Jones - Q: the autobiography of Quincy Jones

| To the memories of my beloved mother and father, Sarah and Quincy, Sr., and of my cherished brothers Lloyd and Waymond.

Q CHAPTER 1

I remember the cold. It was a stinging, backbreaking, bone-chilling Kentucky-winter cold, the kind of cold that makes you feel like youre freezing from the inside out, the kind of cold that makes you feel like youll 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 the 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 thats all there was to eat.

My mother had gone away sick one day and she never came back. Thats all we knew. Thats all my father told us. Shes gone away sick and shell 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 grandmas 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, ohhoh, 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 Chicagothe policy rackets, the Jones five-and-dime storesthe 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. Theyre no worse than the gangsters who wont 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. Id heard his father was a white maneither Irish or Welshwho 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. Hed been a catcher with the Metropolitan Baptist Church team in the Negro Leagueshe even caught the great Satchel Paige onceand 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 his forefinger and thumb and pop you upside the head so hard it felt like a bullet smashing through your skin. My brother and I called that the Thump Bump, and when he thumped you, it stung for hours.

He tried to talk to my mother as she stood by the window singing. He said, Get ahold of yourself, Sarah, but she ignored him and kept singing, so he turned away and went downstairs. As he swept past me I heard him mutter something, so I ran to my mother and told her what he said: Daddys gonna send you away, I said, but she didnt hear me. She stood with her back to me, staring out the window, and the next morning my daddy came back upstairs with two ambulance attendants in white and one of them said, Mrs. Jones, you wanna come get your luggage and things?

She looked over at him without a word, so he said, Either you come or well carry you.

She said, Can I take my Bible?