Cat Power (6 page)

Lenny describes the connection between his sister and grandmother as fueled in part by ongoing religious discourse. “Chan and Lillian are very close,” Lenny confirms. “She's very sweet. Very Southern. Very religious. If there were something that would cause a little friction in their relationship, it is that my grandmother is super-religious. Talking-in-tongues kind of religious. I'm not judging her. Whatever gets you there. She has a strong, strong faith in Jesus. Strongest faith of anyone in my family. Charlyn may not agree with it completely. It's kind of a fifty-fifty deal: fifty percent being strongly rooted in the idea that religion is stabilizing, it's a comfort, and the other fifty is, ‘Wow, you're fanatical.’ But they don't have arguments about it. They talk about it like philosophy.”

Between the ages of four and seven—when Myra was on her own— Chan spent a lot of time with her grandmother. But in 1979 things began to look up when Myra reconnected with her ex-husband Charlie's old friend Leamon Land. “She lived in Buckhead in an apartment with the girls,” Leamon remembers. “I was working at an automotive company, and Myra got a job there. We ran into each other at the place we worked and decided to get married. Got pregnant with Lenny and got married in 1979.”

Land, Chan's “second dad,” as Charlie calls him, was a golden-haired Greg Allman look-alike from Atlanta. He was born in 1950 at the same hospital as Chan, Crawford Long, and became a fixture on the Peachtree Street scene in the late 1960s, where he met Chan's biological father. “My own father and Charlie Marshall knew each other before my father and my mother did,” Lenny explains. “They were actually pretty close.”
Leamon's hippie pedigree is as impressive as Chan's biological parents'. “I went to the original Woodstock,” he remembers. “I worked there. I helped build the stage that went from the food tent to the back of the stage. I had to go to the little town the day before the show to get my pass. My paycheck. Had a backstage pass, was back there with Hendrix.”

They were good friends as young men, but by their late twenties Leamon and Charlie had grown into very different people. Unlike Charlie, who tried on marriage and fatherhood but was pathologically distracted by lingering dreams of fame, Leamon was a solid guy with an unflappable personality and a good job. Land worked as a salesman with a magwheel company and was quickly climbing the ranks, which meant he made good money and was able to provide for the young family he inherited when he married Myra. He also absolutely adored the girls. “My father loved the girls very much,” Lenny says. “He's a kind-hearted person. He's very laid back, very cool. He loves everybody.”

Soon after the wedding and the birth of Chan's half brother, Lenny Wilder Lane, in late 1979, Leamon's job required him to move his new family to the suburbs of Memphis. The sixties may have been over, but between Charlie, Myra, and Leamon, there was still a thriving sense of free love: There was no animosity over Leamon supplanting Charlie as the father figure in the Marshall family. To this day, Charlie and Leamon are still good friends. “He's a great, great pianist,” Leamon says. “I go see him play every couple of months. I have a cocktail and sit with him on his seat.”

Charlie agrees. “They just didn't up and move,” Charlie explains. “It was business. They had to leave. It was just a twist of fate. I understood.” Seven-year-old Chan didn't have the same reasoned perspective on what was happening to her family. She had always been a daddy's girl. She's even admitted to having a crush on her father as a little girl.
Chan was distressed enough that her father hadn't been living with the family for several years, but now they were moving to another state, far away from her dad. It turned out to be only the first of a series of jarring moves Chan would make over the course of the next few years.

“We lived in Bartlett, Tennessee, in a little house,” remembers Leamon, who now lives in Atlanta and runs his own wheel and tire business. “Chan and Mandy
Miranda
went to school in Bartlett. We stayed there about one year, then the company I was with had an opening in North Carolina. It was a better opportunity for me, so we moved to Greensboro. And we moved to McLeansville
North Carolina
after that. Our house was in the back of a tobacco mill in a little neighborhood. We were close to all the neighbors. We stayed there a couple of years before an opportunity to be a manager in Atlanta came up. Moved back there… then a different company wanted me to move to North Carolina again, so we moved again.”

Though Myra would eventually settle in the Greensboro area for good, during her children's elementary and middle-school years the family lived like vagabonds, packing up their stuff every six months or so and hopping from one suburban home to another. Sometimes they wouldn't even get around to unpacking all the boxes before they were off again. Chan has said she attended ten different schools from second to eleventh grades, and the constant uprooting aversely affected her sense of peace with herself and with the world around her.

Each time Chan's family moved, she and her sister would register, once again, at a new school. The singer often found herself dropped midyear into a classroom filled with kids who'd known each other since kindergarten. Chan had to quickly catch up academically, adjust to a new house and city, and make new friends. With ample natural charm and good looks on her side, school could have served as a respite from the
instability at home, but the relentless displacement Leamon's job created made sure that she never had enough time to get comfortable at any of her schools. Her vivacious, comedic side retreated, and in its place emerged a self-conscious, shy girl, petrified of being conspicuous in any way. “You were supposed to work your way around a new set of people every time, but I was the most submissive child, didn't talk or anything,” Chan has said.

In class, Chan was terrified of being called on. She was convinced she wouldn't know how to answer whatever question was asked, and she was also afraid of having to explain to yet another new teacher, another new classful of kids, how to pronounce her unusual name. When Chan was in sixth grade, both she and Miranda decided to stop going by their birth names and instead adopt shorter, punchier, and distinctly less Southern versions. Miranda, who was named after Myra
(MY-randa)
, decided to adopt her middle name, Lee, as her new first name. Chan shortened hers from Charlyn (named after her father:
CHAR-lyn
, but pronounced with a soft “ch”) to Chan (pronounced
Shawn
). “I'd go to a new school and they're like
adopts a thick Southern accent
, ‘What's your name again?’” Chan remembers. “They never got it right, so I changed it to Chan. My mom was like, ‘How about Cher?’” Myra remembers suggesting Chan pronounce her name to rhyme with
fan
rather than
dawn
. “I wanted to call her Chan, but she hated it,” Myra recalls. “She said, ‘No, Mom! I hate Chan. It sounds like a dog.’ I said, ‘What about your middle name, Marie?’ She said, ‘That's even worse!’”

It wasn't just the transience that got to Chan, it was the fact that for all the moving around she was doing, she wasn't seeing much that interested her. The family never moved north or west; they always stayed in the heart of the South, and with the exception of Atlanta, they never lived anywhere urban, always staying in identical, blank suburbs. Each
house had grass out front and a swing set out back, each had a fresh coat of paint and a clean room for Chan to share with her sister, but none of these places, none of these prefab houses, was ever Chan's home.

Chan didn't stay in one place long enough to identify herself as native to a particular town. Instead she became a native of every town she slept in, as if the entire southern United States, from the depressed suburban wastelands the singer briefly inhabited to the lockers in which she stashed her books for a few months at a time—to the interchangeable series of bedrooms where she slept to the highways that connected one house to another—all became home. “My main memory of growing up is visual,” Chan has said. “We had this old run-down graveyard behind our house
in North Carolina
. I remember running over a mud bridge through a tobacco patch in bare feet. God, now, that's pretty Southern.” As an adult, Chan has come to realize how deeply her upbringing united her with the South. “I still love going back,” the singer has said of the areas she lived in as a child. “It's part of me, and I don't even realize it when I'm gone.”