Sadie was often the family’s only refuge. “She was always around,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “She was Mom’s backbone.” Not affectionate by nature, Sadie possessed the kind of steel will necessary to survive the Chicago slums. She worked all day cooking in rich white people’s kitchens, and at night she often brought home food her employers didn’t eat to feed her daughter and grandchildren. Many times she saved them from starvation.
At home, young Curtis watched his mother get beaten; at school, he took the beatings. With a cruelty special to children, his classmates roughed him up and zeroed in on his every imperfection. They mocked his poverty, although they were most likely poor too. They picked on him because of his short stature and big teeth. Perhaps most hurtful, they made fun of him because of his dark skin. He’d never forget the derogatory nickname they slung at him like a stone—Smut. They used the word in its original sense, meaning a dark stain or blot. This bred in him insecurities that would take decades to shake.
Soon, Marion left Eddie and moved the family to the White Eagle, a decaying hotel on Eighteenth Street between Indiana and Michigan Avenues. Of all the cheap digs, the White Eagle haunted my father’s memory most. He recalled it as a dark, dreary joint where hookers stalked the sidewalk day and night, and many more lived in the neighborhood nearby. He never saw a pimp at the time, though. “I guess pimps are a luxury of wealthier neighborhoods,” he said later.
Outside, trash choked the sidewalk and broken windows made the building’s face leer like a jack-o-lantern’s smile. Inside, prostitutes, dope pushers, and drug fiends lived on one side, while poor families huddled on the other—mostly single mothers struggling to raise their children in the jaws of nighttime’s vices. At the White Eagle, the whole family lived in a single room the size of a postage stamp. Marion slept on a let-out sofa bed, and the children shared a bunk bed, Curtis on top, Carolyn, Kenny, and Kirby down below.
Their floor had eight units but only one communal bathroom, so young Curtis had to trudge out to the hall to use it, not unlike Annie Bell’s beaten path to the outhouse in Louisiana. The bathroom was a nightmare—putrid, cramped, filthy, full of exposed pipes and crumbling walls. Residents stuffed newspapers into crevices to stanch water leaks, while exposed light bulbs dangled from dangerous wires overhead.
Life in the White Eagle reflected the building’s shabby state. Most nights, Curtis and family went to bed hungry and woke up itching from bedbug bites. As Aunt Carolyn remembers, “Many Christmases, we didn’t have anything. Mama would fix corn bread and a bowl of sugar to make syrup. We thought it was a treat, but that’s all she had.” Grandma Sadie moved into the building, as did Marion’s siblings, Uncle Son and Aunt Edith. Having family close by did nothing to make the White Eagle a homier place, though. At age seven, Aunt Carolyn narrowly escaped a pervert trying to lure her into the bathroom.
Under such duress, my dad had to grow up fast. He lived in a world that snuffed out innocence, a world that forbade the luxury of childhood. At age five, he became the man of the house through no choice of his own. The word “man” is instructive here—there’s no such thing as child of the house. When Marion wasn’t around, Curtis exerted control like an adult, and he got used to having others look to him for that control. As Aunt Carolyn says, “If anything went on, we looked to him if Mama wasn’t there because he was the oldest one around at that time.” It fit his natural tendencies as a Gemini, and for much of his life, if he couldn’t control something completely, he wouldn’t do it.
Marion’s situation taught him the dangers of living without control. At the same time, she also taught him about the strength of the spirit to survive, and the importance of art as a way to manage despair. She couldn’t provide creature comforts, but she kept the family respectable through sheer force of will and artistic talent. Whatever clothes she couldn’t afford, she could knit, sew, or crochet just as well. She also loved working at puzzles—jigsaw and crossword—and she always had a book in hand, which provided endless entertainment for her children. She’d tell them stories from the books she read, and often she’d recite her favorite Dunbar poems, like “How Lucy Backslid”:
De times is mighty stirrin’ ‘mong de people up ouah way,
Dey ‘sputin’ an’ dey argyin’ an’ fussin’ night an’ day;
An’ all dis monst’ous trouble dat hit meks me tiahed to tell
Is ‘bout dat Lucy Jackson dat was sich a mighty belle.
She was de preachah’s favoured, an’ he tol’ de chu’ch one night
Dat she travelled thoo de cloud o’ sin a–bearin’ of a light;
But, now, I ‘low he t’inkin’ dat she mus’ ‘a’ los’ huh lamp,
Case Lucy done backslided an’ dey trouble in de camp.
The stanzas churned around young Curtis’s mind, powerfully influencing his sense of rhythm and rhyme. While Dunbar’s poetry left a mark on my dad, it also eased his transition into a world that would force him to have two identities. Dunbar’s work is mixed, with some poems written in formal English verse and others, like “Lucy,” written in Negro dialect. This dual identity as a poet struck at the heart of Negro existence in America. It represented an artistic expression of a phenomenon that DuBois, at roughly the same time as Dunbar’s writing, called “double-consciousness.” DuBois wrote:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness…. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost … He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.
Double-consciousness held true for every station of Negro life. From the common laborer to the most successful celebrity, all had to be proficient in two languages, two ways of acting, two modes of dress, two sets of rules—one for the white world, one for the Negro. As Curtis grew, he encountered these two worlds. Often the encounter was silent and subconscious, like listening to his mother recite Dunbar’s poems in two voices. Within a few years, however, the encounters would grow deafening as the worlds crashed together.
For now, my father kept to himself, like his mother and Annie Bell. Quiet and solitary, he preferred doing most things alone—he’d remain that way even as a world-famous musician. Marion recalled, “When other children came by to play, Curtis would tell them he was on punishment and couldn’t have any company.” When the other kids left, he’d break open a box of crayons and lose himself in drawing.
Still, he had a deep curiosity about the world. He plied his mother with questions, wanting to know how everything worked, and where, and when. His favorite question, though, was, “Why?” Even if he knew the answer, he still asked why. It seemed a magical question, always producing new perspectives.
He also had a keen interest in music. During his youth, the smooth sounds of Nat King Cole, Lena Horne, and Dinah Washington poured from the radio like honey, salving the wounds of a war-weary nation. At the same time, a new movement of jazz musicians flouted the unwritten code that a Negro performer mustn’t ever threaten the status quo. Miles Davis led the pack, and whatever anyone thought of him, he “took no shit off of nobody,” as he often said, white or Negro. Living in blues central, Curtis also heard the plaintive moans of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and others who electrified nightclub stages down the street from his home.
Curtis meanwhile took his own first steps on a different kind of stage. As Marion remembered it, “He used to stand on the tree stump in front of my grandmother’s house in Du Quoin, Illinois, and sing ‘Pistol-packing Mama’ to the engineers driving the trains by.” He was a born per
former, and no poverty or hardship could take away my grandmother’s joy at watching her eldest son strut across a tree trunk with the confidence only a child can feel.
Marion also had a voracious appetite for music, listening to opera, classical, country, gospel, and rhythm and blues at home. She had a collection of gospel records she played from her dusty old Victrola while Curtis peeked his little head over the turntable’s edge, watching the black-and-white Specialty Records labels turn in hypnotic circles.
Specialty singers like Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones ingrained Almighty God in the grooves of their records. Jeter’s lilting falsetto—the precursor to my father’s vocal style, and inspiration for legions of doo-wop singers—gave sound to the human soul. When that soul-sound bounced off the White Eagle’s grimy walls, the unfathomable took fleeting shape in Curtis’s mind. Only music had this divine, ecstatic power, and my father was enthralled. He’d found a love as intimate as his own skin.
My grandmother raised her family gently and respectfully. “She was a reasonable mother,” my father recalled, “a woman of mentality, of mind, that could talk, express herself.” Despite her expressive mind, however, her financial situation remained dire. On Kenny’s fourth birthday, she gave him a quarter and asked him not to tell Curtis or Carolyn because that was all the money she had. Annie Bell offered little help, and Mannish had remarried a few times. He fathered more children (who were given the surname Washington, after the new name he took when he went AWOL), leaving him with fewer reasons to think about his first family. “I never will forget this one Christmas,” Aunt Carolyn says. “[Mannish] came over and brought a basket of food and it had a doll in it. This basket of food, that’s how we happened to have a Christmas meal, and I finally got a doll for Christmas. That’s when he was with his third wife, Gracie … and he and Gracie were having an argument. They were arguing because the basket of food was not supposed to come to us. It was supposed to go over to [my half sisters] Tanya and Ann’s house, but they weren’t home. So he brought it to us. I was so upset, when I got home, I took the doll and broke the head off. I remember throwing it because it wasn’t meant for us.”
While Mannish continued to ignore the family, depression gnawed at Marion like an open sore. Sometimes the children heard her crying alone in her room at night because she had nothing to feed them. Curtis and his siblings made a game of it the way children do, filling their little bellies with water and jiggling it around just to hear the noise of something inside other than hunger pangs. Otherwise, they’d squeak by with canned food, and powdered milk, and salad-dressing sandwiches until Marion’s relief check came again.
When it came, she had twenty-five dollars to feed her family for the next month. She had to stock up on staples, but every once in a while she’d buy some popcorn, pop it up, and gather the family around the table, telling the children stories from her books as they munched away. Or, she’d splurge by taking Carolyn down to Woolworth’s and buying a banana split. No matter how much she needed every red cent, she knew sometimes it was a mother’s duty to pamper her children.
Marion’s struggle shaped my father. As he watched her battle to do something as simple as survive, depression became part of his mind. But he had another role model in Annie Bell. She lived in relative opulence because of her work as a reverend. From her, he learned that one way to have what his mother didn’t—success, money, power—was to possess something special, something mystical even, something that set him apart the way Spiritualism set Annie Bell apart.
His family hoped he’d become a preacher, but he knew from a young age that was something he’d never be. Other ways of being special existed though, and he didn’t have to look far to find them. They juked all night in the clubs down the street and shook the walls at the church meetings he attended. Their voices came tinny from the radio speakers like magic every night and crept through the phonograph needle into his wondering ears each day. Muddy Waters was special. Louis Armstrong was special. John Lee Hooker was special. Sam Cooke was special. They held a magical power that seemed as strong as religion itself—music. Like many great preachers, musicians attracted all the things that seemed impossible to attain for a ghetto child insecure of his looks and his poverty—money, fame, power, even sex.
As America eased toward the innocuous 1950s, flush with returning soldiers and financially solvent again, the country celebrated and convalesced. The celebration for Negroes, however, was muted. They still chafed under an oppressive homeland for which they had just fought and died by the thousands. They also fought, as always, for their rights.
In 1944, a woman named Irene Morgan refused to give up her seat on an interstate bus in Virginia, violating Jim Crow laws. She was arrested, and by ’46 her case rose to the US Supreme Court with the help of Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel of the NAACP. Right around Kirby’s birth, the Court struck down the Virginia law as unconstitutional. The ruling prompted a new civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), to launch a series of nonviolent protests challenging segregation laws on interstate public transport, setting the stage for the great bus boycott that would begin the civil rights movement a decade later. Of course, my father didn’t know about CORE or Thurgood Marshall yet, and he felt no personal gain from the ruling. After all, no one complied with it, and the federal government either would not or could not enforce it. Even so, the violent changes that would shape his life stirred once again, with two more key players stepping into the spotlight.
Demonstrations didn’t matter to him yet—Dad had fallen in love with the radio. Later in life, he’d say, “Aside from the gospel music in the church all I’d hear was the R&B stations … I got nothing but Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and all these guys.” He couldn’t avoid it. In the 1940s and ’50s, Chicago had DJs like Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie, whose Jazz from Dad’s Pad aired on WAIT, and Al Benson, “a whiskey-drinking Democratic precinct captain” who slogged out ten hours on the air every day. Several stations interspersed Negro DJs playing R&B with Greek, German, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, and other ethnic shows, filling my father’s head with strange, exotic combinations of sound. No one wielded more influence, however, than Herb Kent “the Cool Gent.” Kent began as a country and western jockey, but his doo-wop and R&B playlists would come to form the backbone of many a Chicago musician’s sense of rhythm, taste, and style, my father’s included.
The radio stations were extensions of Chicago’s jumpin’ and jivin’ club scene, and though Dad was too young for these clubs, they imprinted the fabric of his world. By the end of the 1940s, Chicago had become arguably the best city in America for live jazz, with at least seventy-five clubs on the South Side alone. At places like the Club DeLisa, one could see Fletcher Henderson’s band, featuring a young Sun Ra (when he was still known as Sonny Blount), as well as blues singers like Big Joe Turner, Gatemouth Moore, and Dr. Jo Jo Adams, a flamboyantly dressed man who performed X-rated blues numbers in top hat and tails and did a knock-kneed dance Chuck Berry would make famous a decade later.
During my father’s youth, Chicago also flowered with a cultural and artistic explosion much like the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The Chicago Black Renaissance, which began in the ’30s, reshaped American literature with authors like Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker. The accompanying musical explosion inspired a young generation including Curtis, Ramsey Lewis, Herbie Hancock, and Maurice White.
In addition to so much enticing secular music, Dad saw firsthand the power of gospel music. At Union Hall near Forty-Eighth and State, he watched bands like the Pilgrim Travelers, the Bells of Joy, and the Staple Singers, as well as Sam Cooke, who would profoundly influence his direction in life. He’d also never forget watching Archie Brownlee, singer of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, dart up and down the aisles like a man possessed, pouring sweat and howling until it seemed the sky would split and Christ Himself would appear.
These singers inspired my fa
ther to try his own voice at gospel music, and he’d soon have the chance. Around this time, Annie Bell had saved enough money to rent a small basement at 2310 West Maypole Avenue, where she set up her first church. And there again was the lesson—because of her mystical power, Annie Bell could afford not only food, clothing, and a house, but also her own place of business. If young Curtis had any question about what he wanted to do with his life and how it could help him achieve the control he desired, he wouldn’t have to wait long for the answer.
3
Traveling Souls
“I know I believe in the spirit,
Traveling Soul was alone, a part of me,
Out in this world, it don’t take your eyes too long to see.”
—“SWEET EXORCIST”
Chicago, 1950—Down in a dank basement on Maypole Avenue, forty or fifty people crammed into neatly lined rows of chairs facing a small pulpit. They met every Sunday to chase spiritual ecstasy, arriving impeccably dressed, the men in double-breasted suits, the women in felt hats with grosgrain ribbons. Service commenced with an early morning Bible study followed by Reverend A. B. Mayfield’s sermon from nine until noon, during which she’d recount the stories of Jacob, whose brothers sold him into slavery, and Abraham, who nearly slaughtered his own son, and Job, whom Almighty God persecuted the way a cat toys with a bug. She wove these parables into the flow of her congregants’ lives—few audiences could identify with Job more than a room full of Negroes—and as she spoke, she cast a spell over the room. The old folks swayed and murmured; the children, of course, dropped like little flies, bored straight to sleep.
Annie Bell didn’t celebrate Christian mass, so at some point she called on her spirit guide with rhythmic incantations that snaked around the basement like frankincense. As she channeled the unutterable essence of the divine, her congregation erupted with testifying shouts and moans. They stomped and sang, the spirit alighting where it would—now here, now there.
Traveling Soul Page 3
