leading us towards disappointment. Joseph was adamant that he was doing the right thing, and he needed her support. This was how he expressed his love for us – by believing in our talent. Where Mother soaked us in love and affection, Joseph compensated with what she lacked: confidence and belief. In terms of what children should receive from two parents, these opposites weighed themselves out evenly. Mother tended to look pragmatically at life, whereas Joseph was more ‘speculate to accumulate’. His tough love was expressed not in affection or being tactile, but in the focus and discipline he instilled and the respect he asked for. It was the love of a football coach, expressed with a heart that was all about winning the game. A slap on the back, a smile on his face, and an excited clap of the hands was his way of expressing admiration. It was his only way of knowing how to express his love.
There was tension in the house for a few weeks, but eventually Mother calmed down and agreed to trust Joseph’s gamble. We just didn’t see the chips being pushed on to the red square in our name.
THE RADIO CRACKLED INTO ITS BROADCAST and that night in 1964, the house was the quietest it had ever been. ‘Good evening, sports fans across the land,’ the boxing commentator announced, ‘and now the questions will be answered. Liston in the white trunks with the black stripes. Clay – half an inch taller – in the white trunks and the red stripes …’ It amazed me that this man could take us there, painting a picture so vivid that we could ‘see’, heightening Joseph’s tension as he hunched forward in his kitchen chair, pulled up alongside the radio on the side cabinet. ‘The Heavyweight Championship of the World,’ the voice continued. ‘If it goes past the first round, there will be surprises already …’
We heard the bell. The crowd roared. We pictured the contender, Cassius Clay, the man from Louisville, Kentucky, springing from his corner to take on the reigning champ, Sonny Liston. ‘AND HERE THEY COME!’
Even before the 22-year-old Cassius Clay became known as Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest’, we were rooting for him because Joseph loved his boxing and said we should cheer the underdog who had the fire to take on the best. Joseph had boxed competitively as a teenager in Oakland and he always had Tito, Jackie and me on the front lawn with our red gloves on, teaching us ‘never be afraid of no one’. He’d referee bouts with other kids from the street and Michael would sit on the front step shouting, ‘Hit him! Hit him! Hit him!’
Joseph taught us technique and how to defend ourselves. ‘No one beats a Jackson,’ he said, and no one ever did. Joseph said he had trained using one of Papa Samuel’s solid oak doors, not a punchbag – it strengthened the callouses and toughened the mind. He was the strongest, hardest, toughest man we knew and I’m sure he imagined himself in the ring as we gathered around the radio.
As we listened, he couldn’t help making a link between entertainment and boxing. ‘Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee – that’s what you need to be doing onstage,’ he said, using Clay’s boast from a press conference earlier that week. Joseph found these convenient associations everywhere and disguised them as lessons. He did it with Jim Brown of the Cleveland Bears whenever we talked football. The No. 32 and the greatest running back of all time was an example of dedication: ‘Never missed a game or a training session in nine years because he knows you’ve got to work at being the best.’
He even hid lessons in the chores he made us do. That pile of bricks in the backyard – the ones Mother now knew would never be built on to the house – still served a purpose. There must have been 100 of those real heavy cinder-block bricks sitting in a stack at the left of the house. Our job was to carry them, one by one, to the other side and build a new stack. It was a pointless exercise, but we didn’t ask why; we just did as we were told. When Joseph returned home, he inspected our work. Every brick had to be flush, and every line must be straight, running down the pile. ‘No … do it again. I want them stacked evenly,’ he said – and we moved them from right to left until we had it just right. We learned discipline and perfection through cuts, blisters and grazes. Work as a team. Do it right. No room for error. If one person is off, it messes up everyone else – and messes up ‘the look’. Noted for choreographic reasons.
All this might explain why some of us turned into obsessive compulsives as adults. Whenever Michael walked into a room and saw a pillow ‘out of place’, he’d change it. ‘This is bothering me,’ he’d say with a smile. Same with me. Same with Rebbie. ‘Remember the bricks?’ we’d say, and then we’d fall about laughing.
So when Cassius Clay arrived on the boxing scene, he presented Joseph with the perfect new example to fold into his lectures. Because here was someone new, who was doubted by the experts yet supreme in his confidence. As we huddled around the radio, Michael and Marlon started shadow boxing to one side as the commentator took us through the first round. Sonny Liston was missing more punches than he landed. ‘That’s all about footwork,’ Joseph said. Mother muttered something about not agreeing with a violent sport but Joseph wasn’t listening – he was too busy translating the commentary. ‘Sonny Liston is like your audience … You’ve got to go out there, tear up the stage and lay ’em out flat!’
That night Cassius Clay won and became the youngest boxer ever to take the title from a reigning heavyweight champion. ‘I shook up the world,’ he told the media. Point made – both in the ring and in the minds of the kids he had no idea were rooting for him in Gary, Indiana.
ON THE GRASS BETWEEN OUR BEDROOM window and 23rd Avenue, there was a tree. During high winds and the tornado warnings that swept across Indiana, Michael and I watched from the window to see how strong that tree really was. It was endlessly fascinating to observe the bout between Mother Nature and the muscle of our tree. It bowed and bent, and ducked and dived like Ali, but it never snapped or uprooted. In my mind, the strongest trees represent family: the parents are the trunk – providing stability – and the branches are the children, sprouting new life in different directions. But everyone belongs to the same tree from the same seed: forever solid, whatever weathers it may face.
I once shared this analogy with Michael and he turned it into a plaque at Neverland. It had been inspired, no doubt, by Joseph telling us as children that our family’s roots were as deep and entwined as a tree’s. A solid family was important to our parents, both of whom came from broken homes. The tug-of-war between his own parents was something Joseph didn’t wish to repeat. Mother’s parents had divorced after moving from Alabama to Indiana: she went to live with her father – Papa Prince – and her sister Hattie with her mother, Mama Martha. Mother and Joseph had vowed to build a family and stick together, preaching to us that nothing and no one should ever come between us.
Before the Jackson 5 ever went public, Joseph took us outside the house one Fall to give us a final lesson to carry through life. He led us to our tree. There were broken twigs strewn all around it and he bent down to collect six, of more or less equal length. He asked us to gather round and pay attention.
He reminded us about togetherness and always looking out for one another. Then he separated one twig from the rest and snapped it in half. ‘They can break one of you when you are separated …’ he said, leaving five thick twigs in his hand. He bunched them tight, side by side, and tried breaking them between his hands and over his knee. Try as he might, with a mill worker’s grip, he couldn’t. ‘… but when you stick together, you are unbreakable,’ he added.
CHAPTER FOUR
Just Kids With a Dream
IN TODAY’S LIGHT, I THINK IT apt that our first true public performance as the Jackson 5 was on 29 August 1965: Michael’s seventh birthday. No one noticed it at the time. Birthdays were like Christmas: non-events that were not marked in the house of Jehovah. But at least Michael’s seventh birthday was different in that it wasn’t another ordinary, unremarkable day.
Evelyn
