Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story by Jewel Page B

hand just above the wrist but could use the bit of wrist she had quite handily to carry things like grocery bags. She was a single mom andworked hard, and she was very close to her daughter; they were like a team that stuck together. I craved that closeness. They lived in the projects, and Eleanor was putting herself through school, taking odd jobs where she could without losing her welfare status. They lived on food stamps but she fed me as if I were one of her own.
    I learned to adapt to the city as a teenager, and my pidgin slang came in handy as it made me sound a little more urban. Or at least I thought it did. I began to dress like my new friends, very mid-’80s. I relinquished the grubby secondhand homestead gear and work boots and saved up some money for flats, pegged skinny jeans, black stockings with short black stretchy miniskirts. White button-down shirts with bolos, tank tops with blazers (sleeves rolled up of course), and then there was the ever-present smell of enough hairspray to be a fire hazard when we were all gathered for lunch. The school operated more like a college, where we could attend and create class schedules with some flexibility. Garrett and Sam would often hot-wire a car and take me out for lunch, then we would return it an hour later, no one ever the wiser that I knew of. Garrett and I became close friends, and he often confided in me about his home life. Sometimes his dad beat him so severely that he had to miss school so that no teacher would call social services, staying home for a week to let the bruises heal. I had never been beaten like that. I hoped never to know that feeling. Dionne and I would ride the city bus to his house and visit with him during these times. He was stoic and hard on the outside, but as I got to know him I could see his heart was tender and breaking behind the wall he was building to survive. He was, after all, still just a child. I knew that feeling.
    Life with my mom was not mean at all. She was seemingly the opposite of my dad. She did not yell or hit. She was soft-spoken and calm and full of artistic imagination, always making me feel anything was possible. Butall her time was spent reading or doing artwork, and very little was spent with us. I remember her crying a lot. We could hear her through the floorboards.
    My favorite times with her were in her studio, where she taught me how to do glasswork. I watched as she drew a design on paper in Sharpie. She could draw freehand very well. I would then help her cut each shape and number them. We laid the paper cutouts on sheets of colored glass she had selected and then drew an outline around one using the glass cutting knife to carefully free the unique form from its generic former self. We’d wrap copper foil around the edges of the glass, and slowly a mosaic would come together as her drawing was reassembled, fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. Then the fun work of soldering each piece, the lead melting like mercury when I touched it to the hot tool, and hardening again almost as quickly. I would accompany her on installations, going to rich people’s homes, listening in like a fly on the wall as the owners marveled at their new purchase and my mother waxed on about the philosophical and spiritual undertones of her work. On a few occasions my mom and I got singing jobs this way. She and I worked up an a cappella set, and she would offer to sing at any functions for the same clients. A few took her up on it, and we would dress nicely and walk around parties in backyards, singing songs for partygoers much like magicians walk around performing tricks in similar settings. Soon my mother would be talking with all the guests as if she were one of them. I took everything in, always from the outside.
    My mom began to turn me on to music she liked—Odetta, Josephine Baker, Tracy Chapman. I listened, transfixed, as lyrics stirred my soul, and raw voices transmuted hurt and fear into hope. I had gotten hold of her