You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes
You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes
Jermaine Jackson
‘This is the truth as we know it. I have read so much about what people think they know about Michael, but this is about what really happened.’ Jermaine JacksonYou Are Not Alone is an intimate, loving portrait of Michael Jackson, illuminating the private man like never before. It is an invitation into Michael’s real character, private insights and hidden feelings: the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private individual.Jermaine Jackson knew Michael like only a brother can. In You Are Not Alone Jermaine brings light to the man behind the mask of superstardom, an identity that has lingered in the shadows for too long. You Are Not Alone is a celebration of the real Michael: the boy who shared a tiny bunkbed with Jermaine at 2300 Jackson Street, Gary, Indiana; the brother with whom Jermaine shared laughter, tears and memories; the boy who would grow up to become a legend.Raw, honest and incredibly moving, You Are Not Alone is also a sophisticated, no-holds-barred examination of Michael Jackson, aimed at fostering a true and final understanding of who he was and what shaped him. This is Michael Jackson – the man, not the legend – through a brother’s eyes.If you love Michael Jackson, this is the only book you will want to read.If you think you know the Michael Jackson story, it’s time to think again.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Michael Through a Brother’s Eyes
Jermaine Jackson
Epigraph
I have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal palace of the Pyramids. I shall not totally die, and a great part of me will live beyond death. I will keep growing, fresh with the praise of posterity.
– Horace, 23 BC
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue – 2005
The Beginning – The Early Years
1. Eternal Child
2. 2300 Jackson Street
3. God’s Gift
4. Just Kids With a Dream
5. Cry Freedom
6. Motown University
7. Jackson-mania
The Middle – The Hayvenhurst Years
8. Life Lessons
9. Growing Pains
10. Separate Ways
11. Moonwalking
12. Animal Kingdom
13. The Hardest Victory
14. The Reunion Party
The End – The Neverland Years
15. Once Said …
16. Forever Neverland
17. Body of Lies
18. Love, Chess and Destiny
19. Unbreakable
20. 14 White Doves
21. The Comeback King
22. Gone Too Soon
Photographic Insert
Epilogue – Smile
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
2005
THE BATHROOM MIRROR AT A LITTLE hotel in Santa Maria, California, is fogged with condensation, and there is so much steam from my morning shower that my reflection is rendered invisible. As I stand at the sink, dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, the opaque glass is now nothing but an inviting canvas of mist on which to log a thought I have been repeating in my head.
‘MICHAEL JACKSON 1,000% INNOCENT’, I daub with my finger, ending with a full-stop that I convert into a smiley-face. Believe in the happy ending.
I stare at this message and focus on a visualised outcome: victory, justice and vindication. It is 10 March 2005: day 11 of the courthouse circus that sees my brother accused of child molestation.
‘MICHAEL JACKSON 1,000% INNOCENT’, I read again. I continue to stare at the top left corner of the mirror, watching the smiley-face start to run. Transfixed, I flash back to Michael’s bathroom at the Hayvenhurst estate in Encino, outside Los Angeles – his home prior to Neverland – and know that I am mimicking in 2005 what he did in 1982. Back then, in the top left corner of his mirror, he took a black felt permanent marker – to match the black marble – and scrawled: ‘THRILLER! 100 MILLION SALES … SELL OUT STADIUMS’.
Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen. Will it into reality, as taught to us in childhood by our mother, Katherine, and father, Joseph. ‘You can do this … you can do this,’ I can hear Joseph insisting during early, scratchy rehearsals as the Jackson 5, ‘we’re doing this over and over until you get it right. Think about it, say it, see yourself doing it, visualise it happening … and it will happen.’ Plant it in your head and focus with all your heart, Mother added, more gently. This was drilled into our young minds decades before positive-thinking became fashionable. Our minds are preprogrammed not to entertain doubt or half-heartedness.
Michael knew the scale of the breakthrough, innovation and success he desired as a solo artist with the Thriller album, so that one thought transcribed on his mirror was his positive starting point. Years after his move to Neverland, the permanence of the pen’s marker had flaked and the message appeared to have disappeared to the naked eye, yet it had left its imprint embedded in the glass, because each time that mirror fogged, the faintest outline of his words could still be seen, as if it were one of those secret codes written by a magic pen. Condensation and misted glass always remind me of Michael’s written ambition.
From the eighties, nobody knew about a lot of what he created until its execution, but the idea or concept was written down somewhere he could see it daily, or recited into a voice recorder as a visualisation he could see or hear. He didn’t share ideas because he didn’t want anyone to interfere; he relied on mental strength for his focus. Between November 2003 – when he was arrested and charged – and this day in March 2005, he’s needed that strength.
Awake at 4.30am each day of the trial, he’s bracing himself, getting prepared, psyching himself up to withstand another day of ritual humiliation.
Yesterday, 9 March, Gavin Arvizo, the 15-year-old boy being showcased as ‘the victim’, began his incredulous testimony, going into graphic detail. I was seated behind Michael the whole time, as I have been since the start.
Outwardly, my brother projects a hardened image: detached, expressionless, almost cold. Inwardly, the bolted brackets that had been holding him together are snapping violently under pressure, one by one.
I look at my mirrored message now fading as the air rushes in, but the intent remains stark: Michael will be found innocent. I would carve it into my grandmother’s gravestone if I could. Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen.
But whatever intent I put out there is not enough to remove the ache and worry we feel as a family. I find myself constantly reflecting, going back to a time when we believed Hollywood to be only a magical place; when we believed in the Yellow Brick Road.
I watch the local news on the television in my room, looking ahead to day 11 of the trial. I think of Michael at Neverland. The cars will be pulling up in the courtyard. He will have been up four hours, eaten breakfast on a silver tray in his room, alone – stealing time on his own – before coming downstairs, giving himself 45 minutes between departure and arrival. His routine is clockwork, organised like some back-stage itinerary.
I think of all he has achieved, and all he is now being put through.
How has something so beautiful turned so twisted and ugly? Did fame do it? Is this the end-game in the American Dream when a black man achieves success on this magnitude? Is this what happens when an artist becomes bigger than his record label? Is this about publishing rights? Ruin the man, keep the money-machine?
These are the questions that race through my mind.
Are his Hollywood friends and one-time attorneys, allies and producers staying away because they regard him as nuclear – treating friendship like a sponsorship deal? What about those divisive people who whispered into a malleable ear that we, his family, should be kept at a distance, not trusted. Why aren’t they alongside him now, whispering encouragement and support?
Michael is fast realising who his friends aren’t, and what family means. But now his liberty is at stake, and everything he has built up is in danger of collapsing. I want to turn back time: lift the needle off the record and return us to the first track as the Jackson 5 – a time of togetherness, unity and brotherhood. ‘All for one, and one for all,’ as Mother used to say.
I play this eternal game of ‘What If?’ in my head and can’t help but think that we could have – should have – handled things differently, especially with Michael. We stood off him too much when he wanted his space and that allowed vultures into the vacuum. We allowed outsiders in. I should have done more. Stood my ground. Barged down the gates of Neverland when the people around him never let me in. I should have seen this coming and been there to protect him. I feel a dereliction of duty in the promise of brotherhood we always had.
The cell-phone rings. It’s Mother, sounding alarmed. ‘Michael is at the hospital … We’re here with him … He’s slipped and fallen. It’s his back.’
‘I’m on my way,’ I say, already out the door.
The hotel is equidistant from the Santa Maria courthouse and Neverland, and the hospital is a short detour. I’m met at a side entrance by a hospital manager to avoid any fuss out front.
On the hospital’s second-floor corridor, I see an unusual number of nurses and patients hanging around and an audible fuss dies down as I approach. A presidential-style phalanx of familiar dark-suited bodyguards is clustered around a closed door to a private room. They step aside to allow me to enter.
Inside, the curtains are drawn.
In the half-light, Michael is standing, wearing patterned blue pyjama pants and a black jacket. ‘Hi, Erms,’ he says, in almost a whisper.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
‘I just hurt my back.’ He forces a smile.
The fall at the ranch, when getting out of the shower, has left him in miserable pain and it appears to be the final punch at a time when life keeps pounding him. But he’s a child molester, right? He deserves this, right? The police must have some hard evidence, or he wouldn’t be on trial, right? People have a lot to learn about how wrong this trial is.
Mother and Joseph are the only other people here, sitting against the wall to my right; they are like me in not knowing what to do but be present and appear strong. Michael winces with the pain in his rib-cage and lower back, but I sense his mental pain is far greater.
In the past week, I have witnessed his physical disintegration. At 46 years old, his lean dancer’s body has withered to a fragile frame; his walk has become a pained, faltering gait; his dazzle is reduced to that forced smile; he looks gaunt, haggard.
I hate what it’s doing to him and I want it to stop. I want to scream for the scream that Michael has never had in him.
As he stands, he talks about the court testimony yesterday. ‘They are putting me through this to finish me … to turn everyone against me. It’s their plan … it’s a plan,’ he says.
Our father has never been one for deep emotional examination and, as Michael talks, I can see him itching to divert the conversation towards other plans: a concert in China.
‘Your sense of timing is not good, Joe!’ Mother tells him in admonishment.
‘What better time is there than now?’ he says. That’s Joseph. Very direct, and interpreting this time away from court as a small window to discuss something other than the trial. ‘It’ll take his mind off things,’ he adds.
It doesn’t surprise or sidetrack Michael. Like the rest of us, he’s used to it and understands that this is Joseph’s way. I interpret it as a father’s ploy to deflect his own worry about events he can’t control; to look beyond the trial to a time when Michael is free and able to perform again. Indicate light at the end of the tunnel. But it doesn’t feel like a distraction, it feels inappropriate. Anyway, my brother keeps talking. ‘What have I done but good? I don’t understand …’
I know what he’s thinking: he’s done nothing but create music to entertain and spread the message of hope, love and humanity, and awareness of how we should be with one another – especially with children – yet he is accused of harming a child. It’s akin to putting Santa Claus on trial for entering the bedrooms of children.
There is not one shred of evidence to justify this trial. The FBI knows it. The police know it. Sony knows it. (This irrefutable truth would be confirmed by an FBI statement in 2009, making it clear after my brother’s death that there was never any evidence to support any allegation in 16 years of investigations.) The authorities are just making something fit in 2005. Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen. The negative version.
Michael lifts his eyes from the floor. He looks the saddest I have ever seen him, but I can tell he just wants to talk. Up until now, he has rarely released his emotions in front of us. He has been controlled and resolute, speaking about his faith, how he trusts the judge of God, not the judge in a robe. But his controlled demeanour is now undone, no doubt triggered by yesterday’s testimony, and compounded by the frustration of this back injury.
It’s all becoming too much.
‘Everything they say about me is untrue. Why are they saying these things?’
‘Oh, baby …’ says Mother, but Michael’s hand rises. He’s still talking.
‘They’re saying all these horrible things about me. I’m this. I’m that. I’m bleaching my skin. I’m hurting kids. I would never … It’s untrue, it’s all untrue,’ he says, his voice quiet, quivering.
He starts pulling at his jacket, like an exasperated child wanting out of a costume, shifting on to both his feet, ignoring his back pain.
‘Michael …’ Mother starts.
But the tears are coming now. ‘They can accuse me and make the world think they’re so right, but they are so wrong … they are so wrong.’
Joseph is paralysed by this show of emotion. Mother’s hands are to her face. Michael pulls at his jacket buttons and starts struggling out of its sleeves. It falls off his shoulders and hangs backwards from his upper arms, revealing his bare chest.
He is sobbing. ‘Look at me! … Look at me! I’m the most misunderstood person in the world!’ He breaks down.
He stands in front of us, head bowed, as if he feels shame. It is the first time I have seen the true extent of his skin condition and it shocks me. His self-consciousness is such that he has kept his body hidden from even his family until now. His torso is light brown, splashed with vast areas and blotches of white, spreading across his upper chest; one patch of white covers his ribs and stomach, another runs down his side, and blotches cover one shoulder and upper arm. There is more white than brown, his natural skin colour: he looks like a white man splashed with coffee. This is the skin condition – the vitiligo – that a cynical world says he doesn’t have, preferring to believe that he bleaches his skin.
‘I’ve tried to inspire … I’ve tried to teach …’ and his voice trails off as Mother goes to comfort him.
‘God knows the truth. God knows the truth,’ she keeps repeating.
We all surround him, unable to hug him tight due to his back, but it is comfort nonetheless. I help put his jacket back on. ‘Just be strong, Michael,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
It doesn’t take him long to compose himself and he apologises. ‘I’m strong. I’m okay,’ he says.
I leave him with my parents, vowing to return to the trial after a visit overseas. The brothers are taking it in shifts to provide support and I’ll be back in a few days.
After I leave, the bodyguards convey a message relayed from his attorney, Tom Mesereau, at the courthouse. The judge is not happy that Michael is late, and if he’s not in court within the hour, his bail will be revoked. Even his genuine pain is not honoured or believed.
At the hotel, I finish packing and watch my brother’s delayed arrival at court on television. Shielded by an umbrella to protect his skin from the sun, he shuffles along just as I left him: in his pyjama bottoms and black jacket, now wearing a white undershirt. Joseph and a bodyguard stand either side, holding him steady.
Michael had always wanted to appear pristine and dignified for his trial, choosing his wardrobe carefully. To enter like this, in his pyjamas, will be making him cringe inwardly. This whole circus seems to be careening out of control … and we are only ten days in.
I grab the hotel phone and make a call. The person on the other end of the line provides the reassurance that I needed to hear one more time: Yes, the private jet is still available. Yes, it can be at Van Nuys airport. Yes, everything has been arranged. Yes, we are ready to go whenever you are. All that is required is a day’s notice, and this DC-8 with four engines will have Michael up in the air and heading east – to Bahrain – to start a new life away from the scam of American justice. After this charade, I’m happy to disown my citizenship and take Michael, and his family, to a place where they can’t touch him. We have the backer – a dear friend. We have the pilot. Everything is prepared. There is no way my brother – an innocent man – is going to jail for this. He wouldn’t survive, and I cannot sit back and even contemplate the possibility, let alone the reality.
We’ve arranged ‘Plan B’ without his knowledge, but when I had told him not to worry because every scenario is covered, he will have suspected something, without wishing to know. He doesn’t need to. Not yet.
I have negotiated with myself that the moment Tom Meserau starts to suggest that the scales of justice are tilting against us, I will action the plan and move him to the airport in the San Fernando Valley, outside L.A. We’ll sneak him out of Neverland under a blanket, during the night. Or something. In the meantime, I resolve to play it hour by hour because, so far, Tom has said nothing other than ‘yes, that was a good day for us’, even when the testimony sounded horrible. He knows the evidential nuances, and when the prosecution is swinging with its punches and missing. We’ve quickly learned not to judge the trial by its truncated media coverage. So, I bide my time, but this trust takes all my power and has me writing messages on bathroom mirrors.
As I hit the road and drive south on auto-pilot, I start to wonder where Michael resources the strength and belief that is pulling him through this. I feel immense pride in him – at a time when he is presumed guilty until proven innocent by a media coverage that is unbalanced. It trumpets the weird and titillating testimony, leaving valid defence points as a postscript. I remember what Michael said at the start of these proceedings in 2003: ‘Lies run in sprints, but the truth runs in marathons … and the truth will win.’ The truest lyric he never sang.
I start to visualise him walking free from the criminal court. I picture it like a scene in a movie. When this is over, I will do everything I can to clear his name in the public arena. The worst will be behind us. There will be nothing else they can throw at him. And I will defend him because I know what makes him tick – his heart, his soul, his spirit, his purpose. I know the boy inside the superstar’s costume. I know the brother from 2300 Jackson Street. We have been in sync since infancy, throughout everything: the dream, the Jackson 5, the fame, the separate paths, the rifts, the sorrows, the scandals, and the impossible pressure. He has cried with me. I have shouted in his face. He has refused to see me. He has begged me to be with him. We have known each other’s loyalty and each other’s unintended betrayal. And it is because of everything contained within this history – this brotherhood – that I know his character and mind like only true blood can.
One day, I tell myself – when 2005 is behind us – people will give him a break and attempt understanding, not judgement. They’ll treat him with the same gentleness and compassion he extended to everyone else. They’ll cast aside their preconceived ideas and view him not just through his music but as a human being: imperfect, complex, fallible. Someone very different from his external image.
One day, the truth will win the marathon …
THE BEGINNING
THE EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER ONE
Eternal Child
MICHAEL WAS STANDING BESIDE ME – I was about eight, he was barely four – with his elbows on the sill and his chin resting in his hands. We were looking into the dark from our bedroom window as the snow fell on Christmas Eve, leaving us both in awe. It was coming down so thick and fast that our neighbourhood seemed beneath some heavenly pillow fight, each floating feather captured in the clear haze of one streetlight. The three homes opposite were bedecked in mostly multicoloured bulbs, but one particular family, the Whites, had decorated their whole place with clear lights, complete with a Santa on the lawn and glowing-nosed reindeers. They had white lights trimming the roof, lining the pathway and festooned in the windows, blinking on and off, framing the fullest tree we had seen.
We observed all this from inside a home with no tree, no lights, no nothing. Our tiny house, on the corner of Jackson Street with 23rd Avenue, was the only one without decoration. We felt it was the only one in Gary, Indiana, but Mother assured us that, no, there were other homes and other Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate Christmas, like Mrs Macon’s family two streets up. But that knowledge did nothing to clear our confusion: we could see something that made us feel good, yet we were told it wasn’t good for us. Christmas wasn’t God’s will: it was commercialism. In the run-up to 25 December we felt as if we were witnessing an event to which we were not invited, and yet we still felt its forbidden spirit.
At our window, we viewed everything from a cold, grey world, looking into a shop where everything was alive, vibrant and sparkling with colour; where children played in the street with their new toys, rode new bikes or pulled new sleds in the snow. We could only imagine what it was to know the joy we saw on their faces. Michael and I played our own game at that window: pick a snowflake under the streetlight, track its descent and see which one was the first to ‘stick’. We observed the flakes tumble, separated in the air, united on the ground, dissolved into one. That night we must have watched and counted dozens of them before we fell quiet.
Michael looked sad – and I can see myself now, looking down on him from an eight-year-old’s height, feeling that same sadness. Then he started to sing:
‘Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride,
On a one-horse open sleigh …’
It is my first memory of hearing his voice, an angelic sound. He sang softly so that Mother wouldn’t hear. I joined in and we started making harmony. We sang verses of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’. Two boys carol-singing on the doorstep of our exclusion, songs we’d heard at school, not knowing that singing would be our profession.
As we sang, the grin on Michael’s face was pure joy because we had stolen a piece of magic. We were happy briefly. But then we stopped, because this temporary sensation only reminded us that we were pretending to participate and the next morning would be like any other. I’ve read many times that Michael did not like Christmas, based on our family’s lack of celebration. This was not true. It had not been true since that moment as a four-year-old when he said, staring at the Whites’ house: ‘When I’m older, I’ll have lights. Lots of lights. It will be Christmas every day.’
‘GO FASTER! GO FASTER!’ MICHAEL SHRIEKED, hitting an early high note. He was sitting tucked up in the front of a shopping cart – knees to chin – while Tito, Marlon and I were running and pushing it down 23rd Avenue, me with both hands on the handlebar, and my two brothers either side as the wheels wobbled and bounced off the road on a summer’s day. We built up speed and powered forward like a bobsleigh team. Except this, in our minds, was a train. We’d find two, sometimes three, shopping carts from the nearby Giants supermarket and couple them together. Giants was about three blocks away, located across the sports field at the back of our home, but its carts were often abandoned and strewn about the streets, so they were easy to commandeer. Michael was ‘the driver’.
He was mad about Lionel toy trains – small, but weighty model steam engines and locomotives, packaged in orange boxes. Whenever Mother took us shopping for clothes at the Salvation Army, he always darted upstairs to the toy section to see if anyone had donated a second-hand Lionel train set. So, in his imagination, our shopping carts became two or three carriages, and 23rd Avenue was the straight section of track. It was a train that went too fast to pick up other passengers, thundering along, as Michael provided the sound effects. We hit the buffers when 23rd Avenue ran into a dead-end, about 50 yards from the back of our house.
If Michael wasn’t on the street playing trains, he was on the carpet in our shared bedroom with his prized Lionel engine. Our parents couldn’t afford to buy him a new one, or invest in an electric-train set, complete with full length track, station, and signal boxes. That is why the dream of owning a train set was in his head long before the dream of performing.
SPEED. I’M CONVINCED OUR EXCITEMENT AS kids was built on the thrill of speed. Whatever we did involved going faster, trying to outgun one another. Had our father known the extent of our thirst for speed, he would have banned it for sure: the potential for injury was always considered a grave risk to our career.
Once we grew bored of the shopping-cart trains, we built ‘go-karts’, constructed from boxes, stroller wheels and planks of wood from a nearby junkyard. Tito was the ‘engineer’ of the brotherhood and he had the know-how in putting everything together. He was forever dismantling clocks and radios, and re-assembling them on the kitchen table, or watching Joseph under the hood of his Buick parked at the side of the house, so he knew where our father’s tool box was. We hammered together three planks to form an I-shaped chassis and axle. We nailed the open cockpit – a square wooden box – on top, and took cord from a clothes line for our steering mechanism, looping it through the front wheels, held like reins. In truth, our turning circle was about as tight as an oil tanker’s, so we only ever travelled in straight lines.
The wide open alleyway at the back of our house – with a row of grassy backyards on one side and a chain-link fence on the other – was our race-track, and it was all about the ‘race’. We often patched together two go-karts, with Tito pushing Marlon, and me pushing Michael in a 50-yard dash. There was always that sense of competition between us: who could go faster, who would be the winner.
‘Go, go, go, GO!’ yelled Michael, leaning forward, urging us into the lead. Marlon hated losing, too, so Michael always had fierce competition. Marlon was the boy who never understood why he couldn’t out-run his own shadow. I can picture him now: sprinting through the street, looking down to his side, with a fierce determination on his face that turned to exasperation when he couldn’t put space between himself and his clinging shadow.
We pushed those go-karts until the metal brackets were scraping along the street, and the wheels buckled or fell off, with Michael tipped up on his side and me laughing so hard I couldn’t stand.
The merry-go-round in the local school field was another thrill-ride. Crouch down in the centre of its metal base, hold on tight to the iron stanchions, and get the brothers to spin it as fast as they could. ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’ Michael squealed, eyes tight shut, giggling hard. He used to straddle the stanchions, like he was on a horse, going round and round and round. Eyes closed. Wind in the face.
We all dreamed of riding the train, racing the go-karts and spinning on a proper carousel at Disney.
WE KNEW MR LONG WAY BEFORE we had heard of Roald Dahl. To us, he was the original African-American Willy Wonka; this magical man – white hair, wizened features, leathery dark skin – dished out candy from his house the next avenue up, on 22nd, en route to our elementary school at the far end of Jackson Street.
Many kids beat a path to Mr Long’s door because his younger brother went to our school. Knowing Timothy meant we got a good deal, two to five cents being good value for a little brown bag full of liquorice, shoe strings, Lemonheads, Banana Splits – you name it, he had them all neatly spread out on a single bed in a front room. Mr Long didn’t smile or say very much, but we looked forward to seeing him on school mornings. We grasped at our orders and he dutifully filled the bags. Michael loved candy and that morning ritual brightened the start of each day. How we got the money is a whole other story that I will reserve for later.
We each protected our brown paper bags of candy like gold and back at the house, inside our bedroom, we all had different hiding places which each brother would try and figure out. My hide-out was under the bed or mattress, and I always got busted, but Michael squirreled his away somewhere good because we never did find it. As adults, whenever I reminded him of this, he chuckled at the memory. That is how Michael laughed throughout his life: a mesh-up of a chuckle, a snicker, a giggle; always shy, often self-conscious. Michael loved playing shop: he’d create his counter by laying a board across a pile of books, then a tablecloth, and then he’d spread out his candy. This ‘shop’ was set up in the doorway to our bedroom, or on the lowest bunk-bed, with him kneeling behind, awaiting orders. We traded with each other, swapping or using change kept from Mr Long, or from a nickel found in the street.
But Michael was destined to be an entertainer, not a savvy businessman. That seemed obvious when our father challenged him about getting home late from school one afternoon. ‘Where were you?’ asked Joseph.
‘I went to get some candy,’ said Michael.
‘How much you pay for it?’
‘Five cents.’
‘How much you going to re-sell it for?’
‘Five cents.’
Joseph clipped him around the head. ‘You don’t re-sell something for the same price you bought it!’
Typical Michael: always too fair, never ruthless enough. ‘Why can’t I give it for five cents?’ he said, in the bedroom. The logic was lost on him and he was upset over the undeserved whack on the head. I left him on the bed, muttering under his breath as he sorted his candy into piles, no doubt still playing shop in his head.
Days later, Joseph found him in the backyard, giving out candy from across the chain-link fence to other kids from the street. The kids who were less fortunate than us – and he was mobbed. ‘How much you sell ’em for?’ Joseph asked.
‘I didn’t. I gave them away for free.’
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, AND MORE than 20 years later, I visited Michael at his ranch, Neverland Valley, in the Santa Ynez region of California. He had spent time and money turning his vast acres into a theme park and the family went to check out his completed world. Neverland has always been portrayed as the outlandish creation of ‘a wild imagination’ with the suggestion that a love of Disney was its sole inspiration. Elements of this may be correct, but the truth runs much deeper, and this was something I knew immediately when I saw with my own eyes what he had built.
Childhood memories were brought to life in a giant flashback: white Christmas lights trimming the sidewalk, the pathway, the trees, the frame and guttering of his English Tudor mansion. He had them turned on all year round to ensure that ‘it was Christmas every day.’ A huge steam train with carriages ran between the shops and the movie theatre, and a miniature train toured the circumference of the estate, via the zoo. In the main house – through the doors, passed the welcoming, model life-size butler with tray, up the wide stairway and down the hallway – was the playroom. Inside, beyond the full-size Superman and Darth Vader at the door, was the biggest table dominating the room. On it, a vintage Lionel train set was always running: two or three trains travelling the tracks with lights on, around a model landscape of hills, valleys, towns and waterfalls. Inside the house and out, Michael had built himself the biggest electric train set you could ever imagine.
Back outside, there was a full-on professional go-kart track with chicanes and tight bends, and the merry-go-round was spinning to music, a beautiful carousel of ornate horses. There was a candy store too, where everything was free, and a Christmas tree lit up all year round. In 2003, Michael said he developed the ranch ‘to create everything that I never had as a child.’ But it was also about re-creating what he had enjoyed for too short a time, rebuilding it in an exaggerated version. He called himself a ‘fantasy fanatic’ and this was his eternal fantasy.
Neverland brought back our lost days because that is how he perceived his childhood – as a missing person; an inner child wandering around his past looking to somehow reconnect with him in the future. It wasn’t a refusal to grow up because if you asked him, he never felt like he was a boy in the first place. Michael was expected to be an adult when he was a kid, and he regressed into a kid when he was expected to be an adult. He was more Benjamin Button than the Peter Pan comparison he made himself. However much I might remember laughter in our childhood, he struggled to recall it, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that I am four years older.
A friend, a nephew and I took quad bikes to explore Neverland’s 2,700 acres, which seemed endless, rolling beyond every green horizon, scattered with oak trees. One dusty fire road took us climbing to the highest peak, far away from the developed area, and a plateau, providing a 360-degree vista. My eyes scanned it all – the property, the theme park, the lake, the ferris wheel, the trains, the greenery – and it filled me with awe and pride. Look at what you’ve created, I said to my brother in my head, and repeated to him later.
‘A place of ultimate happiness,’ he told me.
The later warped perception of Neverland shows how Michael was judged on the face value of his world and, in many cases, on the claims of others. There only ever seemed to be lurid judgements about him and his ranch without any attempt to figure out the more complex ‘why?’. As with everyone, his background shaped him. But fame – especially the iconic status attached to my brother – built a public barrier as big as a dam in front of his need to be understood. But to understand him, we need to walk in his shoes and see life from his perspective. As Michael said in 2003, in a message to his fans via Ed Bradley at CBS: ‘If you really want to know about me, there’s a song I wrote. It’s called “Childhood”. That’s the one song people should listen to …’
Michael’s honest awareness that he was a grown man with a kid’s mind shows in the lyrics: ‘People say I’m strange that way because I love such elementary things … but have you seen my childhood?’ His way of saying, this is the way I’ve been made. This is who I am.
Many people have attempted to look through the window of our childhood, and see past the smears of media coverage and the persona of a pop icon. But I feel that you need to have lived it, and shared it, to truly know and understand it. Because ours was a unique world, as brothers and sisters under the roof of one big family. It was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street – named after President Andrew Jackson, not us – that we shared memories, music and a dream. It is here that our stories and his lyrics begin, and where, I hope, a better understanding of just who Michael was can be found.
CHAPTER TWO
2300 Jackson Street
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.
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Jermaine Jackson
‘This is the truth as we know it. I have read so much about what people think they know about Michael, but this is about what really happened.’ Jermaine JacksonYou Are Not Alone is an intimate, loving portrait of Michael Jackson, illuminating the private man like never before. It is an invitation into Michael’s real character, private insights and hidden feelings: the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private individual.Jermaine Jackson knew Michael like only a brother can. In You Are Not Alone Jermaine brings light to the man behind the mask of superstardom, an identity that has lingered in the shadows for too long. You Are Not Alone is a celebration of the real Michael: the boy who shared a tiny bunkbed with Jermaine at 2300 Jackson Street, Gary, Indiana; the brother with whom Jermaine shared laughter, tears and memories; the boy who would grow up to become a legend.Raw, honest and incredibly moving, You Are Not Alone is also a sophisticated, no-holds-barred examination of Michael Jackson, aimed at fostering a true and final understanding of who he was and what shaped him. This is Michael Jackson – the man, not the legend – through a brother’s eyes.If you love Michael Jackson, this is the only book you will want to read.If you think you know the Michael Jackson story, it’s time to think again.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Michael Through a Brother’s Eyes
Jermaine Jackson
Epigraph
I have built a monument more lasting than bronze and higher than the royal palace of the Pyramids. I shall not totally die, and a great part of me will live beyond death. I will keep growing, fresh with the praise of posterity.
– Horace, 23 BC
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Prologue – 2005
The Beginning – The Early Years
1. Eternal Child
2. 2300 Jackson Street
3. God’s Gift
4. Just Kids With a Dream
5. Cry Freedom
6. Motown University
7. Jackson-mania
The Middle – The Hayvenhurst Years
8. Life Lessons
9. Growing Pains
10. Separate Ways
11. Moonwalking
12. Animal Kingdom
13. The Hardest Victory
14. The Reunion Party
The End – The Neverland Years
15. Once Said …
16. Forever Neverland
17. Body of Lies
18. Love, Chess and Destiny
19. Unbreakable
20. 14 White Doves
21. The Comeback King
22. Gone Too Soon
Photographic Insert
Epilogue – Smile
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
2005
THE BATHROOM MIRROR AT A LITTLE hotel in Santa Maria, California, is fogged with condensation, and there is so much steam from my morning shower that my reflection is rendered invisible. As I stand at the sink, dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, the opaque glass is now nothing but an inviting canvas of mist on which to log a thought I have been repeating in my head.
‘MICHAEL JACKSON 1,000% INNOCENT’, I daub with my finger, ending with a full-stop that I convert into a smiley-face. Believe in the happy ending.
I stare at this message and focus on a visualised outcome: victory, justice and vindication. It is 10 March 2005: day 11 of the courthouse circus that sees my brother accused of child molestation.
‘MICHAEL JACKSON 1,000% INNOCENT’, I read again. I continue to stare at the top left corner of the mirror, watching the smiley-face start to run. Transfixed, I flash back to Michael’s bathroom at the Hayvenhurst estate in Encino, outside Los Angeles – his home prior to Neverland – and know that I am mimicking in 2005 what he did in 1982. Back then, in the top left corner of his mirror, he took a black felt permanent marker – to match the black marble – and scrawled: ‘THRILLER! 100 MILLION SALES … SELL OUT STADIUMS’.
Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen. Will it into reality, as taught to us in childhood by our mother, Katherine, and father, Joseph. ‘You can do this … you can do this,’ I can hear Joseph insisting during early, scratchy rehearsals as the Jackson 5, ‘we’re doing this over and over until you get it right. Think about it, say it, see yourself doing it, visualise it happening … and it will happen.’ Plant it in your head and focus with all your heart, Mother added, more gently. This was drilled into our young minds decades before positive-thinking became fashionable. Our minds are preprogrammed not to entertain doubt or half-heartedness.
Michael knew the scale of the breakthrough, innovation and success he desired as a solo artist with the Thriller album, so that one thought transcribed on his mirror was his positive starting point. Years after his move to Neverland, the permanence of the pen’s marker had flaked and the message appeared to have disappeared to the naked eye, yet it had left its imprint embedded in the glass, because each time that mirror fogged, the faintest outline of his words could still be seen, as if it were one of those secret codes written by a magic pen. Condensation and misted glass always remind me of Michael’s written ambition.
From the eighties, nobody knew about a lot of what he created until its execution, but the idea or concept was written down somewhere he could see it daily, or recited into a voice recorder as a visualisation he could see or hear. He didn’t share ideas because he didn’t want anyone to interfere; he relied on mental strength for his focus. Between November 2003 – when he was arrested and charged – and this day in March 2005, he’s needed that strength.
Awake at 4.30am each day of the trial, he’s bracing himself, getting prepared, psyching himself up to withstand another day of ritual humiliation.
Yesterday, 9 March, Gavin Arvizo, the 15-year-old boy being showcased as ‘the victim’, began his incredulous testimony, going into graphic detail. I was seated behind Michael the whole time, as I have been since the start.
Outwardly, my brother projects a hardened image: detached, expressionless, almost cold. Inwardly, the bolted brackets that had been holding him together are snapping violently under pressure, one by one.
I look at my mirrored message now fading as the air rushes in, but the intent remains stark: Michael will be found innocent. I would carve it into my grandmother’s gravestone if I could. Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen.
But whatever intent I put out there is not enough to remove the ache and worry we feel as a family. I find myself constantly reflecting, going back to a time when we believed Hollywood to be only a magical place; when we believed in the Yellow Brick Road.
I watch the local news on the television in my room, looking ahead to day 11 of the trial. I think of Michael at Neverland. The cars will be pulling up in the courtyard. He will have been up four hours, eaten breakfast on a silver tray in his room, alone – stealing time on his own – before coming downstairs, giving himself 45 minutes between departure and arrival. His routine is clockwork, organised like some back-stage itinerary.
I think of all he has achieved, and all he is now being put through.
How has something so beautiful turned so twisted and ugly? Did fame do it? Is this the end-game in the American Dream when a black man achieves success on this magnitude? Is this what happens when an artist becomes bigger than his record label? Is this about publishing rights? Ruin the man, keep the money-machine?
These are the questions that race through my mind.
Are his Hollywood friends and one-time attorneys, allies and producers staying away because they regard him as nuclear – treating friendship like a sponsorship deal? What about those divisive people who whispered into a malleable ear that we, his family, should be kept at a distance, not trusted. Why aren’t they alongside him now, whispering encouragement and support?
Michael is fast realising who his friends aren’t, and what family means. But now his liberty is at stake, and everything he has built up is in danger of collapsing. I want to turn back time: lift the needle off the record and return us to the first track as the Jackson 5 – a time of togetherness, unity and brotherhood. ‘All for one, and one for all,’ as Mother used to say.
I play this eternal game of ‘What If?’ in my head and can’t help but think that we could have – should have – handled things differently, especially with Michael. We stood off him too much when he wanted his space and that allowed vultures into the vacuum. We allowed outsiders in. I should have done more. Stood my ground. Barged down the gates of Neverland when the people around him never let me in. I should have seen this coming and been there to protect him. I feel a dereliction of duty in the promise of brotherhood we always had.
The cell-phone rings. It’s Mother, sounding alarmed. ‘Michael is at the hospital … We’re here with him … He’s slipped and fallen. It’s his back.’
‘I’m on my way,’ I say, already out the door.
The hotel is equidistant from the Santa Maria courthouse and Neverland, and the hospital is a short detour. I’m met at a side entrance by a hospital manager to avoid any fuss out front.
On the hospital’s second-floor corridor, I see an unusual number of nurses and patients hanging around and an audible fuss dies down as I approach. A presidential-style phalanx of familiar dark-suited bodyguards is clustered around a closed door to a private room. They step aside to allow me to enter.
Inside, the curtains are drawn.
In the half-light, Michael is standing, wearing patterned blue pyjama pants and a black jacket. ‘Hi, Erms,’ he says, in almost a whisper.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
‘I just hurt my back.’ He forces a smile.
The fall at the ranch, when getting out of the shower, has left him in miserable pain and it appears to be the final punch at a time when life keeps pounding him. But he’s a child molester, right? He deserves this, right? The police must have some hard evidence, or he wouldn’t be on trial, right? People have a lot to learn about how wrong this trial is.
Mother and Joseph are the only other people here, sitting against the wall to my right; they are like me in not knowing what to do but be present and appear strong. Michael winces with the pain in his rib-cage and lower back, but I sense his mental pain is far greater.
In the past week, I have witnessed his physical disintegration. At 46 years old, his lean dancer’s body has withered to a fragile frame; his walk has become a pained, faltering gait; his dazzle is reduced to that forced smile; he looks gaunt, haggard.
I hate what it’s doing to him and I want it to stop. I want to scream for the scream that Michael has never had in him.
As he stands, he talks about the court testimony yesterday. ‘They are putting me through this to finish me … to turn everyone against me. It’s their plan … it’s a plan,’ he says.
Our father has never been one for deep emotional examination and, as Michael talks, I can see him itching to divert the conversation towards other plans: a concert in China.
‘Your sense of timing is not good, Joe!’ Mother tells him in admonishment.
‘What better time is there than now?’ he says. That’s Joseph. Very direct, and interpreting this time away from court as a small window to discuss something other than the trial. ‘It’ll take his mind off things,’ he adds.
It doesn’t surprise or sidetrack Michael. Like the rest of us, he’s used to it and understands that this is Joseph’s way. I interpret it as a father’s ploy to deflect his own worry about events he can’t control; to look beyond the trial to a time when Michael is free and able to perform again. Indicate light at the end of the tunnel. But it doesn’t feel like a distraction, it feels inappropriate. Anyway, my brother keeps talking. ‘What have I done but good? I don’t understand …’
I know what he’s thinking: he’s done nothing but create music to entertain and spread the message of hope, love and humanity, and awareness of how we should be with one another – especially with children – yet he is accused of harming a child. It’s akin to putting Santa Claus on trial for entering the bedrooms of children.
There is not one shred of evidence to justify this trial. The FBI knows it. The police know it. Sony knows it. (This irrefutable truth would be confirmed by an FBI statement in 2009, making it clear after my brother’s death that there was never any evidence to support any allegation in 16 years of investigations.) The authorities are just making something fit in 2005. Think it, see it, believe it, make it happen. The negative version.
Michael lifts his eyes from the floor. He looks the saddest I have ever seen him, but I can tell he just wants to talk. Up until now, he has rarely released his emotions in front of us. He has been controlled and resolute, speaking about his faith, how he trusts the judge of God, not the judge in a robe. But his controlled demeanour is now undone, no doubt triggered by yesterday’s testimony, and compounded by the frustration of this back injury.
It’s all becoming too much.
‘Everything they say about me is untrue. Why are they saying these things?’
‘Oh, baby …’ says Mother, but Michael’s hand rises. He’s still talking.
‘They’re saying all these horrible things about me. I’m this. I’m that. I’m bleaching my skin. I’m hurting kids. I would never … It’s untrue, it’s all untrue,’ he says, his voice quiet, quivering.
He starts pulling at his jacket, like an exasperated child wanting out of a costume, shifting on to both his feet, ignoring his back pain.
‘Michael …’ Mother starts.
But the tears are coming now. ‘They can accuse me and make the world think they’re so right, but they are so wrong … they are so wrong.’
Joseph is paralysed by this show of emotion. Mother’s hands are to her face. Michael pulls at his jacket buttons and starts struggling out of its sleeves. It falls off his shoulders and hangs backwards from his upper arms, revealing his bare chest.
He is sobbing. ‘Look at me! … Look at me! I’m the most misunderstood person in the world!’ He breaks down.
He stands in front of us, head bowed, as if he feels shame. It is the first time I have seen the true extent of his skin condition and it shocks me. His self-consciousness is such that he has kept his body hidden from even his family until now. His torso is light brown, splashed with vast areas and blotches of white, spreading across his upper chest; one patch of white covers his ribs and stomach, another runs down his side, and blotches cover one shoulder and upper arm. There is more white than brown, his natural skin colour: he looks like a white man splashed with coffee. This is the skin condition – the vitiligo – that a cynical world says he doesn’t have, preferring to believe that he bleaches his skin.
‘I’ve tried to inspire … I’ve tried to teach …’ and his voice trails off as Mother goes to comfort him.
‘God knows the truth. God knows the truth,’ she keeps repeating.
We all surround him, unable to hug him tight due to his back, but it is comfort nonetheless. I help put his jacket back on. ‘Just be strong, Michael,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
It doesn’t take him long to compose himself and he apologises. ‘I’m strong. I’m okay,’ he says.
I leave him with my parents, vowing to return to the trial after a visit overseas. The brothers are taking it in shifts to provide support and I’ll be back in a few days.
After I leave, the bodyguards convey a message relayed from his attorney, Tom Mesereau, at the courthouse. The judge is not happy that Michael is late, and if he’s not in court within the hour, his bail will be revoked. Even his genuine pain is not honoured or believed.
At the hotel, I finish packing and watch my brother’s delayed arrival at court on television. Shielded by an umbrella to protect his skin from the sun, he shuffles along just as I left him: in his pyjama bottoms and black jacket, now wearing a white undershirt. Joseph and a bodyguard stand either side, holding him steady.
Michael had always wanted to appear pristine and dignified for his trial, choosing his wardrobe carefully. To enter like this, in his pyjamas, will be making him cringe inwardly. This whole circus seems to be careening out of control … and we are only ten days in.
I grab the hotel phone and make a call. The person on the other end of the line provides the reassurance that I needed to hear one more time: Yes, the private jet is still available. Yes, it can be at Van Nuys airport. Yes, everything has been arranged. Yes, we are ready to go whenever you are. All that is required is a day’s notice, and this DC-8 with four engines will have Michael up in the air and heading east – to Bahrain – to start a new life away from the scam of American justice. After this charade, I’m happy to disown my citizenship and take Michael, and his family, to a place where they can’t touch him. We have the backer – a dear friend. We have the pilot. Everything is prepared. There is no way my brother – an innocent man – is going to jail for this. He wouldn’t survive, and I cannot sit back and even contemplate the possibility, let alone the reality.
We’ve arranged ‘Plan B’ without his knowledge, but when I had told him not to worry because every scenario is covered, he will have suspected something, without wishing to know. He doesn’t need to. Not yet.
I have negotiated with myself that the moment Tom Meserau starts to suggest that the scales of justice are tilting against us, I will action the plan and move him to the airport in the San Fernando Valley, outside L.A. We’ll sneak him out of Neverland under a blanket, during the night. Or something. In the meantime, I resolve to play it hour by hour because, so far, Tom has said nothing other than ‘yes, that was a good day for us’, even when the testimony sounded horrible. He knows the evidential nuances, and when the prosecution is swinging with its punches and missing. We’ve quickly learned not to judge the trial by its truncated media coverage. So, I bide my time, but this trust takes all my power and has me writing messages on bathroom mirrors.
As I hit the road and drive south on auto-pilot, I start to wonder where Michael resources the strength and belief that is pulling him through this. I feel immense pride in him – at a time when he is presumed guilty until proven innocent by a media coverage that is unbalanced. It trumpets the weird and titillating testimony, leaving valid defence points as a postscript. I remember what Michael said at the start of these proceedings in 2003: ‘Lies run in sprints, but the truth runs in marathons … and the truth will win.’ The truest lyric he never sang.
I start to visualise him walking free from the criminal court. I picture it like a scene in a movie. When this is over, I will do everything I can to clear his name in the public arena. The worst will be behind us. There will be nothing else they can throw at him. And I will defend him because I know what makes him tick – his heart, his soul, his spirit, his purpose. I know the boy inside the superstar’s costume. I know the brother from 2300 Jackson Street. We have been in sync since infancy, throughout everything: the dream, the Jackson 5, the fame, the separate paths, the rifts, the sorrows, the scandals, and the impossible pressure. He has cried with me. I have shouted in his face. He has refused to see me. He has begged me to be with him. We have known each other’s loyalty and each other’s unintended betrayal. And it is because of everything contained within this history – this brotherhood – that I know his character and mind like only true blood can.
One day, I tell myself – when 2005 is behind us – people will give him a break and attempt understanding, not judgement. They’ll treat him with the same gentleness and compassion he extended to everyone else. They’ll cast aside their preconceived ideas and view him not just through his music but as a human being: imperfect, complex, fallible. Someone very different from his external image.
One day, the truth will win the marathon …
THE BEGINNING
THE EARLY YEARS
CHAPTER ONE
Eternal Child
MICHAEL WAS STANDING BESIDE ME – I was about eight, he was barely four – with his elbows on the sill and his chin resting in his hands. We were looking into the dark from our bedroom window as the snow fell on Christmas Eve, leaving us both in awe. It was coming down so thick and fast that our neighbourhood seemed beneath some heavenly pillow fight, each floating feather captured in the clear haze of one streetlight. The three homes opposite were bedecked in mostly multicoloured bulbs, but one particular family, the Whites, had decorated their whole place with clear lights, complete with a Santa on the lawn and glowing-nosed reindeers. They had white lights trimming the roof, lining the pathway and festooned in the windows, blinking on and off, framing the fullest tree we had seen.
We observed all this from inside a home with no tree, no lights, no nothing. Our tiny house, on the corner of Jackson Street with 23rd Avenue, was the only one without decoration. We felt it was the only one in Gary, Indiana, but Mother assured us that, no, there were other homes and other Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not celebrate Christmas, like Mrs Macon’s family two streets up. But that knowledge did nothing to clear our confusion: we could see something that made us feel good, yet we were told it wasn’t good for us. Christmas wasn’t God’s will: it was commercialism. In the run-up to 25 December we felt as if we were witnessing an event to which we were not invited, and yet we still felt its forbidden spirit.
At our window, we viewed everything from a cold, grey world, looking into a shop where everything was alive, vibrant and sparkling with colour; where children played in the street with their new toys, rode new bikes or pulled new sleds in the snow. We could only imagine what it was to know the joy we saw on their faces. Michael and I played our own game at that window: pick a snowflake under the streetlight, track its descent and see which one was the first to ‘stick’. We observed the flakes tumble, separated in the air, united on the ground, dissolved into one. That night we must have watched and counted dozens of them before we fell quiet.
Michael looked sad – and I can see myself now, looking down on him from an eight-year-old’s height, feeling that same sadness. Then he started to sing:
‘Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way
Oh what fun it is to ride,
On a one-horse open sleigh …’
It is my first memory of hearing his voice, an angelic sound. He sang softly so that Mother wouldn’t hear. I joined in and we started making harmony. We sang verses of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’. Two boys carol-singing on the doorstep of our exclusion, songs we’d heard at school, not knowing that singing would be our profession.
As we sang, the grin on Michael’s face was pure joy because we had stolen a piece of magic. We were happy briefly. But then we stopped, because this temporary sensation only reminded us that we were pretending to participate and the next morning would be like any other. I’ve read many times that Michael did not like Christmas, based on our family’s lack of celebration. This was not true. It had not been true since that moment as a four-year-old when he said, staring at the Whites’ house: ‘When I’m older, I’ll have lights. Lots of lights. It will be Christmas every day.’
‘GO FASTER! GO FASTER!’ MICHAEL SHRIEKED, hitting an early high note. He was sitting tucked up in the front of a shopping cart – knees to chin – while Tito, Marlon and I were running and pushing it down 23rd Avenue, me with both hands on the handlebar, and my two brothers either side as the wheels wobbled and bounced off the road on a summer’s day. We built up speed and powered forward like a bobsleigh team. Except this, in our minds, was a train. We’d find two, sometimes three, shopping carts from the nearby Giants supermarket and couple them together. Giants was about three blocks away, located across the sports field at the back of our home, but its carts were often abandoned and strewn about the streets, so they were easy to commandeer. Michael was ‘the driver’.
He was mad about Lionel toy trains – small, but weighty model steam engines and locomotives, packaged in orange boxes. Whenever Mother took us shopping for clothes at the Salvation Army, he always darted upstairs to the toy section to see if anyone had donated a second-hand Lionel train set. So, in his imagination, our shopping carts became two or three carriages, and 23rd Avenue was the straight section of track. It was a train that went too fast to pick up other passengers, thundering along, as Michael provided the sound effects. We hit the buffers when 23rd Avenue ran into a dead-end, about 50 yards from the back of our house.
If Michael wasn’t on the street playing trains, he was on the carpet in our shared bedroom with his prized Lionel engine. Our parents couldn’t afford to buy him a new one, or invest in an electric-train set, complete with full length track, station, and signal boxes. That is why the dream of owning a train set was in his head long before the dream of performing.
SPEED. I’M CONVINCED OUR EXCITEMENT AS kids was built on the thrill of speed. Whatever we did involved going faster, trying to outgun one another. Had our father known the extent of our thirst for speed, he would have banned it for sure: the potential for injury was always considered a grave risk to our career.
Once we grew bored of the shopping-cart trains, we built ‘go-karts’, constructed from boxes, stroller wheels and planks of wood from a nearby junkyard. Tito was the ‘engineer’ of the brotherhood and he had the know-how in putting everything together. He was forever dismantling clocks and radios, and re-assembling them on the kitchen table, or watching Joseph under the hood of his Buick parked at the side of the house, so he knew where our father’s tool box was. We hammered together three planks to form an I-shaped chassis and axle. We nailed the open cockpit – a square wooden box – on top, and took cord from a clothes line for our steering mechanism, looping it through the front wheels, held like reins. In truth, our turning circle was about as tight as an oil tanker’s, so we only ever travelled in straight lines.
The wide open alleyway at the back of our house – with a row of grassy backyards on one side and a chain-link fence on the other – was our race-track, and it was all about the ‘race’. We often patched together two go-karts, with Tito pushing Marlon, and me pushing Michael in a 50-yard dash. There was always that sense of competition between us: who could go faster, who would be the winner.
‘Go, go, go, GO!’ yelled Michael, leaning forward, urging us into the lead. Marlon hated losing, too, so Michael always had fierce competition. Marlon was the boy who never understood why he couldn’t out-run his own shadow. I can picture him now: sprinting through the street, looking down to his side, with a fierce determination on his face that turned to exasperation when he couldn’t put space between himself and his clinging shadow.
We pushed those go-karts until the metal brackets were scraping along the street, and the wheels buckled or fell off, with Michael tipped up on his side and me laughing so hard I couldn’t stand.
The merry-go-round in the local school field was another thrill-ride. Crouch down in the centre of its metal base, hold on tight to the iron stanchions, and get the brothers to spin it as fast as they could. ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’ Michael squealed, eyes tight shut, giggling hard. He used to straddle the stanchions, like he was on a horse, going round and round and round. Eyes closed. Wind in the face.
We all dreamed of riding the train, racing the go-karts and spinning on a proper carousel at Disney.
WE KNEW MR LONG WAY BEFORE we had heard of Roald Dahl. To us, he was the original African-American Willy Wonka; this magical man – white hair, wizened features, leathery dark skin – dished out candy from his house the next avenue up, on 22nd, en route to our elementary school at the far end of Jackson Street.
Many kids beat a path to Mr Long’s door because his younger brother went to our school. Knowing Timothy meant we got a good deal, two to five cents being good value for a little brown bag full of liquorice, shoe strings, Lemonheads, Banana Splits – you name it, he had them all neatly spread out on a single bed in a front room. Mr Long didn’t smile or say very much, but we looked forward to seeing him on school mornings. We grasped at our orders and he dutifully filled the bags. Michael loved candy and that morning ritual brightened the start of each day. How we got the money is a whole other story that I will reserve for later.
We each protected our brown paper bags of candy like gold and back at the house, inside our bedroom, we all had different hiding places which each brother would try and figure out. My hide-out was under the bed or mattress, and I always got busted, but Michael squirreled his away somewhere good because we never did find it. As adults, whenever I reminded him of this, he chuckled at the memory. That is how Michael laughed throughout his life: a mesh-up of a chuckle, a snicker, a giggle; always shy, often self-conscious. Michael loved playing shop: he’d create his counter by laying a board across a pile of books, then a tablecloth, and then he’d spread out his candy. This ‘shop’ was set up in the doorway to our bedroom, or on the lowest bunk-bed, with him kneeling behind, awaiting orders. We traded with each other, swapping or using change kept from Mr Long, or from a nickel found in the street.
But Michael was destined to be an entertainer, not a savvy businessman. That seemed obvious when our father challenged him about getting home late from school one afternoon. ‘Where were you?’ asked Joseph.
‘I went to get some candy,’ said Michael.
‘How much you pay for it?’
‘Five cents.’
‘How much you going to re-sell it for?’
‘Five cents.’
Joseph clipped him around the head. ‘You don’t re-sell something for the same price you bought it!’
Typical Michael: always too fair, never ruthless enough. ‘Why can’t I give it for five cents?’ he said, in the bedroom. The logic was lost on him and he was upset over the undeserved whack on the head. I left him on the bed, muttering under his breath as he sorted his candy into piles, no doubt still playing shop in his head.
Days later, Joseph found him in the backyard, giving out candy from across the chain-link fence to other kids from the street. The kids who were less fortunate than us – and he was mobbed. ‘How much you sell ’em for?’ Joseph asked.
‘I didn’t. I gave them away for free.’
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, AND MORE than 20 years later, I visited Michael at his ranch, Neverland Valley, in the Santa Ynez region of California. He had spent time and money turning his vast acres into a theme park and the family went to check out his completed world. Neverland has always been portrayed as the outlandish creation of ‘a wild imagination’ with the suggestion that a love of Disney was its sole inspiration. Elements of this may be correct, but the truth runs much deeper, and this was something I knew immediately when I saw with my own eyes what he had built.
Childhood memories were brought to life in a giant flashback: white Christmas lights trimming the sidewalk, the pathway, the trees, the frame and guttering of his English Tudor mansion. He had them turned on all year round to ensure that ‘it was Christmas every day.’ A huge steam train with carriages ran between the shops and the movie theatre, and a miniature train toured the circumference of the estate, via the zoo. In the main house – through the doors, passed the welcoming, model life-size butler with tray, up the wide stairway and down the hallway – was the playroom. Inside, beyond the full-size Superman and Darth Vader at the door, was the biggest table dominating the room. On it, a vintage Lionel train set was always running: two or three trains travelling the tracks with lights on, around a model landscape of hills, valleys, towns and waterfalls. Inside the house and out, Michael had built himself the biggest electric train set you could ever imagine.
Back outside, there was a full-on professional go-kart track with chicanes and tight bends, and the merry-go-round was spinning to music, a beautiful carousel of ornate horses. There was a candy store too, where everything was free, and a Christmas tree lit up all year round. In 2003, Michael said he developed the ranch ‘to create everything that I never had as a child.’ But it was also about re-creating what he had enjoyed for too short a time, rebuilding it in an exaggerated version. He called himself a ‘fantasy fanatic’ and this was his eternal fantasy.
Neverland brought back our lost days because that is how he perceived his childhood – as a missing person; an inner child wandering around his past looking to somehow reconnect with him in the future. It wasn’t a refusal to grow up because if you asked him, he never felt like he was a boy in the first place. Michael was expected to be an adult when he was a kid, and he regressed into a kid when he was expected to be an adult. He was more Benjamin Button than the Peter Pan comparison he made himself. However much I might remember laughter in our childhood, he struggled to recall it, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that I am four years older.
A friend, a nephew and I took quad bikes to explore Neverland’s 2,700 acres, which seemed endless, rolling beyond every green horizon, scattered with oak trees. One dusty fire road took us climbing to the highest peak, far away from the developed area, and a plateau, providing a 360-degree vista. My eyes scanned it all – the property, the theme park, the lake, the ferris wheel, the trains, the greenery – and it filled me with awe and pride. Look at what you’ve created, I said to my brother in my head, and repeated to him later.
‘A place of ultimate happiness,’ he told me.
The later warped perception of Neverland shows how Michael was judged on the face value of his world and, in many cases, on the claims of others. There only ever seemed to be lurid judgements about him and his ranch without any attempt to figure out the more complex ‘why?’. As with everyone, his background shaped him. But fame – especially the iconic status attached to my brother – built a public barrier as big as a dam in front of his need to be understood. But to understand him, we need to walk in his shoes and see life from his perspective. As Michael said in 2003, in a message to his fans via Ed Bradley at CBS: ‘If you really want to know about me, there’s a song I wrote. It’s called “Childhood”. That’s the one song people should listen to …’
Michael’s honest awareness that he was a grown man with a kid’s mind shows in the lyrics: ‘People say I’m strange that way because I love such elementary things … but have you seen my childhood?’ His way of saying, this is the way I’ve been made. This is who I am.
Many people have attempted to look through the window of our childhood, and see past the smears of media coverage and the persona of a pop icon. But I feel that you need to have lived it, and shared it, to truly know and understand it. Because ours was a unique world, as brothers and sisters under the roof of one big family. It was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street – named after President Andrew Jackson, not us – that we shared memories, music and a dream. It is here that our stories and his lyrics begin, and where, I hope, a better understanding of just who Michael was can be found.
CHAPTER TWO
2300 Jackson Street
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.
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Jermaine Jackson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘This is the truth as we know it. I have read so much about what people think they know about Michael, but this is about what really happened.’ Jermaine JacksonYou Are Not Alone is an intimate, loving portrait of Michael Jackson, illuminating the private man like never before. It is an invitation into Michael’s real character, private insights and hidden feelings: the innermost thoughts of a fiercely private individual.Jermaine Jackson knew Michael like only a brother can. In You Are Not Alone Jermaine brings light to the man behind the mask of superstardom, an identity that has lingered in the shadows for too long. You Are Not Alone is a celebration of the real Michael: the boy who shared a tiny bunkbed with Jermaine at 2300 Jackson Street, Gary, Indiana; the brother with whom Jermaine shared laughter, tears and memories; the boy who would grow up to become a legend.Raw, honest and incredibly moving, You Are Not Alone is also a sophisticated, no-holds-barred examination of Michael Jackson, aimed at fostering a true and final understanding of who he was and what shaped him. This is Michael Jackson – the man, not the legend – through a brother’s eyes.If you love Michael Jackson, this is the only book you will want to read.If you think you know the Michael Jackson story, it’s time to think again.