAND December 1966-May 1967.......................................169
CHAPTER 16: RUMOR TO LEGEND LONDON, ENGLAND June 1967-July 1967.......................................185
CHAPTER 17: BLACK NOISE NEW YORK, NEW YORK August 1967-February 1968..................................199
CHAPTER 18: NEW MUSIC SPACEQUAKE SEATTLE, WASHINGTON February 1968-May 1968...........................213
CHAPTER 19: THE MOON FIRST NEW YORK, NEW YORK July 1968-December 1968.................................227
CHAPTER 20: ELECTRIC CHURCH MUSIC LONDON, ENGLAND January 1969-May 1969...............................241
CHAPTER 21: HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS TORONTO, CANADA May 1969-August 1969................................253
CHAPTER 22: GYPSY, SUN, AND RAINBOWS BETHEL, NEW YORK August 1969-November 1969.......................267
CHAPTER 23: KING IN THE GARDEN NEW YORK, NEW YORK December 1969-April 1970............................280
CHAPTER 24: MAGIC BOY BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA May 1970-July 1970.........................................294
CHAPTER 25: WILD BLUE ANGEL MAUI, HAWAII July 1970-August 1970........................................306
CHAPTER 26: THE STORY OF LIFE STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN August 1970-September 1970............................319
CHAPTER 27: MY TRAIN COMING LONDON, ENGLAND September 1970-April 2004.................................334
EPILOGUE: LONG BLACK CADILLAC SEATTLE, WASHINGTON April 2002-April 2005...............................353
SOURCE NOTES...........................................................................................357
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................................365
INDEX..................................................................................................369
Chapter One
BETTER THAN
BEFORE
* * *
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
January 1875-November 1942
"Dear Al: Congratulations on your fine son. Mother and son are
well. Conditions lots better than before. Lucille sends love."
-telegram from DeLores Hall to Al Hendrix
JIMI HENDRIX WAS born the day after Thanksgiving, 1942. The
healthy arrival of this eight-pound, eleven-ounce baby was seen by all as
a true thanksgiving sign from God. When his aunt wired his father with
the news, her short telegram included the line "Conditions lots better
than before." That statement could serve as an epigraph for the larger
history of the Hendrixes to that point, and, in an even wider context, as
a wishful summation of the African American experience in the United
States: Things had been bad for a long time, and perhaps this new generation
could hope for an improvement and a more righteous world.
Relatives on both sides of Jimi's family celebrated his birth as a new beginning.
"He was the cutest baby you would ever want to see," recalled
his aunt Delores Hall. "He was darling."
Jimi was born in the maternity ward of King County Hospital,
later called Harborview, in Seattle, Washington. The hospital commanded
a majestic view of the large natural harbor of Puget Sound.
Seattle was slowly emerging as one of the major American port cities on
the Pacific Coast and had a population of 375,000 in 1942. In the wartime
years, it was a boomtown where shipyards cranked out navy vessels
and the Boeing Airplane Company churned out the B-17 bombers
that would win the war for the Allies. In 1942, the factories ran round-the-clock
shifts, and a huge influx of laborers expanded the city and forever
changed its racial demographics. In the 1900 census, there had
been only 406 Seattle residents who reported themselves as black, about
one half of 1 percent of the population. In the decade from 1940 to
1950, fueled by the war machine's need for labor and a large migration
from the South, the city's population of African Americans ballooned
to 15,666, and they became Seattle's largest racial minority.
Neither Jimi's mother nor father was part of the wartime migration,
but World War II would nevertheless play a major role in the
circumstances of their lives. At the time of Jimi's birth, his father, Al, was
a twenty-three-year-old private in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort
Rucker, Alabama. Al had asked his commanding officer for paternity
leave to visit Seattle, but he was denied furlough and jailed instead. His
superiors told him he'd been imprisoned because they were convinced
he would go AWOL to attend the birth. Al was in the stockade when
the congratulatory telegram from his sister-in-law arrived. He later
complained that white soldiers had been given leave in similar situations,
but his complaints fell on deaf ears. Al would not meet his son
until the boy was three years old.
Jimi's mother, Lucille Jeter Hendrix, was only seventeen when
Jimi was born. Through an inopportune stroke of timing, Lucille
found out she was pregnant the same week Al was drafted. They married
on March 31, 1942, at the King County, Courthouse in a ceremony
performed by a justice of the peace, and they only lived together as man
and wife for three days before Al was shipped out. The night before
Al left, they partied at the Rocking Chair, a club where Ray Charles
would later be discovered. Lucille was under the drinking age, but in
the wartime frenzy, that didn't matter to bartenders. The couple toasted
an uncertain future and Al's safe return from the service.
The circumstances of fate that gave the newly married couple their
first child when Al was three thousand miles away created a wound that
would forever fester in the marriage of Al and Lucille. Of course their
separation wasn't unusual in the turbulent time of World War II. Once
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, a harried madness
developed in Seattle and other West Coast cities, where fear of a
Japanese assault was a backdrop to thousands of families being torn
apart. The day before Al and Lucille were married, Seattle became the
first city in the nation where Japanese Americans were gathered up and
sent to internment camps. Eventually, 12,892 persons of Japanese
ancestry from Washington State were imprisoned, including friends and
neighbors of the couple.
Yet the relationship between Al and Lucille was strained by more
than just the turmoil of the war. Al was short but handsome, while Lucille
had an extraordinary youthful beauty that turned heads when she
walked down the street. Other than their physical connection and a mutual
love of dancing, they shared little to build a marriage on. Both had
come from backgrounds of extreme poverty, and Al left Seattle knowing
that he would be able to do little to provide for his new wife and
child while overseas. Theirs had been a quick romance-a shotgun wedding,
really-without the support of friends and family. As a teenage
mother-to-be, Lucille faced extreme challenges in the form of her age,
race, class, and economic situation. It was Lucille's very poverty that
helped breed a deep distrust in Al Hendrix that would cause him to
later raise questions of loyalty, fidelity, and paternity.
* * *
PATERNITY AND BLOODLINE had been contentious issues in the
Hendrix family tree for centuries. The family history mirrored that of
many other slave descendants in that little of it was recorded in the annals
of history being written by whites. Jimi Hendrix would become
one of the first black rock musicians to appeal to a largely white audience,
but his own ethnic ancestry was multiracial and included a complex
mix of Native Americans, African slaves, and white slave masters.
Jimi's maternal grandfather was Preston Jeter, born in Richmond,
Virginia, on July 14, 1875. His mother had been a slave, and like many
former slaves in Richmond, she continued in the same domestic position
after the Civil War. Preston's father was his mother's former owner,
though whether Preston was the result of rape or a consensual
act-if such a thing can be possible in a slave-master relationship-is
unknown. As a young man, Preston made the decision to leave the
South after he witnessed a lynching. He headed for the Northwest,
where he had heard conditions for blacks were better.
Preston was twenty-five when he arrived in Roslyn, Washington, a
small mining town eighty miles east of Seattle in the Cascade Mountains.
Unfortunately, he found riotous racial violence in Roslyn that
mirrored the South, the result of mine management bringing in African
Americans to break a strike by white miners. The county sheriff wrote
the governor, warning, "There is a bitter feeling against the Negroes
and ... I fear there will be bloodshed." A number of racially motivated
killings followed. "Murder is a regular thing," one town resident
observed.
By 1908, African Americans had become a tolerated, if not an accepted,
part of Roslyn's fabric. A photo from that year captures Preston
among a group of black miners in front of the only saloon they were allowed
to patronize, Big Jim E. Shepperson's Color Club. Still, racial intolerance
remained high, and when a mine explosion killed forty-five
men, including several African Americans, whites would not allow the
black victims to be buried in the town graveyard. Eventually, twenty-four
different cemeteries were designated in the town, each devoted to
a single ethnicity or fraternal order.
After a decade in Roslyn, Preston left to work mines in Newcastle,
Washington. By 1915, he was in Seattle, working as a landscaper. By
then in his forties, he entertained hopes of finding a wife. Reading the
Seattle Republican, he sported an ad for a young woman looking for a
husband.
* * *
THE WOMAN IN the ad was Clarice Lawson, Jimi Hendrix's maternal
grandmother. Clarice had been born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1894.
Like many Arkansas African Americans, her ancestors included both
slaves and Cherokees. Clarice would tell her children the U.S. government
had hunted down her Cherokee forebears, until slaves hid them
and, eventually, intermarried with them.
Clarice had four older sisters, and the quintet of Lawson daughters
regularly traveled from their Arkansas home to the Louisiana Delta
to pick cotton. On one of these trips, Clarice, who was twenty at the
time, was raped. When Clarice later discovered she was pregnant, her
sisters decided to take her west and quickly find her a husband. They
picked Washington after hearing from railroad workers that the region
offered greater opportunity for blacks.
In Seattle, they advertised for a husband, not mentioning Clarice's
pregnancy. Preston Jeter responded, and though he was nineteen years
older than Clarke, they began to date. When Clarice's sisters pressed him
for marriage and gave him a sum of money as a dowry, he grew suspicious
and broke off their relationship. Clarice had the child and it was
put up for adoption. The sisters offered Preston more money if he would
marry the now-grieving Clarice. He agreed, and they were wed in 1915.
Though the marriage would last until Preston's death thirty years later,
the unusual circumstances of their meeting would strain the relationship.
Both Preston and Clarice had come to the Northwest to start a life
in a place where race was less an issue than it was elsewhere. To a degree,
this was true in Seattle, which lacked the segregation of the white-only
drinking fountains of the Jim Crow South. In the Northwest,
however, African Americans encountered a less overt form of discrimination,
but one that still limited opportunity. In Seattle, blacks lived almost
exclusively in an area called the Central District, four square miles
that contained some of the city's oldest, and most decrepit, homes.
Outside of this neighborhood, landlords would rarely rent to African
Americans, and many townships had laws banning real estate sales to
nonwhites.
Although their housing options were limited, African Americans
found some benefit in Seattle's de facto segregation. In the Central District,
they developed a tight-knit community where ethnic pride was
strong and neighborhood ties blossomed. "It was a small enough community
that if you didn't know someone, you knew their family," recalled
Betty Jean Morgan, a lifelong resident. The neighborhood was
also home to Native Americans, as well as Chinese, Italian, German,
Japanese, and Filipino immigrants; the local schools were filled with a
patchwork of ethnicities. There were enough ethnic and religious minorities
in the neighborhood-it was also the center of Jewish life in
the city-that a multiculturalism developed that was unique at the time
not only in Seattle but also in the entire United States. Historian Esther
Hall Mumford titled her history of black Seattle
Calabash in a nod to
the African tradition of cooking in a pot big enough to feed the village,
and that metaphor-a neighborhood inclusive and self-sufficient-was
apt for Seattle's Central District in the first half of the twentieth century.
Those strong social ties and a warm sense of inclusiveness would
have a lasting impact on all who grew up within it.
Seattle's black community had its own newspapers, restaurants,
shops, and most gloriously, its own entertainment district, centered on
Jackson Street. There, nightclubs and gambling dens featured nationally
known jazz and blues acts. So vibrant was the scene that one newspaper
editor compared it to Chicago's State Street or Memphis's Beale
Street. Though the Jackson Street clubs were not common stops for
Preston and Clarice Jeter, this colorful and vibrant netherworld would
be an important backdrop for their children's young adulthood and,
eventually, for grandchild Jimi Hendrix.
* * *
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE to blacks in Seattle-and the one that
threatened to supersede all others-was finding fair employment.
African Americans were tolerated by white Seattle society in most situations,
but the only professions open to blacks were service jobs as
cooks, waiters, or railroad porters. In a pattern that was familiar, Preston
Jeter found work as a longshoreman during a strike; it was a job
normally held only by whites. Clarice found work as a domestic, a job
that 84 percent of Seattle's African American women held in the 1910
census. Clarice, like most black mothers of the day, cared for white babies
at the same time as she began to have children of her own.
Over the next ten years, Clarice would have eight children, two of
whom would die in infancy and two who would be adopted out. Lucille,
the youngest of the Jeter children, was born in 1925, eight weeks
premature. Because of complications from a tumor, as well as postpartum
depression, Clarice remained in the hospital for six months after
Lucille's birth. Preston, then fifty years old and suffering from health
problems of his own, couldn't care for the family, so Lucille's three
sisters-Nancy, Gertrude, and Delores-initially raised the baby. The
nurses brought her home on a day in December that featured a rare
Seattle snowstorm. "They had to walk up the hill in front of our house
very carefully with her," recalled Delores Hall, who was four at the
time. "They put her in my arms and said, 'Be careful because this is your
new sister.'"
The Jeters faced enormous challenges over the next few years.
Clarice was in and out of the hospital, suffering from physical and mental
health problems, and the children were sent to foster care with a big
German family that lived on a small farm north of Greenlake. In this
predominantly white area, they were frequently mistaken for Gypsies,
another ethnic minority that was shunned by white Seattle.
When Lucille turned ten, the family was living together again in
the Central District. As an adolescent, Lucille had remarkably beautiful
eyes and a lithe frame. "She had long, thick, dark hair, which was
straight, and a beautiful wide smile," said her best friend in junior high,
Loreen Lockett. Preston and Clarice were particularly protective of Lucille,
who was fifteen before they allowed her to go to dances. Pretty and
vivacious, Lucille drew attention even then. "She was a nice-looking girl
and a very good dancer," recalled James Pryor. "She was very lightskinned
with pretty hair. She could have passed." To "pass" was the
African American vernacular for someone with a complexion light
enough that they could pass in the world as white. To do so meant a con
of sorts, but it opened up a world of employment options denied to
most blacks. Even within the African American community at the time,
lighter skin and straight hair were equated with beauty, and Lucille had
both.
According to all accounts, fifteen-year-old Lucille was proper and
a bit immature. She was also gifted with musical talent and could sing.
Occasionally, she would enter amateur contests, and at one she won a
five-dollar prize. Still, her greatest joy in life was to be on the dance
floor with a good partner. One night in November 1941, Lucille
stopped by a classmate's home on the way to a dance at Washington
Hall. She had just turned sixteen and was in junior high. Like any
schoolgirl, she was excited to be going to a concert, and the featured act
that night was the legendary jazz pianist Fats Waller. A young man from
Canada was visiting her friend. "Lucille," her classmate said, "meet Al
Hendrix."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS
by CHARLES R. CROSS
Copyright © 2005 by Charles R. Cross.
Excerpted by permission.
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