You Are Not Alone_Michael, Through a Brother’s Eyes Read Online Free Page A

providing a 360-degree vista. My eyes scanned it all – the property, the theme park, the lake, the ferris wheel, the trains, the greenery – and it filled me with awe and pride. Look at what you’ve created , I said to my brother in my head, and repeated to him later.
    ‘A place of ultimate happiness,’ he told me.
    The later warped perception of Neverland shows how Michael was judged on the face value of his world and, in many cases, on the claims of others. There only ever seemed to be lurid judgements about him and his ranch without any attempt to figure out the more complex ‘why?’. As with everyone, his background shaped him. But fame – especially the iconic status attached to my brother – built a public barrier as big as a dam in front of his need to be understood. But to understand him, we need to walk in his shoes and see life from his perspective. As Michael said in 2003, in a message to his fans via Ed Bradley at CBS: ‘If you really want to know about me, there’s a song I wrote. It’s called “Childhood”. That’s the one song people should listen to …’
    Michael’s honest awareness that he was a grown man with a kid’s mind shows in the lyrics: ‘People say I’m strange that way because I love such elementary things … but have you seen my childhood?’ His way of saying, this is the way I’ve been made. This is who I am.
    Many people have attempted to look through the window of our childhood, and see past the smears of media coverage and the persona of a pop icon. But I feel that you need to have lived it, and shared it, to truly know and understand it. Because ours was a unique world, as brothers and sisters under the roof of one big family. It was in a small house at 2300 Jackson Street – named afterPresident Andrew Jackson, not us – that we shared memories, music and a dream. It is here that our stories and his lyrics begin, and where, I hope, a better understanding of just who Michael was can be found.

CHAPTER TWO
2300 Jackson Street
    IT ALL STARTED ONE DAY WHEN we found our voices around the kitchen sink.
    It was more assembly line than kitchen sink, the wash-dry-stack-put away ritual after dinner. We divided the chore into weekly shifts as pairs – two children drying, two others putting away, our mother standing in the middle, an apron over her gown, hands deep in soap suds. She always whistled or sang some tune, but the song that first enticed us into joining her was ‘Cotton Fields’, an old slave number by blues musician Lead Belly. This hit resonated with her, for her roots were in Eufaula, Alabama, where she was born Katie Scruse in May 1930.
    Her grandparents had been cotton farmers in what was then named ‘the Cotton State’ and her great-grandfather was a slave to an Alabama family called Scruse. This forefather could sing, too – ‘You could hear his voice from church ring out through the valley’ – and so could Papa Prince, her father. She swears that the voice we heard in our kitchen was channelled from her ancestors and developed in a church choir; she was raised a Baptist. Fine voices ran inthe family, we were told. My father’s father, Samuel Jackson, was a teacher and school director who always gave a near-perfect rendition of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ but he also had ‘a beautiful high voice’ that graced a church chorus. Our mother played the clarinet and piano at high school, and Joseph the guitar.
    When our parents met in 1949, their individual DNA must have combined to create some kind of super-gene for our musical inheritance. It was no accident of birth, Mother assured us: it was God’s gift. Or, as Michael later put it, ‘the divine union of song and dance.’
    We each loved the sound of Mother’s voice. Standing at the sink singing, she was lost in those fields of Alabama, and she sent a shiver down my spine with a voice that was never flat and always on pitch. Her voice singing was like her voice talking: warm, soft and