Traveling Soul (19 page)

After “Keep On Pushing,” Dad became an icon. People began recognizing him when he went out to dinner or walked down the street. They'd approach him breathlessly, sometimes wanting an autograph, sometimes just wanting to shake his hand. He'd smile from ear to ear and charm them with his soft voice. He always reacted graciously, and he noticed the
effect he had. His fans seemed to glow as they walked away from meeting him. “It wasn't like they were starstruck,” my brother Tracy recalls. “It was more admiration, humble admiration for him.”

Now he had more than just money. His face became a form of currency—dark skin, big teeth, and all. It set him apart in a good way. The name Curtis Mayfield was currency too. It meant something. Uncle Kenny recalls going to a convenience store with Curtis and Marion, and when Curtis walked up to the counter to buy something, the cashier said, “Man, you look like Curtis Mayfield.” Dad said, “I am Curtis Mayfield.” “Aw, you lyin',” the man said. In later years, after the novelty of fame had worn off, my father might have let it drop at that, happy to get away unmolested. For now, he said, “There's my mother, there's my brother—you ask them.” The cashier glowed, too. That was the power of fame.

The added attention cut both ways, though—it helped relieve my father's insecurities, but it also added new ones. He could never know who his real friends were. People came at him from all directions. If someone went out of their way to treat him well, he had to gauge their motives. A host of hard questions faced him at every turn—who do you trust, who do you let close, how do you know if they want to hurt you? Some-times—as Fred, Sam, Eddie, and Johnny would soon learn—he'd put his trust in the wrong people, treating friends like enemies and vice versa.

As “Keep On Pushing” rode high on the charts, the eponymous album followed in suit.
Keep On Pushing
was the Impressions' first proper album, as opposed to a collection of singles, and it reflected the growing trend in pop music. The album as a statement existed long before 1964, but it was fast becoming the dominant art form in a world once ruled by singles. The Impressions released
Keep On Pushing
into a musical landscape still quaking from the Beatles'
A Hard Day's Night
, Dylan's
The Times They Are A-Changin
', Otis Redding's
Pain in My Heart
, and the Supremes'
Where Did Our Love Go
. These came out alongside landmark albums by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, the Beach Boys, the Miracles, and a plethora of other soon-to-be icons. With
Keep On Pushing
, the Impressions put themselves at the forefront of this exploding musical landscape and exited the doo-wop age forever.

The album contained five top forty pop and R&B singles, including a version of a spiritual called “Amen,” which my father reimagined with Johnny Pate as a triumphant march. He'd decided to cover the song after he heard Sidney Poitier sing it in the 1963 film
Lilies of the Field
. Johnny came up with the idea to open with an allusion to the old Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and he also suggested the marching beat groove. The song hit number seven on the pop chart and provided Dad with his fourth number-one R&B hit within one year.

His seemingly endless string of hits continued with a catchy song called “You Must Believe Me” and two B-sides that also charted. The first of the B-sides, an epic, haunting ballad called “I've Been Trying,” showcased my father's increasing finesse as a songwriter and highlighted the inherent rhythm in his guitar playing. It was also a perfection of the falsetto vocal style the Impressions had begun working on after the Brooks brothers left. As Johnny said, “On the end of ‘I've Been Trying,' the group went into some high falsetto harmonic things that was really unheard of. Nobody had really done that. After Curtis and the guys did that, we just kind of flipped over it, the way it came out. A few sessions down the line, Curtis came up with a tune called ‘I Need You,' and they did it again. This began to be a signature thing for the Impressions.”

The second charting B-side, “Long Long Winter,” made a further argument for Curtis as one of the great guitar players and songwriters of his era. Bob Marley and the Wailers would soon cover it as well as the album's closing track, “I Made a Mistake.”

“Keep On Pushing” helped take the movement further into the mainstream just as Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. The act outlawed discrimination against “racial, ethnic, national, and religious minorities, and women,” and ended “unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by facilities that serve the general public.” When President Johnson signed it into law, Negroes breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed Kennedy's successor would be a friend—or at least not an outright enemy. With the act in place, hope within the movement reached its pinnacle.

At the same time, my father experienced two great losses. On June 28, Kirby died of an enlarged heart. Only eighteen years old, he lived his entire life with severe mental disabilities. Even Mannish showed up at the funeral, where Uncle Kenny recalls seeing his father for the first time since he left.

As my father mourned Kirby and toured
Keep On Pushing
, he decided to leave Helen. His relationship with Diane had only deepened, and he yearned to pursue the woman in his heart. After his mother wrote him a letter that no longer survives, he wrote back from New York on November 14, 1964. His writing seems at times stilted and too formal, perhaps trying to make up for his lack of schooling, but his reply shows a tenderness and maturity uncommon for someone so young:

Dear Mother,

Here's hoping that you are doing well. I did receive your letter and have read it several times as you have asked. Of course your letter is nothing new to me for all you have said has been in my mind for a great length of time before my love son was born, in which I think has been time enough to consider carefully your letter. Despite of my success in the business world, I must submit to being young, therefore I am considered under rank as you might say. But how old must I be to know my own mind? Or realize what is best for myself, my wife, and my beloved son? I am sure there is no doubt in your mind of my loving our Curt Curt. Might I live with him or away from him, I know I would be a better father to him than some with their sons, and yet I know this is not enough, for it does take two in most cases to give a child the teaching and guidance he needs. We both agree.

I have now been married over three years. I am sorry to say that I've been unhappy a large portion of this time. My wife is a good woman, I need not tell you this despite of her ways. And yet things have happened within our home that has caused my love for her to die. For over a year because of our child to come I have tried and failed in arousing my love for her. Mother, I am not one to pretend I do not love my wife, which I have told her, and my
respect for her will not let me lead her on as I have in the past. A woman with a child needs more than a husband. She also needs love and affection, in which now only my son receives because of the lost feeling for my mate. Maybe you say Curt Curt's a child and don't know the difference, so resolve in some more constructive way, as thousands do … But Curt Curt is not enough. I do not believe an unhappy marriage helps a child or children in any way. Children are people with their own minds. Sooner or later, anything concealed from him will come out. Living with him or away shall amount to the same problems he'll have to face. I am not so worried about Curt Curt, for if he's anything like his daddy, he'll have a mind of his own.

I can still respect my father as a man, and so can you. Would you rather live with him and he not love you? You did this with Al [Jackson] and what came of it? It only brought bitterness and unhappiness of yourself and your children toward a man who didn't love you. You asked the question, “Would I deliberately condemn my baby son of the same misfortune?” Our only misfortune was being poor. I imagine it was harder on you of not having a husband than our not having a father. I love my son and respect his mother, and there's nothing I wouldn't do for the both of them. It is not my intention to say, “The Hell with it, shucking my responsibilities for some corner of the Earth.” I think I have proved myself to you and my family. But I must be happy too if it means giving up everything I have. Call it selfish interest if you must. But I don't think it will deprive the little one of anything. I could not pretend to him that all is well when it is not.

Always your son,

Curt

Despite the losses, my father's life had taken several dramatic turns for the better during 1964.
Keep on Pushing
and his work at OKeh made him successful and rich beyond his hopes, and his new relationship with Diane lessened the sting of his failed marriage. He couldn't marry Diane
since he hadn't divorced Helen—she wanted money as part of a settlement, and my father never liked parting with money. Regardless, like Annie Bell did with Wal, my mother changed her name to Mayfield, making Tracy a Mayfield too.

No one told Tracy that Curtis wasn't his biological father, echoing the situation between Judy and Annie Bell. He had to figure it out later in life. But, as Tracy recalls, Dad welcomed him as his own flesh and blood. “On his part, I didn't feel any iota of a difference,” Tracy says. “He never once made me feel less than or different at all. When I looked at his face, I saw my father's face. When I heard his voice, I heard my father's voice.”

After leaving Helen, Dad moved into a posh apartment in the Marina Towers, one of Chicago's most recognizable landmarks. The building looks like a multitiered spaceship, and he lived near the top of that spaceship, on the highest floor but one. From the windows, he could look down over the well-heeled theater district like a king observing his domain. The building stands less than two miles southeast of Cabrini, but it was a long way from the ghetto. The control he'd chased all his life seemed within his grasp, at least for the moment.

Dad enjoyed earning enough to carve out a place for himself and his family in a stuffy, upper-class white area. His elevation in social status was still new to him, though. He had the money, but not the manners. “He had poor table manners,” my mother recalls. “We were somewhere and he was eating some ribs, and he was licking his fingers. Oh, that just turned me off. I was like, ‘Curtis, can you just use your napkin?'”

Though he lived in a wealthy circle, his friends, family, and acquaintances still struggled with the same old poverty and hardships. He made sure to include them in his new wealth whenever possible, but the fact remained that he now straddled two worlds—the old world of the White Eagle, Cabrini-Green, and never having enough of anything, and the new one of fame, fortune, and excess.

My mother never felt comfortable in that new world. She says of Marina Towers, “The building basically was white people who had money, and you got a doorman. Nobody ever said anything, but maybe
that was my insecurity, being a little girl from Harlem in this building with all these people who probably had a lot of money.”

Aunt Ann felt uncomfortable there too. One day she came by but arrived while my parents were out. When they finally came back, Ann sat by their door waiting. She told them the doorman recognized her and let her up, and their white next-door neighbor saw her and invited her inside to wait, but she preferred to wait outside. The white residents of the building weren't hostile, but it was simply too hard coming from the slums to feel safe and comfortable in upper-class white America. The danger was real, as my mother learned on a trip to Cicero, the neighborhood that destroyed an entire building in 1951 when a Negro family moved there. “They called us names, and it scared me, and I turned around and went home,” she says. “I didn't ever go back.”

Though she didn't feel comfortable in the plush apartment, my mother felt more at home with Dad's family. On a visit to Grandma Sadie's house in Cabrini, she picked up some tips on how to make her greens better. She also cultivated close relationships with Marion and Annie Bell.

As the year wound down, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction for Dad. He had just experienced the most successful year of his life. He could even relax slightly when touring the South. Driving through Mississippi earlier in the year, the Impressions pulled to the side of the road, exhausted. They knew they couldn't stay there, but they couldn't drive on without risking falling asleep at the wheel. Stuck in a bind, Dad decided to go to a nearby Holiday Inn and see if they'd give him a room. Fred and Sam waited nervously outside as he entered the building and approached the clerk. A few minutes later he appeared again, a grin pasted on his face. He waved them inside. They'd stay at Holiday Inns exclusively for the next several years.