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numb,’ Katherine recalled. Her reaction was swift and immediate
     fury. She took a ceramic bottle warmer and threw it at him with everything she had in her. It struck him on his forearm and
     shattered, cutting him deeply. Blood gushed from the wound as the two argued. ‘Don't you ever hit me again,’ Katherine warned
     him, ‘or I'll leave you so fast your head will spin.’ Katherine says that the violent episode marked the first and last time
     Joseph ever struck her – but, apparently, he turned his violent temper on her children.
    When Michael was five, he toddled into a room and had his breath taken away when Joseph tripped him and he fell to the ground,
     bloodied. ‘That's for whatcha' did yesterday,’ Joseph said. ‘And tomorrow, I'm gonna get you for what you'll do today.’
    Michael began to cry. ‘But I didn't even do nothin' yet,’ he said through his tears.
    ‘Oh, you will, boy,’ Joseph said. ‘You will.’
    From that point onward, whenever young Michael walked into a room he looked left, then right, as if crossing the street. He
     was hoping to avoid his father. How does a young boy deal with such fear? ‘I began to be so scared of that man,’ Michael later
     recalled. ‘In fact, I guess it's safe to say that I hated him.’
    Michael recalled that his father ‘was always a mystery to me, and he knows it. One of the things I regret most is never being
     able to have a real closeness with him.’ In truth, none of the Jackson children ever developed ‘a real closeness’ with Joseph,
     who was not affectionate toward them. Sometimes he took his boys camping and fishing on weekends or taught them how to box
     to defend themselves, but he never paid much attention to the girls. (As a toddler, Janet liked to crawl into bed with her
     mother and father, but she had to wait until Joseph was asleep.)
    Aspects of Joseph's parenting were unconventional, to say the least. Whenever the boys left their bedroom window open at night,
     he would go outside and climb into their room and then scream at them at the top of his lungs… while wearing a fright mask.
     The youngsters would begin crying and hyperventilating, frightened half to death. Why would a father cause his children such
     trauma? Joseph explains that he was trying to demonstrate why they should not leave the windows open at night. After all,
     what if a burglar were to enter the house? Michael and Marlon would, for many years afterwards, suffer from vivid nightmares
     of being kidnapped from the safety of their bedrooms.
    Suffice it to say that as he grew older Michael pulled about as far away from Joseph as he could, clinging to his mother,
     whom he adored, as if his very life depended on it (and maybe it did). ‘Even with nine children, she treated each of us like
     an only child,’ he would remember to this writer in 1991. ‘Because of Katherine's gentleness, warmth and attention, I can't
     imagine what it must be like to grow up without a mother's love. [What an ironic statement, considering that both of his children
     are, today, being raised without their mother, Debbie Rowe.] The lessons she taught us were invaluable. Kindness, love and
     consideration for other people headed her list.’
    And, as for Joseph? ‘I used to throw up whenever I thought of him,’ Michael recalled, succinctly. In his 2003 Martin Bashir
     interview, he noted that Joseph has blue eyes. Clearly, he hasn't looked into his father's eyes in some time; they're hazel,
     almost green.

Climbing Mountains
    In 1963, at the age of five, Michael Jackson began attending Garnett Elementary School. Katherine has said that he was generous
     to a fault, so much so that he used to take jewellery from her dresser and give it to his teachers as tokens of his affection
     for them. A stubborn child, he continued to do so even after his mother chastised him for giving away her possessions.
    One of Michael's first memories concerns performing at the age of five, when he sang