system to keep people apart really was. The obstacles were real. They are real.”
“Even here in New York?”
“Everywhere. Growing up in New York, I’d seen how people grouped up according to ethnicity, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t just preference, just families looking out for each other. It made sense to me that people wanted to live among people with similar customs and cultures and language. I thought people segregated themselves because they wanted to. Chinatown, Little Italy, Harlem—it didn’t occur to me that many people didn’t have an option.”
“You toured with Motown for a while. What happened after that?”
“We strapped the instruments to the top of the car and we kept moving. We followed Route 66 from Chicago to LA, performing every place that would have us along the way.”
“How were you received?”
“Most people didn’t know what to think. Some had heard our songs. Some had heard of us. Most people aren’t ugly right to your face. They just make life difficult when your back is turned. They complain or point fingers. They whisper about you or spread mistrust. But people are curious too. They wanted to see us. So we let them look.”
“You’ve gotten used to that? People staring?”
“If you want people to change . . . ,” Benny prods.
“You have to show them what it looks like,” Barry finishes.
“Some places there was nowhere we could stop. Long stretches on 66 where there were no services for Negros. Whites-only establishments, stations, restaurants, hotels. I would drop off Esther and the boys, gas up the car, buy some sandwiches, and go back and get them.”
“You’d drive straight through?”
“We took turns driving—though I was the only one with a license. I couldn’t relax when I wasn’t at the wheel, so I ended up doing most of it.”
“What was the goal?”
“Attention, I suppose. Even bad press is better than no press. If you want to make a name for yourself, you have to perform. You have to get your music to as many ears as possible.”
“It worked.”
“I spent every dime I’d saved, and Pop’s money too, before we started making it back. But eventually, yeah. We made it back, and then some. But we worked our tails off.”
“You were thrown in jail, run out of town, booed off the stage—”
“We weren’t booed, we were bounced,” Benny interrupts.
“Someone threw a glass jar at Money. It split his head open. Esther was dragged off the stage,” Barry continues.
“That was the second time I was thrown in jail, but nobody touched Esther again. Not after that.”
“You put a couple boys in the hospital.”
“They weren’t boys, and they started it.”
“Your father was a fighter—”
“Something I never wanted to be. But I told you, the older I get, the more like him I am.”
26
TOGETHER FOREVER
Esther and I were almost never alone that first year. That was the hardest part. I drove with her sitting beside me; we performed together, ate together, spent every waking minute together and slept beside each other almost every night, but depending on where we were, some nights we couldn’t even sleep in the same hotel, and that was torture. If a man can’t protect and provide it’ll make him mean or it’ll drive him crazy.
Sometimes I would miss her so much, even when she was sitting right next to me, that my hands would shake, my belly would ache, and my missing finger would throb like it was still attached and not lost somewhere in Detroit, a bit of bone in a dog’s belly or a rat’s nest. When we had those minutes or hours alone with a wall or a door between us and the rest of the world, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to kiss her or touch her or just talk without her brothers listening or ears judging.
The best part was that she felt the same way.
Esther liked to lie with her head on my chest and her legs tangled with mine and make me “play her back” like I’d done the first time we danced, my fingers finding the ridges in her spine like the keys on the piano. We wrote a few songs that way, but it usually ended up with her mouth on mine, her sighs in my throat, and our bodies intertwined.
It was exquisite agony, those days on the road, and when we finally found our way back to New York, back to Pop’s apartment and to the streets where we’d both been born, it was hard for us to leave again.