My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Black Migrants, Black Migration, Bradley Arkansas, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Education, Highs and Lows, Insecurities, Intervention, Mary Louise Gill, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, Self-Defense, Self-Reflection, Southern Stigmas, Welfare Poverty

I would be a pretty terrible son and historian to not discuss the fact that this July and August marks fifty years since my mother moved to New York from little ol’ Bradley, Arkansas. For those who think fifty years on anything revolving around race and class is “a long time ago” or “ancient history,” consider the following. At the time Mom moved across the country to Gotham, the Civil Rights Movement had entered its northern, splintered phase, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was barely a year old, and the very first episode of Star Trek with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would air that September.

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966, August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966 (highlighted in blue with yellow dots), August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

On balance, with any neutral but fair eye at all, I’d have to say that Mom’s transition has been more failure than success. Five decades of crisis after crisis, of having a handful of fleeting moments of peace and progress followed by years of abuse, misery, poverty, and sorrow. That could be the summary I’d write about Mom’s fifty years of post-migration experiences in New York and in Mount Vernon.

But, let’s start from the top, through Boy @ The Window:

After drifting a bit after her high school graduation, one of Mom’s first cousins came for a visit to Arkansas in the summer of ’66 and told her that there was good-paying work in New York City. Her cousin lived in the [170s, the Tremont section of the] Bronx, a hotbed of Black migration and West Indian immigration in those years. Without much thought, Mom took a four-day bus trip from Texarkana to New York to what she hoped would be a new life. Given the alternative of tenant farming and generational poverty, New York must’ve seemed like going to heaven.

Mom had it rough long before my father and my older brother Darren and I had come along to be a burden. She lived with her cousin for nearly a year in the Bronx, paying $15 a week for a one-bedroom flat, before good luck turned to bad and then back to wonderful. They had both lost jobs at some factory, but had heard through the other late Black arrivals in the Bronx and Mount Vernon about good paying jobs at Mount Vernon Hospital. When Mount Vernon Hospital hired Mom to be a cook in their dietary department, she and her first cousin went their separate ways living-together-wise. They’d stay in touch until ’78, when Mom’s first cousin moved to Virginia, presumably for work with the Navy.

In the interim, Mom met my father at a juke joint on Mount Vernon’s South Side. It was a place where only Southern Black migrants would be comfortable. They didn’t have to pretend to like the grime, the hustle, the noise, and the taunts that New York and New Yawkers threw at them every day. They could be themselves. They could be shy, apprehensive, even, about their time in a place where everyone joked about their Southern accents and their slow ways. I think that’s what made my father attractive to Mom. Here was someone who made Mom sound much less Southern by comparison. At the same time, my father worked in the city, had a job as a janitor with the Federal Reserve Bank, and knew the Subway better than she knew the route from her one-room flat on Adams Street to Mount Vernon Hospital.

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

Within a year of meeting, Mom gave birth to my older brother Darren. Mom often said that she “wasn’t a teenager” when Darren was born in December ’67, as she had turned twenty six weeks earlier. Yet as I finally pointed out during the intervention fourteen years ago, “But you got pregnant when you were nineteen,” all to let Mom know that the stigma of teenage pregnancy was more about her and her insecurities than it was about what White folks thought, especially back then.

I came along two years later, Mom married my father in ’70, and things started falling apart soon after. Mom never gave herself a chance to live the city, and not just work in it. Mom never gave herself time to grow beyond her insecurities and her vanity about her looks. She never really tried to make her aspirations for joining the Navy or going to college happen. The latter, at least until after I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

As I wrote about Mom’s/our family’s fall into welfare poverty by ’83 in Boy @ The Window,

Sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later, Mom must’ve been thinking that Mount Vernon was a hellish pit that got hotter every time she tried to make her and our lives better. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded, a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The ‘I love you, Donald’ faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

Yes, this is all truly sad. There was way too much too soon for Mom. Family, marriage, abuse, poverty, and internalized issues around race, sexism, misogyny, Black masculinity, evangelical Christianity (and the whole Hebrew-Israelite debacle), and all in New York. It would’ve been overwhelming for anyone whose income never saw $20,000 in any year prior to temp work in ’99, and $30,000 until working for Westchester County Medical Center in 2003.

There are so many mistakes Mom made, with me, my siblings older and younger, in choosing mates, and with work. I’ve written about roughly half of them. But, awful or awesome, without Mom’s momentary hope and courage — often the very definition of Black migration, especially to New York — I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

A Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part Two

06 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anti-Gay Slur, Big Wheel, c, Chevy Malibu, Dukey, Father-Son Relationship, Heterosexism, Hypermasculinity, Molestation, Mother-Son Relationship, Nathan Hale Elementary, Parenting, Pedophilia, Recovered Memories, Sexual Assault, Signs of Trauma

It took me until three weeks after the sex assault on the Nathan Hale ES playground before I told my parents. Those three weeks are a blur, but not the blur that the incident with the light-skinned teenager and his three friends would become until three weeks before my forty-fifth birthday

At the beginning of August ’76, my Mom and my dad Jimme were having another one of their vicious arguments. It was that Saturday afternoon when I finally learned that my Mom had filed for a divorce the month before. Anyway, I somehow managed to get myself in the middle of that argument. I complained that Darren’s bigger butt had been the final straw for my Big Wheel. It had broken in half after he tried to ride it earlier that week.

“I told him, it says ‘90-lb limit’,” I said to my Mom (which I pronounced as “ninety lebs”) while pointing at the inscribed warning label on my now broken Big Wheel, crying.

“You broke that shit weeks ago!,” my Mom yelled.

“I didn’t break it. A bunch of kids did,” I said.

“And you didn’t try to stop ‘em?,” Mom asked.

“I did try to stop ‘em. But they took it and one of them stuck a pee-pee in my mouth,” I explained.

“I done told you not to leave the house when I’m not here! That’s what you get for not listenin’!,” my Mom screamed.

I was so shocked by how angry she was. I was mad, too. I didn’t think. I just ran out the house and out into the middle of the street. I saw a tan Chevy Malibu coming down the street and I just stood there.

1973 tan-ish Chevy Malibu, August 5, 2016. (http://www.autoblog.com).

The older, salt-and-pepper bearded and balding Black man didn’t slow down until he realized I wasn’t planning to move. He slammed on the brakes and came to a stop about three feet in front of me. The man put his car in park and got out. He then slammed his driver’s side door really hard, and yelled, “Boy, what’s wrong with you? Are you tryin’ to get yourself killed? Where’s your mama?”

He grabbed me by the back of my chocolate-brown t-shirt and made me show him where I lived. We marched upstairs to the second-floor, where he proceeded to explain my suicidal actions. My Mom then took the older man’s belt and beat me with it in front of him, with Darren and Jimme watching. Afterwards, she said “Thank you” to the older man, and then sent me to bed without dinner. “Don’t you EVER do that again!,” she screamed.

Nine months after that bicentennial summer, we moved across town to 616 East Lincoln, a three-in-one, five-story Tudor-style apartment complex. After a summer camp at Darren’s Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry, we went outside on 616’s grounds for the first time, in August ’77. The kids at 616 and 630 East Lincoln chased us around the vast two-building complex while throwing rocks at us. Scared, we hid behind the big, wooden, dark-brown front door and huddled, hoping that the kids wouldn’t find us.

Instead, a couple of young Black Turks saw us and took us upstairs to my Mom and my eventual stepfather Maurice. The two young men said that they saw us doing “the dukey.” I had no idea what they were talking about. All I knew was that my Mom and stepfather proceeded to whip us as if we’d gone to the grocery store and stolen $100 worth of candy and soda. Both “dukey” and “faggot” were part of my vocabulary — again.

The mind of a child is a strange place. Mine was no different. For years afterward, I’d managed to forget these most painful memories. I managed to bury them without burying all of my other memories, so many memories that I have for the last forty-one out of my forty-five years. I somehow didn’t remember the connections between my Big Wheel, the light-skinned teenager and standing in the middle of South Sixth, waiting to be run over. I didn’t remember my Mom’s response to finding out that her six-year-old son had been sexually assaulted.

It’s ironic. Ironic because I’ve already written my coming-of-age memoir in Boy @ The Window. I spent the better part of a decade researching, writing and revising it before self-publishing it in 2013. I included excruciating details about my family, my Mom, my father Jimme. I included as many relevant and embarrassing events as I could about how I became the person I always wanted to be. And with all that work, I never remembered the moment a teenager forced his penis tip into my mouth.

Buildings/dream in state of collapse, via Inception (2010), August 5, 2016. (http://www.cinemablend.com).

I only remembered during the holidays in 2014. One night in early December, I had a really bad trying-to-escape dream — again. This time, though, I remembered the taste of a penis in my mouth, and then I saw the light-skinned teenager. Even in my dream, I said, “That’s him. That’s it.”

After I woke up, a flood of images erupted in my brain. The Chevy Malibu and me standing in the street. Seeing the light-skinned kid who assaulted me on the playground at 616 on the same day the other kids chased Darren and me around the building while pelting us with pebbles and rocks. The wall of fear that my Mom had on her face when the neighbors told her that they thought Darren and me were “faggots” because we were standing so close to each other that we looked like we were “doing the dukey.”

The now-remembered incident explained so much. My Mom’s constant fear that I’d turn out gay. My father Jimme constantly calling me a “faggat” (as he pronounced it when he was drunk) whenever I stepped out of line or looked at people the wrong way. My Mom giving my one-time idiot stepfather Maurice carte blanche to “turn” me and Darren “into men” through Isshin-ryu karate and draconian physical abuse. Me being terrified at times when around Black guys on the basketball courts or in other social setting. My looking at young women from afar, attainable and yet all but unattainable for me. The sheer desire to save the people in my life from violence and destruction, especially my Mom and Darren, but the inability to do either.

My family’s fear of the mere possibility that I or my brother Darren could be gay drove many of their measures of physical, verbal and emotional abuse. So much so that they ignored all the signs of my actual abuse. Like standing in middle of the street to get run over by a car, were just considered “defiant” or “weird.” Or with me constantly chewing my fingernails right down to nail bed. Or me constantly stuffing sandwiches and other food down into the recesses of my winter coats, having already ripped out the pockets, and leaving the food there. Or the day I stood on Nathan Hale’s playground during recess in May ’77, when I took some string from my red and blue-striped t-shirt, gradually unraveled it, and swallowed nearly a third of it. My Mom figured she could beat the “something’s wrong with you, fool” out of me. My father calling me a “faggat” from the time I turned fourteen was just tough love, not a form of abuse piled on top of abuse.

Now that I remember everything about the physical and the sexual abuse, what do I do next? It’s been forty years since I found out how horrible life could be. It’s not as if I’ll be able to track down and then beat up the light-skinned teenager, who’s now in his early fifties, assuming he’s still alive.

I could start by revising Boy @ The Window. I wasn’t just weird because I wore a kufi, spoke too slowly, or grew up with weird people. I wasn’t just a child of poverty, abuse, and divorce. I was also a sexual abuse victim, all but completely unacknowledged, and yet such a major part of the story.

Forgiving my abuser could be at the top of the list. It would be difficult to be angry at someone whom I’d forgotten about for nearly four decades. But you know what? If I could just punch him in the throat and then knee him in the balls until one fell out and rolled down the street, that would give me some satisfaction.

Mostly, I’m just satisfied that I know my past in full. I already paid the bill. Now that I know what I paid for, I can move forward. I can look at my past, present, and future with more sanity than I thought possible.

How I Met My Son

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, 9/11, Abuse, Amadou Diallo, Baggage, Black Masculinity, Burden of Success, Child Abuse, Darren Gill, Domestic Violence, Eri, Family Intervention, Father-Son Relationship, Humanities, Maurice, Maurice Eugene Washington, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Noah, Parenting, Penguins, Poverty, Self-Reflection, Siblings, Teenager, Yiscoc

Noah’s birthday cake, Cheesecake Factory Original Cheesecake, adorned with candles, July 30, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

My son turned thirteen yesterday. That sentence by itself speaks volumes. That I have a son, that he’s reached an age where he’s in the midst of puberty, with a discernible personality, with a set of abilities and potential for developing more talents. Wow! Noah loves art, anime, and apples. He’s a classic contrarian who’s just beginning to realize that he has academic and athletic talents. He’s mostly observant, thoughtful, and independent thinking enough to deal with this crazy world outside our home. That he’s managed to get to this point without me messing him up with my own baggage as his father. To me, that’s not just amazing. That’s a miracle.

As late as the early spring of ’02, a half-year before me and my wife conceived our one and only egg, I had some doubts about ever being a dad. But those small doubts mattered little compared to where I’d been the summer and fall of ’01. I wasn’t dead set against becoming a parent. I just felt that in this dangerous, chaotic, racist, oppressive world, how could I be so selfish as to bring a child into this life?

Daddy Emperor Penguin with baby penguin, accessed July 31, 2016. (National Geographic via http://pinterest.com).

I wasn’t just thinking of Amadou Diallo or the aftermath of 9/11. This wasn’t just about the expense of raising a kid. Mostly, it had to do with growing up as the second of six, but with ALL of the responsibilities of a first-born Gen-Xer watching over four siblings ten to fourteen years younger than me, not to mention my wayward older brother. It was the trauma of living through eight years of abject, unrelenting poverty with an abusive asshole of a bully who frequently threatened my and my Mom’s existence. It was having to swallow shit from all of my legal guardians about my lack of observable Black testosterone coursing through my brain cells. Add going through a magnet program from middle school to high school and going to the University of Pittsburgh to this baggage. What I was by twenty was a hopeful but yet emotionally exhausted human being.

So, I was never someone who had this American evangelical desire to get married or have kids (which is also a passion connected to Whiteness, by the way, to propagate their numbers, but not just). Even when it was obvious that me and my wife were heading toward marriage by 1998, I was more against having kids than in favor of the idea. I was still occasionally sending money to my Mom and my siblings to help them out, and taking trips to 616 to put out figurative fires. I had changed enough diapers, made enough bottles, dressed, lunched, dinnered, and laundered enough for my siblings to say “I’m good” when it came to having my own child.

But when my youngest brother Eri beat me to the punch by siring his own kid with his high school girlfriend at seventeen in the spring of ’01, I lost it. I couldn’t sleep soundly for months. I listened to my Mom complain week after week about him and his post-high school dropout future. My brothers Maurice and Yiscoc weren’t doing much better. My family was a cyclone of a disaster, and nothing I had done to blaze a trail for them since 1982 had done much good.

This was when I decided to do my intervention, to go after both my Mom and my siblings. Not so much out of anger, and yes, I had enough anger to keep my current iPhone powered for three days. No, this was a combination of righteous indignation and, well, love. I did my due diligence to dig into my Mom’s life with a few questions that I already knew the answers to, about when and how it all went so wrong for us all. And then I did the intervention, in January ’02, right after the birth of my only nephew.

Only later did I realize the intervention I did was really for me. Only later did I figure out that the 616 intervention had freed me from my self-imposed burden to help lift my family out of poverty. The constant anguish and exhaustion I felt when dealing with my family went away in the weeks after the intervention, and I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, maybe years.

Noah in portrait, May 16, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins)

That’s when I was ready to do my part in the miracle of conception, childbirth, and parenting. Giving myself that permission and then having the recognition of the baggage I carried going in has made fatherhood and parenting much easier (not easy, just much easier) than it would’ve been if I had done like Eri or followed Phil Knight’s “Just Do It” advice.

It’s hard to really be passionate about having a child when nearly all your free time with family between the ages of twelve and thirty-one has been to participate in raising kids. Since my little egg arrived thirteen years ago, though, I’ve reserved my parenting for him. I’m the father penguin in -100°F temps, braving blizzards in eighty-mile-an-hour winds to see my son through. I think it’s paid off so far.

A Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part One

16 Saturday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Bicentennial, Black Masculinity, Bullying, Darren, Left Alone, Memories, Molestation, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Nathan Hale Elementary, Self-Awareness, Self-Defense, Self-Revelation, Sexual Abuse

Big Wheel, pretty much as I remember it, April 2014. (http://sf.funcheap.com/bring-big-wheel-race/).

As most who read me know, I wrote a book about the worst of my growing up years three years ago, Boy @ The Window. I wrote about how I saw things between the ages of eleven and nineteen during the 1980s. I covered everything from a preteen’s fantasy life and Black masculinity to child abuse and domestic violence. I dug into my memories for haunting moments of poverty, for examples of ostracism, for stories about my family, my high-achieving yet soulless classmates, and for any oases of good moments, too.

Or so I though. (And no, it’s not just that I should’ve given the book to another professional to edit.) I focused so heavily on what turned me into the professional, writing, teaching, fairly erudite and extremely goofy me. Really, too heavily, as it turns out. I forgot that there had been a me prior to World Book Encyclopedia and Black America, Starling, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, the Hebrew-Israelites, and Humanities. That even younger me apparently had a story to tell. It was a story that I should’ve told, but I didn’t, I couldn’t remember. Maybe part of me really didn’t want to recall. No, I had to finish Boy @ The Window, publish it, and promote it for a year before I reacquainted myself with that splinter deep in my mind.

I found it, too, in a story that didn’t quite add up. The story that turned me into all of me, good, bad, and yes, obviously ugly began forty years ago this month. Well, it actually started with Christmas 1975. My Mom and my father Jimme had bought me a Big Wheel for Christmas and my sixth birthday, because my birthday comes two days after Christmas. I had begged them for this ride for months, at least as early as that July. I was so happy that as soon as I could, with my dark blue winter coat and all, I rode up and down South Sixth Avenue’s blue-slate sidewalks with it. I thought I was the coolest kid on my block!

The 400-block of South Sixth was one of two and three-story homes with 150-square-foot front yards with interlocked steel gates, and ample backyards. But there were few kids for me to play with, at least kids my age. This despite Nathan Hale Elementary holding up the southeastern end of the block. I rode around that stark early winter-looking block for days, with hardly a toddler to greet me.

At 425 South Sixth, we lived just two doors down from Nathan Hale and its playground area/parking lot. Here was me and Darren struggling to be in front when my mother took this photo.

Me and Darren struggling to be in front when my mother took this photo, Nathan Hale ES playground, February 1975.

Back then I had no trouble talking to anyone about anything, including how I felt. By the end of first grade, a girl in my class named Diana had taken a liking to me. She had skin the color of butterscotch, and bright hazel-green eyes to go with her puffy lips. Diana’s light brown hair was always a mess, but then again, I could pick out a piece of corn or a grain of white rice from my jet-black knotty roots more days than not.

We kissed several times, in class and on the short walk up South Sixth back to our homes. We even attempted to French kiss a few times, including once in class before being caught by our teacher Ms. Griffin. All I know was, there was a lot of spit and tongue involved. When I’d ride my Big Wheel after school, and see Diana on the rough and bumpy asphalt playground between my house and the school, I’d let her ride on it. And we’d continue with tongue practice sometimes, too.

When the school year came to an end in June, Diana and her family moved away. I waved her goodbye as they drove away from South Sixth, me riding my Big Wheel down the block behind them. I felt sad to lose such a good friend.

But I still had my Big Wheel. For weeks after the end of first grade, I rode it around the block and on the school playground. Sometimes my older brother Darren would be there, but most of the time I was by myself. With Diana gone, there were no kids my age around. It was the summer of 1976, and like most parents back then, mine were only interested in seeing me come home for lunch or dinner, not in me being inside all day.

425 South 6th Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Inside was a second-floor, two bedroom and one bath flat within the three-story tan and off-white house that was 425 South Sixth. We had a separate entrance, giving us the appearance of living in our own home without actually owning the place. It sometimes seemed spacious, except when my Mom and Jimme would fight, or when Darren would take my toys, or when my Mom went into the kitchen and made fried porgies and whiting or chitlins. On many a day during our short two and a half years at 425 South Sixth, I stared at the cars parked or rolling down the street. A dark-green ‘68 Chevy Camaro here, a grape-colored AMC Gremlin there. The Chevy Monte Carlo series from between ‘69 and ‘75 was my favorite back then. Maybe it was how high the curvy back-end of the car seemed raised an extra foot off the ground. That summer, though, my Mom and my father weren’t home often to engage me in the car model guessing game that I liked playing when I was bored.

What made this worse for me was that my Mom and my father Jimme were getting a divorce. Only I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that things seemed different. They weren’t fighting as much. My Mom had bought all new furniture for her bedroom and the living room. She even bought a Polaroid camera, to take pictures of herself while wearing a scarf with earth-tone artwork around her head, all without makeup on. Even though anyone over eighteen seemed old to me at six, my Mom seemed ageless, like she would be in her twenties forever, a shade of brown consistent with my own medium dark with copper undertones. I thought it was a good picture of her.

My father had never been home for more than a few days at a time, with his binge drinking and all. He was a night janitor at Salesian High School in New Rochelle, but hardly made it home during the day. My diminutive father worked this job years after losing his custodian job with the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Manhattan, but still acted as if he worked as a banker on Wall Street. My brother Darren and I would sometimes be with him at Salesian whenever he took an evening shift. My Mom’s shifts as one of the dietary supervisors at Mount Vernon Hospital varied, between 7 am and 3 pm during the day and 3 to 11 in the afternoons and evenings. So, some days she was home when I was on one of my Big Wheel adventures. Sometimes Jimme was home. Sometimes, I was with my babysitter Ida or one of my dad’s drinking buddies.

And, there were days I was alone. On a lonely Wednesday in July, just a week and a half after the bicentennial Independence Day, my Mom left for work. She was on a 3-11 pm shift that day. She told me, “Keep your butt upstairs while I’m gone.” Then she left. No one was home. Darren was at his Clear View School in summer day camp. God only knows where Jimme was.

I did that day what I always did when left alone. I got on my now nearly worn out Big Wheel wearing my blue and red-striped t-shirt and dark blue shorts, and rode it down to the school playground. It had rained earlier that afternoon, and the asphalt was still wet from the summer showers. I skidded along the playground, and noticed two things. One, the air still smelled of rain, even though there were breaks in the clouds. Two, a group of four older Black kids had taken over the swing area.

Something had told me to not go over by the swings, but my Big Wheel’s skidding and sliding brought me over there anyway. As soon as I ended up near the swings, the four older boys surrounded me. One of them grabbed me off of my Big Wheel, while another took my ride. I yelled, “Give it back! Give it back!” The lightest skinned one in the group, their leader it seemed, came up to me, unzipped his pants, and said, “You get it back after you suck my dick, muthafucka.”

I shook my head, but then one of them threatened to destroy my Big Wheel by banging it on one of the swing poles. Crying while being held by two of the twelve or thirteen year-olds, they pried open my mouth long enough for the light-skinned leader to stick the tip of his penis in my mouth. I felt the dry meat on my tongue long enough to want to throw up.

“The little muthafucka’s sucking my dick!,” the light-skinned one yelled while laughing.

They started laughing so hard, I was able to pull myself away from them and grab my Big Wheel. While I ran and rode, the four boys kept yelling, “You a faggot! You a faggot!” One also yelled, “You a dukey!”

I rode straight home and tried to forget what just happened. But I couldn’t. My Big Wheel now had a crack in it, between the back of the seat and the back axle. It wasn’t broken, but it was definitely damaged. My Mom noticed it a few days later. “That’s what you get for leaving the house,” she said after I told her about the Big Wheel and the older boys trying to break it. I didn’t tell her about the other part.

I’ve complained for years that my ability to remember has been both a blessing and a curse. But I didn’t deliberately hone this skill until after I turned nine. Between the age of four, when Nixon resigned, and my first time running away, three weeks before my ninth birthday in December 1978, I have lots of memories. Those memories are those of a young child drifting from day to day, as they should be. The result, though, was not being able to recall details like being molested at six. Until twenty months ago, I remembered it as a vague attempt. And not as the damaging, trauma-inducing incident that it really was (to be continued).

Independence Day On The 6’s

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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1976, 1996, 2006, 7 Train, Adulthood, Coming-of-Age, Dwight Gooden, Escapism, Growing Up, Independence Day, July 4th, Lee Iacocca, Manhood, Metro-North, Mets, New York Mets, Nolan Ryan, Peace, Shea Stadium, Siblings, Statue of Liberty, Subway, Technisort

Shea Stadium (taken from 7 Subway), Flushing Meadows, Queens, NY, September 10, 2008. (Gary Dunaier via http://farm4.static.flickr.com/). In public domain.

For me, the 6’s are ’76, ’86, ’96, and ’06. For 2016, all I’ve done today is make BBQ chicken legs and thigh (after an hour of so of marinating), corn on the cob, mac and cheese, and New York Style blondies with chocolate chips and walnuts. It’s a rainy 240th anniversary of America’s independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. About as dreary the Mid-Atlantic and the nation, really, can be during an election cycle.

It wasn’t that way for most of my on-the-6 Independence Days. I’ve talked about my first one, the bicentennial of 1976, the summer of “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” That Saturday down in a ship and fireworks smoked filled New York Harbor, followed a train ride with my inebriated father to New Haven. I slept more peacefully on that train ride than I probably did at home. At least, until the conductor woke us up to let us know we were in Connecticut. We were lucky the trains in and out of New York were free that day.

Typical Pittsburgh fireworks show for Independence Day, Point State Park, Pittsburgh, PA, July 4, 2014. (http://davedicello.com/).

Independence Day/Week 1996 was pretty good, if not as meandering. Me and my future spouse Angelia went to Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh to watch the fireworks. For all of the issues that po-dunk Pittsburgh has, bad fireworks shows weren’t one of them. I needed the break, after a spring of turmoil with my advisor Joe Trotter and weeks revised my then 430-page dissertation (I would end up writing seventy-five pages [net] that month while doing a second set of revisions). It rained that afternoon and early evening, but it cleared up at 8 pm, just in time for some excellent fireworks. We perched ourselves where we could see sparkles and artwork over the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers.

Tuesday, July 4th of ’06 wasn’t memorable. It was my first summer working on Boy @ The Window, and I had already began planning my escape from AED and the daily grind of nonprofit work and raising money. I think we had my sister-in-law over. I made some ribs and chicken, bought dinner rolls and macaroni salad, and talked mostly about my then nearly three-year-old son and his potty training woes. Ah, the boring stability of a more typical middle-class American life!

Of all my Independence Days — on a “6” year or not — one stands out over all the rest. Friday, July 4, 1986. It was the grand re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of one-time Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which had raised hundreds of millions to restore both symbols of American inclusion (via European immigrants, at least) and American freedom to museum-quality glory. My Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, and my younger siblings Sarai and Eri went down to Battery Park by Subway and Bee-Line bus to see the grand ships and fireworks for that celebration of the Statue of Liberty at 100 years old.

Dwight Gooden, aka, “Dr. K,” Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

Not so for me and the rest of us. I took me, my older brother Darren, and my then near-seven year-old brother Maurice and nearly five year-old brother Yiscoc to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play. It was either a 1:05 pm or 1:35 pm start, I don’t remember. What I do remember, though, is that was a beautiful eighty-five degree afternoon, beautiful because it wasn’t particularly humid, and there were no storm clouds to be found that Friday. Dwight Gooden was on the mound for the Mets, starting against the all-time great Nolan Ryan. It was built up to be a duel, and it was.

Keith Hernandez drove in a run in the first, and that was it until the top of the seventh inning, when Dr. K gave up a home run to Kevin Bass. Other than that, fly balls, walks, double-plays, and strikeouts were the order of the day. Lenny Dykstra drove in the game-winning run with a double to right-center field at the bottom of the seventh inning off of a reliever, as Ryan was out after beginning the bottom of the sixth giving up a walk and a hit. Despite giving up five walks and only striking out four, Gooden got a complete-game win, and 30,000 saw the Mets go to 54-21, well on their way toward their World Series title for 1986.

That was already a good day. But it so much better with three of my brothers there, away from 616 and Mount Vernon, hanging out, without an adult to supervise, or rather, abuse us in some way. It was one of the first times I actually felt like a responsible adult. I took the four of us down to the city on Metro-North at the Pelham stop, rode into grimy Grand Central, took the Shuttle train to Times Square, and then the 7 Subway to Shea. Maurice and Yiscoc were so enamored with the trains and the city that it seemed all they did was stare at skyscrapers and out of train windows when we weren’t at the game. Darren, though mostly quiet, at least wasn’t staring off into space plotting some revenge on me for my “5” on the AP US History Exam while doing the Wave.

Shea Stadium, second level, behind visitors dugout, Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY, 2008. (http://www.bloggingmets.com/)

It was so cheap to do what we did that day. The four upper-deck, left-of-home plate tickets we bought cost $4 each, but each hot dog was $3, and the sodas were $2. apiece Given my $3.40-per-hour job with Technisort, though, the $50 excursion wasn’t so cheap that I wasn’t thinking about sneaking a Sabrett hot dog from a street vendor in before we got to the stadium. To be sure, the hot dogs at Shea were better than my usual fare on the street or at Gray’s Papaya.

It was probably the best day I had during my Boy @ The Window years. I was with innocent family members, watching my favorite team and one of my favorite players. I was lost in the humongous human mob of New York on a double-whammy of an Independence Day weekend. I slept well that evening, knowing that I’d drawn a 10 am-2 pm shift that Saturday. I planned on buying a new Walkman at the Cross County Mall that Saturday afternoon. A normal weekend for many sixteen-year-olds was a small eye-wall in the chaotic hurricane that was my life back then.

Mrs. Shannon

25 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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Affection, Crush, Daydreaming, Demographics, Discipline, Expectations, Mrs. Shannon, Nathan Hale Elementary, Neighborhood Schooling, North Side, Puppy Love, South Side, Teaching and Learning, Traphagen Elementary, William H. Holmes Elementary

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, circa 1976, June 25, 2016. (http://www.moviepilot.com).

It’s been nearly four decades since my first teacher crush, maybe really, my only teacher crush. Of course there were a number of teachers I came to adore and love, but not in a child-like, puppy-love way. Ms. Griffin, Ms. Martino, Harold Meltzer, even that tough old bird in Mrs. O’Daniel (R.I.P.) were a few of my favorite teachers before college. (And as a professor, I do make the distinction between teachers and professors, since the former [mostly] work with students more closely, and at a more impressionable age.)

For me it was Mrs. Shannon and third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, the 1977-78 school year. She was my real-life Wonder Woman, with none of the skills but all of the passion of that goofy ’70s show. Beyond that, she really set me on the path to make education my weapon, my equalizer, even though it would be years before I realized the untruth of this ideal for so many.

Third grade was my transition year from Nathan Hale to Holmes. The two elementary schools were at the opposite ends of Mount Vernon, with Nathan Hale on the predominantly Black and more impoverished South Side, and Holmes on the more middle class and Whiter North Side. Though one school veered toward Pelham and the other toward the Bronx, both were similarly composed of mostly Black and some Latino kids. Interestingly, Mostly White Traphagen ES was technically a closer walk than the seven blocks between 616 and Holmes, but the Board of Education cut off the neighborhood zone right at the northern corner of the East Lincoln-Sheridan Avenue intersection.

My pretend version of an introduction to a documents-based question essay for AP World History (in my best-worst handwriting), June 21, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Despite this zoning, I lucked out. Mrs. Shannon was a young Black veteran teacher, probably between twenty-eight and thirty-three years old at the time. She was full of energy and ideas, and kept all of us on our toes. She even made my first grade teacher Ms. Griffin look lethargic by comparison (and Ms. Griffin was a bundle of energy herself!). She gave out tons of homework, drilled us on spelling, grammar, and all but beat my fingers with a ruler to improve my penmanship (my handwriting is still horrific).

In that year of learning about my new school, my new classmates, and my new neighborhood, I learned a lot from Mrs. Shannon. For one, I learned to read about more than Peanuts comic strips in short picture book form that year. I began to see books not as a burden, but as a window to new worlds, to worlds better than the one in which I lived. I learned, too, the power of multimedia. Mrs. Shannon used the latest in technology, the compact short film strip projector, to show us everything from current events to the rise and fall of ancient Mayan civilization. The screams that came from the tape recorder that came with the film strip made the fall of civilizations scary for me.

But really, after a year of unacknowledged abuse, Mom’s divorce from my dad, moving to 616, and a terrible teacher in Ms. Hirsch, I found myself healing a bit in Mrs. Shannon’s class. She actually hugged us, hugged me even, when it looked like we could use one. She was tough, though, too. I daydreamed so hard during one math lesson that I fell out of my desk chair. I ended up standing in the corner for fifteen minutes while balancing my textbook.

I daydreamed a lot in those days. I usually daydreamed about food, usually Hostess Suzy-Qs (back when they were made with lard) or what we’d have for dinner that evening. As the year progressed, a good portion of my daydreaming was about Mrs. Shannon. I was eight, so mostly it would have been about her face, her smile, her smell, maybe a kiss here, or a hug there. (Back then, I even loved the smell of her lunches, which mostly comprised of cans of tuna fish with the occasional crackers.) She would get frustrated with me, too, because I coasted for most of the year with B’s and C+’s. Mrs. Shannon asked me one, “What are you daydreaming about?” There was no way I could say, “Why, you of course!”

Ice Capades 1978 brochure (with Dorothy Hamill near middle right), June 22, 2016. (http://www.retrospace.org).

Still, without Mrs. Shannon, Mom doesn’t go out and spend $300 on the ’78 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. It was the path that led to my cosmic leap of academic development and use of near photographic memory power. With Mrs. Shannon, I saw the world beyond Mount Vernon and 1978. I could see New York beyond subway and Metro-North rides with my drunk father. I went to the Statue of Liberty and to Madison Square Garden for Ice Capades with her. Without Mrs. Shannon, I wouldn’t have recognized that I had within me any intellectual capabilities to develop. Without Mrs. Shannon, the lessons I barely knew I learned — from Roots to multiplication tables — would have disappeared from my memories.

By the end of third grade, I didn’t want to go to fourth grade and Holmes’ second floor, where the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade classrooms were. I felt like I would never see Mrs. Shannon again. On my way out of her classroom, I gave her one last hug, while she reminded me that I could “always do better” academically. I went home that morning, went into the bedroom I shared with my older brother Darren, and walked into our small walk-in closet. Once there, I shut the door, and cried like a little baby for at least a half hour. The good news was, no one was home that Friday. I cried as if I’d never see Mrs. Shannon again, even though I knew I would. That was thirty-eight years ago this week.

My Muhammad Ali

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Impact", Blackness, Bonds, Boxing, Closed-Circuit TV, Death, HBO, Legacy, Life, Maurice Eugene Washington, Meaning, Muhammad Ali, Parkinson's Disease, Robert Farmer, Roots (1977), Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery, The Greatest (1977)

Meme of Muhammad Ali quote on “impossible” combined with iconic photo of Ali in 1st Round of first fight with Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964. (Getty Images via Twitter).

There is so much I could say about Muhammad Ali. His greatness. His contradictions. His imperfections and frailness. And all of them would be true. He was both a great man and a deeply flawed man at the same time. But, from 1964 through 1980, Muhammad Ali was the most recognizable person on the planet, with every aspect of his complicated onion on display in every corner of the world.

I have a few childhood memories of Ali’s headier days and nights. One was in ’74. It was the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Ali and George Forman. My father Jimme took me and my brother Darren over to his drinking buddy Robert Farmer’s house to watch the fight on closed-circuit TV (yep, Mr. Farmer spent good money on this fight). I do remember seeing bits and pieces of the fight, with Ali using the ropes around the ring like they were a trampoline. But mostly, I remember my dad and Farmer and Lo and others drinking and smoking away while watching the fight. October 30, 1974 was also the night that I learned my first colloquialism, the “rope-a-dope.” I know that the “dope” was Foreman, but I’ve seen lots of people as dopes in the four decades since that fight.

The Rumble in the Jungle poster, October 29, 1974. (Armbrust via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution for reproduction.

I remember watching the “Thrilla in Manila” nearly a year later between Ali and Joe Frazier, either at Mr. Farmer’s place or at a bar, I’m not sure. Again, smoke, drinks, beer cans, sunflower seeds and cigars, all in the midst of two fellas knocking the hella outta each other. My father sure knew how to show his two young sons (I was five and Darren was seven at the time) a good time.

These two fights became vague but embedded memories, perhaps two of the greatest bouts of all time. Although, Jack Johnson-James Jeffries, Joe Louis-Max Schmeling I and II, and Ali (née Cassius Clay)-Sonny Lister also come to mind in terms of historical significance.

But where I remember seeing Ali in a context beyond the right was in this movie The Greatest in May 1977. Believe it or not, my soon-to-be idiot stepfather Maurice took us to see this mediocre docudrama of a biopic on Muhammad Ali’s through 1974. (So I guess I was wrong when I said my stepfather had only done two good things for me growing up). At seven, there was no way I could know how bad the film was, between scenery chewers Ernest Borgnine and James Earl Jones. Still, the movie put those hazy memories from ages four and five in better perspective. After having seen Roots a few months earlier, I was really conscious of the wider world, of race, and of Muhammad Ali’s importance for the first time.

Muhammad Ali tweet re: Prince’s death (pic is from their first meeting in 1997), April 22, 2016. (Twitter).

Unlike Natalie Cole, David Bowie, Prince, and going back before 2016, Michael Jackson, I’ve been expecting Ali’s death for quite some time. His Parkinson’s wasn’t just Parkinson’s, but likely brain damage the likes of which NFL players have come to fear. That it took Ali until 1984 to announce what millions had suspected as far back as 1978 told us that he had taken a long time to come to grips with what would become his second act, his new reality. That Ali became a symbol of philanthropy, activism, and humanitarianism during this second act suggests that his strong will and support system deserves way more credit for the quality of his life than anything he did in the ring.

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy” comes from the 1920 mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald. If he were to write Muhammad Ali’s story, it would likely read as a tragedy. Luckily for us, Fitzgerald isn’t around to do so.

We have glossed over a few things in our millions of small eulogies for Ali this weekend. His sexism and occasional misogyny and abuse, both in words and deeds. His obvious colorism, calling Joe Foreman a “gorilla” and most of his somewhat darker skinned opponents “ugly” as a euphemism for their failure to pass the brown-paper-bag test. His rejection of Malcolm X at the very time when Malcolm needed him the most. Ali in the years between his biggest bouts and his mostly silent second life expressed regret about these -ism words and actions.

Despite this, Ali was still a father, a husband, a Muslim, a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, an author, a poet, an actor, an anti-war activist, a civil rights advocate, a social justice leader, a humanitarian, a hostage negotiator, and a Parkinson’s survivor. Ali was a fighter, in the most panoramic sense of the word. And yes, he was a Black man, in the narrowest and most intersectional senses of that two-word phrase. And all of that made him an icon. RIP.

Striking members of Memphis Local 1733 hold signs whose slogan symbolized the sanitation workers’ 1968 campaign, March
1968. (Richard L. Copley/http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/).