Long before the world knew his name, Michael Jackson was just a little boy in Gary, Indiana, who did not want to go to kindergarten.
He was born there in 1958, the seventh of Joe and Katherine Jackson’s nine children. Katherine is Michael’s mother, and with nine kids the house was crowded. Michael remembered it as “only three rooms really.” He joked that “you could take five steps from the front door and you’d be out the back.”
Michael looked back on those years in “Moonwalk,” the life story he wrote and published in 1988. In its very first chapter he admits that his first day of kindergarten was rough. He hated it, and he didn’t want his mother to leave.
His big brother Jermaine walked him to school. Jermaine’s old clothes got handed down to him, too, which is what happens when you’re number seven.
But something changed. Michael grew to love his teachers, “especially the women,” as he put it. And they loved him right back.
“Those teachers were so wonderful; I’d be promoted from one grade to the next and they’d all cry and hug me and tell me how much they hated to see me leave their classes.”
One of them, his kindergarten teacher Felicia Childress, later told Education Week what she noticed about him. “Michael had this stammer, but when he sang he would not miss a note and his pitch was perfect.”
So little Michael wanted to do something nice for these women. He wanted to give them presents.
So where does a kindergartner find presents?
Michael found a way. It worked, too, right up until his mother noticed.
Here’s how Michael told it, word for word.
“I was so crazy about my teachers that I’d steal my mother’s jewelry and give it to them as presents. They’d be very touched, but eventually my mother found out about it, and put an end to my generosity with her things.”
Yes, the presents were Katherine’s own jewelry. Michael took it right out of the house and handed it to his teachers.
You can almost hear him smiling as he tells it. And he explained what was really going on in his little heart. “That urge that I had to give them something in return for all I was receiving was a measure of how much I loved them at that school.”
That tiny house is still standing in Gary, and years later Michael’s brothers Marlon, Jackie and Jermaine walked back through it on camera with Michael’s son Prince by their side. If you want to see just how small the place really was, five steps and all, this visit shows you.
Michael’s brothers walk through the family home in Gary
It’s a sweet thing to picture. A little boy in hand-me-downs, walking to school next to his big brother, with his mother’s jewelry tucked away as a surprise for the teacher.
Katherine put a stop to it, of course. Still, Michael chose to tell this story himself, in the very first chapter of his own book, and he called it generosity.