From the time she was a toddler, most people called her “Little Opal,” because Opal Charmaine was always petite with chipmunk cheeks and a bright smile. She had put on a few extra pounds lately, but she still wasn’t much over five feet tall.

Opal’s mother, Kathy, was once a farm girl in Missouri, a pretty strawberry blonde with pale skin and a tendency to burn if she was out in the sun too long. Her mother was only fourteen when Kathy was born, and she would eventually give birth to fourteen more children, but the family decided she was too young to raise Kathy. The baby girl was given to her uncle Herbert to raise. Herbert Gardner, a milkman, and his wife became her “real parents,” although they were not her birth parents. She knew her birth mother, however, because her extended family lived within blocks of one another. The Gardners were a proud family, able to trace their ancestors back many generations.

Kathy was a tomboy who loved wearing cowboy boots and riding horses on the farm. She was an intelligent little girl, raised as an only child. She married in 1955 when she was in her late teens, and she and her husband moved to Denver. But in the early sixties, Kathy’s marriage was winding down. And shortly thereafter, she met someone whom the Gardners considered a most unlikely mate for her: Robert Mills. His sister, Irma, lived across the street from Kathy in Denver and invited her to a party. Mills was there—as dark and thin and tall as she was fair and plump.

Back in Missouri, her adoptive father, Herbert, and the rest of her southern family found Robert Mills to be the last possible man they would have chosen for Kathy. To begin with, he was too old for her—seventeen years older. For another, he had been married before.

Worst of all for a family steeped for generations in the prejudices of rural Missouri was the fact that Robert Mills was black. Although he was talented and charismatic and Kathy was thrilled when he paid attention to her, her family let her know that she would be as good as dead to them if she continued to associate with a black man.

Maybe she didn’t really believe they meant what they said, or maybe Kathy was too much in love to break her romance off—in any case, she and Robert Mills decided to get married. However, Colorado had long-standing statutes against marriage between partners of different races. As archaic and shocking as those laws are today, they are not as remote in America’s history as we would like to believe. Even in the sixties, miscegenation (marriage between two different races) was listed as an “immoral act” under the vagrancy statutes in Denver. Any couple who defied this law and anyone performing the wedding ceremony would be fined between $50 and $500 and sentenced to anywhere from three months to two years in jail.

“All marriages between Negroes or mulattoes of either sex and white persons are declared to be absolutely void” was the wording in the 1864 Territorial Assembly law that governed most of Colorado. Amazingly, the Colorado State Supreme Court found this law constitutional in 1942 and it stayed on the books—at least for part of Colorado. The part that had once been Mexico had no miscegenation law, so it didn’t apply to anyone living south or west of the Arkansas River or on the other side of a line drawn north from the river’s source at Climax.

Kathy and Mills gave up the idea of getting married in Denver. Instead, they traveled to Yakima, Washington, where Kathy’s grandparents had been assigned as missionaries for their church. They, at least, were speaking to Kathy.

Washington was one of only fifteen states with no miscegenation laws at the time. Kathy and Robert got married there. She was twenty-eight; Robert was forty-five. From that moment and over the next three decades, the Missouri branch of Kathy’s family cut off all ties with her. She sent them letters regularly, but they never responded. She would have felt even worse had she realized that during all those years her letters were tossed into a box, unopened.

Robert Mills worked as a warehouseman, and Kathy in a luggage store. Together, they made a good living. In 1963, they had their first child, Garrett, who was born with a hole in his heart and one of his heart valves on the wrong side. He would need surgery in the years to come if he was to survive.

Finally, when he was six, they could wait no longer. Garrett was scheduled for corrective surgery at Seattle’s Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. He had a close friend, a boy with very similar heart defects. “He had the surgery first,” Garrett recalled. “And he died. When I heard that, I decided they weren’t going to cut my heart open. I ran away from home, but I only got a few blocks. You know the old story: I wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone. So I came back, and I was lucky. My surgery worked.”

“I was to be ‘The Hope,’ ” Garrett would remember, as he explained that his father expected him to become everything that he himself had failed to achieve. It was to be a great burden for Garrett, and Robert Mills used his own brand of tough love that often seemed to have no love at all behind it.

Little Opal Charmaine was born in Seattle’s Harborview Hospital on April 12, 1966. “She was the ‘Princess,’ ” Garrett said fondly. “From the time she was born, my main job, always, was to look after Opal and keep her safe.”

He knew why his parents, particularly his father, were so adamant that Opal stayed safe. She was named after Robert Mills’s sister, Opal, who had been murdered in Oakland, California. The older Opal’s killer was never caught, and her death left a heavy burden on Mills.

Her big brother didn’t mind looking after Opal. Garrett loved her and he’d always been in charge of her, so he didn’t question that he was both her brother and her main babysitter. Kathy went back to work as soon as possible, and they were latchkey kids. Garrett was in charge of the house keys. “I would always pick Opal up from school and walk her home,” he said. “We played in our yard or in the woods, sometimes in the park.”

Garrett remembered Opal’s face shining with excitement as she carried what she called her “Hair Bear Bunch” lunch box on the first day of kindergarten. “She was a tiny little ‘Peanut’ with baby fat and her hair braided into pigtails.”

Wherever Garrett went, he had to take Opal along. The boys he hung out with in elementary school didn’t mind; they all knew Opal was part of the deal. Even when he grew old enough to date, Opal was always there in the backseat at the drive-in movie. She was his responsibility and he accepted that.

The Millses lived in a nice home east of Kent on the way to Maple Valley. There were flowers in the yard, along with a miniature windmill and a brightly painted totem pole. They attended the Church of God in Christ on Capital Hill in Seattle several times a week. The services were four or five hours long, and Garrett and Opal often grew restive and bored. “We weren’t allowed to move. We had to just sit there,” Garrett said. After that, they were very active in the Assembly of God church in Kent.

Elementary school at Cedar Valley was a pretty good time for Garrett and Opal. Their closest friends from the fourth grade on were their neighbors’ children—Doris Davis for Opal and Eugene Smith for Garrett. The families sometimes took each other’s children on trips, and the Mills children were always welcome next door. Robert Mills owned campers over the years and they explored the western states for their vacations. Being mixed-race wasn’t really an issue during Garrett and Opal’s Cedar Valley school years.

In 1973–74, Robert Mills was a den father for Boy Scouts and Kathy a Brownie mother. Garrett and Opal had their picture in the Kent Journal after they raised close to a thousand dollars in a Variety Club benefit to help pediatric heart patients.