“To my boys, who are the greatest love of my life”
PROLOG
As a child, I often wandered and sang for hours all alone in the quiet woods behind our house in Louisiana. Being outdoors made me feel alive and adventurous. When I was growing up, my mom and dad fought all the time. He was an alcoholic. At home I was usually scared. Outdoors wasn’t necessarily heaven either, but it was my world. Whether you call it heaven or hell, it was mine. On my way home, I used to follow a path that led to the neighbor’s house, through their nicely landscaped garden and past a swimming pool. They had a stone section with polished pebbles that absorbed the sun’s heat and stored it. I used to lie down on those stones that felt good against my skin, look up at the sky, really feel the heat both from below and from above, and think: I can create my own path in life. I can make my dreams come true. As I lay still on the rocks, I felt God’s presence.
CHAPTER 1
Resumo
Raising children in the South used to be about children respecting their parents and being quiet. (These days it’s the other way around - it’s more about respecting the kids.) Defying a parent was never allowed at our house. No matter how bad it was, the kids would be quiet, and if I wasn’t, there were consequences. In the Bible it says that your tongue is your sword. My tongue and my sword made me sing. Throughout my childhood I sang. I sang and danced around alone in my room. I sang along to the car radio on the way to dance lessons. I sang when I was sad. For me, singing was something spiritual. I was born and went to school in McComb, Mississippi, and lived in Kentwood, Louisiana, four miles away.
In Kentwood, everyone knew each other. The front doors were unlocked, social life revolved around the church and all the garden parties, children were dressed in matching clothes and everyone could handle firearms. The area’s main historical attraction was Camp Moore, a training camp for Confederate soldiers that had been built by Jefferson Davis. The weekend before Thanksgiving every year, scenes from the American Civil War are re-enacted, so the sight of people dressed in military uniforms was always a reminder that Thanksgiving was coming. I loved that time of year: hot chocolate, the smell of the open fire in our living room, the colorful autumn leaves on the ground. We lived in a small brick house with green- striped wallpaper and wooden panels on the walls. As a child I frequented the drive-in restaurant, drove go-karts, played basketball and attended a small Christian school called Parklane Academy.
The first time I was really touched and felt shivers throughout my body was when our cleaning lady sang in the laundry room. I always took care of the family’s laundry, but when we were a little better off, mom hired someone to come and help. The maid sang gospel and it literally opened up a whole new world for me. I will never forget it. Ever since then, my longing to sing and my love for singing have grown bigger. Singing is magical. When I sing, I am myself. I can communicate completely clearly. You stop using all the usual routine phrases like: “Hello, how are things…?” You can say things with a completely different depth. To sing me to a magical place where language no longer has any meaning, where everything is possible. All I wanted was to leave the everyday world and enter this other realm where I could express myself without having to think. When I was alone with my thoughts, my mind was filled with worries and fears.
But the music put an end to all worries, gave me self-esteem and took me to a completely pure place where I could express myself exactly the way I wanted to be seen and heard. Singing brought me to a divine presence. As long as I was singing I was half outside the ordinary world. I could be playing video games or wheeling around the back of the house, but my thoughts and feelings and hopes were elsewhere. I worked hard to make everything look exactly how I wanted. I took myself seriously when I filmed silly music videos for Mariah Carey songs out in my girlfriend’s garden. At the age of eight, I considered myself a director. No one else in my hometown seemed to do such things. But I knew what
I wanted to see in my world, and tried to realize that vision. Artists create things and play roles to find a kind of escape into other worlds, and that kind of escape from reality was exactly what I needed. I wanted to live inside my dreams, my wonderful fictitious world, and preferably never think about reality, if I had to choose for myself. Singing was like a bridge between reality and fantasy, between the world in which I lived and the world in which I so desperately wanted to live. Tragedies run in families. My middle name, Jean, comes from my grandmother Emma Jean Spears, who was just called Jean. I have seen pictures of her and understand why everyone thinks we are so similar. Same blonde hair. Same smile. She looked young for her age. Her husband - my grandfather June Spears senior - was a bully. One of grandma’s child died three days after birth. Grandpa sent Grandma to Southeast Louisiana Hospital, an apparently horrible mental hospital in Mandeville, where they gave her lithium. In 1966, when my grandmother was thirty-one years old, she shot herself to death with a shotgun at her young son’s grave, eight years after his death. I can’t even imagine the grief she must have felt. In the American South it is not uncommon to talk about men of June’s type in terms such as: “There was never a day for him”, or that he was “a perfectionist”, or that he was “a very involved father”. I would probably use harsher words. He was fanatically interested in sports and forced my father to continue training far beyond the point of exhaustion. As tired and hungry as Dad might be after his daily basketball practice, he had to to practice goal shooting a hundred more times before he was allowed in. June worked as a police officer in Baton Rouge and eventually had ten children with three wives. And as far as I know, nobody has a good word to say about him for the first fifty years of his life. Even in my own family, it was said that the men in the Spears family often meant trouble, especially when it came to how they treated women. Jean wasn’t the only wife June sent off to the Mandeville mental hospital. He also sent his second wife there. One of my father’s half-sisters has said that June sexually abused her, that it started when she was eleven and continued until she ran away from home at sixteen. My father was thirteen years old when Jean died. I know that this trauma is part of the explanation for how he in turn behaved towards me and my siblings, and why nothing was ever enough- good in his eyes. Dad pushed my brother to try to be successful in sports. Dad drank until he couldn’t think. He disappeared from home for several days at a time. And when he was drunk, he got really mean. But June mellowed with age. I never saw that cruel man who had hurt my father and his siblings so badly, but rather a grandfather who seemed patient and kind. Mother and father came from two different worlds, which were each other’s exact opposites. According to my mother, her mother, my grandmother Lilian “Lily” Portell - came from an elegant and sophisticated family in London. She had an exotic air about her that everyone noticed: her mother was British and her father from the Mediterranean island of Malta. She had an uncle who was a bookbinder. The whole family played different instruments and loved to sing.
During World War II, Lily met an American soldier, my grandfather Barney Bridges, at a dance for the conscripted troops. He was a driver for the generals and loved to drive fast. However, she was disappointed when he took her with him to America. She had imagined a life similar to the one she had in London. On her way to his dairy farm from New Orleans, she looked out the window of Barney’s car and was troubled by how desolate his world seemed to be. “Where are all the lights?” she repeatedly asked her new husband. I sometimes think of how Lily traveled through the Louisiana countryside and looked out into the evening darkness, realizing that her varied, lively, music-filled life of afternoon tea and London museums would now be limited and curtailed. Instead of going to the theater or shopping for clothes, she would be isolated out in the country and get to devote themselves to cooking, cleaning and milking. So my grandmother kept to herself, read loads of books, became obsessed with cleaning and missed London until the day she died. My family told me that Barney never wanted to let Lily go back there because he didn’t think she would ever come back home. Mother has said that Lily was so lost in her own thoughts that she had a tendency to start clearing the table before everyone had even finished eating. All I knew was that my grandmother was beautiful and that I loved imitating her British accent. I’ve always liked speaking with a British accent, because it reminds me of my elegant grandmother. I wanted exactly the same manner and melodic voice. Because Lily had money, my mother Lynne and her siblings, Sonny and Sandra, grew up in what you might call a wealthy home, especially for being out in rural Louisiana. Despite the fact that the family was Protestant, mother went to a Catholic school. She looked amazing in her teens, with her black hair cut short. She used to always go to school in the tallest possible boots and the shortest possible skirt. She hung out with the town’s gay guys, who let her ride on the back of their motorcycles. My father became interested in her, and no wonder. Dad was exceptionally good at sports, probably due in part to June forcing him to train so idiotically hard. People came from miles around just to see him play basketball. Mom saw him and said, “Hello, who’s that?” According to consensus, their relationship was based on mutual attraction and a shared appetite for adventure. But the honeymoon was over long before I was born.
CHAPTER 2
Resumo
When my parents got married they lived in a small house in Kentwood. Mom didn’t get any money from her family anymore, so they were very poor. They were young, too— mother was twenty-one and father twenty-three. In 1977, my older brother Bryan was born. They left the small house and bought a smaller one-story villa with three rooms. After Bryan was born, mom returned to school and trained as a teacher. Dad, who worked as a welder for various oil refineries – a tough job with assignments that could last a month, or sometimes three – started drinking - a lot, and it wasn’t long before it affected the family negatively. After a couple of years of marriage, my grandfather Barney died in a car accident. According to Mom, Dad drank so much in the wake of missing Bryan’s first birthday. When Bryan
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got a little older, dad got drunk at a Christmas party and just disappeared on Christmas morning. That time mom said she’d had enough. She moved in with Lily. In March 1980, she filed for divorce. But June and his new wife begged her to take Dad back, and she did. Then everything was apparently calm for a while. Dad quit as a welder and started a construction company. After a lot of hassle, he opened a gym as well. It was called Total Fitness and turned some of the men in town, not least my uncles, into bodybuilders. He ran it in a separate room on the property, right next to our house. An eternal stream of muscular guys went in and out of the gym, flexing their muscles in the mirrors under the fluorescent lighting. Things started to go really well for dad. He became one of the wealthiest men in our small town. My family threw big garden parties and feasted
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freshly cooked crayfish. They had wild parties and danced the night away. (I’ve always assumed they took speed to stay awake all night, it was the most common drug back then.) Mother opened a preschool together with her sister, my aunt Sandra. To really solidify their marriage, my parents gave me a second child. I was born on the second of December,
- Mom never missed an opportunityto point out that that birth cost her twenty-one hours of excruciating pain. I loved the women in my family. Sandra, my aunt, who already had two sons, unexpectedly had a illegitimate child when she was thirty-five: my cousin Laura Lynne. We were only a few months apart, so she and I were like twins and best friends. Laura Lynne was always like a sister to me, and Sandra was like one
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second mother. She was so proud of me, and so encouraging. Although my grandmother Jean passed away long before I was born, I was fortunate enough to get to know her mother, my grandmother’s mother, Lexie Pierce. Lexie was absolutely shockingly beautiful and always made up with white powder and red lipstick. She was a real tough guy, something that became more and more noticeable the older she got. I was told - which was not hard to believe - that she had been married seven times. Seven! Naturally, she disliked her son-in- law June, but after the death of her daughter Jean, she had still kept in touch with and cared for my father and his siblings, and then also her great-grandchildren. Lexie and I were very close. My clearest and happiest memories from my childhood are when she and I got to hang out. I used to spend the night at her place, just the two of us. In the evening we went through her make-up cabinet. In the morning
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she cooked a huge breakfast. Her best friend, who lived next door, used to pop in too, and we would listen to slow fifties ballads from Lexie’s record collection. During the day, Lexie and I were able to take a nap together. There was nothing I loved more than slowly falling asleep with her by my side, smelling her powder and perfume, and listening to her breaths become deep and regular. One day Lexie and I went to rent a movie. When we left the video store, she first drove into another car and then helplessly stuck in a pothole in the road. We couldn’t get away. A tow truck has to pull out and rescue us. That accident scared Mom. From that day on, I was no longer allowed to hang out on my own with my grandmother’s mother. “It wasn’t even anything serious accident!” I said to mother, and begged
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and asked to see Lexie. She was my favorite person. “No, unfortunately she’s probably getting senile,” said mother. “It’s not safe for you to be alone with her anymore.” After that, I met Lexie at our house, but I never got to ride with her or sleep over with her again. It was a huge loss for me. I didn’t understand at all how it could be dangerous for me to spend time with someone I loved. Besides being with Lexie, my absolute favorite pastime at that age was hiding in different cupboards. It became a standing joke in the family. “Where has our Britney gone now, then?” At my aunt’s house, I kept disappearing. Everyone was allowed to participate in the search. But just as they began to seriously panic, someone opened a cupboard door, and I was found. I must have wanted them to look for me. For years that was my thing –
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Disappearing like that was a way for me to get attention. I also loved to sing and dance. I sang in our church choir, and took dance lessons three nights a week, also on Saturdays. Then I added gymnastics classes held an hour away, in Covington, Louisiana. When it came to singing, dancing and acrobatics, I could never get enough. At career choice days in elementary school, I said I was going to be a lawyer, but neighbors and teachers started saying I was ‘made for Broadway’, and over time I began to affirm my identity as ‘the little entertainer’. I was three years old at my first dance performance and four when I sang my first solo: “What Child Is This?” in a Christmas show at mom’s preschool. I wanted to hide, but I also wanted to be seen. The two things could coexist. Where I sat huddled in the cool
the darkness of a cupboard made me feel so vanishingly small. But with everyone’s eyes on me, I was as if transformed, into a person who could capture the attention of the entire room. When I belted out that song in white tights, I felt like anything was possible.
CHAPTER 3
“Ms. Lynne! Ms. Lynne!” shouted the boy who was standing there breathless and panting by the front door. “You must come! Come now!” One day when I was four years old, I was sitting on the sofa at home in the living room, with my mother on one side and her friend Cindy on the other. Kentwood was like a town in a soap opera – there was always great drama going on. Cindy was gossiping with mom about the latest scandal while I eavesdropped and tried to keep up, when the front door was flung open. The boy’s face was enough for me to understand that something terrible had happened. It felt like the heart stopped beating. Mom and I started running. The street had just been unpaved, and I was running barefoot on the hot black asphalt.
“Ouch ouch ouch!” I shouted with each step I took. I looked down at my feet and could see how the tar was sticking. Finally we arrived at the open field where my brother Bryan had been playing with his neighborhood friends. They had tried to mow down some tall grass with their four-wheelers. It had seemed like a brilliant idea in their eyes, because they were idiots. Of course, they had not been able to see each other through the grass, and the result was a head-on collision. I must have seen it all, heard Bryan howl in pain and mom scream in horror, but I don’t remember any of it. I think God gave me a blackout so I wouldn’t remember the agony and panic, or the sight of my brother’s mangled body. A helicopter took him to the hospital. When I visited Bryan a few days later, he was lying in plaster all over his body. As far as I understood, he had almost broken every single bone in the body. And the detail that really made the seriousness clear to me, small as I was, was that he had to pee through a hole in the plaster. The other thing I couldn’t help but notice was that the whole room was overflowing with toys. My parents were so grateful that he had survived, and felt so sorry for him, that during his recovery every day was like Christmas Eve. Mother’s bad conscience made her do everything for my brother. To this day she gives in to him. It’s amazing how a single tenth of a second can change the dynamics of a family forever. The accident brought me much closer to my brother. Our bond was built on my understanding of his pain. Once he came home from the hospital, I never left his side. I slept next to him every night. He couldn’t sleep in his own bed because he still had a cast on
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full body. So he got a special bed, and then mom and dad had to arrange a small mattress for me at the foot of it. Sometimes I could crawl into his bed and just hold him. When the cast was removed I still continued to share a bed with him for years. Even at a very young age, I knew that Bryan was having a hard time, both because of the accident and because Dad was always so hard on him. I wanted to comfort my brother. Finally, after several years of this, Mom said to me, “Britney, you’re going to be in sixth grade soon. You need to start sleeping in your own bed!” I said no. I was so childish - I didn’t want to sleep alone at all. But she insisted and finally I had to give in. Once I started sleeping in my own room, I came to enjoy having a private sphere, but I continued to stand extremely
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near my brother. He loved me. And I loved him so much – for him I felt the most affectionate, protective love. I wanted to protect him from all evil. I had already seen him suffer too much. As my brother recovered, we became more and more involved in our neighborhood. Being a small town with only a few thousand residents, everyone gathered to see the three annual parades – Mardi Gras, National Day and Christmas. The whole town looked forward to the parades. The streets were filled with happy and cheerful people who left their worries at home and slowly strolled along Highway 38 to greet their neighbors. One year some of us kids decided to decorate a golf cart and participate in the Mardi Gras parade. There were probably eight of us in that car – clearly far too many. Three sat on the bench in the back, a few stood to the side and held the tin
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the roof and one or two hung on back there. Our equipment was so heavy that the tires were almost without air. I don’t remember why, but everyone was dressed in 19th century clothing. I sat on the lap of one of the older youths up front and waved to everyone. The problem with that many people in a golf cart with flat tires is that it becomes hard to control, and with all the laughing and waving and the over- the-top energy… We ran into the car in front of us a few times, but enough times to get us kicked out of the parade.
CHAPTER 4
Resumo
When Dad started drinking too much again, his business operations began to deteriorate. The stress of not having any money was compounded by the chaos caused by Dad’s extreme mood swings. I was especially afraid to get in the car with him because he used to talk to himself while he was driving. I didn’t even understand what he said. He seemed to be in his own world. Even then I realized that dad had his reasons for wanting to lose himself in the booze. He was stressed out because of the job. Now I realize that he self-medicated, after enduring so many years of abuse from his own father June. But at the time I had no idea why he was so hard on us, and
why nothing we did ever seemed good enough in his eyes. To me, the saddest thing was that I had always just wanted a father who loved me just the way I was - someone who said, “I love you, period. You can do anything in this now. I’d still love you unconditionally.” Dad was careless and cold to me, but he was even harder on Bryan. He pushed Bryan so hard with the sports training it was cruel. Bryan’s life was much tougher than mine in those years, as our father subjected him to the same brutal methods that June had used on himself. Bryan was forced to play basketball and also American football even though he was not built for it.