The other thing I didn’t realize until much later was how badly my sister wanted my approval. Jean was a deeply passionate human being, much more passionate than I am. She was emotional, whereas I’ve always been a more rational, reasoning kind of person. She would sometimes try to provoke responses out of me, but I never saw that for what it was: a need on her part, rather than just a provocation. As with so many things that didn’t directly affect me, I just never really thought about it. I’ve always tended to focus on whatever is right in front of me, which causes me to miss the nuances of what’s happening to others.
From the time I was very young, I had the ability—the compulsion, really—to get completely absorbed in whatever I was doing. I was obsessed with mechanical things, and I’d spend hours taking apart clocks and watches, poking around inside. I just had a driving need to understand how a thing worked, and if I couldn’t figure it out, I’d block out everything else and focus obsessively until I got it. At first I was just messing around with whatever gadgets I could find in the house. But when my parents bought me the piano, I turned the same kind of obsessive focus to learning how to play it.
Once we got that piano, all I wanted to do was play music. My brother and I both took lessons from the same teacher, Mrs. Jordan, who taught about a dozen primarily black students. We all studied classical, which is what any black person who took piano at the time would study—there weren’t lessons in blues or R&B or anything like that. Studying piano meant studying classical music, which suited my mother just fine.
Mrs. Jordan put on recitals and competitions, and it wasn’t long before I decided I wanted to be a concert pianist. From that point on, music was my life. I spent every spare moment at the piano, picking out chords and melodies, learning to read music, training my hands. No matter how much I learned, there was always more to learn, and I loved that. I still do.
I also loved playing piano because, unlike sports, I was good at it. I always felt inferior at sports, because I was small and uncoordinated, but here was an activity where I could be as good as my brother and his friends. Wayman was a pretty good piano player, but he didn’t have the same single-minded focus on it that I did, so before long I could actually play better than he could. Once we got that piano, I never went back to playing sports with my brother and his friends.
Also, playing piano was considered cool in our neighborhood. Because I was small, other kids would occasionally mess with me—including one time, in front of the Big House, when a couple of kids jumped me. But once word got out that I could play piano, I found myself in a different category. Playing music changed everything about my life. It gave me purpose, it changed others’ perceptions of me, but most important, it changed the way I felt about myself.
When I was eleven years old, Mrs. Jordan entered me in an annual competition held by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As part of its young people’s series, the CSO invited students to play a movement of a concerto, and the winner of the competition would get to play it live, onstage, with the CSO.
By that point I’d been taking lessons for four years, and playing piano was pretty much all I did. I practiced Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 18 in B-flat Major, K. 456, every day for nearly a year, and when my audition came, I was ready. The audition was held at Orchestra Hall (now called Symphony Center), and each student was required to play alone, onstage, in front of the assistant conductor, George Schick.
I walked onto the stage, sat down at the piano, and looked out into the seats. Mrs. Jordan was there, and I saw two other ladies come in and sit in the back, near her. Then I turned my attention to the piano, and from the moment I played the first notes, the rest of the world might as well have not existed. I played the first movement, and only when the final notes had faded did I look up again.
Well, that was pretty good, I thought. When I came offstage and saw Mrs. Jordan, she gave me a hug and told me that, yes, I had done well. In fact, she told me that the two women I’d seen coming in were also piano teachers, and that after I’d finished playing, the two of them were crying. That was pretty heady stuff for an eleven-year-old.
A few months later, I got a postcard in the mail saying, “Congratulations!” I had won the competition and was invited to play with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on February 5, 1952. Unfortunately, the postcard also said that the CSO had been unable to locate the orchestral parts to that particular concerto, so I would have to either learn a new piece or forfeit my chance to play.
I stared at the postcard in shock. How could this be? Over the past year, I had learned that concerto cold, and now I’d only have a couple of months to learn a brand-new one. And this wasn’t for just any recital—it was my debut onstage with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra! But there was no way I was letting my big opportunity slip away. We chose another Mozart concerto—no. 26 in D Major—and I began feverishly practicing. I played that piece for hours upon hours, and as the date of the concert approached, I knew it, though not as well as I knew no. 18.
Finally the big night arrived. I wasn’t at the top of the program, so I waited nervously in the wings while the orchestra played its first piece. There was an elevator platform near the conductor’s podium, and just before I was to play, a big grand piano came up through the floor into position. I took a deep breath and walked onto the stage to take my seat at that massive piano.
I must have looked pretty funny walking out there, because at age eleven I was a short, spindly little kid who could barely reach the piano pedals. I don’t remember exactly what I was wearing, but I think it was a jacket, short pants, and knee socks. I was small for my age, so I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of people in the audience. But just as at the audition, the moment I started playing, everything else faded away—it was just me and the music.
When I finished, the audience exploded into applause, and after the concert a few people even asked me for my autograph. I signed one for a girl my age, writing out “Herbert Hancock” in my most careful cursive. I felt proud of myself, and relieved that I’d been able to learn the new concerto in so little time.
A week or two later, as a congratulatory gift, Mrs. Jordan invited me to see the British pianist Dame Myra Hess perform with the Chicago Symphony. We were both stunned when we saw what was on the program: Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 18! Somehow they’d managed to find all the orchestra music. Or perhaps it was never really lost? It would have been easy to feel suspicious, to wonder whether someone at the CSO just wanted to discourage the young African American kid who’d surprised everyone and won their prestigious competition. For a black person growing up in ’40s and ’50s America, small acts of racism were simply a fact of life. But even at age eleven, I tended to ignore possible racial slights rather than give them any weight. It was just my nature.
CHAPTER TWO
The first time I ever met a white kid was in high school. At my elementary school, Forestville, all the students were black (though some of our teachers were white). No white families lived in my neighborhood, and I never really went anywhere else, so I just never met any. In our part of Chicago, the only white people we saw were the ones coming to collect money—the insurance man, or the landlord.
The only thing I knew about white kids came from the stories my dad told me from his childhood. He’d spent his first years in the segregated South, then went to a mixed elementary school after he moved to Chicago, and often had gotten into fights. So when I was about to start my freshman year at Hyde Park High School, where three-quarters of the students were white, I was definitely wary.
I had skipped a grade in elementary school, so I was young for a freshman—just twelve when I first set foot in the halls of Hyde Park. We weren’t really supposed to go to school there, since we didn’t live in Hyde Park’s district, but it was better academically than the high school in our district, so my mother was determined to send us there. We had an aunt and uncle who lived in the right district,
so my parents used their address when they enrolled us.
My head was full of the stories my dad had told me, so when I went to school on the first day of freshman year, I fully expected something to go down. I was primed for a fight, but to my surprise, the white kids turned out to be . . . just kids. I went running home after that first day of school, and as I burst through the door to our apartment, I yelled, “Mama! Mama! They’re just like us!” It sounds funny now, but that really was a big surprise to me.
Hyde Park was a liberal school, so we students thought of ourselves as progressive, racially and otherwise. But as progressive as we thought we were, it was the 1950s, so a lot of people frowned on blacks and whites dating each other. Still, I probably experienced more overt racism from members of my own extended family than I did from my high school friends. I had darker skin than most of my relatives, and in black families, that’s an easy target. Sometimes, when I was bad, I’d get called “a black, evil rascal.” But to the best of my recollection, nobody in high school ever called me names based on my color.
Even if they had, I’d have done my best to ignore it, because I made a conscious decision in high school not to focus on race at all if I could help it. Racism existed, of course; in the 1950s casual racism was woven into the fabric of American life. You didn’t have to go searching for it, because it was omnipresent, everything from whites getting preferential treatment for loans, employment, and housing to white people addressing a black man as “boy.” But early on, I realized I had a choice: The easy road was to sit back and expect racist acts to happen—to see injustice and ill intent at every turn, to essentially say, I’m black and will never get a fair shake, and to live life accordingly. I made a choice to do the opposite.
Some black people look for racism, but I made a point of not looking for it, because looking for it feeds a victim mentality, which doesn’t help anyone. That victim mentality was rampant in our neighborhood, but somehow I managed to find my way out of it. This was partly thanks to my parents, who raised all three of us to believe we could achieve anything we put our minds to. But it also had a lot to do with my own curiosity. When I started high school, for the first time in my life I found myself surrounded by many different kinds of people. And rather than feeling like I was an outsider or being judged by them, I wanted to know everything about them.
After growing up exclusively around black people, I suddenly had friends who were Jewish, Italian, Asian—and I didn’t know anything about their cultures. I wanted to hear how they talked, see how they lived, learn about their beliefs. Most ethnic groups stuck together at Hyde Park, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in the black-kids group.
One of my first girlfriends was white, a girl named Barbara Laves, who played violin with the orchestra. She was a petite brunette with amazing light blue eyes, and I used to walk her home after school each day. Barbara and I didn’t stay together all that long, and I dated black girls, too, including my prom date, Peggy Milton. But I never really worried about anybody’s race. If I liked a girl, I asked her out. And if other people had a problem with that, I either didn’t know about it or, more likely, didn’t pay attention to it.
My parents tried for a while to turn us into churchgoers, but it didn’t stick. The first church they took us to was Ebenezer Baptist, one of dozens of Baptist churches sprinkled throughout our South Side neighborhood. The music was fantastic. There was a young people’s gospel choir and an adult gospel choir, and I liked the part of the service when they sang. But the sermons were all fire and brimstone, which didn’t really speak to me, or to my mother. There just didn’t seem to be much to learn from listening to someone talk about hell and damnation all the time.
Next, my parents took us to an African Methodist Episcopal church a few blocks away. Their choirs were good, too, but I didn’t love the hymns, and I still didn’t love the message—I just never responded to the notion of heaven and hell and retribution and punishment. Apparently my parents didn’t, either, because the next church we went to was Unitarian, which didn’t preach any kind of fire and brimstone at all. My mother liked this church, as it was more open and seemed to have an intellectual, rather than emotional, basis. But even so, we didn’t go to this one for very long, either.
None of the churches really spoke to me, yet from the time I was very small, I was always curious about the big questions of existence. At night, after my brother went to sleep, I’d sit on the windowsill of our bedroom looking up at the stars, wondering about life and death and the universe. At some point, I figured out for myself that life never ends, and I came early to the belief that even when we die, we reemerge later as another being. Years later, I would learn that these were core beliefs of Buddhism.
The notion of heaven and hell just never made sense to me. I couldn’t imagine that, when you die, you just pop out and disappear to some unknown place. I didn’t see anything else in the world just disappearing like that; matter and energy transform, but they don’t disappear. A seed becomes a tree, a tree becomes a chair, a chair becomes ash, and the cycle continues. It just wasn’t logical to me that the way we live and die could be so different from that.
This was how my brain worked, by seeking out the logical sequence of things. As a kid, I loved mechanics and science, and I spent hours taking apart clocks and toasters because I had a driving need to know how things worked. I was drawn to the rational order of these systems, enraptured by the way that taking apart an object could lead to a complete understanding of that object.
One day in high school, I decided to apply that same kind of logic to other parts of my life. I’d done something that got me in trouble with my parents, and they decided to punish me by not letting me go to a party I was looking forward to. The punishment didn’t seem fair, and I was really angry. I didn’t get mad often, but this seemed so undeserved that I was furious. It was a barrier I couldn’t get around—I felt helpless, almost victimized, by the injustice of it all. I stewed about it for days.
Sulking in my room on the afternoon of the party, I finally thought, Okay, let me examine rationally what’s going on here. I decided to take apart the situation just as I’d take apart a mechanical object. The party started at ten, and because of my curfew, I would have had to leave at midnight. That was two hours of my life; once those two hours were done, I’d be on to the next thing, whether I went to the party or not. Suddenly everything became clear: All I have to do is get through those two hours, and then life will go on as usual.
So that’s what I did. From ten until midnight, I read books and hung out in my room, and once midnight had passed, that was the end of it. I didn’t feel like a victim anymore; in fact, I was proud of myself. I had taken control of my emotions and figured out a way to get past my anger. From that point on, there was no way I could be punished, because I knew I could choose how to respond to any given situation. I had learned how to keep my emotions under control.
This felt like a great development: I would never again feel victimized by external factors, because I could control how they affected me emotionally. In many ways this was a useful trait, but over time, I carried it to an extreme, desensitizing myself. I had never been a particularly emotional kid, but from high school onward I really kept my emotions in check; I almost never cried, no matter how sad or upset I felt. If something started to upset me, I’d shut myself down rather than feel those negative emotions.
There was one glaring exception, and it happened just as I was starting my senior year in high school: the murder of Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was fourteen, just one year younger than me, and he was also from the South Side of Chicago. In August of 1955, he went to Mississippi to visit relatives. His mother warned him before going that the South was different from the North and he needed to behave accordingly. But when Till and some friends went into a convenience store to buy some candy, one of the other boys dared him to talk to the twenty-one-year-old white woman working a
t the store, Carolyn Bryant. He apparently wolf-whistled at her, showing off for his friends, and when Bryant told her husband, Roy, about it, he decided to take action.
Several days later Roy Bryant and a number of other men kidnapped Till and pistol-whipped him. They put the bleeding boy in the back of a pickup truck, covered him with a tarp, and drove him to a cotton gin, where they picked up a seventy-pound fan. Then they drove Till to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, and tied the fan around his neck to weigh down his body before throwing it into the river.
Three days after that, kids fishing in the river found Till’s corpse. His grieving mother insisted that his body be put into a pine coffin and sent by train back to Chicago, rather than being buried in Mississippi. The coffin arrived at the A. A. Rayner funeral home in early September, and when Till’s mother looked in and saw her son’s horribly mutilated face, she decided to have an open casket at his funeral, so the whole world could see what those men in Mississippi had done to him.
The day Till’s body arrived back in Chicago, we happened to drive past the Rayner funeral home, which wasn’t far from our apartment on the South Side. I could see people stumbling out the door, weeping, and I watched in shock as one man came out sobbing, uttering gibberish as he waved his hands in the air. I had never seen people unhinged like that, and it scared me.
Jet magazine published a full-page close-up photo of Emmett Till’s swollen, destroyed face, and although my parents tried to shield us from seeing it, curiosity got the better of me. When I picked up the magazine and flipped to the photo, fear and horror shot right through me. No matter how much control I thought I had over my emotions, nothing could have prepared me for seeing the cruelly disfigured face of a boy my age, from my own neighborhood, who’d been brutally murdered for nothing at all. I had nightmares for weeks afterward.
Herbie Hancock Page 2