Long before Motown, before the Jackson 5 and the screaming crowds, Michael Jackson was a little boy in Gary, Indiana, worrying about his mom.
He told the story himself in “Moonwalk,” his 1988 memoir and the only one he ever wrote.
His mother is Katherine Jackson. She was born in Alabama and grew up to raise nine children of her own, Michael among them. In those Gary days the family got by. As Michael put it, “Mom was working part-time at Sears, Dad was still working the mill job, and no one was going hungry.”
Katherine had a gift for making each child feel seen. “Even with nine children she treated each of us like an only child,” Michael wrote.
She paid attention to whatever her kids loved, too. “If I developed an interest in movie stars, for instance, she’d come home with an armful of books about famous stars.”
So it makes sense that one day Katherine sat the children down and told them about a plan of her own.
Michael’s reaction was pure shock. “I couldn’t believe it when Mom told us she was going to get her diploma.”
Here’s the background. Katherine had to leave school when she was a girl, and she never got to finish. Years later, with a house full of kids, she decided it was time. In the years before the Jackson 5’s Motown audition, she went to night school to finish her high school diploma.
Michael was only about 9 at the time. The Jackson 5 auditioned for Motown in 1968, and he’d been born in August 1958. To a boy that age, school meant one thing: kids.
So he pictured his mother squeezed behind a desk next to teenagers. “I remember worrying that she’d have to go to school with kids Jackie’s or Tito’s age and that they’d laugh at her.”
Jackie and Tito were two of his older brothers.
Katherine didn’t scold him for worrying. She laughed.
“I remember how she laughed when I told her this and how she patiently explained that she’d be with other grown-ups.”
That’s the whole sweet moment, right there. A little boy trying to protect his mom, and a mom gently letting him know she’d be just fine.
And then life in the Jackson house took on a funny new rhythm. “It was interesting having a mother who did homework like the rest of us,” Michael wrote.
On her class nights somebody had to keep the house running. That job went to Rebbie, the oldest of the nine. Michael said she “always ran things” while Mom was at school. Rebbie was engaged back then and planning to “move South with her fiancee.”
There’s something about a mom doing homework right alongside her kids that a lot of readers will recognize. Katherine has her own memories of Michael as a little boy, and this clip is a nice way to hear her side of those years.
Katherine Jackson remembers Michael as a child
As a grown man writing “Moonwalk,” Michael still made room for the days when his biggest worry was whether some teenagers would be mean to his mom.
She went anyway. She sat with the other grown-ups, did her homework and worked on that diploma she’d waited so long to earn.