Early Days
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 becauseI 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. SoI 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.” SoI 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.
In the strictest sense of the teachings, Jehovah's Witnesses considered themselves the sheep; everybody else is a goat. When the great battle of Armageddon is fought – it was expected in 1972 and then in 1975 – all the goats will be destroyed at once and the sheep will be spared. The sheep will then be resurrected to a life on earth as subjects of the Kingdom of God. They will be ruled by Christ and a select group of 144,000 Witnesses who will reside in heaven by Christ's side. At the end of a thousand years, Satan will come forth to tempt those on earth. Those who succumb to his wiles will be immediately destroyed. The rest will live, idyllically. Of course, as with those who adhere to religious beliefs, some Witnesses are more adamant about those teachings than others.
Estimates are that 20 to 30 per cent of its members are black. Witnesses are judged solely by their good deeds – their witnessing, or door-to-door proselytizing – and not on new cars, large homes, expensive clothes and other status symbols. Because of her devotion to the Jehovah's Witnesses, Katherine was mostly satisfied with what she had in Gary, Indiana. She enjoyed her life, and had little issue with it other than her concern that the city didn't offer much promise for her children's future, other than work in factories for the boys and domestic life for the girls. Would that be so bad? Yes, Joseph would tell her, absolutely, yes. Sometimes, she agreed. Sometimes, she wasn't so sure what to think about any of it.
Every day, for at least three hours, the boys would rehearse, whether they wanted to do so or not, with Joseph's only thought being to get his family out of Gary.
‘When I found out that my kids were interested in becoming entertainers, I really went to work with them,’ Joseph Jackson would tell
Time.
‘When the other kids would be out on the street playing games, my boys were in the house working, trying to learn how to be something in life,
do
something with their lives.’
Though the Jacksons' music may have brought them closer together as a family unit, it also served to further alienate them from everyone else in the neighbourhood. ‘Already, people thought we were strange because of our religion,’ Jackie would remember. ‘Now they were sure of it. They'd say, “Yeah, look at those Jacksons. They think they're something special.” Everyone else used to hang out on the corners and sing with their groups. But we weren't allowed to. We had to practise at home. So the other kids thought we thought we were too good to sing with on the corner.’
Rehearsals were still held twice a day, before school and after, even though their peers in the neighbourhood thought the Jacksons were wasting their time. As they practised, voices from outside would taunt them through open windows, ‘You ain't
nothing,
' you Jacksons!’ Rocks would be hurled into the living room. It didn't matter to the Jacksons; they ignored the taunts and focused on their practice sessions.
By 1962, five-year-old Marlon had joined the group, playing bongos and singing, mostly off-key. (Marlon couldn't sing or dance, but he was allowed in the group anyway because Katherine would not have it any other way.) One day when the boys were practising while Joseph was at work, Katherine watched as Michael, who was four years old, began imitating Jermaine as he sang a James Brown song. When Michael sang, his voice was so strong and pure, Katherine was surprised. As soon as Joseph got home, she met him at the door with some good news: ‘I think we have another lead singer.’