THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 63
D
ear Mr. Jackson,
Thank you for your music,
and thank you for reading this
far in a letter, if it reaches you, from a
stranger. Though we have never met
face to face, I could say that I’ve known
you since I was a teen-ager growing up
in Pittsburgh, Pa., in the fifties, born
fifteen years or so before you were born,
Mr. Jackson, and I wanted to be you, or
rather wanted with all my soul, a soul
real to me as the faces of people in my
family, to sing like you would sing the
music we both inherited and you would
keep alive in the eighties, nineties with
your talent and gifts. Listening to your
voice, I hear the old music again—the
Dells, Diablos, Drifters, Flamingos,
Spaniels, Five Satins, Midnighters, Soul
Stirrers—and it takes me back to those
voices on the corner, in church, on rec-
ords, radio, teaching me the fires in my
belly, dance steps in my feet, the hun-
gers, fun, sadness, loves lost and found
all around me I only half understood
and still don’t, old man that I am today,
but yearn so badly, teen-ager and now,
to stay part of, that swirling, full-to-the-
brim, overflowing life that sometimes
fills me up, sways and staggers me, sweeps
me off my feet, that elusive, loud, shak-
ing, shouting world that could some-
times go silent and disappear, here then
abruptly gone, passing me by as if I were
nothing, nobody, less than a speck of
dust or a tear no one sees falling, all of
that, and more bitter and more sweet
because, like you, Freddie Jackson, I was
a colored boy and my world, my peo-
ple, surrounded by others not colored,
others inexplicably mean, crude, intim-
idating, evil as death.
Anyway, I don’t need to tell you about
coming up colored. When I hear you
sing I remember you were there beside
me and here I am now beside you, lis-
tening once more to all the stories, facts,
times, people, voices that the music
passes on, gives back, recalls, steals,
wishes for, touches and lets go.
I should admit straightaway I can’t
claim to be a devoted fan or student of
all your music. I’m writing to let you
know one song in particular that you
recorded, “You Are My Lady,” seems
part of a story I’m trying to compose.
Composing now as we speak. Or rather
as I imagine myself speaking and imag-
ine we are speaking together. Pretend-
ing to speak with you my way of tell-
ing a story. Our silences really, not our
voices, engaged in conversation. Though
I hear you singing. Softly. Clearly. Your
song, “URML,” in my story, insepara-
ble from it before there is a story.
Point of this letter is not exactly to
ask permission to put you in a story I’m
writing, Freddie Jackson. Rather, I’m
letting you know (informing/fessing up/
sharing) I have no choice. You are in it
already without being asked, without
any exit offered, like the color we share,
which this country assigns to us before
we are born.
Story I’m attempting to put together
concerns my son, youngest of my three
grown children, a prisoner now, in Ar-
izona serving a life sentence for com-
mitting murder in 1986, when he and
his victim both fifteen years old. I have
tried to write his story many, many
times—as a short piece of fiction that
stands alone, as an episode in longer nar-
ratives, fiction and nonfiction, published
and unpublished. Each attempt failed.
Failed probably for a variety of compli-
cated reasons in each case, but the sim-
ple fact is none of my efforts to write
my son’s story freed him. And that one
negative outcome they all share certifies
their collective futility: my son remains
incarcerated. Getting him out is the sole
justification, if any legit justification ex-
ists, for me writing about him. Even a
grieving, conflicted father possesses no
right to ignore his injured son’s request
not to discuss in public his son’s wounds,
especially when at best the father able
only to speculate, guess the nature of the
wounds and their effects. No excuse for
a story’s probes, prods, provocations un-
less they promise to produce, at a very
minimum, the possibility of a cure. Why
else disturb a son’s privacy (an inevita-
ble result no matter how scrupulously I
endeavor to avoid it). Why intrude after
finally, expressly, he’s forbidden me to
write about him. Why discuss in public
a horrific series of events unless the re-
telling, the painful, incriminating exhu-
mation liberates my son, sets him free.
None of my previous efforts to tell his
story have disentangled him from the
consequences of a crime beyond my
power to change. My helplessness feels
unalterable. I find myself unable to fore-
see a different scenario. So I’m asking
myself, asking you, Mr. Jackson, if I
should try a story about my son once
more. And if I try to write it, for whose
benefit, whose sake, on whose behalf, for
what purpose would I be performing.
I ask you because you are an artist,
Mr. Jackson, and because sometimes
your singing achieves what the best art
accomplishes. A song you sing creates
a space with different rules, different
possibilities. A space opens that doesn’t
exist until a listener tunes in and hears
your voice, a sudden space that may dis-
appear the very next instant but changes
that instant, too, no doubt, and it doesn’t
matter that the previous moment and
the ones before remain whatever they
were and lock a person down with un-
forgiving, unalterable rules and possi-
bilities. None of that matters when I
experience the undeniable presence, the
unique truth a particular song can de-
liver—your song, “URML,” my best ex-
ample—because then I know time, my
time, my life is always more than it ap-
pears to me. Didn’t that voice, that snatch
of music just remind me that there’s
more in any moment, more to the life
I think I’m caught up in, than I can ever
know, ever understand, ever come to
terms with, make peace with, survive,
so much more and more and different
and other than it had seemed an instant
before the music. If I listen, if I let it be,
let it alone, just listen to the music while
it delivers inklings and intimations of
things very different than I thought they
were, are, and sometimes I do go there,
into a different space, thank you, thank
you, the music reveals, that other, more
than possible place, and I go there, can’t
help myself, because I need it, need help
so much, I do, I do, I yearn, I hear the
music and nothing is what it was an in-
stant before or ever after, maybe, if I lis-
ten, keep believing, learning my life is
less than nothing and also perhaps a
tiny, tiny bit more than everything I be-
lieved I already knew, every damned
body already knows, if I really listen, let
myself hear when a song speaks.
How do you work the magic of your
art, Mr. Jackson. What makes your music
special when it’s special. How do you
offer a space with your voice that feels
real enough for a listener to enter. What
secrets have you learned to please an
audience. How do you put all of your-
self into a song, but then disappear
so there’s only music and it belongs to
