Pat Cleveland - Walking with the Muses: A Memoir

Me at nine months on a good hair day, 1951.

My mother drew pictures of me before I was born. The pregnancy was an accident, and as was her habit from the time she was a small child, Mom turned to art and her own imagination to escape an unpleasant reality: At twenty-three, she was about to become a single mother. (Her lover, Johnny Johnston, had gone back to his home country of Sweden after his visa expired, without even knowing I was about to show up on the planet.) Mom had just purchased a ticket to Paris on the Queen Mary . When she realized she was pregnant, she gave the ticket to her older sister, my glamorous Auntie Helen, a dancer whod been living with Mom in an apartment on East 100th Street that functioned as a kind of nighttime salon for the African-American creative class in New York City.

As Auntie Helen danced her way across the Atlantic, my mom, alone in her apartment, drew picture after picture of the baby whom, ready or not, she would soon welcome into her life. On June 23, 1950, she felt the first pangs of labor. She dressed up in her best high heels and a satin maternity dress shed sewn for herself and walked halfway across the Queensboro Bridge to a little elevator that took her to Welfare Island (as Roosevelt Island was then called), a sliver of land that was home to the citys charity hospital. The hospital complex had been designed by James Renwick, Jr., the architect of Saint Patricks Cathedral, in a grand neo-Gothic style, but it had been allowed to fall into disrepair, and the surrounding buildings were abandoned and being used by the fire department as a practice location for firefighters to learn their trade. So my first glimpse of the worldinto which, Mom always told me, I came barreling feetfirstwas this glorious ruin just outside the hospitals windows.

A week later, with me, Patricia Lee Ann Cleveland, in her arms, Mom put on those same high heels and took me home to the 100th Street apartment. The place was so old that one day, while I was asleep in my crib, the ceiling over my head started to crumble. Luckily, Mom whisked me away moments before the whole thing caved in. A few weeks later, a rat jumped into the crib to get milk from my bottle. Mom managed to kill the rat, but that was the last straw. She moved a few blocks south, to a high-rise on Lexington Avenue, on the edge of Spanish Harlem.

I wasnt yet two when my father came back to America. He found out where my mom was living and paid us a visit. Mom dressed the two of us in our nicest outfits, and in walked a tall, handsome, long-limbed blond man carrying a can of Carnation evaporated milk (a request from my mother). He kissed my mom, looked at me, and sat down on the sofa. My mom placed me on his knee for the first and last time, saying, This is your father. All I remember were his starched white collar, his deep blue satin tie, and his incredibly long legs, a physical characteristic he bequeathed to me. He handed me back to my mom and they chatted for a few minutes. Then he stood up and was gone forever.

Later, Mom told me hed gotten married in Sweden soon after leaving New York, and that hed come back only to tell her he had a son. From that day forward, my mom knew she was on her own when it came to raising me.

Mom continued the jobs shed been doingpainting neckties that looked like regular ties from the front but inside featured naked women in the style of Vargas pinups; decorating store windows; and designing subway billboardsbut her earning potential was limited by the racial discrimination of the era. She was forced to take drastic measures. When I turned two, my mother sent me to live with her brother, Randolph, out in western Michiganin other words, in the middle of nowherein a little house hed built by hand. My uncle, a World War II air force officer, and his wife, a stern former WAC (Womens Army Corps), had no children of their own yet, so they agreed to take me in until my mom saved up enough money to get on her feet. My uncle loved children; my aunt, less so. Nevertheless, these two provided me with my earliest experience of family life.