Sonny Boy

I was performing since I was just a little boy. My mother used to take me to the movies when I was as young as three or four. She did menial work and factory jobs during the day, and when she came home, the only company she had was her son. So she’d bring me with her to the movies. She didn’t know that she was supplying me with a future. I was immediately attached to watching actors on the screen. Since I never had playmates in our apartment and we didn’t have television yet, I would have nothing but time to think about the movie I had last seen. I’d go through the characters in my head, and I would bring them to life, one by one, in the apartment. I learned at an early age to make friends with my imagination. Sometimes being content in your solitude can be a mixed blessing, especially to other people you share your life with.

The movies were a place where my mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else. That was her nickname for me, the one she gave me first, before everyone else started calling me Sonny too. It was something she picked up from the movies, where she heard Al Jolson sing it in a song that became very popular. It went like this:

Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy
Though you’re only three, Sonny Boy
You’ve no way of knowing
There’s no way of showing
What you mean to me, Sonny Boy

It stuck in her head for a dozen years, and at my birth in 1940, the song was still so vivid to my mother that she would sing it to me. I was my parents’ first child, my grandparents’ first grandchild. They made a big fuss over me.

My father was all of eighteen when I was born, and my mother was just a few years older. Suffice it to say that they were young, even for the time. I probably hadn’t even turned two years old when they split up. The first couple of years of my life my mother and I spent constantly moving around, no stability and no certainty. We lived together in furnished rooms in Harlem and then moved into her parents’ apartment in the South Bronx. We hardly got any support from my father. Eventually, we were allotted five dollars a month by a court, which was just enough to cover our room and board at her parents’ place.

Many years later, when I was fourteen, my mother took my father to court again to plead for more money, which he said he didn’t have and which we didn’t get. I thought the judge was very unfair to my mom. It would take decades for the courts to have some sense about a single mother’s needs.