And A Voice to Sing With

A Memoir

Joan Baez

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781439169643
• eBook ISBN: 9781451688405
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

• The perfect time for a reissue: In October 2009, PBS will air a ninety-minute primetime special on Joan Baez as part of the Emmy Award-winning American Masters series. Told often from Baez’s perspective, but supported by a rich performance and historical archive, the documentary centers on her career as a musician, power as an artist, those who influenced her, and those she championed. She will also be on a 27-city U.S. tour starting July 2009..

• A musical force and a catalyst for social change: At the age of eighteen Baez was an international star with a Time magazine cover story; fifty years later she has thirty-three albums to her credit. She also marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed for supporting the draft resistance, and sang in the first Amnesty International tour. An extraordinary woman who has led an eventful life, Baez’s memoir is as honest, unpretentious, and courageous as she is. .

PART
ONE

“THE KINGDOM
OF CHILDHOOD“

1
“My MEMORY’S EYE”

We learned everything from her, little by little, year by year, long before washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, Quik ovens, new improved vacuum cleaners, and drip-dry clothes. My mother was the hen; my father was the rooster. We were little chicks, we were little helpers. When we came to supper at six o’clock in the evening, my mother would take off her apron and hang it over a chair. She would wipe her hands dry on a kitchen towel, push her hair back a little, sit down at her end of the table, take a long breath in and let out a sigh. She was very beautiful.

My mother, Joan Bridge, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second of two sisters, and raised in the United States. Her mother died when she was only two. Her father was a kindhearted, liberal, intellectual Episcopalian minister who fell in love with domineering women. Mother’s sister Pauline, older by two years, was physically abused by the two women their father married after her mother died. But somehow Pauline grew up looking like a Renoir painting. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, and full-bosomed, with dreamy but infinitely sad eyes. She would never condemn the mistreatment she had endured, but was endlessly forgiving, paying for her Christian ethics with years of pain and a deep and lifelong melancholy. Mother didn’t get battered so much as she got neglected. She resisted the ferocity of the stepmothers to the point of defending herself physically. Mother was a dark beauty, thin, angular, vampy. She did not know she was beautiful.

Pauline took refuge in books, nature, dance, poetry, and intellectual companionship with her father. Mother took refuge in summer theater, in the woods, at the houses of friends where she would run to hide, and later in Oakwood School, which appears for a short while like a soothing balm in the dark pages of her childhood. And the sisters took refuge in each other.

At eighteen Pauline married a handsome, wavy-haired artist and settled in an artists’ community in Maine. Their father, leaving two more children, was dying of a liver ailment. Mother was living with a succession of foster mothers who cared for her, bought her nice clothes, and tried to bring some normality into her shipwrecked childhood. Mother talks of those days as of a foggily recalled dream. She had no idea of what she would do with her life. She was a leaf in the wind, floating this way and that. With no driving ambition or encouragement from the foster mothers, she did not pursue the idea of becoming an actress. She was catching her breath, wondering what would befall her next, when she met my father.

She was attending a dance at Drew University, on the arm of a young suitor, when (gazing off from the punch bowl, I have always imagined) she spotted a terribly handsome young man—darkskinned, with thick wavy black hair and perfectly white flashing teeth. He was sitting on the school steps amidst a gaggle of attentive and twittering girls, making airplane noises and dive-bombing motions with his hands. Spotting my mother beyond his ring of admirers, he winked at her. She was overcome with shyness and hurried off to control a boiling hot blush.

This young man who was to become my father came to this country at the age of two from Puebla, Mexico. His father had left the Catholic faith to become a Methodist minister and now chose to work with the underprivileged in the States. Albert developed into a bright, conscientious, attractive, inventive, hardworking kid with a deep respect for his parents and for God, and an insatiable curiosity about everything, especially the construction of crystal set radios. He lived in Brooklyn, and when he was nineteen, preached in his father’s church there. I remember visiting his parents in the same dark and spooky brownstone where he grew up. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees as you walked from the front doorstep into the pitch black corridor, which smelled damp and mysterious and strangely like oatmeal. His father smelled of Palmolive soap and had a cozy chuckle, and his mother frightened us considerably because she was very stern. My father started off intending to become a minister, too, but he changed his mind in favor of mathematics and finally physics.

Albert Baez was working his way through school when he met my mother. He drove a Model-T which he had personally rebuilt into a race car.

It was a year after the airplane noises and the wink before Al Baez actually took Joan Bridge out on a date, but the foster mothers had long since been picking out wedding dresses. It must have been like a fairy tale to my mother, the idea of getting married and having a place of her own. Most of all she wanted to have children. I know that she wanted girls. She got three of them: Pauline Thalia, born October 4, 1939, in Orange, New Jersey; Joan Chandos, born January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York; and Mimi Margharita, born April 30, 1945, in Stanford, California. Before Mimi came we had moved to Stanford so my father could work on his master’s degree in mathematics. We lived in a beautiful little house across from an open field of hay which was piled into small hills after it was cut. There is a picture of my mother and father straddling their bicycles in front of that field, young and smiling, the sun in their eyes, the wind blowing wisps of hair from my mother’s braids, and across my father’s forehead.

Mother grew sweet peas in our backyard on strings that stretched from the tops of the fence slats down to sticks placed firmly in the earth. I see the neighbor’s mulberry tree whose branches hung down so low you could duck right under them and hide against the trunk, peeking out and staining your mouth and cheeks and hands with mulberry juice. I see our rabbit in his cage over the lettuce rows in the vegetable garden, and the clothesline filled with sheets and tiny dresses, all stuck on the line with wooden clothespins. I see the trees lining the sidewalk in the front yard which bloomed in masses of deep pink in the spring. I would pin clumps of blossoms to my dresses and put them in my hair. I recall one evening when my mother and father were making a fuss over me, holding me up to the stairwell window, exclaiming at the night with its sliver of a moon and scattered twinkling stars. I didn’t know which of them to love the most, and so I hugged my father, and then my mother, and then leaned back over to my father again. Springtime in my chest, and a lucky star on my forehead. That’s what I had in our first California house.

After Mimi’s birth the place was too small, so my mother and father got a job as house parents at the progressive Peninsula School in the same town.

I didn’t want to go to kindergarten because the boys pulled up my skirt, so I began to wear overalls. I behaved badly in class and was put into the cloakroom during milk and graham crackers for clowning and being disruptive. My only real goal was to get home by midmorning and be with my mother.

Since she lived on the property, my escapes were easy enough, and back in her room I comforted myself listening to Uncle Don’s Nursery Rhymes, having lovely tea parties with my dollies, scribbling in my Three Little Piggies book, or helping Mother with chores. Outside I played alone, climbing oak trees, picking and eating the Miner’s lettuce which grew in abundance at the base of the redwood trees, taking my Raggedy Ann for walks.

A short time later Tia (our favorite aunt, Pauline) left her husband and moved out West with her two children. She and my parents bought a huge house on Glenwood Avenue where we could rent out rooms to boarders—as many as five at a time—while my father student-taught and continued to work toward his Ph.D. We had college kids, Chinese scholars, sailors, writers, bus drivers, wanderers, and a cellist who played so beautifully that Mother would click off the vacuum cleaner and stand in the hallway to listen, and I would sit outside his door trying to decide whether to become a cellist in the symphony or to grow long dainty nails.

By age five I was vaguely aware that little children in other parts of the world went to bed hungry every night. I also knew that ants ran around in circles dragging their broken legs if you stepped on one by mistake. I assumed that they were in pain. I imagined that my baby sister, Mimi, hurt when she screamed, but I didn’t care about her the way I cared about the ants and bugs. I was in the practice of pinching the neighbor’s baby. I’d wait till the other kids were out of sight and then move in on the fat little diapered thing sitting in his stroller smelling of baby powder, pablum, and throwup. I’d pat his chubby arm as he flailed it happily up and down, banging his chin and drooling saliva down to the stroller beads. Nervous and excited, I’d give his arm a horrible tweak, then watch his face crumple up and his mouth turn down and his legs stop wagging while he prepared to let out a heartbreaking scream. Immediately I would begin to feel terrible, and would pick him up in my arms and try to comfort him, out of fear that I’d been spotted and because I suddenly felt sorry for him. And I’d lug him into the kitchen saying, “Oh, Missiz Robinson, Luke is crying about something and I’m trying to make him feel better.” She would scoop him up and bustle off, not particularly concerned about his racket because Luke was the eighth child and she was used to noise. She would certainly never bother snooping around to find the pinch mark on his arm.

Everyone in the boardinghouse gathered for dinner on Sundays. Mother and Tia would prepare roast beef, popovers, mashed potatoes, and vegetables grown in our own garden. My sister Pauline and I would set the table or do the dishes, jobs which we alternated with Tia’s children: fifteen-year-old, boy-crazy Mary, who had a photographic memory and an unchartable I.Q. and could play classical music by ear on the piano; and her son, Skipper, at thirteen badly in need of a father’s strong hand, who lit fires in his basement bedroom, smoked, was flunking out of school, and generally raised hell with his delinquent friends. He was my favorite cousin. After we’d all held hands and sung “Thank You for the World So Sweet” my father would put Bach or Brahms or Beethoven on the phonograph and my mother would carve the roast, and while the boarders would try to carry on a conversation, Pauline and I would pinch and swat each other under the table. Mimi, who had learned to dance almost before she learned to walk, would pirouette around the floor with her toes curled under, changing the records on the phono—her latest trick, which everyone except Pauline and me thought was terribly cute. With her black hair and blue eyes, Mimi, “the littlest one,” was beautiful. Pauline and I were united against her.

In one of my mother’s albums there’s a photograph of me sitting all alone at the big oak table with its extra leaves and knife scars rubbed smooth and shiny. I am wearing my navy blue corduroy dress with the gold buttons and the white eyelet smock tied over it, and I’m staring through the heavy tiresome minutes that follow an afternoon nap. I remember the stony feeling, as though weights hung from my shoulders and my eyelids were made of clay. I longed to be awake and lively, dashing and playing. But whatever demons would haunt me for the rest of my life were busy at work even then.

The scrape of a new school lunch pail filled me with terror. Because overalls were not allowed in the new school, I wore sweaters tied in giant knots around my waist. I had attacks of nausea, and one teacher or another would hold my head while I hung over the toilet, but nothing was ever forthcoming—from the age of five, I had developed a fear of vomiting that remains with me (to a much lesser extent) today. What cataclysmic event shook my sunny world so that it was shadowed with unmentionable and unfathomable fright? I don’t know. I never will know. Every year, with the first golden chill of fall or the first sudden darkness at suppertime, I am stricken with a deadly melancholy, a sense of hopelessness and doom. I become weighed down, paralyzed, and frozen; the hairs on my arms and legs rise up and my bones chill to the marrow. Nothing can warm me. In the eye of this icy turbulence I see, with diamond clarity, that small shining person in the photograph, with slept-on braids and a groggy pout, and a ribbon of worry troubling her black eyes as she sits down with all her small might on the memories of a recurring dream: I am in the house and something comes in the night and its presence is deathly . . . I scream and run away, but it comes back at my nap time and gets into my bed. Then a voice says angrily, “Don’t look at me!” as I peer at the face on the pillow next to me, and I feel very ashamed.

That’s all I have ever remembered—just that much and no more.

The boardinghouse lasted a chaotic two years until my father finished his degree. At that time most of the bright young Stanford scientists went off to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was being developed. My father recognized the potential destructive power of the unleashed atom even in those early days. So he took a job as a research physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. We settled into a two-story house on a street lined with maple trees, in a tiny town of eight hundred called Clarence Center, an hour’s drive from Buffalo. Suddenly life was calm. Pauline and I took piano lessons. While Mother cooked supper she would hum and I would sit and listen to the evening serials “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon” and “Jack Armstrong” on the big kitchen radio. The new school was small: I didn’t leave class and run home; I stayed and got straight A’s. I also acquired my first best friend, a girl named Lily who lived on a real farm, where I discovered piglets and slept overnight in the hayloft.

Soon my father was invited to become head of Operations Research at Cornell. Exactly what the job entailed was classified information, but he was offered a three-week cruise on an aircraft carrier as an introduction to the project and promised a huge salary. As it turned out, he would be overseeing Operation Portrex, a vast amphibious exercise which among other things involved testing fighter jets, then a relatively new phenomenon. Millions of dollars would be poured into the project, about which he was to know little and say less. Mother showed us the letter he wrote from “sea” with little hand-drawn cartoons of his feet tilting back and forth in his bunk during a week-long storm. He had been very, very seasick.

By now my father had begun to ask himself whether, with the overwhelming capacity of the A-bomb to wreak total ruin, there was any such thing as “defense.” As he struggled with the question—and with the lucrative offers that would assure him and his family comforts thus far unknown to us, my mother suggested we change churches. Though she personally did not like organized religion, for my father’s sake we had joined the Presbyterian church out west. I, for one, had enjoyed dressing up, polishing my patent leather shoes with Vaseline, and sitting next to my mother during the service, smelling her perfume and face powder. When the congregation stood up to sing, her voice rose up more sharply and prettily than all the others, at least to my ears, and I loved the cozy sound of purses clicking open, of the little paper envelopes slipping into the collection plate, and the rustling of the ushers. But now my mother shepherded us, innocents, to the Quaker meetinghouse in Buffalo, hoping to help my father find some spiritual guidance and direction.

Quaker Meeting—what a horror! A room full of drab grown-ups who sat like ramrods with their eyes closed, or gazed blissfully at the ceiling. No one dressed up and there was an overabundance of old people. The few other children were no consolation because we didn’t like them. Their parents were “permissive,” a term we came to understand by way of a horrible little redheaded boy who slithered off his chair and crawled the entire length of the floor every Sunday. One day he caught Pauline scowling at him, and he bit her leg and scuttled off, leaving her clutching her wound and fighting back tears. His mother chose that meeting to rise and speak on the godliness of children, while Pauline and I tried to scorch her flesh with our eyes.

It seems extraordinary that we sat in that room for only twenty minutes each Sunday, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Author Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Part One: “The Kingdom of Childhood“
• Part Two: “Rider, Please Pass By“
• Part Three: “Show Me the Horizon”
• Part Four: “How Stark is the Here and Now”
• Part Five: “Free at Last”
• Part Six: “The Music Stopped in My Hand”
• Part Seven: “Ripping Along Toward Middle Age”
• Photo Insert
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments