Bad Motherfucker Page 3

  310½ Lookout Street was more crowded than ever, and always seemed to be full of women. When his mother had friends over, entertaining in the front room, sometimes they would summon Sam to demonstrate the latest dances, like the Twist or the Jerk. The older ladies would watch with avid curiosity, saying that they’d throw out their backs if they even tried to duplicate his moves. He would get not only applause but loose change: “The ladies would give you quarters, dimes, whatever.”

  Jackson grew even closer with his grandfather. “We took the heat in the house, because it was a house full of women,” he said. And he watched how Edgar handled conflict with Pearl. “He told me not to talk back!” Jackson said. “There’s only one way to have an argument—and that’s if two people are having it.”

  Elizabeth wanted Sam to participate in traditionally male activities: she made sure that her son played Little League baseball. “She sent me out of the house,” he said. “She always made sure I was doing guy stuff.”

  Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in Major League Baseball the year before Jackson was born, but Chattanooga Little League, like everything else in Tennessee, was divided between Black and white. “Segregation was just a way of life,” Jackson said. “It was nothing to worry about.” He was sometimes puzzled by the odder manifestations of racism: he wondered why when he went to the movies, Sidney Poitier’s character always seemed to die. But segregation seemed like an immutable reality, and so not worth railing against.

  Then, when Sam was in sixth grade, his grandmother took him and his cousin Wanda on a train trip across the country to Los Angeles to visit his aunt. In California, for the first time, Jackson saw white people and Black people together. “What’s happening here? What is this?” the stunned boy thought. Thousands of miles away from home, he had a revelation: not only could the world operate with new rules, some parts of it already did.

  Every summer, Jackson would go to a different world of his own: his grandfather’s sister’s farm, in rural Georgia. “All her kids and me running up and down dirt roads, feeling all that freedom,” he remembered. He saw his grandfather’s brothers doing backbreaking work in the fields, moving slowly and efficiently. He saw how they had very strict moral guidelines but would drink on weekends. He saw cows and chickens doing what came naturally. And soon enough, he was doing it too.

  “There was a family of girls who lived through the woods from us, and we all used to meet at this creek and swim naked,” he said. “I was about 10 or 11. I think two of the girls were about 14, 15, so that’s when it happened. Girls were interesting to me, period. They could be fat, skinny, tall, short, ugly, beautiful—as long as they were willing to do that thing.”

  Back in Chattanooga, everybody in the Black community seemed to know each other: “There were only two Black schools,” he said. Many of Jackson’s teachers had previously taught his mother, and her brothers and sisters. They knew he was expected to go to college, and so when other kids were learning to diagram sentences, he was allowed to go to the other side of the room and read Beowulf and Shakespeare.

  Jackson didn’t hang out in the street with other kids; when his friends started making plans that were going to end up with people getting in trouble, he’d head home. He knew the one cardinal rule: don’t embarrass his family. If somehow he ended up in jail, he was pretty sure they would come visit him, but they wouldn’t do anything to get him out.

  On the afternoon of February 1, 1960, four freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University (Aunt Edna’s alma mater) walked into the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They bought a few sundries—toothpaste, a hairbrush—and then sat down at the store’s lunch counter and asked to be served. The facilities were segregated: white people were allowed to sit at the counter, while Black people were supposed to buy their food only from the “stand-up counter.” By sitting at the counter, the quartet were facing arrest; they were risking physical assault, maybe even death; they were reclaiming their dignity from a racist system that had tried to strip it from them every day. One of them, Franklin McCain, said years later, “Almost instantaneously, after sitting down on a simple, dumb stool, I felt so relieved. I felt so clean, and I felt as though I had gained a little bit of my manhood by that simple act.”

  Refusing to serve them, the store closed early instead, and the four young men returned to campus to tell their fellow students what had happened. More protesters came to Woolworth’s every day: three days later, there were hundreds of them. The movement inspired similar sit-ins in dozens of other segregated cities—including Chattanooga. On February 19, Black students from Howard High School began peacefully sitting in at the lunch counters of the variety stores in Chattanooga’s downtown. The movement grew until five days later, there were thousands of people, Black and white, milling around in the streets downtown. Chattanooga’s mayor, P. R. “Rudy” Olgiati, ordered the streets cleared, and the fire department turned its hoses on the crowd: shamefully, the first southern city to assault civil rights protesters in that fashion, but not the last.

  The demonstrations continued in Chattanooga until August, when all the city’s lunch counters were integrated; three years later, all public facilities in the city were integrated. The sit-in movement had similar success across the South—and was an important milestone toward segregation being struck down nationally by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They also directly led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; the SNCC became a central national organization for college students fighting for civil rights.

  Jackson, just eleven years old, took part in the sit-ins but didn’t tell anyone in his family he was doing so. “I would participate, sit at the lunch counter,” he said. “And when the police would show up, I would just run!”

  When Jackson got to seventh grade, he had some classmates who were seventeen or eighteen: they were, essentially, grown men, but they had just gotten out of reform school and were still on a junior-high academic level. “They used to take our money or you had to do their homework for them,” Jackson said. But to his surprise, they looked out for him if he was getting hassled on the street in his neighborhood: “Sam from Lookout Street? Yeah, I know him. I know his mama. Leave him alone.”

  As Jackson saw it, “my job was to go to school and bring home good grades. I was on the honor roll, I swam, ran, and did my homework. I didn’t stay out late. I was more concerned about the consequences I’d face at home than I was about peer pressure.”

  When he reached Riverside High School, Jackson was still bookish, but he sometimes stayed out late enough on Saturday nights that he looked conspicuously red-eyed when the family went to Sunday services at the Wiley Memorial United Methodist Church. “We drank beer like soda,” he said. His mother made it clear that he wasn’t allowed to miss church; the compromise was that he wore sunglasses.

  Like generations of overachieving high school kids before and after him, Sam filled up his time with extracurricular activities. He joined the model United Nations. He played trumpet, flute, and French horn in the marching band; he knew he had great style on the field when the band performed, but he also knew it wasn’t the coolest activity. He swam competitively and ran hurdles on the track team. “I definitely didn’t have the hot chicks,” he complained. “I was popular because I was funny.” But he was, nevertheless, popular enough to be elected senior class president.

  When he talked about growing up under segregation, Jackson often tried to shrug it off, emphasizing the happy aspects of his childhood and minimizing how it affected him. But “I had anger in me,” he conceded. “It came from growing up suppressed in a segregated society. All those childhood years of ‘whites only’ places and kids passing you on the bus, yelling ‘Nigger!’ There was nothing I could do about it then. I couldn’t even say some of the things that made me angry—it would have gotten me killed. But I had a dream of my own. I was determined to get out and make my family proud.”

  Jackson’s family wanted hi
m to have a “productive” career: basically, that meant being a doctor, a lawyer, or maybe a teacher. Chattanooga didn’t have a Black pediatrician, so his mother hoped he would fill that gap. Jackson, meanwhile, wanted to get as far away from Tennessee as he could. He was a candidate for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and he also applied to UCLA, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii. “I had read too many books about the world, and I wanted to see it,” he said.

  When his mother found out he had signed up for a berth on a merchant marine ship, she made Jackson’s decision for him. “My mother had it in her mind that I was going to Morehouse College in Atlanta,” he said, “and that’s where I went.”

  Nicole Goux.

  2 Desk Lamp (with Bulb)

  Self-mastery, symmetrical character, high ideals and purposes are regarded as the chief end of education.” So read the Morehouse College Bulletin, the handbook issued to all students arriving on campus in the fall of 1966. It laid out the college’s lofty ideals: “The character of the work done and the increasing efficiency of every department insure the highest and most lasting results in the lives of the students and those among who they will labor.”

  Morehouse, an all-male college in Atlanta founded two years after the Civil War, was one of the most prestigious of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. The school carefully guarded the reputation of its graduates, approximately 225 a year, whom they called Morehouse men; its most famous alumnus was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “We were told that we were in the top tenth of the Black race that was going to lead everybody out of the darkness into the light,” Samuel L. Jackson remembered. “At that time something like seventy-five percent of all the [Black] doctors in America were Morehouse men. Morehouse men were publishers, editors, they were the leaders of the race.”

  That dream of a respectable future was why Elizabeth pushed Sam to attend Morehouse, and why Edgar and Pearl were willing to mortgage 310½ Lookout Street to pay the necessary fees: in the 1966–1967 academic year, Morehouse cost a minimum of $1,430 for tuition, room, board, and laundry. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be the equivalent of $11,545 in 2021.) “Each student will supply his own linens, blankets and desk lamp (with bulb),” warned the Bulletin.

  On Sunday, September 11, 1966, Morehouse freshmen were allowed to move into their dormitories starting at eight a.m. Jackson’s mother dropped him off—with linens, blankets, and desk lamp—and drove back home, secure in the belief that in the arms of Morehouse, he would be safe from temptation. She was wrong. “I went wild,” Jackson said.

  As soon as his mother was gone, Jackson left the Morehouse campus, bought a quart of beer, and walked up the street to a basketball court he had spotted. He asked who was up next and spent the rest of the day in the projects. (University Homes, right next to the Morehouse campus, was the first housing project in the United States for Black families built with federal funds.) “I balled with them, hung out with them that night,” Jackson said. His new friends had no idea he was a Morehouse student and assumed he had just moved into their neighborhood.

  Jackson was back on campus for the first day of freshman orientation, which tried to instill Morehouse’s ideals and to intimidate the new arrivals with the school’s rigors. The students were given the traditional speech where they were told to look to their left, and then to look to their right: one of those people (spoiler alert!) won’t be here next year.

  Jackson arrived at Morehouse planning to major in marine biology; he wanted to be an oceanographer, because of watching Sea Hunt on TV (the adventure series starring Lloyd Bridges as an underwater diver), not to mention being a huge fan of the classic submarine yarn 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (the Jules Verne novel more than the 1954 Disney film). He dreamed of being the Black Jacques Cousteau—despite growing up more than three hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

  “For the first time, I was on my own. I did all the things I didn’t do in high school: got drunk, stayed up all night playing cards, had lots of girlfriends,” Jackson said. (Morehouse was a men’s college, but its sister school, the historically Black women’s school Spelman College, was right across the street.) “Still, I went to class and maintained a B average.”

  And Jackson kept going back to the projects to play basketball with his friends in the hood, who called him Slim. “I was there every day, and a long time most of the days,” he said. Having been admitted to the ebony tower, he felt more comfortable standing outside it, with the townies—or as they were known around campus, “the block boys.” Jackson described them fondly: “The reprobates who stood on the corner. They smoked weed, they drank wine, they drank beer, they talked shit. A lot. That was us.”

  The block boys thought that Morehouse students were stuck up, or in the slang of the day, “saditty.” (The modern equivalent would be “bougie.”) Jackson agreed with them: he saw how his fellow students not only thought they were superior to the locals, they had that belief reinforced by the school’s administration. “They ignored those people who lived in the community—they invaded these people’s community and felt they were there to run it.” So when the block boys said hello to the Morehouse men, they often wouldn’t get a response. “And that would be cause for a beating,” Jackson said. “Or they would run ’em back to campus. Mainly because they wouldn’t speak.”

  Sometimes the block boys would rob Morehouse students, which didn’t bother Jackson. “Ninety percent of the time, they were correct in that the person they were taking stuff from could afford to have it taken. And they were people with petit-bourgeois ideas who needed a lesson like that in reality.”

  One time, however, their victim was somebody Jackson knew from school. He looked Jackson in the eyes, but before Jackson could say anything, somebody hit the student: the block boys relieved the student of his valuables and they all left. “As a result of that, I ended up in the dean’s office,” Jackson said. “Because the guy did recognize me, he did report the robbery, and did say that I was with them. As a consequence of that, I was put on probation a few times, because I refused to identify the people who did it.”

  Jackson ran with the block boys for six months before they found out he went to Morehouse: they spotted him at a dance where Jackson showed up wearing Morehouse gear. “Slim, you actually go to college?” one of them asked, dumbfounded. Jackson admitted that he did—and so, in a very small way, he improved town-gown relations. “It actually changed their image of the Morehouse guys and they didn’t beat them up so often.”

  Jackson found his own ways to participate in Morehouse life: he became a cheerleader. He discovered that the job had perks, like getting to audition and select the female cheerleaders from Spelman. “I got to travel to other historically Black colleges; I was hanging out with the basketball and football teams, meeting girls.” He laughed fondly at the memory. “It wasn’t about school spirit.”

  Some of the students in Morehouse’s freshman class, maybe eight of them, stood out: a few years older, more intense, more intimidating. Many of them wore their hair in Afros and had necklaces of braided rope; all of them took their classes more seriously than the average freshman. They were Vietnam veterans, going to college on the G.I. Bill. One night, Jackson and his friends were staying up late, drinking and being rowdy—pissing off some of those vets, who were trying to study.

  As Jackson remembered the late-night conversation, the vets came in and lectured them: “You guys need to study, pay attention, and get serious! There’s a war going on. We just came from it.”

  “What fucking war?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Let’s get the map.”

  “There’s no place called Vietnam on this map!”

  “Right there: Indochina. That’s Vietnam. We’re in a war over there. My friends are dying there—your relatives are going to be dying there.”

  It didn’t take long for that prediction to come true. One of Jackson’s cousins in Georgia—they had sp
ent every summer together, running down dirt roads and getting into trouble—had joined the Army around the same time Jackson went to college. “Sure enough, a month and a half later, my cousin was killed in Vietnam,” Jackson said. “That really woke me up.”

  The more Jackson read about Vietnam, the more his convictions against the war hardened. He was careful to get good enough grades that he would be able to stay in school—but everything else about his life was up for grabs. For many people, college is based on identity as much as academics: away from home, you have the freedom to experiment with how you present yourself to the world and figure out what type of person you want to be as an adult. Jackson had always been a complicated guy with a repertory company of personalities inside him, and had lived in a house with four adults watching over him. Now he was finding out that he could be a different person, or even a whole bunch of different people, from block boy to cheerleader to anti-war protester. (He also discovered that having a variety of social circles gave him access to a wider range of women: “Like every sport has its own set of groupies, those circles have their own groupies.”)

  He switched his major to architecture and changed the way he dressed, dropping the herringbone wardrobe. “I became a hippie. Bell-bottom jeans with patches on ’em, leather fringe vests and you know, wild T-shirts and tie-dye and all that stuff.”

  In a sign of the times, he took an English class with a professor who, during a class discussion of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, encouraged the students to use hallucinogenics: “You guys have some great ideas, maybe you should try this.”