In November of 1963, Gene Cheek was a 12-year-old boy living with his mother and a baby brother in Winston-Salem. Two years earlier, his mother Sallie had left Jesse Cheek, her husband and an abusive alcoholic, and had gone to work doing part-time jobs. She had also fallen in love with Cornelius Tuck, a black man whom she had gotten to know at a mill where she worked. Because blacks and whites were forbidden by law to marry at that time, Sallie had born Tuck’s son out of wedlock. Most of her family and friends then cut her out of their lives as if she was dead.

Enraged by Sallie’s behavior, Jesse Cheek brought suit against his wife, asking the court to declare her an unfit mother for Gene in part because she had the temerity to bear the illegitimate son of a black man. That day in court, Gene Cheek was forcibly taken from his mother and dragged from the courtroom, going first into foster care and eventually to Boys Home in Lake Waccamaw in the eastern part of North Carolina. There he spent his high school years, separated from his mother and brother. Though he eventually came to like the atmosphere of the Waccamaw institution — “Boys Home had become my home” — Gene Cheek burned with rage at the injustice of the court and the cruelty of his father.

This white-hot anger stayed with Cheek long after his high school graduation. It followed him through a tour in the Navy, jobs in California and Washington state, a marriage that produced three daughters, a move back to North Carolina in the 1985. But it wasn’t until 2003, when Cheek seriously turned to writing about his past, that he found a way to deal with the pain that had plagued him for so many years. That writing turned into a book titled The Color of Love: A Mother’s Choice in the Jim Crow South (Lyons Press, ISBN 1-59228-626-7, $22.95).

“I set out to be honest in the book,” Cheek said in a recent interview. “You can’t forget your past ... I can forgive those who hurt me because I need it. I need to be able to forgive them.”

In The Color of Love, Cheek shows us that his father never asked for forgiveness for what he had done. Near the end of the book, he describes a visit to Baptist Hospital, where Jesse Cheek lies sick and incapacitated with cancer. Cheek writes that even then his father “didn’t say those healing words. I don’t even know if he was aware of how necessary they were.”

“People sometimes think that talking will cure everything. They think there’s a magic bullet to remove pain,” Cheek says today, “but there isn’t. There is no magic bullet.”

Cheek, who describes himself on the back of his book as “a blue-collar son of the South,” has found that his own healing has been a long process, one in which the book has played a major role. “Every time I do a signing somewhere, every time I talk about the book with someone, I feel that healing,” he says.

Cheek, who lives in Black Mountain where he has worked as a house painter, is a life-long reader who found his own literary influences in Rick Bragg (All Over But The Shoutin’, Ava’s Man), James MacBride (The Color of Water), and Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes). “I listen to them on tape as well as read them,” Cheek says, adding that Bragg is the master of them all.

Though Cheek took years to begin his own book, he wrote quickly after he had decided to write it. “Once I found my own voice,” he says, “I couldn’t stop.” And he has found his own voice, for the voice of the book matches the voice on the telephone, a voice filled with the accent of the Piedmont, a voice that loves a good story and language itself.

Cheek is already working on a second book. He has done a number of signings in different bookstores around the state. On May 18 he will appear at Quail Ridge Bookshop in Raleigh, and on May 25 he will be closer to home, signing his books at the Osondu Bookshop in Waynesville.

When asked how he feels about the attention, Cheek just laughs. “It’s all heady stuff for a country boy,” he says.