Bad Motherfucker Read online

  Jazz scholar Gary Giddins wrote of Gillespie, “At the time he turned sixty, Gillespie said he had once thought that playing the trumpet would get easier over time, but that it got harder—not because his lip was showing wear, but because he had exhausted so many ideas that he used to explore. He could spell himself with comedy and other diversions, but in the heat of improvisation, he was saved only by the truth.” Similarly, Jackson made so many movies that his cadences and crescendos became familiar—but if he lost some of his ability to surprise audiences, his accumulated body of work revealed his true, coolest self.

  Jackson had something else in common with Gillespie: musicality. Gillespie’s chosen instrument was the trumpet, specifically a horn with a bell bent at a forty-five-degree angle. Jackson’s instrument was his own voice, especially as he applied it to obscenity. When Jackson cursed, it was a tone poem built around the two iambic feet in one compound noun that he said was the word in the English language he deployed most often: motherfucker.

  “I use ‘motherfucker’ at least eight times a paragraph,” Jackson told me. “I refer to everything as a motherfucker. I say, ‘Oh this shit was a motherfucker’ or ‘Do you know what that motherfucker was like?’ or ‘Well, you know, the motherfucking thing.’ That’s my perfect noun/pronoun/expletive/everything.”

  Rolling around in Jackson’s mouth, the profane becomes sacred. Not just punctuation, not just emphasis, but the raw material for verbal solos that can sing with rage or swing with awe at the enormity of the universe. To help us better understand the work of a master artist, when writing about each of his movies, I’ve tabulated every one of his curses. In the “Films of Samuel L. Jackson” chapters, look for the census under the heading “Expletives not deleted” for the count of each fuck, asshole, and shitfire—and yes, motherfucker.

  Many of us still pepper our speech with “cool” (or if you’re a sitcom character like Jake on Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Abed on Community, perhaps the “cool cool cool” triple-lutz variation). But we live in an era where cool feels like a cultural value as outmoded as chivalry or courtly love. In an anxious, sweaty time, we suffer from the dearth of the cool.

  That’s not because corporations suddenly began employing “cool” as a marketing strategy: there have always been cool products and accessories that consumers can acquire as easily as Snoopy slips into a “Joe Cool” sweatshirt. Shortly after the end of World War II, the Fox Bros. tailors in Chicago advertised their “leopard skin jacket as worn by Dizzy Gillespie”: mail-order cool for the low price of $2.50.

  Celebrity endorsements go as far back as the notion of celebrities—the British royal family has long issued royal warrants of appointment to businesses that it frequents—but maybe reached their pinnacle with the 1980s rock-’n’-roller cola wars, when Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Tina Turner, and Madonna all lent their cool to the multinational conglomerate PepsiCo. In the twenty-first century, however, those without cool—who George Clinton personified on Parliament-Funkadelic albums as Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk—learned how to fake the funk. Gesturing in the direction of cool proved to be enough in many situations and made it look as if cool had been reduced to a collection of gestures.

  The modern world exists most purely on social media: on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, it seems like everyone is marketing themselves, each individual trying to sell themselves like a two-liter bottle of Crystal Pepsi. Ironically, everyone’s thirsty but nobody’s buying. Social media is built on our shared vocabulary of cool, translated by advertising agencies and then quoted once again by the general population, telling anyone who will listen how groovy their lives are.

  A fundamental component of cool is being unconcerned what other people think of you. That’s what lets people lead revolutions and pull off improbable gowns on Oscar night. That’s part of why politics and cool often don’t blend well—nobody would mistake C-SPAN’s live feed of the Senate floor for MTV’s red carpet at the Video Music Awards. And the disengaged stance of the hipster isn’t very effective in the world of public affairs; “Whatever, man” doesn’t scale up well.

  It turns out that cool is a more important value for the citizens of a healthy society than it is for its political leaders. And although cool seems out of phase right now, it’s still essential as a counterweight to the prevailing trends of emotional clickbait and brazen spon-con hucksterism. Cool can help you spin the world on a different axis, and it can make your corner of it a better place while you’re trying to enact miracles of gravity. And the patron saint of twenty-first-century cool? Samuel motherfucking Jackson.

  “I’m comfortable in the skin I’m in,” Jackson said. “For so long I was uncomfortable being who I was. I did drugs, drank, and did all that other shit to kind of keep the world off me, keep myself from feeling the stuff I was feeling. I was insecure, worrying about my stutter, about not having a job, about not being as rich or successful as the next guy. Those things don’t bother me anymore. I’ve been fortunate enough to play some characters people perceive in a certain way. That’s rubbed off on me, so people attribute those character traits to me.”

  Jackson added, “I don’t know where the ‘King of Cool’ moniker came from or how it evolved. But it had a lot to do with Pulp Fiction and how even-keeled Jules was. He was such a professional. Minimum movement, he doesn’t get distracted—he’s a straight-line guy and people found that cool.”

  Jackson knew there was a huge gulf between himself and Jules: his reaction in a situation where two parties were pointing guns at each other would probably involve high-pitched screaming. But his steady devotion to his own work not only constructed images of cool for other people to emulate and quote, it made the man himself cool.

  “It was no burden to be cool,” Jackson said. “I just present myself as I am.”

  Dammit Wesley.

  1 Half a Piece of Candy

  Years later, he would say that the “L” stood for “Lucky.” But on December 21, 1948, he was not yet able to make his own reality with the force of his will and his imagination, and so he was born in Washington, D.C., as Samuel Leroy Jackson.

  His mother, Elizabeth Harriett Montgomery Jackson, twenty-five years old, had moved to the nation’s capital from Tennessee during World War II: she and her sister Frances had been recruited by the U.S. Navy for jobs as clerks and typists. His father, Roy Henry Jackson, just nineteen years old, was on duty as a private in the Army (he would later fight in the Korean War).

  In Jackson’s memory, his mother was always walking fast, striding through life. As a child, he needed to hang on to her skirt if he wanted to keep up with her. He had no childhood memories of his father: Roy visited his son only once before abandoning the family.

  His parents split up before Sam’s first birthday; Elizabeth brought her son home to her parents’ house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Loath to give up a great job—she would eventually receive a Recognition of Service Award from the Bureau of Navy Personnel—she left young Sam to be raised by her mother and father, Pearl and Edgar Montgomery, and returned to D.C., making the six-hundred-mile trip to Chattanooga at irregular intervals.

  “My grandfather was my best friend,” Jackson said. Edgar worked at a hotel, running an elevator. In the evenings, he was a maintenance man, cleaning three different offices in a one-block area. Pearl also had a full-time job, as domestic help. The young boy absorbed a simple but crucial life lesson: adults woke up in the morning and they went to work. Sometimes Edgar would bring Sam along on his janitorial rounds. The young boy would help empty the wastebaskets, and when Edgar used the buffer, the heavy-duty machine that polished the floors, he would let his grandson ride on top of it.

  The family lived at 310½ Lookout Street, in a Black neighborhood in a segregated southern city. The neighborhood was poor, but the Montgomerys were working class. “I was never hungry and I was never ragged,” Jackson said. Nearby were two (white) houses of prostitution and three different houses selling moonshine liquor, which customers could pu
rchase by the shot, the half pint, or the half gallon. “There’d be bullets flying occasionally, the occasional knife fight, there were drunks passing through the neighborhood—but there were all these old people that took care of us.” Any neighbor who spotted young Sam getting into trouble would inevitably tell his grandparents about it. When Sam came home, corporal punishment awaited—often, that meant getting whipped with a switch. He’d know he was in trouble the moment he walked through the door, because his grandparents would be calling him Samuel, not Sam.

  The Montgomery house was small but nevertheless had a front room, off-limits to Sam except when company came to visit: it had the good rugs, the starched curtains, and the three-tier tables with little figurines. There were a lot of hungry kids in the neighborhood, so Pearl was constantly baking. At 310½ Lookout Street, the cookie jar was never empty; any kid who visited the house would get fed.

  “I grew up with segregation in the South,” Jackson said. “But my world was full.” If his grandmother took him downtown, she had to teach him the boundaries of legalized racism, such as the separate water fountains for white people and colored people. Almost everybody Jackson saw was Black, with a few exceptions, such as the white kids on a school bus that would pass through his neighborhood, who would “unscrew the lightbulbs from inside and throw them at us, yelling ‘Nigger!’”

  There was one white family in the neighborhood, generally looked down on as “P.W.T.”: “Poor White Trash.” But although their house had no running water and so they would bathe only when it rained, the white family always called Jackson “nigger boy” and his grandmother “Miss Nigger”—always “Miss,” as if it were “a term of respect,” Jackson remembered. When his grandfather went to work, Jackson noticed, twenty-year-old white guys would call him Ed or Edgar, and his grandfather would always call them Mister. The white men would rub Sam’s head—and he’d look them straight in the eye. At first he did that because he didn’t know that he wasn’t supposed to; later on, he did it just to discomfit them.

  “My grandfather was this old guy, very dignified, but he never looked ’em in the eye. He’d look at me like, ‘Turn your head down! Don’t look the white men in the eye ’cause they’ll think you being uppity or arrogant.’” Jackson recognized later that his grandfather was just trying to teach him survival skills. “It was very dangerous being a Black man in the era when he grew up,” he said.

  One day when Sam was five, he was sitting on the front porch of the family home and he whistled at a white girl walking by. His grandparents feared for his life: “Everybody was out of the house, snatching me up, hitting me. Because I could have been killed for that.”

  Jackson remembered his childhood fondly, because it was full of love, but he was fully aware that it was walled in by segregation. “You had to learn how to live in a society where your life was devalued,” he said. “My family would point out this or that person as a Klansman or a grand wizard and tell me who specifically those men had killed and gotten away with it just because they’d said that Black person was doing this or that. You could not look suspicious, because when people can accuse you of anything, there’s nothing you can say. They’d tell me not to get in a car with this or that policeman, saying, ‘I don’t care what happens, you run and run till you get here, and then we’ll deal with it here.’”

  If somebody in the family got sick, they wouldn’t necessarily go to the doctor or the hospital—“we figured they weren’t going to see us anyway,” Jackson said. Instead, the Montgomerys would call on the woman known as “the root lady,” who would come over, smear your body with herbal ointments (“very stinky stuff”), and chant.

  Jackson loved listening to the radio, sitting on the porch with his grandfather in the evenings: serials like The Shadow and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the popular if perniciously stereotypical comedy Amos ’n’ Andy, firing his imagination and teaching him how voices can create their own worlds. And sometimes his grandfather told him ghost stories with local flavor: a school bus had turned over nearby, and if you went to the scene of the tragedy at a certain time of night, you could hear the squealing of old tires and the panicked screams of children.

  The precocious Jackson learned to read at an early age, around two or three. When he was alone in his room, he would sometimes stand in front of his mirror, acting out the stories that thrilled him, pretending to be the characters in his favorite books. He said, “I was acting for myself before I ever did it for anybody else.”

  For every five comic books, he was required to read something more substantial. “We were always told we had to be five, ten times smarter; had to act differently because we were representing not just ourselves, but the race, when we went out. People in the community had expectations, and you respected the people who had those expectations. You didn’t resent the teacher, the preachers. You didn’t resent the police, even.”

  His aunt Edna Montgomery, who received a performing arts degree at the historically Black university North Carolina A&T, was also living at 310½ Lookout Street; she had returned to Chattanooga to teach the fourth grade. Before Jackson officially enrolled in school, she would sometimes bring him to her classroom and sit him at the back. If one of her students didn’t know the answer to one of her questions, she would call on her young nephew, who invariably did know. Then, at lunchtime, Jackson would have to defend himself physically against the older kids who were angry they had been shown up by a preschooler.

  Aunt Edna also made Sam join the dance classes that she taught, both tap and modern; the modern dance classes featured the kids doing unusual neck movements to the music of Yma Sumac, the Peruvian soprano with a five-octave range. Twice a year, Aunt Edna was responsible for putting on a pageant: the audience was the members of the school board and other white Chattanooga panjandrums, “to see how the young Negroes were advancing.” The children would recite poems, sing and dance, and wear costumes. Aunt Edna never had enough boys available, so over the years, Sam was drafted against his will to play Humpty Dumpty, a Chinese man with a pigtail, and the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Nutcracker Suite. “I was always crying when she dragged me out of the house,” he said.

  On Sundays, Jackson had to wear his best clothes and go to Sunday school. Sometimes the Sunday school teacher would suddenly announce that she wanted everyone to recite a Bible verse. Because “Jesus wept” and John 3:16 would always be claimed before Jackson got his turn, he memorized an unusual passage that he knew nobody else would say, John 3:8: “The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but can’t tell whither it goeth or whither it cometh, for so is everyone born of the spirit.”

  Jackson’s favorite day of the week was Saturday: he would spend the entire day at the movies, leaving 310½ Lookout Street around nine a.m. and getting home around ten p.m. Chattanooga had two movie theaters for Black audiences, the Liberty and the Grand, and at either one he could take in a full program of newsreels, cartoons, serials, and double features: movies ranging from Francis the Talking Mule to Creature from the Black Lagoon to westerns starring Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or Lash LaRue. One of his favorites was The Crimson Pirate, starring Burt Lancaster.

  On days when he wasn’t at the movies, he reenacted the onscreen adventures that enthralled him, having epic pirate adventures with other neighborhood kids, or sometimes staging fight scenes on nearby Civil War battlefields: they would substitute bicycles for horses, roll down hills, and give everyone their own theme song. “But there was a time of day when I needed to stop and go read my book,” Jackson said. “Go into my head world. I didn’t want to run and jump and hear them make noise anymore.”

  He liked being an only child, enjoyed his own company, savored the feeling that it was him against the world. “And I was a selfish child,” he said. If he was instructed to share a piece of candy, he would throw his half away: “If I couldn’t eat the whole thing, I didn’t get any satisfaction out of it.” He learned to be alone, entertaining himself for hours on end,
and “not to have separation anxiety. I would see my mother maybe two times a year. She’d leave, and there was nothing I could do about it. I learned to accept it. If a person leaves me, I immediately forget them. I don’t dwell on people who leave.”

  Jackson did have a stutter—one that became so bad that he barely uttered a word through the entire fourth grade. The thoughts racing through his mind were colorful and nuanced, but he couldn’t get them out of his head. He was passing all his tests and his sympathetic teachers knew he could read, so they let him stay silent. Aunt Edna took him to a speech therapist, but Jackson said that the library was even more helpful: he found some books on breathing exercises and taught himself how to avoid the worst effects of the stutter. And as his vocabulary increased, he could navigate around words that were impossible to say on a particular day. (The stutter never went away entirely: even as an adult, he said, “There are still days when I have my n-n-n days or r-r-r days. I try to find another word.” He noted that James Earl Jones and Bruce Willis each had a childhood stutter. Having to concentrate intensely on something that most people take for granted—the simple act of saying a sentence—can give actors unusually powerful speaking voices as they grow older.)

  When Jackson was in the fifth grade, his mother, Elizabeth, moved back to Chattanooga, into her parents’ house and back into Sam’s life. She found work at a clothing store called Young Ages, just across the state line in Rossville, Georgia. (Chattanooga hugs the southern border of Tennessee.) Jackson said that his mother’s job as a buyer kept his closet well-stocked: “She always worked at sample shows with the owners, so she always came back home with all this stuff that people were going to be wearing next season, so I never looked like anybody else. But she dressed me very Ivy League, so I wore a lot of Ivy League clothes, so I didn’t get to dress in the hip clothes that everybody else was wearing, so I was kind of square, but well-dressed.” That meant sweater vests, corduroys, “herringbones, and patches on the elbows, and oxford shoes and button-down shirts with monograms, that kind of shit.”