Chapter 1Fairfax Apartments

Foreword

The fact that organized this book for me before I had written a word of it was a fact of geography. Marvin Gaye's voice was raised in a Washington storefront and finished in Detroit, in the Hitsville rooms where a machine turned Black feeling into national product, and from there it traveled — west, across the entire width of the country — to a bedroom in Los Angeles where his own father shot him dead one day before his birthday. I am a Detroit writer. I have spent my working life explaining the sound that city sent out into the world. I had never before had to follow one of its voices all the way to the room where it stopped.

I had also spent that working life on the inheritors. The music I know best is the music that came after him: the slow, engineered intimacy of a later generation, the singers who built whole careers inside rooms he had furnished before any of them were born. I could tell you which of them had studied his phrasing and which had only absorbed it secondhand off the radio. What I had never done was turn around and walk upstream, past the students to the source, and write about the man the entire grammar descended from. This is the first time I have written about the beginning of the sentence instead of its end — and the strangeness of that, for a critic who made her name downstream, is most of why I wanted to.

I thought I knew what I was walking into. I did not. I had assumed I was going to write about a voice, and I was, but the voice kept leading me somewhere the music does not advertise: into a Washington apartment with a leather belt hanging from a hook in the kitchen, into the arithmetic of a marriage a man narrated onto a double album because he had run out of other places to put it, into the transcript of a manslaughter plea. The most persuasive love songs the American century produced were made by a person who had been taught in childhood that his own body was an occasion for punishment. I did not understand how one man held both of those facts at once. I wanted to. That is the only honest reason to spend years inside another person's life.

The record is not thin, which surprised me — a man that private left a great deal of testimony behind. He talked, near the end, at length, and the people who survived him talked after him: a brother's memoir, a sister's, the flat unbearable detail of a court file, the trade-paper obituaries that got him wrong in the specific ways the American press got Black artists wrong in 1984. I read what he said about himself and I read what the people closest to him said about him and I spent a long time in the gap between the two, because that gap is where a biography actually lives. I did not conduct any of it firsthand; the dead do not sit for interviews. I worked, as anyone must now, from the public record and from listening again to records I had been sure I already knew.

What makes him worth a book is not that he was wronged, though he was, and not that he was gifted, though the word is too small for what he could do with breath and a microphone. It is that he did the rarest thing a person can do with pain, which is convert it, wholesale, into something formally beautiful, and then hand it to strangers as though it were a gift and not a wound. He put the fear somewhere outside the room. The songs are where it went. A man can be a mystery to everyone who ever knew him and still leave, in eleven minutes of a record cut with his friends on a winter afternoon, the most legible account of himself that anyone will ever manage to give.

I came to him as a partisan of what came after, fluent in the students and a stranger to the master. I leave the way his subjects tend to leave you: unable to summarize the man and unwilling to stop trying. This book is my attempt to follow one Detroit voice the whole width of the country — from the storefront where it was raised to the room where it was stopped — and to say, as plainly as the material allows, what was lost in that room. What was lost was more than a man, though it was that first. It is never only a man.

— Tariah Robinson, Detroit

Chapter 1 · Fairfax Apartments

The boy who would become Marvin Gaye was born at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., on the second of April, 1939, a Sunday, the same day of the week, by the cold accident of the calendar, on which he would die forty-five years later. His father, Marvin Pentz Gay, was a Pentecostal preacher then twenty-four years old. His mother, Alberta Cooper Gay, was a domestic worker who had come up from rural Kentucky in her teens to take service positions in the houses of mid-level federal employees. The hospital was a Black hospital. Freedman's had been founded in 1862 to provide medical care to formerly enslaved people coming north into the District after emancipation, and by 1939 it was the institution at which the great majority of Black babies in the city were born, including the babies of preachers and the babies of domestic workers. The Gays had been married for four years. The newborn was named for his father. He was their second child. A daughter, Jeanne, had come first in 1936. Two more would follow: a son, Frankie, in 1941, and a daughter, Zeola, in 1945. Years later Marvin Sr. would father another son, Antwaun, by a woman he was involved with outside the marriage — a half-brother who grew up apart from the household and never met Marvin.

The address the Gay family wrote on the hospital admission form was 1617 1st Street SW. This was the Fairfax Apartments, a public-housing complex in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of the District, a few blocks east of the Anacostia River and a few blocks south of the railyards that fed Union Station. The Fairfax was a four-story brick building with concrete stairwells, two-bedroom units, communal hallways painted in a green that was supposed to suggest hospitals or public schools. The Gays occupied a unit on the second floor. The front windows looked out on 1st Street, which in 1939 had not yet been improved or paved. The back windows looked out on a grass courtyard with a clothesline. The neighborhood was working-class and Black. In the years immediately after the Second World War, the Southwest Waterfront would become one of the most concentrated Black neighborhoods in the District, a community of laborers and day-workers and federal mail clerks, and in the 1950s the neighborhood would be largely cleared by urban renewal, bulldozed for office buildings and townhouses and the freeway interchange that fed the Capital Beltway. The Fairfax Apartments where Marvin spent his earliest years no longer exists. The building was demolished in 1957.

His father had been born on a small sharecropping farm along Catnip Hill Pike in Jessamine County, Kentucky, on the first of October, 1914, the third of thirteen children. The middle name Pentz was the surname of the German country doctor who had delivered him. The Gays were sharecroppers, and Marvin Sr.'s mother, Mamie Gay, broke from the rest of the local Black community by joining what her neighbors regarded as an eccentric church, the House of God, where, by the account preserved in the denomination's own oral tradition and confirmed by Bishop Simon Peter Rawlings, who served for decades as the Chief Apostle of the church and as Marvin Sr.'s closest associate, Mamie Gay was said to have been the first female member of the sect. The full name of the denomination, derived from a yoking of verses in Isaiah and First Timothy, was the House of God, the Holy Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth, the House of Prayer for All People: a Christian church that observed only Old Testament holidays, that recognized the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday in the Hebrew style, that forbade dancing and movies and television, that did not celebrate Christmas as the world celebrated it, and that bound its members to a code of conduct as restrictive as any to be found among the small Pentecostal denominations of the early twentieth-century American South. The denomination had been founded in 1918. Marvin Sr.'s family had moved from the Catnip Hill farm to Charles Avenue in west Lexington in the early 1920s. He had been raised inside the church. He had himself been struck, as a child, by a father who, by the account that Marvin Sr. would in later years give to a Washington friend named Mrs. Carson, had often described to his children the violence done to their grandmother in earlier generations, the blood and the horror he saw, as Mrs. Carson would put the recurring phrase. Marvin Sr. had moved to Washington in his twenties. He had, by the time he met Alberta Cooper, become a junior minister within the small DC chapter of the church. He had married Alberta on the second of July, 1935, in Washington, D.C.

The denomination, small, strict, built around the personal authority of bishops called Chief Apostles, was a hybrid that David Ritz, who would interview Marvin in the years before his death and write the 1985 biography Divided Soul on the basis of those interviews, would describe as a bizarre mixture of orthodox Judaism and Pentecostal Christianity. Members did not work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. They did not eat pork. They did not eat shellfish. They did not celebrate Christmas. They observed Passover. The dress code consciously rejected fashion: women wore ankle-length skirts and white head coverings during the period from Passover to Harvest Festival; lipstick was forbidden, as were nylons, as were sleeveless dresses, as were nail polish and open-toed shoes. Men wore plain dark suits and starched white shirts. Marvin's sister Zeola, in her later interviews, would put it in almost the exact way her brother had: Father's church was extremely hard on young people, especially women. We couldn't wear sleeveless dresses, nylons, lipstick, or nail polish. We couldn't show our hair or even wear open-toe shoes. No dancing was allowed and, for a long time, no movies or television. The doctrine on family life was patriarchal in the strict sense. Husbands ruled their households absolutely. Children obeyed their fathers without negotiation. Discipline was scriptural and physical. The rod and the staff were not metaphors.

Within the House of God's small DC chapter, Marvin Pentz Gay rose quickly. By the time of his second son's birth he was a junior minister with his own preaching schedule, conducting Wednesday evening services at the storefront congregation on 7th Street and traveling occasionally to congregations in Baltimore and Annapolis. He earned almost nothing from these ministerial duties. The income that supported the family was Alberta's. She worked six days a week as a domestic in a series of houses in Northwest Washington: first for the family of a Treasury Department employee, then for a State Department family in Foggy Bottom, then for a longer engagement in the Cleveland Park neighborhood for a family whose name does not appear in the surviving accounts. She left the apartment at six in the morning and returned at seven in the evening. She brought home laundry to do at night. She raised the children in the in-between hours. The father was at home most days. The father was at home preparing his sermons. The father was at home reading scripture aloud to himself. The father was at home, and as the second son grew old enough to register where his father was and what his father was doing, he understood by the cadence of the apartment that the father's authority was not earned by what he provided but assumed by who he was.

Marvin Jr.'s earliest memories, as he would later relate them to David Ritz in the long taped conversations that would become the 1985 biography Divided Soul, were arranged around his mother. The smell of starch and bleach in the laundry room of the Fairfax. The hum of his mother's voice singing under her breath as she worked. The Sunday afternoons when she would sit on the couch in the living room with the youngest child in her lap and the older children at her knees and lead them through the choruses of the hymns they would all sing in church that night. Just a Closer Walk With Thee. Precious Lord, Take My Hand. His Eye Is on the Sparrow. The way she sang was the way her son would later sing: a tone that lived more in the chest than in the throat, a tone that swelled rather than declared, a tone that made the small apartment feel for the duration of the verse like a place worth being in. He was three years old, four years old, five years old, learning the harmony lines from his mother before he could read the words. He was six years old singing solos in the children's choir at the storefront on 7th Street. He was seven years old being brought up to the front of the congregation by his father, by the only access route to his father's approval, and asked to sing "I'll Fly Away" before the offering. The congregation would weep. The father would nod. The mother in the third row would close her eyes.

What the boy understood by then, what he had already understood for as long as he had been able to register the shape of a day, was that singing was the only thing he could do that elicited from his father something other than punishment. Everything else he did was wrong. His curiosity about the world outside the House of God was wrong. His questions about why other children at the playground were allowed to celebrate Christmas were wrong. His preference for the comic books a neighborhood boy had given him over the Bible study his father wanted him to memorize was wrong. The beatings began before he was old enough to remember their beginning. They were administered with a leather belt. They were administered for failed Bible recitations. They were administered for failed table manners. They were administered, when the father judged it necessary, for offenses the boy did not understand he had committed. Years later, talking to Ritz, Marvin would summarize the regime in a sentence that has been quoted in nearly every account of his life since. By the time I was twelve, there wasn't an inch of my body that hadn't been bruised and beaten by him.

The brother who came after him, Frankie Gaye, would in his own posthumous memoir, assembled with the writer Fred E. Basten from interviews conducted shortly before Frankie's death of a heart attack in 2001, describe the same regime in flatter terms. The belt was kept hanging from a hook in the kitchen. The belt was visible at all times. The belt was used three or four times a week. Sometimes the belt was used because the boys had not memorized the correct passages. Sometimes the belt was used because their father suspected, without evidence, that they had stolen something. Sometimes the belt was used because their father had been preached against by another minister at a regional gathering and had returned home angry. Sometimes the belt was used because the boys' mother, exhausted from a fourteen-hour day of housework that was not her own, had said something at the dinner table the father did not approve of, and the punishment for her infraction was administered to her sons because the father's theology forbade striking women in front of the children but did not forbid this. Frankie would describe a household in which the food on the table was sometimes withheld for hours after it had been prepared, while the father lectured on a perceived moral failing of one of the children, while the food cooled, while the children sat in their chairs and looked at the ceiling and did not cry because crying was the next infraction. Frankie would describe a house in which the older brother (the future Marvin Gaye, then six and seven and eight years old) would sometimes intervene to take a beating that was being administered to one of the younger children, would step between his father and his sister or between his father and his brother and would offer his own back to the belt instead. This Marvin did, by Frankie's account, more than once. By Frankie's account, this Marvin did regularly.

The father had also another quality, which the children registered earlier than they could name. The father was at home much of the day. The father took an interest in the wardrobe. The father wore, when the family was alone, the loose cotton dressing gowns and the head wraps and the cosmetic accessories of a woman. He did not do this in public. He did not do this in front of the congregation. He did not do this in front of his fellow clergy. He did this in the apartment, in the late afternoons, in the bedroom whose door he sometimes closed and sometimes did not. Alberta accepted what her husband did because she had no theological language with which to refuse it, and because the rest of his behavior gave her no permission to refuse anything. The children registered it without naming it. They knew, the older they got, that their father's habits were a thing the family did not discuss with the neighbors. They knew, by the time the future Marvin Gaye was ten or eleven or twelve, that the neighbors discussed it anyway. The bullying that accompanied this knowledge would become, in the next chapter of Marvin's life, one of the through-lines of his adolescence. It is enough here to say that even in the Fairfax years, before the family moved to a house on East Capitol Street and before the son had yet to give his father the only English-language name he would ever give him in print, the boy had begun to develop the watchful flinching attention of a child who lives with a father who is also two other things, a public-facing minister and a private cross-dressing recluse, and who has not yet decided which of those two persons is the more dangerous to be left alone with.

Alberta protected what she could. She sang with her son in the kitchen. She walked him to the children's choir rehearsals on Saturday afternoons. She shielded him from blows when she could intercept them. She left coins for ice cream under the lining of the laundry basket where her husband would not look. She told him, as he would later quote her, that he had a voice that could make the angels stop and listen, and that whenever he was afraid he was to remember this, that he had a voice that could make the angels stop and listen, and that he was therefore a person of consequence in the world, a person whose existence had been prepared for by something larger than the apartment in which they were standing. She told him this often. She told him this in the tone of someone who had decided her son's survival was going to require the regular reinforcement of a fact that the rest of his daily life worked actively to disprove. Marvin would later tell Ritz that he had been a suicidal child. He would say the words plainly. He would say that without his mother's voice in his ear telling him he was a person of consequence in the world he believed he would have been one of those young children whose deaths showed up on the second page of the Washington Star and were forgotten by Wednesday. He would say that his mother saved his life by force of voice alone, that she had nothing else with which to save him because the man whose belt was hanging on the kitchen hook controlled everything else. He would say this in 1982 in an apartment in Belgium and again in 1983 in a hospital room in Los Angeles and the words would not change much across the years.

The siblings registered all of this differently. Jeanne, the oldest, who had been two years old at her brother's birth and who would die in 2021 at the age of eighty-four, having lived the longest of any of the Gay children, would describe in her own later interviews a household in which she had served as a kind of secondary mother to the younger children, an under-Alberta whose job during the daytime hours when their mother was working in Northwest had been to feed her brothers and her younger sister and to keep them out of their father's way. Frankie, the brother just below Marvin, would describe a different household, one in which he and Marvin had grown up so close in age and so identically oppressed that they were less brothers than allies, two children running the same gauntlet, who learned together to recognize the sound of their father coming up the stairs and who learned together which boards in the apartment hallway creaked and which did not. Zeola, who would be born in 1945 and would in adulthood become the most public of the surviving siblings and the one who in 2011 would publish her own short memoir titled My Brother Marvin, would describe the same household from the perspective of the daughter: a household in which her father's preference for the daughters as visible objects of moral exhibition coexisted with his abuse of the sons as the targets on which the disciplinary architecture was demonstrated.

The neighborhood around the Fairfax in the years just before the Second World War and just after was a Washington that no longer exists. There was a corner store at 1st and L where children went on weekends for penny candy. There was a Black-owned barbershop on M Street where men sat in the chairs reading the Afro-American. There was a record store on 7th Street where in 1942 and 1943 and 1944 the new Decca pressings of Billie Holiday and Louis Jordan and the Mills Brothers were stocked the day they arrived in DC. There was a fish market down by the river where the Black women of the neighborhood went on Friday afternoons to buy the porgies and the catfish that would be fried for Saturday supper. There was the Howard Theatre at Seventh and T, the city's great cultural cathedral, a small intimate movie house with live musical revues, part of the same first-run Black entertainment circuit that included the Apollo in New York and the Regal in Chicago, where the children of the neighborhood pressed their faces to the marquee posters and read the names of Sam Cooke and Jesse Belvin and Cab Calloway and Lena Horne and dreamed. The future Marvin Gaye was three years old, four years old, five years old, walking past the Howard with his mother on the way to her bus stop, holding her hand, looking up at the marquee. He was learning the names. He was learning the geography of a city in which a Black man could become a person whose name was on the side of a building.

The contradiction in the apartment was already organizing itself in the boy's mind as the structuring fact of his life. The same father who beat him was the only father who could authorize him to sing. The same House of God whose codes of conduct circumscribed every minute of his daily existence was the only place in which his voice was permitted to be raised in the presence of others. The same denominational restriction that forbade him from celebrating Christmas with the other children of his school class was the restriction that produced the small Sunday-night congregation in front of which he would, year by year, begin to become someone. The boy understood at five years old that he was a person being made by two opposing pressures. The boy understood at seven that the resolution of those two opposing pressures was going to require him to become unlike anyone he had so far seen. The boy understood at ten that the resolution was probably not going to come. He understood by twelve that he would either get out of the apartment or he would not survive the apartment. He understood by fourteen that getting out of the apartment was going to mean understanding music in a way no one in his family had yet understood it, because music was the only currency the apartment recognized that could also be spent outside the apartment.

By the time he was a pre-teen, by Ritz's later observation, he had developed into a fine two-fisted country-church pianist, playing entirely by ear, picking out the chords of Just a Closer Walk With Thee and Precious Lord, Take My Hand in the church's small back room. He could play heartfelt blues. He could improvise. The music, as he would later phrase it, was the joyful part of services in the House of God which, in other ways, bound its members to an unbending code.

The Gay family would remain in the Fairfax through Marvin's grade-school years. In 1953 or 1954, with the Southwest Renewal plan beginning to clear the neighborhood — the First Street housing itself would not come down until 1957 — the Gays, like many of the working-class Black families displaced from the Southwest Waterfront, were resettled in another public-housing complex, the East Capitol Dwellings, in the far northeast quadrant of the city, against the Maryland district line. The two-story apartment at 10 Sixtieth Street Northeast was, by Marvin's own account, somewhat nicer than the unit at 1617 First Street had been. It had a yard. It had stairs of its own. It had neighbors who would themselves become the boys with whom Marvin would form his first vocal groups: Reese Palmer, who would sing with him in the Marquees; the boy known to all of them as Peasie, whom Marvin would corner on the front step on weekday afternoons and ask to sing Heavenly Father one more time. But the Fairfax years were the architecture inside which his soul had been formed. The childhood of Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. was the childhood at 1617 First Street, the childhood inside the small apartment with the green courtyard, the childhood of his mother singing under her breath as she scrubbed the laundry, the childhood of the leather belt hanging from the kitchen hook, the childhood of the small congregations in front of which his small clear voice ascended into the rafters of a storefront sanctuary that doubled as a church on the Sabbath and as the nearest thing he had been given to a place of safety.