MJ (2 page)

In 1942, when Joe was in sixth grade, his parents, both devout Christians, split up after eleven years of marriage. Chrystal had devastated her husband by having an affair with a soldier—she married him and relocated to Pine Bluff and, later, East Chicago, outside Gary.
Samuel fled to Oakland, California, where he switched careers, finding work in a Bay Area shipyard.
“When I stopped crying, I wrote to him as often as possible,” Joseph said. “Occasionally, he answered me.”

For a while, Joe took a bus to Oakland to visit his father. “I constantly traveled back and forth between Mom and Dad, trying to make them both happy,” he said. “I felt like a ping-pong ball.” Finally, he moved to East Chicago for good.

By the early fifties, when he was in his twenties, Joe was working at Inland Steel, when he spotted a young woman riding her bicycle in the street. Their eyes met. He called out. She stopped. Her name was Katherine Scruse, and she was visiting her mother. She lived in Indiana Harbor, about ten miles away. Her parents were divorced, too.

Born May 4, 1930, in Barbour County, Alabama, Katherine also knew from cotton fields. Her father, Prince Albert Screws, had been a railroad worker and cotton farmer; her mother, Martha, was a housewife; and she had one sister, Hattie, a year younger, tougher and more athletic. (Prince Albert would change “Screws” to “Scruse”—Katherine’s maiden name.) When Katherine was eighteen months old, she developed polio, which forced her to wear a brace through adolescence. She always walked with a slight limp—one that made her self-conscious and inclined to avoid public gatherings. She managed to skip high school, earning her diploma from equivalency courses. She listened on the radio to the plaintive country ballads of
Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams.

A dreamer, Katherine aspired to be an actress, like her heroines Kathryn
Grayson and Barbara Stanwyck, or a singer, as she’d trained in her Baptist church and junior high choir. She found saxophone players sexy, and while
Joe Jackson did not play the saxophone, he had an electric guitar and was leading his own five-man blues band, the Falcons, which scored the occasional gig at a party or nightclub. His
younger brother Luther was also in the band. This was a crucial time in the development of American music, when bluesmen who’d come up from the South were spinning their teary acoustic ballads into more aggressive, electric songs. While Luther played in a separate blues band and idolized electric guitarist Jimmy Reed, Joe composed songs in his head while operating his crane at the mill—he insisted he wrote something called
“Tutti Frutti” a year before Little Richard came out with his famous hit by the same name.

Joe invited
Katherine to the movies, and they arranged a second date at a party. “Not only did I think that Joe was handsome, I liked his manner,” Katherine said. “He was on the quiet side, kind of cool-acting.” She was characteristically self-conscious, but Joe, fortunately, had enough confidence for both of them.
“We have the floor to ourselves, Katie,” he told her. “Let’s keep dancing.”

Too poor for a wedding, Joe and Katherine went before a justice of the peace in Crown Point, Indiana, a small town south of Gary that must have seemed like another world. Almost no African-Americans lived in Crown Point, even though it was just a twenty-minute drive from Gary in Joseph’s brown Buick. They were married on November 5, 1949, and started having kids, beginning with Rebbie in 1950.

After Rebbie came Sigmund Esco (Jackie), a year later, followed by Tariano Adaryl (Tito), in 1953, Jermaine in 1954, La Toya Yvonne in 1956, Marlon David in 1957, Steven Randall in 1961, and Janet Dameta in 1966. Between Marlon and Randy, on August 29, 1958, was Michael Joseph Jackson.

From the first child, the household was chaos. After Michael was born, Katherine added roughly
twenty dollars a week to the family budget from her part-time job as a cashier for Sears in downtown Gary—which is to say, the white part of the city. The family had to make choices, buying a freezer instead of a television or new car. Katherine froze pinto beans, pinto soups, egg sandwiches, mackerel with rice, and
tons of chicken.
“We ate so much spaghetti that I can’t stand pasta today,” Jermaine recalled. Joseph grew potatoes, string beans, cabbage, beets, and peanuts in a community garden plot not far from the house. The boys slept in a three-level bunk bed, with Tito and Jermaine in the top rung, Jackie anchoring the bottom, and Michael and Marlon in between. The girls shared a living-room sofa. The cramped quarters fit with Katherine’s keep-everybody-together philosophy. “It wasn’t much bigger than a garage,” she said.

Joseph began to grow into a hard, uncompromising man, with thick, fierce eyebrows. His kids would say repeatedly that he was difficult to
really know. In the fifties, he was becoming more and more desperate as his obligations increased. Northwest Indiana’s steel mills were thriving, but jobs available to blacks were dangerous and depressing. One of Joe’s early mill jobs was in the blast furnace, where he used air hammers to remove cinders from stone walls and floors after the oven had cooled down for a day.
“It was hot as hell. Nobody could stay in there more than ten minutes, and only the most robust workers could manage that. The weaker men had to leave right away,” Joe said. “When I came back out, I was covered with greasy black soot. . . . Some of the workers fainted.”

Every day, Joe put on a
jacket with an L-shaped rip in the back, which repeatedly tore open despite Katherine’s attempts to stitch it up. He had upgraded from the Buick to a beat-up family passenger van and commuted thirteen miles from the family home in Gary. Joe and his colleagues were given just twenty minutes for lunch every day, but Joe couldn’t afford to bring a lunch, sometimes reluctantly accepting tacos from coworkers.

Joe Jackson responded to stress by drawing closer to his family, insisting on protecting his boys from the increasingly dangerous Other Gary. They would always be “winners,” he vowed, over and over.
“I was strict,” Katherine said. “Joe was stricter.” The kids left home only for school and sports, and returned home on time.
“When he arrived
home . . . the air in the house stiffened,” Jermaine recalled. When Joe became angry, which was often, wrinkles and creases would form in sharp angles all over his
face.
“Clean the house!” he would shout to his kids, who dropped everything and reported for duty. “Wait for me in your room!” he would say, indicating an impending wallop from a leather belt. The standard amount of “whops,” as Jermaine referred to them, was ten.

Michael did not escape this abuse. As a child, he was soft-spoken, an animal lover who secretly fed a
mouse in the kitchen, and was shy and reserved, like his mother. He craved candy, and when he got it, he eagerly shared it with the neighborhood kids. He also had a rebel streak. At eighteen months old, he threw a bottle at his father’s head; at four years old, he escalated to a shoe, prompting a severe
spanking. When Michael was three, Joe finally caught him feeding his mouse and took off after him. Michael tried to hide in his bedroom, but
Joe dragged him out and spanked him. As an adult, Michael would at first complain, vaguely, that Joe
“has always been something of a mystery to me” and “one of the few things I regret most is never being able to have a closeness with him.” Later, Michael elevated those claims to an alarming level of specificity, sobbing as he spat out memories of Joe beating him with
iron cords,
throwing him hard against the wall, as Katherine screamed, “Stop it! You’re going to kill him! Stop it!” His kids called him
Joseph, not Pop or Dad or Father or even Joe.

Joe would dismiss the abuse charges—from several of his children—as standard parenting practices of the time.
“I whipped him with a switch and a belt,” he clarified, regarding his treatment of Michael. “I never beat him—you beat somebody with a stick.” Besides, his kids needed the harsh punishment to avoid getting into trouble. “They didn’t have to go out there in the streets,” he said. “They wasn’t locked up like so many other people, or robbing people—they never did any of that stuff.”

It wasn’t just Joe’s strictness that made the Jacksons so insular. In
1960, Katherine went through a spiritual crisis, having been frustrated with her
Baptist faith when she learned her church minister had been having a relationship with a neighborhood woman. She switched to a Lutheran church, with the same result. So when a Jehovah’s Witness
knocked on her door one day, talking Scriptures and the encroaching Armageddon, she and Joe agreed to convert, although Joe, who liked his nightlife, soon lost interest. Katherine held Bible studies every day for her children, who were paying closer and closer attention to her religious transformation. She was baptized at the Roosevelt High swimming pool in 1963, and
continues knocking on strangers’ doors for the Witnesses to this day, or so she told Oprah Winfrey not long ago. Michael also went door-to-door well into his adulthood, even, crazily, at the peak of his fame. Still, while early church experiences informed the music of soul masters like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Sam Cooke, in the case of Michael Jackson, they mostly illustrated the differences between his religious mother and his uninterested father.

The Jacksons entertained few guests outside the family circle, other than Uncle Luther and his three Falcons band mates, who still showed up with beer to fuel the late-night blues jams.
“The Jacksons didn’t come out much. They were pretty much a close-knit family,” says Reynaud D. Jones, who lived half a block away. One of the few extracurricular activities Joe allowed was Little League baseball, and Reynaud was on the same team as Jackie, who was around his age. Soon Reynaud was becoming close not only to the Jackson boys but to Joe himself.

Jones
^I
found himself regularly sitting silently in the Jacksons’
family room with Jackie, Michael, and his brothers, taking in the Falcons’ informal jam sessions. He recalls the elder Jackson fiddling with his electric guitar on songs by
Jimmy Reed, T-Bone Walker, and other blues heroes of the time.

When Joe was at work, Tito played his father’s prized electric guitar, hidden in a case in Joe’s bedroom closet. The Jackson brothers would gather around, harmonizing on Four Tops songs. Katherine, who gasped when she first saw what was happening, let it go on. One morning,
Tito broke a string. He carefully put the guitar back in its case, hoping his father would miraculously conclude the instrument managed to break itself. All the boys fled to their bedrooms and waited. “WHO’S BEEN MESSING WITH MY GUITAR?” Joe roared when he returned from work that night. Tito owned up to his crime, then boldly told his father he knew how to play it. Jermaine insisted Joe did not beat Tito, as reported in numerous accounts. Tito himself has been more vague:
“He took care of me for it,” he says. Either way, Joe’s eyes widened as Tito played.

The
standard version of this Jackson 5 creation myth involves the Jackson kids practicing, and Joe slowly evolving into a talent manager, pushing them in the right musical direction and maneuvering them to local performances around Gary. But that’s missing a step, according to Reynaud Jones. He was a guitarist, too, and, unlike amateur bluesman Joe, the teenager had been keeping up with the musical styles of the times. The hard, industrial Chicago blues sound was giving way to a softer, if just as intense, style that began with street-corner doo-wop groups and had evolved
into soul bands such as the Impressions and the Temptations.
“Everywhere you went,” Jones says of Gary at that time, “you could hear music from somewhere.” By the early sixties, the press box at the baseball field down the alley from the Jacksons’ house was
playing R&B and Motown hits—not Jimmy Reed.

Jones soaked it all in. He had an electric guitar of his own and
a separate group, the Epics. They experimented with doo-wop harmonies and harder soul-band arrangements. In 1965, Jones and Tito Jackson bonded over their musical tastes, and soon they were practicing in Jones’s basement. Jermaine and Jackie dropped by Jones’s house to watch, and they began to sing together—in surprisingly sophisticated harmony. Jones envisioned a newfangled version of the Spaniels, the Gary doo-wop group famous for 1954’s “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite,” and fantasized about bringing the Jacksons out of his basement and onto a stage, where they could make actual money.

The youngest brothers, Michael and Marlon, showed up one day, and while Marlon struggled to learn the dance steps, six-year-old Michael had no such limitations.
“He wouldn’t stop,” Jones recalls. “He was like a little wind-up toy. . . . At some point, I had to tell him, ‘Okay, okay,
okay
, Mike. That’s good.’ ” The Jacksons had splurged for a small black-and-white television set, Jones recalls, and Michael had absorbed all of James Brown’s dance moves. Jones waxed the floor of his tiled basement, encouraging Michael to slide in his stocking feet. The group rehearsed for hours, until the Jackson boys heard a familiar car pull up. “We have to go! Joseph will be home!” they declared, and took off.

By this time, Joe Jackson had already discerned his
kids’ talent, although he wasn’t sure what to do with it. Not long after Tito broke his guitar string, Joe came home from work with a
new red guitar for his son. In August 1965, Joe picked up the newspaper and spotted a tiny classified ad:
ADULT AND TEEN TALENT WANTED OF ALL TYPES
. Evelyn LaHaie, who ran a modeling school, had placed it to find musicians and actors who could perform as volunteers for local hospitals and nursing homes. The ad was small, and LaHaie hadn’t expected much response, so she was shocked when
two hundred performers signed up to audition—singers, go-go dancers, pianists, actors. Evelyn dutifully watched all of them, taking copious notes on a legal pad. The
Jacksons were No. 55, and they rated exclamations such as “terrific” and
“AA++.”
“The very minute I saw that little child, Michael—oh my God! I fell in love with him,” LaHaie says. “Even to this day, I see six-year-olds, they’re normal children, they can’t do anything. But Michael was a star.”

The boys were known as the Jackson Brothers, but LaHaie made the crucial suggestion to rebrand them the Jackson 5—and Joe agreed. The gig they signed up for was called the
Tiny Tots’ Back to School Jamboree, on August 14, 1965, and it centered on a fashion show of LaHaie’s creation.
“All I remember,” Jermaine said, “is seeing a decent-sized crowd of young girls and Joseph telling us after the show to ‘get down there and start selling your photos.’ ”