He couldn’t fault Rebbie either because she took on motherly duties – preparing the food, cooking, cleaning, overseeing chores – whenever Mother worked. Rebbie was the big sister turned nanny and was equally stern, gentle, methodical and controlled. If I have one abiding memory of Rebbie, it’s of her standing in the kitchen, baking cookies and tea-cakes for us all. She was also the first child to show ‘promise’, according to Joseph, entering and winning local dance competitions. She and Jackie had some duet thing going on, and brought home prize certificates and trophies.
Mother worked weekdays, some Saturdays and some evenings as a cashier at Sears. She couldn’t really afford to shop there. When she did, she chose items to ‘put in Layaway’, reserving something with a down payment, then making a series of small instalments before taking the item home. Sears was our Harrods, and we grew up hearing the words ‘put it in Layaway’. We all hated seeing Mother handing over money and walking away empty-handed. That made no sense to us. Feeling hard done by, we kids regularly moaned about it, but not Mother. She just got on with life and trusted in God. If she ever had a moment to sit down, she spent it reading the Bible.
As a two-year-old, she had had polio, which led to partial paralysis; she had worn a wooden leg splint until she was 10. I don’t know too much about her suffering except that she had several operations, missed a lot of school and was left with a permanent limp because one leg is shorter than the other but I’ve never once heard her complain about it. Instead, she always said how grateful she was to have survived a disease that killed many others. She had dreamed of becoming an actress, but she showed no resentment over a dream that illness had crushed. Her condition led to some merciless taunting from other children when she was a teenager, which left her painfully self-conscious and shy. On one early date with Joseph as a 19 year old, they were on the dance-floor at some party, moving cheek to cheek to a slow number, when Mother started trembling. ‘What’s the matter, Katie?’ asked Joseph.
‘Everyone is staring at us,’ she said, head down, unable to look up.
He looked around and they were the only couple on the floor. He noticed people pointing and talking behind their hands, presumably about one of Mother’s legs being shorter than the other, or that one of her heels was a wedge to correct her balance. She had grown up dreading parties and social gatherings, but Joseph ignored the stares and turned it into a positive. ‘We have the floor to ourselves, Katie,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep dancing.’
Mother had moved from Alabama to Indiana as a child when Papa Prince chased work in the steel industry. She had dreamed of one day meeting a musician so guitar-playing Joseph fitted the bill, and it took the length of one spring and one summer for their romance to turn into marriage. They had ‘met’ in the street. It’s probably more accurate to say that Mother was in the street and Joseph was inside, sitting near his front window, when she rode by on a bicycle. They noticed each other and, for another week or two, she kept to the same route. One day, he plucked up the nerve to rush outside and introduce himself. That led to a date at the movies and then the party with the dance-floor. Katie Scruse, the golden-skinned girl so shy she struggled to look anyone in the face, fell in love with Joseph Jackson, the lean, brash, charismatic working man. They were wed by a Justice of the Peace in November 1949 and bought our childhood home in Gary for $8,500, using his savings and a loan from Mother’s step-father.
As their plans for three children became four, then five and so on, they started saving what little money Mother could earn as she harboured a dream that Joseph would one day build an extension for an extra bedroom and more space. We grew up with a stack of bricks in the backyard – a constant reminder of our mother’s hope for a bigger and better home.
Our little house comes with so many layers in my memory. Its compactness – huddling around Mother and living on top of one another – might not have made it the most comfortable home but it reflected our parents’ continual talk of togetherness and staying close. Within this togetherness, there comes loyalty. With loyalty comes strength. This was instilled in us. It was why we became a unit, moving together as one. Few in Gary could claim such family cohesion. It was a working man’s city built in 1906 by the muscle of African-American immigrants who helped turn a north-west Indiana landscape of sand dunes and scrub vegetation into a hub of the national steel industry.
Old men always spoke of a blood, sweat and toil work ethic back in the day. No man from Gary was ever afraid of putting in the hours and doing the grind. ‘If you work real hard, you will achieve,’ Joseph said. ‘You get back what you put in.’ In the eyes of his forefathers, getting a paid job and owning a house represented ‘achievement’, but he always wanted us to be more than he became. None of us grew up with a dream that ran into a father’s resistance: ‘You’ll stop this day-dreaming and get yourself a real job!’ No. Our father wanted us to have a dream, and hold on to it.
About 90 per cent of Gary’s population, and most of Indiana, found employment at ‘The Mill’ of Inland Steel, located a half-hour drive away in neighbouring East Chicago. Joseph was a crane operator, moving steel beams back and forth. He worked real hard in a tough job with rough eight-to-10 hour shifts. While inside his glass bubble atop the crane, his mind wandered back to his beginnings in Durmott, south of Little Rock, Arkansas. As a young man, he used his pocket money to watch back-to-back silent movies at the cinema, telling himself that, one day, he would be the first black actor to star in one. Ending up at The Mill was not part of that dream. It was slavish work, echoing generations of black men before him. ‘It’s about getting on top, not staying at the bottom,’ he said.
Before meeting Mother, and when he first arrived in Indiana, he had worked on the railroads. He then landed a job at a foundry, working a pneumatic jackhammer in the steel-melting heat of a blast furnace. ‘Hot? Men fainted,’ he said. ‘We worked in 10-minute bursts, then got out of there because those floors were heated white.’ He was skin and bone, apparently. No matter how much he ate, he couldn’t put on an extra pound because the work kicked his butt. It is a metabolism that most of us inherited – especially Michael. Joseph’s ‘worst kind of work’ continued when he had to collect dust from the furnace. This meant his skinny frame became useful when lowered by cord, in a bucket, into a deep flue, three feet in diameter. When I heard these stories, I thought a crane operator’s job was glamorous by comparison.
Let no one say that Joseph doesn’t know the meaning of hard work. I think it takes a certain type of man to do that kind of job – someone hardened and emotionally strong – and he worked his fingers to the bone to ‘earn a life’, as he put it. I think this is where his insistence on ‘respect’ comes from. Worked as a ‘subordinate’ for most of his young adult life, and with an ancestry rooted in the slave trade like Mother, he had earned respect so he expected it from his family. He knew his responsibilities, too. The more children he had, the more hours he worked to bring home extra pay. When Michael arrived, he got a second job and started juggling shifts at a canned-food factory.
As children, we sensed that struggle to make ends meet. Our parents’ combined take-home pay was about 75 dollars a week. They were too proud to claim welfare, so in the winter, Tito and I shovelled snow from neighbours’ driveways to put some extra money on the table. We always knew when Joseph had collected his pay packet because a new loaf of bread was on the kitchen worktop, with a packet of luncheon meat. On more than one occasion, Joseph was laid off and then hired again. During those lulls, he got work picking potatoes. We instantly knew when the steel shifts had dried up because all we ate was potatoes – baked, mashed, boiled, roasted.
Inland Steel was the end of the rainbow for generations of families. It was said there were only three outcomes to life in Gary: The Mill, prison or death. The last two options were related to the gang-life that was the flip-side to our community. But whatever