big wheel keep on turnin'

 

---------------------- [excerpt from I, Tina - Tina Turner's memoir] ------------ At the Poindexters', Anna Mae [Tina Turner] caught glimpses of something that was missing in her own home - easy affection, solicitous commitment. ... But in her own home she felt frozen out, barely there.  It was more than just the pall that hung over Richard and Zelma's marriage.  They managed to find time for Alline between wrangles, it seemed.  But for Anna Mae there was little of the hearthside intimacy of a loving home life, only a grudging toleration.

        For it had been her misfortune to be the last, unwanted child of a foundering union.  As Richard and Zelma turned away from each other, their puzzled daughter, stranded in the middle, began to turn away too.  In those hours unoccupied by schooling, or later by work stints alongside her family in the cotton and strawberry fields, she took to roaming the pastures and the woodlands, searching for strength in solitude.  This, she came to suppose, was simply the way things were.

        But despair was never in her nature.  If there was pain, it would pass.  Another day would come, with a new sun to warm it.  Her life was just beginning, and as the 1940s took form she managed to pry a little girl's pleasures out of her uncomplicated backcountry world.  Despite the emotional dislocations, there was a redeeming sweetness to life then too, looking back.

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