Blue Eyed Soul
By Racheal Alexander
©Racheal Alexander 2011
Published by Centric Publishing Smashwords Version
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One…
You wouldn’t know I had a white daddy just by looking at me. I don’t have the long, silky hair or the skin that looks like buttermilk kissed with cocoa powder. And I don’t have iris’ that reflect off the sunlight sometimes. I got my looks from my mama Glynis. Her hazelnut skin and woolen hair got passed down through four generations of Kinnards and then down to lucky me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend my nights saying prayers to Baby Jesus hoping he could do a miracle on my pigmentation. I tried staying out the sun, that didn’t help. I tried reverse psychology on my cells and went in the sun. That only made me blacker. I tried lying in the crook of my daddy’s arm, hoping the brightness of his skin would rub off onto mine. When that didn’t work, I busied myself by matching my breathing to his. In and out, I tried to get on the same beat as his inhaling and exhaling. I was no match for him, and within minutes of starting the race, I’d fall asleep.
My daddy was Thorton “Tito” Sparks, one of the first, if not the best white singers to sing with soul. Maybe there were a few others who did it before him, but I bet you they didn’t make number one records. And just like I prayed for the skin he wore so easy, sometimes, but not as much, I prayed for his voice. He called it his gift and curse. Took me a dozen or so years to figure out what that meant. I figured it was good and bad, the way me having nappy hair was only good when I wanted to swim laps in the Swim Mobile with no problem. Other than that, nappy hair was of little use to me. I’d watch him in the smallest bedroom mama turned into his “studio”. There wasn’t a thing in that room that officially made it a studio. Unless you counted an old wooden desk and a swivel chair. But I didn’t. Through a small crack in the door, I’d watch him scribble onto yellow legal pads, then toss away balled up pages like they were defective tennis balls. With a Newport cradled in his fingers, he breathed in smoke and exhaled melodies. Some of them were infectious; I might find myself singing the same hook for three days. Others sounded too much like Smokey or Marvin or something I’d heard before. I felt most sorry for him when he latched on to something that was already on the radio.