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keyboards, Sammy Drain recalled,  and Jimi heard, and one day just
stopped by.
Yet there were dangers to the itinerant lifestyle for a teenage boy.
One day Jimi was in the woods with a group of children. One of their
neighbors, a developmentally disabled boy, kept lagging behind. Jimi
and the other boys would yell at him to keep up, and after he fell out of
sight, they went back to locate him. They found the boy about to be
sexually assaulted by an older man, whom they scared off. A decade
later, Jimi told a girlfriend that he himself had been sexually assaulted as
a youth. He left out specific details, other than to say that a man in uni-
form had been the offender, but it was an incident that marked him.
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 51
That summer the welfare department again threatened to bring
court action to force Jimi into foster care. As a compromise, Al agreed
that Jimi could live with Al s brother Frank, who resided close by. At
Frank s house, Jimi found another strong African American matriarchal
figure in Frank s wife, Pearl. She ran her family like a drill sergeant, but
also gave its members affection and homemade apple butter.  My
mother explained to me that Jimi needed a place to stay because Al
couldn t afford to take care of him, Diane Hendrix recalled. Frank
Hendrix worked at Boeing and made a good income, so the extra plate
at the table wasn t a burden. The most apparent negative for Jimi was
that the move had taken him to a different middle school than his old
pals were attending. When Jimi began seventh grade that fall, it was at
Meany, while his friends were at Washington.
Al found landscape work, something he would continue to do for
the rest of his life. But cutting grass didn t pay well, and he was forced
to take in boarders. Cornell and Ernestine Benson moved in for a time,
taking over what had been Jimi s room. Ernestine found that in addi-
tion to paying rent, Al expected her to do housework. Despite the fact
that Al and Lucille had been divorced for several years, Al s ex was a fre-
quent subject of his conversations.  He would call her a drunk, Ernes-
tine recalled.  Sometimes he was calling her these names when he was
drunk. But that was how men treated women in those days. It was ac-
cepted for men to drink, but a woman who drank was shunned. Al s
own drinking, Ernestine recalled, was out of control, and at times he d
get lost coming home.  He d come to a house with a gate, and since his
house had a gate, he d assume it was his, she said.  He d walk right in,
sit on the sofa, and say,  Why are you all here? And they d say,  We live
here and you don t. And then they d call the police to get him out of
there.
The appearance of Ernestine Benson did have one silver lining for
Jimi: She was a blues-music fan and brought a large collection of
78 rpm records to the house. For the first time Jimi was exposed to
Muddy Waters, Lightnin Hopkins, Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, and
Howlin Wolf.  I loved my blues, Ernestine recalled,  and Jimi loved
52 C H A R L E S R . C R O S S
the same down-home stuff. Jimi s only instrument was his broom, but
as he listened to these blues sides, his air guitar became more animated.
 He would play that broom so hard, he would lose all the straw, ob-
served Cornell Benson.
mn
IN FEBRUARY 1956, the never-ending shuffle of Jimi s life contin-
ued. Frank and Pearl broke up and sent him back to Al. The Bensons
moved out, so for a time it was just Al and Jimi.
The move did allow Jimi to transfer to Washington Junior High,
where he was reunited with his friends. In the past he d been a fair stu-
dent, but that year his grades declined dramatically. During the first
half of the year he earned one B, seven C s, and one D. In the second
half of the year, he had three C s, four D s, and two F s. Washington s
principal, Frank Fidler, said Jimi was a frequent visitor to the school of-
fice, more for his poor grades than for discipline issues.  He was not a
kid that got into a lot of trouble, Fidler recalled,  but he wasn t doing
well academically.
Jimi finished the year at Washington and would have started
eighth grade there in September 1956 had it not been for further prob-
lems at home. That month, the bank repossessed the house, and Jimi
and Al were moved to a boardinghouse run by a Mrs. McKay. Jimi had
to switch schools again and went back to Meany for eighth grade.
The McKay family had a paraplegic son who played a beat-up
acoustic guitar with just one string. When the guitar was discarded,
Jimi retrieved it and asked Mrs. McKay if he could buy it.  She said
she d sell it for five dollars, Leon recalled. Al was not willing to fork
over the money, and eventually Ernestine Benson put up the money to
buy Jimi his first guitar. To most, this instrument would have been a
worthless piece of wood. Jimi, however, turned the guitar into a sci-
ence project: He experimented with every fret, rattle, buzz, and sound-
making property the guitar had. He wasn t exactly making music, but
R OOM F UL L OF MI R R OR S 53
he was making noise.  He only had one string, Ernestine Benson ob-
served,  but he could really make that string talk.
When he played air guitar now, at least he had a guitar to hold. At
a matinee at the Atlas Theater, Jimi had seen the Nicholas Ray film
Johnny Guitar. As Johnny Guitar, actor Sterling Hayden played only
one song, and during most of the film, his acoustic was hung on his
back with the neck pointing down. Still, that image had an indelible ef-
fect on Jimi.  He saw that movie, recalled Jimmy Williams,  and he
loved the way that guy looked with that guitar on his back. He carried
his guitar exactly like the guy in the movie. Like many teenagers, Jimi
saw the guitar as a fashion accessory. Several of his classmates remem-
ber him taking the crippled guitar to school as a show-and-tell item.
When asked if he could play, he replied,  It s broken. Still, he never let
the guitar out of his sight. He even kept it on his chest while he slept.
Jimi was fourteen the summer of 1957. Two happenings within
the next eighteen months would stick in his memory for all his years:
He saw Elvis Presley perform and Little Richard preach. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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