La Toya: Growing Up in the Jackson Family

CHAPTER THREE: THE FAMILY ACT (Part I)

"You all are nuthin'."

That's what my father used to tell the wealthiest, most famous, talented black teenagers in America, contempt dripping from every syllable. "You all are weird." We heard it almost daily our entire lives.

Tito confided to me that when they were on the road, Joseph didn't even want to be seen with them. "It's awful, La Toya," he said. "He treats us like we're invisible. If we ask him why, he just looks at us."

Did our father really think so little of his five sons? I believe that systemically destroying their self-worth was Joseph's twisted way of maintaining control over the Jackson 5, his sole source of financial support.. He must have realized now that the guys were older and somewhat exposed to the outside world, they could break away. Certainly if we were still in Indiana and the group never took off, my brothers would have rebelled and tried leading their own lives. There was no way Joseph could have stopped that. But things were different now.

It saddens me to think of all we have missed. Just recently Tito said to me of his school days, "La Toya, whenever I was around kids at school, they always talked about how their fathers took them here and there. And I had nothing to say. I never had that opportunity. Joseph did nothing with us."

"I know," I said softly. "I love you guys."

"We love you too, La Toya. But I don't know how much more of this I can take." Like our father, Tito loved to fish. He added, "I've never even been fishing with him. And I always wanted to do those things with him."

"It's a shame we never had a father," I answered.

All of us needed to feel our father's love, but we rarely if ever did. The only emotions Joseph seemed capable of expressing to us were his anger and disgust.

Jackie, who turned twenty in 1971, still lived at home and continued to receive the brunt of our father's hatred and cruelty. To this day, Joseph blames him for anything that goes wrong, in any situation. “Jackie Boy did it," he'll say scornfully. My father thought nothing of slapping Jackie and the others in public, shocking and repulsing onlookers. Joseph's battering was a well-known secret around Motown. Yet none of them ever fought back. One time, after Joseph threatened to smack Jackie, my older brother reflexively reared back as if to throw a punch.

"What?!" my father roared, striding closer to Jackie. "Did you raise a hand to me?!" With that he crushed his heavy fist into Jackie's face, nearly knocking him unconscious.

"Joseph!" Mother cried, "what are you doing?" There was no use trying to reason with him, for his temper was uncontrollable. At one point the brothers confronted Mother en masse and insisted, "Joseph's got to stop this, or next time we're gonna gang up on him." But it proved an empty threat; with the occasional exception of Michael, none of them ever gave Joseph anything to fear.

   In my father's eyes, we were just a bunch of over-pampered kids. To friends and associates he referred to us as weirdos, and he seemed to resent our new life-style. "When I was your age," he often lectured us, "I didn't live in a big house with a pool. I had to work hard." As if the brothers didn't work hard, rehearsing, recording, and following a punishing schedule. Whatever luxuries we were fortunate enough to have, they earned. "You have a driver taking you to school every morning." Joseph continued. "Me, I had to walk ten miles to school. And these gadgets you have; why, these weren't even invented when was young…”

We were all relieved, then, when our father began staying away from home more and more, leaving at daybreak and not returning until after midnight. His whereabouts were a mystery. We knew only that he'd opened an office in Motown's building on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Where he went after office hours, no one could say.