Читать книгу You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes - Jermaine Jackson - Страница 8

IT ALL STARTED ONE DAY WHEN we found our voices around the kitchen sink.

It was more assembly line than kitchen sink, the wash-dry-stack-put away ritual after dinner. We divided the chore into weekly shifts as pairs – two children drying, two others putting away, our mother standing in the middle, an apron over her gown, hands deep in soap suds. She always whistled or sang some tune, but the song that first enticed us into joining her was ‘Cotton Fields’, an old slave number by blues musician Lead Belly. This hit resonated with her, for her roots were in Eufaula, Alabama, where she was born Katie Scruse in May 1930.

Her grandparents had been cotton farmers in what was then named ‘the Cotton State’ and her great-grandfather was a slave to an Alabama family called Scruse. This forefather could sing, too – ‘You could hear his voice from church ring out through the valley’ – and so could Papa Prince, her father. She swears that the voice we heard in our kitchen was channelled from her ancestors and developed in a church choir; she was raised a Baptist. Fine voices ran in the family, we were told. My father’s father, Samuel Jackson, was a teacher and school director who always gave a near-perfect rendition of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ but he also had ‘a beautiful high voice’ that graced a church chorus. Our mother played the clarinet and piano at high school, and Joseph the guitar.

When our parents met in 1949, their individual DNA must have combined to create some kind of super-gene for our musical inheritance. It was no accident of birth, Mother assured us: it was God’s gift. Or, as Michael later put it, ‘the divine union of song and dance.’

We each loved the sound of Mother’s voice. Standing at the sink singing, she was lost in those fields of Alabama, and she sent a shiver down my spine with a voice that was never flat and always on pitch. Her voice singing was like her voice talking: warm, soft and soothing. We began singing at the sink for entertainment when our black-and-white television was sent for repair, and one day I started making harmonies with Mother. I must have been about five, but I was keeping it high and staying on note. She looked down at me, still singing but beaming with surprise. Before she knew it, my brothers, Tito and Jackie, and sister Rebbie had joined the chorus. Michael was a baby, still stumbling into a walk with diapers on, but when the dishes were put away and the surfaces wiped spotlessly clean, Mother sat down, cradled him and sang him to sleep. ‘Cotton Fields’ was my vocal initiation and Michael’s lullaby.

Michael in his diapers is my first memory of him. I don’t remember his birth, or Mother walking through the door with him. New arrivals were no big event in our family. I was five when I started changing his diapers. I did what we all did – helping Mother where we could, providing an extra pair of hands for what would become a family of nine children.

Michael was born hyper, with boundless energy and curiosity. If any of us took our eyes off him for a second, he’d have crawled under the table or under the bed. When Mother turned on our excuse for a washing-machine, he jigged and bounced on the spot in time to its vibrations. Changing his mushy diaper on the sofa was like trying to hold a wet fish – wriggling, kicking and turning. The art of putting on a diaper with safety-pins was a test for any adult, let alone five-year-old me, and more often than not, Rebbie or Jackie came to my rescue. Michael had these extraordinarily long, thin fingers that used to grab my thumb, and he had wide, doe-eyes that said: ‘I’m having fun giving you a hard time, buddy.’ In my eyes, though, he was the kid brother who needed looking after. Caring for one another was instilled in all of us, but I felt protective of him from day one. Maybe it was because all I heard being shouted was ‘Where’s Michael?’ … ‘Is Michael okay?’ … ‘Is Michael changed?’

‘Yes, Mother … We got it … he’s here,’ one of us shouted.

Don’t worry. Michael’s okay. Michael’s okay.

OUR MOTHER’S MOTHER, MAMA MARTHA, USED to bathe us as babies in a bucket-sized pan brimming with soapy water. I watched Michael, arms held high and face screwed up, standing inside this tiny chrome ‘bath’, washed with tedious thoroughness from the gaps between his toes to the backs of his ears. We always had to be clean and stay on top of germs. I think this was drilled into us before we could walk or talk. And nothing beat Castile soap, and its coarse lather, for staying clean. Lather up and scrub hard. Mother was fastidious about cleanliness, and about everything being neat and looking pristine. Everything didn’t just have to be clean. It – and we – had to look pristine.

Germs were portrayed as invisible monsters. Germs lead to sickness, we were told. Germs are what other people carry. Germs are in the air, on the street, on the surfaces. We were constantly made to feel we were under threat of invasion. Whenever one of us sneezed or coughed, the castor oil came out: we all got a spoonful to keep infection at bay. I know I speak for Michael, La Toya, Janet and myself in saying that we grew up with an almost neurotic fear of germs, and it’s not hard to understand why.

In the kitchen, before the singing started, came the first elementary lesson: ‘We wash up only with clean water … CLEAN water!’ Then: ‘Use the hottest water your hands can bear, and lots of suds.’ Each plate was squeaked within a layer of its ceramic life. Each glass rinsed and dried, and held up to the light to make sure there was not a single watermark. If one was found, do it again.

After coming in from the street, we had to be virtually decontaminated. The first words out of Mother’s mouth were ‘Have you washed your hands? Go wash your hands.’ If she didn’t hear the tap running within seconds, there was trouble. On mornings before school, the hygiene inspection was always the same: ‘Did you wash your face? Wash your feet? In between your toes? Your elbows?’ Then came the acid test: a cotton swab dipped in alcohol rubbed across the back of the neck. If it turned grey, we weren’t clean enough. ‘Go back and wash yourself properly.’ If we wanted chocolate cake or a cookie, our hands were up for inspection, too. ‘But I washed them earlier!’ I often protested. ‘You been out touching door handles, boy – go wash them again!’

Clothes were never worn two days’ running, and had to be clean and pressed. No one from our family walked into the street with a single crease or stain. By the age of six, we had all learned to pitch in with the laundry. This was all part and parcel of a perfect order that helped keep so many kids – and potential chaos – in check.

When I joined the UK’s Big Brother house in 2007, everyone made fun of how I was always on guard against germs, asking house mates if they had washed their hands before preparing food. My wife, Halima, wasn’t surprised. She calls me a ‘germaphobe’ and I can hardly deny it. To this day, I won’t touch a door handle in a public restroom because I know how many men don’t wash their hands. I won’t touch the banister on public stairways or escalators. I’ll use a handkerchief or tissue to hold the gas pump trigger when filling the car. I’ll wash down with alcohol a hotel’s TV remote control before using it. I’m alive to cross-contamination from every surface.

Michael was no different. He even worried about other people’s pens when signing autographs, in the days when fans could get close enough. But his neurosis mainly centred on breathing in airborne germs. People mocked him for wearing surgical masks. There was speculation that he was hiding plastic surgery and I always laughed when I saw an article referencing the mask, saying it was ‘sparking fears about Michael’s health’. Because that was the point: it was all about fear – Michael’s fear that he could get ill. At these times, he will have felt he was coming down with something, or his immune system was low. He was, like me, on guard against germs all his life. At least, that was the origins of his surgical mask wearing and then, after a while, I think it became something of a fashion accessory that allowed him to ‘hide’; a mini shield for a man who wanted to grab whatever fraction of privacy that he could.

I DON’T REMEMBER A TIME WHEN Mother was not pregnant. I cannot recall her walking up the street with anything but a waddle, carrying in both hands two bags of shopping or second-hand clothes. Between 1950 and 1966, she produced nine children. That is some feat when measured against her and Joseph’s initial plan: three children maximum.

My sister Rebbie (pronounced Ree-bie) came first, then Jackie (1951), Tito (1953), me (1954), La Toya (1956), Marlon (1957), Michael (1958), Randy (1961) and Janet (1966). We would have been 10 but our other brother, Brandon, died during his twin birth with Marlon. That was why, at Michael’s memorial service in 2009, Marlon said, in his message to Michael: ‘I would like for you to give our brother, my twin brother, Brandon, a hug for me.’ A twin never loses that bond with his other half.

As kids, we received plenty of hugs from Mother. Contrary to the general depiction that we had some form of cold, unhappy childhood, our upbringing was full of love as Mother smothered us with kisses and affection. We still feel the strength of that love today. I was a real mama’s boy – as was Michael – and our worship became a fight between me, him and La Toya as to who occupied the coveted spot by Mother’s side, tight to her legs, gripping her skirt. La Toya did her best to unglue my attachment.

Whenever Mother was out and we brothers fought, we swore her into a pact. ‘Promise you won’t tell, La Toya. Promise!’

‘Promise,’ she said convincingly. ‘I won’t tell!’ As soon as Mother was through the door, the promise was undone with a dramatic confession. ‘Mother, Jermaine’s been fighting.’ We wanted to jack her up because she told on everyone. She always was the quiet observer, collecting her tales to spill later. It didn’t even matter if she made stuff up; she just wanted to win favour with Mother while I was left with extra chores as punishment. But the joke in later years was that I must have won favour more times than most because I was ‘always Mother’s pet,’ says Rebbie.

‘The favoured one!’ Michael said, which was a bit rich because he could do no wrong either.

I didn’t feel like a favourite but if Mother ever over-compensated, it had everything to do with an event that happened when she was pregnant with Michael. Aged about three, I decided it was a good idea to eat a bag of salt and so I was hospitalised with near kidney failure. I remember nothing of this trauma. I was a strong kid, but that illness put me in hospital for three weeks. Mother and Joseph couldn’t afford to visit me every day. When they did, the ward sister told them I had been screaming out my lungs for them. Every time they left, I stood on the bed, wailing. I’m kind of glad I don’t remember the look on Mother’s face as she was forced to walk away. She said it was ‘the most awful feeling.’

Eventually I was allowed home, but that event might explain why I became such a cry-baby and overly clingy, desperate not to be left behind again. On my first day at school, I struggled free of the teacher’s grip and sprinted down the corridor and out of the doors to find Mother. ‘You have to be here, Jermaine … You have to be here,’ she said, with the calmness that made everything okay again. Her compassion is rooted in a devout, unbreakable faith in God and she manages to strike a balance between the aura of a disciple and the authority of a Justice of the Peace. She has her breaking points, of course, but her calm made better any difficult situation.

She suffered for us, in being pregnant for 81 months of her life. She was beautiful, too, from the way she wore her wavy black hair to her pristine gowns, to the perfectly applied scarlet lipstick that left smudges on our cheeks. Mother was sunshine inside 2300 Jackson Street.

The moment she left for her part-time work at Sears department store, we couldn’t wait for her return. I have this warm image of her arriving through the front door, having trudged through the deep snow of an Indiana winter. She stood there, stamping her feet on the mat and shaking her head to dust off the snow. Then Michael – growing into the fastest of the brood – ran up and wrapped his arms around one leg, followed by me, La Toya, Tito and Marlon. Before taking off her coat, she brought out her hands from inside her pockets – and there was our regular treat: two bags of hot Spanish peanuts.

Meanwhile, Jackie and Rebbie prepared the kitchen for Mother to start cooking, waiting for Joseph to come home. We grew up calling him Joseph. Not Father. Or Daddy. Or Papa. Just ‘Joseph’. That was his request. In the interests of respect.

THERE IS A NURSERY RHYME ABOUT an old woman who lived in a shoe and ‘had so many children, she didn’t know what to do’. In terms of family size and cramped living quarters, it provides the best image of life inside the shoebox of 2300 Jackson Street. Nine children, two parents, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a living room were packed tight into a space about 30 feet wide and no more than 40 feet deep. From the outside, it looks like the kind of a house a child would sketch: a front door with a window either side and a chimney poking out the top. Our home was 1940s build, wood-framed, with a tiled pyramid lid that seemed so thin for a roof that we swore it would blow off during the first tornado. It faces on to Jackson Street on the corner of its T-junction with 23rd Avenue.

At the front, a short path from the sidewalk cut through grass to a black, solid door, which, when slammed, shook the whole house. One step inside and there was the living room – and the brown sofa-bed where the girls slept – with the kitchen and utility room to the left. Straight ahead was a hallway – about two strides long – leading to the boys’ bedroom on the right, and our parents’ room on the left, adjacent to the back bathroom.

Jackson Street was part of a quiet grid bounded by Interstate-80 to the south and a railroad to the north. Directions to our home were easy because of the landmark we backed on to: Theodore Roosevelt High School and a sports field. Its outer chain-link fence created 23rd Avenue’s dead-end, providing an open view of the running track to the left and, just to the right, a baseball field with bleachers on the far side. Joseph said we were lucky to own our home. Others in the neighbourhood were not so fortunate. For this reason, we never officially classed ourselves as ‘poor’ because the people who lived in the Delaney Projects – across the field on the other side of the high school – were living in government tract housing, which we could see in the distance from our backyard. ‘There is always somebody worse off, no matter how bad things might appear,’ we were told. So, the best way of describing our situation was: not enough money to buy anything new, but we somehow scraped by and survived.

Mother learned how to make food last: a freezer was more essential than a car or a television in the black community. Make food in bulk, freeze it, thaw it, eat it. We often had the same meals over and over again: bowls of pinto beans and pinto soup, chicken, chicken and chicken, egg sandwiches, mackerel with rice, and we ate so much spaghetti that I can’t stand pasta today. We made popsicles from Kool-Aid. We even grew our own vegetables because Joseph had a nearby allotment, producing potatoes, string beans, black-eyed peas, cabbage, beets … and peanuts. From an early age, we were taught how to plant seeds and peanuts, lining up enough space so they had room to grow. If we moaned – and we often did – about getting our hands and knees dirty, Joseph just reminded us that his first job as a teenager was working the cotton fields ‘where I collected 300 pounds of the stuff each day.’ He said Mother was ‘the best damn cook in the city!’ and dinner was always waiting for him as he walked through the door. She kept the house spotless, he said. Everything was always neat. This made her the perfect wife, he said.

He couldn’t fault Rebbie either because she took on motherly duties – preparing the food, cooking, cleaning, overseeing chores – whenever Mother worked. Rebbie was the big sister turned nanny and was equally stern, gentle, methodical and controlled. If I have one abiding memory of Rebbie, it’s of her standing in the kitchen, baking cookies and tea-cakes for us all. She was also the first child to show ‘promise’, according to Joseph, entering and winning local dance competitions. She and Jackie had some duet thing going on, and brought home prize certificates and trophies.

Mother worked weekdays, some Saturdays and some evenings as a cashier at Sears. She couldn’t really afford to shop there. When she did, she chose items to ‘put in Layaway’, reserving something with a down payment, then making a series of small instalments before taking the item home. Sears was our Harrods, and we grew up hearing the words ‘put it in Layaway’. We all hated seeing Mother handing over money and walking away empty-handed. That made no sense to us. Feeling hard done by, we kids regularly moaned about it, but not Mother. She just got on with life and trusted in God. If she ever had a moment to sit down, she spent it reading the Bible.

As a two-year-old, she had had polio, which led to partial paralysis; she had worn a wooden leg splint until she was 10. I don’t know too much about her suffering except that she had several operations, missed a lot of school and was left with a permanent limp because one leg is shorter than the other but I’ve never once heard her complain about it. Instead, she always said how grateful she was to have survived a disease that killed many others. She had dreamed of becoming an actress, but she showed no resentment over a dream that illness had crushed. Her condition led to some merciless taunting from other children when she was a teenager, which left her painfully self-conscious and shy. On one early date with Joseph as a 19 year old, they were on the dance-floor at some party, moving cheek to cheek to a slow number, when Mother started trembling. ‘What’s the matter, Katie?’ asked Joseph.

‘Everyone is staring at us,’ she said, head down, unable to look up.

He looked around and they were the only couple on the floor. He noticed people pointing and talking behind their hands, presumably about one of Mother’s legs being shorter than the other, or that one of her heels was a wedge to correct her balance. She had grown up dreading parties and social gatherings, but Joseph ignored the stares and turned it into a positive. ‘We have the floor to ourselves, Katie,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep dancing.’

Mother had moved from Alabama to Indiana as a child when Papa Prince chased work in the steel industry. She had dreamed of one day meeting a musician so guitar-playing Joseph fitted the bill, and it took the length of one spring and one summer for their romance to turn into marriage. They had ‘met’ in the street. It’s probably more accurate to say that Mother was in the street and Joseph was inside, sitting near his front window, when she rode by on a bicycle. They noticed each other and, for another week or two, she kept to the same route. One day, he plucked up the nerve to rush outside and introduce himself. That led to a date at the movies and then the party with the dance-floor. Katie Scruse, the golden-skinned girl so shy she struggled to look anyone in the face, fell in love with Joseph Jackson, the lean, brash, charismatic working man. They were wed by a Justice of the Peace in November 1949 and bought our childhood home in Gary for $8,500, using his savings and a loan from Mother’s step-father.

As their plans for three children became four, then five and so on, they started saving what little money Mother could earn as she harboured a dream that Joseph would one day build an extension for an extra bedroom and more space. We grew up with a stack of bricks in the backyard – a constant reminder of our mother’s hope for a bigger and better home.

Our little house comes with so many layers in my memory. Its compactness – huddling around Mother and living on top of one another – might not have made it the most comfortable home but it reflected our parents’ continual talk of togetherness and staying close. Within this togetherness, there comes loyalty. With loyalty comes strength. This was instilled in us. It was why we became a unit, moving together as one. Few in Gary could claim such family cohesion. It was a working man’s city built in 1906 by the muscle of African-American immigrants who helped turn a north-west Indiana landscape of sand dunes and scrub vegetation into a hub of the national steel industry.

Old men always spoke of a blood, sweat and toil work ethic back in the day. No man from Gary was ever afraid of putting in the hours and doing the grind. ‘If you work real hard, you will achieve,’ Joseph said. ‘You get back what you put in.’ In the eyes of his forefathers, getting a paid job and owning a house represented ‘achievement’, but he always wanted us to be more than he became. None of us grew up with a dream that ran into a father’s resistance: ‘You’ll stop this day-dreaming and get yourself a real job!’ No. Our father wanted us to have a dream, and hold on to it.

About 90 per cent of Gary’s population, and most of Indiana, found employment at ‘The Mill’ of Inland Steel, located a half-hour drive away in neighbouring East Chicago. Joseph was a crane operator, moving steel beams back and forth. He worked real hard in a tough job with rough eight-to-10 hour shifts. While inside his glass bubble atop the crane, his mind wandered back to his beginnings in Durmott, south of Little Rock, Arkansas. As a young man, he used his pocket money to watch back-to-back silent movies at the cinema, telling himself that, one day, he would be the first black actor to star in one. Ending up at The Mill was not part of that dream. It was slavish work, echoing generations of black men before him. ‘It’s about getting on top, not staying at the bottom,’ he said.

Before meeting Mother, and when he first arrived in Indiana, he had worked on the railroads. He then landed a job at a foundry, working a pneumatic jackhammer in the steel-melting heat of a blast furnace. ‘Hot? Men fainted,’ he said. ‘We worked in 10-minute bursts, then got out of there because those floors were heated white.’ He was skin and bone, apparently. No matter how much he ate, he couldn’t put on an extra pound because the work kicked his butt. It is a metabolism that most of us inherited – especially Michael. Joseph’s ‘worst kind of work’ continued when he had to collect dust from the furnace. This meant his skinny frame became useful when lowered by cord, in a bucket, into a deep flue, three feet in diameter. When I heard these stories, I thought a crane operator’s job was glamorous by comparison.

Let no one say that Joseph doesn’t know the meaning of hard work. I think it takes a certain type of man to do that kind of job – someone hardened and emotionally strong – and he worked his fingers to the bone to ‘earn a life’, as he put it. I think this is where his insistence on ‘respect’ comes from. Worked as a ‘subordinate’ for most of his young adult life, and with an ancestry rooted in the slave trade like Mother, he had earned respect so he expected it from his family. He knew his responsibilities, too. The more children he had, the more hours he worked to bring home extra pay. When Michael arrived, he got a second job and started juggling shifts at a canned-food factory.

As children, we sensed that struggle to make ends meet. Our parents’ combined take-home pay was about 75 dollars a week. They were too proud to claim welfare, so in the winter, Tito and I shovelled snow from neighbours’ driveways to put some extra money on the table. We always knew when Joseph had collected his pay packet because a new loaf of bread was on the kitchen worktop, with a packet of luncheon meat. On more than one occasion, Joseph was laid off and then hired again. During those lulls, he got work picking potatoes. We instantly knew when the steel shifts had dried up because all we ate was potatoes – baked, mashed, boiled, roasted.

Inland Steel was the end of the rainbow for generations of families. It was said there were only three outcomes to life in Gary: The Mill, prison or death. The last two options were related to the gang-life that was the flip-side to our community. But whatever destiny seemed laid out for us, Joseph was determined to change its course. Every hour he worked was with that in mind. Our escape was his escape, with Mother.

JOSEPH WAS ONE OF SIX CHILDREN: four boys, two girls. As the eldest, he was closest to the sister who followed him in order of birth: Verna Mae. Our sister Rebbie reminded him of her, he said – dutiful, kind, the proper little housewife, and wise beyond her years. Joseph loved how Verna Mae took care of the house and children. He remembers her, aged seven, reading bed-time stories to their brothers Lawrence, Luther and Timothy, by oil lamp. Then she fell ill and Joseph could do nothing to help her. The doctors couldn’t even diagnose what was wrong with her. From her bed, Verna Mae was stoical. ‘Everything is well. I will be healthy again,’ she said. But Joseph watched his sister’s deterioration from the bedroom door as the adults surrounded her bed. She succumbed to the illness and passed away. Joseph sobbed for days, unable to comprehend such a loss. As far as my understanding goes, that was the last time he shed a tear: he was 11.

As self-confessed cry-babies, Michael and I always hated how hardened our father was. None of us can remember a time when we saw him show any emotional vulnerability. Whenever we cried as kids – even after he had chastised us – he berated us: ‘What you crying for?’

Joseph had spent his formative years mourning and missing his sister. At her funeral, after walking behind the horse-drawn cart that carried her coffin, he vowed he never wanted to lay eyes on anyone’s tomb again. One loss in life sealed our father’s emotions and Joseph kept his word: he never attended another funeral. Until 2009.

WHEN JOSEPH WAS A SCHOOLBOY, HE was terrified of one woman teacher. The ‘respect thy teacher’ decree carried extra force because his father, Samuel, was a high-school director and believed in strict discipline by corporal punishment. This fearsome woman apparently scared Joseph so much that he shivered whenever she called out his name. Once, so the story goes, he was called out to the front of the class to read from the chalkboard. He knew exactly what the words were, but fear left him mute. The teacher asked him again. When he couldn’t answer a second time, the punishment was swift: a wooden paddle board across his bare behind. This thing had holes in it, too, for extra suction with each whack. As she paddled him, she reminded him why he was getting hit: he had disobeyed her when he didn’t read. He hated her for it, but respected her too. ‘Because of this, I listened to her and always did my best,’ he said.

It was the same when Papa Jackson chastised him. That was how he was raised – on the old theory that in order to control someone, you first need to shock fear into them. This was his lesson in life, marked out on his backside. In later weeks, that same woman teacher held a talent contest and pupils were invited to do anything they wished: art, poetry, craft, a short story, a dramatic presentation. Joseph wasn’t artistic; he wasn’t good with words – he’d only ever watched silent movies. He knew only one thing: the sound of his father’s voice, singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. So he decided to sing, but when it came to his turn, he shook so much that his pitch was quivery and rushed – and the whole class burst out laughing. He returned to his desk ‘humiliated’ and expected another beating. When his teacher approached, he cowered. ‘You sang very well,’ she said. ‘They are laughing because you were nervous, not because you were bad. Good try.’

On the walk home from school, Joseph says he made a vow to himself that ‘I’ll show ’em’ and he started dreaming about ‘a life in show-business’. I didn’t know that story until recently. He excavated it from his past, trying to apply meaning after the event. I don’t suppose any of us Jacksons have taken the trouble to understand our deepest history, or even talk about it too much. Michael once said he didn’t truly know Joseph. ‘That’s sad for a son who hungers to understand his own father,’ he wrote in 1988, in his autobiography, Moonwalk.

I think there is something unknowable about Joseph. It’s difficult to reach him beyond his barriers, perhaps built by a fear of loss and reinforced by his need for respect. None of us can remember him holding or cuddling us, or telling us, ‘I love you’. He never play-wrestled with us, or tucked us into bed at night; there were no heart-to-heart father-son discussions about life. We remember the respect, the instructions, the chores and the commands, but no affection. We knew our father as he was; someone who wanted to be looked up to, and to provide for his family – a man’s man.

Acceptance of this was to know him in its limited way, and as much as Michael struggled to accept the way Joseph was, he always had compassion for him, not judgement. The sad thing is that I don’t think he knew the back-story I have just shared. I guess many people only know their parents as ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and not as people prior to that role but if we understand more about our parents when they were young, then maybe we have a better chance of knowing who we become. I like to think that the stories about Joseph’s schooldays explain quite a lot.

JOSEPH DIDN’T NEED TO DAY-DREAM ABOUT a life in California, like most working men in Indiana: he had already whetted his appetite by living there. That was why his horizons were set somewhere between the sunsets on the Pacific and dreams of the Hollywood sign. Aged 13, he moved from Arkansas to Oakland on San Francisco Bay, via Los Angeles, by train. He moved with his father, who quit teaching for the shipyard after discovering that Joseph’s mother, Chrystal, had had an affair with a soldier. Initially, Samuel Jackson went alone, leaving Joseph behind. Three months later, after pleading letters from son to father had gone back and forth, Joseph made the ‘toughest of choices’ and moved west. More letters went back and forth, this time between Joseph and his mother. Our father must have been persuasive even as a kid because some months later, Chrystal Jackson left her new man and returned to the husband she had recently divorced.

The arrangement lasted a year before she headed back east to set up a new life with another man in Gary, Indiana. I suspect Joseph felt like the rope in a tug-of-war being pulled by both parents. For a man who has forever preached ‘togetherness and family’, I don’t know how he stood it. All I know is that he first pitched up in Gary after taking the bus all the way from Oakland. On arrival, he thought the city ‘small, dirty and ugly’ but his mother was there and reading between the lines, I think he detected a small sense of ‘celebrity’ around him. Here was a kid not from Arkansas but from California, and his stories of West-Coast life brought a lot of attention from the local girls. So, aged 16, Joseph moved to be with his mother in Gary, Indiana but in his mind, he would one day return to California. ‘We’ll go out West. Wait till you see it out West,’ he used to say to us – an explorer on stopover from some great adventure he had yet to resume.

Joseph’s face was lined and furrowed by his years of hard work, and he had thick eyebrows that seemed to cement a permanent frown, hardening the hazel eyes that looked right through you. One glare was enough to make us wobble as children. But talk of California softened his features. He remembered ‘the golden California sunshine’, the palm trees, Hollywood and how the West coast ‘was the place to be in life.’ No crime, tidy streets, opportunities to get on top. We watched the television series Maverick and he pointed out streets he knew. Over the years, we constructed this city into a fictional paradise – a distant planet: when man could walk on the moon, we could also perhaps visit LA. Whenever the sun was setting in Indiana, we always said to each other, ‘The sun will be setting in California soon’: we always knew that there was some place, some life, that was better than what we had.

LONG BEFORE MICHAEL WAS BORN, AND while Mother was pregnant with me, Joseph first conceived a plan of ‘making it’. As a guitarist, he formed a blues band named the Falcons with his brother, Luther, and a couple of friends. By the time I came along, they had built up a slick act, performing at local parties and venues to put some extra dollars in their pockets. While he was working the crane, Joseph composed songs, shifting steel beams on auto-pilot and conjuring lyrics as a singer-songwriter.

In 1954, the year I was born, he claims to have written a song called ‘Tutti Frutti’. One year later, Little Richard released a same-titled hit. When we were growing up, the story of how Little Richard ‘stole’ our father’s song became legendary. It was never true, of course. But all that was important was that a black man from the middle of nowhere had created a song that redefined music – ‘the sound of the birth of rock ’n’ roll’. It was that possibility that locked deep in our minds every time the story was told.

I don’t remember vividly the Falcons rehearsing, certainly not when measured against what ‘rehearsing’ would come to mean for us! But I have a vague memory of Uncle Luther – always smiling – arriving with packs of beer and his guitar, then riffing with Joseph as we sat around, sucking it all in. Uncle Luther played the blues and Joseph switched between his guitar and the harmonica. Those were the sounds that sometimes helped us drift off to sleep.

Joseph’s musical dream floundered when the Falcons disbanded after one of them, Pookie Hudson, quit to form a new group. But Joseph still came home and unwound by playing his guitar, then putting it away in its usual spot at the back of his bedroom closet. Tito, the first budding guitarist among us, eyed that closet like an unlocked safe containing gold but we all knew it was Joseph’s pride and joy. As such, it was untouchable. ‘And don’t even think about getting out my guitar!’ he warned us all before leaving for work.

WE FIVE BOYS SHARED ONE BEDROOM – the best dressing room we ever shared. Within this confinement, we grew up as best friends. Brotherhood grows stronger each year. We are the only ones who can ever say to one another, ‘Remember how we were. Remember what we shared. Remember where and what we came from.’

Or, as Clive Davis would later tell me, ‘Blood is thicker than mud.’ We were inseparable in Gary, forever together, night and day. We shared a metal-framed three-tiered bunk-bed. Its length was just big enough to fit against the back wall and its height meant that Tito and I slept head to toe, about four feet from the ceiling. In the middle were Michael and Marlon, and Jackie had the lowest bunk all to himself. Jackie was the only brother who didn’t know what it was like to wake up with a foot in his eyes, ear or mouth. The girls, Rebbie and La Toya, slept on the sofa-bed in the living room (later joined by our brother Randy and baby sister Janet) so every room was crammed to its limit. Imagine being Rebbie – the eldest child – and never once having a bedroom to herself!

As brothers, we spent a lot of time in our bedroom, with its one window looking out on to 23rd Avenue. Every night felt like a sleepover. We went to bed at roughly the same time – 8.30 or 9pm – regardless of age and hurled pillows, wrestled and talked up a storm for a good hour before sleep, planning on what we’d be doing the next day.

‘I got the skates, so I’m the one roller-skating!’

‘I got the bat and ball, who’s playing?’

‘We’re building a go-kart. Who’s in?’

We ripped the sheets from the bed and threw the mattresses on the floor, and built Greek columns out of books, draping sheets over them to create a tented roof. We loved sleeping on the floor in our self-built ‘dens’. We loved sleeping on the floor even when we hadn’t built a den – it felt like camping out.

Come the morning we were each other’s alarm clocks. ‘You awake, Jermaine?’ I’d hear Michael ask in a loud whisper. ‘Jackie?’ We’d wait for the reply that rarely came because he always liked his extra ZZZZ.

Then came the chaos of the ‘15-minute bathroom’ rule. As one brother or sister darted out, another darted in and then we heard Mother shout: ‘JERMAINE! Your 15 minutes is up!’

I loved mornings at home. I loved the chaos in the kitchen, and I loved making harmonies in bed when we woke. We didn’t need to see each other’s faces, we just lay there singing. We always sang, even during chores like painting the house, doing the laundry, cutting the grass, or ironing. Our self-entertainment eased the tedium and we ‘covered’ hits from sounds we heard at home: Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Major Lance (whose keyboardist was an unknown man called Reggie Dwight, nowadays better known as Sir Elton John).

Michael often recalled the ‘joy’ and ‘fun’ we shared in our tiny bedroom. I think he yearned to have those days back; to have brothers ‘sleeping over’. He always said that he missed the company of brothers around him. As grown men, whenever we had a family meeting or a brotherly catch-up, we all convened in the smallest room. We did this unconsciously for years until it was pointed out that it was, perhaps, a bit strange to meet in the smallest room at places like Neverland or Hayvenhurst. Something within each of us obviously enjoyed feeling close and confined with the others. It felt natural; it always felt like ‘home’.

Something else we didn’t realise until adulthood was that Mother and Joseph had lain in their bedroom just across the way listening to us sing through the walls, from 3-year-old Michael to Jackie aged 11. ‘We heard you singing all night, we heard you singing in the morning,’ said Mother. But even then I don’t think Joseph heard the distant drumbeat of his California dream. That didn’t happen until the day Tito broke his prized guitar – and then we had to sing for our lives.

JOSEPH OWNED A DARK-BROWN BUICK THAT looked like an angry fish coming at you. The configuration of the headlights, the grille and the V-shaped rim of the hood was like one big scary face frowning and baring its teeth. I don’t know if they made cars with engines that purred back then, but that car – just like Joseph himself – definitely did not purr.

It seems comical, looking back, that this ‘angry fish’ was our warning system that our father was minutes from home. We’d be out in the street playing when one of us would spot the cruising scowl in the distance and shout, ‘Clean the house! Clean the house!’ We’d drop everything and bolt inside, cleaning up our room faster than Mary Poppins ever could. In the rush, we grabbed all our clothes and shoved them into one great pile in the closet or stuffed them into drawers, unfolded and out of place. We were brought up better than that, Mother always said, when she found clothes bundled into a bed-sheet and hidden away. But all we wanted to achieve was the appearance of neatness: so long as everything looked good on the surface, we were fine. We also knew that, while we were at school, Mother would go into our bedroom, pull out everything, refold our clothes, restore order and say nothing.

It was no surprise to her that Michael and I grew into the kind of men who left clothes on the floor where we stepped out of them but we cited the same defence: when you grow up as brothers in one tiny room, you get used to knowing where everything is in the chaos or clutter. We got away with a lot more things with Mother. Don’t get me wrong, she was strict, too: if we misbehaved, she wasn’t afraid to administer a firm slap around the ear with the palm of her hand. But where Mother had patience, Joseph had a short fuse trip-wired by another hard shift at The Mill. We heeded what Mother said: respect that your father is in the house, respect that he’s had a hard day at work, respect that he doesn’t want to hear noise.

When he arrived home, Respect walked through the door and the air in the house stiffened. His basic rule was simple: I’ll tell you something once and if you have to be told again, you’ll be punished. As kids within a growing family, we regularly had to be told again. Jackie, Tito and I knew from sore experience what the consequences were. Michael and Marlon, as infants, felt our fear vicariously – at first. When Joseph got angry, just one look on his face was enough – he didn’t need to say a word. He had a mole the size of a dime on one cheek and I can still see it in my mind, close up: whenever he got really mad, it and his face crunched up – the storm clouds rolling in before the clap of thunder and the dreaded words ‘WAIT FOR ME IN YOUR ROOM!’ followed by the flash of lightning; the eye-watering sting of a leather belt against skin. We normally received 10 ‘whops’. I call them ‘whops’ because that was the exact sound the belt made as it whipped the air. I screamed out for God, for Mother, for mercy, and anyone else’s name that I could think of, but Joseph just shouted louder, reminding us why we were being punished: the discipline followed by the reason, mimicking his lessons as a schoolboy.

Whenever we were punished, our screams were what Michael heard, and he saw the red marks and belt-buckle imprints on bare skin at bedtime. This made him fear something long before he actually felt it. In his mind, the mere thought of Joseph’s discipline was traumatic. That is what exaggerated fear does: it builds something in the mind to a scale that, perhaps, it is not.

A WHITE MOUSE HAD BEEN RUNNING loose around the house and Joseph was desperate to catch it because it was driving the girls crazy. When we heard them scream, we knew this rodent had scurried in for a visit. An exasperated Joseph couldn’t understand why we suddenly had this problem. What he didn’t account for was the start of Michael’s lifelong affinity with animals.

Unknown to any of us, he’d been treating this mouse like a pet, encouraging its visits with bits of lettuce and cheese. Looking back, it was obvious: whenever Mother screamed and Joseph cursed, Michael fell suspiciously quiet and slid away. He was only three: who was going to suspect his cunning? But it was only a matter of time before he was found out. That moment arrived when Joseph crept into the kitchen and caught him red-handed, kneeling on the floor, feeding the mouse behind the fridge.

The house shook when Joseph bellowed, ‘WAIT FOR ME IN YOUR ROOM!’

What Michael did next surprised everyone.

He bolted.

He started running around the house like a terrified rabbit. Joseph chased him with the belt and grabbed the back of his shirt, but my brother was a flexible, agile little dynamo, and he wriggled and fought and pulled his arms out of the sleeves, and ran on. He darted into Joseph’s room, up and over the bed, and pinned himself against the wall, tight into the corner, knowing the belt’s arc couldn’t reach him without first striking the walls.

I hadn’t seen Joseph so angry. He dropped the belt, grabbed Michael and spanked him so hard that he screamed the house down.

I hated the awkward silence that hung in the air after one of these episodes, broken only by Mother’s murmurs of disquiet and the quiet sobs into the pillow of whichever one of us had got hit.

Michael didn’t help himself because he was the most defiant. Rebbie remembers the time when he was 18 months old and tossed his baby bottle at Joseph’s head. That should have put our father on notice because when Michael was four, he threw a shoe at him in a temper tantrum – and that earned him a good spanking, too.

Michael’s fear of a spanking always sent him running. Sometimes he’d do a sliding dive under our parents’ bed and tuck himself against the back wall in the centre, gripping the bed springs. It was an effective tactic because after half an hour under there, Joseph was either too exhausted to care or had calmed down: Michael got away with a lot more than he ever let on.

TITO’S PASSION FOR THE GUITAR COULDN’T help itself.

As Jackie and I started learning songs from the radio, his talent blossomed through lessons at school. But when he was at home, he couldn’t practise. So, despite all warnings from Joseph, he borrowed our father’s guitar from the back of his closet. What he wouldn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right?

Whenever Joseph worked, Tito seized his moment. He started playing and we began making harmonies. On a couple of occasions, Mother walked in and found us out, but apart from a gasp that told us we were playing with fire, she turned a blind eye. She was a lot more lenient than our father. On one particular weekend, Tito started playing and we were singing some Four Tops’ song. He was sitting there, plucking away, and Jackie and I were crooning when suddenly there was a twanging noise. Tito went white when he realised one of the strings had broken. ‘Oooh, you’re going to get it now!’ squealed Jackie, part excitement, part fear.

We’re all going to get it now, I thought.

We put the broken treasure back in its rightful place and were sitting in our bedrooms when we heard his car pull up. The bomb was primed. Each loud footstep on the linoleum matched what was going on inside our ribcages. One … two … three … ‘WHO’S … BEEN MESSING … WITH MY GUITARRRR?’ He hollered so loud I think they heard him in California. When he pounded into our room, Michael and Marlon scarpered, leaving Jackie, Tito and me standing by the bunk-beds already whimpering over what we knew was coming next. Mother tried intervening, claiming it was all her fault, but Joseph wasn’t listening. We cried even louder when he told us we were all going to get it until one of us owned up.

‘It was me,’ Tito said, barely heard. ‘I was playing it –’ Joseph grabbed him ‘– but I know how to play. I KNOW HOW TO PLAY!’ he screamed.

I’ve read accounts that say Joseph clobbered him there and then, but that’s not what happened. Instead he stopped, scowled and said, ‘Play, then. Let me see what you can do!’ With a broken string, Tito started to play, and Jackie and I started to sing – even if our crying meant we could give only 50 per cent. ‘Doing The Jerk’ by the Larks became our plea for clemency and we started making harmonies, slightly off note, but it must have sounded good because Joseph visibly loosened. We kept on singing: we saw his head moving to the beat, and he did what would become a habit – he started lip-synching the lyrics, going through the motions with us. We became emboldened, stopped sniffling and pulled ourselves together. Our harmonies came good and we were snapping our fingers. Our audience’s eyes widened and narrowed in both victory and defeat. When we stopped playing, he didn’t say a word but we had been spared a major spanking and that was all that seemed to matter.

Two days later, Joseph arrived home from work with a red electric guitar for Tito and told him to start practising. He told Jackie and me to get ready for rehearsals. He told our mother that he was going ‘to support these boys.’ His focus switched from the Falcons to his sons. We had won his approval and he wanted to harness something we loved doing. It felt like recognition and it excited us. People have said that our father ‘made them sing’ or ‘forced those boys into entertainment’, but singing had come naturally to us and that passion was our choice. We had sung up a storm long before Joseph arrived with his rocket fuel. As a trio of brothers, we told ourselves that we were going to be the best group in Gary.