You Are Not Alone: Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes. Jermaine Jackson
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It is my first memory of hearing his voice, an angelic sound. He sang softly so that Mother wouldn’t hear. I joined in and we started making harmony. We sang verses of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’. Two boys carol-singing on the doorstep of our exclusion, songs we’d heard at school, not knowing that singing would be our profession.
As we sang, the grin on Michael’s face was pure joy because we had stolen a piece of magic. We were happy briefly. But then we stopped, because this temporary sensation only reminded us that we were pretending to participate and the next morning would be like any other. I’ve read many times that Michael did not like Christmas, based on our family’s lack of celebration. This was not true. It had not been true since that moment as a four-year-old when he said, staring at the Whites’ house: ‘When I’m older, I’ll have lights. Lots of lights. It will be Christmas every day.’
‘GO FASTER! GO FASTER!’ MICHAEL SHRIEKED, hitting an early high note. He was sitting tucked up in the front of a shopping cart – knees to chin – while Tito, Marlon and I were running and pushing it down 23rd Avenue, me with both hands on the handlebar, and my two brothers either side as the wheels wobbled and bounced off the road on a summer’s day. We built up speed and powered forward like a bobsleigh team. Except this, in our minds, was a train. We’d find two, sometimes three, shopping carts from the nearby Giants supermarket and couple them together. Giants was about three blocks away, located across the sports field at the back of our home, but its carts were often abandoned and strewn about the streets, so they were easy to commandeer. Michael was ‘the driver’.
He was mad about Lionel toy trains – small, but weighty model steam engines and locomotives, packaged in orange boxes. Whenever Mother took us shopping for clothes at the Salvation Army, he always darted upstairs to the toy section to see if anyone had donated a second-hand Lionel train set. So, in his imagination, our shopping carts became two or three carriages, and 23rd Avenue was the straight section of track. It was a train that went too fast to pick up other passengers, thundering along, as Michael provided the sound effects. We hit the buffers when 23rd Avenue ran into a dead-end, about 50 yards from the back of our house.
If Michael wasn’t on the street playing trains, he was on the carpet in our shared bedroom with his prized Lionel engine. Our parents couldn’t afford to buy him a new one, or invest in an electric-train set, complete with full length track, station, and signal boxes. That is why the dream of owning a train set was in his head long before the dream of performing.
SPEED. I’M CONVINCED OUR EXCITEMENT AS kids was built on the thrill of speed. Whatever we did involved going faster, trying to outgun one another. Had our father known the extent of our thirst for speed, he would have banned it for sure: the potential for injury was always considered a grave risk to our career.
Once we grew bored of the shopping-cart trains, we built ‘go-karts’, constructed from boxes, stroller wheels and planks of wood from a nearby junkyard. Tito was the ‘engineer’ of the brotherhood and he had the know-how in putting everything together. He was forever dismantling clocks and radios, and re-assembling them on the kitchen table, or watching Joseph under the hood of his Buick parked at the side of the house, so he knew where our father’s tool box was. We hammered together three planks to form an I-shaped chassis and axle. We nailed the open cockpit – a square wooden box – on top, and took cord from a clothes line for our steering mechanism, looping it through the front wheels, held like reins. In truth, our turning circle was about as tight as an oil tanker’s, so we only ever travelled in straight lines.
The wide open alleyway at the back of our house – with a row of grassy backyards on one side and a chain-link fence on the other – was our race-track, and it was all about the ‘race’. We often patched together two go-karts, with Tito pushing Marlon, and me pushing Michael in a 50-yard dash. There was always that sense of competition between us: who could go faster, who would be the winner.
‘Go, go, go, GO!’ yelled Michael, leaning forward, urging us into the lead. Marlon hated losing, too, so Michael always had fierce competition. Marlon was the boy who never understood why he couldn’t out-run his own shadow. I can picture him now: sprinting through the street, looking down to his side, with a fierce determination on his face that turned to exasperation when he couldn’t put space between himself and his clinging shadow.
We pushed those go-karts until the metal brackets were scraping along the street, and the wheels buckled or fell off, with Michael tipped up on his side and me laughing so hard I couldn’t stand.
The merry-go-round in the local school field was another thrill-ride. Crouch down in the centre of its metal base, hold on tight to the iron stanchions, and get the brothers to spin it as fast as they could. ‘Faster! Faster! Faster!’ Michael squealed, eyes tight shut, giggling hard. He used to straddle the stanchions, like he was on a horse, going round and round and round. Eyes closed. Wind in the face.
We all dreamed of riding the train, racing the go-karts and spinning on a proper carousel at Disney.
WE KNEW MR LONG WAY BEFORE we had heard of Roald Dahl. To us, he was the original African-American Willy Wonka; this magical man – white hair, wizened features, leathery dark skin – dished out candy from his house the next avenue up, on 22nd, en route to our elementary school at the far end of Jackson Street.
Many kids beat a path to Mr Long’s door because his younger brother went to our school. Knowing Timothy meant we got a good deal, two to five cents being good value for a little brown bag full of liquorice, shoe strings, Lemonheads, Banana Splits – you name it, he had them all neatly spread out on a single bed in a front room. Mr Long didn’t smile or say very much, but we looked forward to seeing him on school mornings. We grasped at our orders and he dutifully filled the bags. Michael loved candy and that morning ritual brightened the start of each day. How we got the money is a whole other story that I will reserve for later.
We each protected our brown paper bags of candy like gold and back at the house, inside our bedroom, we all had different hiding places which each brother would try and figure out. My hide-out was under the bed or mattress, and I always got busted, but Michael squirreled his away somewhere good because we never did find it. As adults, whenever I reminded him of this, he chuckled at the memory. That is how Michael laughed throughout his life: a mesh-up of a chuckle, a snicker, a giggle; always shy, often self-conscious. Michael loved playing shop: he’d create his counter by laying a board across a pile of books, then a tablecloth, and then he’d spread out his candy. This ‘shop’ was set up in the doorway to our bedroom, or on the lowest bunk-bed, with him kneeling behind, awaiting orders. We traded with each other, swapping or using change kept from Mr Long, or from a nickel found in the street.
But Michael was destined to be an entertainer, not a savvy businessman. That seemed obvious when our father challenged him about getting home late from school one afternoon. ‘Where were you?’ asked Joseph.
‘I went to get some candy,’ said Michael.
‘How much you pay for it?’
‘Five cents.’
‘How much you going to re-sell it for?’
‘Five cents.’
Joseph clipped him around the head. ‘You don’t re-sell something for the same price you bought it!’
Typical Michael: always too fair, never ruthless enough. ‘Why can’t I give it for five cents?’ he said, in the bedroom. The logic was lost on him and he was upset over the undeserved whack on the head. I left him on the bed, muttering under his breath as he sorted his candy into piles,