Common’s Mother drugged Dad to escape:
My mother escaped with me early one Sunday morning. She recalls my father pulling off the highway to get gas; there were no plans to stop for food, no plans to sleep. She complained of a headache and asked my father to bring her something for the pain.
He came back to the car with a bottle of pills. My mother took two like the container directed then somehow managed to put the rest in his can of Coke as he gassed up the car. When he got back in, he took a big swig of soda then threw the can out the window. It wasn’t long before he started feeling the effects. …
We stopped at a roadside motel on the outskirts of Madison, Wisconsin… My mother told me that my father had just enough time to handcuff her to the bed, sit me on the couch, strip off some of his clothes and fall onto the mattress… Once he was fast asleep, my mother says she started working her small hand against the cuff, folding her fingers in on themselves and pulling until metal scraped skin.
“Rashid,” she said in a stage whisper. “Rashid, baby, go outside and play. Mommy will be there soon.” …I followed her instructions and slipped out the door. Her hand finally free, my mother followed after me. She made it to the lobby and told the man working there to call the police.
“Next thing I know,” my father says, “I wake up and there are two policemen standing over my bed. One of them’s got a shotgun on me. The other’s pointing a pistol. I raised my hands up above my head and turned my eyes to the sky… That’s when I cried out: ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’
“It was all over the radio, the television, the newspaper. ‘Kidnapping,’ in capital letters. But I was in jail only overnight. They released me the next morning without charges.”
…The road trip, the kidnapping, my father’s dream — whatever you call it — it was over almost as soon as it had started.
Thankfully, Common and his Dad reconnected later in life and Lonnie Sr- a skilled poet- was featured on a few of Common’s albums. Prior to Lonnie Sr.’s passing in 2014, he publicly confessed that he ‘learned a lot of life lessons’ from his son.
