The house shook when Joseph bellowed, ‘WAIT FOR ME IN YOUR ROOM!’
What Michael did next surprised everyone.
He bolted.
He started running around the house like a terrified rabbit. Joseph chased him with the belt and grabbed the back of his shirt, but my brother was a flexible, agile little dynamo, and he wriggled and fought and pulled his arms out of the sleeves, and ran on. He darted into Joseph’s room, up and over the bed, and pinned himself against the wall, tight into the corner, knowing the belt’s arc couldn’t reach him without first striking the walls.
I hadn’t seen Joseph so angry. He dropped the belt, grabbed Michael and spanked him so hard that he screamed the house down.
I hated the awkward silence that hung in the air after one of these episodes, broken only by Mother’s murmurs of disquiet and the quiet sobs into the pillow of whichever one of us had got hit.
Michael didn’t help himself because he was the most defiant. Rebbie remembers the time when he was 18 months old and tossed his baby bottle at Joseph’s head. That should have put our father on notice because when Michael was four, he threw a shoe at him in a temper tantrum – and that earned him a good spanking, too.
Michael’s fear of a spanking always sent him running. Sometimes he’d do a sliding dive under our parents’ bed and tuck himself against the back wall in the centre, gripping the bed springs. It was an effective tactic because after half an hour under there, Joseph was either too exhausted to care or had calmed down: Michael got away with a lot more than he ever let on.
TITO’S PASSION FOR THE GUITAR COULDN’T help itself.
As Jackie and I started learning songs from the radio, his talent blossomed through lessons at school. But when he was at home, he couldn’t practise. So, despite all warnings from Joseph, he borrowed our father’s guitar from the back of his closet. What he wouldn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right?
Whenever Joseph worked, Tito seized his moment. He started playing and we began making harmonies. On a couple of occasions, Mother walked in and found us out, but apart from a gasp that told us we were playing with fire, she turned a blind eye. She was a lot more lenient than our father. On one particular weekend, Tito started playing and we were singing some Four Tops’ song. He was sitting there, plucking away, and Jackie and I were crooning when suddenly there was a twanging noise. Tito went white when he realised one of the strings had broken. ‘Oooh, you’re going to get it now!’ squealed Jackie, part excitement, part fear.
We’re all going to get it now, I thought.
We put the broken treasure back in its rightful place and were sitting in our bedrooms when we heard his car pull up. The bomb was primed. Each loud footstep on the linoleum matched what was going on inside our ribcages. One … two … three … ‘WHO’S … BEEN MESSING … WITH MY GUITARRRR?’ He hollered so loud I think they heard him in California. When he pounded into our room, Michael and Marlon scarpered, leaving Jackie, Tito and me standing by the bunk-beds already whimpering over what we knew was coming next. Mother tried intervening, claiming it was all her fault, but Joseph wasn’t listening. We cried even louder when he told us we were all going to get it until one of us owned up.
‘It was me,’ Tito said, barely heard. ‘I was playing it –’ Joseph grabbed him ‘– but I know how to play. I KNOW HOW TO PLAY!’ he screamed.
I’ve read accounts that say Joseph clobbered him there and then, but that’s not what happened. Instead he stopped, scowled and said, ‘Play, then. Let me see what you can do!’ With a broken string, Tito started to play, and Jackie and I started to sing – even if our crying meant we could give only 50 per cent. ‘Doing The Jerk’ by the Larks became our plea for clemency and we started making harmonies, slightly off note, but it must have sounded good because Joseph visibly loosened. We kept on singing: we saw his head moving to the beat, and he did what would become a habit – he started lip-synching the lyrics, going through the motions with us. We became emboldened, stopped sniffling and pulled ourselves together. Our harmonies came good and we were snapping our fingers. Our audience’s eyes widened and narrowed in both victory and defeat. When we stopped playing, he didn’t say a word but we had been spared a major spanking and that was all that seemed to matter.
Two days later, Joseph arrived home from work with a red electric guitar for Tito and told him to start practising. He told Jackie and me to get ready for rehearsals. He told our mother that he was going ‘to support these boys.’ His focus switched from the Falcons to his sons. We had won his approval and he wanted to harness something we loved doing. It felt like recognition and it excited us. People have said that our father ‘made them sing’ or ‘forced those boys into entertainment’, but singing had come naturally to us and that passion was our choice. We had sung up a storm long before Joseph arrived with his rocket fuel. As a trio of brothers, we told ourselves that we were going to be the best group in Gary.
CHAPTER THREE
God’s Gift
MICHAEL SAT ON THE CARPET WITH two empty, cardboard tubs of Quaker Oats sandwiched between his knees. He bound them together by sticking a pencil through their middle. This, he told everyone, was his set of bongos. Taking up his position as a spectator on the sidelines with Marlon, he was eager for rehearsals to start even though he wasn’t involved since he’d been deemed ‘too little’. But he had decided he was going to join in anyway and four fingers on each hand contributed his beat to whatever rhythm we played. He watched as a purposeful Joseph took Jackie, Tito and me by the shoulders and positioned us like chess pieces ‘on the stage’, which was our living room. Tito, on guitar, took centre position, with me to his right; the three of us stood around wondering what our next move was going to be.
In the kitchen, Mother stayed out of the way with Rebbie and La Toya, allowing us to do our thing. She knew what we’d soon find out: these sessions were not some dreamy pretence but a serious business in our father’s eyes. A single microphone was hooked into its stand in the middle of the room. No hairbrushes or shampoo bottles for his sons. It was borrowed from the Falcons, a baton passed to the next generation. ‘You’ve got to learn how to use it, not be afraid of it, hold it, play it,’ said Joseph.
Play the microphone? I think our faces said it all.
He put on a James Brown LP, turned it up loud, grabbed the mic, dipped left, dipped right, then threw it forward so it bounced right back. That was ‘playing’ the mic. ‘Hear that voice, Jermaine? Do it like that. Do it just like that.’ He played classic 45s and LPs so that we could study, over and over, one song at a time, how it was sung, and how it should be performed. I remember the repetitiveness of ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. & the MGs, and James Brown’s version of ‘Night Train’. As Joseph encouraged us to move, we started doing the cow-step, snapping our fingers, and self-consciously shuffling around. He wasn’t impressed. ‘Boys, you can’t just sing and sway. You gotta move – put more feeling into it! Like this …’
He stepped in, with James Brown as his dance track, and started getting down, bobbing his head. We couldn’t help but giggle at his lack of grace. ‘I can see you laughing,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want you looking like amateurs.’
We went back to our ‘marks’, back to being choreographed. Back to the class where there was no motto above the door but if there had been, it would have read: ‘The Right Way Becomes Habit’.
In the meantime, there was always Joseph’s verbal handbook, which was seared into our memories. ‘You have to entertain. Be dynamic. Be different. Take it to the audience!’ We studied songs and learned moves for two, three, sometimes five hours a day for months on end. Whenever Joseph wasn’t working or sleeping, we practised. ‘Practice does not make perfect,’ he always said. ‘It makes consistency.’ Practice made us remember. And yet we seemed to forget