Читать книгу You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes - Jermaine Jackson - Страница 9

MICHAEL SAT ON THE CARPET WITH two empty, cardboard tubs of Quaker Oats sandwiched between his knees. He bound them together by sticking a pencil through their middle. This, he told everyone, was his set of bongos. Taking up his position as a spectator on the sidelines with Marlon, he was eager for rehearsals to start even though he wasn’t involved since he’d been deemed ‘too little’. But he had decided he was going to join in anyway and four fingers on each hand contributed his beat to whatever rhythm we played. He watched as a purposeful Joseph took Jackie, Tito and me by the shoulders and positioned us like chess pieces ‘on the stage’, which was our living room. Tito, on guitar, took centre position, with me to his right; the three of us stood around wondering what our next move was going to be.

In the kitchen, Mother stayed out of the way with Rebbie and La Toya, allowing us to do our thing. She knew what we’d soon find out: these sessions were not some dreamy pretence but a serious business in our father’s eyes. A single microphone was hooked into its stand in the middle of the room. No hairbrushes or shampoo bottles for his sons. It was borrowed from the Falcons, a baton passed to the next generation. ‘You’ve got to learn how to use it, not be afraid of it, hold it, play it,’ said Joseph.

Play the microphone? I think our faces said it all.

He put on a James Brown LP, turned it up loud, grabbed the mic, dipped left, dipped right, then threw it forward so it bounced right back. That was ‘playing’ the mic. ‘Hear that voice, Jermaine? Do it like that. Do it just like that.’ He played classic 45s and LPs so that we could study, over and over, one song at a time, how it was sung, and how it should be performed. I remember the repetitiveness of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & the MGs, and James Brown’s version of ‘Night Train’. As Joseph encouraged us to move, we started doing the cow-step, snapping our fingers, and self-consciously shuffling around. He wasn’t impressed. ‘Boys, you can’t just sing and sway. You gotta move – put more feeling into it! Like this …’

He stepped in, with James Brown as his dance track, and started getting down, bobbing his head. We couldn’t help but giggle at his lack of grace. ‘I can see you laughing,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want you looking like amateurs.’

We went back to our ‘marks’, back to being choreographed. Back to the class where there was no motto above the door but if there had been, it would have read: ‘The Right Way Becomes Habit’.

In the meantime, there was always Joseph’s verbal handbook, which was seared into our memories. ‘You have to entertain. Be dynamic. Be different. Take it to the audience!’ We studied songs and learned moves for two, three, sometimes five hours a day for months on end. Whenever Joseph wasn’t working or sleeping, we practised. ‘Practice does not make perfect,’ he always said. ‘It makes consistency.’ Practice made us remember. And yet we seemed to forget regularly. ‘Let’s do it again … and again … and again, until we get it right,’ he said.

Meanwhile, Michael kept pounding those upturned oatmeal cartons. I lost count of how many he went through, but Joseph eventually found him a real set of second-hand bongos. And our lessons kept coming. ‘Imagine the crowd … picture them … look out … feel them … and SMILE!’

We looked straight out of the window on to Jackson Street – always facing the light – and saw other kids running around playing tag-football or roller-skating. We heard fun and laughter. When school friends knocked on our door to ask if we wanted to play, Joseph refused. ‘No, they’re busy rehearsing,’ he said. This, in turn, built an endless curiosity about the goings-on inside our house for the rest of the 1960s. On a few occasions, children came up to the window to see what was happening, mushing their noses against the glass. I guess that was the start of living in a goldfish bowl. Some kids banged on the window and made fun of us.

‘You’re locked up! You’re locked up!’ they chanted, and ran away laughing.

Joseph drew the curtains. No one got anywhere in life from playing in the street. ‘Focus’, he said. ‘You’ll always face distractions,’ he added, ‘but it’s about keeping your minds on the job.’ If he could take time out to work hard between his shifts, so could we. That was the unspoken message.

As we continued, he recognised our talents. But entertainment wasn’t just about skill: it was showmanship, he said. We had to create ‘the Jackson mystique’. As for those dance moves, never, ever start counting them. ‘You must not do that. It can’t be one, two, three … kick. That’s dancing by numbers,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to know and feel what’s coming up next. Take OUT the numbers, bring IN the feeling!’

In those early days, Joseph was patient and took his time shaping us. He knew we were green, so he was forgiving. When he witnessed our gradual improvement, this pleased him and in turn, made us dig deeper. Impressing him and winning his respect mattered. Family members like Uncle Luther and Mama Martha came over, and Joseph asked us to sing. He noted their enthusiastic reactions, but it was never good enough. ‘You can give more. We can do better!’ At least Joseph was kicking our butts with something we loved doing. At least he was spending time with us, unlike a lot of fathers in the neighbourhood. We felt driven, not pushed, guided into where we wanted to go.

‘Blood, sweat and tears, boys – if you wanna be the best, blood, sweat and tears,’ he said.

Tito had the guitar down, I was vocally strong, and Jackie’s forte was honed by the dance contests he’d won with Rebbie. He led the moves Joseph wanted, and we mirrored him until we were in sync. We were light on our feet so it soon came easy. Outside these sessions, I was encouraged to sing ballads: ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Moon River’ – Mother’s favourites. I mastered them by putting on the LP and writing out the lyrics. The tough part was holding my notes with the lungs of a kid but Joseph noticed my initial struggle.

‘You gotta sing from your stomach,’ said our vocal coach, choreographer and manager. ‘Imagine a balloon expanding as it sucked in air,’ he said. ‘That’s breathing in. Releasing that air is how you sing, hold and control a note. Think bagpipes.’ I compared my lungs to balloons and bagpipes for many years because knowing how to breathe – swelling the stomach – taught me how to sing.

‘Master the melody before the lyrics. Know where the key change is. Know where the notes are,’ he said. This was the strongest lesson inside 2300 Jackson Street: understanding our voice is the melody, and that the melody is everything. ‘You should be able to sing a song without music.’

Even our ‘ear’ was being trained.

We knew it was all starting to click together when none of us looked down at Jackie’s feet, or muttered a countdown under our breath. We just fell into it. Performing felt like the most natural thing in the world.

MAMA MARTHA WAS EVER-PRESENT IN OUR childhood, always visiting from her house in Hammond, East Chicago, about 20 minutes away. She arrived with pound cake and a big smacker of a kiss, which, when planted on the cheek with vigour, made one of those squelching sounds of puckered lips on skin. A real grandmother’s ‘mwah’!

After we had put in endless practice as a trio, Joseph was keen to show his mother-in-law what his micro man-management had created. What we didn’t know was that Michael was also itching to get in on the action. As our all-female audience – Mother, Mama, Rebbie and La Toya (plus two-year-old Randy) – stood watching, Jackie, Tito and I lined up in formation, ready to do our father proud.

Michael was, as always, seated with his bongos on the floor. As we came out of the intro of some song I now forget, the girls started to clap with the rhythm and Michael stood. Then, sensing the song building, he started to sing spontaneously, coming in on a part. Distracted, I waved him away, trying to hush his mouth. As far as we were concerned, he was ruining our moment.

Before we knew it, Joseph had stopped the record.

‘He’s not supposed to be singing!’ I said, protesting.

Mama Martha jumped to his defence. ‘Leave him alone. Let the boy sing if he wants to sing! You want to sing, Michael?’

His face lit up. We stood to one side to let him have his moment in our grandmother’s sun and Joseph begrudgingly turned on the music as our little brother started to sing. What he produced was no ‘Jingle Bells’ at a Christmas window. It was one hundred times better because it was an invited rendition, not a forbidden carol. This was Michael, shy but confident and knowing exactly what to do: he played the mic, worked the floor and sang beautifully, and we were, like, ‘Damn – that’s good!’

I didn’t know where that voice came from.

‘Heaven,’ said Mother.

The wide-eyed look on Joseph’s face was a picture.

All that time on the sidelines, Michael had been memorising everything we were doing. And then Talent emerged from its hiding place.

As everyone applauded, he felt as big as his brothers, and that’s all a kid brother wants to feel.

Mama Martha and Mother nodded knowingly to one another, as if to say ‘Always knew that one had it in him’.

I don’t remember Joseph immediately installing him in the group because there were still reservations about his age: he had only just turned five on 29 August 1963. But a few weeks later that no longer mattered when Michael became the first brother to perform before a live audience – at a Parent Teacher Association gala at Garnett Elementary School. It was Michael’s first term there, and a set of grey, oblong blocks became his first stage.

The gymnasium was filled with wooden foldaway chairs and it felt like the whole community had turned out to see local kids perform. I was sitting with Mother and Papa Samuel, and we knew Michael’s class was due to sing and that he had been asked to do a solo. We sensed it was a big deal for him because he had left the house that morning in a blue shirt, buttoned up to the neck, and smart pants, not his usual T-shirt and jeans. His chosen song was ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’ from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (which would become one of his all-time favourite movies).

Michael hadn’t made a big fuss about this spot and I don’t remember him rehearsing his solo at home but that probably speaks of a quiet confidence first being displayed; a boy getting on with something in his own head until the moment of execution. Something he’d do throughout his life.

When it came to his spot, the woman teacher on the piano nodded and Michael stepped forward. Mother squeezed the purse on her lap with both hands and I didn’t know what I was going to do: die of embarrassment or claim him as my own.

I shouldn’t have worried.

He did everything our father had taught us to do – and then came the unexpected ‘wow’ moment: the high note at the end, which soared and echoed around the gymnasium with acoustic perfection. It was like God had reached down into one moment and said: ‘Kid, I’m going to give you a voice that is out of this world. Now use it!’

Michael was animated, wandering the stage with confidence. He didn’t follow the lead of the teacher, like most kids: she followed him. What amazed everyone was that he sang it so high. On that end note everyone stood and applauded. Even the teacher at the piano was up, clapping faster than I had ever seen anyone clap.

That’s my brother! I thought.

Mother was in tears. And even Papa Samuel was choked.

Damn, Michael – you’ve even made Papa Samuel cry!

I suspect that was the very moment Michael’s soul locked into its purpose to entertain, upon feeling the buzz of applause and seeing the reaction he had created. I knew that I wanted to be alongside him, feeling the same thing.

After that day, our musical group became five. Michael was drafted in, and so too was Marlon. Not because he had demonstrated anything outstanding but because Mother wasn’t having him be the odd one out. ‘You’ll crush him if you don’t include him, Joe,’ she said.

Over the years, it has been written that I was somehow hurt or jealous over Michael’s inclusion but I was not: there was nothing to be jealous about. We were a group without a name that hadn’t even broken out of our living room, so there was no limelight to steal. There was nothing but enthusiastic harmony between brothers. We used to lie awake in our bunk-beds, imagining being stars. Our morning singing now took on purpose. As we climbed out of bed, one brother would sing, another would jump in, then another and before we knew it, we had a three-part harmony going.

There were notes I couldn’t hit and all of a sudden, Michael reached them with ease. That boy was like a bird. He found octaves that I didn’t know existed and our father was blown away. You could tell he viewed Michael as the unexpected bonus to his game plan. The only thing missing now was the right name.

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED HOW MANY names my parents went through before agreeing on the final nine. Not that it mattered in the end, because the choice of ‘Sigmund Esco’ for their first son morphed into ‘Jackie’ when Papa Samuel thought it easy to refer to him as ‘Jackson boy’, then laziness shortened it some more. And ‘Tariano Adaryl’ became ‘Tito’ because it was easier for us all. I was forever curious as a child about how two people’s taste could go from the exotic-sounding ‘Jermaine LaJuane’ to ‘Michael Joe’. From somewhere, and especially after Michael’s death, a rumour began that his middle name was Joseph. Maybe this myth prefers the echo with our father’s name because the crossover reads better about a father and son who struggled to see eye to eye. ‘Joe’ was his middle name, as recorded on his birth certificate. His first name was almost ‘Ronald’, at the suggestion of Mama Martha, but Mother quickly quashed that one. In the light of history, ‘Ronald’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Michael was the seventh child with seven letters in his first name and ‘7’ was his favourite number. So, numerically, his name is ‘777’. That’s the Jackpot there. The Lucky 7s. A number that appears only once in the Bible. There’s a lot that can be read into a name. That’s the power of its sound and interpretation; the story it can tell, and the memories it can evoke. But ‘7’ was central to his identity. He wore jackets with ‘7’ sewn into the arm. When he doodled on paper, ‘7’ was tagged all over. And what the world never saw were his pencil sketches in later life for a furniture range he had in his head. He drew throne-like upholstered chairs with ‘7’ carved into the centre of the oak frame beneath the seat, set within an intricate, floral design.

I think about all the names we considered across the years: song titles, album titles and names for our own children, all in search of the one name that sounds right. That is one reason why biographers should always have known that ‘The Ripples and the Waves’ was not a name we would have chosen as a group. To our amusement, the rumour went around, and made it into print, that this was our first name. It started, no doubt, because a song titled ‘Let Me Carry Your Schoolbooks’ was released by the Ripples and the Waves + Michael on the Steeltown Records label – which would become our first label. I suspect the use of the name ‘Michael’ was a deliberate marketing ploy aimed at catching our coat-tails. But this Michael was a Michael Rogers, and the Ripples and the Waves was another group.

Our first name could actually have been a lot worse. One lady suggested we needed something fancy like the El Dorados. We were in danger of being made to sound like some damn Cadillac. Luckily, that idea was sunk when we discovered there was another band from Chicago of the same name. Joseph wanted ‘Jackson’ in the name, but it had to be catchy. Our parents talked about ‘The Jackson Brothers 5’ and that was the lead contender until Mother had a conversation with a local lady named Evelyn Lahaie, who said, ‘It’s too much of a mouthful. Why don’t you just call them the Jackson 5?’ Mrs Lahaie ran ‘Evelyn’s School of Charm’ for local girls in Gary and seemed to know a thing or two about image, so that was how the Jackson 5 was born. On paper, at least.

JOHNNY RAY NELSON, THE KID WHO lived next door, was always good value for entertainment because his brother Roy would chase him out the front door with a crow-bar, Johnny running and giggling, Roy vowing to get him; playfighting, Gary style. When Johnny had stopped running and peace had returned, he’d overhear us singing through the open windows. He said he was always amazed by how we could harmonise so young.

Once, Michael was out front in the sunshine when Johnny said, ‘Sing us a song and I’ll get you some cookies.’ On cue, Michael stood there and sang. Sure enough, we all caught on to this neighbourhood perk and before anyone knew it, five brothers were lined up at the fence, giving Johnny Ray Nelson a private performance for a plate of his cookies.

BETWEEN 1962 AND THE SUMMER OF 1965, Joseph kept honing our performance until he felt we were ready. He fixed us a rehearsal timetable: Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, starting at 4.30 after school, and running, non-stop, until seven or sometimes nine o’clock.

By the early sixties, the Temptations had broken through to become our newest role models. In Joseph’s eyes, Dave Ruffin’s mellow but raspy vocals, with his stage presence, set the bar for what he wanted us to achieve. But he didn’t expect us to match him, he expected us to better him. The Temptations, for all their greatness, represented basement level in our father’s standards. There were groups all over America trying to be the next Temptations, he said. ‘You aren’t going to be the next, you’re going to be better!’

He illustrated his point with one hand in the air to show where we needed to aim. ‘We don’t want you here,’ he said, jabbing a flat hand at waist level. ‘We want you here’ – top of the head – ‘and when you’re here, we want you here!’ Two feet above his head. ‘Reach higher … always go for more …’ He didn’t want the audience reaction to be ‘Hey, they were good for a bunch of kids.’ He wanted ‘Wow – who are they?’ We would achieve this by creating a performance that pulled on the audience’s emotions, he said. ‘When they watch you, you’re controlling them and bringing them into your world. Sell the lyric. Make ’em stand and make ’em scream.’

Five boys, none of us yet teenagers, wondered privately how we would ever make people scream.

When she was doing the dishes, Mama Martha could squeeze every last drop of water out of a wet tea-towel. If it didn’t think it had one more tear left in it, she would prove it wrong. Joseph was the same with us. And as we saw our performance coming together, we understood better – and then we embellished it some more, especially Michael. When he told us to slide a certain way, or fall to our knees, or show a certain expression, we added more. We watched and learned from Dave Ruffin’s anguished performances and James Brown’s pained soul.

When the Jackson 5 went live, many people said the body language and emotion Michael demonstrated belied his years. There was talk – then and now – that he was an old soul tapping into feelings he couldn’t know, let alone understand, as a child. People even suggested that this showed how quickly he had been forced to grow up. The truth is simpler: it was nothing more than another child imitating adults. Michael was a master of imitation, as coached by Joseph – our drama teacher. Each time a song required heartache or pain, he told us, ‘Show it in your face, let me feel it …’ Michael dropped to his knees, pulled at his heart and looked … pained. ‘No. NO!’ said our harshest critic. ‘It doesn’t look real. I’m not feeling it.’

Michael studied human emotions on the faces of others in the same microscopic way he studied song and dance. Ask him then what he was doing and he would have parroted our father: ‘I’m just selling the lyric …’ His practice began to focus more on the required showmanship, so he played James Brown records, this time breaking down the music into steps and dance moves. Or he’d watch a Fred Astaire movie, lying on the living-room carpet in front of the television, chin on hands. He didn’t make notes: he just watched awestruck and soaked it up like a sponge. If ever he was in bed, and Joseph was at work, and James Brown or Fred Astaire came on television, Mother would come into our bedroom. ‘Michael,’ she’d whisper, ‘James Brown is on TV!’

Michael’s world stopped for either James Brown or Fred Astaire. He idolised the very ground they danced on.

We had a black-and-white Zenith TV and its reception depended on a metal coat hanger. We tried to make the picture ‘colour’ by adding one of those transparent plastic sheets that could be fixed to the screen back in the day. It had a blue hue at the top for the sky, a yellow-bronze as the middle layer for people’s skin, and green at the bottom for grass. We even had to use our imaginations when it came to watching television.

It became Michael’s tool for memorising everything. If he saw someone doing a move, he channelled it, as if his brain sent an instant signal to his body. He watched James Brown and became James Brown junior. He moved with a finesse that was fluid from the start. From the very beginning, he was a man dancing in a kid’s body. It was innate. He always knew his part, and never asked where he was supposed to be.

His confidence gave us confidence. Joseph restrung his old guitar and put me on bass. Like Tito, I had never read a sheet of music in my life but I listened, played and picked it up. None of us understood notes or chords, or anything like that. I still wouldn’t know my way around a sheet of music if you put one in front of me. Notes on paper – a written instruction – do not carry feeling. A musical ear comes from the heart. Take Stevie Wonder – his blindness proves that it’s all about playing from the heart.

Michael and I often shared lead vocals by alternating verses, but he was very much the group’s frontman holding the mic. We lined up in the living room as we would line up on stage. Facing the audience, I was on the far left and bass, Michael to my right, then Jackie, Marlon – who was the same height as Michael – and Tito on the far right with his guitar. With Tito’s and my height book-ending us, and Jackie as the tallest in the middle, we stood with the symmetry of five bars on an equaliser.

But we weren’t the only group forming in Gary: dreams were being rehearsed in plenty of other houses because of the soul market sprouting in nearby Chicago. There were several barber-shop quartets going down, and the genre was all about choreographed routines. But we always sensed there was something unique about us, in real terms, not just in Joseph’s mind. Being brothers brought us an instant synchronicity and kinship that other groups didn’t have. This unity was our edge and I doubt anyone across all of America had a coach as fiercely passionate as Joseph. People ask about the pressure and burden we must have felt, but we didn’t. There was no such thing as fear of failure because Joseph made us imagine – and believe in – success: think it, see it, believe it, make it happen. As Michael said in an interview with Ebony magazine in 2007: ‘My father was a genius when it comes to the way he taught us: staging, how to work an audience, anticipating what to do next, or never let the audience know if you are suffering, or if something’s going wrong. He was amazing like that.’

One day, Joseph made us stand a few feet away from the wall and stick out our hands. As we stood in this position, our fingers fell a few inches short of the wall. ‘You can touch it,’ said Joseph.

‘How can we? Our fingers aren’t long enough … it’s impossible,’ we moaned.

‘Get it in your head that you can touch that wall!’ he insisted.

Here started yet another Joseph mental lesson: the mind is stronger than the physical. ‘Believe that you can touch the wall,’ he said. ‘When you think you’re at the limit of your reach, then reach more. Visualise reaching it. Picture yourself touching the wall.’ Michael stood on tiptoe and strained to outreach us all. That made us giggle. He was the tiniest boy, yet he always wanted to be fastest and first.

If Joseph had any doubt of his influence on Michael’s career, then that doubt will have gone when Michael put his stamp on Hayvenhurst in 1981. Nailed to an exterior wall of his old studio remains a sign with a pale blue background and big-lettered words: ‘Those Who Reach Touch The Stars’.

IF WE COULDN’T WAIT FOR MOTHER to return home from work, we couldn’t wait for Joseph to leave: with him out of the way, we could run around, act the fool, go outside and play. Rebbie, especially, couldn’t wait for him to work a night shift because then she could sleep in a proper bed with Mother, not on the sofa-bed. The common perception of our youth seems to be framed by the use of Joseph’s belt and the timetable for rehearsals, and it’s true that our circumstances developed us more as artists than as boys. But, as much as I hear the voice of discipline and instruction in my memories, I also hear the distinct sound of fun, laughter and play. As brothers, we always had someone to hang around with and those memories have not been allowed to breathe in public. Anyone from a large family will tell you that we each remember things differently.

With Joseph at work, Mother made sure we didn’t slacken off on the routines we were expected to know. ‘Did you learn that song you’re supposed to do? Did you learn those steps?’ she would ask. She was our father’s eyes and ears, but she balanced that with our need to play. As well as the go-karts, the trains and the merry-go-round, we rode our bikes (again built by Tito out of junkyard frames and wheels) and went roller-skating (with those wheeled brackets that clamped on to sneakers, bought second-hand). We couldn’t wait to get out and tear up and down Jackson Street – ‘But go no further than Mr Pinsen’s house!’ He was our baseball coach and lived 10 doors down.

We enjoyed family camping holidays to the Wisconsin Dells, where we went fishing with Joseph and he taught Jackie, Tito and me how to bait the hook. We always stayed near old Indian towns and walked the trails in homage to our ancestry. We grew up knowing we have Native American blood in our veins, passed down from both the Choctaw and Blackfoot tribes. The inherited physical attributes were our high cheekbones, light skin and hairless chests.

Back home, we watched lots of television and it was always a fight between Jackie wanting sports, Michael and Marlon wanting Mighty Mouse or The Road Runner Show, and me wanting Maverick, starring James Garner. The only programmes we all liked were The Three Stooges, Flash Gordon and any Western starring Randolph Scott. It’s The Three Stooges we must thank for first teaching us the harmonies we took to Mother at the kitchen sink. We loved mimicking their introductory triad-harmony of ‘Hello … Hello … Hello’.

We huddled around Mother on the sofa to watch TV. My abiding memory of this happy scene is of her seated in the middle and Michael lying across her lap, head facing the screen, me sitting on her other side, La Toya on the floor, against her legs, resting her back on the sofa, Marlon on the other side (with Janet when she entered the equation). Tito and Randy would lie on the floor, while Rebbie and Jackie took the armchair or a kitchen chair. In the window – opened during sultry summer evenings – we wedged one of those square fans that blew cold air into the room. Michael would stick his head in front of the fan, on its highest whirring speed, and hum – fascinated by how the blast of air made his voice waver.

In the winter, there was no shortage of cold air blowing through every crack of our poorly insulated home. The brutal winters of Indiana punched through the paper-thin walls and the walk to school sometimes felt like an expedition across Antarctica. On school mornings, Joseph ensured Mother cooked a pot of boiled potatoes before we set off from base camp into the deep snow. We couldn’t afford gloves – and didn’t wear hats because of our blowout Afros – so we placed a hot potato in each pocket to keep our hands warm. Mother then covered our faces with Vaseline, rubbing it in like sun-lotion, from hairline to chin, ear to ear. In those severe winters, this stopped our skin getting dry but it also served another purpose in Mother’s eyes: ‘It makes you look all shiny, fresh, new and clean,’ she said, making the greasy smears of Vaseline sound almost fashionable. We told her that other kids didn’t have Vaseline faces; she told us that they didn’t look as clean as we did.

MOTHER STILL WANTED JOSEPH TO BUILD an extra room on to the house and for as long as there was a stack of bricks in the backyard, she was not going to relent. We were eight-strong now with the addition of Randy (Janet was still to come), but if one sentence was repeated in our house – apart from ‘Let’s do it again’ – it was ‘This place is falling to pieces’, as expressed by our mother. Her savings, which had been building since Tito’s birth, were now somewhere in the region of $300, but I don’t think anyone dared point out that the money would be better spent on fixing the patched-up water-pipe or buying a new television: this was Mother’s growing nest-egg for another room …

Until, that is, the day Joseph made a unilateral decision in the interests of our group. His VW van, which had replaced his old Buick, pulled up outside and he started unloading microphones, stands, amplifiers, tambourines, a keyboard, drum-set and speakers. It was like the Christmas we were never allowed. Mother was breathless with anger. ‘Joseph!’ she said, rushing outside as he pulled our new instruments out of the van. ‘What have you done? What is all this stuff?’ We were too excited to know which ‘toy’ to play with first. Mother trailed Joseph as he went back and forth between living room and van. ‘I don’t believe it!’ she said. ‘We can’t dress our children in new clothes and Jackie has holes in his shoes, this place is falling to pieces, and you’ve gone and bought instruments?’

As with everything in our household, Joseph’s decision was final. He said it was a necessary investment, ‘if we are to support our boys.’

I had never really heard our parents fight before because Mother usually stepped down, but this time he had crossed the line. Not only had he failed to consult her, he had used most of her precious savings. ‘You’ll get your new room, Katie,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move to California and then I’ll buy you a bigger house, but our boys can’t perform without instruments!’ On several nights, we heard raised voices from their bedroom. Mother was worried that he was chasing a pipe-dream and building up our hopes, leading us towards disappointment. Joseph was adamant that he was doing the right thing, and he needed her support. This was how he expressed his love for us – by believing in our talent. Where Mother soaked us in love and affection, Joseph compensated with what she lacked: confidence and belief. In terms of what children should receive from two parents, these opposites weighed themselves out evenly. Mother tended to look pragmatically at life, whereas Joseph was more ‘speculate to accumulate’. His tough love was expressed not in affection or being tactile, but in the focus and discipline he instilled and the respect he asked for. It was the love of a football coach, expressed with a heart that was all about winning the game. A slap on the back, a smile on his face, and an excited clap of the hands was his way of expressing admiration. It was his only way of knowing how to express his love.

There was tension in the house for a few weeks, but eventually Mother calmed down and agreed to trust Joseph’s gamble. We just didn’t see the chips being pushed on to the red square in our name.

THE RADIO CRACKLED INTO ITS BROADCAST and that night in 1964, the house was the quietest it had ever been. ‘Good evening, sports fans across the land,’ the boxing commentator announced, ‘and now the questions will be answered. Liston in the white trunks with the black stripes. Clay – half an inch taller – in the white trunks and the red stripes …’ It amazed me that this man could take us there, painting a picture so vivid that we could ‘see’, heightening Joseph’s tension as he hunched forward in his kitchen chair, pulled up alongside the radio on the side cabinet. ‘The Heavyweight Championship of the World,’ the voice continued. ‘If it goes past the first round, there will be surprises already …’

We heard the bell. The crowd roared. We pictured the contender, Cassius Clay, the man from Louisville, Kentucky, springing from his corner to take on the reigning champ, Sonny Liston. ‘AND HERE THEY COME!’

Even before the 22-year-old Cassius Clay became known as Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest’, we were rooting for him because Joseph loved his boxing and said we should cheer the underdog who had the fire to take on the best. Joseph had boxed competitively as a teenager in Oakland and he always had Tito, Jackie and me on the front lawn with our red gloves on, teaching us ‘never be afraid of no one’. He’d referee bouts with other kids from the street and Michael would sit on the front step shouting, ‘Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!’

Joseph taught us technique and how to defend ourselves. ‘No one beats a Jackson,’ he said, and no one ever did. Joseph said he had trained using one of Papa Samuel’s solid oak doors, not a punchbag – it strengthened the callouses and toughened the mind. He was the strongest, hardest, toughest man we knew and I’m sure he imagined himself in the ring as we gathered around the radio.

As we listened, he couldn’t help making a link between entertainment and boxing. ‘Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee – that’s what you need to be doing onstage,’ he said, using Clay’s boast from a press conference earlier that week. Joseph found these convenient associations everywhere and disguised them as lessons. He did it with Jim Brown of the Cleveland Bears whenever we talked football. The No. 32 and the greatest running back of all time was an example of dedication: ‘Never missed a game or a training session in nine years because he knows you’ve got to work at being the best.’

He even hid lessons in the chores he made us do. That pile of bricks in the backyard – the ones Mother now knew would never be built on to the house – still served a purpose. There must have been 100 of those real heavy cinder-block bricks sitting in a stack at the left of the house. Our job was to carry them, one by one, to the other side and build a new stack. It was a pointless exercise, but we didn’t ask why; we just did as we were told. When Joseph returned home, he inspected our work. Every brick had to be flush, and every line must be straight, running down the pile. ‘No … do it again. I want them stacked evenly,’ he said – and we moved them from right to left until we had it just right. We learned discipline and perfection through cuts, blisters and grazes. Work as a team. Do it right. No room for error. If one person is off, it messes up everyone else – and messes up ‘the look’. Noted for choreographic reasons.

All this might explain why some of us turned into obsessive compulsives as adults. Whenever Michael walked into a room and saw a pillow ‘out of place’, he’d change it. ‘This is bothering me,’ he’d say with a smile. Same with me. Same with Rebbie. ‘Remember the bricks?’ we’d say, and then we’d fall about laughing.

So when Cassius Clay arrived on the boxing scene, he presented Joseph with the perfect new example to fold into his lectures. Because here was someone new, who was doubted by the experts yet supreme in his confidence. As we huddled around the radio, Michael and Marlon started shadow boxing to one side as the commentator took us through the first round. Sonny Liston was missing more punches than he landed. ‘That’s all about footwork,’ Joseph said. Mother muttered something about not agreeing with a violent sport but Joseph wasn’t listening – he was too busy translating the commentary. ‘Sonny Liston is like your audience … You’ve got to go out there, tear up the stage and lay ’em out flat!’

That night Cassius Clay won and became the youngest boxer ever to take the title from a reigning heavyweight champion. ‘I shook up the world,’ he told the media. Point made – both in the ring and in the minds of the kids he had no idea were rooting for him in Gary, Indiana.

ON THE GRASS BETWEEN OUR BEDROOM window and 23rd Avenue, there was a tree. During high winds and the tornado warnings that swept across Indiana, Michael and I watched from the window to see how strong that tree really was. It was endlessly fascinating to observe the bout between Mother Nature and the muscle of our tree. It bowed and bent, and ducked and dived like Ali, but it never snapped or uprooted. In my mind, the strongest trees represent family: the parents are the trunk – providing stability – and the branches are the children, sprouting new life in different directions. But everyone belongs to the same tree from the same seed: forever solid, whatever weathers it may face.

I once shared this analogy with Michael and he turned it into a plaque at Neverland. It had been inspired, no doubt, by Joseph telling us as children that our family’s roots were as deep and entwined as a tree’s. A solid family was important to our parents, both of whom came from broken homes. The tug-of-war between his own parents was something Joseph didn’t wish to repeat. Mother’s parents had divorced after moving from Alabama to Indiana: she went to live with her father – Papa Prince – and her sister Hattie with her mother, Mama Martha. Mother and Joseph had vowed to build a family and stick together, preaching to us that nothing and no one should ever come between us.

Before the Jackson 5 ever went public, Joseph took us outside the house one Fall to give us a final lesson to carry through life. He led us to our tree. There were broken twigs strewn all around it and he bent down to collect six, of more or less equal length. He asked us to gather round and pay attention.

He reminded us about togetherness and always looking out for one another. Then he separated one twig from the rest and snapped it in half. ‘They can break one of you when you are separated …’ he said, leaving five thick twigs in his hand. He bunched them tight, side by side, and tried breaking them between his hands and over his knee. Try as he might, with a mill worker’s grip, he couldn’t. ‘… but when you stick together, you are unbreakable,’ he added.