Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read Online Free PDF Page B

there was only so much you could get away with, because the neighborhood functioned, really, as an extended family; if you got too out of hand, the neighbors would correct you, even go so far as to physically chastise you, and Reverend and Mrs. Cook would certainly do the same.
    There were still white people in the neighborhood when the Cooks moved in, but by now almost all its residents were black, the shopkeepers uniformly white—and yet the children for the most part thought little about segregation because their exposure was limited to the fact, but not the experience, of it. Reverend Cook, on the other hand, was unwilling to see his children, or anyone else in the family for that matter, treated like second-class citizens. One time the police confronted Charles on the street, and Reverend Cook, in his children’s recollection, came out of the house and said, “Don’t you mess around with my kids. If there is something wrong, you come and get me.” And when the policeman touched his holstered gun, their father said, “I’ll whip that pistol off you.” He meant it, according to his children, “and the police knew he meant it. Our daddy wasn’t bashful about nothing. He always told us to hold our head high and speak our mind. ‘Don’t you all run from nobody.’”
    I T WAS A FAMILY ABOVE ALL, one that, no matter what internal frictions might arise, always stuck together. Charles might feel resentment against his father and long for the day when he could find some escape; the girls might very well feel that it was unfair that the boys had no household responsibilities; Sam and L.C. might fight every day just in the course of normal events. “We was always together,” said L.C. “We slept together, we grew up together. Sometimes we’d be in bed at the end of the day, and Sam would say, ‘Hey, we didn’t fight today,’ and we’d fight right there in the bed—that’s how close we were!” But the moment that the outside world intruded, Cooks, as their father constantly reminded them, stood up for one another. Mess with one Cook, mess with all.
    The children all took their baths before their father came home from work (“We could tell it was him by the lights of his car”). Then they would sit down at the round kitchen table and have dinner together, every night without exception. They weren’t allowed to eat at somebody else’s house (“If you had a friend, bring them home”). Their mother, who addressed her husband unfailingly as “Brother Cook,” never made them eat anything they didn’t like and often cooked something special for one or another of her children. Chicken and dumplings, chicken and dressing, and homemade dinner rolls were the favorites, along with red beans and rice. None of them doubted for a moment that Mama loved him or her best of all. She lived for her children, as she told them over and over, and she prayed every night that she would live to see them grown, because “she did not want a stepmother over her children.”
    After dinner, in the summertime especially, they might go for a drive. They might go to the airport to watch the planes take off; they might go to the park or just ride around downtown. On weekends they would all go to the zoo sometimes, and every summer they had family picnics by the pavilion at Red Gate Woods, part of the forest preserve, family picnics for which their mother provided baskets of food and at which attendance was not optional.
    Once a year the family attended the national Church of Christ (Holiness) convention in Annapolis, Detroit, St. Louis, and every summer they drove to Mississippi, spending Reverend Cook’s two-week vacation from Reynolds shuttling back and forth among their various relatives all over the state, with Reverend Cook preaching (and the Singing Children accompanying him) wherever they went.
    The preparations for the trip were always busy and exciting, with Mama staying up the night before frying chicken and making pound