MOTHER STILL WANTED JOSEPH TO BUILD an extra room on to the house and for as long as there was a stack of bricks in the backyard, she was not going to relent. We were eight-strong now with the addition of Randy (Janet was still to come), but if one sentence was repeated in our house – apart from ‘Let’s do it again’ – it was ‘This place is falling to pieces’, as expressed by our mother. Her savings, which had been building since Tito’s birth, were now somewhere in the region of $300, but I don’t think anyone dared point out that the money would be better spent on fixing the patched-up water-pipe or buying a new television: this was Mother’s growing nest-egg for another room …
Until, that is, the day Joseph made a unilateral decision in the interests of our group. His VW van, which had replaced his old Buick, pulled up outside and he started unloading microphones, stands, amplifiers, tambourines, a keyboard, drum-set and speakers. It was like the Christmas we were never allowed. Mother was breathless with anger. ‘Joseph!’ she said, rushing outside as he pulled our new instruments out of the van. ‘What have you done? What is all this stuff?’ We were too excited to know which ‘toy’ to play with first. Mother trailed Joseph as he went back and forth between living room and van. ‘I don’t believe it!’ she said. ‘We can’t dress our children in new clothes and Jackie has holes in his shoes, this place is falling to pieces, and you’ve gone and bought instruments?’
As with everything in our household, Joseph’s decision was final. He said it was a necessary investment, ‘if we are to support our boys.’
I had never really heard our parents fight before because Mother usually stepped down, but this time he had crossed the line. Not only had he failed to consult her, he had used most of her precious savings. ‘You’ll get your new room, Katie,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move to California and then I’ll buy you a bigger house, but our boys can’t perform without instruments!’ On several nights, we heard raised voices from their bedroom. Mother was worried that he was chasing a pipe-dream and building up our hopes, leading us towards disappointment. Joseph was adamant that he was doing the right thing, and he needed her support. This was how he expressed his love for us – by believing in our talent. Where Mother soaked us in love and affection, Joseph compensated with what she lacked: confidence and belief. In terms of what children should receive from two parents, these opposites weighed themselves out evenly. Mother tended to look pragmatically at life, whereas Joseph was more ‘speculate to accumulate’. His tough love was expressed not in affection or being tactile, but in the focus and discipline he instilled and the respect he asked for. It was the love of a football coach, expressed with a heart that was all about winning the game. A slap on the back, a smile on his face, and an excited clap of the hands was his way of expressing admiration. It was his only way of knowing how to express his love.
There was tension in the house for a few weeks, but eventually Mother calmed down and agreed to trust Joseph’s gamble. We just didn’t see the chips being pushed on to the red square in our name.
THE RADIO CRACKLED INTO ITS BROADCAST and that night in 1964, the house was the quietest it had ever been. ‘Good evening, sports fans across the land,’ the boxing commentator announced, ‘and now the questions will be answered. Liston in the white trunks with the black stripes. Clay – half an inch taller – in the white trunks and the red stripes …’ It amazed me that this man could take us there, painting a picture so vivid that we could ‘see’, heightening Joseph’s tension as he hunched forward in his kitchen chair, pulled up alongside the radio on the side cabinet. ‘The Heavyweight Championship of the World,’ the voice continued. ‘If it goes past the first round, there will be surprises already …’
We heard the bell. The crowd roared. We pictured the contender, Cassius Clay, the man from Louisville, Kentucky, springing from his corner to take on the reigning champ, Sonny Liston. ‘AND HERE THEY COME!’
Even before the 22-year-old Cassius Clay became known as Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest’, we were rooting for him because Joseph loved his boxing and said we should cheer the underdog who had the fire to take on the best. Joseph had boxed competitively as a teenager in Oakland and he always had Tito, Jackie and me on the front lawn with our red gloves on, teaching us ‘never be afraid of no one’. He’d referee bouts with other kids from the street and Michael would sit on the front step shouting, ‘Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!’
Joseph taught us technique and how to defend ourselves. ‘No one beats a Jackson,’ he said, and no one ever did. Joseph said he had trained using one of Papa Samuel’s solid oak doors, not a punchbag – it strengthened the callouses and toughened the mind. He was the strongest, hardest, toughest man we knew and I’m sure he imagined himself in the ring as we gathered around the radio.
As we listened, he couldn’t help making a link between entertainment and boxing. ‘Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee – that’s what you need to be doing onstage,’ he said, using Clay’s boast from a press conference earlier that week. Joseph found these convenient associations everywhere and disguised them as lessons. He did it with Jim Brown of the Cleveland Bears whenever we talked football. The No. 32 and the greatest running back of all time was an example of dedication: ‘Never missed a game or a training session in nine years because he knows you’ve got to work at being the best.’
He even hid lessons in the chores he made us do. That pile of bricks in the backyard – the ones Mother now knew would never be built on to the house – still served a purpose. There must have been 100 of those real heavy cinder-block bricks sitting in a stack at the left of the house. Our job was to carry them, one by one, to the other side and build a new stack. It was a pointless exercise, but we didn’t ask why; we just did as we were told. When Joseph returned home, he inspected our work. Every brick had to be flush, and every line must be straight, running down the pile. ‘No … do it again. I want them stacked evenly,’ he said – and we moved them from right to left until we had it just right. We learned discipline and perfection through cuts, blisters and grazes. Work as a team. Do it right. No room for error. If one person is off, it messes up everyone else – and messes up ‘the look’. Noted for choreographic reasons.
All this might explain why some of us turned into obsessive compulsives as adults. Whenever Michael walked into a room and saw a pillow ‘out of place’, he’d change it. ‘This is bothering me,’ he’d say with a smile. Same with me. Same with Rebbie. ‘Remember the bricks?’ we’d say, and then we’d fall about laughing.
So when Cassius Clay arrived on the boxing scene, he presented Joseph with the perfect new example to fold into his lectures. Because here was someone new, who was doubted by the experts yet supreme in his confidence. As we huddled around the radio, Michael and Marlon started shadow boxing to one side as the commentator took us through the first round. Sonny Liston was missing more punches than he landed. ‘That’s all about footwork,’ Joseph said. Mother muttered something about not agreeing with a violent sport but Joseph wasn’t listening – he was too busy translating the commentary. ‘Sonny Liston is like your audience … You’ve got to go out there, tear up the stage and lay ’em out flat!’
That night Cassius Clay won and became the youngest boxer ever to take the title from a reigning heavyweight champion. ‘I shook up the world,’ he told the media. Point made – both in the ring and in the minds of the kids he had no idea were rooting for him in Gary, Indiana.
ON THE GRASS BETWEEN OUR BEDROOM window and 23rd Avenue, there was a tree. During high winds and the tornado warnings that swept across Indiana, Michael and I watched from the window to see how strong that tree really was. It was endlessly fascinating to observe the bout between Mother Nature and the muscle of our tree. It bowed and bent, and ducked and dived like Ali, but it never snapped or uprooted. In my mind, the strongest trees represent family: the parents are the trunk – providing stability – and the branches are the children, sprouting new life in different directions. But everyone belongs to the s
ame tree from the same seed: forever solid, whatever weathers it may face.
I once shared this analogy with Michael and he turned it into a plaque at Neverland. It had been inspired, no doubt, by Joseph telling us as children that our family’s roots were as deep and entwined as a tree’s. A solid family was important to our parents, both of whom came from broken homes. The tug-of-war between his own parents was something Joseph didn’t wish to repeat. Mother’s parents had divorced after moving from Alabama to Indiana: she went to live with her father – Papa Prince – and her sister Hattie with her mother, Mama Martha. Mother and Joseph had vowed to build a family and stick together, preaching to us that nothing and no one should ever come between us.
Before the Jackson 5 ever went public, Joseph took us outside the house one Fall to give us a final lesson to carry through life. He led us to our tree. There were broken twigs strewn all around it and he bent down to collect six, of more or less equal length. He asked us to gather round and pay attention.
He reminded us about togetherness and always looking out for one another. Then he separated one twig from the rest and snapped it in half. ‘They can break one of you when you are separated …’ he said, leaving five thick twigs in his hand. He bunched them tight, side by side, and tried breaking them between his hands and over his knee. Try as he might, with a mill worker’s grip, he couldn’t. ‘… but when you stick together, you are unbreakable,’ he added.
CHAPTER FOUR
Just Kids With a Dream
IN TODAY’S LIGHT, I THINK IT apt that our first true public performance as the Jackson 5 was on 29 August 1965: Michael’s seventh birthday. No one noticed it at the time. Birthdays were like Christmas: non-events that were not marked in the house of Jehovah. But at least Michael’s seventh birthday was different in that it wasn’t another ordinary, unremarkable day.
Evelyn Lahaie, the lady who first suggested our group name, invited us to take part in a child’s fashion event she had organised at the Big Top shopping centre on Broadway and 53rd. She was the commentator on a ‘Tiny Tots Jamboree’ and we were billed as ‘The Jackson Five Musical Group: Another Spectacular Little Folks Band’. All I remember is seeing a decent-sized crowd of young girls and Joseph telling us after the show to ‘get down there and start selling your photos.’
In our eyes, the jamboree was just a warm-up for the proper stage at Jackie and Rebbie’s school, Theodore Roosevelt High, a few months later in 1966. Mother had said at the mall that we’d get to perform at ‘nicer places’. The school held an annual talent contest, featuring a variety of acts from around the city – Gary’s equivalent to The Ed Sullivan Show. We were the youngest act by far and couldn’t wait to get out there.
Backstage, Michael tapped the bongos he still played. Jackie rattled his Maracas and two band members joined us: local boys Earl Gault, our first drummer, and Raynard Jones, who played bass on a couple of occasions. The school hall was packed. It was a paying crowd, too – 25 cents a ticket. We also knew it would include some familiar faces, such as those who had been mushed-up against the living-room window, waiting to laugh at us.
When Tito went for our guitars – left leaning against a wall in the wings – he discovered someone had attempted sabotage by messing with the tuning pegs. Joseph’s advice – ‘Always check your tuning before going on’ – came good in plenty of time. ‘Someone doesn’t want you to win,’ he said, ‘so go out there and show ’em!’
He stood with us in the wings, looking nowhere near as confident as we felt. He was always tense before a show, whether it was the talent-show days or record-label years. For the duration of a set, he had no input and no control. But we couldn’t have been more ready. When we walked on, met by polite applause, we just switched to the auto-pilot of rehearsals. ‘My Girl’ by the Temptations was our opener. As everyone’s quiet curiosity sat in that gap between applause ending and music starting, I looked across to Tito and behind him, in the shadows, to Joseph. Still pensive. Raynard, on bass, gave the song’s intro that opening bounce … and in came Tito on guitar with the melody lick … and Jackie with his Maracas … and Michael poised with his bongos … and then I started to sing.
Our momentum built as I led the vocals into another Temptations number: the more up-tempo ‘Get Ready’. And Jackie, Marlon and Michael killed it front of stage, revving them up for Michael’s lead vocal finale – James Brown’s ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’. By his first verse, the crowd was on its feet. I looked to my right, for Joseph’s approval. Still pensive, arms by his sides. Only his lips were moving as he mouthed the lyrics, fixated on Michael. ‘Eeeeeooowwww!’ Michael screamed. ‘I FEEEEL good …’ With his high-pitched, hyena-like screech, the crowd’s jaws opened as one and they screamed. Then, during our closer, ‘I Got The Feeling’, he made them feel it. He jumped out front of stage and started to dance; a choreographed whirling dervish. Aged seven.
We were not supposed to be this good, but Michael tore up the place. It didn’t matter that this was only our local school. When you’re kids, a screaming crowd is a screaming crowd.
Backstage, post-show, we jumped around, reliving it all. I guess it was like hitting a home-run or scoring a great goal. Joseph was … content. ‘Overall, you did good,’ he told us, ‘but we’ve got some work to do.’
Next thing I remember is the MC announcing us as winners. We bounded on stage. More screaming. Funnily enough, one of the acts we beat was Deniece Williams. A few years later, she released her chart topper ‘Let’s Hear It For The Boy’. We didn’t need Joseph’s approval that night: we were winners first time out and that was good by anyone’s standards.
We went home and celebrated with ice-cream all round. Joseph pointed to a proud corner of the living room – home to a small collection of baseball trophies, speaking to our other obsession in life. Those trophies stood as unintended props to support the one point he always made: being rewarded is about becoming the best.
FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW, WE HAD an open view of the baseball field where we played, next to Theodore Roosevelt High. Had you asked us back then to choose between the musical dream or the sporting dream, I think we’d have opted for baseball. Especially Jackie, the jock of the family. Whenever he was in trouble with Joseph and wanted to run, we always knew where to find him: the dug-out across the way, in front of the bleachers, tossing a ball between hand and glove.
We’d have opted for the baseball dream for the simple reason that it seemed more realistic and three of us were already decent juniors. The miniature gold players swinging a bat on the podium of our trophies were testament to the glory and championships won with the Katz Kittens – the team we played for in Gary’s Little League baseball. We grew up watching the Chicago Cubs, aspiring to follow its stars: Ernie Banks, their first black player, and Ron Santo.
Jackie was so good he had people scouting him and he felt sure a contract was imminent. He was a great pitcher and batsman, hitting home run after home run. Baseball was where his heart was, more than any of us. At games, Michael was like our mini-mascot, sitting with Marlon and Joseph in the bleachers, wearing his mini green-and-white jersey, which came down to the knees of his jeans, chewing his red shoestring candy and cheering whenever one of us got the ball. One weekday evening, there was a ‘big game’ – a playoff or something – with some local rival. I was playing outfield, Tito was on second and Jackie was pitcher. We had started to earn a bit of a reputation as ‘The Jackson Boys’ and Jackie’s pitching was key to that hard-earned kudos.
During the warm-up, the coach hit balls into the air as catch practice and he hit one fly-ball that bounced off the clouds before it came back down. We were always taught to call it, so I ran and kept my eye on the ball, yelling, ‘MINE! I got it …’ Wesley, our catcher who had torn off his mask, was running for the same ball, but he didn’t call it and didn’t hear me. He just kept his eye on the falling ball. Then BOOM! We collided. For the first time, I saw stars without feeling Joseph’s belt on my behind. Wesley’s forehead
hit me across the right eye and split me wide open. He was out cold and blood was everywhere. I remember seeing concerned faces peering down but then they parted as Joseph’s face came into full focus. His pained expression didn’t leave me all the way to the hospital or even as a doctor sewed me up with 14 butterfly stitches. I was bruised, swollen and messed up – my ‘image’ as an entertainer had been put at risk. As Mother thanked God that my sight was not impaired, Joseph cursed himself for allowing such an injury to take place. Then he made the swiftest decision. ‘No more baseball for you, Jermaine,’ he announced. ‘None of you. No more baseball! It’s too dangerous.’
I don’t remember much else about that night except Jackie’s grief for the dream that had ended all because one boy didn’t call the ball. ‘One day you’ll thank me,’ Joseph told him unsympathetically. ‘You’re too young to understand.’
AS ROOSEVELT HIGH’S TALENT CONTEST CHAMPIONS, we entered another competition that pitched us against the winning finalists from other schools in the area. We won that, too, and the Gary Post-Tribune’s flashbulb captured our triumph and trophy for posterity in black-and-white. I remember that grainy photo because of the giant bandage still plastered over my right eyebrow. The importance of first place – that prestige and that trophy – became obvious on the one occasion we didn’t win. It was at Horace Mann High and the reason it sticks in my mind is because of the prize we received for coming second: a brand new colour television.
You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes Page 7