Cold Drank

June 25th, 2009 remembered …

Mama wanted me to love Michael Jackson as she did, but I couldn’t because all I could see was his work. My Mama, a 53 year-old woman from Forest Mississippi felt like she grew up looking horizontally at Michael and his brothers. Mama heard not only the Jackson 5’s work, but also their asphalted American journey. As a black girl who moved every summer from Mississippi to Milwaukee with her singing sisters, my mother recognized the contoured place from which Jackson’s bended notes sprang. Mama moved through the world a virtuosic, curious, confused, defiantly capable, black girl in schizophrenic post-Brown United States. Like Michael, Mama was the child of two beautiful, persistent and sometimes destructive parents.

Let Mama tell it, she grew up different, alone, the “peculiar dove” in a caring but limiting nest. Let both of her sisters tell it, each of them was the peculiar dove longing for belonging. All three sisters tell the story of my grandmother working hard to get them their first stereo and first record during the Christmas of 1969. The album was a 45’ with “I Want You Back” on the A side and “Who’s Loving You” on the B-side. After huddling in the living room and listening to the both sides of the 45 over and over, Mama remembers telling Grandma thank you, then wading through Chinaberry bushes and climbing a hanging moss tree where she wrote about Michael Jackson’s happysad voice, her hatred for ugly Isiah Horde and the colorful isolation she felt from the world.

As a single working parent in the late 70’s,  Mama worked to create music despite the heartbreaking noise of flimsy job security, mangled romantic relationships, unpaid utility bills. Mama found some order through limiting my consumption. I could watch our 12 inch black and white television for one hour a day. I could go outside only after I wrote an essay using words that neither of us knew. I couldn’t eat much sugar, salt or cold drank unless Mama was there to okay it. Playing any form of Hip Hop was a beatable offense while all music played on my little radio couldn’t exceed 5 on the volume … except for Michael Jackson.

When Mama and I weren’t jamming til all hours of the night to Off the Wall tape I got for Christmas, I was in my room listening to the tape alone. There, I could sing the songs the way I wanted and be weird and fascinated by the minimalist album cover of Mama’s Off the Wall album. The Off the Wall cover foreshadowed part of my future with Michael Jackson. Like a lot of folk, I’d be mesmerized by the work of Michael’s feet while also wondering about his face.

The contrast between the dense black of Michael’s high-watered tuxedo slacks and the glow of his white socks up against a haggard brick wall created a depth, or a crease into which I could easily slip. In that crease, it’s easy to say that I wanted to be Michael. But I don’t think that’s really true. Much more meaningful that personal adulation or some strange kind of body transference, didn’t we all want to work, work it like and be worked by Michael Jackson. We wanted to dress as he did while he was at work and defy rhythmic possibilities. And we tried, too, didn’t we, over and over again in mirrors, at dances, in bedrooms, on stages, in classrooms, at parties, in our dreams?

Michael’s work post Thriller changed the way we consumed music. Lots of black folks who I respect have said that Michael was ours on Off the Wall and he became the property of world’s post Thriller. I’ve said that shit too, but I’m not so sure about that any more.  I am sure that he belonged to music pre Thriller, and post Thriller, the video as a form and workable possibility belonged to him. In forcing MTV to play black music videos, Michael’s work dictated to us the tight vivid narratives in the songs we loved. Where all of us made up a thousand scenes, characters, familiar details of our own life to songs like “Rock With You” or “She’s Out of My Life” we now knew the exact the story of “Billie Jean” “Beat It” “Thriller” “Say Say Say” “Smooth Criminal”. Michael’s vision became ours. Hence the story of where you were, what you were doing, what you felt when you first saw “Thriller” or “Beat It” is as vivid for us as the “videos” we used to make up while listening to Off the Wall.

Today, Michael Jackson, the greatest American worker of my life, is dead.  His work connected us. His work made us wear pants that flooded and strange white sequined gloves from our Grandma’s usher uniform. His work encouraged us save up lunch money for the Beat It jacket with the zippers that didn’t work. His work bullied us into celebrating the presence of a confessional, a plea and  incredible physical ferocity in one audio-visual setting. His work nudged us into acceptance of a cardboard kind of androgyny, though we didn’t know what that meant. His work redefined rhythm, rhythmic abrasion and colorful darkness while moaning “look at me” and “look at you” and “it hurts if you look at me too hard.” Michael’s work was our badman, our trickster, our tragic mulatto, our Pinnochio, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, all at once.

Most of us all remember where we ran, or where we wanted to run, after we watched Michael turn around with those yellow eyes at the end of the Thriller video. We don’t just remember his many moonwalks; we remember Motown 25 and way his work brought us out of seats and really made us wonder if we were watching some altered televisual effect. We worried and dropped our cool when we heard he’d burned his curl while shooting that Pepsi commercial, but even then we never ever thought he could die.

As we’ve grown into our 30′s, we’ve become more capable of looking horizontally at Michael Jackson, too, just like our parents. Post Thriller, Michael’s body became as important as his voice to his body of work. In a nasty, but almost awesome twist of fate, we’ve been forced to reckon with our greatest American worker being a ferocious American black boy from Gary who performed in white face while begging us to “shum on.” Michael Jackson, like us, didn’t really know what to do with the eyes of white folks. He seemed to believe that one could find asylum from the aestethic burdens of blackness in the creation of ultra black music and parodying of white skin and features.

But we do reckon, and we know that there are more ways to perform in white face than to bleach your skin, slice off your nose and fry your hair. 50 years ago, James Baldwin wrote that it is only in “his” music that the American Negro is able to tell “his” story. Baldwin, as boldly imaginative as he is, could not forecast what Michael Jackson’s work would do forever to the way we heard and saw our story. Michael worked to entertain us and at the end, like most good workers, he seemed to believe the customer was always right (even though he had to know that there are far too many customers and far too much good work to take for granted for that to ever be true).

Like a lot of you, I been up all night waddling in the work of Michael Jackson and wondering if we failed to let him know how thankful we were for his work. I cry not when I think about his dead whitened body or when I think about his kids. I cry when I see my Grandma watching my aunts and my Mama huddled around the new stereo in their tiny living room in Forest Mississippi. Grandma is behind the door swelling with pride as her daughters listen to that last note of “Who’s Loving You” spin safely away into a series of grainy hiccups. Neither Grandma, Mama, Aunt Linda or Aunt Sue can imagine a day some 40 years in the future where their grandson, son and nephew will write that The greatest American worker of our time, a curious little black boy from Gary who felt compelled to work in white face while changing the way music and black masculinity sound and look, died today. Michael Jackson will never work for us again.

Thank you, Michael. You were so fucked up, and so are we. We see you, really. And we love what we see. We know you were tired, and now maybe you wanna go take care of yourself. But please don’t worry. The work ain’t going nowhere.  Get your rest, brother.

Your work is here.

Ether.