If I were to write a book about my parents, it would be about star-crossed lovers doomed to heartbreak and hardship. From what I’ve heard about their lives, they were misfits and all wrong for each other—yet there was something special between them. Over time, my parents—James and Lottie—seemed like stars crashing into one another, each time diminishing the other just a little more.
It seems that they had a brief period of happiness living together. Mrs. Oma Lee Taylor owned the rooming house where my father rented a room to which he brought my mother not long after I was born. According to Mrs. Taylor, Lottie and James were as different as night and day, and probably should never have been together.
From what Mrs. Taylor could see, Lottie was a good Christian girl who got caught in James’ snare. Though James was a notorious womanizer, Mrs. Taylor said that after I was born, she saw a transformation in James. He took his responsibility as a father seriously and seemed to be living for something more than being with other women and his gang.
By my mother’s own account, she came to understand why James’ gang was so important to him, noting in her autobiography how James had told her “about how his father threw him outdoors and mistreated him and did not allow him to eat. His first stealing was stealing food.”
Lottie was a young mother estranged from her parents because she was having a baby outside of marriage. Though she didn’t allow James to visit her during her pregnancy, his guys kept tabs on her and he would show up wherever she went. When it was time to have the baby, the relatives Lottie was staying with called him.
He went to the hospital with her and followed as far as he could go. When she woke up after giving birth, he was at her side. He showed a tenderness that she had not experienced from anyone before, and he seemed genuinely enchanted by their baby girl. Beginning with the way James had protected her from afar during her pregnancy and his obvious love for their child, Lottie found herself falling deeply in love with the man she once hated.
Gwen Dungy 