“Hey, Trace Face, you get uglier every time I see you!” Pop said as the nurse assisted him dragging an IV into the chaise lounge next to mine. He had his hand over his trachea tube.
“Well, look who is up? How you feeling today, Pop?” I asked.
“The cancer monster robbed me of my sleep last night, but feeling a bit better today, sweetie. How are you feeling, Pregasuarus?”
“Like a Pregasaurus,” I replied.
“I see Lessie Lee hooked you up!” Pop noticed my empty fried chicken plate. “I thought I was the superstar around here, but when people walk in this house, first thing out of their mouths is, ‘Hey, Ms. Jackson, whatcha cooking back there?’ I say, ‘Yeah, she made her fried chicken. Hang on I’ll get you some!” Pop laughed.
“Pop, I know you always call Vegas home, Los Angeles your home away from home, but how did you like living in New York when you were on Broadway?” I asked.
“Loved Broadway, but as a Broadway star, in New York, I was not shielded from racism, Trace. It was no longer about beatings like I endured in the military. I was standing in the middle of a social revolution. Posh liberals would accept me into their homes as the ‘token colored star’ yet come and go talking about how ‘spics’ have ruined New York. It was a new kind of racism. Social microaggressions.
“Dr. Chester Pierce, a black professor from Harvard Medical said, and I quote: ‘The chief vehicle for proracist behaviors are microaggressions. These are subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges which are “put-downs” of blacks by offenders.’
“He couldn’t be more correct. I attended liberal private parties with buffet tables: lobster Newburg, pâté de foie gras, a tin of caviar resting on shaved ice, and then something ‘special’ for the ‘token colored star’ . . .”
Family photos, with Mom and my brother Mark—our rainbow tribe.
Dad as a guest of Johnny Carson, 1968
Bandleader Sammy Kaye visits Dad backstage at the Majestic Theater during the run of Golden Boy, November 1964.
“Like a platter of fried chicken?” I added.
“And they didn’t make it like Lessie Lee or Colonel Sanders either!” Pop chuckled. “There were upper crust restaurants in New York that still wouldn’t let me through the front door and Fifth Avenue doormen who turned me away from private parties we were invited to.”
“And we lived off Fifth Avenue ourselves.”
“Microaggressions. The token liberal line was no longer, ‘my best friend is black.’ It was: my son goes to school with Dr. Ralph Bunche’s son. Both were lame attempts to make us feel assimilated. Even my own people—the colored press—turned on me, calling me an ‘Uncle Tom’—just like they called Dr. Bunche when he was the first black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As if we didn’t fight any racial battles to become successful. I was living proof that black folks were not the stereotype of a slow, lazy, shuffling Stepin Fetchit. But the black press never appreciated that—just claimed we sold out.” Pop shook his head.
“I read a book about Judaism once, and it said: ‘The difference between love and hate is understanding.’ Unfortunately, for us colored folks the understanding was obstructed by prejudgments without due examination. Hey, if white folks were so afraid of color, why hit Florida every year and bake in the sun to darken their skin, right?”
Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King Jr., Golden Boy producer Hillard Elkins, and my father in New York, 1965
Pop guest-starred on some of the most popular shows of the ’60s, including I Dream of Jeannie.
Jerry Lewis, Dad, Hugh Hefner, and Anthony Newley on the short-lived TV show Playboy After Dark
“I remember in college reading Marcel Proust,” I said.
“Who?”
“A French writer. We had to memorize a quote for my English Literature class. I’ll never forget it because it always reminded me of you, Pop,” I said. I recited the quote from Proust aloud to my father: ‘We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him. . . .’”
“Well, thank God you learned something in college!” Pop said.
“I am the only one in the family to go to college so far.”
“I am proud of you, Trace Face. Like this cat Proust was talking about—prejudgments. And during my Broadway days, Lord, did that come into play. I used to run around with George Rhodes like a chicken with my head cut off. We’d go around from one press conference to another, one colored critic to another, one white liberal socialite to another, trying to ‘fix’ the prejudgments that were stacked against me in the press.”