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Clint Riese
Staff Writer
The road to fulfilling our meaning in life is seldom smooth, yet it is one we all must travel.
By only the grace of God, Sheila Jean Robinson says she has completed her journey, and the Forest Lake resident is now helping others in their quests.
Her path was littered with heartache, blocked by tragedy and steeped with unimaginable horrors. She spent most of her years forgotten and forlorn, suffering more trials than most would hope to endure in 100 lifetimes.
She brought much of the pain upon herself, but even more was simply a part of life for the children of Ray Charles.
The wrong side of fame
 Sheila entered the world in the global spotlight, a tough feat for someone arriving before the world of People magazine and Entertainment Tonight. In the height of Charles’ legendary career, her fate played out in the courtroom for all to see, a child born out of wedlock to a father who was slow to acknowledge it.
Sheila Jean Robinson, right, with her father, the late singer Ray Charles.
(Photo Submitted)
She would inherit little of fame’s privileges – nary a mansion, private tutor or personal chef. Yet she was undoubtedly a Charles, evidenced by an uncanny vocal aptitude that blossomed quickly.
But the contradicting, overwhelming environment of her youth would send her spiraling downward. Unbeknownst to Sheila or her mother, Sandra Betts, Ray had 12 children with nine women. Sandra clung eternally to the hope of settling down with him, and her whole family put undue pressure on Sheila to rise out of the mess and save them with her own musical career.
“I was so focused on being him, there was nothing I could do that was good enough,” Sheila says. “No one in the world could be Ray Charles.”
And Ray Charles was not the helping type. For years, Sheila’s relationship with her father was limited to rare phone calls.
“Time and time again I thought, ‘How can you give more to the audience than you do your own child?’ He was feeding off them and not my need, and that would suck...”
She went searching for a new life. At 15, she ran away, and life quickly became even more interesting. She began a relationship with drugs that would last for years, and within months of leaving Ohio, nearly died in a car crash. She returned and enrolled at Ohio State, but it wasn’t conducive to her partying lifestyle.
Her subsequent years held more valleys than peaks, but nothing in between. The good times were great. There were bands and promises of record deals. She recorded in her father’s studio and he vowed to help her career, but again, she would be left hanging.
“It was hard for me,” she says. “I watched Natalie Cole, Frank Sinatra’s daughter...It would have taken him one time for my dad to say, ‘Here she is world, embrace her.’”
Drugs became her outlet. She took up cocaine, and lost complete control of her life. She suffered domestic assault, witnessed a woman refuse to stop smoking while giving birth in a crackhouse, and as her mom was on her deathbed, Sheila had to leave to return to a halfway house on a larceny sentence.
Continued drug use brought continuing probation violations and landed her in federal prison. She served her time, returned to crack, and returned to federal prison.
Out of the depths
As little good as it did to be Ray Charles’ daughter to that point in her life, it did even less inside prison. But it was there, inside the walls of Bryan Federal Prison Camp, that God began to work inside Sheila.
“Prison saved my life,” she says. “It stopped me in my tracks... Some of the happiest times of the 15-18 years I was addicted to drugs were in prison. I could think, I could feel.”
And she had plenty of time to pray. Reading her mother’s memoirs, Sheila realized what her life had come to. Inside solitary confinement, she hit rock bottom. But then, in the darkest of times, her heart was filled and an unexplainable joy lifted her soul.
Her actions, past and present, suddenly had a purpose and meaning.
“This world does not teach us to love what is good,” she says. “Sin is an inappropriate response to an appropriate need. My drug use, sexual confusion were all derived on a need I had to have a hole in my heart filled.”
She began witnessing to fellow inmates, helping them overcome many of the same evils she was battling.
“When God began sending people to me to minister to and talk about his greatness when I was still in a terrible part of my life, I thought, ‘Why me?’” she says. “That’s the beauty of God – it’s not about you, it’s about Him.”
Fittingly, her personal revival centered around joining the prison choir. For the first time in years, she allowed music back in her life. She even wrote a musical about her newfound faith and was allowed to direct the piece with a cast of convicts.
Most importantly, she was able to forgive herself.
“Before I found Christ, [my troubles] were all my fault, in my mind,” she says. “[Afterward,] I knew that all I had to do was walk in the deliverance God had given me.”
After 18 months, a reformed Sheila Robinson left prison for good. She began the uphill climb of putting her life back together. But as in most of her life, the rays of hope hid behind stormclouds.
She tried desperately to regain contact with her father, but shortly after her release, Ray Charles passed away.
Ironically, it took his death to bring the whole family together. The funeral was also a once-in-a-lifetime family reunion. Most of the children did not even know that each other existed.
“Happy, sad, mad, confused,” Sheila says. “It was very emotionally driven. I can just see us hanging around when we were with each other, catching each other staring.”
The daughter who was so desperate for one person who understood her situation suddenly had eleven.
“It’s amazing how close we got and the emotions there between us,” she recalls. “We didn’t even know about each other.”
And through this new bond, Sheila began seeing her father in new ways.
“Since we’ve been together it feels like we have a little more of him than when we were growing up,” Sheila says. “We all got as much of Ray as we could as kids, but we knew he really, really loved his music and the women.”
Like his children, Ray grew up without a father, and when he began to lose his sight, pity was the last thing his mother gave him. It was tough love or no love.
“He didn’t know any other concept of family,” Sheila says. “He loved exactly how he was loved. He helped everyone in his own way.”
Into the light
Sheila Robinson is finally at peace with herself. Life has been different since her family came together, and doors that seemed locked forever are now opening all around her.
Her brother, Ray Jr., co-produced the smash movie Ray, she has penned Behind the Shades, an autobiography including her mother’s memoirs, and she is working with Emmy-winning producers to create a documentary.
And at long last, Sheila has achieved her goals of singing for a career. She has recorded an album and performed around the globe on a Ray Charles tribute tour.
“The world wants to still have a continuance of Ray,” she says. “Music is God’s highest form of praise. There’s power in the music. When I’m on stage, I feel totally not of this world. It’s beautiful. I feel whole, at one with God.”
The 45-year-old is working on another CD and will embark on a 50-week world tour again in 2009.
“The presence of God in my life is so real,” she says. “Everybody in the industry would say ‘Give up, why are you trying?’... The difference is I have something to say. I have a message.”
She is also still sharing her message with inmates through One Way Up Prison Ministries.
“I’m very grateful God allowed [my dark times] to happen and gave me the strength to make it through it,” she says. “Had I not been through what I did, I would not be spiritually where I am today. I would be the arrogant child of a superstar, looking at the world like it owes me something.”
Sheila’s journey brought her, her oldest daughter, Jeanna, and her granddaughter to Forest Lake last year, after she got caught in the home mortgage pinch.
“I said ‘Oh, my god’, the first time I came here,” she laughs. “‘Where are we going?’ Now I love it out here. I know this is where God placed me.”
She also credits God for leading her to Forest Hills Methodist Church. Upon taking a walk past the church this summer, she felt compelled to pray there and meet the people. She became a member and soon was lifting her voice in praise in front of the congregation and pitching in on outreach efforts.
Forest Hills member Judy Huntosh says Sheila has been a blessing.
“She’s just a fabulous person, very full of life and very well meaning,” Huntosh says. “She’s very community minded, especially in reaching out to people that have gone through addiction and serious problems in life. She has experienced a lot and is willing to learn from that.”
For Sheila, her new life is second-nature.
“It’s so cool,” she says. “I’ve always had the love inside of me and we all have it in us. Once you walk in God’s consciousness, the love starts to flow. It’s been great to love myself again...Now I can be strong in knowing who I am. It’s no longer about walking in [my father’s] shoes, but in God’s.”
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