Q The Autobiography of Quincy Jones

Chapter 1 The promise I remember the cold. It was a stinging, backbreaking, bone-chilling Kentucky-winter cold, the kind of cold that makes you feel like you're freezing from the inside out, the kind of cold that makes you feel like you'll never be warm again. I had no music in me then, just sounds, the shrill noise the back door made when it creaked open, the funny grunts my little brother Lloyd made while we slept together, the tight, muffled squeals that rats made when the rat traps snapped them in half. My grandmother did not believe in wasting anything. She had nothing to waste. She cooked whatever she could get her hands on. Mustard greens, okra, possum, chickens, and rats, and me and Lloyd ate them all. We ate the fried rats because we were nine and seven years old and we did what we were told. We ate them because my grandma could cook them well. But most of all, we ate them because that's all there was to eat. My mother had gone away sick one day and she never came back. That's all we knew. That's all my father told us. "She's gone away sick and she'll be back soon," was what he said, but "soon" turned into months and years, so the two of us had left Chicago and gone to Louisville to stay with Grandma. Laying in bed at night in my grandma's house, I could remember the night before my mother left us. We were downstairs in the living room back home in South Side Chicago during the Depression, Lloyd and Daddy and me, and we heard a crash and the noise of a window breaking, and we ran upstairs and I felt the rush of cold air and saw my mother at the broken window looking out into the street. She was wearing only a housedress, standing in the freezing nighttime air, the snow blowing in on her face, and she was singing, "Ohh, ohh, ohh, ohh--oh, somebody touched me and it must have been the hand of the Lord." As a young boy, I thought it was odd for my mother to sing out the window. She played piano and sang in church, but my mother was a private woman, solid and proper. She never spoke out of turn like that. She did not like loud things or loud people, but her behavior had become more and more strange. She had frequent fainting spells. She would yell at us for no reason. She quoted the Bible and scribbled notes endlessly. The lines around her eyes seemed to grow tighter and tighter every day. Her angry outbursts were crushing affairs, sometimes lasting for days. My daddy never knew what to do when my mother had spells like this. He was not a complicated man. He was a carpenter for the Jones Boys, the black gangsters who ran the ghetto back in Chicago -- the policy rackets, the Jones five-and-dime stores -- the V and X, as they were known in the 'hood. When my Aunt Mabel asked him once why he worked for hoods and hustlers, he made a funny face and said, "Gangsters need carpenters, too. They're no worse than the gangsters who won't give me jobs." He grew up in Lake City, South Carolina, so I was told, but to be honest I never knew exactly where he was really from. I'd heard his father was a white man-- either Irish or Welsh-- who had killed somebody, and Daddy had to get out of the South because of this, which made as much sense as anything else in my life, because since my mother left us, nothing seemed solid except the black space in my stomach. Daddy was a quiet man, with smooth straight hair, soft brown eyes, and firm face. His shoulders were broad, his arms were thick and muscled, and his hands were gigantic, huge iron fists with fingers as thick as cigars. He'd been a catcher with the Metropolitan Baptist Church team in the Negro Leagues -- he even caught the great Satchel Paige once -- and all those years of catching baseballs with a thin mitt had smashed his fingers and made them flat and crooked. He could bend the first knuckle of each hand and hold them out like claws. His fingers were so strong that he could make a circle with hJones, Quincy is the author of 'Q The Autobiography of Quincy Jones' with ISBN 9780385488969 and ISBN 0385488963.