I was born in Nashville, but I got my start in the mountains of Western North Carolina, on the last day of the second session at Camp Hollyhock for Girls, August 1969, in the back seat of an old Buick parked on a deserted fire road above the camp lake. My mother, Bonnie, fifteen years old, between her sophomore and junior years of high school, had fallen for a handsome stable boy named Johnny Larue, recently drafted and bound for Basic Training. Her parents were strict Upstate South Carolina Presbyterians, who firmly believed that God hates liquor and sex and loves rich white people, so long as they at least pretend to hate liquor and sex. But my mother never listened in church.

Three months later, back home in Greer, when she could no longer hide her condition and was forced to confess, my grandfather vowed to make this Johnny LaRue take responsibility. But by then, he was on the other side of the world fighting communists. My mother’s letters to him went unanswered. Years would pass before she found out he’d been killed in action. She did not know if he’d learned that he was going to be a father before he disappeared. She knew only that she was about to become an unwed mother in a town where such a designation was a disgrace. My grandfather resolved to send her off until I was born and could be given up for adoption. He knew of a home for unwed mothers in Virginia that placed infants born to wayward daughters in good Christian homes. Everyone in Greer would be told that Bonnie had gone off to boarding school, which would soon enough be true: my grandfather had arranged to send her to a girls’ school notorious for breaking the spirits of privileged girls who had turned out willful or wild or “fast.”

My grandfather had not accounted for the fact that Bonnie had inherited both his temper and his stubbornness. One morning, she woke before dawn, packed a suitcase, stole all of the money her mother kept stashed in a coffee can, and hitched a ride to the Greyhound station. She had a cousin who had run off to Nashville to become a country singer—Beverly Poteat, who called herself Sunny Brown. A few months later, at Vanderbilt Hospital, I made my inglorious entry into the world.

These were the days when they stamped bastard on the birth certificates of fatherless children. Still, my mother decided to name me Charles, after her father, in the hope that this sign of respect would soften his heart, and that, perhaps, he might beg her to come home. When she called to give him the news, he said only two words to her—“Good luck”—and hung up.