The Legs Are the Last to Go by Diahann Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

education to prove their worth. Without that, they were left on the outside of the Harlem society they craved to join. But their alienation made them determined to see that their own children would not face those kind of barriers and limitations.
    They did only one thing in my entire childhood that made me feel unloved. When I was still a toddler, they left me with my mother’s sister in North Carolina. To the sound of tree frogs in the hot and humid evening, my mother tucked me in and kissed me good night, and the next morning she was gone. Gone! She and my father had decided that they could not afford to be proper parents and work to earn enough to support us decently. So one morning, with honeybees and crickets now buzzing outside the window of a house with no plumbing or electricity, I awoke to find no mother. My aunt scrubbed me in a big tin washtub. I was utterly bewildered. Why would my mother leave me without even telling me why? Was I too young to understand without flying into a tantrum that would tear ather heart so it would have made it impossible for her to leave me? She and my father knew what they had to do to get ahead. But that one year, without the security of my own parents, has stayed with me all these years. I hated living in my aunt’s house. I missed the doting of my parents, and I was terrified of the outhouse, where I had seen snakes, spiders, and lizards. And I was so bewildered. Nobody would answer my questions, “Where is my mother? Why did she leave me here?”
    How could I possibly understand that the decision to leave me with this aunt was inspired by a need to secure a better future for me? My father had crunched the numbers. Though he had little book learning, he always had a very astute business mind. He knew if he and my mother could be free for one year of the demands of parenthood, they could get ahead financially. So they chose a hard path for a year to build us a better life. In their year of working without me around, they were able to move to a larger apartment, in which they occupied two rooms and rented out the others.
    I returned to it one day with them from the South, and said very little. A few years later, their work ethic would become my own work ethic, but at the time, their decision only caused me misery. We never talked about that lost year—my parents simply didn’t discuss difficult and disturbing incidents. But I was scarred by it, and I was left with such a deep feeling of abandonment that I took it with me for years, all the way into middle age and beyond. And I still believe that that year—and the fear I subsequently had of being left behind—caused me to stick with men who were absolutely wrong for me later in my life. I also carried with me a feeling that I had done somethingwrong to deserve such treatment from people I loved so very much.
    But that day when my parents finally brought me back to New York, I will say this: a far more comfortable life was beginning for all of us in every way.
    My parents were all about moving up. But stylish as Harlem was in those years, it was still a ghetto. So early on, my father talked of moving to the suburbs—and Mother urged him along with the idea. He once interrupted a game of stickball outside our home to have the children who were playing take their coats off his car—he prided himself on having a clean car—and when he returned he found his windshield broken. It only reinforced his dream of having a nice lawn on which his little girl could play without worry, and a garage to keep his Chrysler safe from stickball players. It took a long time to move. But he was doing well. By the time I was in kindergarten, he had saved enough to purchase a brownstone as a rental property. So he became a landlord.
    If you tried to tell me we lived in a rough part of town or that we were low on the social totem pole, I would not have believed you. To me, my parents were a king and queen, and I was