The question came late in a radio interview in Chicago. TJ Jackson, Tito Jackson’s youngest son, was sitting behind a microphone at V103, talking about new music with host Bioncé Foxx. Then she changed the subject. The holidays were around the corner, she told him, and she’d be remiss if she didn’t ask for a memory that stands out.
“There’s so many,” TJ said. He picked one from when he was very small.
“When I was young we used to play games, he and my aunt La Toya,” he told V103 in the interview, which the station posted on Dec. 4, 2019.
TJ is the youngest of Tito’s three boys. Taj and Taryll came first, and years later the three of them would sing together as 3T. In this story they’re just kids, with an uncle and an aunt who liked to set them a hunt.
The way TJ tells it, the grown-ups did the hiding. Michael and La Toya would tuck a few things away, the three boys would be in a room together, and then they had to go and find them.
That’s a fair game if you’re the oldest, and TJ wasn’t. “I would be like 5 years old,” he said. His brothers had the edge on him every time. “They’re older than me,” he said, so they always got to the prizes. And the prizes were worth getting to.
What Michael and La Toya hid around the room
“They would hide hundred-dollar bills and they would be crisp,” TJ said, “and I would be like 5 years old, mesmerized about how many toys I can get with one of those things.”
It wasn’t just one, either. “He’d hide about five or six,” TJ said of his uncle.
That left a little boy doing toy-store math in his head while his two big brothers found every bill before he could. That’s where his aunt came in.
“My aunt La Toya would always help me out,” he said. Then he added that Michael did the same: “He would as well.” And he gave the reason himself. “They would help me out as I was a youngster.”
He doesn’t say how they did it, whether it was a nod toward the right corner or something more obvious. He only says that the two people who had hidden the bills were also the two making sure the smallest player didn’t walk out with nothing.
Watch TJ Jackson tell V103 Chicago about the game
This is the full interview from V103’s own channel. The host asks for a memory at about 10:12, TJ starts the story of the game at about 10:48, and the two memories run to about 11:43.
He didn’t stop at one. “Another great memory,” TJ went on, came from the “Thriller” days, when Uncle Michael would pull in to Hayvenhurst, the family’s home in Encino, and act out his “Thriller” routine for the kids. “At first it was scary because that was our uncle and we saw him turn into a werewolf,” he said. It wore off. “After like the third or fourth time we were throwing things at him, saying let’s go.”
TJ grew up to return the favor. In 2012 he became co-guardian of Michael’s three children, Prince, Paris and Bigi, alongside their grandmother Katherine, the Associated Press reported that August.
In the V103 studio, though, he was back to being the smallest of three boys in a room, working out how many toys one find would buy.