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Last Updated: Sep 2nd, 2009 - 13:04:47 |
I have never been a big fan of Michael Jackson but my heart burst with sadness when I heard of his death. Beginning in 1969, I grew up with Michael and his brothers as the first, most visible promise of our post-Civil Rights generation.
Yet, in the ensuing decades, Michael embodied, instead, a dream deferred, a shooting star that gleamed brightly in the distance but was, at the same time, engulfed in flame. His body—cut, hacked, chemically peeled and altered—became a walking-talking Rorschach test for American society, as well as a symbol for the self-inflicted crucifixion of the Black body.
Even when the Jackson Five burst on the scene in 1968, with all five brothers older than me, I preferred the quiet, behind-the-scenes Marlon, mainly because he was a fellow Pisces. My older sister and her friends were wild over Jermaine, the alter vocal lead on the Jackson Five hits (“You’d better stop, the love you save may be your own…”) that blared from the baby blue plastic radio over our kitchen sink. I remember like yesterday the group’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” how the media pitted the Jackson Five against the Osmonds, and Michael against Donnie Osmond, as if there was any real competition to be had, the prize of glimpsing a Right On! Magazine with Jackson 5 pictures and posters to hang on my beleaguered bedroom wall, the Jackson Five cartoon, their variety show…
Maybe the first sign that Michael had been taken from us, or had left us, was when he sang a song to a rat for the movie “Ben” in 1972. It seemed like in just three years the hit machine had started to drag and we fans were hungry for anything Jackson-related. That same year, I remember spending my whole week’s salary from my so-called summer job, only about $25 (talk about child labor!), to buy Jermaine Jackson’s album Jermaine, which had only one song that I knew but featured, on the cover, the singer in full afro regalia. A few years later, when I was a young teen-ager, the group had faded from the limelight and eventually split with Motown and Berry Gordy in 1975.
By the time Michael reemerged in 1979 with “Off the Wall,” I was a sensitive but confident high schooler heading to college, who was more interested in jazz fusion and Parliament-Funkadelic than pop hits, especially as sung by a seemingly effeminate man. I was less interested in Michael musically and more interested in what his life and fame said to American society about me as a brown-eyed, brown-skinned person with nappy hair—a description that he would soon discard for himself. And, I felt, whether he realized it or not, that he was also sanctioning the discarding of similarly described Black people just in time to be exploited by the re-emergent racist machine, headed by Ronald Reagan.
In the 1980’s, at that fragile time of my twenties, when I was most sensitive about the depiction of Black beauty standards and relationships, I was incredulous and then alarmed at Jackson’s very public physical transformation. First of all, the afro morphed into some sort of jheri curl with the ubiquitous “baby hair” brushed out on the sides. (And then, much later, the hair changed even more into a straightened hairdo worthy of a Clairol commercial). By the time Jackson made his famous moon walk on the “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today and Forever” TV special in 1983, the numerous plastic surgeries and other procedures to lighten his skin and drastically alter his facial features seemed to be well underway. Yes, he would eventually suffer from vitiligo but would, according to one doctor quoted by the columnist Courtland Milloy, opt for a treatment of complete de-pigmentation. His appearance had nothing to do with what I thought of as an attractive man.
I searched for any sign that he might be in a relationship with a Black woman. There was none, despite the sensuous musical videos featuring the flirtatious supermodel Naomi Campbell. So the eventual two marriages to White women, and the fathering of three children, also with White women, were not a surprise but were further confirmation of a Michael Jackson reality that held little attraction to women who look like his unaltered self.
Despite his occasional performances and the 50-concert tour he was planning at the time of his death, Michael had ceased to be a musical presence in my life. During his last trial on child molestation charges, I went on MSNBC to, I suppose, offer a perspective of a Black person of the Jackson 5 generation. I was very clear then, as I am now, that for me it’s not about being “fan” of Jackson but, despite his eccentricities, relating to him as a human being, as a child of God who did not understand that money, power and influence could not make people see the world as he did (like it was O.K. to sleep with other people’s children in his bed), and that it could not buy him life just as he wanted to live it.
I have long since lost interest in his actions as any sort of a reflection on me, African Americans or Black people in general. But it doesn’t mean that I do not/did not embrace him as a Black man. The weekend after his death, I was in New York City and witnessed some of the outpouring of love for him at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Khadija, a city resident, said that it took Michael Jackson’s death to return him to the Black community. “He may not have been ours in life, but we have him now,” she said.
Khadija reminded me of how, during all the years that Michael was labeled a freak, Wacko Jacko etc., for his bizarre habits, like his living relationship with Bubbles the chimp, or false claims (about buying the bones of the Elephant Man, for example), that if he was a freak he was America’s freak. He was what America made him, writ large, so that everyone could see the full terribleness. Now I pray that his soul journeys to a peaceful place and, that if he ever returns here, he loves his face and body and has no pain that he tries to mask under the surgeon’s knife, or with lies, childish make believe or pills. Yes, in many ways, Michael left us a long time ago and we were forced to watch the star on fire from afar. But just like we are all the stuff of stars, he is still in our DNA. Despite his death, we can never say good-bye.
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