Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Late that night, nine-year-old Aytch Yancey, with a borrowed Winchester rifle, set out through the woods toward home to tell his father what had happened. He arrived home without incident, and his father decided that he and Aytch should set out right away for the friend’s cabin and collect the other children. They started off through the deeply wooded trails in the cold night, which was fortunately moonless. Father and son found the other children safe, and headed home with them. It was 1:30 in the morning when they approached their own cabin, but, as they neared it, they knew that something was wrong. The light that should have been burning in the window was not.

  The Yanceys entered their darkened home and found the younger children sleeping peacefully in their beds. But Mrs. Yancey was missing. Aytch Yancey’s father called, “Julia! Julia!” and then, from a darkened corner of the front room, heard soft moans. Here he found the figure of Julia Yancey, a tiny woman, crumpled and bleeding. Yancey carried his wife into the bedroom and placed her on the bed. Her face was a mass of blood. Aytch Yancey was dispatched to get a doctor because, among other fears, Mr. Yancey knew that his wife was four months pregnant. When Mrs. Yancey regained consciousness, she told her husband what had happened. It was the Cox and Edwards boys. They had come to her door at midnight, and forced their way into the house, demanding money. When Julia Yancey protested that she had none, they called her a liar and began beating her about the face and shoulders with the butt of their rifle. That was the last she remembered. Then the white men had ransacked the house and taken, among other things, $42, which was the children’s Christmas money. The doctor treated Mrs. Yancey for multiple bruises and contusions, but he was not able to save her unborn child. She miscarried the following morning.

  The Cox and Edwards boys were eventually brought to trial and, though their defense attorney attempted to imply that the incident was actually just a case of a black man “beating up on his wife” in a domestic quarrel, character witnesses came forward for both Mr. and Mrs. Yancey, and the four men were convicted by a judge named Gober and sentenced to the penitentiary. It might have seemed as though justice had prevailed, but the story actually had another, more ironic, ending. Some months after the trial, a white politician named Patterson was campaigning for Judge Gober’s job, and he came to see Mrs. Yancey. He asked her to sign a petition asking that the sentences of the Cox and Edwards boys be commuted. In return, Patterson promised Julia Yancey that if he won she and her family would never be molested again and would have his “protection.” Julia Yancey signed the petition. Patterson ran on a campaign that, among other things, promised that no white Georgia man would ever be sentenced to the chain gang and that used the Yancey case to brand Judge Gober a “nigger lover.” Patterson won. At the time, Julia Yancey was severely admonished by the Negro community for signing Patterson’s petition, which got the Cox and Edwards boys an early release from prison. But Julia Yancey had signed the petition out of fear and a desire to spare her family from any further trouble with the whites.

  The trauma of seeing his mother beaten and brutalized by white hoodlums may account for what happened to Aytch Yancey’s older brother Homer. His life turned out quite differently from Aytch’s. Homer had been the fairest of the family, with blond hair and blue eyes. When he grew up he worked as a night engineer at the largest ice plant in Atlanta, and it was said that he could have had the job of chief engineer—he looked so white—but for the fact that “everyone knew” that Homer Yancey was a Negro. As a young man, Homer began to express deep shame, even hatred, of having black blood. He married a black girl, but he and his wife soon separated. He was sued for alimony, did not pay, and was thrown into jail. He was released when his first wife died, and he promptly married a girl who he insisted was a Puerto Rican, though his family was certain that she was as much a Negro as Homer was. Homer and his wife tried to invade Atlanta’s white society, but were not successful; the fact that Homer was a Negro was too well known. He and his wife were divorced.

  Then, in 1920, Homer Yancey decided to resign from the black race. He moved to Chicago, where he married a white girl and—because his origins were not known—successfully joined the whites. In Chicago, Homer Yancey became known for his virulently anti-Negro views. He denounced blacks at public gatherings, and fought against civil rights. He had become a true white supremacist, and preached against social, political, and economic equality for blacks. In Chicago, it was said that “the black man never had a worse enemy than Homer Yancey.” At home in Georgia, Homer’s picture was turned against the wall and his name was forever banished from family conversation.

  Aytch Yancey never talked to the children and the grandchildren about his brother Homer.

  VI

  Where Are We?

  21

  Dollars and Cents

  The largest black-owned business in the United States today is Berry Gordy, Jr.’s, Motown Industries, Inc. Motown employs some 375 people, and has annual sales in the neighborhood of $45,000,000. Next to Motown, John Johnson’s publishing company and George Johnson’s cosmetics manufacturing firm run just about neck and neck in terms of size, with sales of about $40,000,000 a year each. In the entertainment industry, Motown is something of a phenomenon; it has been in business barely fifteen years. And its president and chairman of the board, Mr. Gordy, has come to be regarded as something of a mystery man. One of the mysteries is: How could a man with so little education and business experience create such a large business in so short a time?

  Born about forty-five years ago—he dislikes revealing his age—on Detroit’s Lower East Side, the son of a plasterer father and a mother who was an insurance agent, Berry Gordy dropped out of Detroit’s Northeastern High School in the eleventh grade to become a featherweight boxer. Gordy is a small, compact man who still weighs a trim 140 pounds, and has a round, not unhandsome face with a nose that looks as though it had been pushed in in a fistfight. It was, several times. Between 1948 and 1951, Gordy fought fifteen Golden Gloves fights, knocking out seven of his opponents and beating five others. Then his boxing career was interrupted when he was drafted into the army and sent to Korea.

  When he was discharged in 1953, Gordy returned to Detroit where, using what money he had saved in the army, his discharge pay, and $700 borrowed from his father, Gordy decided to go into the record-store business. “I loved jazz,” Gordy says. “Stan Kenton, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker—and so I decided to concentrate on jazz. I wanted to let people know I was modern, so I called the place the 3-D Record Mart. But people started coming in and asking for things like Fats Domino. Pretty soon I was asking, ‘Who is this Fats Domino? What is this rhythm-and-blues stuff?’ I listened and ordered a few records by these people, and sold them. But all my capital was tied up in jazz, and jazz didn’t have the facts, man, the beat.” The 3-D Record Mart shortly went bankrupt.

  For a while, Gordy became what is known as a “street hustler.” He did odd jobs. For a while, he worked for his father. Then he took an $85-a-week job with the Ford Motor Company, where he worked on the assembly line, tacking on the upholstery of Lincoln cars. Working at this boring occupation, “to keep from going crazy,” Berry Gordy began composing songs in his head. When he got home at night, he wrote them down. On weekend evenings, he roamed around Detroit’s nightclubs and bars, trying to interest singing groups in performing his songs. A few did, and a few were placed on records. The results were not distinguished. Finally Gordy decided to try to produce records of his songs himself. He rented a small recording studio, hired some musicians, and put his songs on records, sometimes with himself as vocalist. Periodically, whenever he had enough money scraped together, he set off for New York to try to persuade the big record companies to listen to his songs and, perhaps, to buy them. His first sale, to Decca, was a song called “Reet Peteet,” which Gordy wrote with his sister Gwen. It earned him $1,000. His first real success was with a song called “Way Over There,” in 1959. It sold 60,000 copies.

  Berry Gordy’s greatest
talent, some people say, is an ability to listen to good advice when it is given to him. With the success of “Way Over There,” a songwriter friend named William Robinson suggested that, instead of selling his titles to record companies from master cuts, Gordy should start mass-producing records under his own label. “Why work for the Man?” Robinson said. “Why not you be the Man?” Gordy agreed, and Motown—for “Motor Town,” Detroit’s nickname, was born. Another $700—which seems to have been Gordy’s favorite borrowing figure—was obtained from his father and, in 1960, “Shop Around” was the first song published under the new Motown label. The song had been written by Robinson, who was then only nineteen years old, and performed by his group, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Within a year, a million copies of “Shop Around” had been sold, and Motown was on its way.

  But despite the success of “Shop Around,” the young company had definite growing pains. Berry Gordy, it began to seem, might be a tough and able administrator of his new company and might possess an ear for hit songs. But he was not a particularly talented money manager. One of the problems in the beginning was that Gordy had relied on financially shaky independent distributors to place the record before the public. When the first record became a hit, a number of these overextended themselves in order to handle the sudden volume. It began to seem as though—though Motown was earning a lot of money on paper—there was going to be some difficulty collecting the money owed the company in cash. The distributors, who had borrowed heavily to handle the unexpected volume, could not pay their own bills and could not pay Motown. Incredibly, it also began to seem as though the cost of a hit might be another bankruptcy for Gordy. But at that point Gordy’s sister stepped in, took over the collection of the money that was owed, and managed to raise enough cash to keep the company going.

  Gordy, meanwhile, busied himself by rounding up bright young songwriters and performers. He plucked the Supremes—Diana Ross and her friends Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson—right out of high school. (Miss Ross had already earned a certain reputation locally for her singing in a Detroit Baptist church.) Along the way, he also found Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations. Gordy wanted to develop what he called “the Motown sound,” a style he describes as “a combination of rats, roaches, dirty dishes, and soul, but that’s really a ghetto sound. It could happen in Harlem, Chicago, or anyplace else.” He divided his company into three divisions—Hitsville, U.S.A., which controls the company’s recording studios; the Jobete Music Company—an acronym from the first names of Gordy’s three children, Hazel Joy, Berry, and Terry—which holds and markets the copyrights on songs written by Gordy himself; and the division called International Talent Management, Inc., a “finishing school” for Motown’s performing artists.

  International Talent Management was an unusual operation in many ways. Since Motown’s artists were for the most part young blacks who had grown up in the ghetto or on the streets and who lacked any degree of sophistication, Gordy decided that it was important that they learn to present themselves properly and attractively to the public. In his school, performers were taught how to speak, walk, shake hands—“a firm grip is most important”—how to sit, smile, pose for a photographer, and how to hop up onto a piano. Performers were given lessons in makeup, grooming—“a bath at least once a day is most important”—and stage choreography. Sometimes it took as long as six months for a performer to complete the course to Gordy’s satisfaction. Even more valuable lessons were given in money management and how to avoid the temptation of high living and compulsive spending that often overtakes people who suddenly, and with no preparation, find themselves with large amounts of money in their hands. A singer’s professional life—like an athlete’s—is often brief, and Motown’s young performers were reminded that poorhouses are full of old performers who, once upon a time, made thousands. At Gordy’s “school,” performers were instructed in the difference between a checking account and a savings account, the difference between a stock and a bond. They were taught about tax shelters and investments, and were reminded of something many of the young performers had never heard of—the existence of the Internal Revenue Service.

  In his record-publishing business, Gordy decided to go after hits rather than volume. He held down the weekly output to one or two titles, less than half the production of other record companies. To get the quality of sound he wanted for a hit song, Gordy sometimes insisted on dozens of retakes on a recording before he was satisfied. With this tactic, Gordy soon managed to boast that three out of every four Motown songs were hits—an unusually high average in the record industry. Motown’s most successful group, in all likelihood, was Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Gordy likes to say that he “made” the Supremes. It is probably equally true that the Supremes made Berry Gordy. In any case, by 1967 Motown was grossing $30,000,000 a year in record sales.

  At the same time, Gordy and his financially savvy sister were keeping Motown’s overhead low, operating out of eight ramshackle houses on both sides of Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard. In 1970, however, Gordy decided that, despite Motown, Detroit would never be an entertainment capital, and that he should move his company to the heart of things: Hollywood. The company now operates out of the tenth and penthouse floors of an eleven-story building on Sunset Boulevard.

  On the West Coast, Motown continued to expand. Today, as chairman of the board and president of Motown Industries, Inc., Berry Gordy controls not only the Motown Record Corporation (which still maintains offices and recording studios in Detroit) but other subsidiary companies, including Jobete Music, Stone Diamond Music Corporation, Stein & Van Stock, Inc. (all music publishing firms), Motown, Inc. (a New York production office), Motown-Weston-Furre Productions—which was formed to produce the movie Lady Sings the Blues—and Multimedia Management, which evolved from Gordy’s International Talent Management Corporation. Gordy likes to say that his business was built on “love and character.” He does not claim much business acumen, and for the last several years his chief business mentor has been a white New Yorker named Michael Roskind. Roskind is credited with Motown’s expansion into motion pictures, television, and Broadway theatre. There have also been rumors of “other interests moving in” to Motown. These Gordy hotly denies.

  Berry Gordy usually refers to himself grandly in the third person as “the company president,” and he is a cheerful believer in wholesale nepotism. His mother, father, brothers, sisters, and in-laws are all on the company president’s payroll. Gordy’s life-style is expansive, not to say extravagant. He is a ferocious golfer, often travels with his personal golf pro, and becomes even more ferocious when he loses a match, breaking expensive golf clubs across his knee five at a time. Clearly, the rules of thrift and prudence that his company tries to impress upon its artists do not apply to Berry Gordy, Jr. He loves to gamble, and frequently jets to Las Vegas, where he always sports a large bankroll. His collection of silk and velvet suits in every color of the rainbow is legendary, as is his collection of huge, floppy pocket scarves and neckties. He owns more monogrammed silk shirts than a Jay Gatsby could have wished for in his wildest dreams. Berry Gordy loves parties and pretty girls—he has been married and divorced twice—and for some time his relationship with Diana Ross was so well publicized that it was assumed the two would marry. At the time Gordy commented, “We haven’t chosen to be married for several reasons.” Then he laughed and added that he had “tried to marry her a couple of times. But why should she marry me when she’s got me already? She’s free, rich, and talented. Get married for what?” Shortly thereafter, Diana Ross married a white publicist named Robert Ellis—apparently to Gordy’s distinct surprise. A Motown official commented, “The whole company is surprised and hurt by it.”

  In manner, the company president is autocratic and aloof—and often rude. When, at the suggestion of his financial advisor, Mr. Roskind, Gordy put money into the Broadway musical Pippin, he was invited to the customary backers’ audi
tion. Gordy yawned and fidgeted all through the first act, and then wanted to leave. The show’s producer, Stuart Ostrow, said to him, “You can’t do that, Mr. Gordy. It would be an insult to the director and the entire cast and company.” So Gordy remained for the second act, looking bored. Now that Pippin has paid back Gordy’s original investment of $135,000 at a ratio of five to one, with more money still to come, Gordy has taken to calling himself “The producer of Pippin,” which amuses the actual producer, Mr. Ostrow. “He wasn’t even a major backer,” Ostrow says.