To understand Marvin Gaye, you have to go back to Washington, D.C., in 1939. To a public housing apartment in Southwest Waterfront. To a church where a preacher who had never found peace held court over a family that lived in his shadow.
To a little boy who could sing like an angel—and who spent his whole life trying to understand why his father didn’t love him.
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PART TWO: WASHINGTON, D.C.—BORN INTO THE SHADOW
Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. was born on April 2, 1939, at Freedman’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. His first home was the Fairfax Apartments in the Southwest Waterfront district of the city—a public housing complex that has since been demolished.
His mother was Alberta Gay, née Cooper, a warm and gentle woman who worked as a domestic worker to support her family. His father was Marvin Gay Sr.—a minister, a preacher, a man whose complicated inner life would cast a shadow over everything and everyone around him.
Marvin was the second of four children. He had an older sister, Jeanne; a younger brother, Frankie; and a younger sister, Zeola. Of the four, Marvin was the one his father seemed to single out. He was the one who bore the heaviest weight of his father’s attention, which was not the same thing as his father’s love.
Gay Sr. was born on October 1, 1914, on a farm in Jessamine County, Kentucky—the third of thirteen surviving children. He had grown up in a home touched by its own violence; his own father had been physically abusive. In his late teens, he moved to Washington, D.C., to pursue ministry in the House of God, a Hebrew Pentecostal denomination that kept a Saturday Sabbath and mixed elements of Judaism and Pentecostalism in ways that set it apart from mainstream Black churches.