I didn’t know how much longer past eight thirty my sisters could stay awake, but for once I’d listen to Lucy Raleigh. I told Vonetta and Fern we had to watch something on TV and to be ready when I came to get them.
“You have to be quiet,” I told my sisters. “You can’t wake Big Ma or we’ll miss it.”
“Miss what? You still didn’t tell us,” Vonetta said.
I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to come off not knowing. I said, trusting Lucy Raleigh, “It’s a surprise. The best surprise. You just have to be quiet and watch.” When we got out in the hallway, I said, “We’re on a spy mission. Top secret.” I zipped my lips. They did the same and followed me into the living room.
It was half past the hour. The show was already on, and I hoped we hadn’t missed the surprise.
Big Ma snored ferociously, her body sunk peacefully into her comfy chair.
I turned the sound all the way down and clicked the dial to channel seven. With each click I waited for Big Ma to awaken and send us to bed without our seeing the surprise. Big Ma snored on.
We sat before the glowing television, careful to not make a noise.
So far, we had seen Diana Ross without the Supremes, wearing a glittery gold jumpsuit. Even gold came across as gold on a black-and-white television set. I smiled to myself and thought, Miss Diana Ross wasn’t hardly digging any ditches in her sparkly gold pants.
Before you knew it, Sammy Davis Jr. had joined her on the stage and the two joked around with each other. We couldn’t hear the jokes, but even if we could, I knew the two performers were not the surprise we waited for. I liked Diana Ross and the Supremes. I liked Sammy Davis Jr. in his sharp black suits, tap-dancing and singing all cool with his hair slick and shiny. If it were the afternoon on The Mike Douglas Show, my sisters and I would have been glued to the TV screen, shouting, “Black infinity!” because black folks were on TV for more than a minute. But it was late into the night and I had pulled my sisters out of bed on a spy mission that wasn’t worth a whipping. I had put my trust in Lucy when I should have known better. After all, Lucy wasn’t my best, best friend. Frieda Banks was.
I turned the sound up just a little and we moved closer to the screen. We could hear Diana Ross telling Sammy Davis Jr. something about five Jacksons and the lead singer, whose name was Michael. That was the last sane and clear thought I had before I saw at least a hundred bright lightbulbs and five boys onstage singing that new Sly and the Family Stone song. Our television screen didn’t seem big enough for all those Jacksons. Afros bopping, arms swinging, and feet stepping and spinning in sync. And they wore wide bell-bottoms like crazy! The voices in the back were smooth and together. And the little boy singer let out his lungs like James Brown and Jackie Wilson rolled into one.
Our mouths opened to scream, but we were on a spy mission. Vonetta and I covered our mouths with our hands. Fern stuffed the bottom of her nightie in her mouth. And we shook and silently screamed.
Then the Jackson boys had gone from singing the Sly and the Family Stone song to singing a slower song. A love song about remembering.
The camera kept showing the youngest boy, but he wasn’t the one I watched. I felt myself tremble every time they showed the tallest Jackson brother. And I swore—and I didn’t swear—if Big Ma was whipping my legs with her lightning strap, I wouldn’t have felt a lick. I could only feel my heart beating and my eyes tearing every time they showed him on the screen. He had to be the oldest. And tall. So tall.
Every time the youngest one sang, “Can you remember?” Fern whispered, “Surely do!” We didn’t bother to shush her.
The camera kept putting Michael up on the screen and that made Fern happy. Vonetta too. But I was happy to get a glimpse of the oldest one and wished he sang the love song. As tall as he was, he danced smooth. Better than all of his little brothers put together.
Then a commercial came on and we all squeezed one another and bit our hands to keep from screaming. We had to sit through the other performers, but finally it was time for the five brothers to return, and Diana Ross introduced them: The Jackson Five.
The youngest one started things off, telling us they had an album coming out, and then the piano rolled hard and the guitars twanged electric and loud and that little boy was begging his girlfriend to come back while his brothers “ooh-hoo-hooed” and Vonetta, Fern, and I screamed and danced with the Jackson Five.
Then Big Ma woke up.
“Go to bed! Y’all better get in your beds. Now.”
We stopped dancing but we couldn’t stop watching. We were frozen by fear of the strap and frozen by the Jackson Five and the most electric song ever played, sung, or danced to. We didn’t know what to do.
“Where’s my strap?” Big Ma said. “Delphine, get me my strap!”
I managed to say, “Can we see the rest, Big Ma? Can we see it?”
“Please, Big Ma.”
“We gotta, gotta see it!”
“Do you know what time it is?” Big Ma asked, searching for the clock. “It’s nighttime. There’s nothing on TV for children this time of night.”
“They’re children,” I answered. “They’re our age.” Although the oldest Jackson had to be in the eleventh or twelfth grade. And then there was the guitar player. The one with the eyebrows. He had to be in high school. And the other guitar player, too.
“That should be against the law,” Big Ma said. “Children singing and dancing on TV late at night.”
“Please, Big Ma. Please.”
She wagged her finger at us. “This is your no-mother-of-a-mother’s doing. Y’all come back here as wild as a bunch of untrained, back-talking chimps sneaking around in the night.”
“Please, Big Ma. We won’t ask for nothing else,” I begged.
“Ever,” my sisters chimed in.
But Big Ma got up out of her chair and turned off the TV set. She picked up her Bible from the end table and sat back down.
“You seen ’em. Now if those boys have any kind of mother and father, they’ll snatch those children off the stage and get them home to bed. Now y’all get in your beds before your father comes home and sees you’re up.”
“But it’s not over,” Vonetta wailed.
“We want Michael,” Fern said.
“Michael? Michael?” Her face was like Cecile’s when we said things that made her think we were Martians, or at the very least, not her children. “What you want is my strap.” It was when Big Ma lifted herself up and out of her comfy chair that we knew she wasn’t just fussing with us, and we scooted back to our rooms.
I turned out my light and fell into my bed. I had never cried so hard in my life. Not because I couldn’t see the rest of the show, but because I saw him, and he was tall. Taller than me.
At Madison Square Garden
The front passenger seat in the Wildcat belonged to Big Ma when the whole gang of us piled into the car. If Big Ma stayed home, Uncle Darnell sat up front next to Pa. If it was just us girls with Pa, that seat was mine, and I loved being up front, stealing glances at my pa as he hummed but didn’t whistle to Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and, of course, to “Old Man River”—all songs that suited my old pa. Sometimes he’d pass me the smallest grin and I’d feel wonderful bumping along as the tires hit every pothole on Atlantic or Fulton Avenue on our way to wherever we were going. Vonetta would wail, “Why does she”—meaning me—“get to sit up front all the time?”
“And not us,” Fern would chirp.
Then Pa always said, “To keep an eye on the road,” as if I was really doing something when all I did was keep Pa company. I’d ride along bubbling up with things to say but I never uttered a one, which suited Pa fine. He just wanted me to be with him. That was how it was between Cecile and me when I was little and she kept me with her while she wrote poems and listened to Sarah Vaughn records on our deluxe stereo while Vonetta howled in her crib.
When Miss Hendrix bent down and slid her bottom onto the passenger seat, sw
inging her legs in last, I knew my days of riding up front next to Pa in the Wildcat were numbered.
“Can we go to the RKO after Central Park, Pa?” Vonetta asked.
Miss Hendrix snickered and gave Pa a playful tap. “Pa. That sounds old. And country.”
Pa shrugged it off, but I didn’t. I took note of everything she did and said.
We were close to the Brooklyn Bridge when Vonetta cried, “Look!”
“What?” I asked, convinced it was nothing at all. I had been staring off into the blur of Miss Marva Hendrix’s curly Afro.
“Look-look!” she cried out.
And then I saw it. We all saw what Vonetta could see from hundreds of feet away. A billboard of Jackie, Jermaine, Tito, Marlon, and Michael sporting big applejack caps over their even bigger Afros. We screamed. The letters on the billboard shouted at us: THE JACKSON FIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. And underneath those words: DECEMBER. The inside of the Wildcat became a cage of screaming and seat-jumping until we finally heard Pa shouting, “All right! All right back there!” Miss Marva Hendrix laughed and laughed.
I screamed for Jackie, whose real name was Sigmund, and I screamed for Tito, who had the best eyebrows and always looked cool and tough. Vonetta screamed for Jermaine, who was kind of good looking, and she screamed for Marlon, whom she claimed was the best dancer. The only Jackson Fern screamed for was Michael. Every chance we got, we’d stand in the record department of Korvettes and study every inch of their album cover.
“Papa, can we go to Madison Square Garden in December?” I asked.
“To see the Jackson Five?”
“We want to see the Jackson Five.”
We sealed our wishes together singing, “Pleeeease.”
“The Jackson who?” Pa asked. “Sounds like a Mississippi chain gang.”
Vonetta asked, “What’s a chain gang?”
“They make chains,” Fern answered, sounding every bit like me.
The two got to arguing about chain gangs, which I think Pa intended all along. I wouldn’t let go of our wishes. If we learned anything from our summer with the Black Panthers, we learned to be clear about what we wanted, and to be willing to do what was necessary to get it.
“They are not a prison chain gang.” I threw in the prison part to answer Vonetta’s question and for solidarity. I needed my sisters to be united with me and to stay focused. “The Jackson Five is the best singing group in the world.”
“In the universe,” Vonetta added.
“And the Milky Way.”
“Jackson Five?” Pa said. “Never heard of them. Can’t sing better than Sam Cooke. Or the Temptations.”
“And what about Smokey Robinson and the Miracles?” Miss Hendrix said. “Oh. And Marvin Gaye.”
I said, “The Jackson Five are better than all of those singers and groups put together.”
“Their Afros are bigger,” Vonetta said.
“And they have Michael,” Fern said. “He’s better than best.”
“He is not,” I said.
“Jermaine is the best,” Vonetta said.
“Jackie is the best looking,” I said, “and then Tito.”
“Not hardly,” Vonetta said. “Jermaine is. And Marlon is the best dancer. Like I am.”
And before we knew it, our solidarity had fallen apart. For the rest of the ride to Central Park, we did nothing but argue about the Jackson Five until Fern began to sing “Can You Remember” and Vonetta and I joined her. Pa and Miss Hendrix talked amongst themselves.
We bought ginger ale and a bucket of fried chicken and we headed over to Central Park with a blanket. Big Ma wouldn’t have seen the point in an outing like this. Especially buying store-fried chicken. But there we were, spending a lazy Saturday afternoon with our father, eating chicken I didn’t have to cut, clean, and fry. I could put up with his lady friend tagging along.
“Papa,” I said as calmly as I could, “we want to see the Jackson Five.”
“At Madison Square Garden.”
“In December.”
All together we sang, “Pleeease.”
“I don’t know,” Pa said. “Madison Square Garden. New York City. Mobs of screaming teenagers. I don’t know.”
This was a time that called for Uncle Darnell. He’d know who the Jackson Five were, and he was grown enough to take us to the Garden. Instead of Uncle Darnell coming to our rescue, Miss Hendrix said, “What if I took them?”
Vonetta and Fern began to shriek and Pa covered his ears. As much as I wanted to see Jackie and Tito in person, I refused to shriek. I didn’t want anything from Pa’s lady friend.
“How much could the tickets cost, sweetie?” She fluttered her eyelashes at my father. “Five, six dollars each? And a little extra for soda? Popcorn. Raisinets. Maybe a hot dog.”
My sisters screamed. Pa choked. “Marva honey. That’s nearly seven or eight dollars.”
All I heard was “honey.”
“Are you sure you want to do that? All those rowdy teenagers screaming and hollering over some finger-popping little hoodlums in Afros?”
“They’re not hoodlums!” Vonetta cried out. “They’re entertainers.”
“Surely are,” Fern said. “They entertain us.”
The “honey” stuck to me. The sick sweetness of it. I knew I had to unstick myself if I wanted to see Jackie and Tito Jackson. I decided I wanted to see them more than I didn’t like Pa’s lady friend.
“As long as the girls behave, there won’t be a problem,” Miss Marva Hendrix said.
“We’ll behave,” Vonetta pledged without hesitating.
“We will behave, be good, be seeing Michael,” Fern said in one breath. “Surely will.”
I didn’t add my voice to my sisters’ but I at least nodded. Then Pa said, “And Delphine will see to it that they do.”
To him I said, “Yes, Papa.”
“And it will be my treat,” Pa’s lady friend said.
There was screaming and cheering from Vonetta and Fern. But Papa said, “Oh, no. Can’t let you do that, Marva honey.” And Vonetta and Fern had an “aw, shucks” fit.
“If you girls want to see these little boys sing and dance, you’ll have to earn half the money for your tickets and refreshments,” Pa said. “And I’ll pay the other half.”
I felt myself coming out of the sticky-honey sulk. If I knew anything, I knew how to earn my way.
Pa said, “If you pitch in around the house, you’ll get a weekly allowance.”
“I get a weekly allowance,” I told Pa.
“They’ll get one too,” he said.
“But I work for mine,” I said.
“They’ll work for theirs too.”
“Good idea,” Miss Hendrix chirped. “That’s a good idea, Lou.” And then she reached over and kissed him, leaving her chicken oil and lipstick on his cheek.
“But you’ll have to save your money,” Pa said, ignoring the greasy kiss. “That means no chasing the ice-cream truck with every penny you earn,” he said to Vonetta and Fern. “If you want my money, you’ll have to save yours.”
“Don’t worry, Pa,” I spoke up. “I’ll make sure they save.”
Then, at the part where Pa was supposed to pat me on the head for saying the right thing, Miss Marva Hendrix said, “Why can’t Vonetta be in charge of saving?”
No one said a word. Hers was a shock of an idea that caught anyone chewing or swallowing. Even Vonetta had to cough.
She got over the shock and said, “Yeah. Why can’t I be in charge of the saving?”
“Because,” I said, “the saver has to be responsible.”
That should have fixed that, but nosy Miss Marva Hendrix said, “How will she learn responsibility if she’s not given a chance?”
“I can learn responsibility,” Vonetta chirped up. She looked worried.
“Surely can!” Fern added for solidarity.
Then Miss Hendrix asked, “What is with all this ‘surely’?”
Later at the line for the bathroom,
Vonetta and Fern went in together, leaving me alone with Miss Hendrix.
I said, “What if Vonetta loses the money we save?”
She stepped on my question right away with one of her own. “Delphine, do you know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is?”
I could have figured it out with more time than a second to answer but I said no. There was no point spinning straw and coming up all straw and no gold.
She said, “Don’t wish for bad things to happen, Delphine. Vonetta deserves a chance.”
I said, “I’m always in charge.” I made sure I spoke Papa-calm and not Cecile-crazy, although I felt Cecile-crazy. “Papa and Big Ma depend on me to look out for my sisters.”
“I know you’re older, Delphine, but if you keep your sisters down they’ll never learn.”
She might not have used the word, but I heard her calling me an oppressor. Someone who keeps the people down. It isn’t oppression if you get whipped for what your sisters do and don’t do. It’s keeping them in line.
“I don’t keep my sisters down,” I said.
But she didn’t say anything and neither could I. I was both angry and hurt. Nothing good could come out of my mouth. Certainly not gold.
Doves
We headed back to Herkimer Street after seeing Miss Marva Hendrix off to her apartment in Brownsville. I let Vonetta and Fern beat me out of the Wildcat and up the steps so they could tell Big Ma all about our day with Pa’s lady friend. I would have felt a little giddy if Miss Marva Hendrix hadn’t soured the day by making me out to be my sisters’ oppressor.
I followed behind and unlocked the door while Vonetta and Fern ran inside. I left the door cracked for Pa, who was getting the blanket out of the trunk.
My sisters tried to clamor around Big Ma but she wanted no part of them. She didn’t want to hear about our outing with Miss Marva Hendrix, that we’d seen the Jackson Five billboard, or that they were coming to New York City in December. She had a long, brownish-yellow envelope choked in her fist. And she looked confused while she turned left and then right like she was playing keep-away. I saw she’d been crying, so I said, “Vonetta. Fern. Quit it.”