Against All Odds: My Story (3 page)

My tiny body was a dark shade of bluish purple. My father, Ray Norris, was in the delivery room along with both of my grandmothers, and when he first caught a glimpse of me, he was so unnerved that he fainted right on the spot.

The doctors and nurses weren't too concerned about my dad, but they were extremely concerned about me! They recognized me as a “blue baby,” which means that I had not begun breathing immediately after birth, thus causing my skin to turn the deathly color. They had to act fast to save my life, even faster to prevent the lack of oxygen from doing permanent damage to my brain. The doctors hastily placed me on oxygen to jump start my lungs. It worked, and before long, I was gulping air like a pro.

Nevertheless, for the first five days of my life, the doctors weren't sure I was going to make it. They kept me in an isolation unit, similar to a neonatal intensive care unit nowadays, to prevent me from contamination and also to keep a close watch on me. I was too weak to eat normally, so Mom expressed milk for me, and I was fed with an eyedropper. Extremely weak herself, Mom was not permitted to see me during that time. She still has a letter written by my grandmother, dated that week, telling my aunt that “Wilma's baby probably isn't going to live.”

But Mom and I surprised everyone! We pulled through, and before long the doctors discharged my mother and me. Mom later told me that from the first moment she saw me, she looked into my face and said, “God has plans for you.” It was a message she has reiterated many times throughout my life.

Mom and Dad took me home to the farm where Dad worked, in Ryan, Oklahoma, a small town not far from the Texas border, about a two-hour drive from Dallas. The name on my birth certificate is Carlos Ray Norris. I was named in honor of Reverend Carlos Berry, my family's minister in Ryan. My middle name, Ray, is in honor of my father.

Genetically speaking, I am equal parts Irish and Native American. On the Norris side, my paternal grandfather was Irish, and my paternal grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. My mother's family name was Scarberry. My maternal grandmother, Agnes, was Irish, while my maternal grandfather was a Cherokee Indian from Kentucky.

Grandpa Norris left Ireland and came to America with his parents in the mid-1800s. He married and had three children, but his wife died from the hardships of frontier life. He hired a sixteen-year-old Indian girl from the Cherokee Indian reservation to be the children's nanny. Before long he decided to marry the nanny, and arranged to buy her from her parents on the reservation. The fact that the young woman was in love with a young man from her own tribe was of no significance to her parents. They sold her to my grandfather without a moment's hesitation.

The young Cherokee woman proved to be a good choice. She bore Grandpa Norris thirteen children, seven of whom lived, including my dad. Nevertheless, their relationship never blossomed into romantic love—perhaps my grandma could not forget her first true love from whom she had been ripped away to marry my grandpa. Years later my mom told me that at Grandpa Norris's funeral, Grandma said, “Good. Now I'm finally rid of him!” Not exactly the mourning of a grief-stricken widow!

My parents were a handsome couple. Dad was about six feet, one inch, well built and strong, with coal black hair and black eyes. In early photos he resembles John Wayne as a young man. Dad was nineteen and Mom sixteen when they married in Marietta, Oklahoma. Mom was a petite young woman, with long, flowing red hair and a pretty face full of freckles.

We soon moved from Ryan to Lawton, Oklahoma, where Dad got a job as a mechanic with the Greyhound Bus Company. It was the first of at least a dozen moves our family made before I reached the age of twelve. Had it not been for Mom's spiritual and practical stability, we'd have established no roots at all. Her love was the glue that kept us together and provided us with a sense of security, no matter where we moved or how often we packed up and moved again.

In November 1942, Dad took Mom and me to Wilson, Oklahoma, to stay with Granny Scarberry while he went to Richmond, California, hoping to get a job in the shipyards. The war was raging, and Dad felt that if he could contribute to the effort by working in the shipyard, he could serve his country and still avoid being drafted and leaving his young family. He was wrong, but his ploy provided him a few extra months to find a place for us to live.

Mom was five months pregnant at the time. We stayed with Granny another month and then took a train to California to be with Dad. Traveling on the same train was a group of young Navy sailors who took me under their wing. They recognized that Mom was pregnant, so they helped take care of me. It took several days to make the trip from Oklahoma to California, so when the train stopped in small towns along the way, the sailors disembarked long enough to run into the station or into town to get Mom and me something to eat. They were good guys, and I was in awe of them. My respect for the US military had its beginnings right there on that train.

Two months later my brother, Wieland, was born. Mom planned to name him Jimmy, but Dad named him Wieland—after his favorite beer. Mom was upset, but there was nothing she could do. The name was already on the birth certificate.

Three months later Dad was drafted into the army and was soon fighting the Nazis in Germany. While Dad was away in the service, Mom, Wieland, and I moved back to live with Granny Scarberry in her tiny home in Wilson, Oklahoma. Wilson was a small prairie town, flat, arid, and dusty, with a population of about one thousand people. It was an impoverished and desolate area, just a few miles east of the Texas-Oklahoma border. That's where I spent most of my early, formative years.

Granny Scarberry's home was a small clapboard house on the outskirts of Wilson. All four of us—Mom, Granny, Wieland, and I—slept in one room. Granny slept in the bed, while Mom, Wieland, and I took the couch that folded out into a bed. My brother and I were bathed together in a big galvanized tin washtub. Our toilet was an outhouse, and it reeked so horribly, I hated going in there! Many times I'd walk to my aunt's home over a mile away to use the bathroom because she had indoor plumbing. It was worth the walk!

Although Granny Scarberry possessed little as far as material goods, she was a saint. A tiny woman with bright blue dancing eyes, Granny's heart overflowed with a love for God and for her family. She showered Wieland and me with attention and affection. Granny's love filled that shack in which we lived and made it a home.

Dad had been overseas for more than two years when a young boy, riding a bicycle, came to our house delivering a telegram from the War Department. Mom signed for the telegram and, with her hands shaking, hurried to open it. Suddenly she began screaming! Granny raced across the room and pulled Mom close to her. “What's wrong, Wilma? What's wrong?”

“Ray is missing in action,” I heard Mom sob, holding the telegram out for Granny to see. I was too young to know what “missing in action” meant, but by the way Mom and Granny were acting, it sounded as though Dad might not be coming home for a long time or maybe not at all.

I was concerned for my dad, but I wasn't worried about our family surviving. As long as my mother and Granny Scarberry were around, I felt safe. Every night before we went to bed, we all knelt together in our living room and prayed, asking God to find my dad and to send him home to us.

For three long months we heard nothing at all. Then at last we received good news. Dad was alive! He had been shot in the leg and nearly buried alive in a German foxhole, causing him to be separated from his unit. When the debris was cleared, his comrades found him. He was transferred home to Texas and was recovering in a military hospital. The doctors estimated that within two months Dad would be returning home to us.

For the next two months I'd sit out on the porch every day, waiting for the bus to pull up. Each day I'd watch as men and women got off the bus, my eyes peeled for any sign of Dad. Disappointed, I'd go back inside and say, “Not today, Mom. Dad didn't come home.”

After two months passed, I was becoming discouraged. One day I watched and waited for the bus to unload its passengers, only to be disappointed again. I started back inside the house and said, “Mom, I don't think Dad is ever coming home.”

“Oh, really?” Mom said just then with a twinkle in her eye. “Well, guess who that is!” She pointed to a soldier slowly easing himself off the bus. It was Dad!

The good news was that Dad was back in the USA. The bad news was that his drinking problem, already serious before he'd gone off to war, was now even worse.

CHAPTER 3

LIFE IN A BOTTLE

G
rowing up, my most difficult and confusing relationship was with my father. One of the few positive memories I have of him is the day he picked me up and let me straddle his broad shoulders while he carried me to the banks of the Red River, looking across the water toward Texas. We spent the entire day fishing and talking, just the two of us. When I flash back on that scene now, it seems like an image I saw in a movie: father and son on a riverbank with fishing lines stabbed out over shining water—a perfect image of togetherness. But as soon as we got home with the few fish we had caught, Dad left for the local beer joint. He didn't return until much later that night, drunk again.

One night, Dad and my Uncle Buck wanted to go out drinking and they needed some money. Mom had only five dollars left with which to buy food for Wieland and me, and she refused to give it to Dad. “Just take that money from Wilma,” Uncle Buck urged.

“That's right. Give me that money!” Dad bellowed.

“No, Ray,” Mom replied calmly. “You're not going to get this money. I'm saving it to buy food for the children.”

Uncle Buck cajoled my dad, “Ray, punch her in the mouth and get that money.” Buck punched his hand with his fist, menacingly. Dad formed a fist and shook it in Mom's face.

Standing tall at five foot, two inches, Mom didn't flinch. She looked my dad right in the eyes and said, “You go ahead and hit me, but you're going to have to sleep sometime. And when you do, I'm going to get a frying pan and beat you to death!”

Dad unclenched his fist, and he and Buck stormed out of the house—without Mom's five dollars.

Dad was generally a good man when he was sober, but those sober days were becoming fewer and further between. When he was drunk, little things often sent him into a rage. If he heard the water running while he was suffering from a hangover, he would explode in an abusive tirade, roaring threats and expletives against everyone in the house. While Mom tried to calm him down, Wieland and I hid in the bedroom.

Despite Dad's bombast Mom was the disciplinarian in our family. When Wieland and I got into fights, Mom would make us sit down in chairs, across from each other. We'd be huffing and puffing, our cheeks red, our necks wet with perspiration, and Mom would say, “Now sit there and look at each other, and don't say a word until I tell you to move.” Wieland and I would sit there and glare at each other. Before long one of us would start to giggle, and then we'd bust up laughing. In a matter of minutes, we couldn't even remember what we had been fighting about.

When I seriously misbehaved, Mom would send me out to get a switch to swat me. Dad would say, “If you're going to spank him, I'm leaving.” Dad's threats didn't deter Mom from disciplining me one bit. I received a good thrashing with the switch, and Dad went off on another drinking binge. I now realize that Dad could never stand confrontation. It was easier for him simply to run away. Sadly, he spent most of his life running.

When I was six years old, we moved to Napa, California, where we had family. Dad went to work at a Navy shipyard, and I started school. In school I was shy and inhibited. If the teacher asked me to recite something aloud in front of the class, I would just shake my head no. I would rather get a poor grade than embarrass myself in front of the class. People who know me today from television and movies may have a hard time imagining me as shy, but believe me, as a boy, I was as bashful as could be!

Wieland was the outgoing Norris brother. But Wieland had such bad asthma that we were forced to move again, this time to Miami, Arizona, near Mom's sisters and their families. The climate was drier in Arizona, and Mom hoped that Wieland could breathe more easily there. We lived in a small cottage next to a gas station, and Mom enrolled me in the third grade. Most of the students were Native Americans. I was the new kid there and the only one with blond hair and blue eyes.

An Indian boy named Bobby was the class bully, and for some reason he had it in for me. He chased me home from school every day. He was my age but a lot larger, so I did the smart thing—I ran!