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CHAPTER FIVE Cry Freedom

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‘IF THEY LIKE YOU HERE, THEY’LL like you anywhere,’ Joseph said, in the van en route to New York City. Destination: the world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem – a place ‘where stars are made’.

All the way from Indiana, he talked up a storm about what this venue meant and the singers who had triumphed here: Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, tap-dancer Bill ‘Bo Jangles’ Robinson … and James Brown. In an era when black faces on television were still relatively rare, the Apollo was the platform for African-American acts. ‘But if you get it wrong, make a mistake, this audience will turn on you. Tonight, you have to be on your game,’ he continued.

We honestly weren’t intimidated: we knew that winning over the crowd meant we’d be walking through a door towards bigger things, so what greater motivation could there be for young boys with a dream? Sometimes there were benefits to being lambs in the entertainment industry – our innocence made us blind to the enormity of certain occasions. We pulled up beneath the Apollo sign, which hung vertically, lit sunset orange at night.

When we first went in, the walls were lined with the photographs of legends. We walked the corridors and then noticed the shabby carpet. Joseph asked us to imagine the feet that had worn it away; to imagine the kind of shoes we were walking in. We had our own dressing room with a mirror surrounded by light-bulbs and a chrome clothes rack on wheels. And the microphones popped up electronically from beneath the stage, all space age.

Inside our dressing room, Michael stepped up on a seat with Jackie and pushed up the window to look out. ‘There’s a basketball court!’ shouted Jackie. That brought a new burst of excitement. We wanted to get outside and shoot some baskets, but then Joseph walked in. Everyone jumped into line and pretended to be focused again. Time to get serious. I don’t know if Joseph ever realised how nonchalant we were on the inside about performing, but he knew Harlem wasn’t Chicago. The Apollo crowd was well versed in entertainment: it knew its music. If things went badly, disgruntled murmurs grew into boos, followed by missiles of tin cans, fruit and popcorn. When things went well, they were up on their feet, singing, clapping and dancing. No one walked off the Apollo stage and asked, ‘How did I do?’

Before going on, we sensed the buzz of a full house. Michael and Marlon stood in front of Tito, Jackie, Johnny and me in the shadows and whoever was on before us wasn’t getting the greatest reaction. The boos were loud and unforgiving. Then a can landed onstage, followed by an apple core. Marlon, startled, turned to us. ‘They’re throwin’ stuff!’

Joseph looked at us as if to say, ‘I’m telling you …’

Between the curtains, backstage and hidden from public view, there was a section of tree trunk. It was the Apollo’s ‘Tree of Hope’ chopped from a felled tree that had once stood in the Boulevard of Dreams, otherwise known as Seventh Avenue, between the old Lafayette Theater and Connie’s Inn. In an ancient superstition, black performers touched that tree, or basked beneath its branches, for good luck. It had come to symbolise hope for African-American acts in the same way that the tree outside our home symbolised unity. Michael and Marlon duly stroked the ‘Tree of Hope’, but I don’t think Lady Luck had anything to do with the performance we gave that night.

We rocked the Apollo and the crowd was soon on its feet. I don’t think we brought a finer performance to any venue in our pre-Motown days and we ended up winning the Superdog Amateur Finals Night. We must have impressed management because we were invited back … this time as paid performers. That May of 1968, we were on the same bill for an Apollo night with Etta James, the Coasters and the Vibrations. We knew we’d done good at the highest level. What we didn’t know was that a television producer had been sitting in the audience, taking notes and developing a keen interest.

A SHORT JEWISH LAWYER WHO ALWAYS wore suits arrived on the scene. Apparently Richard Aarons had knocked on Joseph’s hotel-room door in New York and sold his services. We were introduced to the debonair and playful Richard as the man ‘who is helping us get to where you need to be.’ As the son of the chairman of a musicians’ union in New York, Richard had useful connections.

Straightaway, Richard put together a professional pitch-package that contained our Steeltown hits, newspaper cuttings of rave reviews, promotional material and a letter explaining why the Jackson 5 should be given a chance. It was dispatched to labels such as Atlantic, CBS, Warner and Capitol. In addition, Joseph personally mailed a package to Motown Records in Detroit, addressed to Mr Berry Gordy, hoping to follow up on Gladys Knight’s recommendation. Apparently he used to tell Mother: ‘I’m going to take the boys to Motown if it’s the last thing I do!’

Many weeks later, and with us still technically attached to Steeltown Records, Joseph brought in an envelope, opened it and our demo tape slid out on to the table … Returned and rejected by Motown.

THE BEST THING ABOUT JOURNEYING THE Chitlin’ Circuit was the feeling that we were always tiptoeing in the shadows of the greats. We had already found ourselves in the dressing room of Gladys Knight and on the same stage as the Delfonics, the Coasters, the Four Tops and the Impressions but two thrilling ‘meets’ were golden and both at the Regal in Chicago.

On the first occasion, we were either waiting for Smokey Robinson to head to rehearsal or go onstage to perform. I can’t remember which. But Joseph reassured us that if we hung around and behaved ourselves, we’d get to meet the greatest songwriter of all time. That was one of the few times we’d ever feel butterflies in the stomach: getting ready to meet one of our heroes was more nerve-racking than performing.

When Smokey walked up to us and stopped to talk, we couldn’t believe he was actually taking time out for us. But there he stood, in a black turtleneck and pants, smiling broadly and shaking our hands, asking who we were and what we did. Michael was always intrigued by another artist’s way of doing things. He peppered Smokey with questions. How did you write all those songs? When do the songs come to you? I don’t remember the answers but I’ll guarantee that Michael did. Smokey gave us a good five minutes – and when he walked away, you know what we talked about? His hands. ‘Did you feel how soft his hands were?’ whispered Michael.

‘No wonder,’ I said. ‘He ain’t done nothing but write songs.’

‘They were softer than Mother’s!’ Michael added.

When we burst through the door in Gary, it was the first thing we told Mother, too. ‘MOTHER! We met Smokey Robinson – and you know how soft his hands were?’

That’s what people forget. We were fans long before we became anything else.

The day we met Jackie Wilson we advanced one stage further with our VIP access: we were invited into his hallowed dressing room. It was ‘hallowed’ because, to us, he was the black Elvis before the white Elvis had come along, one of those once-in-every-generation entertainers. Jackie and his revue were regular headliners at the Regal so our sole focus that day was to meet him. After Joseph had had a word with someone, we got the ‘Okay, five minutes’ privilege that our boyhood cuteness often bought. I’ll say this about our father: he knew how to open doors.

This big-name door opened and we entered single file from the darkness of the corridor into the brightness cast by the light-bulbs arcing around the dressing-table mirror, where Jackie was seated with his back to us. He had a towel wrapped into a thick collar to protect his white shirt from the foundation and eye-liner he was self-applying.

It was Michael who spoke up first, politely wondering if he could ask him some questions.

‘Sure, go ahead, kid,’ said Jackie, speaking to our reflections in his mirror.

He then bombarded him with questions. How does it feel when you go on stage? How much do you rehearse? How young were you when you started? My brother was relentless in his quest for knowledge.

But it was Joseph who handed us the biggest piece of information to take away that night: he told us that some of Jackie Wilson’s songs had been written by none other than Mr Gordy, the founder of Motown. (‘Lonely Teardrops’ had been Mr Gordy’s first No. 1.)

In meeting both Smokey Robinson and Jackie Wilson, we all knew theirs was the level where we needed to be. Maybe that was what Joseph had been doing all along: introducing us to the kings so that we, too, would want to rule. It was almost like he was saying, ‘This can be you – but you’ve got to keep working at it.’

I wish I could remember the pearls of show-business wisdom that each man left us with – because each one had ‘sound advice’, according to Joseph – but those words are now buried treasure somewhere deep in my mind. Michael hoarded these influences, absorbing every last detail: the way they talked, moved, spoke – and how their skin looked and felt. He watched them on stage with the scrutiny of a young director, focusing on Smokey’s words, focusing on Jackie’s feet. Then, in the van going home afterwards, he became the most vocal and animated out of all of us: ‘Did you hear when he said …’ or ‘Did you notice that …’ or ‘Did you see Jackie do that move …’ My brother was a master studier of people and never forgot a thing, filing it away in a mental folder he might well have called ‘Greatest Inspirations & Influences’.

WE WERE NOW EARNING ABOUT 500 dollars a show and our father worked us harder than ever, with an unremitting expectation of precision. ‘We’ve done this over and over. WHY are you forgetting what to do?’ he shouted, when a song or a move broke down – and then reminded us that James Brown used to fine his Famous Flames whenever they made a mistake.

But fines weren’t Joseph’s choice of sanction. Whippings were. Marlon got it the most because he was singled out as the weak link in the chain. It’s true that he wasn’t the most co-ordinated, and he had to work 10 times harder than the rest of us, but none of us saw anything in him that hampered our performance. But Marlon became the excuse for Joseph to cram in extra rehearsal time and keep us indoors more. It would turn out there was a deeper reason behind all this, but that would dawn later.

One time there was a step Marlon just couldn’t master and Joseph’s patience snapped. He ordered him outside to get a ‘switch’ – a skinny branch – from the tree outside. We watched as Marlon chose the stick with which we knew Joseph was going to beat him – from the very tree he had used to symbolise family and unity. ‘When you forget,’ Joseph barked, ‘it’s the difference between winning and losing!’ As he struck Marlon on the back of the legs, Michael ran away in tears, unable to watch.

The sight of that switch made us all dig deeper in rehearsals but time and again, Marlon messed up. ‘BOY! Go out there and get a switch!’ Marlon tried to get clever – taking his time to find the skinniest, weakest branch to lessen the impact. ‘NO! You go back out there and get a bigger one!’ said Joseph. Marlon learned to scream louder than it actually hurt. That way, the beating stopped sooner. What Marlon didn’t hear was the talk about turning the Jackson 5 into the Jackson 4.

‘He can’t do it, he’s out of step and out of tune, and he’s ruining our chances!’ Joseph told Mother. But over her dead body was Marlon going to be kicked out and scarred for life: Mother picked her battles, and Marlon stayed in the group.

I’ll say this about Marlon: he’s the most tenacious of us all. He knew his limits but never stopped trying to push beyond them. Whenever we took a break, he kept on practising. He even used the walk to school to rehearse. There we were, a group of brothers ambling to school, and Marlon broke out, dancing on the sidewalk, going through his steps, moving sideways.

From the middle bunk at bedtime, we heard Michael reassuring Marlon – ‘You’re doing good, you’ll get there, keep at it.’ At school, Michael would use break-time to show Marlon spins and different moves. As lovers of Bruce Lee movies, we had our own nunchucks – martial-art sticks – and Michael used to take them to school (rules were more lenient in the days when kids didn’t use weapons to harm one another). Michael and Marlon were like poetry in motion, using the nunchaku techniques to practise fluidity, flexibility and grace in movement. I think this was why Marlon eventually became an accomplished dancer, too – because he put in the extra hours. But Michael hated Joseph using his own excellence as the measure by which he judged his brother. He hated the way that such unforgiving scrutiny always planted doubt: ‘Was that good enough? Was that what he wanted? Did I make a mistake?’ – the early whisperings of a rabid self-doubt that would compel each one of us to worry if our best was our best.

Maybe the resentment this stoked was what lay behind Michael’s rebellion. During rehearsals, if Joseph asked him to do a certain new step, or try a new move, Michael, whose developing freestyle required no instruction, refused. At the age of nine, he had turned from a compliant, ask-me-to-do-anything child into the stubborn kid with attitude. ‘Do it, Michael,’ said Joseph, glaring, ‘or there’ll be trouble!’

‘NO!’

‘I’m not going to ask you again.’

‘NO – I wanna go outside and play!’

Michael became one of those kids who strained against imposed order, pushing his luck more than we ever dared. Inevitably, he received the switch. Time and again, he stood at the tree, crying, trying to choose his branch. Buying time. I remember getting the switch once – for not doing some chore – but Marlon (for errors) and Michael (for blatant disobedience) received it the most.

There were times when Mother felt Joseph was administering his punishment too hard. ‘Stop, Joseph! Stop!’ she begged, trying to make him see through his red mist.

In time, Joseph would learn that the switch was not the most effective man-management tool because it made Michael recoil so far. He barricaded himself in the bedroom, or hid under the bed, refusing to come out – and that ate into precious rehearsal time. Once he screamed in Joseph’s face that he would never sing again if he laid another hand on him. It was left to us, the older brothers, to talk Michael down and coax him with candy: it was amazing what the prospect of a Jawbreaker could do.

Let’s also not forget that Michael was a big tease and it wasn’t all tears and tantrums. If watching The Three Stooges taught him anything, it was how to be silly and he loved to tease. He’d make this face where he opened his eyes real wide, puffed out his cheeks and pursed his lips – and he did this whenever someone was talking all serious. Once, Joseph was lecturing me about a missed chore. It wasn’t serious enough for a spanking, but I had to stand there while he gave me a good talking-to. As he stood across from me – his face thunderous – I spotted Michael behind him, making that face. I tried to focus on Joseph but Michael stuck his fingers in both ears, knowing he’d got me. I started smirking. ‘BOY! Are you laughing at me?’ yelled Joseph. By which time, Michael had darted into our bedroom, out of sight.

He and Marlon even dreamed up a new nickname for Joseph behind his back: ‘Buckethead’. They would say it behind his back, or whisper it when he was near and crack into fits of giggles. We also called him ‘The Hawk’ – because Joseph liked to think he saw and knew everything. That was the one nickname we told him about. He liked it – it sounded respectful.

JOSEPH’S TEMPER AND DISCIPLINARIAN UPBRINGING ARE never going to win much support today, but as I moved through my teenage years, I began to understand the thinking behind the beatings. We didn’t know it at the time, but our parents worried about the growing influence of gang violence in the mid-sixties, which led to a crop of youth gangs. The Indiana Police Department set up its own Gang Intelligence Unit and there was talk at school of automatic weapons and FBI surveillance in the neighbourhood. In Chicago 16 youths were shot in one week, two fatally.

At the Regal Theater, the management went to the extreme of hiring uniformed police officers to patrol the lobby and ticket booths because gangs were terrorising the region. It was this unease and local talk that spread to the ears of fathers at the steel mill. Joseph wasn’t just determined to save us from a life of struggle at The Mill but to keep us from gang involvement – and wrecking our, and his, dream. As he would tell newspaper reporters in 1970: ‘In our neighbourhood, all of the kids got into trouble and we felt that it was very important for the family to involve themselves in activities which would keep them off the streets and away from the temptations of the modern age.’

Gang-bangers preyed on the impressionable (which we all were) and, in a city where the divorce rate was high and kids had little respect for their fathers, gang recruitment brought many kids a sense of belonging, of family, and a chance to earn the love of ‘brothers’. That, and the prospect of something terrible happening to us, was what Joseph dreaded. His dread was heightened when Tito was ambushed on his way home from school and held at gunpoint for his lunch money. The first we knew was when Tito burst through the front door, screaming that some kid had tried to kill him.

Joseph responded by doing two things. He ensured we had a purpose: we had constant rehearsals, which meant we had to come home and couldn’t go out to play. He then turned himself into a greater force of fear. In becoming the tyrant at home, he prevented us submitting to the tyrants on the street. It worked: we were more scared of him than we were of any gang member. Michael noted that Joseph had more patience with us at the beginning, but then his discipline hardened. The timing coincided with the increase in gang violence. Throughout our childhood, we had only ever been encouraged to play with one another and sleepovers with friends were never allowed. Apart from Bernard Gross and next-door neighbour Johnny Ray Nelson, we didn’t really get to know other children.

‘Letting the outside in’, as Mother put it, was fraught with risk because none of us could know what a child from another family might bring in terms of bad thoughts, bad habits and domestic troubles. ‘Your best friends are your brothers,’ she said.

In our minds, ‘outsiders’ were people to be wary of and when you’re raised like that, it can only go two ways: you either become extremely guarded and mistrusting of anyone who isn’t family, or you bounce to the opposite extreme and let anyone in, reacting to the restrictions of the past.

Once the gang threat had become an issue, we were kept indoors more and even kept back from school on the last day of the year because that was thought to be when kids settled scores. Joseph even considered moving us to Seattle ‘because it’s safer there.’ At his hands, we may have seen stars as he beat our asses with a leather belt, the switch and sometimes the broken cord from the iron, but we never saw a knife, a gun, a knuckle-duster, a police cell or a hospital emergency room. I guess Joseph did what he felt was right at the time, in that era, in those circumstances.

TITO AND I REGULARLY WALKED THE fields that led from our house to the Delaney Projects where all the gangs congregated. This was our back route to our new school, Beckman Middle. One day, we saw a police officer standing by a big patch of blood in the snow. We asked him what had happened. He told us we didn’t want to know. But, kids being kids, we pressed him for the answer. He used a long word to make it sound less gory. We took this word home for translation: ‘decapitated’. Someone had been ‘decapitated’. The horror on Mother’s face was matched in the following weeks when I told her that my walk to school wasn’t so bad: the gang-bangers were real friendly and waved, giving us credit for being the Jackson 5. ‘Those boys are not good, Jermaine. You heard what your father said – steer clear of them.’ So the walk to school, through the Projects, with the clothes-lines, abandoned toys and junk wrecks parked up, became a constant head-down-don’t-look-at-anyone exercise.

But then the gangs, and their fights, started encroaching nearer our street. From our front window, we witnessed about three bad rumbles between rival gangs. As the gangs moved in – one coming down 23rd Avenue, the other from the far end of Jackson Street – Mother screamed for us to get inside and shut all doors and windows. Our five little heads must have looked like a row of Afro wigs as we lined up at the window, spying the action.

One time, things got out of hand. Two gangs decided to rendezvous on our corner and school had been abuzz with talk of this showdown. When the day came, we were locked indoors. We knew trouble was near when we heard shouting. And then the pop of a gunshot. That was when we hit the deck. ‘Get down! Everyone down!’ Joseph yelled. Inside the house, the family kissed the carpet. Rebbie, La Toya, Michael and Randy screamed and cried, and Joseph’s face was pinned to the floor, side on, eyes wide. There must have been about two other shots that rang out and we were lying there for about 15 minutes before Joseph checked to see if the coast was clear. ‘Now do you see what we’ve been telling you?’ he said.

From that story, you now know the inspiration behind Michael’s 1985 hit ‘Beat It’ – and the video that begins with two gangs approaching from different ends of the street before he jumps into the middle and unites them with dance.

In an interview in 2010, Oprah Winfrey asked our father if he regretted his ‘treatment’ of us – as if he had been a waterboarding jailer at Guantánamo Bay. It is a question that is easy to ask with a condemnatory subtext in a different age, but had Oprah asked that question in 1965 before a black community pitched into the middle of gangland warfare, she would have been treated as the oddity, not Joseph. It was the way of the world back then. Joseph was a hard man with better managerial skills than fatherly ones, with a heart encased in steel but a dedication driven by good. The only expressed regret was Michael’s. He wished we had known more of the absent father than the ever-present manager. But here’s one irrefutable fact: our father raised nine kids in a high-crime, drug-using, gangland environment and steered them towards success without one of them falling off the rails.

Until I was researching this book, I hadn’t understood the extent of the nonsense written about Joseph’s discipline: that he had once cocked an empty pistol to Michael’s head; that he had locked him, terrified, in a closet; that he had jumped out of the shadows with kitchen knives because he ‘enjoyed terrifying his children’; that he had violently shoved Michael into a stack of instruments; that Michael had had to step over La Toya on the bathroom floor – and then brushed his teeth – after Joseph had laid her out cold. It’s a sad truth of celebrity that when something isn’t officially denied or legally contested, outside commentators feel free to push the boundaries of fantasy until myth is cemented as fact. Whenever I have attempted to place Joseph’s behaviour into a true context, I am accused of being a sympathiser or an apologist, and yet I was there. I saw what really happened – and it doesn’t line up with the portrayal of him as a monster.

People cite to me Michael’s televised Oprah interview of 1993 or the Martin Bashir documentary of 2003. They have heard how the thought of Joseph made Michael feel sick or faint; how Joseph used to ‘tear me up’ and give him ‘a whipping’ or ‘a beating’ and be ‘cruel’ or ‘mean’, and it was ‘bad … real bad’. All of which is true. There is no denying that Michael was terrified of our father and his fear grew into dislike. As late as 1984, he turned to me one day and asked, ‘Would you cry if Joseph died?’

‘Yeah!’ I told him, and he seemed surprised by my certainty.

‘I don’t know if I would,’ he said.

Michael was the most sensitive of brothers, the most fragile, and the most alien to Joseph’s ways. In his young mind, what Joseph did wasn’t discipline, it was unloving. This was reinforced when, after moving to California, new friends (both young and old) reacted in horror when Michael openly told them about Joseph’s actions. ‘That’s abuse, Michael!’ they said. ‘He can’t do that to you. You can report him to the police for that!’ If Michael didn’t think it was abuse before, he did now. Joseph had a big problem in controlling his temper and none of us would raise our children the same way today. But had he truly abused us we wouldn’t still be speaking to him, as Michael was until the rehearsals for the ‘This Is It’ concert of 2009. He had forgiven Joseph and didn’t subscribe to the notion that any of us had been ‘abused’.

In 2001, Michael gave a speech to students at Oxford University about parents and children. The words he used then still stand today: ‘I have begun to see how my father’s harshness was a kind of love, an imperfect one, but love nonetheless. With time, I now feel a blessing. In the place of anger, I have found absolution … reconciliation … and forgiveness. Almost a decade ago, I founded a charity called Heal the World. To heal the world, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within each and every one of us. That is why I want to forgive my father and stop judging him. I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past …’

HOWEVER MUCH MICHAEL SPOKE ABOUT HIS fear of Joseph, he liked taking it to the edge. Between the ages of six and 10, his love of candy propelled him into a mission that, for him, was akin to crawling into the big bad bear’s cave as it slept. Each morning before school, and with Joseph in bed after working a swing shift, we’d send Michael to grab change from inside the pockets of the pants left lying on the bedroom floor.

Jackie, Tito, Marlon and I stood against the wall, shushing one another and trying not to giggle as Michael slithered slowly on the floor and through the partially open door into darkness. I stood as lookout – checking for movement from the big bundle under the sheets. Next thing we knew, Michael was backing out with some change and we’d run out of the house, yelping with delight that we had pulled off another successful mission. Sometimes our candy-heist yielded a disappointing haul of cents and nickels, but sometimes we struck gold with dimes and quarters.

Throughout our childhood, we thought we were the bravest kids until Mother told us in later years that she and Joseph would lie there in bed, eyes open, looking at one another, raising their eye-brows and smiling as they heard Michael shuffling in.

MICHAEL’S SWEET TOOTH WAS BEHIND THE one moment in his life when he said time stood still. It was winter and thick snow was on the ground. He hadn’t wanted to venture out into the cold so he’d begged Marlon to go and buy him some bubble gum.

Some time later, we were all playing inside and Mother was in the kitchen when a kid pounded on the door, shouting, ‘Marlon’s dead!’ He had been hit by a car.

Mother ran outside, yelling, ‘WHERE? WHERE?’

I stood on the pathway, watching her hurry through the snow up the street. Behind me, Michael was rooted by guilt to the doorstep. ‘Oh, Lord, what have I done? I sent him for some gum … Erms, it’s all my fault.’

Marlon had suffered a head injury after a car slid in the snow and slewed into him. Mother found him knocked out under the front bumper, being tended by people in the street. He was taken to hospital, where he stayed for a few days. When Mother came home and said he was going to be okay, Michael burst into tears of relief. He had convinced himself that his brother was dead all because of him and that his punishment would be exclusion from God’s paradise.

That was because, in our home, the lessons of the Kingdom Hall held equal weight to the lessons in entertainment. The irony was lost on us. We never questioned things as kids: I don’t think we ever learned how to question things. We just followed instructions and did as we were told. Michael believed it when the elders preached that only 144,000 people would be saved by Jehovah and transported to a new paradise when Armageddon happened. Why only 144,000 out of the four million practising Witnesses across America? We never did ask. Jehovah’s influence was one aspect of life at 2300 Jackson Street that people perhaps haven’t properly weighed: those doctrines conditioned Michael and pinned us to the straight and narrow, just as much as Joseph’s discipline.

GOD WAS ALWAYS RESIDENT IN OUR house, but Jehovah moved in before Mother fell pregnant with Randy, when Michael was two. She had been raised a Christian with devoted family links to the Baptist Church, but two things happened in 1960: a local pastor she respected at Gary’s Lutheran church turned out to be having an affair and therefore broke his covenant with God; and a practising Jehovah’s Witness, a friend named Beverly Brown, knocked on our door at the exact time of Mother’s spiritual disillusionment. That was when Christmas and birthdays moved out of our home. Mother says that I ‘must’ remember having a Christmas tree and presents until I was six, but I honestly can’t.

After her conversion the only ‘special occasion’ was the obligatory visit with Mother to the local Kingdom Hall. It was her responsibility to show us the love of God: Joseph rarely joined us as we dressed up in our second-hand smart pants, jacket and tie to sit in the chairs and get shushed for fidgeting, moaning or rocking our feet. Only the hymns brought things to life.

Mother ensured we made time for Bible study. The Old and New Testaments and the faith’s main publications, the Watchtower and Paradise Lost magazines, were always on the living-room table. A fellow Witness joined Mother to read over the scriptures as Jackie, Tito, Marlon, Michael and I sat squashed up on the sofa, with the girls at our feet, Bibles in our laps and pencils in hand to underline certain passages to be discussed at the next sermon. Rebbie couldn’t wait to join Mother on ‘field service’ – going from door to door to spread Jehovah’s message. The times we trailed after Mother, up and down people’s pathways, were a lesson in determination if nothing else.

I watched curtains twitching and used to count how many seconds it would be before the door was slammed in Mother’s face. Rejection didn’t faze her – she was serving Jehovah. Bless her, she’s still blazing a trail in His name in California to this day. The one lesson imprinted on our minds from our own Bible study was that we’d take a fast trip to Hell if we didn’t serve Jehovah and attend the Kingdom Hall. Our Judgement Day was Armageddon, when all evil life would be destroyed and a new world created for the chosen 144,000. Salvation hinged on our devotion to Jehovah.

Just in case our young minds were not imaginative enough, the Watchtower illustrated what Armageddon would look like. I remember reading it with Michael, scanning vivid illustrations of buildings imploding and people falling into cavernous cracks in the earth, arms reaching out to be saved. The anxiety spread as we pondered the questions that would decide our fate. Do we honour Jehovah enough? Are we good enough for eternal life? Will we survive Armageddon? If we get into trouble with Joseph, does that mean we’re in trouble with Jehovah, too?

‘I want to go to Paradise!’ I said, more out of fear than enthusiasm.

‘Mother, are we going to be saved?’ asked Michael.

The most important thing in life, she said, was to be good and be good to others: salvation is granted to those who keep the faith, do field service and live according to the scriptures. As an adult, Michael would later accept the Watchtower illustrations as ‘symbolism’, but as boys, it was still scary to wonder how Jehovah noticed the difference between us being good and, say, the mailman. What about the times Michael gave kids in the neighbourhood candy and I didn’t? Mother’s stock answer was the same: Don’t worry, He sees everything.

And then there was the proximity of Armageddon. When was it going to happen? Next week? How long have we got? An inquisitive mind like Michael’s never could stop thinking about it. I can see him now looking up to an elder to ask some earnest question, only to be patted on the head and humoured. But witnesses seemed forever braced for the end of the world. The first Armageddon was estimated to be 1914. When that didn’t happen, it was changed to 1915 … And they’re still waiting.

I distinctly remember when the Jackson family was convinced it was coming: 1963. The Russians seemed sure to bomb the US, JFK was assassinated, and then the suspected gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot – an event we watched on our black-and-white TV. Our household was sure all this was a prelude to the end of the world – and we brothers had never been so keen to get to the Kingdom Hall to honour Jehovah.

Michael always said he was raised biblically. In fact, he was the only one of the Jackson 5 to be baptised. Michael prayed, I did not. Michael learned the Bible, I did not. I didn’t appreciate that Jehovah was the ultimate Father because we were made to believe that He can disown you if you don’t behave. The threat of abandonment – of being ‘de-fellowshipped’ – was ever-present. Michael would learn all about Jehovah’s threat of banishment in later life but in his childhood, the threat of it was a whip in itself.

When the Jackson 5 took off, I would say his faith became his bedrock; something solid to hang on to, a place to which he could retreat and be regarded not as famous but as equal and normal. Witnesses never made a fuss of Michael because they were only allowed to make a fuss of Jehovah. The Kingdom Hall brought him a sense of normality that, in the outside world, dwindled year upon year. Michael was dedicated to walking the higher path. I know that he confided in God and felt He was a presence you could never fool or hide anything from. In later life, he once told me he still felt a twinge of guilt for celebrating Christmas and birthdays.

Collectively speaking, the ever-watchful Jehovah, combined with our parents’ determination to ring-fence us from the threat of gang violence, ensured that we didn’t learn how to integrate socially except with each other. Even then, there was no real sense of coming together because of the lack of family occasions such as Christmas, birthdays and Thanksgiving. In our childhood we walked the line between Joseph’s strict expectations and Jehovah’s salvation. The stage was the only place where there were no rules; it became our one area of freedom.

WE DIDN’T THINK STAGES GOT ANY bigger than the one that talk-show host David Frost offered us. One of his producers had been in the audience that night at the Apollo and he called Richard Aarons, saying he wanted us to perform on The David Frost Show from New York, to be broadcast to the whole of America. For nights afterwards, we climbed into our bunk-beds, unable to sleep through excitement. We told everyone at school that we were going to be on the TV and teachers made announcements in class.

David Frost was the Englishman with a talk-show in America: he was part of ‘the British invasion’. There were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and David Frost – and we were on his radar.

What we didn’t know was that Joseph had been simultaneously thrown into a dilemma. We had performed again at the Regal on 17 July 1968, where we shared a bill with Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. Bobby was so impressed that he got on the phone to a lady who had recently moved into the Detroit apartment block where he lived. Suzanne de Passe was a 19-year-old who had just started work in town as creative assistant to Berry Gordy at Motown and we ended up auditioning for her in Bobby’s living room. As Suzanne remembers it, she rang Mr Gordy about ‘these amazing kids’, but he wasn’t impressed.

‘Kids? I don’t want more kids! I’ve got enough on with Stevie Wonder!’ To him, of course, kids were a headache, with tutors and all. Apparently, he had been the same with Diana Ross and the Supremes at first, dismissing them as ‘too young’.

Mr Gordy clearly needed persuading, and Suzanne persuaded him. This was where Joseph had his dilemma: our invitation to audition at Motown clashed with the David Frost booking. It was dream national-television exposure versus one golden opportunity. Michael and Marlon were initially devastated when Joseph chose to audition. Instead of performing to an audience of millions from New York, we found ourselves at Motown’s headquarters – Hitsville USA – performing to a handful of people, including Mr Gordy. Joseph was smart in not grasping at the instant celebrity of television: David Frost wouldn’t bring us closer to a record deal – but the audition did.

On 23 July 1968, that audition took place before a selected group of people. We couldn’t see them because they were gathered in the dark on the other side of the glass in the sound studio; we only saw a camera on a tripod, capturing our ‘screen test’, as was standard. We sang the aptly titled ‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’ and ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ by the Temptations, before ending with ‘Who’s Lovin’ You?’ by Smokey Robinson. The weirdest thing was the pregnant pause that greeted our final note: no one said a word.

Michael couldn’t stand it. ‘So? How was that?’ he chirped.

‘Michael!’ I said in a loud whisper, embarrassed by his rudeness.

‘That was great … very good,’ said some voice. But that was all we got. We had to wait a few years before we learned the truth of the reaction when Mr Gordy wrote about it in his Foreword to Michael’s reissued autobiography, Moonwalk, in 2009: ‘Michael sang “Who’s Lovin’ You” with the sadness and passion of a man who had been living with the blues and heartbreak his whole life … As great as Smokey sang it, Michael sang it better. I told Smokey, “Hey, man, I think he gotcha on that one!”’

Two days later, we got the call back: Motown wanted to sign us.

You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes

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