by Grace Jones
I wanted to challenge my parents—Do you still like me now?! I started to sneak in the sinning as soon as I arrived. Flexing my muscles. Sneaking out into the center of Syracuse with Chris, my older brother, and seeing what was there. Getting in later and later. I remember drinking alcohol for the first time at the Lyncourt Grill up the street from our house.
I started with Southern Comfort. It looked pretty and tasted sweet, and I liked what it did to my mind. I drank and drank and drank. I didn’t feel it having a terrible effect until I stood up. I fell over in the middle of the road and vomited all over one of those smooth American streets that were so clean it was like you could eat off them, not like the streets back in Jamaica, which, even when they were tarred, seemed gnarled and crumbling, the dark, ancient earth itself barely covered up.
I started to go out to the gay clubs with Chris. My dad was very uncomfortable at the time with Chris being gay. It was one of the worst things for a pastor to cope with in quiet, very repressed suburbia when you wanted your children to set an example for the religious community you were building, to appear pristine and deadly straight within the church family. Pentacostal Christianity is the kind of religion where you command no respect if your own family is seen as being different, or somehow stained.
It was difficult for Chris. It wasn’t necessarily a sexual thing—he was simply born very feminine. I felt as close as I could to Chris without us actually being twins. We easily passed ourselves off as twins, though, and I wonder if we were somehow tangled up inside my mother. I was born a little more masculine, a girl with some of the boyness Chris lacked. And he had some of the girliness I didn’t have. In Jamaica, this meant he got beat up and verbally abused a lot for being a “batty boy.” It’s changing now, there is more tolerance, but back then it was the dark ages.
There is a gene, I am sure, in your DNA that traps you inside a certain gender. For people like Chris, from the minute they can walk before they know anything, before they can speak, there is a definite feminine element in their movement. Chris was like that. He was teased because it wasn’t clear which way he turned. There is a world where he might have ended up conventionally straight and married. Girls, though, saw him as being too feminine to be sexually attractive, and a lot of straight men are attracted to pretty, young, feminine boys like Chris. Chris did admit to me that he was raped when he came to America by a straight family man. Chris was very delicate and feminine. It was tough for him. He played the organ at church, and I would call him “church gay,” or perhaps it should be “church feminine.” I think of Prince that way. A whole new gender, really.
He went to a psychiatrist, to try and sort out his feelings. He loved women. He could have had a girlfriend who understood his femininity, but if you are as feminine as he was, then the conclusion is, you must be gay. I don’t think that is necessarily the case. Sexuality can be much more fluid than that.
He was forced to choose, and to accept a specific sexual choice. He loved men, because of a fantasy father image he built while his father was away—also, straight men love him. And he was often attracted only to straight men. But then there’s no sex, so it’s very confusing for him. He walks and he swishes in a feminine way—he was born that way. But his direct sexual preference is not blatantly for men; he has gone with women whom he has had chemistry with. People would ask, Well, your brother is gay, how come he never got AIDS? Because he very rarely had sex, with a man or a woman! Closeness and friendship were more important to him.
Mom was much more understanding of his sexuality and tried not to put pressure him. My dad denounced him and stopped him playing the organ in church. Piano playing runs in the family, coming down from my mum’s dance-band dad, Dan, my real grandfather. Chris was an amazing pianist from the age ten, a prodigy. He played like the great Billy Preston at age eleven and used to contribute all the church music, help the choir—it was very important for him, this role. My father took that away from him because complaining church members were gossiping that he was gay. Chris was never the same when that was taken away from him.
He would say, “Well, if I’m gay I’ll do what gay people do.” And I’d go with him to the clubs. Being tangled up, having some of the man in me, I loved that. The man in me—as well as the girl—loved men! I felt I was among my own even as I was so far removed. This was when gay life existed deep in the margins of the margins of the mainstream, a system of rumors, innuendo, and scandal.
Back then drugs were not then around as much, although later Randy did manage to get busted for dealing coke. Dad had to deal with that, which didn’t go down well at all. He basically told the police to lock Randy up, he was so dismayed.
I would sneak a little drink, puff on a cigarette that would choke the life out of me, but those were merely early attempts to go out and discover a new world, meet people, different sorts of people, see what they did, good ones, bad ones. I didn’t feel disloyal to my parents. I’d been completely loyal to the family I had been given for a decade. It was time to be loyal to myself.
I was crazy about this African-American guy I remember as being called Bobby Rawls, who was a running back for the school football team. His nickname was Half a Man, because he was so small compared to the other players. I was a majorette for the team. I fell madly in love with him—my knees used to melt. He broke my heart: He got a local girl pregnant and he had to marry her. Love then was so passionate, wibbly-wobbly legs and knees, complete infatuation. When I fell for someone, I would really fall for someone.
I remember meeting a particularly bad boy whom I got close to. He was the first boy I truly got to kiss. We would almost climb inside each other’s mouth. He was a Native American, Joe Rourke, and apparently he was very bad news, a classic rebel, and I took to him. He was probably of the Onondaga tribe, whose tribal home was in that part of New York State.
Obviously I was in the mood to be attracted to the baddest ass, someone with dangerous undertones, and hanging out with a local Native American from a community with its own issues in terms of where its members fit in was perfect. Joe seemed distantly related to the red-eyed Rastas who used to terrorize Spanish Town with their smoking and cycling.
We were together one night, having gotten a little drunk, and the police arrested him for smashing a window. I got so worked up I kicked a police officer and the cop car, and I was handcuffed and arrested for disorderly conduct. My first official trouble with the authorities. When they tried to take my mug shot at the police station, their camera never worked when I was put in front of it. Perhaps I was too demonic. They tried a few times. It worked when I wasn’t being photographed. As soon as they tried to capture my image, nothing would happen. Chris came and bailed me out and somehow made up an excuse about where I had been to my parents.
Our mom was very tolerant and very protective—she would make sure we were safe, but she didn’t want Dad to know. She would say, “If you let us know when you are coming home, I will meet you at the corner in the car and it will look as though we are all coming home together.” Sometimes she’d sneak us in so Dad didn’t see. I was skinny enough to squeeze through a basement window. She understood that all the strictness that she grew up with was no good, and she tried in her own way to break away from it. As long as we weren’t hurting ourselves. She knew I had a lot to get out of my system, although I think she thought I would be experimenting with my new surroundings for only a short while. If she had known I was never really going to stop running wild, that it wasn’t a passing phase, she might have been less understanding.
I was the first one at college to wear an Afro. That definitely challenged my dad. It was an abrupt way of telling the world: I am not a nice girl! They tried to force me to be nice in Spanish Town; well, that failed. I think my father thought I was losing my mind. It wouldn’t be the last time he thought that.
The way you wore your hair signified much about your status, identity, and even mental wellness. Well-groomed hair was vital to the church. In Jamaica, i
t had been braided and tamed. What became known as the Afro, which involved growing out your dense hair, suggested to people like my dad that you were careless, filthy, or even in mourning.
The Afro style was just starting, and I must have seen it in a film, or seen a photograph of the blues singer Odetta, but I knew it was a brand-new thing. I really liked the idea. I instinctively responded to how the first women letting their hair go natural and unprocessed were the daring, artistic types whom I was quickly developing an affinity with. It also meant I didn’t have to suffer the pain of educating my tough, nappy hair into neatness.
It was the first real sign of the fact that I now felt, in America, that I didn’t have to ask permission to do anything, certainly not change my hairstyle. The Afro was seen as an explicit revolutionary act in the early ’60s: To let your hair grow naturally was to embrace your heritage and reflect black pride. I didn’t know anything about that. Being new to America, I didn’t appreciate the reality of racial segregation. I wasn’t consciously soaking up the spirit of change in the air. I just liked how I looked. It felt more realistic, as well; it suited my bone structure, skin tone, and hair texture, and because it didn’t require all the maintenance I had been used to in order to obey my elders, it was instantly liberating. It didn’t necessarily make me feel blacker. But it made me feel more me. Jackie Kennedy bows were a breakthrough for my mom, but not for me.
We had a big assembly the day I had my Afro on full show. I proudly walked in with this fucking Afro, a tiny brushed-up halo compared to what they would become in the late 1960s, but everyone turned and laughed at me. Older members of the staff stared at me in horror, like I was flirting with prostitution. Very soon, though, three other girls with black hair had one too.
They had all wanted to do it, but they were afraid to do it, in case they were not thought of as attractive, until I did it. There was a photograph of me in the student newspaper with this little Afro. I was already beginning to see how much better it was to be different than being, like in Jamaica, an example to the community.
I was doing my own makeup, my own costumes, and I was trying to dress stylishly. I got addicted very quickly to dressing to impress, even if that meant dressing to bother my father. I would wear two pairs of false eyelashes. Like the Supremes, whose lashes were very heavy, like feathers brushing their cheeks. Mascara was pretty new then, especially out of a tube with a wand. It seemed so exotic. I favored very strong makeup that drew attention to my eyes and lips. Orange lipstick, green eye shadow, even if they weren’t made for black skin. Diana Ross’s red fingernails seemed to be about three inches long, like scarlet bullets.
I liked the fashion of the Supremes, which seemed to be like nothing I had ever seen before. They were sharply and beautifully decked out in flashy sequins and shimmering gowns, their glossy, stylized hair shaping their faces. They were apparently living the dream, but in the early days they made their own clothes and bought their fake pearls from Woolworths. They were an example I wanted to follow—the most modern thing in the world when the idea of being modern seemed more important than ever. Their dresses were like the old church dresses worn as Sunday best given a whole show-business boost.
I sewed in my mum’s basement using the same Butterick and Vogue patterns they would use when they started and had no money. I would cut up old dresses and make new ones from the material. I wanted to look more mature, like my mom, who was dressing somewhere between the Supremes and Jacqueline Kennedy, who was too prim for me.
I wanted to look more like I felt, like someone chasing her own identity, piecing it together both from my upbringing, what I was denied, and what I found looking around me, at women like me, or at women I wanted to be like. I guess this is when I started to exaggerate my appearance, invent what I wore, take ordinary things and customize them, make them my own, so they belonged to no one else. I wanted to be bigger, stronger, more myself. If I had been blanked out in Jamaica, now I was doing everything I could to fill myself in.
I had made myself older because I had wanted to work and make some money. This might be how there are usually a few extra years added to my age; it entered the system somehow. I made myself older than I was to get a job as a telephone assistant as a summer job. I was too young. I had to cheat.
I wore roller skates when I worked, answering the phone as a directory assistant. My employers didn’t say anything as long as I did my job. I loved roller-skating. I loved the feeling of speed. Skating gave me my first scar, on the top of my right arm. I was going too fast down a hill in Syracuse, behind my junior high school, and I panicked. I grabbed hold of a branch as I sped past, and some spikes and twigs sliced into my skin. I healed with the broken bits still inside me, and they had to cut me open and take out all the wood. My first scar and my first operation—every scar a reminder of who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. Here I was, going as fast as I could, seeing where it would take me.
My instincts were to become someone else, to be unbound, to be born once more. I was born, I will be born, but as fast as I wanted to go, I brought with me some of the discipline of my old world. I couldn’t get rid of it that quickly. Deep down, I wanted to please my mom and dad, as much as I wanted to make trouble, so I concentrated on my studies. I was focused on becoming a teacher. I was top of the class in Spanish. I think that’s why my first real boyfriend was Italian and most of the boys I first kissed at school were white—there was that part of me that was European, because of the colonial traces that were left in the buildings and institutions of Spanish Town.
This is why I was strange to others at my school and in Syracuse. Black, but European. European, but Jamaican. It was something I would always have, a mixture of places and accents that I added to as I moved around, constantly relocating myself physically and mentally.
In a sense, my life paralleled that of Jamaica itself; the island gained its independence at about the same time I gained mine. This was because of the many cultures, races, and backgrounds that had come to the island during the previous five hundred years. Something new was always being brought, or started. Out of many, one people.
The funny thing is, I didn’t feel any racial pressure at the school I went to. There weren’t many blacks there, but I never felt persecuted or harassed. I felt it later, during the 1960s, but not when I arrived. It wasn’t on my mind, because in Jamaica, people of African ancestry were in the overwhelming majority. If there was still a legacy of three centuries of slavery, and an insidious, lingering imbalance biased toward the few whites on the island, I never noticed as a child. I was surrounded by family who, in their own way, were successful. In religion, in politics, in business, in the military—the main black population, through entrepreneurship and education, had been given the kind of opportunities to better themselves that blacks in America hadn’t received. Though America was such a forward-looking country, the battle for civil rights there was over a hundred years behind Jamaica.
The Jamaicans I knew simply considered themselves Jamaicans, whatever their background. There are nicknames for how black you might be—the lighter shade, the yellow end, the darker one—and people always want to feel superior to someone. I was dark, sometimes darker when I was out in the sun, but there was never a sense of feeling officially inferior. You would be insulted as being dark like the bottom of a pot, but never in a class way, only as a basic insult. It wasn’t racial, more about hierarchy within the community, a way of creating status without it having to do with race.
Coming to America, I sensed it was different, but I didn’t want it in my consciousness. I didn’t want to be thought of as “black” and certainly not as “negro,” because I instinctively felt that was a box I would be put in that would control me. I didn’t want to be fixed as anything specific. I had been treated as a victim for too long, and now I wanted to be invisible, unmarked, too elusive to be domesticated. Oddly enough, I did this by standing out, often by accentuating details about myself that were down to the color of my s
kin.
My family brought the first books to Jamaica—at least according to family lore. They were in local government; my uncle was head of the Bank of Nova Scotia. A white friend said, “But they are dark; how did they manage to do that?” Well, they were educated! That’s the key—education. In Jamaica, to a certain point, it doesn’t matter what color you are if you are highly educated. My grandfather on my father’s side said that his grandfather was brought over as a slave, but he had been educated in England, and that made a difference from the beginning. Even though he was a slave, the fact that he was educated meant that our roots were different, inspiring more confidence and drive, and his children and his grandchildren went into politics and banking. In that sense, because he went into religion, my father was the black sheep. That was deemed a trivial way of earning money, and it seemed a backward step.
Of course, in some ways my siblings and I were being treated as inferior beings, beaten and controlled, but that wasn’t because we were black. It was because we were children. Once I had the chance to get out of Jamaica, like my mom did, I went out on my own. I needed to stand up for myself. I started looking for people—anti–Mas Ps—who could help me find out everything I could about what went on in a world that had broken free of the Bible.
When I did find someone to help me discover newer experiences, I was fortunate enough that that person was a theater professor at school, Tom Figenshu, who was interested in literature, the Beats, poetry, and theater. In the early ’60s, America was throbbing with new sensibilities, and Tom was so different from what I had been used to from teachers and pastors at my school and church in Jamaica. I wasn’t even intending to do theater—I was studying to be a Spanish teacher, to be an interpreter and a teacher of languages. That was my ambition, still framed within the sensible Jamaican Jones middle-class expectancy of what I should do. The reality is, when everything was stripped away, I started out with nothing but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don’t know where it came from, but I was always very stubborn about it, and nothing could deter me. I just needed to harness that drive into something concrete.