My mother, Emma Johnson, and my brother, Clyde, were already a lockstep duo by the time I showed up on the scene. Clyde was six, and nobody knew how old my mother was. She refused to tell her age to me or anybody. Still, I tried to get it out of her once in a while. I’m not sure why. She was notorious for answering my questions with a question.
“Why do you want to know?” she would say.
“Because it’s your birthday,” I’d answer. “So, how old are you?”
“Why does it matter?”
“I’d just like to know.”
She would light a Kool cigarette and give me a look.
“I’m old enough to be your mother.”
That’s as far as I’d get.
As a kid, I tried not to annoy my mom by asking too many questions. In the 1960s, adults didn’t think kids should know their business, at least not in my neighborhood.
It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that she told me a secret she had kept for forty years, and it gave me a lot more insight into why she was the way she was and how I got to be the way I am.
I thought my mother was the most interesting, beautiful, funny, and wise person in the world. And Clyde was the coolest sibling anybody could possibly have. I felt that way as a kid, and it never changed. I knew I was lucky that my mom and Clyde allowed me to hang with them. It’s not like they didn’t want me to be around. They had bonded in this magical nucleus of two, which they expanded to include me.
The three of us lived in the Chelsea projects at Twenty-Sixth Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, in a five-room apartment on the sixth floor of a twelve-story brick building. There were nine other buildings that matched ours. We had about 2,400 close neighbors. Lots of folks of every color, religion, language, and culture, all packed into a couple of city blocks.
Apparently, we lived in the projects because we were poor, but I didn’t know it. When you’re a little kid, you accept the way things are. Nobody told me what “poor” meant because everyone around me was in the same situation. I lived among a whole lot of people barely getting by. Somehow, my mom made my brother and me feel like we lived at the entrance gate of a big, interesting world in which we could do anything we wanted to do.
From as early on as I remember, my mother would say to me, “Listen. The confines of this neighborhood do not represent the confines of your life. You can go and do and be whatever you want. But, whatever you choose, be yourself.”
I believed her. That’s what made the real difference in my future.
In reality, there was no extra cash, no rainy-day fund, no spare-change jar on top of the fridge. No child support checks came in the mail. No inheritance would be forthcoming. My mother’s mom had died at age fifty, and her father had remarried. Nothing was expected in a will. Emma was on her own, except she wasn’t. She had Clyde and me.
Even when I asked her, well into my adult years, “Ma, how did you take us to see the Ice Capades and the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall and all the other experiences we had?”
She’d answer, “Why are you asking me that?”
I’d say, “Because we always went everywhere and saw everything. How did you do that? How did you make that happen?”
“I have no idea why you’re asking me that,” she’d say.
I’d end up feeling kind of foolish, like I wasn’t asking in the right way. So I’d drop it. It was a mystery to me then, and now that she’s gone, it always will be.
New York City in the 1960s and ’70s was the hub of it all. Everything was going on: pop art, timeless art, classical ballet, the symphony, protest music, Alvin Ailey dancers, beatnik poets, street theater, hippies, civil rights, women’s lib, gay rights, Lincoln Center Theater, film, Miles Davis, Birdland, Joe Papp and Shakespeare in the Park, and a long line of high-kick dancing women at Radio City Music Hall. Everything was a fifteen-cent bus or subway ride away, ten cents for kids.
My mother would figure out which days were free at the galleries and museums and make sure that Clyde and I were out the door to go see the newest exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the American Museum of Natural History, even though she could rarely go with us because of her job.
At home, our tabletop record player played all types of music: Lady Day; Bing Crosby; Ella Fitzgerald; Peter, Paul and Mary; Pavarotti; the Supremes; Sinatra; and the Beatles. My mother had an eye and ear for what she liked, and she liked the Beatles.
The Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965. My mother had somehow scored tickets. Our seats were way up high, along the top rim of the stadium. Huge floodlights buzzed right over our heads, but it didn’t matter. We were in the stadium with fifty-six thousand other fans. Not many other nine-year-old kids were in that crowd, watching four guys from England in matching jackets and black pants sing “Can’t Buy Me Love,” but my mom made it happen for me.
For some reason, she wasn’t a fan of the Rolling Stones’ music and didn’t want it played in the house. I think I remember her saying something about them “being dirty.” I thought she meant unbathed, but it was probably about the lyrics. My mother rarely said anything negative about anybody. She thought “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Get Off of My Cloud” were not as sweet as “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
There wasn’t much room for complaining when I was growing up. My mother would say, “If you’re going to feel bad today, then make it big. Lie on the couch and throw your wrist across your forehead and sigh loudly, so we all know what’s going on for you. That way we can step back and say, ‘Okay. That’s what she’s doing now. Go ahead. Get it over with. I’ll wait.’”
She did not believe in self-pity. Her attitude was simple, and one of the big things she put in my head was this: “You’ve got two choices. You can waste a lot of time complaining, or you can get up and figure out how to fix it.”
My mother was clear: “I have to be practical. I have two kids. I can’t spend a lot of time crying about what I don’t have. I have to figure out what I do have and go from there.” That was her approach. She didn’t complain or explain. However, my mother laughed. A lot. She loved a good reason to laugh. Clyde and I got the same gene. The three of us knew how to have a good time together.
When I was about eight, my mother, brother, and I took a subway and maybe a bus to Rockaways’ Playland amusement park. That kind of adventure was always a treat day. The park had a fun house entrance, a giant barrel that rotated slowly on its side, and you had to walk through as it spun to the side under your feet.
Clyde made it through, no problem. I crossed through next. Then, we heard my mother’s laugh. We looked back into the barrel and saw her on her hands and knees, trying to keep from tipping over as the barrel turned. Whenever she tried to stand up again, she would laugh harder and fall back to the floor.
Clyde inched back in to give her a hand up and ended up on his ass, too. So, you know, I thought I’d better get back in there and join them. The three of us tumbled from side to side, Clyde and me screaming with laughter and my mother’s light musical laugh bouncing around in the barrel.
Eventually, a carnival worker turned the whole thing off, hoping to get this crazy family out of there.
As a little kid, I always felt secure and loved. I thought everything would come out okay because my mom was in charge. Between her and Clyde and me, I thought we could do anything.
It wasn’t until I was older that I really understood what my mother had to go through to keep a roof over our heads. My father and mother had separated, so I didn’t grow up with him. She tried to get him to pay some support through the courts, but helping black women living in the projects wasn’t high on the state court’s priority list, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer who might have gotten something done.
Still, she refused to apply for welfare, saying, “If I am able to work and take care of my own, then I should do that.” She didn’t like the stigma of being on welfare. I saw her cry once or twice about being unable to pay her taxes. But as a kid, I never grasped that we were always one paycheck away from the worst-case scenario.
Kind of like the fun house barrel, my mother never got to stand still for a minute and let someone else handle it all for a while. No one was going to show up and rescue her, and she knew it. There was no alternative plan to fall back on. Whatever challenges she had to face, she somehow managed. And she did it alone.
Clyde and I never thought she needed rescuing. She had an air of authority. We didn’t question it. But in reality, she had to endure a whole lot of stuff that would’ve beaten down somebody with less backbone.
In 1994, eight years after I starred in the movie Jumpin’ Jack Flash, I called my mom up to ask her a question.
“Ma, the Rolling Stones want me to come to Miami for the filming of their Voodoo Lounge Tour, introduce them to the crowd, and then join them onstage when they perform ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’ Do you want to go with me?”
I wasn’t sure how she’d answer, considering how she’d felt about them during my childhood, but she told me she’d like to attend.
When I joined Mick Jagger on stage for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” I looked down from the stage to see my mother up and dancing in the front row, holding her cigarette lighter high above her head. (Back then, we didn’t have cell phones to wave around, so lighters held by thousands of fans had to do.) I couldn’t take my eyes off her—my mother having a great time rockin’ to the Stones.
I looked at her and started laughing. She looked back at me and laughed. That’s how we did life, right up to the day she died.