we’ve been telling you?’ he said.
From that story, you now know the inspiration behind Michael’s 1985 hit ‘Beat It’ – and the video that begins with two gangs approaching from different ends of the street before he jumps into the middle and unites them with dance.
In an interview in 2010, Oprah Winfrey asked our father if he regretted his ‘treatment’ of us – as if he had been a waterboarding jailer at Guantánamo Bay. It is a question that is easy to ask with a condemnatory subtext in a different age, but had Oprah asked that question in 1965 before a black community pitched into the middle of gangland warfare, she would have been treated as the oddity, not Joseph. It was the way of the world back then. Joseph was a hard man with better managerial skills than fatherly ones, with a heart encased in steel but a dedication driven by good. The only expressed regret was Michael’s. He wished we had known more of the absent father than the ever-present manager. But here’s one irrefutable fact: our father raised nine kids in a high-crime, drug-using, gangland environment and steered them towards success without one of them falling off the rails.
Until I was researching this book, I hadn’t understood the extent of the nonsense written about Joseph’s discipline: that he had once cocked an empty pistol to Michael’s head; that he had locked him, terrified, in a closet; that he had jumped out of the shadows with kitchen knives because he ‘enjoyed terrifying his children’; that he had violently shoved Michael into a stack of instruments; that Michael had had to step over La Toya on the bathroom floor – and then brushed his teeth – after Joseph had laid her out cold. It’s a sad truth of celebrity that when something isn’t officially denied or legally contested, outside commentators feel free to push the boundaries of fantasy until myth is cemented as fact. Whenever I have attempted to place Joseph’s behaviour into a true context, I am accused of being a sympathiser or an apologist, and yet I was there. I saw what really happened – and it doesn’t line up with the portrayal of him as a monster.
People cite to me Michael’s televised Oprah interview of 1993 or the Martin Bashir documentary of 2003. They have heard how the thought of Joseph made Michael feel sick or faint; how Joseph used to ‘tear me up’ and give him ‘a whipping’ or ‘a beating’ and be ‘cruel’ or ‘mean’, and it was ‘bad … real bad’. All of which is true. There is no denying that Michael was terrified of our father and his fear grew into dislike. As late as 1984, he turned to me one day and asked, ‘Would you cry if Joseph died?’
‘Yeah!’ I told him, and he seemed surprised by my certainty.
‘I don’t know if I would,’ he said.
Michael was the most sensitive of brothers, the most fragile, and the most alien to Joseph’s ways. In his young mind, what Joseph did wasn’t discipline, it was unloving. This was reinforced when, after moving to California, new friends (both young and old) reacted in horror when Michael openly told them about Joseph’s actions. ‘That’s abuse, Michael!’ they said. ‘He can’t do that to you. You can report him to the police for that!’ If Michael didn’t think it was abuse before, he did now. Joseph had a big problem in controlling his temper and none of us would raise our children the same way today. But had he truly abused us we wouldn’t still be speaking to him, as Michael was until the rehearsals for the ‘This Is It’ concert of 2009. He had forgiven Joseph and didn’t subscribe to the notion that any of us had been ‘abused’.
In 2001, Michael gave a speech to students at Oxford University about parents and children. The words he used then still stand today: ‘I have begun to see how my father’s harshness was a kind of love, an imperfect one, but love nonetheless. With time, I now feel a blessing. In the place of anger, I have found absolution … reconciliation … and forgiveness. Almost a decade ago, I founded a charity called Heal the World. To heal the world, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal the kids, we first have to heal the child within each and every one of us. That is why I want to forgive my father and stop judging him. I want to be free to step into a new relationship with my father for the rest of my life, unhindered by the goblins of the past …’
HOWEVER MUCH MICHAEL SPOKE ABOUT HIS fear of Joseph, he liked taking it to the edge. Between the ages of six and 10, his love of candy propelled him into a mission that, for him, was akin to crawling into the big bad bear’s cave as it slept. Each morning before school, and with Joseph in bed after working a swing shift, we’d send Michael to grab change from inside the pockets of the pants left lying on the bedroom floor.
Jackie, Tito, Marlon and I stood against the wall, shushing one another and trying not to giggle as Michael slithered slowly on the floor and through the partially open door into darkness. I stood as lookout – checking for movement from the big bundle under the sheets. Next thing we knew, Michael was backing out with some change and we’d run out of the house, yelping with delight that we had pulled off another successful mission. Sometimes our candy-heist yielded a disappointing haul of cents and nickels, but sometimes we struck gold with dimes and quarters.
Throughout our childhood, we thought we were the bravest kids until Mother told us in later years that she and Joseph would lie there in bed, eyes open, looking at one another, raising their eye-brows and smiling as they heard Michael shuffling in.
MICHAEL’S SWEET TOOTH WAS BEHIND THE one moment in his life when he said time stood still. It was winter and thick snow was on the ground. He hadn’t wanted to venture out into the cold so he’d begged Marlon to go and buy him some bubble gum.
Some time later, we were all playing inside and Mother was in the kitchen when a kid pounded on the door, shouting, ‘Marlon’s dead!’ He had been hit by a car.
Mother ran outside, yelling, ‘WHERE? WHERE?’
I stood on the pathway, watching her hurry through the snow up the street. Behind me, Michael was rooted by guilt to the doorstep. ‘Oh, Lord, what have I done? I sent him for some gum … Erms, it’s all my fault.’
Marlon had suffered a head injury after a car slid in the snow and slewed into him. Mother found him knocked out under the front bumper, being tended by people in the street. He was taken to hospital, where he stayed for a few days. When Mother came home and said he was going to be okay, Michael burst into tears of relief. He had convinced himself that his brother was dead all because of him and that his punishment would be exclusion from God’s paradise.
That was because, in our home, the lessons of the Kingdom Hall held equal weight to the lessons in entertainment. The irony was lost on us. We never questioned things as kids: I don’t think we ever learned how to question things. We just followed instructions and did as we were told. Michael believed it when the elders preached that only 144,000 people would be saved by Jehovah and transported to a new paradise when Armageddon happened. Why only 144,000 out of the four million practising Witnesses across America? We never did ask. Jehovah’s influence was one aspect of life at 2300 Jackson Street that people perhaps haven’t properly weighed: those doctrines conditioned Michael and pinned us to the straight and narrow, just as much as Joseph’s discipline.
GOD WAS ALWAYS RESIDENT IN OUR house, but Jehovah moved in before Mother fell pregnant with Randy, when Michael was two. She had been raised a Christian with devoted family links to the Baptist Church, but two things happened in 1960: a local pastor she respected at Gary’s Lutheran church turned out to be having an affair and therefore broke his covenant with God; and a practising Jehovah’s Witness, a friend named Beverly Brown, knocked on our door at the exact time of Mother’s spiritual disillusionment. That was when Christmas and birthdays moved out of our home. Mother says that I ‘must’ remember having a Christmas tree and presents until I was six, but I honestly can’t.
After her conversion the only ‘special occasion’ was the obligatory visit with Mother to the local Kingdom Hall. It was her responsibility
