By Barnett Wright | The Birmingham Times
It’s not easy to sum up all that Birmingham resident Norma Dean Ray has experienced over nine decades, but she would say that she’s been able to find peace after years of pain.
Ray, once a professional singer in Chicago, Illinois — where she rubbed shoulders with entertainment icons like Nat King Cole, Della Reese, Lena Horne, and Ella Fitzgerald — has also worked as cardiovascular technician at UAB Hospital and the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before retiring.
And now the 92-year-old Ray (she turns 93 on September 28) has become a first-time author.
Her memoir, “From Redemption to Restoration: A Memoir of My Journey to Finding Peace After Pain,” was published recently by the California-based Urban Author Incubator, a subsidiary of Urban Ingenuity LLC, an organization dedicated to helping first-time authors bring their stories to life.
The book is described as one that chronicles Ray’s journey from music to medicine, from addiction to recovery, and from pain to peace.
During an hour-long interview at her home in Birmingham’s Smithfield Estates community, Ray said she’s looking forward to her birthday next week but there’s another anniversary that makes her extremely proud and figures prominently in her book — 45 years of continuous sobriety.
“I’m not afraid of death, but I’m afraid to take that drink, that torture” she told The Birmingham Times. “To think that insanity would have set back in and I put myself through that, I don’t think I would ever recover.”
In her book, Ray writes openly and candidly about the toll alcohol had taken on her life — from being suspended from her job to destroying her marriage and to even shooting a man.
Ray, who was born in Birmingham, moved to Chicago, where she began a thriving singing career. While working at a store, she met her husband Charles Bennett, and they were married on June 17, 1952.
“Unhinged”
The drinking problem began almost immediately. Recalling her wedding night, Ray writes in her book that she’d never drank such an “exquisite drink as Dom Pérignon,” a brand of Champagne, and she was really “tipsy.”
She remembers her husband holding her up as she was about to fall, and she asked him, “You think I’m drunk, don’t you?” He said, “No. I think you are high but not drunk.” I was starting an argument for nothing,” she writes.
She remembers her husband grabbing her by the hand: “I snatched my hand from Charles and slapped him so hard that my hand began to throb. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind,” she writes.
“He was bewildered, and I didn’t know what was happening to me. The only thing I knew was when I would drink, if someone said something to me I didn’t agree with I would become unhinged really quickly.”
The couple had two sons. The first, Charles Jr., was born on Nov. 11, 1953. “I would love to say that having a baby improved the quality of our marriage. It did not,” she writes. “Our selfishness and being inconsiderate of one another led to our marriage beginning to deteriorate.”
Her second son, Timothy, was born 14 months later on Jan. 4, 1955.
Ray writes that she stopped singing and was drinking more. On one trip while taking the children to the store, in addition to getting groceries, she writes, “I would also get about two cases of beer and [two different brands of whiskey]: a fifth of Jack Daniels and a bottle of Crown Royal.”
Ray and her husband would often fight. “I was thankful that the children were babies and didn’t know what was happening. … Finally, one night, our marriage ended.”
She said her husband came home one night and asked why she hadn’t cooked.
Of the encounter, she writes, “I told him he had hands to cook for himself. He slapped me. I took a lamp and threw it at him with all the force I had. It hit him in the face. That’s all I remembered. When I woke up, Charles and the boys were gone. There was a note Charles had left. He said he could not take me with my drinking.”
Eventually, her husband filed for divorce, and Ray was given a date to appear in court.
“On the date I was supposed to appear in court, I forgot and I was drinking,” she writes. “Charles divorced me and got custody of our boys because I was a no-show on that date. Just like that, no husband. No children.”
There were other incidents Ray recalls where drinking ruled her life.
At one job at a medical facility, she writes that one of her favorite doctors noticed that she would be sipping tomato and orange juice from a container, and he told her she was drinking too much acid.
“What he didn’t know was that my container had vodka and orange juice or tomato juice,” Ray writes.
“Please Stop Drinking”
Two men would come into her life and “both ended in a horrible way,” she writes. One was insanely jealous, and he attacked and choked her. They split up, and she never saw him again. The second she shot, she writes.
Ray believes the choking incident by the first man may have led her to shoot the second.
“I did not intend to allow a man, woman, or child to ever get me in a position where I might die,” she writes. “I pulled out the gun out [on the second man] and said, ‘Don’t walk up on me.’ He attempted to grab the gun, and I shot him. He ran in the closet and wrapped himself in one of my club gowns I sang in. … I called the police and told them I had shot this man, and he needed attention right away.
“The next day I had to go before the judge. He asked the arresting officer what the condition of the victim was. The detective said the doctor said the condition was critical.”
The case was dismissed after the victim declined to press charges. While she was relieved, Ray felt terrible “that I almost murdered a man because of the fear of what another had done to me.”
She saw him once more and asked why he didn’t press charges.
“He said, ‘Norma, I love those boys of yours. I could not live with myself knowing that I was the cause of their mother being in prison.’ And then I heard those words again,” she writes. “Norma, please stop drinking. It does something to you. It makes you mean.”
“One Day at a Time”
Ray moved back to Birmingham in 1969. She was 38 years old. “I started working at [UAB Hospital] within the month of my coming to Alabama not realizing I was a full-blown alcoholic when I arrived in Alabama,” she writes. “I found myself chewing garlic, putting coffee grinds in my mouth with Sen-Sen [breath freshener], and holding my breath on the elevator so no one could smell alcohol. I was having blackouts and not knowing what they were.”
Ray recalls when she forgot the floor where she left an electrocardiogram (EKG) machine. She was suspended for two weeks after her superiors knew she had been drinking.
Out of all the dates in her life, in addition to her birth date, Ray remembers another one that stands out — Aug. 20, 1980, “my last day of drinking.”
“I was getting ready for work, glass in hand. I took a sip of whiskey and looked in the mirror and what I saw engulfed me with a paralyzing fear I never knew existed,” she writes.
Ray would end up in Brookwood Lodge (now Bradford Health Services), where “I readily admitted I was an alcoholic and my life was unmanageable,” she writes. “I came to believe in a power greater than myself [that] could restore my sanity.
“One significant aspect of recovery is honesty. I might lie to everyone else, but I must be honest with myself; usually, if I’m honest with myself, I can be honest with others. With prayer and meditation, I try to be my best. Sometimes I make it one day at a time and sometimes I do not. If someone else is involved [and] I have said or acted harshly toward them, I try to make things right.”
Ray married a man with 55 years in the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program in 1987, and he transitioned in August 2001. Her youngest son, Timothy, transitioned in 1989. Her eldest son, Charles Jr., transitioned in 2013.
“I took time to grieve the loss of those I loved dearly, [and] drinking never entered my mind. The obsession to drink had been lifted,” she writes.
Ray will celebrate her 93rd birthday on September 28. Asked by The Birmingham Times if she any plans, she said, with a laugh, “The family may take me out, if they’re not mad with me.”
Asked if she would like to add anything, Ray said, “My Higher Power, whom I call Jehovah God, has allowed me to have a good life in spite of myself — and I know it gets better one day at a time.”
To order a copy of “From Redemption to Restoration: A Memoir of My Journey to Finding Peace After Pain,” send an email to normadray7199@gmail.com (payments can be made via Cash App: $NormaDRay2).
