The Last Holiday

by Gil Scott-Heron

  Also by Gil Scott-Heron:

  The Vulture

  The Nigger Factory

  Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron

  Published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012

  Copyright © The estate of Gil Scott-Heron

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in the United States of America in 2012 by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003

  The lyrics on page 11 are taken from the song ‘Happy Birthday’ by Stevie Wonder, © Black Bull Music, Inc./Jobet Music Co. Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to Chuck Stewart, whose photograph of Gil Scott-Heron inspired Oscar Wilson’s jacket illustration.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 301 0

  eISBN 978 0 85786 302 7

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Gil Scott-Heron in January 1981, two weeks before the Hotter than July tour concluded at the Washington Mall (Ebet Rogers/Redferns/Getty Images)

  “Bob Scott’s boy”: The family of Bob and Lily Scott, circa 1930s–40s (courtesy of the family of Gil Scott-Heron)

  Gil Scott-Heron performing at the WOMAD festival in Wiltshire, UK, in July 2010 (Samir Hussein/Getty Images Entertainment).

  Contents

  Dr. King

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  INTERLUDE

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Publisher’s Note

  Dr. King

  I admit that I never had given much thought

  As to how much of a battle would have to be fought

  To get most Americans to agree and then say

  That there actually should be a Black holiday.

  But what a hell of a challenge. How far would Stevie go

  To make them pass legislation tabled ten years in a row?

  I didn’t doubt for a second that the brother was sincere

  But how many minds had come together in the last twelve years?

  How many folks recognized that America had to grow?

  And who else could convince them that yesterday had to go?

  I had liked the idea of a minister being around

  When racing for high stakes, to have his foot near the brakes

  Because of what truly could have gone down.

  I thought America could have blown up

  Before it could ever be said that we had grown up.

  And for whatever reason were there Americans who never knew

  That Dr. King prevented chaos and would give him his due.

  I admired Stevie’s enthusiasm and that he spoke his mind

  But right does not triumph over wrong every time.

  Ghandi took nonviolence with him when he died.

  Over here there was nonviolence, but only on one side.

  When white folks beat up and killed people that you knew

  You might direct your anger at a building or two.

  Instead of making the Old Testament a civil rights guide

  And saying that “an eye for an eye” would now be justified

  We were told to accept that some white folks had no class

  And instead of condemning white people “en masse”

  We were told remaining peaceful would be the best thing

  And directing that philosophy were men like Dr. King.

  Through a storm of provocation to fight we saw

  That in order to change America you must change the law.

  They called us “militants” and “radicals” and were made to look bad

  For trying to secure rights all Americans had.

  But behind what’s often written is where you find the real thing

  So America might not have made it without Dr. King.

  PROLOGUE

  I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods. Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long agos while my own past seems only long gone.

  What helped me to retain some order was that by the age of ten I was interested in writing. I wrote short stories. The problem was that I didn’t know much about anything. And I didn’t take photos or collect mementos. There were things I valued, but I thought they would always be there. And that I would.

  There was Jackson, Tennessee. No matter where I went—to Chicago, New York, Alabama, Memphis, or even Puerto Rico in the summer of 1960—I always knew I’d be coming back home to Jackson. It was where my grandmother and her husband had settled. It was where my mother and her brother and sisters were all born and grew up. It was where I was raised, in a house on South Cumberland Street that all of them called home, regardless of what they were doing and where they were doing it. They were the most important people in my life and this was their home. It was where I began to write, learned to play piano, and where I began to want to write songs.

  Jackson was where I first heard music. It was what folks called “the blues.” It was on the radio. It was on the jukeboxes. It was the music of Shannon Street in “Fight’s Bottom” on Saturday night, when the music was loud and the bootleg whisky from Memphis flowed. The blues came from Memphis, too. Shannon Street was taboo at my house, something my grandmother didn’t even think about. We never played the blues at home.

  Our house was next door to Stevenson and Shaw’s Funeral Home. The man who ran that business was Earl Shaw, one of the nicest men I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. His wife was a good friend of my mother, and our families were so close that I related to his children as cousins for years.

  Evidently business at the funeral home was good because I remember clearly when Mr. Shaw purchased another building in East Jackson and the movers came to take everything out of the place next door. And then the men from the junkyard came to put everything else in the back of an old truck. My grandmother knew the junk man and after a brief conversation with him he directed his two sons to bring an ancient and well-used upright piano into our front room and push it up against the wall. I was seven years old. Old enough to start learning to play. What she had in mind was that I learn some hymns I’d be able to play for her sewing circle meetings. That’s how my music playing started.

  There was no blues on the living room radio. My grandmother had that one locked on the station that played her soap operas in the afternoon and her favorite radio programs at night. When we got a second radio, it was quickly dubbed “the ballgame radio,” and, sure enough, when a ballgame was being broadcast I listened. But at other times I’d try to tune in WDIA in Memphis, the first Black radio station in the country, with on-air personalities like Rufus and Carla Thomas and B.B. King. Late at night I’d try to get “Randy’s Record Show” out of Nas
hville.

  I heard people talk about a music explosion in Memphis. I knew my favorite music, the blues, came from there, too. But I was living in Jackson, ninety miles east of Memphis, and had no desire to go anywhere else. Until I had to, when the family—my mother and I—moved to New York City. Though my mother and I left Jackson in the summer of 1962, I had known the move was coming from the time the new highway was announced. That had been a couple of years and a hundred rumors prior. The route the highway would take had sparked hours of conversation. In the end, it came through our neighborhood.

  A lot of the neighborhood had already been cleared out when we left. Liberty Street Church, just behind us, and Rock Temple, the Sanctified Church a few blocks away, had already closed up. There had never been many commercial establishments in that direction and the four lanes were rolling through what had been blocks of aging residences. Soon it would all be gone. I could imagine the rows of gas stations and fast food joints lining what had been my backyard. Easier access for truckers and travelers going west to Memphis and east to Nashville.

  In a way this was a prelude to a larger funeral. The Paving of America constituted a symbolic burying of the hatchet, a signal that the northern CEOs and southern See$s were at long last seeing eye to eye. The Confederacy had finally found cosigners for its hundred year loan and had negotiated its way from Appomattox Court House through the gauntlet from apostate, around apathy, apology, appeasement, appeals, approbation, apprehension, and appropriation to approval. The southern quadrant of the contiguous country had done a century of icy isolation and by God a nig . . . a Negro had put a blow torch to the thermostat. Thurgood Marshall had thawed things, battered the last barricade with Brown v. Board of Education. The financial folks now faced the final frontier.

  I had played my small part, a ripple in one of the incessant waves that were wearing down the mountain that had been segregation. Together with Madeline Walker and Gillard Glover, I had initiated school desegregation in Jackson. And factories would be built. And highways would uncoil like rattlesnakes from Maryland to the Gulf of Mexico. And Jim Crow, the bastard who had swung a thousand nightsticks and set a thousand crosses on fire, was not dead. But he’d been wounded. That time by three children: Madeline, Gillard, and me, civilians in a civil war.

  Since those beginnings, I have not been proud of everything that has happened or that I have done throughout my life. But I consider myself fortunate. I was raised by two women—my mother and grandmother—who were both dedicated to my well-being and did everything they could to make sure I had every opportunity to succeed in life. They were dedicated to my book learning and were examples of what I should try to be as an adult and as a gentleman. The mistakes have been due to my own poor judgment both of people and circumstances.

  I am the father of three children, regardless of rumor and comment to the contrary. My first born was my son Rumal, an anagram that makes use of the letters of his mother’s first name. My older daughter is Gia, a soft sounding word for a very feminine delight. My younger girl is named Chegianna and goes by Che—pronounced Shay. This book is a chance to share some things with them and other readers, things I hope will be useful. Some of it is purely biographical. The central focus, however, revolves around experiences orchestrated by Brother Stevie Wonder, a true miracle of talent and concern for his fellow man. I was lucky enough to be with him when he set his mind and heart on doing something important, something that a lot of folks thought was impossible, and he got it done.

  We all need to see folks reach beyond what looks possible and make it happen. We need more examples of how to make it happen. We will all face difficult circumstances along the way that will challenge our self-confidence and try to disrupt our decisions about the directions we wish to choose.

  I hope this book will remind you that you can succeed, that help can arrive from unexpected quarters at times that are crucial. I believe in “the Spirits.” Sometimes when I explain to people that I have been blessed, and that the Spirits have watched over me and guided my life, I suppose I sound like some kind of quasi-evangelist for a new religion. I am not and do not have a personal church to promote. I believe, however, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, that at almost every corner of my life there has been someone or something there to show me the way. These landmarks, these signals, are provided by the Spirits. This is not a subject I offer up for purposes of debate. Whatever you call the intangible influences that help direct you in your life is not the point. My contention is that your blessings derive from your positive contributions. But they must come from the heart. Not because of what you expect in return. Otherwise what you contributed was a loan, not a gift.

  I am grateful to dozens of people who helped advance my work over the years, and who helped further the accomplishment I am trying to describe here. I hope that will become clear in the descriptions that follow. In the meantime, I would hope this book helps all of us remember to celebrate Brother Stevie Wonder, on his own birthday and on January 15—the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.—every year.

  1

  Words have been important to me for as long as I can remember. Their sound, their construction, their origins. Because of that interest, there are few places I could have been raised that would have provided more wonderful raw material than the southeast quarter of North America.

  The word Tennessee means “land of trees” to the folks native to that part of the world three or four hundred years ago. Residents of the region respected the land and their attention to the details of their surroundings stands out in their descriptions. They examined their environment thoroughly, creating drawings of what they saw from a mountain that provided an unobstructed view for miles in all directions. South and east of the mountain, a blanket of treetops led to trails marked by the Seminoles. Due west, the Chickasaw people lived on the banks of the horseshoe-shaped Tennessee River that one encountered twice as it sliced the state into thirds. And everywhere stood dense forests. Tennessee, they say, was once 90 percent trees, the land of trees.

  The natives from the heights of the Appalachians scattered when the new folks came into the mountains from the east. These graceless, grimy intruders were more than a different tribe. And less. They were more than a different skin color and language. They had no respect for the land and its inhabitants. Arriving in waves, they attacked the mountains as if to level them. They slashed jagged holes and damned the streams before thunderous explosions collapsed the face of hillsides, leaving only the ugly scars to evidence their search for the black rocks they called coal. The natives charted their ragged trails of mutilation from the peak above Chattanooga. And they led their families west.

  When I was a boy in Tennessee, our first class in the morning was geography and time was always dedicated to Tennessee and how it was connected to history. Tennessee was the Volunteer State. University of Tennessee sports teams were the Volunteers. I remember being shown pictures of Davy Crockett and Smoky the Bear. I also recall the slightly curved diagonal line I drew that linked Knoxville to Nashville to the city named after an ancient Egyptian metropolis, Memphis.

  Memphis, Tennessee, was only ninety miles west of Jackson, my home. But Memphis was as far away as the North Pole in my mind. People in Jackson were always talking about somewhere else, mostly Memphis, because it was a close somewhere else and you could drink alcohol there, while Jackson was in a dry county. I talked about going to Chicago, where my mother lived. Some of my grandfather’s relatives were in Memphis and I had visited them, but what I remember about the trip was getting carsick and throwing up.

  The history that we were given about Memphis was done in light pencil that hopscotched its way to a semisolid landing with Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show. The city had started as a midway market, a meeting place on the banks of the Mississippi River that squatted in the muck almost squarely between New Orleans and Chicago. As such, it provided a perfect location for traders of all description and from all directions, who brought everything to ex
change—from furs to furniture and cotton to cattle. As the steamboats and paddle wheelers sought the shallows of Memphis and St. Louis, they stirred great clouds of silt and sand, turning the surface of the waterway a burnished brown. The Mississippi became known as the Big Muddy.

  The docks at the edge of the village were a magnet for hunters, trappers, farmers, and natives, who rolled up in wooden wagons to trade loads of tobacco, produce, and buffalo hides for guns, whisky, and farm implements. They all walked and rolled past the narrow, squalid shacks, no more than cages, where there were echoes of moans and rattling chains from human cargo.

  The Memphis day was from “can see” to “can’t see,” and with the first hint of another sunrise the procession from the docks to the foul smelling mudhuts beneath the auction blocks began. There, nearly naked black men and women barely covered by rotting rags were led in, bound and shackled, with rawhide nooses around their necks. The least cooperative captives were hobbled with ankle chains that limited them to short, stuttering steps. They would be sold, these bucks, to the cutthroat Cajuns from the sea-level swamps. It was said that each year spent in the paralyzing heat of a Louisiana summer took five years off a man’s life. When a slave was sold to the Lords of Louisiana, the observers lamented that he’d been “sold down the river.”

  Memphis matured from midway market to a major metropolis. Saloons and whorehouse tents, once soaked with the sweat of drunken sailors and reeking with the acid stench of swine, slime, sewage, and slaves is now better known for Graceland and the Grizzlies than for Beale Street and the blues. Its filthy foundation as a headquarters for whores and for humans sold to the highest bidder was obscured by the magic of musical melding. Sun Records considered itself the fuse that lit the 1950s with Elvis and rock ’n’ roll. With Carla and Rufus Thomas and Otis Redding, Stax Records brought blues to the hit parade with hooks and horns and a solid beat, evolving into Al Green and Willie Mitchell. Memphis meant music.