Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart - Hardcover

DEBORAH SANTANA is vice president and COO of the New Santana Band, Inc., and has been managing the Santana Band full-time with her husband of three decades, the Grammy-winning musician Carlos Santana, since 1994. She is also vice president of the Milagro Foundation, which was started by the Santana family and which has given almost $2 million to charities and agencies that support children and youth in the areas of health, education, and the arts. In 2000 she received the UCLA César E. Chávez Spirit Award, which honors individuals who have continued to pursue Chávez’s vision of social justice. In 2004 she received a “Women of Distinction” Award from the Marin Soroptimist organization for her work with the Milagro Foundation. Deborah and Carlos Santana live in San Rafael, California, with their three children. Visit the author’s website at www.deborahsantana.com.

Skin

San Francisco, California, 1960

The summer I was nine I climbed to the top of our hill, grabbing handfuls of dry sweet grass to pull me over jagged rocks. I stood looking out at San Francisco unfurled before me, a mix of winding streets that trailed into the sky, or tipped into the soft, blue bay. Sunlight strained to warm me through the fog, and people drifted like watercolors on a page, hues of dark and light, diverse as the world. We lived on Majestic Avenue, a cul-de-sac whose name fit perfectly with our family surname, King. Feeling crystalline and ever so shaky in the gusting wind, I stood at the top of our street and waved my arms to the city, queen of it all.

My sister, Kitsaun, almost two years older than me, thought she was queen. She climbed ahead of me to the top of the bluff, holding stalks of anise toward the sky, the scent of licorice sifting down to me. Sitting on a ledge, I could see our little house with red stairs that led to the front door, a mean cactus century plant with two-inch thorns growing near the driveway. Once, Kitsaun had fallen off the porch onto the spiny arms and I thought she was dead. She had long scratches and cuts that bled, and Mom laid her on the couch so I could touch her face and bring her food. “She’s a fainter,” Mom said. “She’ll be fine.” The next day she was back on the hill, waving her royal stems.

Kitsaun and I shared a bedroom at the front of the house. Every night I slept with my head under the covers, clutching my stuffed dog, Brownie. I tried to fall asleep right after prayers because I did not want to be awake by myself in the dark. Kitsaun’s bed was next to mine. She slept soundly under her flowered comforter—unafraid of the night. Morning light rose over the mountains of the East Bay and through the branches of a tall Monterey pine outside our window, and we could see the tip of the Bay Bridge glinting in the sun. We played hide-and-seek and “mother may I” with the kids on our block and some evenings we filled balloons with water and hid behind parked cars and bushes that poked us while we ran and smacked one another with wet, rubbery fun. We rode on coasters we made from planks of wood nailed to ball bearings, shrieking wildly as we careened down the smooth sidewalk, our hands clasping a circle of rope, a close-knit passel of friends.

My father, Saunders King, was a flinty observer of life, a man who spoke only when necessary. Singing was his language. He carried society’s racism and his personal view of right and wrong a knife’s blade beneath his steely control. His life as a guitarist and singer fulfilled him, and he tried to never compromise his art by working a nine-to-five job. Mom was an outspoken Irish-English woman who fell in love and married Dad, an African-American man, in the 1940s. She worked full-time in an era when it was acceptable, if not expected, that women stay at home with their children and sublimate their dreams and desires to help their husbands reach theirs. Mom loved working, and Dad loved being at home with Kitsaun and me during the day before going to his gigs at nightclubs. Our family was not at all defined by the traditional American mores of 1951, the year I was born.

Sundays, Dad would drive Mom, Kitsaun, and me across the Bay Bridge for church. Dad’s brother Ulysses was pastor of Christ Holy Sanctified Church, the Pentecostal house of worship started by their father, Judge King, and Sarah, their mo-ther. Dad would dress up in a shiny fitted suit with a wide tie like he was going to work. He smelled of Ivory soap and lime aftershave. Mom wore suits with stockings and heels. My favorite was pink mohair that felt like a rug. Kitsaun and I wore dresses with white socks and saddle shoes that made our legs look like toothpicks in boats. We both had hair that looked like we were in a perpetual wind. I wore a scarf tied tight around my head, pressing my waves flat. My bangs sat like a Tootsie Roll across my forehead. Kitsaun’s black hair curled around her face. She was taller and lankier than me, smart and funny, too. She enjoyed yelling and singing, often combining the two, like opera. Mom would laugh and tell her to quiet down, which she did while making dramatic faces of rejection.

Church service began at eleven in the morning with the choir marching through the front doors in their white robes with red satin collars. My eyes followed their feet as they stepped forward with one foot, held it for two counts, and then pulled up the foot in back, tapping lightly. The choir bounced like springs, singing about the holiness of God. And I believed. Church grounded me in the heavens, telling me through sermons that life was full of strife, but that God was a present help in times of trouble. Call on Him and you will find peace, their powerful voices sang.

Every summer, a few days after school let out, Mom and Dad took us to Grandmother King’s farm in Chowchilla, where the land lay out flat and dry, and when we walked down the road, a mirage of water shimmered in the distance. Grandmother wore a dress with a flowered apron over it. She spoke with a crinkle in her voice—never a bad word, either. She was not much taller than Kitsaun, even with her sturdy black shoes on, but strong spirited with a quietness that concealed her courage. Grandmother looked across her yard to the farmlands, as if she could see farther than the fields and pastures. I recognized a fire inside her, but she never spoke in a tone that was not gentle. She made a cup of hot water every morning, stirring in two heaping teaspoons of sugar and a splash of evaporated milk. She sat in a wooden rocking chair, her brown leather Bible open in her lap as she read and rocked, sipping her hot water. It was so scorching hot in Chowchilla that Grandmother never let us play outside between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon. Every slow and sizzling day, Grandmother had Kitsaun and me wash and dry the dishes, dust the dining table, and fold tea towels. If we giggled and made fun of someone, Grandmother scolded our meanness—she didn’t believe in gossip or swearing. She had a funny way of saying “excuse me” after she coughed, but nothing after a loud belch—which may have been a custom from Louisiana, where she was born. Dad’s brother Judge lived with her, caring for the farm, because Grandfather King had died years before. Uncle Judge rose long before our dreams were done, to milk the two cows that lived in the tiny pasture. After our breakfast of Cream of Wheat or grits and eggs, Kitsaun and I followed Uncle Judge out to the chicken coop to toss corn feed to the hens and roosters. Once, when a chicken pecked my thigh, Uncle Judge wrung its neck and cooked it for dinner. I was grateful for the revenge, feeling the tender puncture where the beak had poked into my leg, but I could not swallow the meat that steamed on my plate. Where were the feathers, the head, the beady eyes?

At night, Grandmother put her teeth in a jar of water on the bathroom sink. It took me a long time to go to the bathroom without Kitsaun: The teeth looked so big in the glass. I would sit on the toilet and squeeze my eyes closed until I saw stars, wipe myself, and run out of the bathroom while pulling up my pajamas. Kitsaun and I slept on the sofa bed in the living room, the window open wide, without a prayer of a breeze—only crickets singing in the dark.

I learned about the peace of God in that house. Grandmother prayed morning and night, hummed hymns, and taught us Bible verses. On the dining table was a tiny wooden box that held little rectangular pieces of cardboard with scriptures that we read out loud before each meal. No matter how young, we were to pick out a pink, blue, or green card and stumble through a verse. No food passed our lips without a blessing. No sleep came until we said the Lord’s Prayer. Kitsaun and I had memorized John 3:16 before we knew how to tie our shoes: “. . . that God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believeth on Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” We grew up knowing we were expected to live up to Grandmother’s image of a spiritual human being, praying for others and choosing good over bad. I still love the smell of cow pies when I drive in the country, because they remind me of hot, quiet days watching Grandmother’s cows chew their cuds while I turned cartwheels through sprinklers on the crabgrass with my sister. I still can’t fall asleep until I have said good night to God.

Every August, three of Mom’s four sisters converged on our house in San Francisco—Aunt Nita and Aunt Ginger from Chicago and Aunt Nomi from South San Francisco. Our living room, with the Sears Roebuck sofa, and a black-and-white TV beside the upright piano, became a land of stories and bebop music. Mom reminisced about picking cotton with her sisters in Arizona when she was five, how raw and pricked their fingers got. Dad remembered his first singing lessons with Mrs. Forsythe in Oakland. She had taught him to enunciate his words and sing from his diaphragm. Aunt Dini had introduced Mom to Dad in 1947 when Dad’s band, the Saunders King Orchestra, was playing at the Café Society in Chicago. She and Uncle Stan had become Dad’s fans listening to him in San Francisco at the Club Savoy. Our scrapbook had a photo of Dad in a sleek, dark suit and black bow tie, his white shirt stark against his smooth, charcoal skin. His eyes glimmered with starry light, his teeth straight and white beneath his mustache. He sang and played the guitar with his sextet, and often sat in with Billie Holiday, Charlie Mingus, and T-Bone Walker.

Dad played Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on the turntable in our living room. Aunt Nita, Aunt Ginger, and Mom laid out cards for group solitaire in the ki...