Authors: Joanna Connors
Charlene looked at the recorder. Neither of us said anything.
Lisa filled the silence for me. “Wow, that’s a big fish tank,” she said.
“I had some goldfish, but they died,” Charlene said, her voice flat. She had stopped crying. “So we gotta fill it up again.” She made it sound like filling up that tank and buying goldfish would take more energy than she could ever muster. Lisa and I nodded, smiling.
There is something almost deranged about what journalists do, meeting a stranger and immediately asking questions about her life. I once toured the county mental health hospital for a story. A mild-looking man, dressed in street clothes, approached me. “How old are you?” he asked. “Have you ever had sex? Do you think you’re pretty?”
“Don’t worry about him,” the guide had said. “He’s harmless.”
I always think of him at the awkward start of interviews.
“Look at all these pictures!” I said. (Here I pause to tell you that I cringe when I listen to these recordings and hear this enthusiastic woman—me—chirping inanities.)
“It’s all my kids,” Charlene said. “And my kids’ kids.”
“How many kids do you have?”
“Me? I have eight, and eleven grandkids. Soon to be twelve. I have a great-grandchild coming.”
“Wow!” I said. Charlene had no comment to that.
“So, you were the oldest of your brothers and sisters, right?” I said.
“Yeah. It was me, then there was my brother Heavy—”
“‘Heavy’?”
“Well, his name was Clifford but we called him Heavy. He was murdered in Boston.”
“Murdered?” I said. I had already seen that on his death certificate.
Charlene didn’t stop to explain. “Then there was my sister Linda. Ummm. Who’s next? It was Philip, Joseph, Laura, and Neamiah.”
“What about David?” I asked. “Where was he in the lineup?”
“David was right after Linda. So he was like the fourth.”
“Were you close growing up?”
“He was my favorite brother,” she said, sniffling. “Yeah, we did everything together. Got in trouble together, got locked up together—we did a lot of stuff when we were little.”
“Locked up for, like, serious stuff?”
“No, for stupid little stuff, like stealing candy. I never got into any serious trouble.”
Her voice caught when she said, “Everybody thought we was twins, we looked so much alike.”
I looked closely at Charlene. Twins? She did have her brother’s eyes—eyes that were both watchful and utterly weary. If he had lived into his fifties, and not gone to prison, David might have looked like Charlene, who was now fifty-seven, with an ample body that had gone soft and round at the middle, a face etched with years of drugs and alcohol and trouble, and those big eyes that missed nothing. Even though she was crying off and on, she unnerved me. I saw David in her eyes.
I stole a glance at Lisa, who sat on the floor over by the aquarium, listening to us and smiling. She hadn’t started taking photos yet. She didn’t look scared in the least.
I took a deep breath and told Charlene that I was writing about men who had died in prison without a family, or anyone else to bury them. I was looking for those families. I told her I knew David had died of cancer in 2000, in a prison hospital, and was buried in a prison cemetery in Ohio.
She started crying again. “I wrote to him in prison. He wrote back and told me he had a little girl. The second time I wrote, they said he had been released. Next time I heard, he was in Lucasville [prison], and he wrote back saying he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Then they wrote me back saying he had been released, and that’s the last I heard from him.”
She got up and came back with a handful of tissues. “Last time I called the prison, they told me David had died and been
buried. I said, ‘You had all my information, why didn’t you call me?” Cause I wanted my brother’s body. They told me he was buried in some damn debt place, and nobody knew where he was at. I was pissed off and tried to sue them, but I couldn’t find a lawyer to do anything about it.”
Charlene had buried everyone else in the family. Her mother first, in 1984, after the fire. Then Heavy, murdered in 1994. Then her father, cancer in 1995. Then Linda. Charlene said she died when she was forty-two, but she didn’t tell me the year.
“It was mesothelioma,” she said. “They think it happened in the fire that killed my mother. She was living at Linda’s house, and Linda was there and her lungs got burned or something.” She sighed. “After my mother died, we all just stayed drunk. So me and Linda used to party all the time, and she started getting so she couldn’t breathe.”
Charlene stopped and wiped her tears. “That almost broke me, burying my sister. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
I was quiet. “It sounds like you’ve had to do a lot of hard things in your life,” I said.
Charlene nodded. “I used to tell people this family was cursed.”
Then she told me about all the curses of her childhood.
“Your daddy’s a pimp.”
Charlene was thirteen when another kid told her that after school. “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she said. “I thought maybe it was cool, since my daddy always had lots of money
and owned houses and cars and this and that.” Then she found out what it meant. It meant that the other women who lived in their house—sometimes two women, sometimes three, with all their kids—worked for her father.
In Charlene’s telling, Clifford George Francis emerges as a mythical figure, a colossus who stomped through the world, destroying the women and children who feared and despised him.
Charlene’s memories emerged in the form that our brains store them—disconnected and random. She spoke with a stream-of-consciousness flow, and when I listened to the recording later, I realized that for almost an hour I did not ask her a single question. I barely made a sound, other than saying
“Really?”
or
“That’s terrible.”
I was like a child listening to a bedtime story, a story filled with witches and graveyards, bags of money and black magic, poison and murders. And, as in so many fairy tales, this one featured an evil spirit that took the material form of parents.
Charlene started with her father.
“When I was little, they used to call him T.C., for Top Cat. He used to take me to the pool hall, and he used to hit the street numbers all the time. I remember a couple gangsters coming and walking us home, ’cause he had won all this money. He had a bagful of money. That’s when he bought the first house, and a brand-new Cadillac. Lime green. Three days after he brought it home, David stole it and tore it up.”
T.C. weighed more than five hundred pounds, Charlene said. “He was huge. He told us he was a full-blooded Narragansett Indian. He and his brothers all had this long hair and
this high-red skin. And he had Indian superstitions, like he wouldn’t let anyone take his picture because he said it captured your spirit. It should have told you something when he drank the fire water that something was wrong with him.”
His mother, their grandmother, was a witch. “She practiced black magic,” Charlene said. “She had these bull horns over her front door, and she confessed to me, right before she died, that she had given her soul to the devil. She was a horrible person.”
Prejudiced, too. She didn’t like Millie or her kids because they were black. As a full-blooded member of the Narragansett nation, she looked down on them. Once she asked her youngest grandchild, Laura, “What color am I?” When Laura answered, “Black,” she locked her in the basement for hours.
“I remember the day my daddy brought the first woman home,” Charlene said. “I was seven or eight years old, and I was outside, jumping rope, when he pulled up with this lady in the car. He went inside the house, and I heard a lot of yelling between my mother and my father. That was the first time he hit my mother, far as I know.”
The lady’s name was Beverly, but everyone called her Mary. “She had a baby sister, Theresa. She was fifteen years old when he brought her home to the house. They lived with us.”
Over the years, Beverly/Mary had five children and Theresa had three, Charlene said. T.C.’s older children must have moved on, and I knew that some of them, including David, went to juvenile detention. Even so, it was hard to imagine, all those children and mothers living together in one house. Charlene was on a roll, so I didn’t stop her to ask how they
managed this, or why Beverly was called Mary, or what their last names were.
“I thought how we lived was normal,” Charlene said. Then the kid at school told her that her daddy was a pimp.
“So when I did find out what that was, I asked him, ‘Why would you do that to my mother?” Cause he used to beat up my mother, beat up the other women. It was a big mess. I guess you would call us—what do they call it now?”
“Dysfunctional?” I guessed.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the word. We were real dysfunctional.”
The other women never brought the johns back to the house, she explained. “They went out and did their stuff and brought their money back. I never seen any of the guys they went with. My mother didn’t prostitute. She and this other woman, Mary, they’d go out and steal things for him—you know, get clothes, food, jewelry, all this other stuff—and bring the stuff back to him.”
T.C. wasn’t just big—he was mean, Charlene said, especially when he was drinking, which was most of the time. When he beat their mother, Millie, sometimes he made her children watch. He beat the other women. He beat his boys—Clifford, Joseph, David, Philip, and Neamiah.
Charlene paused for a sip of water.
“Oh God, he was real mean. He’d hang them up on hooks and beat them with belts, and kicked them. My brother Heavy had a broken hip for almost two years and nobody even knew it. He would walk funny and nobody knew why until they
took him to the hospital. It wasn’t broken, it was out of place, and it was due to him beating Heavy.”
He didn’t beat the three girls—Charlene, Linda, and Laura. But T.C. abused them in other ways. “He told us we were worthless, we were stupid, that we weren’t nothing but a bedsheet for men,” Charlene said. “He was cruel.”
Once, she remembered, when Laura and Neamiah were still little, he told them to get dressed. “You’re going to go talk to your grandfather now,” he said.
“Granddaddy’s dead,” Neamiah said. They all knew this. T.C. didn’t say anything, he just put them in the car and took them to a graveyard. It was dark out by then. He took them to their granddaddy’s plot and left them there all night.
“Me being the oldest, mostly I ended up taking care of my brothers and sisters, because when they was down there drinking and fighting, I would take the kids upstairs and we’d sit in bed and I would try to read the Bible to them. I became their second mother, and after she died, they would come to me with their drama. I just took over the family.”
She paused. “They left me to bury everyone.”
There was more. When they were little, Charlene said, she would go without eating to make sure the other kids were fed. “My appetite still isn’t normal,” she said.
She remembers once all of them were together in a bedroom, plotting how to kill T.C. Charlene wanted to put poison in his food and watch him eat it. But David was the only one to act on his plot. “One time, he tried to murder my father,” Charlene said. “It was funny as hell. He locked my father in a
room and set the room on fire. He didn’t die in it, he ended up jumping out the window, and David took off in the brand-new Cadillac. He was about twelve or thirteen. I didn’t see much of David after that.”
All five boys started getting in trouble around that age, Charlene said, mostly for stealing cars.
I knew from the records in the prosecutor’s file that David had just turned twelve when he got the first entry on his rap sheet: an arrest for assault and robbery. His juvenile record from Massachusetts goes on from there, for pages and pages, fifty-three entries that record an adolescence of arrests for committing theft, breaking and entering, carrying concealed weapons, doing drugs, and escaping from detention. He was sent away most of the time.
The girls, too, got into trouble with the law, for drugs and prostitution.
“I was addicted to crack for about ten years,” Charlene said. “My brother Heavy, he used to sell it. So we’d be at his house on Green Street smoking, and then we’d go to other people’s houses, we’d start smoking. When Heavy died, I ended up doing it even worse. He was murdered. They said it was that Heavy stole some drugs from these guys in Boston, and like six guys jumped him and fought him. They never found who did it. Never. I don’t think they looked too hard.”
It took her grandson’s dying for Charlene to get clean.
“Little Thomas was two years old,” she said, tearing up. “We was all drinking and drugging, and me and the guy I was going with at the time got into a big fight. My daughter lived upstairs, and I lived on the second floor, and me being so drunk
I put a cigarette on an ashtray and left it on my bed and forgot about it, and we went into another room and we were fighting, and next thing I knew the whole mattress caught on fire.”
The guy she was going with tried to take the mattress outside, but he couldn’t get it through the door and the hall filled with smoke. Everybody got out of the house. Except Thomas. They were all running around looking for him, yelling. The firemen found him behind a chair. Apparently the smoke scared him so much he was hiding back there.
“I went to that funeral, and I looked at my grandson in his little casket, and I promised him I would never touch another drug as long as I lived,” Charlene said, the tears spilling over and running down her face again. “And I haven’t. I haven’t even touched a drink. I don’t even have feelings for it anymore. I used to crave it; I would get mad if I didn’t have it. But now I don’t care about it.”
Charlene always thought the whole family would end up dying from drugs or alcohol. David was the only one who didn’t seem to like it. When they all got to drinking, he’d just take off. Nobody knew where he went or what he did.
“Of all of us,” Charlene said, “David was the biggest mystery.”
He had this problem with rage, she told me. “He would get so mad, until he wanted to kill somebody. But the thing is, the madder he got, the calmer he would get. He’d start talking real soft and low, calm, and then you knew to get the hell out of the way.”