And imagine that the person that you are being powerful against is an eight-year-old. And that's what I was dealing with. These older people who flexed their bigotry on a child. And when I think about it, it is so insane.
You are worthy of respect, just as everyone is worthy of respect. But we were dealing with that. Porter says that when he looks back at some of the incidents, "it's psychotic almost. We were walking down the alley in an all-white neighbourhood, myself and my brother [and a year-old friend, Freddy].
There were these little girls playing jump-rope. We didn't say a word to them, three little white girls. I was seven, my brother was eight. The man then got closer with the baton "like he was going to hit Freddy across the head" and asked, 'I said, what did you fucking say to my daughters'. Basically what he was saying to us was, 'If you even think about looking at, talking or saying anything to my kids, I am going to try to kill you', and we were 10, eight and seven-year-old boys.
And this was a grown man threatening our lives with a weapon. That's what we were dealing with. We were always out-sized, out-numbered, out-aged. How do you respond? A lot of our response was to run, in which case, 'Why are you running? You are only running because you did something wrong, right?
I could talk about it for hours. Porter told The New York Times in more about the harrowing racism he experienced as a child. The broken window image returns on Porter's album Take Me to the Alley, but it is a positive image of non-violence. Porter was born on November 4, in Sacramento, California, moving to LA when he was six months old. His first childhood memory was of being three years of age and hiding in a hole in the wall of the house in LA. It felt safe, this little cylinder I could get into to," he says.
Was Porter looking for something safe, emotionally, because even at that stage he would have been old enough to realise his father was not around at all? I was always conscious of my father not being around," he says. Porter's father, originally from Memphis, was a singer, too. Porter only learned this at his funeral, when he himself was He said to himself, "He gave me nothing, he left me nothing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.
He had no connection to me. Did music give him something to hold on to? He was in the hospital. He called my brother Cornelius and he said to him, 'We're okay, right? So, we're okay. He never called me. He got everyone's numbers but he didn't call me. Then he died. There was never any face-to-face reconciliation, even though I kept giving him opportunities.
I saw him in the hospital before he died. Although Porter was left unreconciled, he says: "I created some reconciliation with my music. Porter's mother died of cancer a year later. She never showed any emotion about him, other than frustration.
But she cried when she heard about his funeral. He was such a great singer. He was such a great preacher [he had a church in LA]. He took the young boys in the church out and he taught them how to paint. How did hearing that make Porter feel? For a religious man like his father, it is surely his life's major dichotomy that he turned his back on his children?
It doesn't make sense. When I mentioned to him in the hospital on his death bed that I wanted to try to sing a little bit, he said: 'There are a lot of good singers out there. Maybe he was trying to protect his son finally by hinting that singing was a tough road to go down? By contrast, Porter's mother, on her death bed, told him the exact opposite: "Go for it.
She was getting all the oxygen she could possibly get and she turned to me and said, 'Can you turn the oxygen up? I think it is on 2. Then she said - ten seconds at a time because she had to stop and breathe - 'Don't forget about your music. More info. Gregory Porter is releasing a new album next week on November 5, He has the nation wondering why the artist always appears in a signature hat.
His new album, Still Rising, boasts five new tracks, two new arrangements, nine of his most popular songs, covers and duets.
Paloma Faith, Moby and Ella Fitzgerald are just some of the artists who have collaborated with him on it.
But it was not a decision he made due to being in the public eye, as it was before his music career began.
Gregory Porter releases Nat "King" Cole album.
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