“I cannot describe the pain”: The terrible story of Aretha Franklin’s harrowing childhood
For a long time, Aretha Franklin kept details of her past hidden, intensely protective of what she had endured and the possibility of having such details exposed to the world.
In 1999, she began to peel back some layers, a relative few, when her memoir, From These Roots (ghostwritten by David Ritz, over two years), was released. Where it offered a capsuled look at the singer’s life, it also left major gaps, particularly considering the traumas she had gone through.
Fifteen years later, Ritz persuaded Franklin to allow him to pen a more in-depth story in his 2014 biography, Respect, which featured interviews with Franklin’s family, as well as fellow musicians. Franklin later condemned her biographer’s account of her life, claiming that it was “full of lies”, as People reported, shortly before her passing in 2018.
“She had a tough childhood,” Ritz told People when speaking of how Franklin’s need for privacy remained strict throughout her life. “And early on in her career, she was hit by the tabloids,” he continued.
Ritz also noted that, at the hands of her first husband and former manager, Ted White, “There were stories of her being a victim of domestic violence, and she didn’t like that. She didn’t like the image of her being a beaten woman. She loved the blues, but she didn’t want to be seen as a tragic blues figure.”
In 2021, Franklin’s life was translated into the Liesl Tommy-directed biopic Respect, in which the singer is portrayed by Jennifer Hudson. Following the first three decades of Franklin’s life, with Franklin’s involvement in the development of the film up until her passing, the story features (somewhat vaguely, with respect to Franklin’s expectations and with respect to her autonomy in revealing these stories) the number of traumas that the singer experienced in childhood: her parents’ divorce, the passing of her mother, her pregnancies in childhood and later, her volatile first marriage.
While Franklin was not alive to see the film’s release, one can imagine the complexities of wanting to portray an accurate depiction of the musician’s life, even its most harrowing details, while maintaining Franklin’s integrity. “Her childhood had so much heartbreak that helps you understand how she was able to sing with such emotional intensity,” Tommy told Vanity Fair, “And how she was able to bring so much pain and power to the renditions of the songs she chose to sing.”
While she remained largely quiet on the misfortunes of her life, up until her last few years, Franklin’s music did, in turn, remain largely informed by these experiences. Her life was marred with tension from childhood, when she was raised under the volatile umbrella of her parents’ marriage. Her father, Clarence LaVaughn ‘CL’ Franklin, was a Baptist minister and civil rights activist who fathered a child with a 12-year-old member of his congregation. Spurred by her husband’s infidelities, Franklin’s mother, Barbara, a pianist and singer, left the family in Detroit and moved to Buffalo with her son, Vaughn, whom she had outside of her marriage.
Franklin would spend summers with her mother in Buffalo and have frequent visits from her in Detroit, before her sudden death from a heart attack in 1952. Franklin was weeks shy of turning ten years old. “I cannot describe the pain, nor will I try,” Franklin noted of her mother’s passing in From These Roots, remembering how she “sat in tears… for a long time,” after her mother’s burial.
About two years after the passing of her mother, Franklin became pregnant with her first child, Clarence, when she was 12 years old, two months before she turned 13. She never publicly shared the identity of her son’s father. Once she gave birth, her father allowed her to drop out of school – only to become her manager and recruit her to his “gospel caravan” tours with him and his gospel group. Her son, then, fell into the hands of her paternal grandmother.
CL’s biographer, Nick Salvatore, described the implications of CL having his young daughter work for him postpartum in the biography Singing in a Strange Land. “CL’s inclusion of his daughter, a vulnerable woman-child, on the tour all but demanded that she grow up fast,” he wrote. Two years after the birth of her first son, Franklin became pregnant again with her second son, Edward Derone, at 14 years old.
Franklin did not like to discuss these pregnancies with interviewers, and little detail is known about them otherwise. In the film Respect, their depiction is brief, as they were “following Aretha’s lead”, as Tommy and writer Tracey Scott Wilson told Vanity Fair.
“The specificity [of who impregnated] her doesn’t matter as much as what it did, in terms of trauma, and children not being able to provide consent,” Wilson stated, to which Tommy added, “All victims of abuse should get to share their own stories of abuse on their own timeline and terms.”
