Family portrayals in 'A Ballad Of Remembrance‪'‬

Robert Hayden was born as Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan on August 4, 1913. His biological parents were Asa and Ruth Sheffey – a black former coal miner from West Virginia and a woman of mixed origins from Pennsylvania, who ran away from home - while still teenager - to join a circus. They divorced yet before Robert’s birth and when Asa disappeared, Ruth decided to leave 18 months-old Robert with a black neighbor couple - William and Sue Ellen Hayden - and went to Buffalo, New York to find work there (Hatcher, 6). So Asa Bundy Sheffey became Robert Earl Hayden.

Sue’s daughter Roxie lived with them and worked as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant (Hayden 1993, 18). The four lived on Beacon Street in a part of Detroit which later ironically became known as Paradise Valley (Greenburg 363). That district was filled with a mixture of cultures. Hayden knew kids of Chinese, “Italian, Jewish, even Southern white” origin (Hayden 1993, 26). Robert Hayden describes the main street of Paradise Valley as a place of “shootings, stabbings, blaring jazz, and a liveliness, a gaiety at once desperate and releasing, at once wicked – Satan’s playground – and good-hearted.”(Hayden 1993, 19) Later, that part of Detroit became a “largely Black ghetto” (Hatcher 5).

Robert Hayden suffered from extreme myopia. This short-sightedness restricted his social development in so far, that he could not take part in every kind of leisure activities, like sports. He was, however, a very intelligent boy and learned to read before entering school and took violin lessons. He had to quit, when his teacher discovered that Robert did not play after the music but simply by hearing it because he couldn’t decipher the music anymore. Due to this handicap – his visual defect - he early began to withdraw into the world of literature (Hayden 1993, 22).

By having described himself as an “old man’s head on a boy’s shoulders” (1993, 22) Robert Hayden may was not only pointing to his intelligence but also made a reference to his myopia. At junior high his teachers told him not to read small prints, which made reading books even more interesting to him, because it now was a forbidden thing to do. It is, as Fetrow puts it: “Hayden’s eyes failed him, yet perhaps also “saved” him for something more important.”(3)