And unless you stop to think for a minute, you might forget that it was in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on a motel balcony on April 4, 1968. That assassination is one of our starting points.
Stevie Wonder did not forget.
In 1980, Stevie joined with the members of the Black Caucus in the United States Congress to speak out for the need to honor the day Dr. King was born, to make his birthday a national holiday.
The campaign began in earnest on Halloween of 1980 in Houston, Texas, with Stevie’s national tour supporting a new LP called Hotter than July, featuring the song “Happy Birthday,” which advocated a holiday for Dr. King. I arrived in Houston in the early afternoon to join the tour as the opening act. I was invited to do the first eight shows, covering two weeks, and I felt good about being there, about seeing Stevie and his crazy brother Calvin again.
Somehow it seems that Stevie’s effort as the leader of this campaign has been forgotten. But it is something that we should all remember. Just as surely as we should remember April 4, 1968, we should celebrate January 15. And we should not forget that Stevie remembered.
As Stevie sang on “Happy Birthday”:
We all know everything
That he stood for time will bring
For in peace our hearts will sing
Thanks to Martin Luther King
2
Stevie Wonder could not see. He was blind. Blind was damn near part of his name. From the first time his name was broadcast and the tune’s title was tagged, he was stamped “Stevie Wonder, the Blind Boy.” I knew it was all part of programming, of selling Stevie to the public, but I still felt a little sympathy for the brother because it put something in capital letters he probably didn’t need to hear.
I had never heard “Blind Ray Charles” or “Blind José Feliciano.” It couldn’t have been because Stevie played an instrument, because Ray Charles played piano and José Feliciano played guitar. What the hell?
There had been a stretch when brothers and sisters were taking on what they considered religious names. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. Bobby Moore became Ahmad Rashad. In the old days guys named something else became Rock Hudson and John Wayne. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. Ma Bell became Nine X. And Stevie . . .
Stevie started out carrying a tic-tac-toe of AKAs. He was known as “Little Stevie Wonder” when his first Top 10 tune turned the American airwaves into his one-man tidal wave. Had I been around in those days with a microphone, it would have been a title wave. But since his real name was Stevland Morris, he had actually been riding the waves on a fictitious surfboard.
He might have been little when he was first spotted by the record executives at some show down in Motown, but by the time he played “Fingertips” on American Bandstand, he was clearly pushing six feet and looked like he could slam dunk Dick Clark.
I first had the chance to see Stevie Wonder at the Apollo on 125th Street when I was fifteen and living in the Bronx. The young man at center stage holding a harmonica and a microphone while urging the crowd to clap their hands was as tall as I was, and only the dark glasses that concealed his eyes reminded me that his hundred-watt smile from inside the bright spotlights was offered to a darkness that began behind his eyelids and not just beyond the footlights. The guy could flat-out play, and I hoped the “Blind” part of his introduction would be dropped rather than become attached to him as a professional name, like Blind Lemon Jefferson—as though plain old Stevie Wonder was an amateur handle.
Stevie continued to grow in all directions. To his full adult height of over six feet, but also in the public eye as a wonderful musical talent. An exceptional keyboard player, an enthusiastic percussionist, an inventive and challenging composer of both rousing dance numbers and thoughtful ballads, tunes that stuck with you and came back to you with fresh feelings. He demonstrated his full conceptual grasp as a composer and arranger with his orchestrated score of the movie The Secret Life of Plants.
The texture of his voice and vocal range made his every offering as a singer an individual accomplishment. His songs were sung by other artists, but not “covered.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he remained highly valued as an attraction and was in constant demand.
I thought about Stevie often before I met him. Aside from his constant presence on the radio, he spent a good deal of time on my personal stereo. Along with the early look at him I got at the Apollo, I saw him again a few years after that, during a summer break from college when I stayed on campus to work as a sort of camp counselor. We took a bus from Lincoln University’s Pennsylvania campus up to a New Jersey fairground for two hours of Stevie’s songs and showmanship.
He put on an awesome display of virtuoso performances on a number of instruments. Seeing his growth since 125th Street on harmonica to the master of a variety of keyboards and percussion instruments and the ease with which he handled his singing chores elevated the brother to the top of my ladder as a performer and a talent. His playing, singing, and songwriting had expanded exponentially while he still retained the unrestrained joy that exploded like a physical force from his opening notes and lassoed everyone within reach of his frequency of freedom. I had never attributed to Stevie any supernatural powers or felt as though he was visited by aliens or touched by some witch waving a magic wand, but after seeing a couple of his performances, I was definitely captivated by the energy he always generated from the stage.
I was glad that by the time I met the brother—in the mid 1970s—he was just Stevie Wonder. Or Stevie. He had either lost or thrown away most of the ill-fitting descriptives that had been spread over him here and there like ugly coats of paint. Otherwise I could have ended up at thirty years old sharing the bill with “Little Blind Stevie Wonder.” But things worked out.
A few years before the offer to tour with Stevie, Clive Davis had invited him to a show we played at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. After that Stevie would show up spontaneously at shows once in a while, at the Roxy, at the Wilshire Theater, but I never knew he was coming. That was what friends did. They could show up without a royal proclamation and know they’d be welcome. With the kind of schedules entertainers have, it’s not odd that things happen spontaneously. You get a minute, you hear somebody’s in town, and you want to see them. The bigger the celebrity and the more things they had to do, the more spontaneous things were.
I always called everybody “Brotherman” and Stevie had his own personal names for people. Soon after we met he began to call me “Air Reez,” which was cool because I am an Aries.
Meeting him also sent me back to the Bronx for memories of what I had thought of the early “Little Stevie” and I felt happy for him. It has been a private joy of mine to have felt that kinship with the brother nearly all my life. Never caring in the beginning or now when someone might say, “He’s blind, you know.”
That meant the harmonica on “Fingertips”
Was no sooner settling on Stevie’s lips
Than what inevitably came to their mind
For some reason was that the brother was blind.
Which obviously didn’t mean a helluva lot
’Cause it said what he didn’t have but not what he got.
His music hit a certain chord
And moved you like the pointer on a Ouija board
Your feet made all of your dancing decisions
And didn’t give a damn if he had X-ray vision.
So why was it that people always remarked
“He’s blind” as though Stevie was condemned to the dark?
Suppose you looked at it the opposite way:
They had 20/20 vision and still couldn’t play.
And when they danced seeing didn’t help them keep time
And things like that made me wonder just who was blind.
3
I’m going to have to ask you to accept some information on faith, the way I did. For instance, that on the morning of April 1, 1949, at Provident Hospital
in Chicago, Illinois, a very pretty young Black woman named Bobbie Scott completed a roundtrip to and from the hospital delivery room. According to the information on the birth record, she gave birth to a child that was a legitimate-black-male, the tic-tac-toe of birth certificates in that day and age.
A lot of people’s positions in life changed that day. Birth always directly affects far more people than is readily apparent. Everyone related to either parent gets an additional name to be called. My mother’s mother became a grandmother, my late grandfather’s sister became a great aunt, my grandmother’s brothers became great uncles, their children became cousins again, and my mother’s brother and sisters became an uncle and two aunts.
My father’s family was affected the same way: his mother and father became grandparents, his seven brothers became uncles, and their children became cousins. My father, who was originally from Jamaica, and all seven of his brothers had the middle name “Saint Elmo.” I’m not sure how many of his brothers named their children Saint Elmo, but my father decided he wanted to name his son after himself, name for name: Gilbert Saint Elmo Heron. This was cool with my mother up to a point. Using the same first name was cool. The use of the same last name was not only cool, but also fit with the legitimate-black-male of the birth certificate. But using Saint Elmo would have brought the known number of men on the planet with that middle name to nine, which was one too many as far as my mother was concerned. Not cool.
According to my mother, she had absolutely nothing against Saint Elmo or the fire that may or may not have been his responsibility. She did not question the veracity or the sobriety of the many seamen who had reported seeing this flaming phenomenon along the masts of ships at sea. She simply didn’t like the name Saint Elmo, and she convinced my father that unless the saint came marching in, there would be no “Mo.”
My mother suggested finding another name that started with “S” so the initials of father and son would remain the same. My father’s problem was that he didn’t know any other middle name that might go with his last name—all of the Heron men he knew had Saint Elmo as a middle name. Then my mother suggested “Scott,” her maiden name. My father didn’t think much of Scott—all the Scotts he knew had it as a last name—but he reluctantly agreed.
My mother had been named after my grandfather, Bob Scott. Everyone called her Bobbie, but her full name was Robert Jameson Scott. Her parents, Bob and Lily, obviously didn’t care much about convention when it came to the names of their children. They gave them the names they wanted them to have. Bob Scott had died in 1948, after going blind ten years before. My grandfather had been an insurance man before and through the worst of the Depression and then began to break down. First, constricted veins blocked circulation in his legs. Then he went blind. He began to lose his grip, slipped, lost his mind, and later became violent and had to be committed to the hospital for the criminally insane at Bolivar, Tennessee.
Still, it was probably my father as a Caribbean version of Bob that made him attractive to my mother. Gil, my father, was tall, handsome, well-dressed, and well-mannered. So had been Bob Scott, who always wore a suit for business, with a white shirt and a tie, his hat cleaned and his shoes shined. (Later in life, I remember members of my father’s old soccer teams telling me about the zoot suits and wide, striped ties Gil would be wearing when he arrived in the locker room.) When my mother talked about her youth in Jackson, Tennessee, and going places with Bob Scott, you could hear the pride in her voice and see her eyes shine. The strength of their relationship was obvious.
My grandfather had been “Steel Arm Bob,” a pitcher who bested Satchel Paige’s barnstorming team 1–0 when they came through Jackson. Reading the sports pages to him was how my mother got to know so much about sports and batting averages—the knowledge and real understanding of the details. My father liked that.
Gil Heron was young, exotic, and worldly, a veteran of the Canadian Air Force. He was also physical and athletic, and went all out when he competed. The Aries fire lit up his face and made it glow. The joy of winning brought a smile that made you feel like you were standing in a bright, warm sun. Sometimes he was romantic and sometimes thoughtful, brooding over the quality of his competition and teammates who couldn’t get the ball to him when they were pressed. He loved to talk about soccer, past games, teammates, opponents ridiculed as their pointless, desperate pursuit of him always ended the same way: Gooooooaaaaal!
Her honesty and curiosity, not naïveté, attracted Gil to my mother, Bobbie. My mother was the second of four Scott children, a scholar who graduated from Lane College, the Black university in Jackson, with an incredible 3.96 grade point average, and then moved north to Chicago. She was obviously a pretty and vivacious young lady, a college graduate with a soft drawl, and not a bad bowler. They had met at the bowling alley next to the Western Electric plant where they both worked in Chicago. She was slim but he could see the shapely legs, the firm hips, and the guileless smile. He’d known women who pretended to be sports fans, saying, “I’d love to come to a game and see you kick a home run.” Not her. Not Miss Bobbie Scott from somewhere in Tennessee. She knew sports. She even knew about his “football.” Soccer.
Gil would come home after soccer games and rub his legs down with alcohol. Only then would the cuts and scratches and bruises receive the notice they deserved. During games he was oblivious to discomfort; my mother would be appalled by his injuries. Opponents tried to deliberately injure him, with high tackles and tackles when he didn’t even have the ball. It was inevitable when his team played groups from the surrounding areas. His skills would offend the opposition, often leaving them feeling foolish and flailing, victims of Gil’s fancy footwork. There were scoundrels in places like Skokie, a suburb of Chicago then inhabited primarily by Europeans, who treated soccer like an ethnic heirloom. My mother talked about incidents when opposing players had felt forced to foul, going for his legs instead of the ball, not trying to tackle him but to injure; these were red flags to his temper. Bad move. Gil would grab them and either overpower them with the strength that could be generated by his powerful legs, or while grappling face-to-face he would suddenly jerk his opponent toward him, forcing their face into his forehead. Once he had been so upset with the blind-eye officials who ignored intentional attempts to injure him that he suddenly turned on the ball and kicked it over a wire fence into Lake Michigan, ending the game.
Bobbie was as worried about fights as she was worried about him getting hurt in games. And those were not related to the same set of circumstances. His reputation, or so the legend goes, was that he handled both of those very separate skills with equal dexterity and with equal enthusiasm. So she would go see him play, hoping that would be all.
My mother told me there was a certain grace and ferocity whether he was kicking goals or kicking ass. She didn’t come up with that opinion just because she was married to him. Though she might have been biased, her belief in his talent was confirmed when the Scottish national team visited Chicago for a “friendly” match, an exhibition game, and were impressed. In fact, after the game members of the coaching staff spoke to him and made an informal offer for him to come to Scotland to play. He was, after all, already a citizen of the commonwealth.
My mother and father separated when I was one and a half years old, when Celtic, in Glasgow, Scotland, offered him a formal contract. My father decided to take an opportunity to do what he always wanted to do: play football fulltime, at the highest level, against the best players. It was, for him, the chance of a lifetime, the chance to play for one of the most famous teams in the British Isles. It was an opportunity to see who he was and what he was, to avoid sliding through fits of old age and animosity and spasms of “I coulda been a contender” that no one believed. That sort of thing can even make you doubt yourself, doubt what you know, doubt what you would have sworn if anyone was willing to listen. To play with Celtic was also a Jackie Robinson–like invitation for him. It was something that had been beyond the reach and
outside the dreams of Blacks.
4
According to my grandmother, Lily Scott, I arrived at the house on South Cumberland Street in Jackson, Tennessee, in December of 1950, after taking the train south with her. My grandmother had come to Chicago to collect me from my mother after they agreed I would be better off in Tennessee while everything in my mother’s life was restructured. Like where she lived, how she lived, and, to be blunt, who she didn’t live with. She and my father had agreed to disagree and were to make this difference of opinion as official as their previous agreement. I was not needed as either a referee or witness to this action, and was sent on the Seminole with my mother’s mother. According to the plan, I would be with her for six months. I was not consulted.
My stay stretched beyond those six months that had been planned, and eventually beyond six years, which landed me in the same school my mother had attended, St. Joseph’s. The period from a skinny, chocolate, preschool-aged mischief maker to my short-pants uniform at Catholic school seems hardly a blink in retrospect. As I grew up I was blessed with the run of an aging neighborhood in the southern section of town where I was always near a “cousin” or someone who recognized me as a descendent of a family that was near legend in South Jackson. I was an heir of Bob and Lily Scott. My every appearance was a reminder of some hazy happening from the halcyon days before Cumberland Street was even paved, and before Jackson was large enough to show up on state maps.
All the Black folks lived in South Jackson. A substantial percentage of the community members were from my grandparents’ generation. It seemed that the numbers were split between folks who were easing toward senior citizenry and those of school age. The hole was in the middle—people my mother’s age. Those were the folks who had left Jackson and Tennessee for factory work and urban life in the north or farther west: St. Louis, Memphis, and Chicago. Somehow their children, like me, all ended up in Jackson with their grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
The Last Holiday Page 2
