1Family Affair

(1943–1955)

Life is a record. But where do you drop the needle? You can put it down near the beginning, where a young boy in Northern California starts to discover how much music moves him. You can put it down a little later, when he assembles a band, or a little later than that, when the band appears onstage, first in front of small crowds in clubs, then in front of larger crowds, including one of the largest in history. Those are good tracks.

Or you can play the flip side of this bright and stirring story: the young boy, now a young man, facing the harsh light of fame; the young man, now a star, making his way through a house crowded with drugs and guns; the star, now letting his light be crowded out by those drugs and guns.

Or is it better to start right at the start? Find the lead-in groove. That’s the outer edge of the record before the first song. Put the needle down there. You may hear some static. Pay close attention to it. It’s giving you a chance to get ready.

* * *

In the story before my story, there’s Denton, Texas, a small city in a big state, north of Dallas and Fort Worth. In the 1920s, F. L. Haynes, Fred to those who knew him, went to Denton to set up the St. Andrew Church of God in Christ. The Church of God in Christ was a Pentecostal denomination with roots in Tennessee, only a few decades old at that point but gaining steam.

Fred’s family included two girls named Alpha and Omega. In Fred’s church, Alpha met a man named K.C. Stewart. Alpha and K.C. married in 1933 and brought a daughter, Loretta, into the world the following year. For a while that was the family, the three of them. Then, on March 15, 1943, a fourth face appeared. That was Sylvester Stewart. That was me.

The street where we lived in Denton is barely a memory for me. A cemetery was to the east. What was to the west? We all were, soon enough. A little while after I was born, we moved out to California. Denton went into the past and the future went into Vallejo, a city about thirty miles northeast of San Francisco on San Pablo Bay.

For a minute in the 1850s, Vallejo had been the state capital before Sacramento took over. Vallejo was a port, which meant that people were always coming in and out. They weren’t just getting off ships and getting on them. They were also building them. There was a naval shipyard on Mare Island that needed workers, and that grew the town. When we arrived from Texas, Vallejo was in the middle of a boom.

Boom! There we were. Our first Vallejo address was 125 Denio Street. Back then it was just a few kids—me, Loretta, and the next sister down the line, Rose. My father, K.C., who we called Big Daddy, had a cleaning business. My mother kept the house. I never met grandparents on either side, never got any of that spoiling. When I was four, a little brother arrived, Frederick Jerome, who we called Freddie. He bunked in my room, at the bottom of my bed. New faces needed new spaces. My dad put up another house behind 125 Denio, at 127, and we moved there. And a few years after that, a fifth child, another girl, showed up—that was Vaetta, who we called Vet.

There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music. Even before children, my parents played. My father played washboard, guitar, violin, fiddle, harmonica. My mother played keyboards and guitar. Music was as much a part of our home as the walls or the floor. The piano was as prominent as the kitchen table. All of us sang from as early as I can remember, and the first songs we learned were gospel songs by Mahalia Jackson, Brother Joe May, the Soul Stirrers, the Swan Silvertones. We built our future in heaven. We dug a little deeper. We put our trust in Him.

We sang at home and then we sang in church. We all sang together but sometimes one of us would get a solo. I was put in front of the congregation to perform when I was only five or six. My mother said that I really came alive in front of a crowd. More than that: If they didn’t respond I would cry. Once, I was up there, singing, feeding off the audience, hearing their shouts and applause, when pieces of the crowd broke off and women started running down the aisle, holding on to their hats, still shouting. Now I see that they were feeling the spirit in the song calling them toward the stage. Back then, I thought they were coming to grab me. I turned around, jumped off the table, and started running for my life.

I stopped running. I came back for the music. From the time I was very small I could tell that I was deeper into it than most because I was so often with an instrument. It might have been drumsticks first, and then I was out on the street with my mother and saw a man playing guitar. I asked her for one. She sent my father out the next day with instructions not to return empty-handed.

Learning was looking. There was a guy in the church who played guitar. What he did with it was amazing, six strings and an infinity of things. I watched him like a hawk. He wasn’t a mentor. I don’t even know if I spoke to him. I just saw what he did and tried to figure out how to do the same and more. Guitar stayed with me, but I was always looking to whatever was next, taking up the bass, picking out songs on the piano. I felt incomplete without an instrument, or maybe it’s more to the point to say that I only felt complete with one. When I went out into the world, I was surprised to see people who weren’t carrying instruments. I wasn’t sure what they did instead.

* * *

I was up under the bridge with a friend of mine. We were small, six or seven, looking at clouds in the sky, at fog lower down, at reflections of light on the water. We spied on people, made up stories about them. Vallejo was all around us, which was cool with me.

In my neighborhood, we didn’t know about other neighborhoods, not yet. If you got along with your parents, you were good. I got along with mine by listening. Big Daddy was big on justice. He gave me some advice early on, in his Texas accent. “Ah tayl yew,” he said. “If ah ketch yew maken any kyna prob-um, ahm gonh wayh yew out. Donh evuh be stahrtinn a fight. But if somebody messiss wich yew, get a brick and make for sho’ you leave them quiverin’ or still.” That advice stuck with me, then and forever. Don’t fight. But if you see an injustice, don’t stop fighting back.

I remember dodgeball with other kids. I remember Halloween. My family didn’t really do costumes, but I would put a little black mask over my eyes so I could fool people and get candy. We had a contest to see who could get the most candy, and I used to win. A shopping bag was needed to hold it all.

I built roller coasters in the yard, tracks of boards nailed together. The first one was small. Freddie and I worked on that together. You could skate on it. Later I built another one that was big enough for soapbox derby cars. I did most of that one, though my father’s friend Brother Wilson helped out.

By the time I was eleven or twelve my older sister, Loretta, was already grown, and since I was second in line I was put in charge of the other kids. Big Daddy’s cleaning business handled some of the big buildings downtown. He would work every day. As he went out the door, he would point at the other kids and say, “Do a song with them.” I smiled and told him I would.

One day, he had another request. He gave me a shotgun and strict orders to use it if a certain neighbor chased his wife into our house. She was allowed to come in but he could not follow. I didn’t understand that they were drinkers and fought often. I just thought they were crazy. When I felt the weight of the weapon in my hand I cried.

When I was old enough to not be too young anymore, I went with Big Daddy on weekends to work. One of the buildings he cleaned was the Higgins Building, all five floors. I made money, but only from cleaning. If I found a coin on the floor, even a nickel, Big Daddy would make me leave it for the people in the office. It wasn’t ours to take.

My mother was my best friend. How can you describe a mother? She loved me. She made me feel safe. She put the idea in my head that I could do anything and worked to keep it there. She ran the house, including the kitchen. We ate collard greens, chicken with gravy, fried chicken, cornbread. We raised chickens for a while there too.

We kept singing and playing together as a family, to the point where we got noticed and then named: the Stewart Four. We even cut a single, one side with “On the Battlefield” (which might have been the song I was singing on the table), the other with “Walking in Jesus’s Name.” The record was released by the Church of God in Christ, the Northern California Sunday School Dept. Vocal with Inst. Acc., the label said.

The fifties was a parade of names. Truman, Eisenhower, Stevenson, Warren. That was politics, which belonged to the world beyond the town. Brando, Monroe, Taylor, Dean. That was the movies, which sometimes came to town. The radio brought more of the outside world into the house, and when we got a television, I watched everything I could. My eyes stuck most to the cowboy programs. I liked The Range Rider, with Jock Mahoney, tall as a tree. I liked Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. My favorite was Lash LaRue. There was no one cooler. He wore all black and used a whip. What for? To keep himself from shooting a motherfucker.

School marked time, mostly. I was smart, which teachers liked to tell me, usually because they were about to tell me that I should apply myself more. But I couldn’t pay attention. Lessons didn’t reach me because they didn’t challenge me. I was too smart for what was being sent my way but not smart enough to understand how to use it. Activities and competitions were more fun. One year, I had a role in a school play. I was Don Pepe, a guitar player, an easy part. Another year, during the class spelling bee, I was half-watching the teacher at the blackboard and agreeing— black, bored—when another boy went up to write down the names of the contestants. He spelled my name wrong: “Slyvester.” Everyone started laughing but I took a closer look. Sly: Not bad. The correct order of letters may be better, but a reversal isn’t always worse.


Copyright © 2023 by Sylvester Stewart

Foreword copyright © 2023 by Ahmir Khalib Thompson

Preface copyright © 2024 by Sylvester Stewart