Michael Jackson (3 page)

‘People told me that when the church windows were opened, you could hear my great-grandfather's voice ringing out all over
the valley,’ Katherine would recall. ‘It would just ring out over everybody else's. And when I heard this, I said to myself,
“Well, maybe it is in the blood.”’

At the age of eighteen months, Katherine was stricken with polio, at the time often called infantile paralysis because it
struck so many children. There was no vaccine in those days, and many children – like Joseph's sister Verna – either died from
it or were severely crippled.

In 1934, Prince Scruse moved his family to East Chicago, Indiana, in search of a steady job. He was employed in the steel
mills before finding work as a Pullman porter with the Illinois Central Railroad. In less than a year, Prince and Martha divorced;
Martha remained in East Chicago with her young daughters.

Because of her polio, Katherine became a shy, introverted child who was often taunted by her schoolmates. She was always in
and out of hospitals. Unable to graduate from high school, she would take equivalency courses as an adult and get her diploma
in that way. Until she was sixteen, she wore a brace, or used crutches. Today, she walks with a limp.

Her positive childhood memories have always been about music. She and her sister, Hattie, grew up listening to country-western
radio programmes and admiring such stars as Hank Williams and Ernest Tubbs. They were members of the high school orchestra,
the church junior band and the school choir. Katherine, who also sang in the local Baptist church, dreamed of a career in
show business, first as an actress and then as a vocalist.

When she met Joseph, Katherine fell for him, immediately. Though he had married someone else, it lasted only about a year.
After his divorce, Katherine began dating Joseph, and the couple soon became engaged. She was under his spell, gripped by
his charisma, seduced by his charm, his looks, his power. He was a commanding man who took control, and she sensed she would
always feel safe with him. She found herself enjoying his stories, laughing at his jokes. His eyes were large, set wide apart
and a colour of hazel she had never before seen, almost emerald. Whenever she looked into them, as she would tell it, she
knew she was being swept away, and it was what she wanted for herself. Or, as she put it, ‘I fell crazy in love.’

They were opposites in many ways. She was soft. Joseph was hard. She was reasonable. Joseph was explosive. She was romantic.
Joseph was pragmatic. However, the chemistry was there for them.

Both were musical: he was a bluesman who played guitar; she was a country-western fan who played clarinet and piano. When
they were courting, the two would snuggle up together on cold winter nights and sing Christmas carols. Sometimes they would
harmonize, and the blend was a good one, thanks to Katherine's beautiful soprano voice. Michael Jackson feels he inherited
his singing ability from his mother. He has recalled that in his earliest memory of Katherine, she is holding him in her arms
and singing songs such as ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘Cotton Fields’.

Joseph, twenty, and Katherine, nineteen, were married by a justice of the peace on 5 November 1949, in Crown Point, Indiana,
after a six-month engagement.

Katherine has said that she was so affected by her parents' divorce, and the fact that she was raised in a broken home, she
promised herself once she found a husband, she would stay married to him, no matter what circumstances may come their way.
It didn't seem that she had much to worry about with Joseph, though. He treated her respectfully and showed her every consideration.
She enjoyed his company; he made her laugh like no one ever had in the past. Importantly, there was a tremendous sexual bonding
between them. Joseph was a passionate man; Katherine, less so a woman. However, they were in love; they were compatible and
they made it work.

The newlyweds settled in Gary, Indiana. Their first child, Maureen, nicknamed Rebbie (pronounced R
ee
bie), was born on 29 May 1950. The rest of the brood followed in quick succession. On 4 May 1951, Katherine's twenty-first
birthday, she gave birth to Sigmund Esco, nicknamed Jackie. Two years later, on 15 October 1953, Tariano Adaryl was born;
he was called Tito. Jermaine LaJuane followed on 11 December 1954; LaToya Yvonne on 29 May 1956; Marlon David on 12 March
1957 (one of a set of premature twins; the other, Brandon, died within twenty-four hours of birth); Michael Joseph on 29 August
1958 (‘with a funny-looking head, big brown eyes, and long hands,’ said his mother); Steven Randall on 29 October 1961, and
then Janet Dameta on 16 May 1966.

Talk about cramped quarters… once upon a God-forsaken time, all eleven members of the Jackson family lived at 2300 Jackson
Street. ‘You could take five steps from the front door and you'd be out the back,’ Michael said of the house. ‘It was really
no bigger than a garage.’

Katherine and Joseph shared one bedroom with a double bed. The boys slept in the only other bedroom in a triple bunk bed;
Tito and Jermaine sharing a bed on top, Marlon and Michael in the middle, and Jackie alone on the bottom. The three girls
slept on a convertible sofa in the living room; when Randy, was born, he slept on a second couch. In the bitter-cold winter
months, the family would huddle together in the kitchen in front of the open oven.

‘We all had chores,’ Jermaine remembered. ‘There was always something to do – scrubbing the floors, washing the windows, doing
whatever gardening there was to do,’ he said with a smile. ‘Tito did the dishes after dinner. I'd dry them. The four oldest
did the ironing – Rebbie, Jackie, Tito, and me – and we weren't allowed out of the house until we finished. My parents believed
in work values. We learned early the rewards of feeling good about work.’

Joseph worked a four o'clock-to-midnight shift as a crane operator at Inland Steel in East Chicago. In Michael's earliest
memory of his father, he is coming home from work with a big bag of glazed doughnuts for everyone. ‘The work was hard but
steady, and for that I couldn't complain,’ Joseph said. There was never enough money, though; Joseph seldom made more than
sixty-five dollars a week, even though he often put in extra hours as a welder. The family learned to live with it. Katherine
made the children's clothes herself, or shopped at a Salvation Army store. They ate simple foods: bacon and eggs for breakfast;
egg-and-bologna sandwiches and sometimes tomato soup for lunch; fish and rice for dinner. Katherine enjoyed baking peach cobblers
and apple pies for dessert.

There are few school pictures of the Jackson children today, because they could not afford to purchase them after posing for
them. For the first five years that they lived on Jackson Street, the family had no telephone. When Jermaine contracted nephritis,
a kidney disease, at the age of four and had to be hospitalized for three weeks, it hit Katherine and Joseph hard, financially,
as well as emotionally.

Whenever Joseph was laid off, he found work harvesting potatoes, and during these periods the family would fill up on potatoes,
boiled, fried or baked.

‘I was dissatisfied,’ Joseph Jackson remembered. ‘Something inside of me told me there was more to life than this. What I
really wanted more than anything was to find a way into the music business.’ He, his brother Luther and three other men formed
The Falcons, a rhythm and blues band that provided extra income for all of their families by performing in small clubs and
bars. Joseph's three oldest sons – Jackie, Tito and Jermaine – were fascinated with their father's music and would sit in on rehearsals
at home. (Michael has no recollection of The Falcons.)

In the end, The Falcons was not commercially successful; when they disbanded, Joseph stashed his guitar in the bedroom closet.
That string instrument was his one vestige of a dream deferred, and he didn't want any of the children to get their hands
on it. Michael referred to the closet as ‘a sacred place’. Occasionally Katherine would take the guitar down from the shelf
and play it for the children. They would all gather around in the living room and sing together, country songs like ‘Wabash
Cannonball’ and ‘The Great Speckled Bird’.

With his group disbanded, Joseph didn't know what to do with himself. Now working the swing shift at Inland Steel and the
day shift at American Foundries, all he knew was that he wanted much more for himself and his family. It was the early sixties
and ‘everybody we knew was in a singing group’, Jackie recalled. ‘That was the thing to do, go join a group. There were gangs,
and there were singing groups. I wanted to be in a singing group, but we weren't allowed to hang out with the other kids.
So we started singing together 'round the house. Our TV broke down and Mother started having us sing together. And then what
happened was that our father would go to work, and we would sneak into his bedroom and get that guitar down.’

‘And I would play it,’ Tito continued. ‘It would be me, Jackie and Jermaine, and we'd sing, learn new songs, and I would play.
Our mother came in one day and we all froze, like “Uh-oh, we're busted,” but she didn't say anything. She just let us play.’

‘I didn't want to stop it because I saw a lot of talent there,’ Katherine would explain later.

This went on for a few months until one day Tito broke a string on the guitar. ‘I knew I was in trouble,’ Tito recalled. ‘We
were
all
in trouble. Our father was strict and we were scared of him. So I put the guitar back in the closet and hoped he wouldn't
figure out what had happened. But he did, and he
whooped
me. Even though my mother lied and said she had given me permission to play the guitar, he tore me up.’ When Tito tells the
story, his words tumble out and he gets tongue-tied. So many years later, one can still sense his anxiety about it. ‘She just
didn't want to see me get whipped,’ he said, sadly. ‘Not again.

‘Afterwards, when Joseph cooled off, he came into the room. I was still crying on the bed. I said, “You know, I can play that
thing. I really can.” He looked at me and said, “Okay, lemme see what you can do, smart guy.” So I played it. And Jermaine
and Jackie sang a little. Joseph was amazed. He had no idea, because this was the big secret we had been keeping from him
because we were so scared of him.’

Joseph later said that when his sons revealed their talent to him, he felt a surge of excitement about it. ‘I decided I would
leave the music to my sons,’ he told me, many years later. ‘I had a dream for them,’ he said. ‘I envisioned these kids making
audiences happy by sharing their talent, talent that they'd maybe inherited from me.’ He seemed touched by his own words as
he looked back on the past. ‘I just wanted them to make something of themselves. That's all I wanted,’ he added.

Joseph went off to work the next day and, that night, returned home holding something behind his back. He called out to Tito
and handed him the package. It was a red electric guitar. ‘Now, let's rehearse, boys,’ Joseph said with a wide smile. He gathered
his three sons together – Jackie, nine, Tito, seven, and Jermaine, six – and they practised. ‘We'd never been so close,’ Tito
would recall. ‘It was as if we had finally found something in common. Marlon and Mike, they would sit in the corner and watch.
Our mother would give us some tips. I noticed our mother and father were happy. We were all happy. We had found something
special.’

In the sixties, Gary was a tough, urban city, and the Jacksons' neighbourhood was sometimes a dangerous place for youngsters.
Katherine and Joseph lived in constant fear that one of their children would be hurt in the streets. ‘We were always protected
by our parents,’ Jackie recalled. ‘We were never really allowed to have fun in the streets like other kids. We had a strict
curfew. The only time we could actually play with people our own age was in school. We liked the social aspect of school.’

Katherine Jackson, a strong force in the lives of her children, passed on to them a deep and abiding respect for certain religious
convictions. She had been a Baptist and then a Lutheran but turned from both faiths for the same reason: she discovered that
the ministers were having extramarital affairs. When Michael was five years old Katherine became a Jehovah's Witness, converted
by a door-to-door worker. She was baptized in 1963 in the swimming pool at Roosevelt High in Gary. From then on, she asked
that the rest of the family get dressed in their best clothes every Sunday and walk with her to Kingdom Hall, their place
of worship. Joseph, who had been raised a Lutheran, accompanied his wife a couple of times to placate her, but stopped going
when the children were still young because, as Marlon put it, ‘it was so boring.’ As time went on, Michael, LaToya, and Rebbie
would become the most devout about their religion.

Had that religion been any but the Jehovah's Witnesses, Michael Jackson would probably have evolved in a completely different
way. So removed are Jehovah's Witnesses from mainstream Protestantism, they were sometimes considered a cult, especially in
the fifties and sixties. No matter where they live, no Jehovah's Witness will salute a flag (they believe it is idolatrous
to do so) or serve in any armed forces (each Witness is considered an ordained minister and, therefore, exempt). They don't
celebrate Christmas or Easter or birthdays. They usually will not contribute money to any group outside their own church because
they consider preaching the gospel the most worthwhile, charitable deed. Jehovah's Witnesses periodically make news because
they refuse to receive blood transfusions for themselves or their children, no matter how gravely ill the patient may be.