Early on, Opal had an optimistic view about the future. She told Garrett about all the kids she planned to have. “Naively, she would say, ‘And they will all be happy!’ Opal planned to be rich so she could take care of our mother, and she was going to buy her a big house someday,” Garrett recalled. “Even when she was seven, she struck me as someone who cared about others more than herself.”

Outwardly, the Millses seemed to be a happy family. In fact, Robert Mills was probably the most popular man in their neighborhood. He was the “go to” guy who was always willing to help everyone who lived there. He was friendly and charming, easy to get along with. He could fix things, and he could get people good deals when they were looking to buy something. He had a lot of charisma.

“And he could sing,” Garrett remembered. “He looked and sounded like Nat King Cole, so close that when I was younger, I thought he was Nat King Cole!”

But Garrett Mills’s life at home was extremely difficult, and things were not what they seemed to be. Once the front door closed, the father whom the neighbors admired and looked up to was a man full of rage.

“It’s hard to describe,” Garrett said. “In one way, my dad was the coolest person in the world, and I wanted to be like him. But I was also frightened of him. He always said, ‘People are rats!’ and if he thought I even looked the wrong way with my eyes, he’d hit me. He called me Whispering Smith because I was afraid to talk around him. He could never remember people’s names so he called them some celebrity’s name and they liked that.”

Mills wanted Garrett to become a doctor or a famous saxophone player like Seattle’s renowned Kenny G. But Garrett wasn’t particularly adept at science, and he was only an average saxophone player, even though his father bought him the best instrument available. He took lessons for years and played in the school marching band, but Garrett just wasn’t musically talented. His dad could sing but he couldn’t.

“My father was bitter and he was mean,” Garrett said. “But he wanted us to have everything material that we could—the best of everything. And we did, although he was very bad at handling money. He always had a job, except the one time he was fired after he saw one of his managers reading a ‘Klan’ magazine. He was so mad he went after the guy with a crowbar.”

Robert Mills went to the union and appealed his firing on the grounds that it had come about because of racial prejudice, and he won. He was back on the job.

Although his family had a nice house and furniture, and he drove fancy cars, Mills’s children never knew what would set his temper off. “He was always strict with us. But when he didn’t take his blood pressure medicine,” Garrett said, “he’d do things like shake down our bedrooms at one AM. We weren’t doing anything wrong, or hiding anything, but he’d just get these ideas, come in and wake us up and start searching for whatever.”

Robert Mills never hit Opal, although he used cruel words with her. He did use physical punishment with Garrett, hitting him with everything from a belt to a hammer. Most of his verbal abuse bounced off Opal. She was happy, bubbly, and full of mischief.

“We both were kind of mischievous,” Garrett remembered. “We were home alone so much that we’d get bored. My parents had a hard time getting babysitters for us because we had a reputation, but not for anything really bad. We did stuff like dragging lawn sprinklers to the front of a babysitter’s door—she lived in our cul-de-sac—and we’d turn it on so it would get her wet when she opened the door. Or we’d coast downhill in a grocery cart. Once, our cul-de-sac had a meeting about our pranks and what should they do with us?”

The only times that Garrett grew annoyed with his little sister was when Opal tattled on him for something. She was something of a snitch, often telling on her father, too, when he drank too much or flirted openly with other women.

“I was never supposed to hit Opal,” her brother said. “But she could do anything she wanted to me, and sometimes she pushed it. If I got mad, she’d call my dad at work and I’d have to move out of the house for a couple of days.”

Most of the time, however, Opal and Garrett were there for each other. Their mother had no power to stop her husband from his cruel punishments, which became more frequent after he had a series of little strokes. Although Garrett wanted her to leave his father, he knew she always held on to her belief that things were going to get better, that everything would turn out all right.

In the early years of their marriage, the Millses had had a lot of dogs—chows for Robert and collies for Kathy. But as the years passed, Robert’s rage grew and he was no longer a kind pet owner. Asked if he and Opal had pets when they were children, Garrett shook his head and mumbled so softly that he was almost inaudible. “No…he’d get mad and kill them—so after a while, we didn’t try.”

While he bought the biggest TV sets and a series of cars for Garrett, the elder Mills sometimes thought his children ate too much, so he locked up the food cupboards and the refrigerator. He complained that their showers used up too much hot water, so they often went next door to eat and to use Doris and Eugene’s folks’ bathroom.

“I didn’t feel like I was abused,” Garrett said. “I didn’t know anything different from the way it was for us.”

While Garrett grew more quiet and tried to stay out of his father’s way, Opal seemed happy. She always had “weird collections,” said her brother. “One time, she papered one wall of her room with candy bar wrappers. Another time, it was posters from some movie she liked. She kept every doll she ever had, and she made up stories about all of them—really complicated stories because she had a great imagination.

“I remember us going to school, hours before anyone else, to dance in the school cafeteria with the jukebox. For those few hours we were free to be happy, free from ridicule and worry. We would tire out and sit and talk about the future as usual, and all her big dreams.”

Opal and her friend Doris Davis would dance together at parties; Garrett laughed, remembering, “Opal couldn’t dance at all!”

And so they lived with a nurturing mother, a father who was growing increasingly bitter, and had good friends. Things got much worse as Garrett went to junior high school. Kent was very different in the seventies than it is now. There were only twenty-five minority students in the entire Kent school system, and Garrett found himself a target for bullies.

“I was goofy-looking with a small head and big glasses. I was so skinny that my chest caved in. First, they called me ‘gay’ because there was this gay guy on Soap—the TV show that was popular then. Then, with the Iran war, they called me Sand Nigger, and then Kunta Kinte after Roots.”

It was a very hard time for him. He tried out for football, but “I just didn’t understand it.”

Robert Mills urged Garrett to use violence to strike back at the students who teased him, and he put crowbars in his son’s car to encourage him to do that. But Garrett didn’t feel that was the answer to anything. He was not a fighter.

It got worse when Opal moved up to junior high. “Opal, Doris, Eugene, and I were the only black students in the school,” Garrett said. “I tried not to let Opal see how I was treated. She would want to fight back and stand up for me.”

Opal had always been feisty as well as fun, and she couldn’t stand to see anyone mistreat her big brother. “When people picked on me for being multiracial, the Klan jokes, chasing me, shutting me out of everything, I didn’t want her to be ashamed of me, but she never was. Opal would say, ‘That’s my brother and you better shut your mouth or get a knuckle sandwich!’

“Her face would get red and she’d put her tiny fist up and be ready to square off.”