Given my recent blogs, why in the world would I write a book about the worst years of my life? Years in which my wonderful moments were sprinkled in between segments of loneliness, hostility and betrayal? Am I a fool or just an arrogant SOB who has nothing better to do than blather on about his rather ordinary life?

The answers to why write and publish Boy At The Window now are simple, so much so that they surprise me. I’m motivated by the reality that my adult life has been much more pleasant than my life was twenty or twenty-five years ago. Not only my education. My social life, my family life, my Christian life, my career choices have almost all been good experiences, successful endeavors, wonderful choices. But even with all of that, I’ve remained unhappy when I otherwise should be, continue to see myself as an underdog, and in want for more in my life. This despite all of the blessings that have befallen me since leaving Mount Vernon for college. I want to know what in my past has made it difficult for me to celebrate a milestone like finishing a degree, enjoy the work I do, to not worry about money even when all the bills are paid.

Boy At The Window has helped me figure out much of what is ailing me. I tend to see myself as an underdog, so I put myself in positions where I’m fighting against a system, whether it be academia, the nonprofit sector and my supervisors, or the materialism of modern-day Christianity. Even though I’m optimistic about my own ability to succeed in life, I tend to expect the other shoe to drop, as it did a week and a half after I was awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in April 1995. That’s when my mother and four younger siblings were rendered homeless by a fire at 616 East Lincoln in Mount Vernon. They began a nearly three-year-long odyssey of homelessness and semi-homelessness before moving back to 616. I’m almost always on the lookout for something that could threaten my future or that of my son and wife. Nuclear annihilation. Global warming. A high debt to income ratio. 🙂

I know, I know. I should’ve gotten over all of the misadventures I experienced growing up by now. And for the most part I have. Yet that doesn’t mean that there aren’t scars, that there aren’t things going on within me that I’m otherwise unconscious of. So many of us who do “make it” out of poverty and abuse “by the grace of God” refuse to look back to see how much of our lives continue to be determined by the forces that shaped our upbringing. In order to be truly free, which for me means to be free to be happy in every way possible, it means confronting the past in a way that allows it to stay in the past.

It also means realizing that there are other people like me out there, maybe a ten ot twelve or sixteen-year-old who doesn’t think much of himself (or herself) or his community or parents. Someone flying right under the radar at school but a person who has talents and abilities that they can’t quite imagine unleashing in a way to transform their life. Someone who believes that there’s more to life than what they’ve experienced but doesn’t exactly know how to get there. Someone willing to make sacrifices, to take risks to make their life worth living, if only someone or something were there to help them. I hope that Boy At The Window can reach them and teach them a way to trust without being gullible, to hope without worrying about loss, to be happy even when it might seem that there isn’t a reason to be so.

Some of you may think that Boy At The Window is mostly a dark, depressing tale of struggle and strive with bits and pieces of silver lining mixed in. That’s not true, but the context for what pushed me into the journey that I’ve taken over the years arose out of moments like the one that I described on Friday. On the positive tip, the one silver lining, the one theme from 1982 that helped me get through an otherwise soul-destroying year was my seventh-grade crush.

Not that the girl whom was the object of my infatuation ever noticed. We fought twice, and for most of the year, we exchanged barbs and insults, most of them of the ridiculously stupid variety. But after watching her ballerina performance in class one day, I was smitten with attraction. It was the first time in my life that I had a crush on anyone my own age, much less a classmate. I found myself daydreaming about kissing her in class, my heart skipping a beat before pounding in my chest. My stomach would tie itself into knots upon seeing her arrive at school with her entourage at hand.

I don’t know when my crush on her turned into a metaphor for redemption. Somewhere around the time of my witnessing my ex-stepfather’s abuse of my mother, my classmate became more than just an attractive, fierce, and abundantly gifted individual. She became the type of person I aspired to be. Someone confident, fearless, able to take on the world. Someone who could defy gravity and my otherwise emotionally enigmatic self and pull out of me passions and possibilities that I never knew existed. That’s what she became to me at twelve. I’ve hoped ever since to meet people throughout my life that reminded me of my one-crush, at least the way I saw her back then.

By the time I began to get my head kicked in, I had transferred some of my feelings and thoughts about my crush to my mother. That gave me the strength that I needed to get through the summer. I know that this transference set me up for attraction to two kinds of people (women especially) in my life — those who are passionate, purposeful, and represent “damsels in distress,” and those who are popular and could be passionate and purposeful.

After a quarter-century, I’ve come to appreciate the different (and different) kinds of folks whom have been a part of my life because of my basic need for inspiration, for passion, to be saved, most of all from my past. I stopped pining away for my favorite ballerina years ago. But there is still a twelve-year-old in me who wouldn’t mind going back in time to steal a kiss, to grab her hand and thank her for being there (even if she didn’t know she was “there”), for waking me out of my childhood slumber.

It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve experienced some of the worst physical abuse that I could ever imagine short of rape. It was July 6th, a Tuesday in 1982, when my now ex-stepfather began the afternoon by literally whipping me in my bedroom for not tracking down and beating up my mugger from two weeks before. I was all of twelve and a half, barely five-foot-four, and still in shock from seeing him knock my mother unconscious at the end of Memorial Day that year. I got mugged at the end of June because I carelessly walked around with ten dollars in my hand at the nearby public park and swimming pool, the largest one in Mount Vernon.

So there I was two weeks later, stripped naked and being beaten with my arms and legs spread against a dirty eggshell white wall because I failed to find a man who went by “Pookie,” about five-ten and at least five years older than me. When I yelled that my stepfather wasn’t my father, the already ugly situation became criminal. I took several punches to the head, jaw, ribs and stomach, was picked up by my arms and thrown into the wall in my room. The man who had claimed to be changed by becoming a Hebrew-Israelite then said, “Go to police! I dare you… I’ll kill you!” If not for my mother coming home from work by mid-afternoon, I probably would’ve been in an emergency room, maybe even murdered. As it was, I would spend the next five weeks under constant abuse from the man who wanted me to call him “Dad.”

I discovered about a year later that my stepfather and “Pookie” actually knew each other, that he had paid “Pookie” to go to the park to mug me, to make me “into a man,” as he’d liked to say all the time.

I can’t believe that it’s been twenty-five years. Especially since I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the end of 1982 when all of this abuse stuff started. It’s the ultimate irony, though. If it weren’t for that summer of abuse at home and my experiences in the gifted track at school — not to mention a crush I had on one of my classmates — I wouldn’t be in the position to write these words. I found myself so down at times that I thought about killing myself. But the anger and rage that came from that abuse, the desire for revenge and my unrequited infatuation on a girl that I had built up as a savior of sorts all kept me going in July and August of ’82.

It’s difficult to be thankful for so much pain that was the beginning of my journey for survival and success, but in many ways I am thankful. Every moment I breathe, live, work, write, teach, learn, succeed, love, forgive and care for others is a moment of revenge, a moment that I’ve taken away from those horrible days and times. Obviously I haven’t forgotten what happened to me (I still bare a few scars on my right leg and back, not to mention in my trust of those who’ve claimed authority over me over the years). But that’s what my memoir is all about, the ability to forgive, to understand what’s been lost, to find one’s self and truth even in the midst of violence and chaos. So I mourn a little for the person that I was at twelve today, but just a little, because I also know that I have a life that my twelve-year-old self could only dream of. I hope that he can smile about that today.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of another teaching gig for me, this one at Howard University in their Department of Afro-American Studies. I’m teaching a summer session course in research methods for Black Studies for undergraduate majors. This will be the sixth university in which I have taught since 1992, but this will be my first time teaching at an historically Black college and my first time teaching this course.

I wrapped the course around the theme of African American identity and the various ways to approach this broad and fundamentally important topic to anyone of African descent living in the US (White South Africans included – 🙂 ). I hope that my student can appreciate the levels of complexity and subtlety involved in identity construction and perception that we all live with as individuals and as members of a particular group or society, especially in this society.

I’m of two minds as I approach my class for the first time tomorrow. One, I recognize that I have spent the past quarter-century or so attempting to make sense of who I am and where I fit or don’t fit in this world. I know that because of my voice and education that many Blacks assume that I’m “acting White” from the moment I open my mouth to say “Hi” or “Yo”. I’ve had numerous experiences with Whites who assume because I’m 6’3″ and still in decent shape that they can start a conversation with “Yo, what’s up man” and launch into a basketball discussion before I’ve learned their name. Those from other ethnicities might make their own assumptions, but my experience has been that they tend to keep them to themselves. So I plan to approach the topic with some patience and with kid gloves on, at least initially. My biggest issue is the fact that I’m not an academic true-believer, in that I don’t believe that scholarly research is the best or only way to address questions in Black Studies, including the topic of African American identity.

Mind number two is the one that reminds me that I’ve been doing research around my own identity and on the issue of racial, ethnic, and societal identity for almost half my life, since I was the age of the students I’m about to teach. I can question the validity of research now more than ever because of my experiences and because of the knowledge that good scholarship often isn’t enough to touch the minds and hearts of others, much less their will to act on the knowledge that they’ve received.

Research certainly has it place. It was integral to Boy At The Window. The local newspaper records (Mount Vernon Daily Argus dating back to 1976), a copy of my high school yearbook, some Board of Education docs I managed to obtain long before I started this book, New York State Department of Education school district report cards and my interviews benefitted my writing of Boy At The Window a great deal. But ultimately all research and the methods you use to collect it is a journey, to find the truth, a truth and/or your truth. It’s not an end in itself. Sometimes I think folks in the academic world forget that. I hope that my students, at least, get that if nothing else.

It’s another week of writing and searching for an agent and a publisher for Boy At The Window. Many thanks for the comments and email over the past couple of weeks. I’m glad that folks are reading and are giving feedback on my ramblings. I do plan to continue to update and improve the website, including the blog section, so there may be a few glitches along the way. I apologize in advance, and hope that all of you can bear with me.

There’s not much news to report on my search for an agent. I received three rejections last week, including one from an agent who apparently is too swamped to take on another client but thinks that my work is “impressive.” I often don’t know what to make of rejections, but I assume that the fact I received a response is impressive enough. For the month, I’ve received twelve total rejections, mostly of the “your work is good but…” variety. Sometimes I think that there must be an easier way to find agents besides going to writer’s conferences and workshops or working the process as if it were a police investigation and a research project all wrapped together. I find myself thinking, “Maybe I should’ve gone to Harvard or Columbia, Oberlin or UMass, Morehouse or NYU, someplace where future literary agents and editors congregate before working at a publishing house or an agency.” But then I realize that I can only do what I’m doing now, and to keep doing what I’m doing until I either break through or until everyone tells me that my writing skills are about as impressive as an aging frat boy farting on my living room couch with my family present.

I did add an unpublished essay, titled “Shouting ‘Race’ in a Crowded Theater,” to the website today (under the “Other Writings” button). As I said in my cover letter to magazines for the piece at the end of last year, “I discuss an incident that occurred on my company’s volleyball team. It was subtle enough that if I hadn’t been paying attention, I would’ve missed it. Yet the more interesting aspect of this story wasn’t so much what happened during the game. It was after the game and after I politely raised the issue of bias that those subtle group dynamics became more obvious. Within this story is a message for us all around the nature of group (or societal) chemistry and how that can trump our more politically correct and conscious selves regardless of intent, as well as what to do about it.”

The larger story here is that we need not shout “Race!”—nor be in a “crowded theater”—to send people running in panic. One needs only to say “race” loud enough for a few folks to hear to generate a cynical or fearful response. But that’s the irony of race in America these days. In group settings, particularly ones in which there is a clear and significant majority, the issue of race is taboo, even when group dynamics indicate an unconscious set of attitudes and actions that those in the minority can interpret as bias. Now I’m no psychologist or sociologist. But I do think that these dynamics leave all of us with more questions than answers about race and about ourselves, about whether we actually act as individual or if we really are sheep.

It’s another theme in Boy At The Window, how group dynamics can heighten the insensitivities and cruelities of life in a program, school or community. I know, I know, I spend too much time thinking about things that make others’ heads hurt. Oh well. Someone has to do the heavy lifting here, so it might as well be me.

Thursday, June 18, 1987. It was twenty years ago on this date that I graduated from Mount Vernon High School, twenty years ago today. After two decades and a manuscript that covers the years leading up to this date, you’d think that I’d have some witty and unconventionally intellectual perspectives on this day. Yet all I’ve been thinking about is if I or my former classmates will really try this time or over the next five years to have a class reunion.

Ten years ago, a few did just that, without really taking the time to plan it right. Out of our graduating class of 509 students, only 72 actually made it to the reunion in October ’97. Most of those folks had stayed or moved back to Mount Vernon, New York. I only found out about the reunion through one of the few classmates with whom I still had contact and a friendship, whom herself only found out because her father was once a prominent man in the city. Neither of us had been invited, at least not directly. I decided not to go, coming off of three months of unemployment as a new Ph.D. and in need of money to present at a conference in Philly at the same time as this partial reunion. From everything I heard, though, it was an overpriced disappointment, kind of like my times in Mount Vernon High School. The cliques that became post-high school circles of friends mostly showed up. None of them included my circles of classmates, as many were long gone by ’97.

But this isn’t all there is to think about when it comes to the twentieth anniversary of the end of my formal schooling in my first hometown. Mostly the issue for me is waste and loss. When I started seventh grade in ’81, there were nearly 1,700 other students (about 75 percent of them of Black, Afro-Caribbean and Latino descent) that could’ve been part of my Class of ’87. By the time we reached ninth grade, that number was down to 1,075. The very first day of high school, our principal Richard Capozzola had all ninth graders report to auditorium to welcome us. “Four years from now, only half of you will graduate,” he said with a jaded sense of sternness. I didn’t think the man cared if any of us would ever graduate. Of course he was wrong. Less than half of us graduated four years later.

Even if you were to account for the affluent Whites and middle class Blacks who left Mount Vernon and the high school before graduation for private and parochial school or another school district, it would only account for a tiny fraction of the attrition. The building that I grew up in, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, is a more typical example of what I’m sure happened to so many of my former classmates. At least two people I knew who dropped out ended up becoming low-level drug dealers and would spend most of the past twenty years in and out of jail (mostly in). One neighbor and former classmate who dropped out became a prostitute, contracted HIV and died from AIDS a couple of years ago. So many others became drug addicts or wandered from job to job or became mothers before I finished college that it almost goes without mentioning.

Of those of us who went on to college and left Mount Vernon behind, my more immediate classmate circle, the bonds we formed during middle school and high school were about as strong as wet pieces of toilet paper. It’s sad, really, when I think about it now. I can count on one hand the former classmates I have regular contact with, and half of those are as a result of writing Boy At The Window.

I do hope that we do have a 20th or 25th anniversary reunion. I just hope that enough time has past to heal the wounds of loss and waste that were so much a part of our lives back then–and for many of us, have survived to this day. To those of us how have succeeded and survived, I tip my cap to each of you and hope that life is treating you kindly, certainly more kindly than back then. Vaya con dios and, dare I say it, happy anniversary!