Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (5 page)

Everyone was expected to contribute. The girls did the housework. Willie, the oldest, the adopted cousin, was already sixteen and working for the Jewish butcher at the chicken market across the street. At eleven, Charles went to work as a delivery boy for the Blue Goose grocery store. Even the little boys helped their mother with her shopping.

Charles joined the Deacons, a neighborhood gang. Sam and L.C. freely roamed the streets, but there was only so much you could get away with, because the neighborhood functioned, really, as an extended family; if you got too out of hand, the neighbors would correct you, even go so far as to physically chastise you, and Reverend and Mrs. Cook would certainly do the same.

There were still white people in the neighborhood when the Cooks moved in, but by now almost all its residents were black, the shopkeepers uniformly white—and yet the children for the most part thought little about segregation because their exposure was limited to the fact, but not the experience, of it. Reverend Cook, on the other hand, was unwilling to see his children, or anyone else in the family for that matter, treated like second-class citizens. One time the police confronted Charles on the street, and Reverend Cook, in his children’s recollection, came out of the house and said, “Don’t you mess around with my kids. If there is something wrong, you come and get me.” And when the policeman touched his holstered gun, their father said, “I’ll whip that pistol off you.” He meant it, according to his children, “and the police knew he meant it. Our daddy wasn’t bashful about nothing. He always told us to hold our head high and speak our mind. ‘Don’t you all run from nobody.’”

I
T WAS A FAMILY ABOVE ALL,
one that, no matter what internal frictions might arise, always stuck together. Charles might feel resentment against his father and long for the day when he could find some escape; the girls might very well feel that it was unfair that the boys had no household responsibilities; Sam and L.C. might fight every day just in the course of normal events. “We was always together,” said L.C. “We slept together, we grew up together. Sometimes we’d be in bed at the end of the day, and Sam would say, ‘Hey, we didn’t fight today,’ and we’d fight right there in the bed—that’s how close we were!” But the moment that the outside world intruded, Cooks, as their father constantly reminded them, stood up for one another. Mess with one Cook, mess with all.

The children all took their baths before their father came home from work (“We could tell it was him by the lights of his car”). Then they would sit down at the round kitchen table and have dinner together, every night without exception. They weren’t allowed to eat at somebody else’s house (“If you had a friend, bring them home”). Their mother, who addressed her husband unfailingly as “Brother Cook,” never made them eat anything they didn’t like and often cooked something special for one or another of her children. Chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, and homemade dinner rolls were the favorites, along with red beans and rice. None of them doubted for a moment that Mama loved him or her best of all. She lived for her children, as she told them over and over, and she prayed every night that she would live to see them grown, because “she did not want a stepmother over her children.”

After dinner, in the summertime especially, they might go for a drive. They might go to the airport to watch the planes take off; they might go to the park or just ride around downtown. On weekends they would all go to the zoo sometimes, and every summer they had family picnics by the pavilion at Red Gate Woods, part of the forest preserve, family picnics for which their mother provided baskets of food and at which attendance was not optional.

Once a year the family attended the national Church of Christ (Holiness) convention in Annapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and every summer they drove to Mississippi, spending Reverend Cook’s two-week vacation from Reynolds shuttling back and forth among their various relatives all over the state, with Reverend Cook preaching (and the Singing Children accompanying him) wherever they went.

The preparations for the trip were always busy and exciting, with Mama staying up the night before frying chicken and making pound cake because there was nowhere on the road for a black family to stop. Papa did all the driving, at least until Charles turned fifteen, and after the first hour or so, everyone started to get hungry and beg Mama for a chicken leg or wing out of the shoe boxes in which she had packed the food. They all sang together in the car, silly songs like “Merrily, We Roll Along,” and read off the Burma-Shave signs that unspooled their message sign by sign on the side of the highway. They all remembered one sequence in particular year after year. The first sign said “Papa liked the shave,” the next “Mama liked the jar,” then “Both liked the cream,” and, finally, “So there you are!” One time, Agnes recalled, they ran out of bread for the cold cuts, and Papa sent her and her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary, into a grocery store—she couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. “Well, Mary went in and picked up the loaf of bread and put it on the counter just like she do anywhere else, just like she would do at home, and the man said, ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ So she says no, and he said, ‘When you come in here, you ask me for what you want, and I’ll get it for you.’ So she said, ‘I’m buying it. I don’t see why I can’t pick it up. I’m taking it with me.’”

It was a very different way of life. Charles and Mary went out in the fields to pick cotton, but, L.C. said, he and Sam had no interest in that kind of work (“We were out there playing with the little girls, trying to get them in the cotton gin”), and Hattie, who did, was forced to take care of Agnes. One time Sam and L.C. were watching their grandfather pull up some logs in a field, “and he just throwed the horse’s reins down when he seen us coming,” said L.C. “Well, Sam got tangled up in the reins, and they had to run and catch the horse. And we got Sam back to the house, and he was all right, but I never will forget, he said, ‘That horse tried to kill me.’ I said, ‘No, Sam, the horse was just spooked. She wasn’t trying to kill you.’ He said, ‘No—Nelly tried to kill me!’”

They met far-flung relatives on both sides of the family who had never left Mississippi, including their mother’s cousin Mabel, who lived in Shaw and was more like a sister to her, and their father’s brother George, who sharecropped outside of Greenville. Their grandmother, L.C. said, was always trying to get Sam and him to stay with her. “She would say, ‘You got to come live with us,’ but I had a little joke I’d tell her. I said, ‘You know what? If Mama and them hadn’t of moved and left Mississippi, as soon as I’d gotten big enough to walk, I’d have walked out!’ They used to laugh at me and say, ‘Boy, you’re so crazy.’”

Papa preached and they sang all over the state. To Hattie, “It was really a learning experience,” but from Charles’ point of view, “We was glad to get there, glad to leave.”

T
HEY SAW THEIR FATHER
as a stern but fair man, but their mother was someone they could tell their secrets to. She treated their friends with the same kind of gentle consideration that she showed all of them, never reluctant to add another place to the table or take a mattress and lay it on the floor. “I don’t know where one of you all might be,” she told them by way of explanation, “maybe someone will help you some day in the same way.” If any one of them was in a play and just said “Boo,” why, then, to their mother, they were “the best booer in the world.”

None of them was ever really singled out. Papa whipped all of them equally, and Mama rewarded them all the same—but even within the family Sam stood out. To L.C., bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, someone who by his own account, and everyone else’s, too, “always thought like a man,” Sam was similar—but at the same time altogether different. “Hey, I thought I had a personality. But
Sam
had the personality. He could charm the birds out of the trees.”

If you tried to calculate just what it was, you would never be able to figure it out. There were other little boys just as good-looking, and there were undoubtedly others just as bright—but there was something about him, all of his siblings agreed, whether it was the infectiousness of his grin, or his unquenchable enthusiasm, or the insatiable nature of his curiosity, he possessed a spark that just seemed to light a fire under everyone he was around. He was a great storyteller and he always had something to tell you—but it was the
way
he communicated it, the way he made you feel as if you were the only person in the world and that what he was communicating to you was something he had never told anyone else before: there was a seemingly uncalculated spontaneity even to what his brothers and sisters knew to be his most calculated actions. He was always calling attention to himself. “He loved to play little pranks,” his sister Agnes said, “and he could think of more jokes than anyone else.” But why his actions failed to cause more jealousy or resentment than they did, no one could fully explain. Unless it was simply, as L.C. said, “he was just likeable.”

To his older sister Hattie, Sam always had his own way of doing things. Sam and L.C. and Charles all pooled their collection of marbles, “but Sam liked to be by himself a lot, too, and he would take those marbles and have them be like boxers in the ring—he made up all kinds of things.”

For that same reason, to his ninety-eight-year-old father looking back on it all thirty-two years after his son’s death, “Sam was a peculiar child. He was always headman, he was always at the post, from a kid on what he said went. He’d just be walking along the street and make a song out of it. If he said it was a song, it was a song all the way through.”

The others could see the contributions their next-to-youngest member made even to such familiar spirituals and jubilee numbers as “Deep River,” “Swing Down, Chariot, Let Me Ride,” and “Going Home,” not to mention the more modern quartet style of Birmingham’s Famous Blue Jays and the Five Soul Stirrers from Houston, both of whom had recently moved to the neighborhood. Spiritual music was at a crossroads, with the older style of singing, which the Reverend Cook favored—“sorrow songs” from slavery times along with the more up-tempo “jubilee”-style rhythmic narratives of the enormously influential Golden Gate Quartet—giving way to a more direct emotional style. This was the new quartet sound, with five- or six-member groups like the Stirrers expanding on the traditional parts while featuring alternating lead singers who egged each other on to a level of histrionics previously confined to the Pentecostal Church. Their driving attack mimicked the sound, as well as the message, of gospel preaching, and their repertoire, too, frequently sprang from more accessible personal testimony, like the “gospel blues” compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey. To the Singing Children it made little difference, they sang it all. Their repertoire was aimed at pleasing their audience, but they were drawn to the exciting new quartet sound. Anything the Soul Stirrers or the Blue Jays sang, they learned immediately off the record. But Sam’s ability to rearrange verses or rhyme up familiar Bible stories to make a song was not lost on any of them, least of all the Reverend Cook.

It wasn’t long before the Singing Children had a manager of their own, a friend of their father’s named David Peale who owned a filling station and had plenty of money. He set up church bookings for them, established a firm fee structure (“We charged fifteen cents’ admission, and we wouldn’t sing if we didn’t get paid”), drove them to their engagements in a white Cadillac limousine, and collected the money at the door. They had quite a following, according to Agnes, still too young to join the group. “Everywhere they went, they would turn the church
out.
”

Sam accepted Christ at eleven, in 1942, just after America had entered the war—but like all of his brothers and sisters, the religion that he embraced seemed to have less to do with the Church of Christ (Holiness) or their father’s strictures than the simple precepts that Reverend Cook had taught them: show respect to get respect, if you treat people right, they in turn will do right by you. At the same time, as Reverend Cook was equally quick to point out, there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success; in fact, there were many verses that endorsed it, and as proud as he was of his ability to put enough food on the table to feed a family of ten—
and
to have recently acquired two late-model limousines, a radio, a telephone, and a brand-new windup phonograph—he was equally determined that his children should learn to make their own way in the world.

Sam took this lesson in the spirit, but perhaps not quite in the manner, that his father intended. He established his
own
business with a group of neighborhood kids, with his brother L.C. serving as his chief lieutenant and himself as CEO. “Yeah, tearing out people’s fences and then sell it back to them for firewood at twenty cents a basket.
We
did that; Sam didn’t do it—he get the money. Sam would have me and Louis Truelove and Slick and Dan Lofton (there was about five of us) to go tear out the fence and chop the wood up—naw, they didn’t know it was their fence—and then as soon as we get the money, he take half of everybody’s but mine.”

He was a mischievous, inquisitive child, always testing the limits but, unlike L.C., not inclined to measure the consequences of his every action. He went to the movies for the first time at around thirteen, at the Louis Theater at Thirty-fifth and Michigan, somehow persuading his younger brother to accompany him. “I said, ‘You know Papa don’t believe in it.’ He said, ‘Nobody gonna say anything, and you ain’t gonna tell anyone.’ I said, ‘Noooo . . .’ ‘Then how he gonna know?’

“After that we went all the time—me and Sam had a ball. One time there was no seats, and Sam called, ‘Fire!’ Shit, they wanted to put our ass in jail. But we got a seat. We used to get tripe sandwiches at this little place on Thirty-sixth, they be all covered with onions and pickles, and you get in the theater and just bite down on it, and everybody in the show want to know, ‘Who got them tripe sandwiches?’”