Bad Motherfucker Read online

  Jackson didn’t need any encouragement. He did every drug he could get his hands on during his college years, including acid, weed, and even heroin during a period when nothing else was available: “We actually thought that the government took all the marijuana off the streets. There was no marijuana. There was very little acid. The only thing that you could get, and get in quantity, was heroin, and that’s what we got.” Jackson and his friends snorted it for a while, and then figured they might as well shoot up. “I was a weekend tippler,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it on a regular basis. I understood the dangers.”

  Understanding the dangers didn’t stop him from overdosing on heroin. Jackson had an out-of-body experience where he saw his friends saving his life: “It’s like I’m floating above the room, and I look down and there I am, and there’s some guy pounding me in my chest, and somebody else is trying to hold me up, walk me around, and I’m just watching all this shit. It’s a fucked-up feeling.” But not fucked-up enough to get him to stop right away, apparently: Jackson had two more near-death experiences before he swore off heroin. “My third OD was the end of my run with heroin. I didn’t want to die doing drugs, and I saw that. I was smart enough to recognize that and stop.”

  “You don’t think of an event being an historic event in the moment the event’s taking place,” Jackson said. And you especially don’t think of it being an historic event when you’re watching the movie John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!—a Cold War satire starring Peter Ustinov that somehow ends with Shirley MacLaine scoring the winning touchdown against the Notre Dame football team. But on the evening of April 4, 1968, a Thursday night in the spring semester of his sophomore year, that’s exactly where Jackson was: at campus movie night, watching what he judged to be “one of the worst movies ever made.”

  Jackson knew that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis and rushed to the hospital; the cashier at the liquor store told him the news when Jackson bought a quart of beer to drink during the movie. However, he wasn’t expecting the movie to be interrupted. Somebody came into the theater to make an announcement: “Dr. King is dead. We need to do something.” Everyone filed out and milled around in the streets, grieving, trying to make sense of senseless events.

  Jackson felt like he was in a fog. Looking at his fellow students, he could see that many of them looked just as numb as he felt. And then, “sure enough, someone threw a brick through a store window, and I was standing there, thinking, ‘This is not what we should be doing.’” When Jackson went back to his dorm to check on his roommate, he wasn’t there: “He was already in the streets with a whole bunch of other people, tearing up and burning up our neighborhood.”

  King was in Memphis because he had come to lend support to the city’s striking sanitation workers. A few days later, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby paid for the plane fare for any Morehouse and Spelman students who wanted to go to Memphis to march with the sanitation workers, so that King’s work would not end with his death. (Culp and Cosby were the stars of the then-current TV show I Spy, a secret-agent adventure series that was groundbreaking because of its interracial lead actors.) Jackson flew to Memphis with a group of Morehouse and Spelman students. “We all thought it was probably going to be something physical, even though the National Guard was there,” Jackson said. ”Culp and Cosby were trying to give us instructions on how to carry ourselves and enact King’s dream of being nonviolent.” The march proved to be peaceful; the students flew back that night. “We were glad there was something we could do other than burn, loot, and destroy our own neighborhood.”

  King’s funeral was the next morning, on Tuesday, April 9: after a private service at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King had been senior pastor, the body was carried to Morehouse on a farm wagon pulled by two mules, in a procession observed by over one hundred thousand people. The school needed volunteers to help visitors find their way around campus, so Jackson put on a suit and served as an usher. The funeral itself was an overwhelming blur of grief, although he was impressed by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who sang King’s favorite gospel song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”

  Jackson said, “I was angry about the assassination, but I wasn’t shocked by it. I knew that change was going to take something different: not sit-ins, not peaceful coexistence.” His family understood his growing militancy—they were just worried that he was going to get himself killed expressing it. On a visit back home to Chattanooga, Jackson was sitting on the porch of 310½ Lookout Street when a white man came calling: Mr. Venable. “From the time I was an infant, my grandmother had been buying all these bullshit life-insurance and burial policies,” Jackson said, “and every week this insurance guy, Mr. Venable, came to collect his nickel premiums.”

  This time, when Mr. Venable walked up to the house and said, “Hi, Sam, is Pearl here?” something snapped inside Jackson, and he said what he had never been able to verbalize as a child when he saw, again and again, how young white office workers condescended to his grandfather.

  “Motherfucker, why are you calling my grandmother, a woman three times your age, Pearl?” Jackson demanded. He was cursing and yelling at maximum volume, so overcome with rage that he was babbling. Hearing the commotion, his grandmother came out on the porch and grabbed him by the hair.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded.

  Jackson wasn’t sorry for the outburst: from his point of view, it was the first time that Mr. Venable had to consider the notion that he might have been wrong. Mr. Venable apologized, but after he left, Pearl laid into her grandson: “She still thought that he was going to call somebody and have me hanged.”

  English 353, as listed in the Morehouse College Bulletin: “ELEMENTARY PUBLIC SPEAKING. A course in the fundamentals of speech preparation and speaking.” Back at Morehouse, Jackson, who still sometimes struggled with his stutter, thought that a public-speaking class might reduce its severity. The class helped, although not as much as an independent discovery Jackson made: he could almost always avoid stuttering by using the word “motherfucker.”

  Even more important than the class itself was an offer made by the professor: a Morehouse-Spelman production of The Threepenny Opera (the Brecht-Weill musical famous for the song “Mack the Knife”) needed more actors. Anyone in the class who joined the cast would get extra credit. Jackson couldn’t really sing, but it turned out that he “could act like I could sing.” He was cast in the supporting role of Ready-Money Matt. As soon as Jackson walked into the theater, something clicked: he knew that he had found the place he should have been all along. Possibly influencing this sense of belonging was that his first rehearsal doubled as a photo shoot for the play, so the women in the cast were dressed in bustiers and garter belts. Since six of the nine men in the cast were gay, it didn’t take Jackson long to figure out how that tilted the odds in his favor with the women in lingerie. Soon there was a brand-new thrill: “on opening night, you get that applause. I guess it’s like a rush. Wow!”

  Nobody believed that The Threepenny Opera marked the theatrical debut of a world-shaking thespian talent, not even Jackson himself. “I was horrible,” he conceded. He was aware of the contempt he inspired in the undergraduate women who formed the core of the Spelman theater program (Morehouse had no drama department of its own—Morehouse men who wanted to major in drama had to go across the street to Spelman). One of those theater majors said her initial response to the sight of Jackson in rehearsal was, “What’s cheerleader boy doing on my stage?” She did concede that he had his virtues: “He was very, very fine.” Her name was LaTanya Richardson, and Jackson had noticed her too: the first time he spotted her was the tumultuous week after King was assassinated, when they were both on the same plane flight to Memphis, heading for the march with the sanitation workers. Richardson thought that Jackson looked just like Linc Hayes, the character played by Clarence Williams III in the TV show The Mod Squad: “this huge Afro, little bitty round sunglasses, and long sideburns.”
r />   Jackson noted that there were certain parts of that style he never adopted: he was too tall to wear platform shoes, for example. “And I didn’t have a medallion,” he emphasized. “Those were cheesy.”

  Jackson was still experimenting with different identities in different social contexts, but there was one role he wasn’t interested in: the traditional Morehouse man. “Morehouse was breeding politically correct negroes,” Jackson said. “They were creating the next Martin Luther Kings. They didn’t say that because, really, they didn’t want you to be that active politically, and they were more proud of the fact that he was a preacher than that he was a civil-rights leader. That was their trip: they was into making docile negroes.”

  “SOMEBODY’S WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO,” said a flyer distributed on the Morehouse campus in the spring of 1969. Over the image of a clenched fist, the sheet had typed thoughts such as “Is the slogan ‘Power to Black people’ or ‘Power to some Black people… and not most’?” and “Pretty soon the rhetoric of blackness will degenerate into expositions and arguments of my mama is blacker than your mama” and “Either the tension is subsiding or the lull before the storm is here.” Most ominous was the section that read “Little House, little House, how strong are you? Somebody’s trying to huff and puff and blow the little House down. If made of sticks and straw the little House can’t stand. Little House, little House, how strong are you?” The flyer was signed, “I remain sincerely and always: God (p.s. you’d better wipe that damn silly grin off your face!!)”

  In that atmosphere of threats and consciousness-raising and black comedy, Jackson joined a group of Morehouse undergraduates called Concerned Students, who wanted to petition the Morehouse board of trustees to remake the college. Their four principal demands: a Black studies program; improved community involvement with the housing projects adjacent to the Morehouse campus; people of color forming a majority of the voting members of the board of trustees; and for the six Black colleges in the Atlanta area to consolidate as one larger institution, with a focus on Black studies, to be known as Martin Luther King University.

  When the Concerned Students tried to discuss their issues with the board of trustees, they were rebuffed—so they went outside Harkness Hall, the stately brick administration building where the board was meeting, and gathered up the chains that inhibited pedestrians from walking on the grass lawns. “We had read about the lock-ins on other campuses,” Jackson said. With some padlocks purchased at a local hardware store, they chained the doors to Harkness Hall shut, locking themselves in with the trustees.

  The standoff lasted for twenty-nine hours. Students painted revolutionary slogans on campus sidewalks and buildings, including “M. L. King University Now.” Some Spelman students wanted to join the protest, so they found a ladder and climbed in through a second-floor window. Those women included LaTanya Richardson: “Wherever somebody was speaking about revolution and change, I showed up for it.”

  Concerned Students made sure that they fed the trustees and took care of them. About six hours into the standoff, when trustee Martin Luther King Sr. (not just the father of MLK Jr., but a minister and civil rights leader in his own right) complained of chest pains, they allowed the seventy-year-old to leave via that second-story ladder. “We let him out of there so we wouldn’t be accused of murder,” Jackson said.

  The hostage situation ended when the trustees made various concessions (which the Morehouse administration later repudiated). Charles Merrill, the chairman of the board of trustees, signed an agreement granting the protesters amnesty, promising that they would not be punished for participating in the protest. As soon as the semester ended, however, dean of students Samuel J. Tucker, heading the Morehouse Advisory Committee, sent registered letters to various Morehouse students—including Samuel L. Jackson—summoning them back to campus for a hearing.

  “It has been reported to the Advisory Committee that you were among the individuals who participated in [the] lock-in,” Tucker wrote. “During the lock-in the following illegal actions were committed; forcible confinement and detention of Board members and student representatives; forcible seizure and occupation of the administration building; and unauthorized use of office supplies, unauthorized use of office telephone for long distance calls, and damage to school property.” The timing—after the student body had gone home for the summer and couldn’t protest any discipline—wasn’t an accident.

  The Advisory Committee peremptorily expelled Jackson. He recalled his freshman orientation, when they had told students to look to the left and then the right, and warned them that one of the three of them would not be there the following year. “Finally I was that person who was not there the next year,” he realized.

  Jackson couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go home to Chattanooga; 310½ Lookout Street was full of disappointment and broken promises. He stayed in Atlanta, sleeping in a house rented by the SNCC, which had its national headquarters near the Morehouse campus, in a cramped second-floor office above a beauty parlor. Jackson spent his summer doing volunteer work for the SNCC at the Rap Brown Center: “We fed kids in the morning and did field trips,” he said. Leaving Morehouse had only pushed him further into political activism. “I wasn’t one of those people that was gonna walk around and get spit on and get slapped and not fight back,” Jackson said.

  Jackson was spending time with Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, each of whom served as chairman of the SNCC (succeeding John Lewis), leading the organization as it made the transition from the Freedom Riders to the Black Panthers. “I was never a Black Panther,” Jackson clarified. “But the fact that you were alive during that period in America, you had to either be part of the problem or part of the solution. We chose to be part of the solution.”

  Jackson became part of what he termed “the radical faction” of SNCC. He was instrumental in a scheme to steal the credit cards of white people and then to use them to buy guns, building a stockpile of armaments for the conflict that seemed imminent: not just a race war, but young versus old, rebels versus the establishment. The stakes seemed much larger than who got to sit on the Morehouse board of trustees. “All of a sudden, I felt I had a voice,” he said. “I was somebody. I could make a difference.”

  Radical conspiracies didn’t come without risk; some of Jackson’s friends died in mysterious car explosions. But Jackson’s life as a revolutionary ended abruptly on the day when his mother showed up in Atlanta and told him that she was taking him to lunch.

  He got in her car, but instead she drove him to the airport. On the way, she told him that two FBI agents had knocked on the door of 310½ Lookout Street and told her that they had her son under surveillance, and that if he didn’t get out of Atlanta, he would probably be dead within a year. She handed him a plane ticket to Los Angeles and instructed him: “Get on this plane. Do not get off. I’ll talk to you when you get to your aunt’s in L.A.”

  Ali Fitzgerald.

  3 Little Cooked Onions

  In Los Angeles, Samuel L. Jackson put his politics away. Just nineteen years old, he moved in with his aunt and got a job as a social worker, in the county bureau of public assistance. He was still smoking weed and dropping acid—but, he said, “I learned how to take care of myself a little better.”

  By this time, Jackson fancied himself quite the operator with women. He had figured out his essential seduction techniques: “That bedroom look: eye contact that lets a woman know ‘I’m really with you and I love you.’ The soft voice that goes along with it. And my ability to unhook a bra with one hand.”

  Something took Jackson by surprise in California—he fell in love. The object of his desire was an older woman, in her thirties. They had a passionate relationship, but it ended with his first adult heartbreak. “At a certain point, she told me she loved me but she had needs I couldn’t meet,” Jackson said. “I couldn’t afford her.”

  He didn’t take the news well. He’d drive by her house just to see if her car was parked there. Sometimes, he would par
k and gaze at her windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, wanting to knock on her door but knowing what a terrible mistake it would be. In a rainstorm, he hid behind a palm tree while his car radio played the hit songs of 1970. James Taylor crooned “I always thought that I’d see you again,” but somehow the lyrics of “Fire and Rain” didn’t assuage Jackson. With the buffer of some decades, Jackson could judge his youthful lovelorn behavior: “It was pathetic.”

  Jackson stayed in Los Angeles for almost two years, long enough to get a reality check and to consider how privileged his life had been. “I learned that I wanted to be back in school and not in the real world, working,” he said.

  He also didn’t want to be in Vietnam, but when the first draft lottery happened at the end of 1969—the random drawing of birthdays that determined the order in which young American men would be drafted for the Vietnam war—Jackson had an uncomfortably low number (70 out of 366). That provided an additional incentive for him to return to school: he could benefit from a student deferment again.

  Morehouse readmitted Jackson after his mother threatened to sue the school. He returned for the spring semester of 1971 and found that the school had quietly implemented many of the changes that Concerned Students had agitated for: the Martin Luther King University consortium remained a dream, but there was now a meaningful Black studies program.

  Returning to campus, Jackson had one more epiphany, an unexpected one: “I found out that I wanted to be an actor.” He changed his major one last time, to drama. To make that happen, he went across the street to the Spelman campus, to talk to Dr. Baldwin Burroughs, the dean of the theater department there. While Dr. Burroughs spoke with Jackson, laying out the expectations for the major, the dean was looking out the window, with his back turned. That’s when a female student crept into his office: LaTanya Richardson. She and Jackson locked eyes for a moment and she put a finger to her lips. She slipped an overdue assignment—a production book for a play she was working on—onto a pile of similar books on Dr. Burroughs’s desk and silently backed out of the office.