I'll Never Write My Memoirs

by Grace Jones

  * * *

  My early Jamaican years were an awful lot for a child of that age to process. I split my personalities because of it. To protect myself I would split into different characters. It was the only way to evade that kind of pressure: Hide parts of me that would later emerge as distinct personalities, sometimes with different names.

  Eventually I realized it wasn’t me who was wrong—it was them. The way it works is: They make you feel that you deserve to be punished. You are somehow encouraged to think that it is a necessary part of life, that you need the discipline. Therefore, you must be worthless, or why would this be happening to you? It is crippling to your self-esteem.

  I hung on. I wouldn’t let myself be harmed. I didn’t want to think that I was weak. I would think of myself as the master. I made sure that I loved myself, because at times it seemed no one else was loving me. That’s carried on—it’s definitely one of my personalities. One boyfriend told me that I loved myself too much. I thought, Well, you can love a boyfriend too much, but you can’t love yourself too much. Sometimes you have to love yourself to keep yourself whole.

  Something vicious and implacable was being pushed deep inside me and I had to stop it from completely breaking me apart. It was a childhood that was not a childhood. And you end up being detained in childhood longer than you should be, perpetually the oppressed daughter. You take longer than most people to get used to being alive.

  There were ways in Jamaica of escaping the brainwashing, but not for long. They would always catch you and punish you. That’s what happened to me in Jamaica: I was brainwashed by all this hellfire and damnation, and if I did anything wrong, if I talked back to my elders, or talked to someone I shouldn’t have, they would pull out my bottom lip and stretch it and pull it until the skin connected it to my lower jaw would tear. Once I left Jamaica I had to wash all that away, brainwash myself in a way, and for a while it was as though I was washing away the religion, and that viciousness took Jamaica away with it.

  * * *

  We knew our parents were eventually going to send for us—we just didn’t know when. There was never a definitive time period. Then, one day, it started to happen. The children began to move to America, pulled away from Mas P and the church.

  Chris went first. Then I went. Or was it the other way around? Noel didn’t want to go straightaway, because he had embedded himself with friends and in school, and he resisted when they wanted him to go. He didn’t want to leave. He was finding his own ways to stand up to the control. My younger brother Max came with me, because he definitely wanted to get out of Jamaica. After ten years, one by one, we were brought to America. My sister Janet was such a baby and my grandmother didn’t want her to go. My mom thought it would kill her mom to bring Janet, as they were so close. So Janet stayed behind for a while.

  My dad had changed his religion, gotten into Bishop Walters’s house, married my mom, and taken her to America. He didn’t originally head there, like a lot of migrants did, to carry the message of the church, taking over a uniquely Jamaican modification of an American-style religion. He had traveled to America to work, at what he thought would be a job that suited his talents and enterprise.

  He worked in agriculture, and after the war in America they needed people with his expertise cultivating land. He could grow anything, and they needed new food sources at the time. He was full of hope and excitement about a new life away from the complicated family relationships in Spanish Town, but he was disappointed when he got to America that he was not being hired as anything other than a laborer. He considered that he was not that far above a slave, not expected to work as an educated Jamaican would in management or as an entrepreneur, but simply as someone moving earth about and digging holes.

  He was in crisis, thinking of his wife and children and how he had moved for a better life despite the opposition of his father. He was a proud man, worried what his father would think, and he became suicidal. He remembers wanting to kill himself, to jump off a platform in front of an oncoming train. He says he was definitely considering it, because he felt he had let everyone down. He was standing at the edge of the platform, a train heading into the station, prepared to jump and end it all, when something sudden and amazing happened. At that point he got what he calls the calling. He had a vision.

  He saw Jesus, in some form, who was asking him using words that weren’t words, to become a pastor, and open his own church in America dedicated to the healing of mind, body, and soul. He had converted in Spanish Town to marry my mom but had never really bought into the Pentecostal premise, and then, in North America, at the end of his tether, he had this awakening moments before ending his life. He didn’t expect this—he had converted to get my mom, to win the bet and get the girl, not to find God. To his surprise, he emotionally and spiritually converted after his vision on the station platform, and took the calling seriously.

  My father really did feel he had escaped. Once he made it to America, he found that the Pentecostal Church there was very different from the church of Bishop Walters; it wasn’t so exploited for personal power. It was a lot more open than my family’s version in Jamaica, and he felt he could correct what he saw as the oppressive elements that had alienated his father and put a barrier between him and his wife. He had his own mission now.

  In 1956, after ministering in New York and Connecticut, he founded the Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ in Syracuse, upstate New York. After a few years spent establishing his church and working his way into the local community, reaching out to the unchurched through neighborhood revivals, he felt settled and had a purpose. It was time for his children to come over to the nest he and my mother had built.

  * * *

  I don’t know what Mas P thought when I left. I never thought about him. I wanted to forget about him immediately, wipe him out. When he died, more than twenty years later, I felt nothing. I didn’t want to commit so much of myself that I had any kind of emotional response. Brother Noel wanted me to think about it from a different point of view, to be released—saved, in a way—but I never could. He didn’t want me to think of him as a monster, but to accept that he was ill, or himself the victim. To forgive him. I couldn’t. I don’t know if that meant I had taken control or was still in his control. The more you try and escape, the more the thing you are escaping from continues to exist. I didn’t want to think about it.

  Noel’s way of dealing with Mas P and Bishop Walters, and their corruption of religion, was that he wanted to go into the church and turn it the other way. Make it kinder, more inspiring, more caringly Christian. He seriously studied the Bible and wanted to transform the churches in Jamaica to which our family belonged. Noel dissected their power. He analyzed it. He wanted to know how it worked and transform it into a positive thing.

  We have all reacted to this cult that surrounded us in our own ways. I wanted to be free. Free of myself, almost. Free enough to choose to be lonely. Noel wanted to repair the idea of God. He received a degree in theology, became a pastor in Texas at twenty-six, and later became a senior pastor, and a bishop, and a driven, charismatic preacher at the City of Refuge Church in Los Angeles, with twenty thousand followers. His church is so large it’s known as a megachurch.

  He found other words in the Bible that weren’t about God the bully, a supporter of torture and recrimination. God was our protector, which was news to me. Noel needed to uncover a gentle God, to recover some sort of sanity. “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified, do not be discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9). In a way he is anti-religion. He doesn’t preach to you in the way we were preached to. His Lord is a very different Lord from the Lord that was forced on us. His interpretation is very extreme in terms of our faith. A lot of other bishops and preachers try to get him out—to them he’s a blasphemer. He’s the me of that world, the me in how I approach my career.

  I’m still afraid of walking into the church in Jamaica. It still makes me feel very uncomfor
table because of how they all look at you in a judging way. I say to my mom, “I am not going to church in Jamaica,” and she says, “No, it has completely changed. It’s not the same as it used to be. People can dress up and wear earrings, you can wear pants even!” But it doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable, however much has changed on the outside. Even if I can wear pants, I don’t trust it after the brainwashing all those years ago.

  I went to church with them one time as an adult, but my grand-uncle had everyone all so brainwashed that it was hard to watch. The housekeeper who looked after my grandmother, Sister Dorothy, still works in the house in Jamaica where I grew up and, even now, comes to Syracuse to look after my mom. She has been persuaded that the television is a force for evil and still will not look at the TV in a room if it is on. She thinks that if she looks at it she is going to burn in hell. Dorothy will contort her body and hide behind her fingers if it is turned on to make sure she doesn’t get a glimpse of the hell it is revealing.

  They are still under the powers of the long-dead Bishop Walters. He convinced his followers that they are going to burn in hell if they see something on television—a prime example of people using religion to gain control over other people’s lives. I find it deeply disturbing that this still goes on, that someone who is no longer living under the pressure of the bishop still obeys him. It’s a power that still causes me to pause, to feel the old anxiety, whatever I have done in my life.

  I was successful and famous as a singer when Mas P died. I wanted to send my grandmother money directly, but was never able to until he died. I would pass it through my mother to give to her. Whenever I went to Spanish Town, to visit my mother when she was staying in our old house, if I saw him he would try to back me in a corner. I didn’t want to see him, but he would be there, as though he had done nothing wrong, or had raised me as the Bible recommended.

  He would try and tell me how I could use my fame, how many people I could reach as a missionary. I never confronted him about what he had done to me and my brothers and sisters. What was the point? Basically, I tried to avoid him. I never trusted that he had shed his venom. Every time we met he tried to reconvert me. He considered me a backslider. A serious sinner.

  When my father visited Jamaica he would never stay in Spanish Town, because of the extremism of Bishop Walters. He would stay with his brothers in Kingston. The church was horrified at what I had become, and my father didn’t want to have to argue with them. There was enough Jones common sense for him to decide what I did with my life was up to me, as hard as it was for him to understand.

  Bishop Walters called me the devil. Whenever I was involved in a scandal that made the papers, I symbolized pure evil. He wrote it in a letter to my mother: Your daughter is the devil. He expected my mom and dad to shun me. They never did, whatever I got up to. My dad was punished because of me. He could have been made a bishop long before he was ordained if he hadn’t had me to deal with, if he hadn’t had a devil for a daughter.

  2.

  Syracuse, Philadelphia & New York

  I crossed the water, feeling no emotion about leaving Jamaica behind. It had never felt like home, and there was little to look back on but confusion and penitence. Our new house in America was in a place called Lyncourt, in Salina, a routine northwest suburb of the industrial city of Syracuse in upstate New York on the shores of Onondaga Lake. We were the only black family in what was mostly a very Italian neighborhood. A couple of families did put their houses up for sale, across the street, next door, when my family moved in. I didn’t think about it at the time. Mostly, it was all very suburban and polite, and it looked like a place where you could be free.

  Somehow, this comfortable North America of humming lawnmowers and shiny automobiles festooned with chrome looked closer to the over-the-top fantasy I had seen in The King and I than anything I’d seen in Jamaica. I’m not sure it was a place buzzing at the center of the flourishing American dream, but it was on the edges of it. There were new highways up in the sky swooping this way and that, and they seemed like they were headed toward adventure. America was in a funny mood at the time, but then, so was I.

  I was very glad to be out of Jamaica. I was in serious dispute with my past. I thought, Whatever happens next, I am going to make sure I do my own thing. I landed in America looking straight head. I didn’t know what to expect when I moved to Syracuse, but I knew from seeing my mother and father come back and forth from America that it was very different. Once my mom was away, she would visit with my dad every so often. I don’t know if she started using contraception in America, but the children stopped coming, until Randy arrived about ten years later.

  She had changed while she was there—she’d become very showy and stylish. When she came home to visit she was like a film star in my eyes, her natural Jamaican vanity and flamboyance amplified by her being in America at the beginning of the ’60s, when things were blooming into color and new voices were fighting through. Her hair would be all straight and glossy, and she was suddenly fashioned out. It was like she was coming from outer space compared to the other women of Spanish Town, who were dressed very differently.

  She would be all Givenchy, and very, very on the button for the 1960s—tight dress, stiletto heels, sharp pointy toes, glasses like the tail fin of a Cadillac, earrings the size of saucers. I would see her and go Wow. I loved how she looked. This kind of explicit female confidence was a revelation. She was something else. She would make her own clothes from paper patterns, and quickly became a professional seamstress. She would make wedding dresses in the basement of our house, and even now, sixty years later, it’s like a dress shop down there, filled with reams of material and sewing machines.

  When she came back on occasional visits to Spanish Town, no one from the church said anything to her about this wicked new look. There was a new kind of assurance about her. She had escaped the dreadful reach of Bishop Walters. She was still in the church; she was the star singer, the soloist, and she and my father sort of took on a Hollywood sheen—the pastor and the first lady. She came back fearless. Actually, when she left she was fearless—you had to be to say, faced with such disapproval, I’m out of here.

  I don’t know how fearless I was when I made the move. I was so relieved to be getting away from Mas P and the hell he had made out of getting into heaven. I didn’t think twice about leaving Spanish Town. I was somewhere else, and it had meant that my mother now dressed like she knew about films and music and pleasure, and that was good enough for me. There was no way the controlling eye in the sky could follow me here.

  I had spent the 1950s in Jamaica, without getting to know the island, because I had been crushed underneath the Bible. In the early 1960s, I was more or less a teenager, and I was in America—it was definitely the right time for me to be there. Eventually, I would find the right place to be as well. If I hadn’t traveled in Jamaica, had barely seen the sea that was all around us, a theater in itself, with its esoteric, sunken history, and all that had washed up into the island’s gregarious personality, I was going to make up for that now. I was going to move. I was going to make things happen. I propelled myself out of Jamaica so vigorously, I’ve been rolling on and on ever since.

  * * *

  I started going to Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, which had opened in 1961, so it was shiny new, as if it was also connected to the brash, expectant American dream. I’d already had three years of high school—in Jamaica we started school much earlier than in America—so I was three years ahead of American children my age, and after a short time in high school, I graduated at fifteen and went to college.

  Because of my new school, I had a new name. In Jamaica, I was always Beverly. Or Bev. Now I was Grace. That was weird. I was not used to it at all. It’s strange to suddenly be called by a new name. I knew it was my first name, but it was never used in Jamaica. They called me Grace at school because it was my first name as it was written down, but at first I didn’t even respond when it was used. I
didn’t recognize it as being me. I was Beverly, not Grace. I was called Bev at home, Grace at school. It took a long while to get used to.

  I was laughed at a lot because of my accent. I looked black, but I didn’t sound black, or at least not black American. I was considered an outsider and was looked upon with suspicion. I was often by myself, quite a loner.

  When I first arrived, there were certain rules I had to follow, because there was still my father, and his church rules. The girls were wearing pants, or dresses with stockings, but I still had to wear skirts an inch or so below my knee, revealing my skinny bare Jamaican legs. I wanted to fit in with my new classmates, at least at first, so that I didn’t stick out so much. But a community of insurgent thirteen-year-old girls is not an easy thing to break into, and I decided the best way to join in was to try things that would mean opposing my parents.

  I started to wear makeup. This alarmed my dad. He was no Bishop Walters, but he was still a responsible pastor in the Pentecostal Church, and wanted me to adhere to their values. I was in the mood to leave the church behind completely, even though my dad was a pastor, with his own loyal flock, on the way to becoming known as the Shepherd. In a way he was more devout than Bishop Walters, and more loyal to a moderate kind of Christianity, but this meant his children still had to set an example.

  I knew this was going to be tough for everybody. It was like my life had been put on hold in Jamaica, and now I could actually start living. I had a lot of making up to do, and I had arrived in a country that was giving birth to the permissive society. Which was doing a lot of talking.