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was wrong with her. From her bed, Verna Mae was stoical. ‘Everything is well. I will be healthy again,’ she said. But Joseph watched his sister’s deterioration from the bedroom door as the adults surrounded her bed. She succumbed to the illness and passed away. Joseph sobbed for days, unable to comprehend such a loss. As far as my understanding goes, that was the last time he shed a tear: he was 11.
    As self-confessed cry-babies, Michael and I always hated how hardened our father was. None of us can remember a time when we saw him show any emotional vulnerability. Whenever we cried as kids – even after he had chastised us – he berated us: ‘What you crying for?’
    Joseph had spent his formative years mourning and missing his sister. At her funeral, after walking behind the horse-drawn cart that carried her coffin, he vowed he never wanted to lay eyes on anyone’s tomb again. One loss in life sealed our father’s emotions and Joseph kept his word: he never attended another funeral. Until 2009.
     
    WHEN JOSEPH WAS A SCHOOLBOY, HE was terrified of one woman teacher. The ‘respect thy teacher’ decree carried extra force because his father, Samuel, was a high-school director and believed in strict discipline by corporal punishment. This fearsome womanapparently scared Joseph so much that he shivered whenever she called out his name. Once, so the story goes, he was called out to the front of the class to read from the chalkboard. He knew exactly what the words were, but fear left him mute. The teacher asked him again. When he couldn’t answer a second time, the punishment was swift: a wooden paddle board across his bare behind. This thing had holes in it, too, for extra suction with each whack. As she paddled him, she reminded him why he was getting hit: he had disobeyed her when he didn’t read. He hated her for it, but respected her too. ‘Because of this, I listened to her and always did my best,’ he said.
    It was the same when Papa Jackson chastised him. That was how he was raised – on the old theory that in order to control someone, you first need to shock fear into them. This was his lesson in life, marked out on his backside. In later weeks, that same woman teacher held a talent contest and pupils were invited to do anything they wished: art, poetry, craft, a short story, a dramatic presentation. Joseph wasn’t artistic; he wasn’t good with words – he’d only ever watched silent movies. He knew only one thing: the sound of his father’s voice, singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. So he decided to sing, but when it came to his turn, he shook so much that his pitch was quivery and rushed – and the whole class burst out laughing. He returned to his desk ‘humiliated’ and expected another beating. When his teacher approached, he cowered. ‘You sang very well,’ she said. ‘They are laughing because you were nervous, not because you were bad. Good try.’
    On the walk home from school, Joseph says he made a vow to himself that ‘I’ll show ’em’ and he started dreaming about ‘a life in show-business’. I didn’t know that story until recently. He excavated it from his past, trying to apply meaning after the event. I don’t suppose any of us Jacksons have taken the trouble to understand our deepest history, or even talk about it too much. Michael once said he didn’t truly know Joseph. ‘That’s sad for a son who hungers to understand his own father,’ he wrote in 1988, in his autobiography, Moonwalk .
    I think there is something unknowable about Joseph. It’s difficult to reach him beyond his barriers, perhaps built by a fear of loss and reinforced by his need for respect. None of us can remember him holding or cuddling us, or telling us, ‘I love you’. He never play-wrestled with us, or tucked us into bed at night; there were no heart-to-heart father-son discussions about life. We remember the respect, the instructions, the chores and the commands, but no affection. We