Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,32
hearts are part of an infinite intelligence that we can call God or Spirit or even Christ Consciousness. That was beautiful, but I had begun to think differently. I had accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.
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That message I heard as a kid on Mahalia Jackson records played by Grandma Bessie came full circle. That message had reached my head, but it was now in my heart. I wanted to praise God through the gift that he had given me.
I met some guys at church who really knew how to harmonize. I thought it would be cool if we put together a group. One afternoon, I invited them to my house to work up some hymns. We started with “We’re Going to See the King”:
“Stepped in the water / Water was cold / Chilled my body / But not my soul / Don’t have to worry / Don’t have to fret / Come on Jesus/ Jesus, He will fix it!”
And then into, “Hallelujah, hallelujah, we’re gonna see the King!”
It was really starting to gel when all of a sudden, my dad came through the front door. He looked us up and down. He was not happy; nor did he even try to be nice.
“What the hell is going on here?”
He reminded me that I wasn’t allowed to have anyone over unless he or Mom was home.
“This is different,” I said. “This is part of church.”
He told my friends to get out. I was embarrassed and humiliated. Dad knew damn well I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I mean, here’s a kid who isn’t having his buddies over to party. We were singing to the Lord! But Dad didn’t care. He had to prove that he was the boss.
After everyone left, I went to my room. I waited till Mom got home to complain. She understood, but when it came to marriage, Mom was old school. She reminded me that he was my father, and he had his rules. Mom was devoted to Dad, and Dad was devoted to discipline.
And yet I didn’t mind Grandpa’s discipline. When he got on my case, he did it firmly but with love. He used to walk up the hill from Village Green and, at 6 a.m., he’d be standing over my bed dripping water on my forehead until I woke up. Time to go to work! And work meant pulling weeds in the backyard, mowing the grass, chopping and bundling wood. I hated it, but I did it. My love and respect for my grandfather overrode my resistance.
And where my father never talked about his past, Grandpa always did. As we worked, doing those chores side by side, he told me stories about his early days in the Bahamas, Miami, and Brooklyn. He never bragged, but he never stopped letting me know that hard work was the only way to succeed. His central message was that you must build a strong foundation. He was adamant about teaching me that achievement doesn’t come from luck, but from discipline. Drenched in sweat, he never complained about manual labor. In fact, he reveled in it. He showed me that honest work isn’t a burden. It is a joy. And so it is.
MARRIED FOURTEEN YEARS: AT HOME WITH THE JEFFERSONS’ TELEVISION STAR
That was the headline under the color picture of Mom and Dad on the cover of Jet, the most popular magazine in Black America. Smiling broadly, Mom was wearing a pink kimono, her hand placed on Dad’s shoulder. Dad looked like the happiest man on earth. The caption read, “ROXIE ROKER and her husband Sy Kravitz.”
The article said my folks’ marriage was “not even typical among Black-White couples. Most of the nations’ 421,000 interracial marriages (about 76 percent) involve Black men and White women. But in the minority are such couples as the Kravitzes and Pearl Bailey and Louie Bellson, Leslie Uggams and Grahame Pratt, Chaka Khan and Richard Holland, Maya Angelou and Paul Du Feu, and Minnie Riperton and Dick Rudolph.”
In the interview, Dad describes his proposal to Mom: “When I asked her to marry me, she laughed and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ And her mother said, ‘He’s a nice man, but…’ And now her mother and I are just the tightest.”
Most of the article was about Mom’s career, with only one reference to Dad’s work. Sy Kravitz, wrote Jet, was “venturing into music promotion.”
Dad’s desire to enter the music world had been building ever since we moved west. With Mom doing