A Consenting Juveniles narrative is a first-hand account reporting the words of the research subject on his or her experience. |
Ike Turner
All I felt was a good hot feeling.
Source: | Takin Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner by Ike Turner with Nigel Cawthorne, Virgin Books, 1999 |
Ike Turner grew up in the Great Depression, a black boy in a Mississippi town where the theater was segregated and the hospital only served whites. As a youth, he witnessed a policeman kill a black epileptic man like he was a hog or something. He taught himself to play piano at the age of eight and in high school started a band that recorded what has been called the first rock and roll song, Rocket 88. Rock and roll legend Little Richard credits Turner as the primary inspiration of his career. If rock and roll goes with sex and drugs, Ike Turner was a fitting founder of the genre. He lost count of how many times he was married, and fathered at least six children with at least four women. Although he avoided drugs early in his career, he soon made up for lost time, and eventually spent a year and a half in prison for possession of cocaine. His 18-year relationship with Tina Turner was marred by accusations that he physically assaulted her. Turner wrote in his autobiography about his introduction to sex at the age of six. In a retrospective a year after his death in 2007, Ebony quoted a close female confidante of Turners on his sexual initiation: He knew it was wrong. In his mind he had endured that sexual abuse from those women. Part of inflicting pain on women brought out the pain that was inflicted on him as a child.1 In his own words, the story comes out rather differently. |
Today they call stuff child-molesting. Well, man, there was no such thing back then. When I was a small boy, about six years old, there was a woman named Miss Boozie Owens who lived with her husband in the same neighborhood. Mr. Owens worked as an auto-dealer at the Buick dealership at Clarksdale. Miss Boozie stayed at home raising chickens to sell in the neighborhood. She was about forty-five, fifty years old.
I had just started school not even first grade, what we called back then primer. I would leave my house at 7.30 am so I could walk to school by 8. The route I took went right past the Owens house.
One day, just as I was about to pass by her house on my way to school, Miss Boozie, who always addressed me by my childhood nickname, Sonny, called me to come into her house. She was at home alone because Mr. Owens left for work daily at 6 am. She asked me if I would like a job and I said, Yes, maam.
She explained that she wanted me to feed her chickens every morning before I went to school, and that she would pay me a nickel a week for doing it. After accepting the job, I continued on to school. When I got home I told my mother about the new job. The fact that I was able to find work on my own initiative made her really proud of her son.
So I stopped by every morning to feed the chickens and empty out the bottom trays under the wire-mesh screen that the chickens stood on inside the coops. I would always replace the old newspapers with fresh ones that I had to trim with a putty knife to make them fit the trays. It was messy work and when I finished I always had to go inside the house to wash my hands. Sometimes I would have spots on my pants as well. Miss Boozie would help me to clean myself up, because I had to be neat and clean when I continued on to school.
I guess because it was so early in the morning, Miss Boozie always had on her nightgown, which was made of that real thin see-through material that some window drapes are made of. After these chores became routine, Miss Boozie and I became very close. She was always very friendly.
One morning she came out and helped me with my job and I finished early. She said, Come on, Sonny, let me clean you up so you can go to school. When we both went back into the house, she removed her robe and washed up first. She still had on this nightgown, but while Im standing there, man, I can see through this thin thing. Without the robe, her whole body was revealed to me and as she stood with her back to me, bent over her face bowl, I could see the long hairs from her cat between her legs. She was standing with her legs spread wide apart and I got a good look.
After she finished and dried her hands, she asked me to come into the bathroom so that she could help me clean up as usual. But this time she asked me to remove my pants, and she helped me to unzip them, claiming that I had a spot on them. After Miss Boozie washed away the so-called spot she set my pants down near the electric fan to dry.
We walked into the bedroom and she sat down on the bed while I stood there in my underwear. As I stood in the middle of the floor, nervously fidgeting, and not knowing what to do, she called me over to the bed. Miss Boozie reached out her hand and pulled out my penis. Then she began squeezing it, which made it jump hard. She then leaned back across the bed with her cat at the forward edge of the mattress facing me. I was just the right height, standing there, and she inserted my penis into her cat. She placed her hands on my hips and started pulling me backwards and forwards, making my penis move in and out of her.
This was the beginning of Miss Boozie teaching me what sex was all about. From then on, it became a daily routine. First I did my chores, and then received what I would call lessons. I guess the bed was about the height of a chair. She would sit on it and lay back, then she would stand me in front of her and my little thing would stick up.
The lessons consisted of five different steps. The first step was learning to push my penis in and out without letting it slip out of her. The second involved learning how to twist my ass in a clockwise motion. After a week or so she taught me the third step, which was how to twist my ass counter-clockwise, all the time making sure I didnt let my penis slip out. For the fourth step, she taught me how to roll my stomach muscles. Finally came the hard part, the fifth step. I learned how to coordinate steps two and three and perform them all simultaneously without stopping. As an added feature I also was able to roll my stomach while doing all the other movements. That was the hardest of all.
After doing this for weeks, I finally got to the point where I began actually to enjoy it, because by then I had learned to follow Miss Boozies feelings and movements. She would be moaning and groaning, finally releasing a loud grunt, which I realize now, of course, was her reaching an orgasm. At the time, however, I had no idea what was happening to her. All I felt was a good hot feeling.
We would always stop after that final groan. Then she would take a towel and clean me off and send me to school. No one ever knew this was happening.
Ive found that Miss Boozies teachings have been very helpful to me in sexual relationships with women throughout the years. Even now, some of the girls I know teasingly call me rota-rooter.
A few years later, my sister, Lee Ethel Knight, used to hire a babysitter to come and stay with us whenever she went out. This girl, who we used to call Little Sister, was only about nine years old.
I used to get with Little Sister and try out all the moves I had learned from Miss Boozie. I also taught her to respond to the movements in the same way that Miss Boozie did, which was great. My sister would give me 25c to pay the babysitter, but I would always keep the money because I knew that she really enjoyed the lesson I was giving her, and I just wanted to screw anyway.
Once, when I was walking home from school, Little Sister invited me to come over and play. Her house sat on pillars and had a shallow crawl space underneath it. While playing a game of hide-and-seek, we crawled under the house and over into a dark corner. Then Little Sister unzipped my pants and my dick automatically got hard. She lay down and I got on top of her. Just as I got in the right position and was about to start pumping, her mother began to call her name from outside.
We were often caught by Miss Hattie B., who still lives on the corner of Magnolia and Washington in Clarksdale. She would beat my butt. One time, Miss Hattie B. found us under Little Sisters house. I saw her big ankles, but when I tried to raise up off Little Sister I was stuck in my butt by a nail that was sticking down through the floorboards of the house.
Every time I struggled to get free the nail would poke me deeper and deeper. After a few minutes, I was able to disentangle myself and went home. My mother noticed the wound on my behind, and I had to tell• her that I had sat on a nail earlier in the day. Momma put some coal oil on it, one of her favorite home remedies for minor cuts and scratches.
But it took more than a nail in the ass to discourage me. When Little Sis and I played house in the old coal-storage shed every day after school, we would also have sex. We were both too young to have an orgasm, but it felt good.
This went on for months until finally, one day, Little Sis and I went into our house to play as usual not realizing that my stepfather was at home. He saw us go in, and sneaked out to see what we were doing. He caught me playing with Little Sisters cat. My stepdaddy started whipping me with a piece of barbed wire while Little Sis ran home. When he finished whipping me, he carried me round the corner to Little Siss house and told her mother and she got a good whipping, too. We were both put on punishment and given extra chores to do around the house every day. It was months before we could play with the other kids after school again.
Another incident happened later that year. When we walked to and from school we used a smooth, well-worn pathway that cut right across the front of a row of shotgun houses. A woman named Irene Woolfolk lived in one of these, and she used to sit on her porch every afternoon as we passed by on our way home. Miss Reeny, as I called her, would sometimes send me to the store to get stuff for her as I came by. She would always give me two or three cents or some candy.
Her husband died and she needed someone to cut firewood for her. At first, my friend Ernest Lane and I were doing it for free. Then Ernest joined the Army, and that left only me to do the job.
Miss Reeny was a short, very black woman, and, thinking back, I would say that she was a pretty nice-looking woman, too. She was perhaps middle-aged, her dark hair mingled with touches of grey, giving it a salt-and-pepper look. She wore her stockings without a garter belt, twisting them into a knot at the top and then rolling them over.
Miss Reeny had a big ass, so big that when she bent over to remove the ashes from the stove in her kitchen, her dress would ride up above her thighs. I used to peek up under her dress but I was afraid to approach her. Looking back, I think she knew exactly what she was doing.
One day she turned round just in time to catch me bending over to steal another peek under her dress. She whirled around quickly and said, Sonny, Im gonna tell Miss B. thats my mother on you, trying to peep up under old folks dresses.
I was scared to death. I remembered what had happened when I had been caught twice before. Standing there that day, I couldnt make up my mind whether I should stay or run away from home. I couldnt think of anywhere to go, so after staying out for several hours, I finally went home about 8.30 that night, afraid that Miss Reeny had already told Momma what Id done.
When I entered the house, my momma said to me, Boy, where you been?
I told her Id been playing ball and had forgotten what time it was.
Im gonna make you remember what time youre supposed to be home, she said. She also reminded me that I had no business playing ball anyway, because I was going to be baptized that Sunday and should have been going to revival at church all week. She lectured me about gambling when I should have been getting religion instead, but she never said one single word about my looking up Miss Reenys dress. Thats when I knew that Miss Reeny hadnt told on me.
The next day after school I stopped by and asked Miss Reeny if she wanted me to do anything for her around the house since she had no husband to do those things any more. She told me that she would like me to continue chopping wood for her now that Ernest had gone. She said that she would start paying me for it.
After that, Miss Reeny got really friendly with me. She was always smiling at me, and would playfully address me as Sonny, you little bad nappy-headed boy.
Miss Reeny would sit on her front porch in a swing, swaying back and forth. As she swung the breeze would lift her dress up a little. After a few weeks or months went by, she no longer bothered to pull it back down when that breeze lifted it up. Instead she would leave part of her thigh exposed so that I could see her meat.
One day, after I had finished cutting some wood for her, I went in to stack it behind her stove as usual. She was sitting at the kitchen table, and when Id finished she said Come here, and reached out to hand me a dime. She was sitting at that kitchen table with her legs spread wide apart and the bulk of her dress tucked between her two fat thighs.
As I went to take the dime, she held on to it and wouldnt let go. We found ourselves holding on to both sides of that dime, neither one of us letting go.
Then she said to me, Sonny, why are you so bad? as she opened her legs wider. She never stopped smiling. My dick was getting hard but I still held on to the dime.
As she pulled forward, I found myself right between her large thighs. Then she reached up and put one of her arms across my back. I couldnt resist any more, and it was on.
This went on for years, and we were never caught by anyone. But she would warn me every single day not to tell anybody, cos if I did, she would tell Momma B. So I have never told anyone about this until now. Miss Reeny was the third person with whom I had sexual relations before the age of twelve.
Limited excerpt reproduced under fair use doctrine for noncommercial, educational purpose.

Footnotes
1. The Last Days of Ike Turner: The Story of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Legend who Lived Hard, Loved Life but Couldn’t Quite Let Go of his Pastby Margena A. Christian
Ebony, October 2008
available at http://prince.org/msg/8/333185