I felt gospel music deeply at Rose Hill Baptist, but I didn’t see the point of all of the churchgoing. I heard a lot of fire and brimstone from the pulpit, a lot of do this and don’t do that, give yourself to Jesus or God is going to burn you to a crisp forever. Something about it just didn’t sit right with me. I had a healthy respect for the Creator, but I never, ever believed in the God of fear. The notion that God favored some and didn’t favor others rang false. I questioned not so much what was right or wrong but what was the way to actually know God.
In the Pentecostal church, women screamed and briefly fainted, which actually scared some of us kids. Avoiding the scene, I sometimes, to Mama’s disappointment and anger, would sneak out of the church and hang out with my friends.
Memphis during my youth was tough. Mama had a brother named Tuck who was a nasty dude. Big and black, he had a hell of a negative presence. He was loud, boisterous, and rude, and he also constantly had alcohol on his breath and a half pint of liquor in a brown paper bag sticking out of his pocket. He always carried a razor, the old single-edge barbershop style, which he would whip out at a moment’s notice.
“See this razor, boy, dis is why nobody fucks wit me,” he said to me more than once.
I didn’t want to look at the razor, or at Tuck. He was like 90 percent of the males around me at that time, guys who would talk a lot of foolishness, spend their paycheck over the weekend, and not have any cash come Monday. They also would beat their women, sometimes unmercifully, then cry and ask for forgiveness. They were such jive-ass cats.
In contrast, Mama’s younger sister Edna epitomized cute. I would overhear Mama tell her friends, “My baby sister is pretty and a little fast.” She got a lot of male attention and always had a boyfriend. One of her boyfriends went by the name of Son. I repeatedly had run-ins with the forty-five-year-old Son, who didn’t like me from day one. I avoided him like the plague. Sometimes I was successful, sometimes I wasn’t.
“Hey, half-breed,” he’d say.
“What?” I’d say, turning away from him.
“Stay out of my motherfuckin’ way.”
I said nothing.
“You better say something, or I’ll beat your high-yellow ass right now.”
I nodded yes.
His threats and name-calling were one of the first indicators that my fair skin was unacceptable. There were not many kids around with my skin tone. Over time, I would become aware that black folks had a hierarchy based on skin complexion. I didn’t know what the categories meant historically or psychologically, but I knew they suggested something serious. I saw a picture of Ralph Bunche in the newspaper, probably after he got his Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. I said to myself, He looks like me. Why am I not OK?
The run-ins with Son were balanced by visiting an older guy named Hundee. While sitting on his porch, corncob pipe in his mouth, rocking back and forth, he’d tell jokes. Short jokes, long jokes, corny jokes, and a few off-color jokes. I’d sit at his feet and just laugh and laugh. His jokes have never left me. Perhaps it was his heavy, slow Mississippi drawl that amused me, but I remember those moments as pure joy. I never left his presence without a smile on my face.
King Cotton was a huge part of the Memphis economy. The city’s location on the Mississippi River had made it a hub for the lucrative cotton trade for decades. Several months out of the year I spent time away from Memphis in Osceola, Arkansas. Mama’s sister Edna (not the Edna who was my birth mother) would sometimes stay there. I think Mama, being the older one, felt an obligation to follow her around and keep an eye on her. Edna somehow convinced Mama that a good living could be made picking and chopping cotton.
Osceola was the country, the real country. Beyond the beautiful courthouse on the main drag, this was rural living like I had never witnessed—and I hated it. Wide-open spaces connected to mile upon mile of wooded land. I’d wake up with mosquito bites all over my body. I had to keep my eye open for poisonous cottonmouths and copperheads lurking in the high grass. I used to fish about every day in Osceola—not for sport, but for food. I caught, cleaned, and ate enough fish to last me two lifetimes. My hands would be raw with those tiny fish-scale cuts.
There was outdoor plumbing too. The little dark outhouse scared me. Sitting on that flat piece of wood with my butt not fully covering the hole, I’d feel like I was going to fall into its stinky abyss. Newspaper or the Montgomery Ward catalog served as toilet paper. Osceola had its benefits, though. On the porch of the general store there was a black man with a beat-up brown acoustic guitar who would sing primitive blues, wearing bib overalls and a white V-neck T-shirt. White folks would stop and listen a minute or two as they came in and out. The racial barrier between whites and blacks was even stronger in Osceola than in Memphis, but I felt that these white folks respected his talent as they smiled and tapped their feet. He had a bottleneck on his finger that he would slide up and down his guitar neck. That sound blew my mind.
During our stays in Arkansas, sometimes we traveled a little ways from Osceola to the town of Joiner to pick even more cotton. Joiner was so tiny that it just had a sign that said “Joiner” on the main road, and as soon as you passed its turnoff, you were out of the city of Joiner. The long main road had nothing but cotton fields on both sides. I was there to bring buckets of water to everyone picking cotton in the hot, oppressive southern sun. I’d watch the pickers bend over and efficiently pull the cotton out of the husk, depositing it in big brown burlap sacks that they all had hanging from their sides. As they moved down the field row, the sack would get longer and wider until a lady arrived to empty the contents into a huge wicker basket that she carried on the top of her head. This hard-ass, backbreaking work went on for twelve hours. I learned how hard my people worked to build this country.
On one of my walks back from getting water, with the work group at least a half mile off in the distance, I heard a clear, strong voice saying, “Stop.” I believed this was the voice of God.
“Why do we have to die?” I asked.
“You will live forever, you are immortal.”
I was a little scared at first, but then a refreshing cool wind blew. A sense of calm came over me that I continue to seek to this day—an awesome, peaceful feeling. The only words I knew then to describe this overwhelming experience was the Holy Spirit that they talked about in church. I had a deep knowing that everything was going to be all right. I knew I could depend on God. Even if I couldn’t depend on anything or anyone else, I could depend on him. It seemed like we made a covenant together that day, and he became my friend.
Master told me one day
I’d find peace in every way
But in search for the clue
Wrong things I was bound to do
Keep my head to the sky
For the clouds to tell me why
As I grew, and with strength
Master kept me as I repent and he said
Keep your head to the sky
—“Keep Your Head to the Sky,” Head to the Sky, 1973
The following fall I was back at La Rose Elementary School in Memphis. I hid, fought, and ran away from kids, as many of them were teasing me about my high-yellow skin. I certainly couldn’t identify with the whites. To them, I was just another nigger. I also couldn’t identify with the blacks, because of the half-breed status bestowed upon me. I tried to compensate by trying to be more “black.” I tried to play it elementary-school cool, but it didn’t stop the taunting and teasing.
I was fighting damn near every day. I didn’t start fights, but as time went on I didn’t back away from them, either. I had a mouth on me. I talked cash money stuff, and my tongue became the provocateur. There were one-on-one fights and group fights. First there would be pushing and shoving matches, usually ending with some cuss words and the threat of another fight tomorrow. Later it evolved into full-on punches thrown, cuts and scrapes. If you cried, that guaranteed that you would become a target for any boy who wanted to show he was tough.
It felt like I could not count on anyone except God. Boys don’t go to their mama for this stuff. You suck it up. Still, I was exhausted by the regular confrontations. I was convinced it wasn’t the bullies’ fault, that my yellow skin alone was to blame. The duress caused by the bullies was spiritually transformative for me. I prayed, pleaded with God over and over again, that I would wake up in the morning and my skin would be dark. This went on for years. I didn’t realize it then, but in my unanswered prayer, my concept of God was gradually starting to form. I came to see God as steadfast and still sovereign; he provided for me, and yet he was not beholden to my prayers. This kept me in my head a lot, as I continued to pray, kept on appealing to God about my complexion. Eventually I would learn that it was the personal relationship with God that mattered most.
I was also teased about what I wore. It seemed everybody had better clothes than me. The clothes I had were either stuff that Mama got from white folks she worked for or hand-me-downs from other sources. My pants were patched on the inside and the outside, and they rubbed and scratched my legs. My shirts were often too big. Even though Mama always demanded that my clothes be clean, neat, and pressed, I still felt ashamed, since early on I took pride in being well groomed.
Some years before, when Mama came home from working for a new white family, she’d carried an overstuffed brown paper bag through the door, saying, “Come here Sandy, I got some clothes for you.” Even though I was always happy to get an upgrade in clothes, I was not impressed with what she was pulling out of the bag until she held up a cowboy outfit. It was beautiful—a poncho with a red-and-yellow plaid design on the lower half. The pants had a white line down the sides. It came with a holster and two toy guns. What boy doesn’t want to be a cowboy? It quickly became my most prized possession. I pleaded with Mama to let me wear it to school. Of course the answer was no, and she even limited the time I could wear it on the weekend. Even in the hot Memphis summers, I wanted to wear my cowboy outfit.
Time passed, but my desire to have cool clothing continued throughout my childhood. One day I saw a drum and bugle corps marching through my neighborhood, and they had these beautiful shiny uniforms—shiny buckles, clean stripes down the side of the pants leg. They looked like the dress blues of a military general. I absolutely had to have one. I already had toy drumsticks, which I beat regularly on the front porch. I auditioned for a snare-drum position. To my surprise I was accepted in the drum and bugle corps, even though, at the time, my biggest goal was getting one of those uniforms.
The neighborhood I grew up in in Memphis was called Third and Virginia. The houses were nothing to speak of. None were professionally built. Some of the floors were uneven to the point that when you walked from one room to another, you had to step up or step down a little. Many of the houses were set on cinder blocks, with stacked cinder-block steps, which made for easy access to the front porch. We blacks lived on one side of the railroad tracks, and on the other side were the white folks, who we unaffectionately called peckerwoods. I developed a friendship with David Porter, who lived on the other side of the hill. We made mud pies together, rode horses with broken broomsticks and string.
David and I got the music bug early. We weren’t obsessed with sports like other kids. He and I had a little gospel quartet with a couple of brothers with the last name Cunningham. When I was six years old, we sang at a church at the top of the hill, the Rose Hill Baptist Church. It was the seed of our mutual musical beginnings.
Around the time I turned twelve, Mother Dear wrote me a letter, requesting that I come to Chicago for a few days. It had been eight years since I had seen her face. I hadn’t heard from her much—almost not at all. She seemed overjoyed when I arrived. She had some people she wanted me to meet. Leaning down and extending his hand to me was Dr. Adams. She then introduced me to my new brothers and sisters: Verdine, Geri, Monte, and baby Patt. They all looked at me with stark curiosity as if to say, Who is this? I didn’t stay long. After I returned home, I would receive letters from Mother Dear more often—still not a lot, but more.
That same spring I came home from school to find a gigantic box in the living room, “Maurice White” written in large letters on it. I stood there and looked at it for a little while in awe before tearing into the thick cardboard with Mama’s help. I was shocked. My stepdad had sent me the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life—a burgundy bicycle with a shiny black vinyl seat and sparkling chrome handlebars. It was awesome, the cat’s meow and the dog’s bowwow. The bike symbolized so much to me. I felt like somebody who I didn’t even know loved me, and loved me a lot. Even though it was a material gift, with that gift Dr. Adams became my dad.
The gesture did so much for my self-esteem. It was my first taste of a tangible sense of self-worth. I rode that bike every day. I felt independent. I could say to my friends with authority, “I have a daddy, he lives in Chicago, he sent me this bike.” I stood a little taller, and I smiled a little wider.
2
As I Yearn, So I Learn
Once upon a time a child was born
With a light to carry on,
Didn’t know what he had to be, had a feelin’
He was bound to see
—“Yearnin’ Learnin’,” That’s the Way of the World, 1975
Right before Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was elected president, David and I both moved from Third and Virginia to the new twenty-six-acre Lemoyne Gardens housing projects. We went from living down the street from one another to living straight across the grounds of Lemoyne Gardens. With the hundreds of families that lived there, we were a stone’s throw apart. I considered it part of our shared destiny that we moved there almost at the same time. The government-subsidized apartments were not “the projects” of today. They were brand spanking new. Our unit was a one-bedroom. Mama gave me the bedroom, and she slept in the living room on a pullout sofa. It wasn’t much, but 919A Memorial Drive defined a big step up for Mama and me. Mama went out and purchased some furniture, and that shit was so cheaply made that it didn’t even last nine months.
We lived in the front of the complex, where there was a playground with lampposts that would illuminate a small portion of an otherwise very dark area. When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, we’d stand around those lampposts and sing songs by the Flamingos, the Dominos, the Drifters, and others. Or, as I used to say on tour, “When the streetlight was the spotlight and the corner was the stage.”
We entered Porter Junior High School in the fall of 1957, and David and I were deep under the spell of music. I fell in love with the Spaniels’ velvety harmonies. This was the doo-wop era, which had grown out of the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots days of the 1940s. Doo-wop had more gospel and early rock-and-roll influences, using group harmonies, usually with a high tenor or a low deep bass voice as the featured singer. From boyhood through my teenage years, this music dominated the radio. As much as I loved singing, it was the grooves that turned me on. When the drumbeats were out front on a hit record like Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” I took note, learning the tom-tom rudiments by beating on schoolbooks with my drumsticks.
The tall beige hallways of Porter Junior High were a place of change for me. Previously, I hadn’t taken teachers too seriously, though I wasn’t rude or boisterous. I couldn’t be—teachers did not tolerate foolishness in my day. The paddle in the principal’s office looked like a boat oar, and he wasn’t afraid to use it. Schools weren’t having it, and parents backed up the schools’ discipline.
My lack of seriousness was not lost on one of my teachers, Mrs. Gossett. Short and stout like Mama, and dark-skinned, she had those scoop glasses that she would look over and down at you. She was a pleasant lady, but she was always on my ass. “Straighten up, White,” she told me, “you must apply yourself more.” I quickly began to see her as more than a giver of grades. She cared, and I wanted to please her. She made me learn all the state capitals. “Know your country,” she would say. She stressed the importance of reading
as the way to a better life. “You want to go to Paris? Pick up a book and go there in your mind,” she’d say. I credit her with sparking my lifelong love of reading.
Walking into the band room at Porter Junior High, I saw a clean-cut kid practicing scales on the saxophone with speed and accuracy. Looking up, he immediately stopped playing.
“Don’t stop, you sound great,” I said.
“Just practicing,” he replied.
“I’m Maurice White.”
“I’m Booker Jones. Do you play?”
“I play drums.”
“We should play together sometime.”
Nothing was the same after I met Booker T. Jones. My musical spirit awoke in a new way. Booker radiated creativity and was way ahead of me in his musicianship. I was in the eighth grade, and Booker was probably a grade or two lower. I had just started formally playing drums. Booker could play sax, bass, trombone, clarinet, and very soon piano—and of course, later, organ. He was always studying music and taking formal lessons. His dad was a science teacher and his mom was a school principal, which made him well-to-do. At the time, I didn’t know of anyone who had two parents who were both professionals. Mostly, in the 1950s, black kids’ parents had blue-collar jobs. The Joneses lived in a nice house on Edith Avenue, and his dad had a beautiful car. Booker was well-spoken. He was classy, like his parents.
Booker T. and I became fast friends, spending most of our spare time together. Booker was shy—even shyer than I was, and that’s saying a lot. As we spent time together, gradually I started to become more outgoing. I think we both did. Booker’s musical passion, along with his quiet temperament, kind of opened me up. He was like the brother I never had.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 2