Colored Girl’s mother did not keep journals, she kept steno pads, spiral wire bound at the top, dated in ink on the front, and ruled down the middle. There were hundreds. A single steno pad marked “November 1992” was packed in with the box of papers Colored Girl inherited. She removed one entry and threw away the rest of the pad.
Colored Girl doesn’t know why I left Detroit. I like confusing her.
Part of it was Bob Dylan. Ziggy helped me get to the March on Washington. That changed everything. Washington intoxicated me. I wanted that boy who sang “Only a Pawn in their Game.” When Dylan came to Detroit, in October of 1964, and then again 1965 at Cobo Hall, I was backstage. And I believed if I could win George, I could win any man. Dylan was a lot less than George, at least that’s how it looked in Detroit in 1964 and 1965. I planned on seeing him when we went to the World’s Fair in 1967 but that didn’t happen. But from the first we were together, I knew if I got the chance, I could keep him for a while. I thought my chance was in Washington. I didn’t realize how good Dylan thought Detroit looked on me. When I saw him in New York he had moved on.
Everybody was moving on. When they first dressed the Supremes, they dressed them to look like me. In 1961 I was the most elegant woman in Detroit and they were . . . well, ghetto girls. By 1965, they had been to London, and Glasgow and Hamburg, and Paris, and I had been nowhere but Detroit. The summer of 1967, about the time we headed to the World’s Fair in New York, things that should have been happening in Motown were happening in Hollywood, like it being announced that the Supremes were no longer the Supremes—but “Diana Ross and the Supremes.” According to the grapevine, one or more Gordys were looking to buy a house in Hollywood, Bel Air, or Beverly Hills, not Palmer Park. And back in Detroit the bougie ones who didn’t invite me into their fancy lady clubs, who were married to doctors and lawyers, were dancing with presidents and kings in other cities and coming back to brag up and down Boston Boulevard. George couldn’t give me any of that. What I learned from Dylan? Change your name. Change the way you talk. Change your history. Change your clothes. Shoot for the stars.
I took the girl, because as long as I had her, if I needed Detroit, Detroit would save me, to protect the girl. Without the girl, Detroit would forget me. Simple as that. She was an insurance policy. That’s all I intended. But taking Colored Girl did more than that. It killed George’s sister. It wounded George. And it hurt Ziggy more than I thought it would. Ziggy tried to use the wound to his advantage. He left his book to her and sent it to me. He said he was getting the book out of Detroit because Detroit was busting up. Said it would rise again and the book would be one of the seeds. If I could have done that for Ziggy, I would have. I loved that little man. But I couldn’t keep that book. Everything I told Colored Girl about Detroit was defeated by Ziggy’s book. Everything she believed or suspected about Detroit was affirmed by Ziggy’s book. I told her Detroit was shit. I told her Black Bottom was mud. I let her know her daddy wasn’t anything more than a man born to clean other people’s dirty clothes. If she didn’t believe me, she stopped saying otherwise. Ziggy’s book would have changed all of that. I burned the thing, kept the ashes, and tickled myself by thinking of what she would think when she saw those ashes. What didn’t kill her would make her stronger.
I always thought she was me. It’s never wrong to touch yourself. Colored Girl doesn’t think she belongs to me. She says, “I’m your daughter, I’m not your slave.” I am very angry at Colored Girl. That’s the only thing we agree on: I am very angry at Colored Girl.
My shrink says, because I felt powerless as a child, I try to exert strict control over my daughter so that I might create an idealized version of a family that can never exist. I say it came very close to existing in Middleburg. Then she almost killed me in West Virginia. After West Virginia I mainly left that girl alone. There is more George Stanley in Colored Girl than one might think. She used a river and a rubber raft to half choke the life out of me with water.
That doesn’t matter now. Clinton’s just got elected. He’ll get sworn in in January and before he’s out of office he’s going to appoint me to something big. Board of the Kennedy Center. NEA. NEH. Something. Diana Ross beat me out. I beat out Florence and Mary. That’s why I left Detroit City.
The way Ziggy felt about Sammy, Colored Girl felt about Josette: jealous. A daydream that traveled with her from Detroit to DC was that she and Josette were sisters and they had two daddies just like Sammy had: Josette’s daddy, and Colored Girl’s daddy. One of the daddies would have all the vices except those that were unforgivable and none of the virtues except those that were essential. The other would be Ziggy.
Will Mastin lived to be 100 years old and died in 1979. Sammy Davis Sr. died in 1988 and was buried beside Will. Sammy Davis Jr. died in 1990 and was buried beside his father. In death, the Will Mastin Trio was reunited.
Sammy Davis Jr.
PATRON SAINT OF: Peerless People, Performers, Veterans, and Other Wounded
Sammy is without peer. My favorite performance I have ever seen on television, my one for the ages, was Sammy Davis on television on The Milton Berle Show. What was that, 1955? He was with his dad and his uncle. That was my Old World meeting the New, and nothing was ever the same.
Sammy is an artist who puts the green in my eyes. Closest I ever came to being a true intimate in his circle was when he was engaged to my dear friend Cordie, who threw him over. Sammy and I were almost exact opposites. We were both small, but Sammy stayed chiseled. And there was very little girl in his boy. I think that’s why he loved women so much. He was especially hungry for what they had because he had so little of it himself. Sammy was all action, muscle, what the Eastern people call yang—he was the fiery sun. I think that’s why he liked the desert and Las Vegas so much.
I was the moon. And I was no genius. But that is not why I was jealous of Sammy.
Why am I so jealous of him that I stumble on my words as I try to tell you about him? Sammy had two daddies; he had his daddy, Sammy Davis Senior, and his uncle, Will Mastin. Sammy didn’t start out in this life alone or with someone trying to exploit him, or like me, with a loving parent who didn’t know the business; he was born into, then cradled by, two unselfish geniuses. I always wondered whether or not Will Mastin and Sammy Davis Sr. were actually blood relations. I don’t think they were. I think they had a closer bond. What is certain: that Big Sammy, Little Sammy, and Will were a family.
Folk get this wrong about Sammy Davis. Many think he prefers the white world to the Black world. It isn’t quite like that. It was like this: In the Black world Sammy felt like a pup who always saw Big Sammy and Will Mastin as top dogs.
I got this from Cordie. Sammy wanted to conquer the white world and find a bit more space for himself. He lived and loved and worked the first part of his life in a sepia bubble where there was only room for two men, Big Sammy and Will, and one short boy. There never was room for Little Sammy to stand up tall in our sepia universe—because of the deference he and we gave to Big Sammy and Will. In our world Sammy Jr. could never be fully grown. He ran out into the white world for space to stand and be a man, but he always returned home, to Will and Big Sammy. His fathers, the dance, and the song were his life. Cordie said there was no room for any woman of any color in Sammy’s bubble. That’s why she left him. And she left him stunned.
And there was this: You can read all about it in Yes I Can, his autobiography that he launched in Detroit. When he was in the army, white soldiers tried to make him drink pee as beer. Told that. Told about the car wreck and his eye dangling out of his head. Then he rose as high above vicious hate and hard luck as his feet rose above the ground when he danced Bojangles.
Sammy rises highest when the moons of winter shine into sheltering dark spotlighting our sepia capacity to make something out of nothing at all.
In 1965 Sammy was performing at the Fisher Theatre in Clifford Odet’s play Golden Boy. The show was in Detroit both before and after it was on Broadway. During one of the performances he got injured in a fight scene. He had played that scene so many times and didn’t get hurt. What do I think happened that second run in Detroit that caused Sammy to get injured? I think it was looking at all those white folks in the Detroit audience that got to him. Sammy depended on coming to Detroit and being with only us. And then he was too much with them.
He had earned some respite from their hate, earned time with us to give him a chance to fall fully back in love with life. “I need three weeks in the Gotham, but the Gotham’s torn down,” Sammy said. I said, “You got Big Sam and Will. You don’t need a damn thing. You chiseled by love.”
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF SAMMY DAVIS JR.:
Stay Chiseled
1 jigger of Old Tom gin
½ pony of grenadine
1 lime, juiced
2 chunks of pineapple, muddled, or ½ pony of pineapple juice
¼ orange, juiced, or ½ pony of orange juice
3 sprigs of mint
Seltzer
Place all ingredients except seltzer into a cocktail shaker and shake well. Strain into a tall glass with ice cubes and top with seltzer.