Traveling Soul (21 page)

Traveling the South, my father saw how much his message songs were needed. He witnessed firsthand the hope and terror coursing through places like Alabama, where a few weeks after
People Get Ready
came out, King and the SCLC joined a march from Selma to Montgomery. With the Civil Rights Act still facing violent resistance, the marchers planned on demanding voting rights at the state capital.

The first attempt, on March 7, became known as “Bloody Sunday”
after state and local police brutalized the marchers with clubs and tear gas as white spectators cheered and whistled. After a second attempt ended in failure—without violence this time—President Johnson addressed a nationwide television audience. Seventy million people watched Johnson say, “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.” He ended by quoting the movement's slogan, vowing, “We shall overcome” America's “crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Never before had the movement received such strong federal endorsement.

The day after Johnson's speech, events in Montgomery foreshadowed the new direction the movement would take. That day, a group of Montgomery sheriff's deputies attacked a crowd of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers with nightsticks. Witnesses reported hearing the sound of the sticks cracking against skulls up and down the block. After the attack, SNCC's James Forman told the crowd if Montgomery was unwilling to let Negroes sit at the table of government, then SNCC would knock the “fucking legs” off the table.

Forman wasn't alone in advocating “violent overthrow of the government.” Stokely Carmichael, a young movement worker who had been active since the early freedom rides, ascended the ranks of SNCC and thrust the organization toward militancy. Like Forman, Carmichael demanded a policy of freedom by “any means necessary.” His ideas would soon father the next phase of the movement.

Around the time Curtis returned home from tour, King announced the SCLC would target Chicago as the first city in its northern campaign. King desperately needed to succeed in Chicago. For all his gains in the South, he knew life had barely changed for the vast majority of Negroes around the country. Even when it did change in places like Birmingham and Montgomery, it often went right back as soon as the SCLC left town. It seemed the future of the nonviolent movement, already teetering, would be decided by what happened in Dad's hometown.

King faced formidable odds in Chicago. The organizations he once counted on as allies were in the midst of power struggles between the old guard and a younger, angrier faction. James Farmer lost control of CORE
to Floyd McKissick, a Malcolm X devotee. SNCC fractured from within as the pacifist Bob Moses fought for control with Carmichael, who had just about run out of patience with the nonviolent movement.

As King prepared for the Chicago campaign and
People Get Ready
struck a chord with movement workers, my father continued writing for OKeh. He gave Major three hits—“Sometimes I Wonder,” “Come See,” and “Ain't It a Shame”—and wrote “You Can't Hurt Me No More” and “I'm So Afraid” for the Opals, a girl group modeled after the Supremes. Gene Chandler remade “Rainbow” as “Rainbow '65,” and took it to number two on the R&B chart. Meanwhile, the Impressions had eight songs on the charts and a number-one album. “We were so hot,” Fred said. “I never will forget, I was looking in
Billboard
and they had Sam, Curtis, and myself standing in a big skillet, flames shooting up around us, because we were just so hot.”

It is hard to think of any songwriter with more hits at one time than Curtis during this period, let alone the number of hits he'd written over the past three years. His songs had built OKeh into a first-rate label. They'd made Major Lance, Gene Chandler, Billy Butler, and half a dozen others into stars and took the Impressions from one-hit wonders to premier social commentators and legends in the making.

Dad knew he was good. He proved it relentlessly with hit after hit. His success was a resounding answer to everyone who wrote him off because of his poverty, stature, or looks; to everyone who had hurt or mocked him as a child; to every record label that rejected him because they didn't like his songs or his voice. As Eddie says about Vee-Jay, “They thought they had the cream of the crop, which was Jerry Butler. They had no idea they were throwing away the greatest songwriter I've ever known in this business. The cream of the crop was Curtis Mayfield.” They paid for it, too, as my father gave ABC and OKeh his constant stream of hits and the untold millions of dollars they earned.

In mid-1965, Diane told Curtis he'd soon have a second son—me. The news came at a point when their relationship had started showing signs of strain. My mother had difficulty dealing with my father's idiosyncrasies, and they fought often. When they first met, she noticed the loner in him, but she didn't realize he was a borderline recluse. On tour, he preferred to stay in his hotel room; at home, he felt most comfortable in his den with his guitar. “We would go to friends' houses, either a party or Jerry Butler's house, but he never wanted to stay very long,” she says. “He'd say, ‘Either leave now or figure out how to get home.' And sometimes I'd leave and sometimes I'd catch a cab. But he was never a social person. His mother was kind of a loner. He was kind of a loner. He could go in the den, play his music, be creative. He didn't need to be around people.”

He'd always been that way. It helped him handle the pressures of life, and with the added pressures of fame, he needed the solace of his guitar more than ever. It was his shield against the outside world.

My mother also discovered a tempest churning beneath his cool demeanor. “He seemed like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth—real easygoing,” she says. “But that was his facade in front of people. He was moody, so it would just depend on his mood.” His mood could swing from loving and affectionate to dark and brooding at a moment's notice. It was the Gemini in him. His mind changed as fast as his mood—he often made last-minute plans to go to the Bahamas or Bermuda, and it had to happen now. The longer it took to leave, the more likely he'd change the plan or scrap it altogether.

She also had learned about his intense need for control. “He picked my friends,” my mother says. “When I was trying to be friends with the lady down the street, and I wanted to go to a movie with the kids, he said no. He didn't know her, so I couldn't go with her.” Dad's controlling nature seemed to contradict the way he worked as a musician. Everyone who played for him knew him as easy and free in the studio. Only those closest to him saw the truth—beneath that laid-back demeanor lurked a man who needed control and almost always had it.

That need came from growing up in treacherous circumstances. Childhood in the White Eagle taught him what happened when you
didn't control your finances, your relationships, or your life. His mother couldn't control those things, and as a result, his family starved and suffered. The lesson was sewn into his sinew and bone. Music gave him the power to overcome. It gave him control over himself and his family. It let him lift his friends from the ghetto with the power of his songs. He could never have total control, though. He couldn't control racist radio programmers who put a lid on the success his songs could achieve. He couldn't control which songs hit and which flopped. He couldn't control his own insecurities. He couldn't always control my mother, either, especially with her fiery demeanor.

Pursuing total control worked in the studio, where success was the only rule. It did not work in a romantic relationship. Even though he loved to buy my mother things—especially jewelry, including three wedding rings, though they never officially married—that didn't make up for his shortcomings as a husband. “He was a better father than a husband,” my mother says. “He spoiled the kids, where I was more frugal. But with his schedule, a lot of times, I'd cook dinner, he wasn't there. He'd come home, eleven or twelve o'clock at night, expect me to heat it up or fix him something to eat. And sometimes it was OK and sometimes it wasn't. When he was in the studio, I'd understand. But you don't know if they're always in the studio.”

My mother's fears were justified. Once the Impressions became famous, Dad had never been faithful to any woman. “Because of who he was, there were always women after him, and that makes it hard for a man, I guess, to say no,” my mother says. “I think he was addicted to sex.”

They'd fight often about lipstick on his collar and other indiscretions, and even though my mother was a louder and more forceful arguer, Dad didn't end his affairs. It became a constant issue, harder to deal with given his expectation that she only socialize with people he picked for her. He wanted a woman who bent to his wishes. My mother was no such woman. Growing up, it often seemed strange to me how they came together at all.

Dad's obsession with control could be both dark and comical. For instance, in the late '60s, he and my mother moved into a house in Pill
Hill, and my mother received an offer to model. My father's half sister Ann came to watch Tracy and me on the day the modeling gig was to take place. On a break at the studio, Dad called the house and found out about the modeling gig from Ann. He jumped in his car and sped home, screeching into the driveway before my mother could leave and demanding she stay home. She yelled, “I want to work! I want my own money!” He shot back, “You want money?” Then he snatched a wad of cash from his pocket and threw it at her. It caught the wind and blew all over the street. As my mother peeled out of the driveway, she watched him recede in the rearview, scrambling to gather the money he'd thrown to the breeze.

Like many a self-conscious man in love with a beautiful woman, Curtis wanted to control Diane's every move. He couldn't give her the space to make her own decisions—it felt too dangerous, especially when she decided to do something as fraught with sex appeal as modeling. As in most things, he was capable of the grand gesture—whisking her away to the islands, buying her the three wedding rings—but he couldn't do the small things necessary to keep their relationship alive. Things like supporting her ambition to earn her own money, or helping around the house, or pitching in with the grunt work required to raise Tracy and me. He did love her, but his love often came from a place of insecurity. Inside, he was still the little boy called Smut, the one pretty girls laughed at or ignored.

That insecurity was wearing off in his professional life. He'd grown accustomed to others complying with his wishes when it came to business, and no one challenged him in the studio. With each new hit, he became more confident. He trusted his instincts, and if a musician didn't see things his way, he found someone else who did. Even Fred and Sam followed his lead. He expected the same from his personal life, and his temper sometimes flared when he didn't get it.

While my parents prepared for my arrival, Dad decided to leave OKeh. He couldn't continue to supply hits to the label's entire roster while also
writing, touring, and promoting for the Impressions. “He was always up late writing,” my mother recalls. “I could hear him playing the guitar. He was always taping songs and going back over them. That was his main focus: writing, writing, writing.”