Sammy Davis Jr(2)

On this day, Pop held court behind the brownish downstairs bar off the living room, pulling the sides of his V-neck cashmere sweater down over his designer jeans. From time to time, his nurse, doctor, or private armed guard would pass by, but we never paid them much mind. I sat on a bar stool, praying my pregnancy weight wouldn’t topple me over. I was confident we would have some privacy that morning, no celebrity visits from Uncle Frank (Sinatra), Liza (Minnelli), or Bill (Cosby).

Pop caught me staring at his raw pink blasted neck where the second round of chemotherapy radiated his dark skin pigment right off. Even his Aramis cologne couldn’t diffuse a smell of sickness in the air. But to mask my sorrow, I allowed the cologne to assume its olfactory guise. I surrendered all my sensibilities to its soothing artificial semblance of reality.

“I’m doing all right, Trace, just tired.” Dad winked. “Want a Strawberry Crush?”

“Coke, please, and maybe something to eat,” I replied. Pop hollered into the kitchen, “Lessie Lee, whip up some smothered pork chops with rice, I think we got a craving here!”

“So, Trace Face, I’m thinking about pulling out the pool table in the bar upstairs and making a proper nursery for when you and the baby come over,” my father announced.

“Are you going to pull out the bar, too?”

“Let’s not get ridiculous!” Pop smiled.





Dad poses with his Rolls Royce outside Piccadilly Station in Manchester, 1961.





I love this picture of Pop, smiling and happy.


“How about the racks of guns on the wall from Clint Eastwood, Elvis, and all of them?” I asked.

“Never mind. We’ll put the nursery in the guest house!” Dad smirked.

I could tell an ominous shadow followed a deep reflection that enveloped my father’s eyes today. “Bet you wish you could turn back the clock, huh, Popsicle?” I often called my father Popsicle.

“Perhaps, but childhood, I don’t know. I never was a kid,” my father said.

“You made damn sure we got the best childhood, Pop. But I guess you missed out, huh?”

“I never realized there was a childhood to miss!” Pop said. “Show business was a particular world unto itself. When I was three years old, doing two or three vaudeville shows a day, I couldn’t just go out back and play with the kids. I didn’t know how. I didn’t even learn to read or write until I was seventeen and in the army. I never had any formal education like you, Trace Face, never spent a day in school. So guess what?”

“What, Pop?”

“Baby, I’m going back to school!” Dad howled.

“You mean for your GED?” I knew Pop had no idea what a GED was.

“Nope, I’m going back to the first grade!” he said. “Dip into that well! Learn my lines! Sing some ABC’s to that kid bursting out of your belly!” Pop knew his ABC’s, but I wondered if he could sing the song that accompanied it. My father spent the first ten years of his life like a mimic when it came to anything outside of entertainment.

“Just teach your grandchild how to play ‘Fool the School.’ You mastered that role.” He gave me one of his warm, twinkling, father-daughter smiles.

“Fool the School” was a game Pop played back in the early 1930s in his Harlem home on 140th Street and Eighth Avenue with his grandma, who raised him. He called her Mama. She was a heavy-set woman with joy in her heart, a happy face, and the “black-attude” of “You come around here again, I’ll beat your butt with this broom!”

From about the age of six, my father would rehearse his rat-tat-tap dancing in the living room for that evening’s vaudeville show. Mama would guard the window, watching for truant officers who could potentially mess up Pop’s rise to fame by throwing him into school. When Mama spotted one of the truant officers, they would both freeze in place. “Don’t move. Don’t breathe,” Mama would whisper, as she listened to the slow, steady pace of heavy boots entering the building, each footfall climbing creaking the wooden stairs.

Dad never went to school a day in his life, never knew the first thing about literature, but the way Pop told the story, it felt like Edgar Allan Poe’s black raven flew smack into the middle of Harlem! Suddenly there came a tapping, a white man gently rapping, rapping at their rickety ghetto door. Deep into that darkness, peering long, Pop stood there at six years old—wondering, fearing, doubting, and dreaming dreams of stardom no “colored” mortal ever dared to dream before.



My dad and his own father, the man who started him in show business.



A congratulatory kiss from his mother, Elvera, after the opening of Golden Boy on Broadway, 1964. Although raised by his grandmother, my father’s own mother remained on the outskirts of his life.