“I just clung closer to her and knew the boogeyman couldn't get me, not as long as Mama held me in her arms, not as long as I didn't think about the little girl who had been cut up and stuffed in a trunk -- only a block away from our house -- the one crime that freaked me out when I was still very young.”
More from Etta James
“You might look at me and say, Hey, there's a happy kid; a little hyper, a little…”
“I was afraid of the boogeyman until I was fourteen or fifteen. The boogeyman was the devil…”
“One mother was nurturing while the other was neurotic; one father was missing -- the…”
“All this insanity has made me wonder whether craziness was in my blood.”