Editor 's note : Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning and NAACP Image Award-winning novelist . She is based in Los Angeles . Her Web site is http : //www.tananarivedue.com/ . The Due sisters -- Johnita , left , Tananarive , center , and Lydia -- prepare for a Jackson concert in 1984 . LOS ANGELES , California ( CNN ) -- Michael Jackson died Thursday , and my family gathered by telephone from Florida , Texas , California and Georgia to mourn and remember . But we began mourning long ago . I was 17 when the `` Motown 25th Anniversary Special '' aired in 1983 , and my parents , sisters and I first saw Michael Jackson moonwalk to `` Billie Jean . '' He sent a lightning bolt through our living room , and all of us leaped to our feet with shouts . He may have been the best entertainer I live to see . His music asked us to transcend race and geography , hate and bigotry , and made us feel like we were the world . In recent months , I showed my 5-year-old son , Jason , that Motown performance on YouTube . `` Billie Jean '' made Jason want to moonwalk and wear a glove . `` Beat It '' inspired Jason to kick his leg and fling his head from side to side like Michael . But it has been a long time since I could watch Michael Jackson videos without feeling sad . His death is only the next stage of the loss . Michael Jackson left the music world to mourn -- but many of us , especially black Americans , felt like we lost a family member on Thursday . He pained and puzzled us , but we still loved him . Until Thursday , some of us had forgotten how much . Michael was not always easy to love . He tested us , sometimes asking us to ignore what we could see with our own eyes . We may never know fully what Michael did or did n't do , but he was like the lost relative we wished we could bring back to shore . When Jason asked questions about Michael 's changing face in the videos , I showed him the beautiful brown-skinned , bright-eyed little boy who grew up in my family 's living room . There is supreme irony in the death of Michael Jackson the same year as the inauguration of the first black president . Michael , who would ascend higher than any black artist in music history , learned a bitter lesson : Even at the top of the mountain , there is only the man in the mirror . Jason is n't old enough to fully understand black and white , why his grandmother was sent to jail for ordering a hamburger at a Woolworth lunch counter in 1960 , or how an ill-used child 's soul might never find its way back home . So I told Jason about the time Mommy , Grandma , Grandpa , Aunt Lydia and Aunt Johnita [ now an assistant general counsel at CNN ] drove from Miami to Jacksonville to see the Jacksons ' Victory Tour in 1984 , when Michael Jackson ruled the world . How his aunties and I dressed up for the concert in our own gloves . After the concert , still floating from the surreal experience , we approached a stretch limousine on the highway . As my father sidled our car closer and my sisters and I pressed our noses to the window to try to see , the limo 's tinted electric window slid down . A sparkling silver glove waved out to us . When we saw that glove , the whole car screamed -- even my father , who was driving . My sisters and I begged my father to follow the limousine ... and it finally came to a stop in front of our budget hotel . When the rear door opened , a white blond-haired decoy stepped out -- wearing a silver Michael Jackson glove . If only we 'd never seen past the tinted window . If only we had a perfect memory of Michael waving goodbye . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Tananarive Due .
Tananarive Due : My friend mourning the death of Michael Jackson last week . In some ways , she says , the mourning began long ago with his puzzling behavior . She says many black people forgot how much they loved him .