In time, Joseph would learn that the switch was not the most effective man-management tool because it made Michael recoil so far. He barricaded himself in the bedroom, or hid under the bed, refusing to come out – and that ate into precious rehearsal time. Once he screamed in Joseph’s face that he would never sing again if he laid another hand on him. It was left to us, the older brothers, to talk Michael down and coax him with candy: it was amazing what the prospect of a Jawbreaker could do.
Let’s also not forget that Michael was a big tease and it wasn’t all tears and tantrums. If watching The Three Stooges taught him anything, it was how to be silly and he loved to tease. He’d make this face where he opened his eyes real wide, puffed out his cheeks and pursed his lips – and he did this whenever someone was talking all serious. Once, Joseph was lecturing me about a missed chore. It wasn’t serious enough for a spanking, but I had to stand there while he gave me a good talking-to. As he stood across from me – his face thunderous – I spotted Michael behind him, making that face. I tried to focus on Joseph but Michael stuck his fingers in both ears, knowing he’d got me. I started smirking. ‘BOY! Are you laughing at me?’ yelled Joseph. By which time, Michael had darted into our bedroom, out of sight.
He and Marlon even dreamed up a new nickname for Joseph behind his back: ‘Buckethead’. They would say it behind his back, or whisper it when he was near and crack into fits of giggles. We also called him ‘The Hawk’ – because Joseph liked to think he saw and knew everything. That was the one nickname we told him about. He liked it – it sounded respectful.
JOSEPH’S TEMPER AND DISCIPLINARIAN UPBRINGING ARE never going to win much support today, but as I moved through my teenage years, I began to understand the thinking behind the beatings. We didn’t know it at the time, but our parents worried about the growing influence of gang violence in the mid-sixties, which led to a crop of youth gangs. The Indiana Police Department set up its own Gang Intelligence Unit and there was talk at school of automatic weapons and FBI surveillance in the neighbourhood. In Chicago 16 youths were shot in one week, two fatally.
At the Regal Theater, the management went to the extreme of hiring uniformed police officers to patrol the lobby and ticket booths because gangs were terrorising the region. It was this unease and local talk that spread to the ears of fathers at the steel mill. Joseph wasn’t just determined to save us from a life of struggle at The Mill but to keep us from gang involvement – and wrecking our, and his, dream. As he would tell newspaper reporters in 1970: ‘In our neighbourhood, all of the kids got into trouble and we felt that it was very important for the family to involve themselves in activities which would keep them off the streets and away from the temptations of the modern age.’
Gang-bangers preyed on the impressionable (which we all were) and, in a city where the divorce rate was high and kids had little respect for their fathers, gang recruitment brought many kids a sense of belonging, of family, and a chance to earn the love of ‘brothers’. That, and the prospect of something terrible happening to us, was what Joseph dreaded. His dread was heightened when Tito was ambushed on his way home from school and held at gunpoint for his lunch money. The first we knew was when Tito burst through the front door, screaming that some kid had tried to kill him.
Joseph responded by doing two things. He ensured we had a purpose: we had constant rehearsals, which meant we had to come home and couldn’t go out to play. He then turned himself into a greater force of fear. In becoming the tyrant at home, he prevented us submitting to the tyrants on the street. It worked: we were more scared of him than we were of any gang member. Michael noted that Joseph had more patience with us at the beginning, but then his discipline hardened. The timing coincided with the increase in gang violence. Throughout our childhood, we had only ever been encouraged to play with one another and sleepovers with friends were never allowed. Apart from Bernard Gross and next-door neighbour Johnny Ray Nelson, we didn’t really get to know other children.
‘Letting the outside in’, as Mother put it, was fraught with risk because none of us could know what a child from another family might bring in terms of bad thoughts, bad habits and domestic troubles. ‘Your best friends are your brothers,’ she said.
In our minds, ‘outsiders’ were people to be wary of and when you’re raised like that, it can only go two ways: you either become extremely guarded and mistrusting of anyone who isn’t family, or you bounce to the opposite extreme and let anyone in, reacting to the restrictions of the past.
Once the gang threat had become an issue, we were kept indoors more and even kept back from school on the last day of the year because that was thought to be when kids settled scores. Joseph even considered moving us to Seattle ‘because it’s safer there.’ At his hands, we may have seen stars as he beat our asses with a leather belt, the switch and sometimes the broken cord from the iron, but we never saw a knife, a gun, a knuckle-duster, a police cell or a hospital emergency room. I guess Joseph did what he felt was right at the time, in that era, in those circumstances.
TITO AND I REGULARLY WALKED THE fields that led from our house to the Delaney Projects where all the gangs congregated. This was our back route to our new school, Beckman Middle. One day, we saw a police officer standing by a big patch of blood in the snow. We asked him what had happened. He told us we didn’t want to know. But, kids being kids, we pressed him for the answer. He used a long word to make it sound less gory. We took this word home for translation: ‘decapitated’. Someone had been ‘decapitated’. The horror on Mother’s face was matched in the following weeks when I told her that my walk to school wasn’t so bad: the gang-bangers were real friendly and waved, giving us credit for being the Jackson 5. ‘Those boys are not good, Jermaine. You heard what your father said – steer clear of them.’ So the walk to school, through the Projects, with the clothes-lines, abandoned toys and junk wrecks parked up, became a constant head-down-don’t-look-at-anyone exercise.
But then the gangs, and their fights, started encroaching nearer our street. From our front window, we witnessed about three bad rumbles between rival gangs. As the gangs moved in – one coming down 23rd Avenue, the other from the far end of Jackson Street – Mother screamed for us to get inside and shut all doors and windows. Our five little heads must have looked like a row of Afro wigs as we lined up at the window, spying the action.
One time, things got out of hand. Two gangs decided to rendezvous on our corner and school had been abuzz with talk of this showdown. When the day came, we were locked indoors. We knew trouble was near when we heard shouting. And then the pop of a gunshot. That was when we hit the deck. ‘Get down! Everyone down!’ Joseph yelled. Inside the house, the family kissed the carpet. Rebbie, La Toya, Michael and Randy screamed and cried, and Joseph’s face was pinned to the floor, side on, eyes wide. There must have been about two other shots that rang out and we were lying there for about 15 minutes before Joseph checked to see if the coast was clear. ‘Now do you see what 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