Traveling Soul (47 page)

My father seemed to need an escape, too. As his relationship with Altheida deepened, he became more of a recluse than ever. “His behavior patterns changed, and not for the good,” Sharon says. “He was more withdrawn. They would just be in the room for hours and hours on end, and we would be left to our own devices.” In the apartment on Marine Drive, Dad fell further into abnormal behavior. Some people whispered rumors attributing it to cocaine use. Tracy recalls seeing strange people hanging around, people we didn't know. “They would be feeding him information,” Tracy says. “It felt strange, whatever it was.”

We could only guess what was going on at the time. He never did anything in front of us. Instead, he stayed locked in his room while we entertained ourselves. He wasn't always getting high in his room—like his mother and Annie Bell before him, he did many normal, everyday things from that sanctuary, and because he kept such late hours, many times he'd just be in there sleeping. Still, as we got older we noticed the pattern getting worse, and we assumed why.

One day, as Sharon recalls,

they were in the room for so long, and we had nothing to do. We hadn't had anything to eat, there was nothing to do in that condo, and so they had all these boxes of tissues. We went on the balcony and started tossing tissues out into the open air and watching them float. Maybe an hour later, my dad comes out of the room, we all go out to get something to eat, and there are tissues everywhere down below. He made a comment about it like, “What in the world? I wonder what happened.” I felt like that was definitely the beginning of him withdrawing and being irresponsible when it came to caring for his children when they were in his presence. That made me very angry. It made me not want to go and visit.

As he withdrew, the day-to-day issues of life—never his strong point—became even harder to handle. Stacks of unopened mail sat neglected on his table for months. Bank statements, bills, and letters piled up in forgotten corners of the apartment. Sometimes we couldn't get in touch with him because he'd forgotten to pay the phone bill and the phone company cut off his service.

Like always, he had the grand vision but needed others to execute it. For a man so concerned with control, this left him at the mercy of people who did know how to execute—people who couldn't write a song but could keep two sets of books, or lift a few thousand dollars here and there without him noticing. I noticed these things, though, and I became more interested in the business. I saw a way to protect my father by learning to do the things he couldn't. Later in life, I'd get my chance to try.

While life with my father became difficult during this period, the Gemini in him made sure that we also saw another, better side. As often as he withdrew, and as much as he broke promises—little things, like saying he'd show up somewhere and then forgetting to do it—he also proved his love for us constantly. Always a practical joker, he went out of his way to fill our lives with excitement. “I think he got a kick out of scaring us,
like Halloween-type stuff,” Tracy says. “He would set up these elaborate things because he was a very funny person. He liked magic. He would do magic tricks for us.”

He showed us the world, taking us on vacations to California, Hawaii, the Bahamas, and other places, often on a moment's notice. He gave us advice, telling us over and over again the importance of owning ourselves. “He was always like the old wise man,” Tracy says. “He would get astute—philosophical, really deep answers.” He lectured on the dangers of borrowing money, especially from shady characters. “That's when they own you,” he always said. He spent time with us, bringing us to Six Flags, playing chess, taking us shopping. He'd often pick us up after school, drive to a store, and say, “Pick out what you want.”

He even doted on us. “He was always concerned with, ‘You want something to eat, cat?'” Tracy recalls. “He always wanted to feed you. ‘You want me to fix you some fish, cat?'” Sharon also remembered his efforts to maintain a presence in our lives, saying, “It felt like we were always in connection with him. I didn't feel like he was an absentee father. I felt like my mom did a good job and kind of insisting that he did interact with us, and I think that he made a pretty good effort to have us around him when he was in the studio.”

He also protected us with a ferocity that let us know we could trust him when in need. At his house in Atlanta, which we visited often, we made friends with some white kids who lived nearby. One day as we swam in the pool, they came over and hurled rocks and racial slurs at us. When Dad found out, he shot out of the house in a fury with no shoes or socks on, chased the kids through the woods, caught one of them, and dragged him back to the house. As the boy wriggled and cried, his parents came to get him. My father laid into them and made them apologize. “He did what any father would've done to protect his children,” Sharon says. “And he acted immediately. He didn't hesitate. He didn't even wait to put shoes on or anything; he wanted to know who was inflicting harm on his children. So I remember feeling like my dad is going to protect us.”

Dad didn't face disrespect like that often. Most people stood in awe of him. Watching the way people reacted to him, we learned about the
power of stardom. Each of us dealt with it in our own way, but we all learned what he already knew—fame and money cloud everything. They make everyone's motives suspicious. They make it hard to recognize one's real friends or know whom to trust. In my eyes, being Curtis Mayfield's son was the proverbial double-edged sword. It set me apart, but not always in a good way. I felt everyone wanted something. People always asked, “How's your dad doing?” No one ever asked about my mother.

That's not to say having a famous dad didn't come with many advantages. But sometimes such a thing precedes you. I often got upset when people introduced me as Curtis Mayfield's son, as if that's all I was. Sharon felt the same way. She says, “I didn't want to be identified as Curtis Mayfield's daughter. I just wanted to be like everyone. I've never in my whole life told anyone that Curtis Mayfield was my father. Anyone who knew, knew either before they met me, or they heard it from someone. And I remember times growing up that I denied it. I didn't want the attention. I didn't want the questions.” The same held true for Tracy. “You don't want to tell people who your father is because there's a lot of jealousy out there,” he says. “When some people found out or some kids found out, it wasn't a happy thing; it was more of a jealousy kind of thing.”

While we understood his importance, the life we lived was all we knew. Others might have counted him as a hero; to us he was just Dad. “I have an early memory of being aware of other people's reactions to him in public,” Sharon recalls. “I would think, ‘Why are they so excited about him? He's just my dad.' I knew that he was a singer. I just thought, ‘Well, he's not Michael Jackson.' At the time when I was growing up, the Jackson 5, they were just it.”

We also learned how to deal with these things graciously. He made sure we appreciated what we had. We never had to worry about money, but he couldn't forget going to bed hungry while his mother wept, so he expected us to remain humble in the face of good fortune. He still lived modestly for a man of his means. His main extravagances were cars—with his
Super Fly
money he bought a 1974 convertible Rolls Royce Corniche, baby blue with cream interior. In summertime, he'd roll out
with the top down, come around the house, drive it over to the office. Still, he never went for huge houses or flashy possessions, and even when it came to cars, he preferred bouncing around in his brown soft-top Jeep Wrangler.

While we learned to remain humble, he learned that we didn't always feel comfortable with shows of wealth. At the time, Sharon and I attended a Catholic school in a rough neighborhood. One day after school, my sister walked outside and, as she recalls, “Here comes Curtis Mayfield driving up in a Rolls Royce. The excitement that that would cause, and then me getting into that car, and everyone watching—that made me a little bit uncomfortable, and I remember asking, ‘Dad, the next time you pick us up, can you park a little ways down?' He was tickled by it. The next time he parked half a block down from the school.”

After
Sweet Exorcist
, the Impressions released the
Three the Hard Way
soundtrack, which only hit twenty-six on the R&B chart and missed the pop chart. At the same time, they worked on another album called
Finally Got Myself Together
. Yet again, my father passed off writing duties, this time to a team of writers including Ed Townsend, the man the Impressions replaced in concert more than a decade before, the first time they played for Georgie Woods in Philadelphia. Townsend wrote the title track, which went to number one R&B—the only Impressions number-one hit my father didn't write. They would never reach the top of the charts again. Though the album did well, Fred and Sam could see they were no longer a top priority at Curtom. They began looking for a way out.

Finishing off a busy year, Curtom released four more albums in 1974—Leroy Hutson's
The Man!
, the Natural Four's self-titled album, Bobby Whiteside's
Bittersweet Stories
, and Curtis's third album of the year,
Got to Find a Way
. The last begins with a reworking of the song “Love Me,” which he'd given to the Impressions on
Times Have Changed
. This time, it's called “Love Me (Right in the Pocket),” and is an undeniable piece of rhythmic, sexual soul. Again, my father sings near the top
of his range, almost whispering the lyrics, and providing his own backing vocals—soulful “doo doos” and “mmhmms.” The song also contains his clearest nod to Hendrix, as a wailing wah-wah guitar noodles over the entire thing, giving the listener a tantalizing taste of what a possible May-field/Hendrix collaboration might have sounded like.

The next song, “So You Don't Love Me,” is another heartbreaking ballad of lost love. Again, he provides his own gorgeous backing vocals, and in the chorus he hits what might be the highest note of his career when he sings the line “I guess I got to find me a better place.” Just like on “Sweet Exorcist,” my father showed great maturity, singing again of the pain and struggle inherent in life. He'd written breakup songs before, but never had he approached the subject with such nuance and maturity.

Side A ends with another slow soul shuffle called “A Prayer,” in which he dipped back into the gospel of his youth. Like in the previous song, his lyrics contain a mixture of world-weariness and hope, the kind only a true artist can convey. In a way, these were message songs—not about the movement, but about life in general, full of the accumulated wisdom of a man who had been on the top and the bottom and everywhere in between, who had seen great success and painful failure, who knew about love and hate, wealth and poverty, equality and discrimination, fame and obscurity.

The only real message song on the album, “Cannot Find a Way,” is a dark answer to the album's title. The combination forms a poignant comment on what had happened to the movement—it began with a mass of people demanding a way forward and ended with the disillusionment of realizing that, in fact, they could not find a way. The lyrics serve as a sort of coda to the movement:

People across the country, they all protest the same old news

The white and black, rich and poor

Find we're all standing in the same old shoes
.

We just cannot find a way

Preacher man, trying to do the best he can

But the text he preaches seems obsolete

And we suffer still over the land

We just cannot find a way
.

In total, other than the sexy, upbeat opening track,
Got to Find a Way
plays like a man battling serious depression over losing love in his life and hope in the world. The album's strength is even more impressive considering that he'd already written two other albums that year. It remains one of my favorites, but at the time it removed my father further than ever from the disco craze. It also marked the worst chart showing yet for his solo career.