Yes I Can: The Story of Sammy Davis, Jr. (2 page)

I was born in Harlem on December 8, 1925. My father was the lead dancer in Will Mastin’s
Holiday in Dixieland
, a vaudeville troupe in which my mother, Elvera “Baby” Sanchez, was a top chorus girl. Good jobs were scarce so she remained in the line until two weeks before I was born. Then, as soon as she was able to dance, she boarded me with friends in Brooklyn, and continued on the road with my father and the show.

My grandmother, Rosa B. Davis, came out from Harlem to see me and wrote to my father, “I never saw a dirtier child in my life. They leave Sammy alone all day so I’ve taken him with me. I’m going to make a home for that child.”

I heard my father call my grandmother “Mama” so I called her Mama, and this was appropriate because by the time I could speak I thought of her as that.

Mama was housekeeper for one family for twenty years, cooking, cleaning, ironing, and raising their children and me at the same time.

One day she returned to the nursery school at which she’d been leaving me. The nurse was surprised. “We thought you were on your job, Mrs. Davis.”

“Something told me get off the streetcar and see what you’re doing with my Sammy. Now I find you put these two other children in his carriage with him and you got Sammy all scrooched up in a corner of his own carriage. I bought that carriage for Sammy. Paid cash for it. Now you got him so he can’t stretch out in his own carriage. Get those kids out of Sammy’s carriage.”

She began taking me to work with her. On her days off she took me to the park and put me on the swings. Nobody else could push or touch me. When her friends saw us coming they snickered, “Here comes Rosa Davis and her Jesus.” Mama’s reply was, “He’s a Jesus to me.”

When I was two my parents had a daughter, Ramona, whom they sent to live with my mother’s family while they stayed on the road. Six months later they separated. My mother joined another travelling show, Connors’ Hot Chocolate, and my father came home to get me.

“Sam, this child’s too young to go on the road.”

“Hell, Mama, I’m his father and I say he goes on the road. I ain’t leaving him here so’s Elvera can come in and take him away. ‘Sides, I want my son with me.”

When the train moved into the tunnel and I couldn’t see Mama anymore I stopped waving and settled back in my seat. My father started taking off my coat, my leggings and my hat. “Where we goin’, Daddy?”

He smiled and put his arm around me. “We’re goin’ into show business, son.”

Our first stop was the Pitheon Theatre in Pittsburgh. I was backstage with my father all day, but at night he left me at the rooming house with a chair propped against the bed and often I didn’t see him again until the next afternoon. Will Mastin came in every morning, bathed me in the sink and made my breakfast, Horlick’s malted milk, which he mixed with hot water from the tap. We were great
friends. He spent hours making funny faces at me and I loved making the same faces right back at him. One afternoon I was in the dressing room playing with the make-up, trying to use the powder puffs and tubes and pencils on my face the way I always saw my father and Will doing it. Will was watching me. “Here, let me show you how to do that.” I sat on his chair while he put blackface on me. Then he took a tube of clown white, gave me the big white lips and winked, “Now you look like Al Jolson.” I winked back. He snapped his fingers like he’d gotten an idea, and sent for our prima donna who sang “Sonny Boy.” “Next show,” he told her, “take Sammy onstage, hold him in your lap and keep singing no matter what happens.”

As she sang, I looked over her shoulder and saw Will in the wings playing our game, rolling his eyes and shaking his head at me and I rolled my eyes and shook my head right back at him. The prima donna hit a high note and Will held his nose. I held my nose, too. But Will’s faces weren’t half as funny as the prima donna’s so I began copying hers instead: when her lips trembled, my lips trembled, and I followed her all the way from a heaving bosom to a quivering jaw. The people out front were watching me, laughing. When we got off, Will knelt to my height. “Listen to that applause, Sammy, some of it’s for you.” My father was crouched beside me, too, smiling, pleased with me. “You’re a born mugger, son, a born mugger.” He and Will both had their arms around me.

When we arrived at our next town Will began giving out meal tickets to the troupe. Once an act had its name up on a theater, there were restaurants in show towns that would give food on credit. They’d issue a meal ticket good for a week’s food and we’d settle with them on payday. Will gave my father his ticket and then put one in my pocket. “Here you are, Mose Gastin. You got a meal ticket coming to you same as anyone else in the troupe.”

I took it out of my pocket and held it. “Okay, Massey.” I couldn’t say Mastin. Why he called me Mose Gastin or where he got that name I don’t know.

Will built up a new show called
Struttin’ Hannah from Savannah
. Curvy, sexy Hannah was struttin’ from Savannah to New York. On the way, she’d pass a house with a picket fence, see me playing in the yard with a pail and shovel and do a slinky Mae West kind of walk over to me. “Hi, Buster. Any place around here where a lady can get a room?” She’d turn to me and roll her eyes, but the audience
could only see me wildly rolling my eyes back at her. “Hey, are you a little kid or a midget?” Then she’d wink, also without the audience seeing it, and I’d wink back hard and long.

Between shows I’d stand in the wings watching the other acts, like Moss and Fry, Butterbeans and Susie, The Eight Black Dots, and Pot, Pan & Skillet. It never occurred to me to play with the pail and shovel, they were my props, part of the act, and I didn’t think of them as toys. At mealtime, I’d sit with my father, Will, and the other performers, listening to them talk show business, hearing about the big vaudeville acts that played the Keith “time.” Keith was far over our heads. Shows like ours, Connors’ Hot Chocolate and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers played small time like TOBA and Butterfield but there was no end of stories to be heard about the great acts who worked the big time.

We always rented the cheapest room we could find, and my father and I shared the bed. He’d turn out the light and say, “Well, good night, Poppa.” Then I’d hear a scratching sound. I’d sit up, fast. “What’s that, Daddy?”

“I didn’t hear nothin’.”

The scratching would start again. I’d be suspicious. “Lemme see your hands.”

“Fine thing when a kid don’t trust his own daddy.” He’d hold both hands in the air and I’d lie down, watching them. The scratching would start again.

“Whatsat, Daddy? Whatsat? Lemme see your feet, too.”

He put his feet in the air along with his hands. “Now how d’you expect a man to sleep like this, Poppa?” The game was over then and I’d snuggle in close to him where it was safe.

We were playing the Standard Theater in Philadelphia when he said, “Good news, Poppa. There’s a amateur dance contest here at the theater day after we close. Course, there’s sixteen other kids’d be against you. And all of ‘em older’n you. You suppose you c’d beat ‘em?”

“Yes.”

I was only three but I’d spent hundreds of hours watching Will and my father work, and imitating their kind of dancing. They were doing a flash act—twelve dancers with fifteen minutes to make an impression or starve. The other kids in the contest were dancing in fox-trot time but when I came on, all the audience could see was a blur—just two small legs flying! I got a silver cup and ten dollars.
My father took me straight over to A. S. Beck’s shoe store and bought me a pair of black pumps with taps.

We hung around Philadelphia hoping to get booked, but our money ran out and my father had to call Mama for a loan. She told him, “That’s no life for Sammy if you gotta call me for money. I’m sending you fare to bring him home.”

He told Will, “Guess she’s right. This ain’t no life for a kid. Trouble is, I can’t bring myself to leave him there and travel around without him now. I’ll just have to get me a job around home doin’ somethin’ else.” I saw tears in my father’s eyes. “I’ll always wanta be in show business, Will. It’s my life. So anytime you need me, just say the word.”

Massey picked me up and hugged me. “Be a good boy, Mose Gastin. And don’t worry. We’ll be working together again someday.”

Mama was waiting up for us when we got home. I put on my shoes and ran into the front room to show them to her. My father proudly explained how I’d won them. Mama turned on her player-piano and I did my routine. She smiled. “My, oh my! You’re a real dancer now.” She shook her head at my father. “You buy him shoes when you don’t have money for food. I always knew you was smart.”

My father left the apartment every morning and came back at dinner time, but after a week he was still without a job. “I couldn’t bring myself to look for nothin’ outside of show business, Mama. I’ll do it tomorrow. I really will.”

But each day it was the same thing. He was spending his time hanging around backstage with the dancers at the Odeon Theater. When he came home he’d just stare out the window, shaking his head. “I can dance circles around them guys. I’m over them like the sky is over the world, and they’re making $150 a week.”

Before I was born he’d driven cabs in New York, shined shoes, cooked, pulled fires on the Erie Railroad, and run an elevator at Roseland Dance Hall. Then he’d won some Charleston contests, met Will, and from then on there was only one way of life for him.

One night he looked over and saw Mama and me dancing. That was the first thing that brightened him up. “Mama, just whut’n hell do you call what you’re doin’ with him?”

“We’re doin’ the time step.”

He laughed. “Hell, that ain’t no time step.”

Mama snapped back. “Maybe so, but we like it. And if Sammy likes it, then anything to make him happy.”

I couldn’t stand the way he was laughing at me. I tried harder to do it the way he’d shown me but he kept shaking his head. “Damnedest thing how he can do some tough ones and can’t do the easiest of all. Here, lemme show you again.” He did a time step. “Now you do it.” I tried to copy it. “Hell, you ain’t doin’ nothin’.” I kept trying, harder and harder but I couldn’t get it right. He said, “Here, looka this.” He showed me his airplane step and some of the really hard steps I’d seen him and Will do in the act. “Some day maybe you’ll be able to do that, too, Poppa.” Then he went back to the window.

I heard Mama laughing excitedly. “Look at your son flyin’ across the room.”

I was doing a trick of his with one hand on the floor, the other in the air and my two feet kicking out in front of me. He snapped out of his melancholy and almost split his sides laughing. The harder he laughed the harder I kicked. He bent down and put his face right in front of mine. “Betcha I can make you laugh, Poppa.” He made a very serious face and stared at me. I bit my lips and tried desperately to keep a straight face, but that always made me die laughing.

He lost interest in me again and went back to the window, staring at the street, leafing through an old copy of
Variety
which he’d already read a dozen times. Suddenly he smacked the arm of the chair and stood up. “Mama, I’m wiring Will to send me a ticket. I’m in the wrong business here.”

She snapped, “You ain’t in
no
business here.”

“Maybe so, but it’s better to go hungry when you’re happy than to eat regular when you’re dead. And I’m good as dead out of show business.”

A few days later a letter arrived Special Delivery from Will. My father pulled his suitcase out from under the bed. I ran to the closet for my shoes and put them in the suitcase alongside his. He took them out and I held my breath as he stared at them, balancing them in one hand. Then he slapped me on the back, put them in the suitcase and laughed. “Okay, Poppa, you’re comin’ too.”

Holding hands we half-walked, half-danced toward Penn Station, smiling at everybody.

“Where we goin’, Daddy?”

“We’re goin’ back into show business, Poppa!”

We rarely remained in one place more than a week or two, yet there was never a feeling of impermanence. Packing suitcases and riding on trains and buses were as natural to me as a stroll in a carriage might be to another child. Although I had travelled ten states and played over fifty cities by the time I was four, I never felt I was without a home. We carried our roots with us: our same boxes of make-up in front of the mirrors, our same clothes hanging on iron pipe racks with our same shoes under them. Only the details changed, like the face on the man sitting inside the stage door, or which floor our dressing room was on. But there was always an audience, other performers for me to watch, always the show talk, all as dependably present as the walls of a nursery.

We arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, on a Sunday, and Will gave everybody the day off. We were doing the three-a-day, from
town to town, so most of our troupe spent the time catching up on sleep, which was also the cheapest thing they could do. I wasn’t tired so I wandered into the parlor of our rooming house. Rastus Airship, one of our dancers, was reading a paper, and Obie Smith, our pianist, was rehearsing on an upright. I started doing the parts of the show along with him. Rastus left the room and came back with Will and my father and I did the whole hour-and-twenty-minute show for them, doing everybody’s dances, singing everybody’s songs, and telling all the jokes. People were coming in from other rooms and from the way they were watching me I knew I was doing good. When I finished our closing number, Will said, “From now on you’re going to dance and sing in the act.” My father picked me up, “Damned if he ain’t,” and carried me around the room introducing me to everybody we’d been living with for the past year. “This is my son. Meet my son, Sammy Davis, Jr.”

She was much prettier than any of the girls in our show. I started to shake hands with her but she knelt down and hugged me and when she kissed me her eyes were wet.

“You cryin’?”

She touched her eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m happy to see my little boy, that’s all.”