She was barely thirteen years old at the time and was truly excited to be a part of the school spirit at Rocky Point. She was pert and spunky, but a good girl, too. She prayed often, and went to church regularly with her family.
“She was a good student when I taught her,” recalled Mary Faison, a former faculty member at Rocky Point.
It’s not clear whether James played on Charity’s team that night. He was seventeen and a senior, and he was there with a car, which was indicative of the Jordans’ improving financial situation as well as his strong mechanical bent.
As in many teen love stories, she noticed him before he was aware of her. He had doe-like eyes and high cheekbones, but that wasn’t what captured her fancy. “What attracted me was his personality,” she explained. “As far as looks, it was no more than some of the other guys. He was outgoing, had a good sense of humor, and was a caring, kind person.”
Deloris and several of her cousins jumped in the backseat of his car to get a ride home after the game. When it appeared that he was going to drive right past her house, she called out for him to stop.
“Oh, I didn’t realize I had somebody else in here,” he said. “You’re pretty cute.”
“You’re pretty fresh,” she supposedly retorted.
“Could be. But someday I’ll marry you,” he replied, according to her recollection.
“I knew he was going out with somebody else,” she said. “I stayed away from him.”
Deloris ran into her house and slammed the door behind her as thirteen-year-old girls are wont to do.
In that small community, James Jordan was likely already aware that Edward Peoples farmed his own land, and he had to have noticed the girl’s house, which was larger than most. It was a two-story frame house that sat back from the road. “There was a lot of big ol’ shade trees in the yard,” recalled Maurice Eugene Jordan.
“A lot of colored peoples were just farm labor back then,” he added, explaining that the industrious Edward Peoples kept his own land busy year-round, all the while working at Casey Lumber Company. Beyond his farming, he invested time and money in another cash crop, just as so many of his neighbors did: Edward Peoples was a moonshiner. In fact, Peoples was said to be close with David Jordan, one of Dawson Jordan’s many moonshining cousins. As Maurice Eugene Jordan explained, “They had quite a few stills. The revenooers would find them, tear ’em up, but they’d go right back at it. The key was not to get caught.”
It wasn’t long before James approached Edward Peoples about dating “Lois,” as he called her. A hardworking, no-nonsense man, Peoples didn’t think much of the idea. She wasn’t old enough, he said. Young love—not to mention ambition—has long had a mind of its own, however. The two were soon seeing each other despite her parents’ wishes. “We quickly fell in love and dated for the next three years,” Deloris remembered.
The relationship lost little steam, even when James finished school in 1955 and joined the Air Force, making his father and grandfather quite proud. James underwent training in Texas, while Deloris’s family sent her off to Alabama to live with an uncle and take classes in a two-year cosmetology program. She has said that the move was made as an attempt to slow things down with the young airman, but the relationship had already hit its own warp speed. By early 1957, she was fifteen and pregnant—a fact she didn’t acknowledge in her own memoir—and dealing with the fallout of her family’s anger. The sudden enrollment in Alabama seemed a typical solution at a time when a pregnant teen was often sent away to have her child.
That April both James and Deloris were back in Pender County and went to a movie together, ostensibly to sort out their situation. The resolution came when he proposed in his car after the show. Once James did the right thing, she informed her parents that she would not be returning to Alabama, another decision that apparently didn’t sit well. Years later, she would remark that her mother should have insisted she go back to school. “My mother should have put me right back on the train,” Deloris once told a reporter.
Instead, she moved into her fiancé’s crowded family home in Teachey, where Dawson Jordan, now sixty-six, still very much ruled the roost. There, the pregnant teenager soon formed a lasting friendship with Rosabell Jordan, who had just turned forty. A devout and worldly woman, James’s mother loved children, loved filling the little house with relatives and friends on holidays and weekends. Deloris took to calling her “Ms. Bell,” and in a time when things were so strained with her own parents, Deloris found a wise and nurturing older soul. The friendship between the two women would grow into one of the tight family bonds that helped shape Michael Jordan’s later success.
James and Deloris soon celebrated the birth of their first child, James Ronald, that September. The mother, who had just turned sixteen, held her baby close and wondered what the world would hold for him. In time, the infant would grow into the sort of industrious young man that her own father had been. Ronnie, as they would call him, held down two jobs in high school—driving a school bus and managing a local restaurant in the evenings—all while excelling in junior ROTC and making his parents proud. This first son, it seems, had drawn on Dawson Jordan’s commanding presence. He would go on to a distinguished career as a master sergeant in the U.S. Army with multiple tours of combat duty.
Deloris brought the new baby into the already crowded Jordan household. James had been assigned to a base in Tidewater Virginia, a little better than two hours away, and came home on weekend leave to see his young son. Deloris would later admit that this was when she entertained the first doubt and self-recrimination about the turn of events in her life. She longed to see her own family more, but they were almost a half hour away, in Rocky Point. She kept faith, and her new mother-in-law helped her remain positive. James did his part as well, determined that his service experience would start him on a path to becoming the sort of breadwinner who could provide a middle-class upbringing for his own children.
Brooklyn, Then Teachey
James Jordan’s young family welcomed their second child, Deloris, in 1959. Early in her life, the child would go by Delores as a given name before settling on Deloris as an adult. For clarity’s sake in the early years, the family called her Sis. That same year, James left the Air Force and returned to Teachey, where he took a job at a local textile plant. For the time being, the young family crowded in with his parents until they could build a small home right across Calico Bay Road from Dawson, Medward, and Rosabell.
It was handy to have grandparents close by, as Deloris Jordan would give birth to five children by the time she reached twenty-three. In the early years, much of the burden of child-rearing fell to Rosabell Jordan, who wanted nothing more than to shower love on each new grandbaby that came along. As strong as the bonds of the extended Jordan family were, Deloris’s time away in Alabama and James’s stint in the Air Force had opened their eyes to the world beyond North Carolina. And so it happened that even as they were building their house across Calico Bay Road from his parents, they began to realize that deep down, they wanted something more beyond the offerings of the little farming communities of Teachey and Wallace.
In that regard, they were no different from millions of others of their generation. African Americans, in particular, were drawing the first breaths of a new air after suffocating for so long. The serf systems of sharecropping and tenant farming had begun to die off in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, which hastened the movement of millions of rural blacks to cities, particularly in the North, in search of new economic survival.
The march to freedom picked up its pace on February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University went to a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, bought a few things, then sat at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. Their simple act rang across North Carolina. The store’s management ignored the students, so they sat there in silence until closing time. The next morning the A&T students returned with five friends and again soug
ht service at the lunch counter. Met again with management’s silence, the students began what they described as a “sit-in,” a quiet, nonviolent demonstration. White youths soon showed up to taunt them and flick cigarette butts at them, but similar protests appeared in Winston-Salem, Durham, Charlotte, Raleigh, and High Point. And then it spread to fifteen cities and many more Woolworth’s stores across the country, all in a matter of about two weeks. Woolworth’s, a national chain, soon relented and began serving black customers at its lunch counters. The company was clearly unwilling to perpetuate racism in the public spotlight, before network TV cameras.
The unfolding civil rights movement was but one part of the tremendous cultural upheaval affecting the country. With that change came new promise for life itself, and James and Deloris couldn’t help but share in that expectation. It was an exciting time, yet confusing, and still quite dangerous.
Deloris delivered the couple’s second son, Larry, in early 1962; two months later she learned that yet another child was on the way. Shortly thereafter, the twenty-one-year-old Deloris and her husband scooped up baby Larry and headed to Brooklyn, New York, where they would live for almost two years as James went to trade school on the GI Bill to learn to build, repair, and maintain hydraulic equipment, a logical extension of his Air Force training. The move required their leaving their two oldest children, both under age five and still in their formative years, in the care of the Jordan grandparents for almost two years. Later, Deloris Jordan would remark that in essence she and James had two families: the older children, who remained behind, and the younger children. This would come to create no small gulf in their family.
As joyful as the new additions would be, they were tempered by heartbreak. The Jordans hadn’t been in New York more than a few weeks when Deloris received the news that her mother, Inez, had died suddenly. The shock of the loss and the instant torrent of grief staggered Deloris and imperiled her unborn baby. Her doctor ordered bed rest for a week.
“The near miscarriage was very bad,” James Jordan recalled years later.
Relations had improved between Deloris and her mother since the difficult period of her early pregnancy and marriage, but unresolved issues remained, as is so often the case with the sudden, premature death of a loved one. Deloris’s grief was compounded by her precarious pregnancy and her situation, far away from home in a crowded, alien city. Michael Jordan’s delivery was a particularly hectic scene that Sunday, February 17, 1963. Deloris had gone into labor a bit early, which was how she wound up at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn, even though her doctor was in Manhattan. Even before the hospital attendants could get Deloris onto an emergency room gurney, the large, strapping male child made his startling appearance, clogged with mucus and struggling to breathe.
“When Michael was born, we thought there might be something wrong with him,” James Jordan revealed years later in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “He was born with a nosebleed. The hospital kept him three days after Deloris was discharged. He’d have nosebleeds for no reason until he was five, and then they just stopped.”
“After Michael’s birth the doctors did keep him a couple of days to be sure that his lungs were clear of some mucus,” his mother recalled.
In many ways, the arrival helped punctuate her months of grief. “I always said that Michael’s birth was like a sign,” she later explained. “I lost my mother unexpectedly while carrying Michael, and he was my godsend. Michael was the happiness He sent me after a very sad time in my life.”
Michael himself would learn some details of his birth years later from Chicago newspaper reporters, who had gathered them from his family. “My nose still bleeds easily,” he told Bob Sakamoto of the Tribune. “That’s one story my mom never told me. The only thing my mom told me was the time when I fell behind the bed as a baby and almost suffocated. There have been some very close calls in terms of my life.”
The near suffocation, which happened after the family returned to North Carolina, only served to raise his mother’s anxiety levels over her special gift. “He was such a jolly baby,” she remembered. “He never cried. Just feed him and give him something to play with, and he was fine.”
By the time Michael was five months old, the family had retreated from Brooklyn back to their home on Calico Bay Road in Teachey. They made the move with Deloris pregnant one final time (daughter Roslyn was on the way), and back home, James put his education to use as a maintenance employee for the General Electric plant in Castle Hayne, near Wilmington.
Soon the young mother found herself in the small house with five children, four of them under the age of five. Her husband called her Lois, as did the rest of the family. And her term of endearment for him was Ray. He cut an impressive figure in the small farming community with his Air Force experience and his job at GE. Although generally warm and friendly, he began to show a harsher side as well. He proved to be a stern taskmaster with children, whether they were his own or somebody else’s. Word soon enough got out among the neighborhood children: Ray didn’t play. He’d whip your butt in a minute.
Young Michael would spend his formative years on sleepy little Calico Bay Road. By all accounts, he was easy to laugh, eager to please, and hungry to entertain, which also earned him his share of spankings.
“You had to discipline him,” Deloris Jordan once remembered. “He would test you to the limit. Michael was always getting into things.”
As a two-year-old he wandered outside one late afternoon while his father worked on an auto in the family’s backyard and used a lamp powered by two extension cords stretched across the damp ground from the kitchen. Before his father could stop him, the toddler grabbed the two cords at their juncture. The ensuing shock knocked young Michael back three feet, leaving him stunned but otherwise unhurt.
Already strict with their children, the Jordans were prompted by the incident to tighten their control. No one was to leave the house under any circumstances without permission. And each night the children had to be in bed by eight o’clock, no matter if others in the neighborhood were still outside playing. But it soon became evident that Michael’s bountiful nature could not be contained as he grew into childhood.
One time he found trouble under his granddaddy Dawson’s wagon, with a wasps’ nest that he attempted to douse with gasoline. That was followed by his adventure with a stack of lawn chairs he piled amazingly high to demonstrate his flying prowess. He suffered a long cut on his arm from that one.
James Jordan couldn’t wait for his boys to be big enough to hold a bat. He was always eager to get them into the backyard so he could toss a baseball their way and teach them how to swing. One day Michael was swinging away with a bat at a block of wood with a nail in it, only to discover that the missile had struck his older sister in the head and stuck there.
Perhaps the biggest trouble came at age four when he slipped away from the house and crossed the road to his grandparents’ place, where he found an older cousin chopping wood. Little Mike hoisted the axe a time or two, and the cousin said he’d give him a dollar to chop off his own toe. Eager to impress, he raised the axe and let it fall, just on the tip, then immediately howled in pain and took off back across the road, hopping and screaming and bleeding the whole way home to his mother.
“He was a mischievous child,” James Jordan would later remember—with a smile.
Sis, the older girl in the family, recalled that her parents had their favorites. She and Larry were her father’s pets, while Ronnie and little Mike—born just eleven months apart—could do no wrong in their mother’s eyes. Roz, the baby of the family, had everyone’s undivided affection. Young Michael Jordan faced much competition for attention in that busy household, and a lifelong dynamic was set in place. He was always eager to please—first his parents and family, and later his coaches and an adoring public.
“He mastered the art of entertaining and spent hours amusing us,” remembered Sis of those early years. “Dancing, singing, teasing or whatever it t
ook to bring a smile, grin, or laugh, he did. And never content to play by himself, he always needed an audience and would not let us ignore him no matter how hard we tried.”
Moving Again
Michael’s idyllic early childhood in Teachey was not easy to come by in 1960s America. But circumstances changed dramatically before he started kindergarten in the fall of 1968. In January that year, James and Deloris Jordan sold their house in Teachey, packed up the family, and moved to Wilmington, about sixty miles away on the coast. One reason for the move was that James had tired of his forty-minute commute to the GE plant in Castle Hayne each day. But more importantly, as Deloris Jordan would explain later, the family longed for something beyond the rural life. They wanted more for their children, too. They remained quite close to the grandparents, and planned to make frequent visits to Wallace and Teachey. In particular, they promised to return at least one weekend a month to attend services at Rockfish African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Jordan family’s place of worship for decades.
They hardly had time to unpack their things in Wilmington when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, which threw the entire nation into turmoil. Even in Wallace and Teachey, blacks and whites began brawling in the wake of the murder, and Wilmington was no better. The community had made some progress in race relations since the 1950s, when local leaders saw that attracting businesses to the area hinged on changing old ways. The city had long been a railroad town until the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad moved its central office to Jacksonville in 1955, causing Wilmington to look around for new industry to replace the lost jobs. Companies like General Electric had asserted that they would locate their plants in Wilmington only if the city made opportunity equal.
Even so, the racial atmosphere in Wilmington remained tense. The Jordans had arrived there just as the schools launched into a court-ordered desegregation plan that sparked controversy and bitterness. Headlines and emotions were dominated by the city’s evolving plans for bringing blacks and whites together in schools. Because the elementary schools were the last to be integrated under the plan, Michael and others his age began school that fall in classrooms that were still divided by race.
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