The Last Holiday (2 page)

We all need to see folks reach beyond what looks possible and make it happen. We need more examples of how to make it happen. We will all face difficult circumstances along the way that will
challenge our self-confidence and try to disrupt our decisions about the directions we wish to choose.

I hope this book will remind you that you can succeed, that help can arrive from unexpected quarters at times that are crucial. I believe in “the Spirits.” Sometimes when I explain
to people that I have been blessed, and that the Spirits have watched over me and guided my life, I suppose I sound like some kind of quasi-evangelist for a new religion. I am not and do not have a
personal church to promote. I believe, however, to paraphrase Duke Ellington, that at almost every corner of my life there has been someone or something there to show me the way. These landmarks,
these signals, are provided by the Spirits. This is not a subject I offer up for purposes of debate. Whatever you call the intangible influences that help direct you in your life is not the point.
My contention is that your blessings derive from your positive contributions. But they must come from the heart. Not because of what you expect in return. Otherwise what you contributed was a loan,
not a gift.

I am grateful to dozens of people who helped advance my work over the years, and who helped further the accomplishment I am trying to describe here. I hope that will become clear in the
descriptions that follow. In the meantime, I would hope this book helps all of us remember to celebrate Brother Stevie Wonder, on his own birthday and on January 15—the birthday of Martin
Luther King, Jr.—every year.

Words have been important to me for as long as I can remember. Their sound, their construction, their origins. Because of that interest, there are few places I could have been
raised that would have provided more wonderful raw material than the southeast quarter of North America.

The word Tennessee means “land of trees” to the folks native to that part of the world three or four hundred years ago. Residents of the region respected the land and their attention
to the details of their surroundings stands out in their descriptions. They examined their environment thoroughly, creating drawings of what they saw from a mountain that provided an unobstructed
view for miles in all directions. South and east of the mountain, a blanket of treetops led to trails marked by the Seminoles. Due west, the Chickasaw people lived on the banks of the
horseshoe-shaped Tennessee River that one encountered twice as it sliced the state into thirds. And everywhere stood dense forests. Tennessee, they say, was once 90 percent trees, the land of
trees.

The natives from the heights of the Appalachians scattered when the new folks came into the mountains from the east. These graceless, grimy intruders were more than a different tribe. And less.
They were more than a different skin color and language. They had no respect for the land and its inhabitants. Arriving in waves, they attacked the mountains as if to level them. They slashed
jagged holes and damned the streams before thunderous explosions collapsed the face of hillsides, leaving only the ugly scars to evidence their search for the black rocks they called
coal
.
The natives charted their ragged trails of mutilation from the peak above Chattanooga. And they led their families west.

When I was a boy in Tennessee, our first class in the morning was geography and time was always dedicated to Tennessee and how it was connected to history. Tennessee was the Volunteer State.
University of Tennessee sports teams were the Volunteers. I remember being shown pictures of Davy Crockett and Smoky the Bear. I also recall the slightly curved diagonal line I drew that linked
Knoxville to Nashville to the city named after an ancient Egyptian metropolis, Memphis.

Memphis, Tennessee, was only ninety miles west of Jackson, my home. But Memphis was as far away as the North Pole in my mind. People in Jackson were always talking about somewhere else, mostly
Memphis, because it was a close somewhere else and you could drink alcohol there, while Jackson was in a dry county. I talked about going to Chicago, where my mother lived. Some of my
grandfather’s relatives were in Memphis and I had visited them, but what I remember about the trip was getting carsick and throwing up.

The history that we were given about Memphis was done in light pencil that hopscotched its way to a semisolid landing with Elvis Presley on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. The city had started as a
midway market, a meeting place on the banks of the Mississippi River that squatted in the muck almost squarely between New Orleans and Chicago. As such, it provided a perfect location for traders
of all description and from all directions, who brought everything to exchange—from furs to furniture and cotton to cattle. As the steamboats and paddle wheelers sought the shallows of
Memphis and St. Louis, they stirred great clouds of silt and sand, turning the surface of the waterway a burnished brown. The Mississippi became known as the Big Muddy.

The docks at the edge of the village were a magnet for hunters, trappers, farmers, and natives, who rolled up in wooden wagons to trade loads of tobacco, produce, and buffalo hides for guns,
whisky, and farm implements. They all walked and rolled past the narrow, squalid shacks, no more than cages, where there were echoes of moans and rattling chains from human cargo.

The Memphis day was from “can see” to “can’t see,” and with the first hint of another sunrise the procession from the docks to the foul smelling mudhuts beneath the
auction blocks began. There, nearly naked black men and women barely covered by rotting rags were led in, bound and shackled, with rawhide nooses around their necks. The least cooperative captives
were hobbled with ankle chains that limited them to short, stuttering steps. They would be sold, these bucks, to the cutthroat Cajuns from the sea-level swamps. It was said that each year spent in
the paralyzing heat of a Louisiana summer took five years off a man’s life. When a slave was sold to the Lords of Louisiana, the observers lamented that he’d been “sold down the
river.”

Memphis matured from midway market to a major metropolis. Saloons and whorehouse tents, once soaked with the sweat of drunken sailors and reeking with the acid stench of swine, slime, sewage,
and slaves is now better known for Graceland and the Grizzlies than for Beale Street and the blues. Its filthy foundation as a headquarters for whores and for humans sold to the highest bidder was
obscured by the magic of musical melding. Sun Records considered itself the fuse that lit the 1950s with Elvis and rock ’n’ roll. With Carla and Rufus Thomas and Otis Redding, Stax
Records brought blues to the hit parade with hooks and horns and a solid beat, evolving into Al Green and Willie Mitchell. Memphis meant music.

And unless you stop to think for a minute, you might forget that it was in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on a motel balcony on April 4, 1968. That assassination is
one of our starting points.

Stevie Wonder did not forget.

In 1980, Stevie joined with the members of the Black Caucus in the United States Congress to speak out for the need to honor the day Dr. King was born, to make his birthday a national
holiday.

The campaign began in earnest on Halloween of 1980 in Houston, Texas, with Stevie’s national tour supporting a new LP called
Hotter than July
, featuring the song “Happy
Birthday,” which advocated a holiday for Dr. King. I arrived in Houston in the early afternoon to join the tour as the opening act. I was invited to do the first eight shows, covering two
weeks, and I felt good about being there, about seeing Stevie and his crazy brother Calvin again.

Somehow it seems that Stevie’s effort as the leader of this campaign has been forgotten. But it is something that we should all remember. Just as surely as we should remember April 4,
1968, we should celebrate January 15. And we should not forget that Stevie remembered.

As Stevie sang on “Happy Birthday”:

Stevie Wonder could not see. He was blind. Blind was damn near part of his name. From the first time his name was broadcast and the tune’s title was tagged, he was
stamped “Stevie Wonder, the Blind Boy.” I knew it was all part of programming, of selling Stevie to the public, but I still felt a little sympathy for the brother because it put
something in capital letters he probably didn’t need to hear.

I had never heard “Blind Ray Charles” or “Blind José Feliciano.” It couldn’t have been because Stevie played an instrument, because Ray Charles played piano
and José Feliciano played guitar. What the hell?

There had been a stretch when brothers and sisters were taking on what they considered religious names. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. Bobby Moore became Ahmad Rashad. In the old days guys
named something else became Rock Hudson and John Wayne. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X. Ma Bell became Nine X. And Stevie . . .

Stevie started out carrying a tic-tac-toe of AKAs. He was known as “Little Stevie Wonder” when his first Top 10 tune turned the American airwaves into his one-man tidal wave. Had I
been around in those days with a microphone, it would have been a title wave. But since his real name was Stevland Morris, he had actually been riding the waves on a fictitious surfboard.

He might have been little when he was first spotted by the record executives at some show down in Motown, but by the time he played “Fingertips” on
American Bandstand
, he was
clearly pushing six feet and looked like he could slam dunk Dick Clark.

I first had the chance to see Stevie Wonder at the Apollo on 125th Street when I was fifteen and living in the Bronx. The young man at center stage holding a harmonica and a microphone while
urging the crowd to clap their hands was as tall as I was, and only the dark glasses that concealed his eyes reminded me that his hundred-watt smile from inside the bright spotlights was offered to
a darkness that began behind his eyelids and not just beyond the footlights. The guy could flat-out play, and I hoped the “Blind” part of his introduction would be dropped rather than
become attached to him as a professional name, like Blind Lemon Jefferson—as though plain old Stevie Wonder was an amateur handle.

Stevie continued to grow in all directions. To his full adult height of over six feet, but also in the public eye as a wonderful musical talent. An exceptional keyboard player, an enthusiastic
percussionist, an inventive and challenging composer of both rousing dance numbers and thoughtful ballads, tunes that stuck with you and came back to you with fresh feelings. He demonstrated his
full conceptual grasp as a composer and arranger with his orchestrated score of the movie
The Secret Life of Plants
.

The texture of his voice and vocal range made his every offering as a singer an individual accomplishment. His songs were sung by other artists, but not “covered.” Throughout the
1960s and 1970s he remained highly valued as an attraction and was in constant demand.

I thought about Stevie often before I met him. Aside from his constant presence on the radio, he spent a good deal of time on my personal stereo. Along with the early look at him I got at the
Apollo, I saw him again a few years after that, during a summer break from college when I stayed on campus to work as a sort of camp counselor. We took a bus from Lincoln University’s
Pennsylvania campus up to a New Jersey fairground for two hours of Stevie’s songs and showmanship.

He put on an awesome display of virtuoso performances on a number of instruments. Seeing his growth since 125th Street on harmonica to the master of a variety of keyboards and percussion
instruments and the ease with which he handled his singing chores elevated the brother to the top of my ladder as a performer and a talent. His playing, singing, and songwriting had expanded
exponentially while he still retained the unrestrained joy that exploded like a physical force from his opening notes and lassoed everyone within reach of his frequency of freedom. I had never
attributed to Stevie any supernatural powers or felt as though he was visited by aliens or touched by some witch waving a magic wand, but after seeing a couple of his performances, I was definitely
captivated by the energy he always generated from the stage.

I was glad that by the time I met the brother—in the mid 1970s—he was just Stevie Wonder. Or Stevie. He had either lost or thrown away most of the ill-fitting descriptives that had
been spread over him here and there like ugly coats of paint. Otherwise I could have ended up at thirty years old sharing the bill with “Little Blind Stevie Wonder.” But things worked
out.

A few years before the offer to tour with Stevie, Clive Davis had invited him to a show we played at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. After that Stevie would show up
spontaneously at shows once in a while, at the Roxy, at the Wilshire Theater, but I never knew he was coming. That was what friends did. They could show up without a royal proclamation and know
they’d be welcome. With the kind of schedules entertainers have, it’s not odd that things happen spontaneously. You get a minute, you hear somebody’s in town, and you want to see
them. The bigger the celebrity and the more things they had to do, the more spontaneous things were.

I always called everybody “Brotherman” and Stevie had his own personal names for people. Soon after we met he began to call me “Air Reez,” which was cool because I am an
Aries.

Meeting him also sent me back to the Bronx for memories of what I had thought of the early “Little Stevie” and I felt happy for him. It has been a private joy of mine to have felt
that kinship with the brother nearly all my life. Never caring in the beginning or now when someone might say, “He’s blind, you know.”