There is a watchful sadness about him, a haunted quality, that began in boyhood and persisted until the end of his short life. Few photographs show him smiling. His childhood, in High Point, North Carolina, was broken in two by loss: for his first twelve years, Coltrane, an only child, lived in the bosom of an intact extended middle-class family in his maternal grandparents’ house in Griffin Park, the town’s best Black neighborhood. His grandfather, the Reverend W. W. Blair, was the presiding elder of St. Stephen A.M.E. Zion Church; his father, John R. (the younger John was John William), owned a dry-cleaning and tailor shop. It was a musical household, in a serious way. “My family liked church music, so there was no jazz in the house,” Coltrane remembered. John R. played violin well; he also had a clarinet and a ukulele, and tinkered a little on both. Coltrane’s mother, Alice, had a trained singing voice and played piano. Young John sang in his elementary school chorus and joined the Boy Scouts.
Then, within a few months in the winter of 1938-39, his family suffered a series of deaths—first a beloved aunt, then the Reverend Blair, and then, most devastatingly to John, his father. Suddenly he and his mother were not only bereaved but impoverished. Alice’s sister Bettie Lyerly and Bettie’s daughter Mary moved in with them, and Alice rented the bedrooms to boarders. Alice, Bettie, Mary, and John slept on cots in the dining room. He had always been quiet, with a subtle streak of mischief, but the rupture of his life turned him even further inward.
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