Eartha Kitt had an extremely rough childhood. To sum it up: She was born on a plantation in South Carolina in 1927 and picked cotton as a little girl. Her mother was an African American sharecropper, who many say became pregnant after being raped by a White plantation owner.

Eartha never was able to get concrete evidence of exactly who her real mother and White father were though. Confused yet? Understood, we’ll explain it in a minute. She eventually moved to NY and quit high school to work in a Brooklyn factory. As a teenager, Kitt lived in friends’ homes and in the subways. it wasn’t until the 1950’s that Eartha began to sing and dance her way out of poverty. But that didn’t come without a whole lot of heartache in her struggle to find out who her father was.

Now, I’m sure many of you are probably just as shocked as some of us were when we first found out Eartha was biracial. That’s one old school fact that wasn’t really publicized about her back in the day, but it’s true. Eartha was half Black and half White.

Anna Mae Riley, the woman she thought was her mother, was murdered when someone put a weird poisonous pepper-like substance on her food. Eartha’s “mother” Anna, actually abandoned her prior to dying. After Anna’s death, Eartha discovered that the woman she called “mother,” may have really been her aunt.

Eartha’s Aunt Mamie requested that Eartha to live with her in New York, only for Eartha to then be informed that Aunt Mamie was actually her mother. There were never any blood tests done, so Eartha never knew exactly who to believe on that.

Her aunt/mother Mamie was very physically abusive to her, tying her to a tree and beating her for the slightest of things. That’s when Eartha eventually wanted to…