Ki Longfellow - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Ki Longfellow was born on December 9, 1944, either in the Mount Loretta Orphanage on Staten Island, New York or in Staten Island's Bayley Seton Hospital (called, at the time, the Staten Island Public Health Service Hospital), to a mother, Andrea Lorraine Kelly, who was barely sixteen years old. Kelly left her baby in foster care while she worked at any job she could find during the last of the war years. The infant Longfellow contracted pneumonia and was removed from the foster home, and taken in by her great aunt. She was removed from this "home" when it was discovered the husband was abusive.

Within two years Kelly, briefly assuming care of her child, left New York to resettle in Marin County, California. It was not until 1972, shortly before Kelly's sudden death at the age of 44 from an embolism, that she told Longfellow that her biological father was a full-blooded Iroquois whom Kelly had met at an unnamed New York City art school. Kelly never revealed his name. Longfellow never met him nor could she find him. In Marin, Longfellow was cared for by her mother's married older sister, Rosemarie Anderson, until her "Aunt Re" left for Texas with her own child and new husband.

After Kelly met and married a US Navy man, she claimed Pamela again, who at the age of four or so joined her mother and stepfather moving from naval base to naval base, including New York's Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Long Beach Naval Shipyard, both in California, and Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. Seldom anywhere for long, Longfellow attended a different school for each grade except the years spent on the Island of Oahu. Between duty stations, the family lived at her adopted grandfather's house in Madrone Canyon in Larkspur, California. Throughout these years, Pamela Ki Longfellow turned to her grandfather, Lindsay Ray Longfellow, for "family." The two of them would go to "the races." Lindsay was a keen horse racing fan, taking 7-year-old Ki to Golden Gate Fields and the now gone Tanforan Racetrack where she learned to love the races as much as he did.

Longfellow graduated from Redwood High School in Larkspur. In her junior and senior years, she attended only those classes that interested her and cut those that did not. Determined to become a writer, she spent time with painters, poets, and musicians in Sausalito, and discovered what remained of the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco.

At nineteen, Longfellow suddenly and unexpectedly had a dramatic experience that she now considers an occurrence of self-realization known as gnosis, or in the Hindu mystical tradition: Jnana. Not understanding her experience then and enduring increasingly severe panic attacks, she voluntarily entered the State Mental Institution at Napa, California. There she was diagnosed, without benefit of a doctor, as a "severe psycho-neurotic". In her later novel about Mary Magdalene: The Secret Magdalene, Longfellow made use of her gnosis as well as her experiences at the mental hospital.