Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Night the Music Died. Cissy Houston
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a fury, and although we were all able to get out of the house safely, we had no time to save our possessions. We all ran across the street and huddled there, frightened, as the flames rose higher amid the shrieking of sirens and people’s screams.
My father held me in his arms, and as I clutched his neck in terror I watched the flames climb higher, engulfing our home and then consuming the entire block of tenement houses. I looked at my father and saw tears roll from his eyes as he watched years of our family’s memories burn. The fire destroyed not only our home, but just about everything we owned—our clothes, our books, family photographs, and what few playthings we had. And because our extended family—Daddy’s parents, Mommy’s sister and mother, and several aunts and uncles—had lived in that same block of tenements, their places burned, too. We’d all have to move.
The fire scattered the Drinkards all over Newark, but strangely, in other ways, it was a godsend. If it hadn’t been for that fire, it would have taken us years to save enough money to move out of the tenement. But afterward, with the help of city services, we were able to move into an apartment in a much better neighborhood. From the ashes of something terrible, something good was able to emerge—another lesson that imprinted itself on my young mind.
Once we settled into our new neighborhood, our family started attending St. Luke’s A.M.E. Church. At age five, I was too young to understand much of what was going on, but I was drawn to the joy and enthusiasm that seemed to swell up in that place. You could feel the force of the Spirit and the music the minute you stepped inside those doors.
St. Luke’s was more than just the place our family went to Sunday school. It was the place where my brothers and sisters and I learned to sing.
At first, I wasn’t all that interested in singing. But the music at St. Luke’s was different. At St. Luke’s A.M.E., they not only had a piano, they also had cymbals, tambourines, and even a washboard. This was where we learned to clap our hands in time, and where we learned syncopation, the offbeat rhythm that’s a cornerstone of so many musical styles. It’s where we learned to play the tambourine, and to harmonize. And it’s where I first began to experience music as something spiritual.
Inspired by the music in that church, my brothers and sisters and I started singing together. I don’t remember when we first started, but the minute we did, something just clicked—we could hardly believe what was coming out of our own mouths. We were blessed with some truly great singers in my family (all except poor Hank, who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket), and when my father heard us sing together, that was it—our carefree childhood days were over.
Daddy made us practice together every single day. I didn’t want to, of course—I just wanted to keep playing like all the other five-year-old kids. Sometimes I’d hide in my room, or I’d run outside and duck behind the car, and my father would threaten me with a beating to get me to come join the others. He never did actually spank me, because, as the youngest, I was his “baby.” But he surely did spank my brothers and sisters—Daddy was not one to fool around if he wanted something done.
My sister Marie, who we called Reebie, taught us songs and rehearsed us, and she was just as strict as my father. We’d learn the melody of a song from the hymnbook, then add in the harmonies, and then finally improvise. “Strike me up a tune!” my father would say, and we’d stand in a group, hold up a broom like a microphone, and start singing.
I could see the pride in my father’s eyes when we sang, but you know, he wasn’t training us to make himself proud. As we started performing in churches, and later in concert halls, he really saw us as junior missionaries—young ambassadors of God’s Word. He wanted us to be a positive influence on other young people, and to carry God’s Word and the family name with our own group: the Drinkard Quartet.
For a time, things were good. We might not have had much money, but we had enough—and more important, we had each other, our faith, and our music. But just as life seemed to be getting better, my mother had another stroke.
From that point on, my mother’s hospital visits became part of our family’s daily life. Every so often, sometimes in the middle of the night, she’d go to the hospital and stay there for a few days. After a while, we kids would hear from a relative or neighbor that she was coming home, and we’d crowd into the front window of our apartment to watch for her and my father coming up the street, him pushing her in her wheelchair.
We were always so happy to have Mommy home, but after those hospital visits she usually needed relief from taking care of the three youngest children—Larry, Nicky, and me. So, during these times, Larry and Nicky were sent to stay with relatives who still lived near Court Street, and I got shipped off to Newark’s Ironbound section to stay with my aunt Juanita. I hated staying with Aunt Juanita, not only because I missed my brothers, but also because she was a mean, nasty woman. She wasn’t like my other relatives—she dipped snuff and was always trying to get a rise out of everybody. Every day I spent at Aunt Juanita’s, I prayed for my mother’s quick recovery.
When Mommy was feeling better, and we could all be at home again—those were the happiest times of my young life. But they lasted only until one terrible night in May 1941, when I was eight years old. That night, my mother began having seizures, and blood started pouring from her mouth and nose. Daddy and my older sisters tried desperately to stem her bleeding and comfort her, but the blood was still gushing out when the ambulance arrived. Mommy was rushed to the hospital as my brothers and I slept through it all, unaware that anything was happening.
The next morning, we were told only that our mother had gone to the hospital. And later that day, when a neighbor boy yelled up to us that he saw Daddy coming up the street, Larry, Nicky, and I gathered in the window of our apartment, just like we always did, to watch for Daddy rolling Mommy up the street in her wheelchair.
That’s when mean Aunt Juanita yelled up to us, “Get out of that window, children! Don’t you know your momma’s dead?”
I didn’t even have time to take in her words before I saw my father walking up the street. His head hung down, and he was leaning heavily on Oscar, my mother’s brother. He was crying, and my mother and her wheelchair were nowhere to be seen. As it turned out, she’d suffered a severe cerebral hemorrhage and hadn’t even made it to the hospital.
My beloved mother, Delia Mae Drinkard, had passed. She was only thirty-nine years old.
I didn’t know how to cope with the terrible feeling of emptiness that settled over me after my mother died. I didn’t think I’d recover from it, and I’m not sure I ever did.
I was only eight, and the very idea of death was hard to put my head around. To make matters worse, no one had the time or inclination to talk to me about it. I think my father, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles all assumed I was too young, so I was left to deal with it on my own. In fact, for years afterward, my sisters avoided talking about Mommy’s death, as the mere mention of her name brought tears to their eyes. And so I learned very early on to tamp down my feelings of sadness and just get on with life—because there really wasn’t any other choice in the matter.
My mother’s quiet stability, her faith and love, had sustained all of us during those harsh Depression years. With that stability gone, we were adrift. And so we turned to the one thing that could ground us: singing the gospel.
Singing and rehearsing kept our family together after my mother’s death. We looked to Daddy for support, and he looked to us, burying his grief in his involvement with his children and the music. Daddy always urged us to practice more; sometimes, when he came home after we were in bed, he’d wake us and say, “Come on, now, get up and sing me a song!” Nobody wanted to disappoint him, so we always did it. And with all that practice, we started getting booked to sing in churches and gospel programs from New Jersey to New York and beyond.
I loved singing with my brothers and sisters, but, unlike my older sister Reebie, who had found the Lord and been converted at the storefront church, I didn’t know what I was singing about. Something definitely touched me when I sang, but I didn’t really understand it. For Reebie, who believed that true gospel singers had to have the spirit of God within them, I was just “half-steppin’.”