Chapter 12300 Jackson Street

Foreword

There is a home movie the whole country shares, though no two of us remember it the same way. A boy on a television screen, too small for the suit and too old for his own face, singing something that should have been past a child that age and somehow was not. Maybe you caught it in 1969 on a Sunday-night variety show and maybe you caught it forty years later on a phone in a waiting room, but you caught it. That is the strange thing about Michael Jackson. He arrived through the glass, and for most of us he never came back out from behind it. We met a surface and mistook it for a person, the way you do with anyone famous enough to have replaced himself with his own image.

My beat has always been the people who held a mirror up to this country and forced it to look — the comics, the singers, the ones whose fame said something about America it would rather not have heard out loud. By that measure Michael Jackson is not a subject. He is the subject, the largest mirror the culture ever built. Which is exactly why I kept my distance from him for years.

He is the book you are warned against. Take any position on him and you lose half the room before the first chapter — the half that has already acquitted him or the half that has already convicted him, both of them certain, both of them louder than you. I told myself I wrote about people the country could still argue over in good faith. Michael, I thought, was past argument. He had hardened into two myths facing each other across a wall. Then I started reading, and the wall turned out to be the story.

I expected the icon and the freak — the glove, the moonwalk, the surgeries, the tabloid grotesque. What I found first was a two-bedroom house on Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, eleven people and one bathroom, a father with a belt and a closet, and a boy with the most extraordinary voice in America who had worked out before he was ten that the stage was the only room where nobody hit him. I worked from what anyone can work from: the public record, the memoirs the family and the people around him left behind, the trial transcripts, the decades of press. I did not go hunting a secret Michael. I went looking for the ordinary machinery that built the impossible one, and I found it running in a living room in the Rust Belt, twice a day, before school and after, without exception.

There is the other matter, and I will not write around it. He was accused, in his life and after it, of the worst thing a person can be accused of. He denied it to the end. He was tried and acquitted; other claims have moved through the courts for years and, as I write, have reached no verdict in any direction. I did not solve this, and I want to be plain about that, because the temptation to solve it — to hand you a Michael who is safe to love or safe to hate — is the single largest temptation in the material, and every writer who surrenders to it produces a lie. The honest position is the uncomfortable one. The country cannot settle him. Neither could I. This book holds him where the culture actually keeps him, which is unsettled, and declines to move him out of it for the reader's comfort.

Why write him at all, then, if he cannot be settled? Because the not-settling is the most American thing about him. He is the boy his father manufactured and the man that fame finished the job on. He is the brown-skinned certainty of the Thriller cover and the pale, remade face at the Santa Maria courthouse. He is the voice half the planet still streams and the accusation the other half cannot stream past. He is not a puzzle with a missing piece. He is a mirror, and the reason he is worth a book is that everyone who looks into him sees the country looking back — its genius and its appetite, its love of a child star and its taste for a ruined one, its hunger to build a person that big and its hunger to watch him come apart.

I did not come to acquit him and I did not come to convict him. I came to look, and to keep looking after it got hard to, which is the only thing I have ever known how to do with a face this country will not stop staring at. What follows is what I saw.

— Keisha Morgan, Harlem

Chapter 1 · 2300 Jackson Street

A belt lands on a child's back. The child does not cry. He has learned not to cry because crying makes it worse, and worse, in this house, means the closet -- hours in the dark, the door locked, the boy's small fists beating against the wood until his hands are raw and his voice is gone. He is nine years old. He has the most extraordinary voice in America. The man with the belt is the reason why.

The house at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, is about a hundred feet deep and fifty feet wide. There is no garage. There is no landscaping. There is no green grass. Thick smoke plumes upward from the steel mills -- Inland Steel, US Steel, the furnaces that built the industrial Midwest and poisoned the air above it -- and envelops the atmosphere in a way that makes a person breathing it feel just a little sick. Joseph and Katherine Jackson purchased the home in 1950 for $8,500, with a $500 down payment. It has two bedrooms and one bathroom. Eleven people live in it.

The boys sleep in a triple bunk bed in the second bedroom. Tito and Jermaine share the top. Marlon and Michael share the middle. Jackie sleeps alone on the bottom. The three girls sleep on a convertible sofa in the living room. When Randy arrives, he gets the second couch. In the bitter-cold Indiana winters -- and Gary's winters are brutal, the wind coming off Lake Michigan with nothing to stop it -- the family huddles together in the kitchen in front of the open oven, the only reliable source of heat in the house.

Joseph Walter Jackson works the four-to-midnight shift as a crane operator at Inland Steel in East Chicago. He seldom makes more than sixty-five dollars a week, even with extra hours welding. Katherine makes the children's clothes herself or shops at Salvation Army stores. They eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, egg-and-bologna sandwiches for lunch, fish and rice for dinner. Katherine bakes peach cobblers and apple pies for dessert when she can afford the ingredients. There are few school pictures of the Jackson children because they cannot afford to purchase them after posing for them. For the first five years on Jackson Street, the family has no telephone.

This is where the King of Pop was manufactured. Not born. Manufactured.

Gary, Indiana, in 1958, was a city in its final decade of industrial glory. United States Steel had built Gary in 1906 -- literally built it, from swampland along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, naming it after Elbert Henry Gary, the chairman of U.S. Steel, who never visited the city that bore his name. By the time Michael was born, approximately 180,000 people lived in Gary, and approximately forty percent of them worked for the steel industry in some capacity. The mills ran three shifts, seven days a week. The furnaces never went cold. The air above the city had a brownish tint that long-term residents stopped noticing because it was always there, the way poverty is always there in the cities that sustain it.

The Jackson Street address had nothing to do with the family's name -- the street had been named for President Andrew Jackson decades before the family arrived. But the coincidence pleased Katherine, who saw in it a sign that the family was where God wanted them. Her faith organized everything: the calendar (no birthday parties, no Christmas, no Easter -- Jehovah's Witnesses observe none of these), the social world (the children's friendships were primarily with other Witness families), and the discipline (Katherine's correction was verbal and consistent where Joseph's was physical and unpredictable).

Joseph Walter Jackson was born on July 26, 1928, in Fountain Hill, Arkansas, to Samuel and Chrystal Jackson. Fountain Hill is an unincorporated community in Ashley County, in the flat cotton-field country of southeastern Arkansas near the Louisiana border -- a place where Black men in 1928 were sharecroppers or domestic workers, where the Great Depression would arrive within two years and find the community already at the economic floor, where the options for a Black child with ambition were limited to education, religion, or migration. Samuel Jackson chose education: he was a high school teacher at the local segregated school, a man who taught by authority and enforced that authority at home with the same tools he used in the classroom -- discipline, demands, and, when necessary, physical force.

Samuel was a strict and unyielding man who raised his children with an iron fist. They were not allowed to socialize with friends outside the home. He loved his family but was distant and hard to reach. He rarely showed affection, and so he was misunderstood. People thought he had no feelings. He had them. He just didn't know what to do with them.

Joseph would take after his father in so many ways.

When Samuel and Chrystal divorced, Sam moved to Oakland, taking Joseph with him. When Samuel married a third time, Joseph left for Indiana to join his mother and siblings in East Chicago. He dropped out of school in the eleventh grade. He became a boxer in the Golden Gloves -- the body as weapon, the fist as solution, the violence as the only language that reliably produced results. Shortly after, at a neighborhood party, he met Katherine Esther Scruse.

Katherine was born on May 4, 1930, in Barbour County, Alabama, a rural farming area where her family had lived for generations. Her grandfather, Kendall Brown, had been a slave for an Alabama family named Scruse, whose name he eventually adopted as his own. Brown sang every Sunday in a Russell County church and was renowned for his voice. When the church windows were opened, you could hear it ringing out over everybody else's, all over the valley. Katherine heard this story and said to herself: maybe it is in the blood.

At eighteen months, Katherine was stricken with polio. There was no vaccine in those days, and many children died from it. Katherine survived, but she walked with a brace until she was sixteen. She still walks with a limp. The polio made her shy, introverted, often taunted by schoolmates. But her positive memories were always about music. She and her sister Hattie grew up listening to country-western radio, admiring Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb. Katherine played clarinet and piano, sang in the local Baptist church, and dreamed of a career in show business.

When she met Joseph, she fell for him immediately. He was commanding, charismatic, with large eyes set wide apart -- hazel, almost emerald. Whenever she looked into them, she knew she was being swept away, and it was what she wanted. They were opposites. She was soft. Joseph was hard. She was reasonable. Joseph was explosive. She was romantic. Joseph was pragmatic. But both were musical -- he played blues guitar, she sang country soprano -- and when they were courting, they would snuggle up on cold winter nights and sing Christmas carols together, and the blend was good.

They were married by a justice of the peace on November 5, 1949, in Crown Point, Indiana. Katherine had promised herself, having been raised in a broken home after her parents' divorce, that once she found a husband, she would stay married to him, no matter what.

No matter what turned out to be a lot.

The children came in quick succession. Rebbie in 1950. Jackie in 1951. Tito in 1953. Jermaine in 1954. La Toya in 1956. Marlon in 1957 -- one of premature twins; the other, Brandon, died within twenty-four hours of birth, a loss the family would carry silently. Michael Joseph on August 29, 1958, born, as Katherine would remember, "with a funny-looking head, big brown eyes, and long hands." Randy in 1961. Janet in 1966.

Nine surviving children. Two bedrooms. One bathroom. Sixty-five dollars a week.

Joseph believed in the value and impact of brute force as a disciplinary tool. "Either you're a winner in this life, or a loser," he liked to say. "And none of my kids are gonna be losers." To ensure this, he would smack his children without giving it a second thought, shove them into walls, lock them in closets. The boys got it worst. Michael got it worst of all -- not because he was the most disobedient, but because he was the most sensitive, and Joseph could see it, and something in Joseph could not tolerate sensitivity in a boy.

Michael was too quick to be easily caught. Tito remembered that if his mother or father swung at Michael, he'd be out of their way -- they'd be swinging at air. But Joseph always caught him eventually.

Once, when Michael was three years old, Joseph spanked him for something he had done. Crying, the toddler took off one of his shoes and hurled it at his father. Joseph ducked. The shoe missed.

"Are you crazy?" Joseph screamed. "Boy, you just signed your own death warrant. Get over here."

He grabbed Michael and, according to Marlon, held him upside down by one leg and pummeled him over and over again with his hand, hitting him on his back and buttocks. Michael screamed so loudly it seemed as if he was trying to summon the entire neighborhood to his aid.

"Put him down, Joseph," Katherine hollered. "You're gonna kill him! You're gonna kill him."

When Joseph released the boy, Michael ran to his room, sobbing, "I hate you." Those were fighting words for Joseph. He followed Michael into the bedroom, slammed the door, and let him have it again.

Joseph once locked Michael in a closet for hours. He would go outside at night when the boys left their bedroom window open, climb back in wearing a fright mask, and scream at them at the top of his lungs. The children would cry and hyperventilate, terrified half to death. Joseph said he was teaching them to keep the windows closed. Michael and Marlon would suffer vivid nightmares of being kidnapped from their bedrooms for years afterward.

When Michael was five, he toddled into a room and had his breath taken away when Joseph tripped him and he fell to the ground, bloodied. "That's for whatcha did yesterday," Joseph said. "And tomorrow, I'm gonna get you for what you'll do today."

"But I didn't even do nothin' yet," Michael said through his tears.

"Oh, you will, boy," Joseph said. "You will."

From that point onward, whenever young Michael walked into a room, he looked left, then right, as if crossing the street. He was hoping to avoid his father.

The guitar changed everything.

Joseph had played in a rhythm-and-blues band called The Falcons with his brother Luther and three other men, performing in small clubs and bars for extra income. When The Falcons disbanded -- they were never commercially successful -- Joseph stashed his guitar in the bedroom closet. That guitar was his one vestige of a dream deferred, and he didn't want any of the children to get their hands on it. Michael called the closet "a sacred place."

But when Joseph was at work, Katherine would sometimes take the guitar down from the shelf and play it for the children. They would gather in the living room and sing together -- country songs like "Wabash Cannonball" and "The Great Speckled Bird." The three oldest boys -- Jackie, Tito, and Jermaine -- were fascinated. They began sneaking the guitar out of the closet while Joseph was at the steel mill.

"And I would play it," Tito recalled. "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," Katherine explained, "because I saw a lot of talent there."

This went on for months until one day Tito broke a string. "I knew I was in trouble," he recalled. "We were all in trouble. Our father was strict and we were scared of him. So I 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 this story, decades later, his words tumble out and he gets tongue-tied. One can still sense his anxiety about it. "She just didn't want to see me get whipped," he said. "Not again."

But afterward, when Joseph cooled off, he came into the room. Tito was still crying on the bed. "You know, I can play that thing," Tito said. "I really can."

Joseph looked at him. "Okay, lemme see what you can do, smart guy."

So Tito played. And Jermaine and Jackie sang a little. Joseph was amazed. He had no idea. This was the big secret they had been keeping from him because they were so scared of him.

The next day, Joseph went to work and came 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.

The factory had found its purpose.

The rehearsals began twice a day, before school and after, every day, without exception. Joseph ran them with the discipline of a drill sergeant and the fury of a man who had been denied his own dream and was now going to achieve it through his children's bodies or destroy those bodies trying. The rehearsal schedule was non-negotiable. If a boy had a cold, he rehearsed anyway. If Katherine had prepared dinner, the boys would eat after rehearsal. If homework was due, the homework was due -- but it got done after the run-through was finished to Joseph's satisfaction.

"When I found out that my kids were interested in becoming entertainers, I really went to work with them," Joseph told Time magazine. "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."

Trying to learn, or being forced. The line was invisible to Joseph. Visible to everyone else.

The choice of material tells you something about what Joseph knew and what he wanted. The boys performed Motown songs -- Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Temptations. They performed James Brown, which was different: Brown's music required the boys to understand rhythm as a physical thing, not just a vocal one. Joseph would demonstrate the footwork himself -- clapping, snapping, moving his body with a confidence he'd never had an outlet for before. This was the one context where Joseph Jackson's interior life became visible: in the living room of 2300 Jackson Street, running his boys through James Brown choreography while the steel mill waited for his next shift.

The neighbors thought the Jacksons were strange. "Already, people thought we were strange because of our religion," Jackie remembered. Katherine was a Jehovah's Witness -- no birthdays, no Christmas, no Easter, no saluting the flag, no blood transfusions. The faith created a border around the family that separated them from the Gary neighborhood's social rhythms in ways that were reinforced by the rehearsal schedule. "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 practice at home."

As they practiced, voices from outside taunted them through open windows. "You ain't nothing, you Jacksons!" Rocks would be hurled into the living room. It didn't matter. Joseph had sealed them inside the house, inside the music, inside the rehearsal schedule. The world outside was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the sound.

In 1962, five-year-old Marlon joined the group, playing bongos and singing, mostly off-key. Marlon couldn't sing or dance at the level the older brothers had reached, but Katherine would not have it any other way -- her boy was going to be included, Joseph's standards be damned. Then one day, while the boys were practicing and Joseph was at the mill, Katherine watched as four-year-old Michael began imitating Jermaine as he sang a James Brown song.

James Brown. Not a Motown song. Not a Temptations song. James Brown -- the hardest, most physically demanding, most technically complex performer in American popular music. Michael was four years old and imitating the Godfather of Soul.

When Michael sang, his voice was so strong and pure that Katherine was startled. She had heard all her children sing. She had heard her grandfather's voice described, ringing out over the valley from the church in Russell County. But she had never heard anything like what was coming out of this four-year-old's mouth.

As soon as Joseph got home, she met him at the door.

"I think we have another lead singer."

At the age of five, Michael Jackson sang "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" from The Sound of Music a cappella for his kindergarten class at Garnett Elementary School. The other children were impressed as much by his self-confidence as by his talent. He received a standing ovation. The teacher started to sob. Katherine attended the performance with Joseph's father, Samuel, who was not a sentimental man, yet even he was moved to tears.

"I don't know where he got it from," Katherine said. "He was just so good, so young. Some kids are special. Michael was special."

Jackie, who was twelve at the time, decided his younger brother would become "the lead guy." Jermaine's feelings were hurt -- he had been the lead singer, and now suddenly he wasn't good enough. But Michael was so obviously a natural entertainer that the family's decision was unanimous. Michael wanted it, too. He enjoyed being the center of attention. It was the only safe place he knew.

"He became this great little imitator," Jermaine recalled. "He'd see something -- another kid dance, or maybe James Brown on TV -- and next thing you knew, Michael had it memorized and knew just what to do with it. He loved to dance too. Marlon was a good dancer, maybe better than Mike. But Mike loved it more. He was always dancing 'round the house. You'd always catch him dancing for himself in the mirror."

Dancing for himself in the mirror. The image that will recur for the next forty-five years. The boy in the mirror. The man in the mirror. The face in the mirror that will change and change and change until the person looking back is unrecognizable, because the original face belonged to a boy whose father called him ugly, and the boy believed him, and the man could never stop trying to fix what his father's words had broken.

But in 1963, in a house on a corner lot in Gary, Indiana, none of that has happened yet. The boy is five years old. He can sing and dance and imitate James Brown. He has big brown eyes and long hands and a funny-looking head. His father is terrifying. His mother is gentle. The steel mills smoke. The belt hangs on the door.

The instrument is being built.

Roosevelt High School in Gary was where the Jackson family's public life began. The school, on West 25th Avenue in Gary's western section, had an auditorium large enough to host community events and talent shows that served the same function in the mid-1960s that social media competitions would serve sixty years later: the mechanism by which a neighborhood sorted its talent, identified its stars, and fed them into the city's informal entertainment network. Gary in the 1960s had a robust Black cultural scene -- the Roosevelt district, centered on the school, was the hub of Black commercial and social life in the city. The bands that played the local clubs, the gospel choirs that traveled between churches, the school talent shows that packed auditoriums on Friday nights -- all of this was infrastructure for what was about to happen.

"Finally it was time for us to enter a talent contest," Michael recalled. "I was about six years old, but I had figured out then that nobody gives you nothing. You got to win it. Or, like Smokey Robinson said in one of his songs, 'You got to earn it.' We did this talent contest at Roosevelt High School in Gary. We sang The Temptations' 'My Girl' and won first prize."

He was six. He had already figured out the rules. Nobody gives you nothing. You got to earn it. He would earn it. He would earn everything -- the fame, the fortune, the adulation, the number-one records, the stadium tours, the title of King of Pop. He would earn it with the voice that came from Katherine's grandfather in Alabama, with the dancing that came from James Brown on the television, with the discipline that came from Joseph's belt, with the fear that came from Joseph's fist, with the need that came from Joseph's closet.

He would earn all of it. And it would never be enough. Because the thing he wanted most -- his father's love, freely given, without conditions, without violence, without the belt -- was the one thing that was not for sale, not at any price, not for any number of trophies or records or standing ovations.

He was six years old, standing on the stage at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana, singing "My Girl" by The Temptations, and the audience was cheering, and for the first time in his life, the room was safe. The stage was the only place where nobody hit him. The spotlight was the only closet that wasn't dark.

He won first prize.

He would spend the rest of his life trying to stay onstage.