My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  I talked to some brilliant minds in those prisons: minds wasted in a country that hurried to lock them up at the slightest pretext, because these young people were inner-city black, and Hispanic, and sometimes Asian, too. Then I learned how many of these prisons were privately run, for-profit companies—the more prisoners they locked up, the higher their profits—and my blood really started to boil.

  I decided to hold a series of gatherings around the country for hard-core youths either just out of prison or all too likely to go back in. Most would be gang members. Gangs, after all, were the great recruiters of inner-city youth; by the age of twelve, a boy or girl in South Central L.A. either joined a gang and started breaking the law or risked being killed for not joining. Connie helped put out the word, and I paid everyone’s way to Epes, Alabama, a backcountry settlement of former black sharecroppers one hundred miles from the nearest distractions. It now served as a base for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, dedicated to helping black farmers keep their land. After we bunked down, we gathered in the main farmhouse.

  “Okay, Mr. B.,” one of them said, “we’re here. What’s the agenda?”

  “The agenda,” I said, “is to find the agenda.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, look at us,” I said. “Look how we’re suffocating inside the box.” I fed them all these statistics about youth and incarceration: that one out of every three black males in their twenties is in prison on any given day in this country; that the last thirty years have seen a 500 percent increase in America’s prison population, to 2.3 million, more than any other country in the world; that 60 percent of that population are racial and ethnic minorities; that 800,000 are black males. If they were going to change those statistics, I told my new friends, they would have to mobilize, and learn how to fight—not with knives and guns, but with the principles and practices of nonviolence that Martin had learned from Mahatma Gandhi, and I’d learned from Martin.

  A few months later I held a second gathering, this one in Santa Cruz, California. This time most of the participants were Mexican and Native American, largely from gangs. I invited a number of blacks as well, most of them gang members, too. I made the two groups describe themselves to each other, and start noticing what they had in common. Turned out they had a lot in common. Why, then, were they killing each other? Why couldn’t they appreciate the power they’d have if they teamed up against their mutual oppressor, the American justice system, and used the tools of nonviolence to make it change? That led to a treaty between southern California’s Latinos and blacks. The treaty was forged by two truly remarkable young men—Nane Alejándrez, leader of the northern California Latino movement Barrios Unidos, and Bo Taylor from the Los Angeles group Unity One. Both of these men had been deeply involved in the gang world, had served time in the armed forces, and, upon leaving the service, dedicated their lives to gang reform. It was through that work that Connie Rice brought them an ally: of all people, Sheriff Leroy D. Baca of Los Angeles County.

  In gatherings that followed, I kept putting together different pairings: Native Americans and Hispanics, blacks and Asians, blacks and whites. Just as SNCC had done nearly half a century before, we targeted communities, made them our bases, reached out to other groups, and made the network grow. Today The Gathering for Justice is a national movement. Like SNCC, it’s not a membership organization. Each person in its hierarchy has a constituency, and at any moment those leaders mobilize thousands and thousands of grassroots members to engage in campaigns of teaching and practicing nonviolent activism. One campaign, in 2009, took on the high incidence of violence at a Chicago school called North Lawndale College Prep. The school’s one hundred fights a year were part of a larger crisis; more people were killed in the streets of Chicago that year than U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. After a newly formed cadre of “Peace Warriors” at the school were trained in nonviolence, the school achieved a record 150 days of peace, and North Lawndale earned a prestigious Heroes in the Hood award.

  I talk a lot these days with The Gathering’s young leaders around the country. They are, without exception, eloquent and poised, charismatic and committed. I hear them and I wonder: Were we that impressive? Dr. King at twenty-four, and me at twenty-six? Julian Bond and John Lewis at seventeen? The truth is: yes, because we had to be. Just as these youth have to be now.

  I’d thrown myself into The Gathering, and Another Night in the Free World. At the same time, a Canadian producer named Michael Cohl had come to me to propose financing a documentary about my life, to be called Sing Your Song. I was flattered by the pitch, but I had another reason for signing on: Marlon’s death in 2004. I wasn’t entirely surprised that he went when he did; he was eighty and in poor health. What shocked me was all the stories he’d taken with him to his grave, stories that his memoir all but ignored. He’d taken a lot of history with him—not just of Broadway and Hollywood but of the civil rights movement, all his passionate efforts on behalf of blacks and Native Americans—and now that history was gone. I knew I had a history worth recalling. I also knew that a lot of my contemporaries who had their own stories of the movement to tell weren’t getting any younger. If, in my documentary film, I could interview them as well, I could be onboard for that. Cohl agreed, though neither he nor I had any idea the filming would consume six years.

  For starters, a film crew and my producer daughter Gina followed me up to the Harlem apartment on West 156th Street where Marguerite and I lived when Adrienne was a baby, tracing my unlikely path. We sifted through archives for footage of those early rallies for peace, of Paul Robeson, of the Montgomery bus boycott and a young Martin Luther King, Jr., of SNCCers on their voter registration drives, of Birmingham and the March on Washington and Jay Richard Kennedy interviewing civil rights leaders later that day, of Selma and Black Panthers and the assassinations of Bobby and Martin. Gina and I interviewed the survivors: Sidney and Coretta and John Lewis and Julian Bond, and so many more. Seeing all that footage, and all those interviews, was like seeing my entire life unspool. What would I have changed? I had some thoughts on that, but they weren’t worth the time it took to think them. For better or worse, this was my life. My quest. My song.

  All these projects—Another Night in the Free World, The Gathering for Justice, and now Sing Your Song—charged me up and put me on the path to finding an answer to that fundamental question: What next?

  That, I realized, was the same question I’d been asking about my marriage. After forty-eight years, Julie and I were played out. I hadn’t made a move yet, but I knew I would. I just couldn’t abide this husk of a marriage anymore. What next?

  On that one, happily, I knew the answer.

  20

  At David’s wedding on that New York fall day in 2000, I’d looked around the room and marveled at how happy all of my children were with their partners. For all our emotional complexities, we were a family better off than most. Until my gaze landed on Julie. And then I was reminded that of all the couples that made up our family, we were the exception.

  I was not easy to live with. I so often flared with anger; I had an ego that was easily bruised and led to scenes I regretted. I still nursed grievances long past when I should have let them go. I traveled too much, and when tensions arose, I traveled more, which only made things worse. If I went to Paris or London to give a concert, Julie might come with me, happy to indulge in the pampering we got at fine hotels. But she wouldn’t come to the Atlantas or Wichitas, if she could avoid them. Observing that, I began visiting such places more often, until I found myself booking a lot more out-of-the-way concert venues than my popularity could sustain.

  The pantomime we’d put on had lasted for years, and although to the public it might have looked real, at night in that vast West End Avenue apartment, with the children grown and gone, we struggled to be civil, and too often didn’t succeed. I could set my watch to the sound of the ice going into Julie’s glass for the first drink of the even
ing. When she drank, I drank, too. The best part of the ritual was the toasting; for me, the pleasure diminished from there. In the later stages of our marriage, my continuing participation in the drinking game robbed me of any rights to complain about the consequences. Instead of helping Julie drink less, I was the enabler. Nightly, I saw the fog of inebriation settle over us, and hated being enveloped by it. If there was another way to get through an evening at home, I didn’t know what it was. Inevitably we’d fall to arguing, and then retreat to our separate wings, bitter and befuddled. The more we played out those roles, the more I sought distraction—in gambling, sympathetic women, and all the concerts and social causes I could handle. I got to a point where I no longer knew what I wanted; the search itself exhausted me. Until one day I felt a warm and sympathetic glow from a place I least expected it: a woman I’d met long before, not as a date or a dalliance, just as a fellow activist with mutual friends.

  I’d known Pamela Frank casually since a memorable night in September 1982, when Julie and I went to cheer on our old friend Diahann Carroll as she stepped into the lead role of the play Agnes of God for one week while its star, Elizabeth Ashley, was on vacation. (For Diahann, that week led to a run of her own in the play the following spring.) The play’s director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was there, too, along with his very attractive date. Afterward we all ended up at Sardi’s restaurant. Michael’s date, I learned, was a photographer, a divorcée with two children, active in various civil rights causes. I guessed Pam to be quite a few years younger than I was, which in 1982 meant she was in her late thirties. Since she was spoken for, and I was married, I simply regarded her as a very attractive dinner companion. She did make an impression, however, with the story she told me that night.

  “We’ve met before, you know,” Pam said. “Back when I was in college.”

  That’s the kind of line, coming from a beautiful woman, that makes a guy with my kind of record pay attention. I leaned toward her so that this bit of public disclosure would be confined to no greater perimeter than my eardrum.

  “Really?”

  Pam explained that as a student at Syracuse University, she’d gone down to the Bahamas on a spring break with her girlfriends. (One of them, I later found out, was her closest friend, Neilia Hunter, who would go on to marry a young man she’d met on that trip—Joe Biden. Pam never quite got over the fact that Neilia died six years later in a tragic automobile accident, just as Biden’s political star began to rise.) Pam went on to explain that while there, the girls had met actor Sean Connery, who was making the James Bond movie Thunderball. Connery had invited them to stay and be extras. Neilia had preferred to fly back in time for the start of classes, but Pam and some of the other girls had stayed on to be in the film. Arriving alone at the tiny Nassau airport for her flight home, Pam found herself waiting in a line behind me. (I was on my way to a smaller island in the Bahamian chain to spend the week with Sidney.) She’d asked if she could take my picture with her tiny Minox—those little spylike cameras that were all the rage at the time. After a brief chat, I’d agreed.

  “Was that … it?” I asked her at Sardi’s.

  She flashed me a mischievous smile. “No.”

  “Oh,” I said. Now she really had my attention. “Then what?”

  Some time later, Pam explained, her father had called her to report that a flood had ruined everything stored in the family garage, including boxes of negatives from all the pictures Pam had taken. By then, Pam had become a professional photographer. She had covered Broadway shows, shot album covers, book jackets, and political campaigns. She also had her own studio on Madison Avenue, specializing in family portraits and pictures of children. Out of the thousands of negatives she’d had in those boxes, only a few had survived.

  “And …?” I asked.

  “Those were the pictures of you.”

  That was the whole story.

  Four years after that Sardi’s dinner, a powerful South African play called Asinamali! came to Lincoln Center. Pam, who had become very active in the anti-apartheid movement and taken a lot of photographs to publicize the situation in South Africa, was the play’s official photographer. So impressed was she with the play that she called me and a number of others to come see it as prospective backers. I ended up helping underwrite its passage to Broadway, along with Miriam Makeba, Paul Simon, and others. I found myself taking more notice of her. I started calling her to take pictures for various “Free South Africa” fundraisers. That kept us in touch. We attended screening parties Bob and Kathryn Altman gave for many of Bob’s films; Pam knew the Altmans, too. The more I saw of her, the easier I found it to be around her. The more I shared my feelings with her, the less anguished I felt. One day I took her to lunch at the Carlyle. That led to more lunches, and then to dinner, and finally dinner led to breakfast.

  A lot of intimations of mortality at that time had had me asking myself, more urgently, why I was still in my marriage. At sixty-nine I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Like most men who get it these days, I’d undergone an operation that eradicated it completely, though not without a lot of pain and soul-searching. Sidney, in fact, had been diagnosed not long before me with the same problem, and had the operation just weeks before I did. This business of parallels in our lives was getting ridiculous. At least he’d survived the operation, I thought, as I went in for mine! (As I became more knowledgeable about the disease, I was stunned to learn that black men as a group were by far the likeliest victims of prostate cancer. In the black culture, rectal exams conjure up associations with homosexuality, so black men, who must struggle culturally with what is perceived as a stigma, shun them. It’s surely not the sole reason for this troubling statistic, but homophobia greatly pushes the odds. When I recovered, I volunteered to be an advocate for the American Cancer Society, and for a long while, pictures of me and Shari, taken by Francesco Scavullo, flooded New York City’s subways and buses with a blunt message to black men: Being skittish about rectal exams for prostate cancer is a good way to end up dead.) Still, how much time did I have left, really, and how was I spending it? In my sessions with Peter Neubauer, we talked about the sense I had that I was always running from something, and never fast enough.

  One night in 2004 I came back to the apartment from a round of errands in advance of yet another road trip. Julie had called dinner for 6:30; I got home at 7:00. The libations, I saw, had been flowing freely: Julie was glassy-eyed and angry. Angry for my half-hour lateness? I wondered. Or at our whole life together? After a few choice words about my tardiness, she declared, “If you decide to ever eat tonight, your dinner’s in the oven. I’m going to bed.”

  This was hardly the first time I’d been late for dinner. So why was this scene, which had played itself out so many times before, circling the room like a vampire looking for blood? Something was different.

  I felt angry and trapped, but then I’d always felt that way. Trapped by my mother, by poverty, by being my brother’s keeper at the age of five, by my father and what he did, by living in Jamaica on a plantation, by having a nomadic childhood, by dropping out of school and having to work at dead-end jobs, by feeling a failure and then, when I did succeed, never trusting my victories. Trapped, too, by the responsibility I felt for the global poor; trapped by the ignorant right-wing politics that made the plight of the poor so much worse. And now I was in my seventies! Maybe I’d never stop feeling suffocated by all that. But I sure didn’t need to keep fighting for air in an airless marriage.

  “It’s over,” I told Julie.

  “What’s over?” she said.

  “Our life together is over.”

  She sneered. “Again?”

  That really threw me. She was right: I’d stepped away in frustration before but never left, bound as I was by guilt and all the other binding agents of marriage and parenthood. This time felt different. I might be at an age—seventy-seven—when almost no man breaks the domestic pattern of his life and leaves his wife. But this was it. This w
as what I had to do. Julie didn’t know it yet, although I’m sure she sensed it. Our life was over. Whatever divorce would bring—whatever—I was ready to take it on, no matter the cost.

  For some years now, Julie and I had basically led separate lives in our vast, U-shaped apartment, with a whole wing for each of us. Now we went further, shutting the folding doors of the connecting living room. Since each side had originally been a separate apartment with its own elevator line, we didn’t need to see each other at all. I started making the requisite calls to lawyers and financial managers. They warned me that the cost of untangling forty-seven years of marriage would be considerable. As they started to explain the details of the process, there was no question it was going to exact a great emotional toll, beginning with our having to sell the apartment.

  That was difficult. For me, and Julie, too, those twenty-one rooms still echoed with our children’s laughter, parties and weddings, and the voices of an era—John F. Kennedy, Martin, Sidney, SNCCers, Black Panthers, and so many others. Only half jokingly, Clarence Jones, Martin’s lawyer, had declared the apartment should be registered as an historic site, open for the public to see where Martin and his kitchen cabinet had met so many times to plan the movement’s next goals.

  Put up for sale in August 2005, the apartment was bought by Abigail Disney, Walt’s niece. We had a home in St. Maarten, too, on a beach with a truly beautiful view of the sea. I had bought it from my friend Chris Blackwell. I loved that place. But we’d made so few visits there with the children and friends, because drinking had turned many a beautiful sunset into a blurred horizon of disappointment. I’d imagined retiring there eventually. But that wasn’t to be. It, too, was put up for sale.