Afrocentricity and the Writing Bug

15 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Africana Studies, Afrocentric Education, Afrocentric Idea (1987), Afrocentricity, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Black Action Society, Black Issues in Higher Education, Black Studies, Blackness, Cool, Coolness, Litmus Test, Marc Hopkins, Maulana Karenga, Molefi Asante, Pitt, Temple University, Writing, Writing Bug

A ladybug, often a symbol for the writing “bug,” May 15, 2013. (http://flickr.com). In public domain.

This time two decades ago, I was already a bit desperate for work. In transferring from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon, I’d left myself without any financial coverage for the summer of ’93 (see my post “The Arrogance of Youth, Grad School Style” from June ’12). I had applied for several fellowships, summer teaching gigs, even some nonprofit work. But as of the middle of that May, nothing had come through. I’d already spent $200 on a root canal that occurred on the same day as my written PhD comps at CMU (see my post “Facing the Tooth” from May ’12).

Even before my comps and my surprise root canal, I had talked with my friend Marc about writing a joint article about the false litmus test of Blackness that Afrocentricity had come to represent in our minds. Between Molefi Asante’s students at Temple — not to mention the overtly Afrocentric turn of both the Black Action Society and the Black Studies department (which had changed its name to Africana Studies) in the previous eighteen months — both of us felt we needed to provide an alternate perspective.

On that third Saturday in May (and the day after my comps and root canal surgery), we worked for five hours in putting together what amounted to a 1,200-word opinion piece against the belief system and authenticity test that Afrocentricity (and Afrocentric education) had become. By some folks’ definition, we realized that jazz, Miles Davis and John Coltrane would fail the authentically Black test of a Molefi Asante’s wonderful Afrocentric Idea (1987) and of Maulana Karenga as well.

Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers (1991), [about as authentic as auto-tunes], May 15, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

Now I’m pretty sure why Marc had problems with Afrocentricity. As a Christian and a jazz aficionado, Marc likely saw Afrocentricity as something somewhere between a misguided way of thinking about Blackness and complete and utter bull crap. His goal was to “add to the debate” and “educate” those who weren’t Asante or Karenga apostles and disciples. A laudable — if somewhat naive about the politics of academia and race — goal.

As for me, beyond the academic superficiality of having a litmus test on what is and isn’t Black, I had at least two unconscious reasons for writing my first crossover piece. One had to do with my sense that too many young folks were all too interested in doing the cool thing and not the right thing. Afrocentricity was cool, just like all rap and hip-hop was cool, just like giving libations to ancestors was cool.

Being cool had always meant following a crowd and seldom saying anything that would dig more than a nanometer beyond the surface. Or saying a critical thing about the cool thing that everyone in the same crowd otherwise takes in without a critical thought. I went to a high school full of people like that, and loathed being around people like that when I’d been a part of the Black Action Society at Pitt.

Unconscious reason number two had something to do with my Hebrew-Israelite days. Again, I gave this zero direct thought during my grad school days. But the given the trauma I’d suffered through during my three years of kufi-dom, it had to affect my thinking about Afrocentricity. The Black folk I knew who were part of the Hebrew-Israelite religion were much more obvious about what they did and didn’t consider Black or kosher. Yet, it was so obvious that they constantly contradicted themselves, in terms of food or music, how they treated their wives or children. Most important for me, though, was the fact that they tried to live separate and apart from other Blacks, yet seemed no more different beyond the kufis, veils and kosher meats from other Blacks (or Jews, for that matter).

I saw Afrocentricity as bullshit, and still see the fact that so many folks who get caught up in this sense of authenticity around Blackness as folks falling for bullshit. If I hadn’t lived as a Hebrew-Israelite between the ages of eleven and fifteen, perhaps I wouldn’t see Afrocentricity this way. If I hadn’t been around the “Party All The Time” folks in high school and the “Black Panther Party” posers at Pitt, maybe Afrocentricity would’ve been more appealing to me.

Letters to the Editor, Black Issues in Higher Education, September 9, 1993. (Donald Earl Collins).

But at twenty-three years old, I was already tired of the pursuit of coolness and authenticity. That hasn’t changed in the past two decades. I’m sure the letters that called Marc and I “Uncle Toms” after our piece was published in Black Issues in Higher Education were from folks who thought we weren’t cool, and thought they had the answers to life itself.

I wonder how those folks back then would see the academics who believe that hip-hop can explain everything in the social sciences and humanities who are prominent today. Perhaps some of these people today were the Afrocentric followers of twenty years ago. Perhaps not. All I know is, I haven’t stopped writing since that cloudy day in mid-May.

My Trouble w/ the Lauryn Hill Reaction

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pop Culture, race

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"Ready or Not" (1996), Afrocentricity, Class Privilege, Criminal Justice System, Crying, Die Hard (1988), Federal Government, Hip-Hop, Income Tax Evasion, IRS, Lauryn Hill, Music and Politics, New Jersey, Newark New Jersey, Sentencing, Sobbing, Speaker John Boehner

House Speaker John Boehner sobbing in public (again), May 8, 2013. (http://www.goodbye-blue-monday.com/).

I am by no means a supporter of our slanted US justice system. It’s all too often slanted against the poor, of color and male. But I can’t sit around and watch folks gnash their teeth over the federal court in New Jersey sentencing her to three months in jail for over $1 million in income tax evasion.

Sure, it’s not fair. Perhaps even very unfair. We must keep in mind the simple fact that the IRS, et al. take years attempting to work with the rich (and yes, Lauryn Hill is a rich person) before putting a case together for the federal courts. It’s not as if the feds immediately swooped in, tasered Hill and then dragged her through the streets in chains on the way to court. After all, she didn’t file federal or state income tax returns on $2.3 million in income from ’05 through ’09 — for five years! Heck, if Willie Nelson could figure out a way to stay out of federal courts and prison while paying off $17 million in back taxes, then surely Hill could’ve done the same at some point.

Lauryn Hill in court for one of her sentencing hearings, April 22, 2013. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, given subject matter and public hearing.

Those who’ve compared drug-addled celebs like Lindsey Lohan to Lauryn Hill as a case of Black versus While and the criminal justice system are missing a couple of valuable points. One, Lohan’s cases have never been federal, with mandatory sentences included. Two, and this is way more important, the feds tend to be pretty unforgiving once they do bring a case against a rich person for income tax evasion (e.g., Al Capone, Wesley Snipes, Leona Helmsley).

As much as I like Lauryn Hill’s music, I may feel bad for her, but I’m not going to make a federal case out of her serving three months in a federal prison for tax evasion. She’s not Mumia Abu Jamal, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur or even Tupac Shakur. Maybe Hill should’ve heeded lyrics straight from The Fugees, adapted federal government-style: “Ready or not, here [they] come, you can’t hide (uhhhh-huhhh) /gonna find you, and take it slowly…” As for the “find you” part, I also have to misquote Die Hard (1988) here, courtesy of the character Hans Gruber: “when you steal $600, you can just disappear. When you steal [one] million, they will find you, unless they think you’re already dead.”

I’ll take crap for writing this I’m sure. But Hill will be breathing free air again before Columbus Day, if not sooner.

Boy @ The Window Is Live!

16 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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E-Book, ebook, PDF edition, Publishing

Final Cover

Well, “it is done,” as my former graduate advisor Joe Trotter used to say. Boy @ The Window is now a published book. For now, it’s an e-book, available on Amazon.com through Kindle Books (as Boy @ The Window: A Memoir) and through Smashwords.com (which will then ensure that the book makes its way to iBooks, Apple’s bookstore, as well as Barnes & Noble.com). I also have a free PDF edition of Boy @ The Window (text only) available on this blog site (in the sidebar to the right), at least for the next three months.

I anticipate putting out a trade paperback edition in the next few months, either in July or in the fall. But with more than forty percent of the book market now in the e-book realm, it made far more sense to start with the fastest growing part of the market first. It’s a bit weird not holding a copy of Boy @ The Window in my hands, being able to leaf through the paper pages. It’s been on my iPad, though, for a couple of days, and seeing it there in 100 percent working order has been a pretty good feeling.

For me, at least, incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing yesterday — and so many other tragedies and dastardly events in the seven years and four months since I first began writing my book — are a reminder to live every day like there may not be a next one. After years of work and waiting for the commercial market to say “yes” to Boy @ The Window, I knew I didn’t want to wait forever to put this work of mine out into the world. So, “hello, world!”

“The Dying of Black Women’s Children”

27 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"A Substance of Things Hoped For", "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", Black Migrants, Black Migration, C. Matthew Hawkins, Census Data, Child Mortality, Child Mortality Rates, Correlation, Infant Mortality, Infant Mortality Rates, Joe William Trotter Jr., Julie Saville, Larry Glasco, Laurence Glasco, Lotus 1-2-3, Otis Redding, Pitt Honors Convocation 1994, Public Health Records, Quantitative Analysis, Quantitative Methods, SPSS, University of Chicago, Women Studies Program Award

Infant mortality rates by country (2004), March 27, 2013. (http://www.mchb.hrsa.gov/). In public domain.

That was the title of a research paper I wrote for an independent study course I did with my former Pitt advisor Larry Glasco. It was a paper I wrote during my last semester at the University of Pittsburgh, undergrad and grad school. It was the last paper I would write for any professor at Pitt. But it was a paper that would address a bunch of common themes about me as a historian and scholar knowingly, and a writer unknowingly.

I began this paper without a course and on my own time in the Fall ’92 semester (see my post “December Doctoral Decisions” from last year). I had to fulfill a quantitative methods requirement in order to take my PhD comprehensive examinations at the end of my coursework, which at my pace would’ve meant taking them in the fall of ’93 at Pitt. Why they never included a qualitative methods requirement, I’ll never know. Of course, this digital humanities movement of quantifying the heretofore unquantifiable was but an embryo in the early ’90s.

With my language requirement taken care of the year before, I had no choice but to build on my existing statistical knowledge. Luckily, I’d inadvertently minored in mathematics and had been a computer science major before switching to history. I’d already decided on the topic of comparing infant/child mortality rates among White and Black Pittsburghers between 1900 and 1920, coinciding with the Great Migration period for Blacks. This meant census data from 1900, 1910 and 1920. This meant public health records from the same twenty-year stretch. It meant looking at neighborhoods like the Lower Hill District and Bloomfield, the occupations of the men and (in the case of Blacks) women living in these communities.

And it meant that I had to learn how to use SPSS, the most powerful number-crunching statistical software package on the planet. At least as far as I was concerned. It took me from September ’92 until the end of January ’93 to get comfortable enough with SPSS to plot and correlate different points of data. By then, I could generate reports and make sense of them. I knew that race, poverty/neighborhood and occupation (in that order) correlated best to the 2.5 to 1 ratio between infant/child mortality (death between child birth and the age of five) rates for Black families versus White families.

I used Lotus 1-2-3 to construct the tables, charts and graphs for my statistical correlations and data. Why Lotus 1-2-3? Their charts and graphs looked like “arts and crafts,” to steal a phrase from David Letterman. SPSS’s visuals were boring. Between the numbers crunching, the translation of correlation data into Lotus, and the actual writing of this paper, I completed my work for this independent study and quantitative methods requirement at the end of February ’93.

By then, I had two issues. One, I didn’t know what to title my paper. Most of my titles were inspired by cultural references from music, sports, TV shows, catch commercial jingles. I’d titled one paper “‘Sittin’ On The Dock of The Bay’,” an homage to Otis Redding and in reference to the topic of Black migrants finding permanent economic degradation after leaving the Jim Crow South for places like New York, Chicago and L.A. Another one, which I’d presented at several conferences, was “‘The Evidence of Things Not Seen’,” a prelude to my “‘A Substance of Things Hoped For'” dissertation (thanks to Hebrews 11:1 and James Baldwin).

Pitt Honors Convocation program, (March 1, 1994), March 27, 2013. [Ironic, given that I received this honor when I was at CMU]. (Donald Earl Collins).

I solved this title problem while simultaneously dealing with the second issue, which was that I knew I was about to transfer to Carnegie Mellon to complete the doctorate. Joe Trotter had invited me to attend the job talks of a young professor who had recently earned tenure at the University of Chicago, I believe. I remember her being fairly attractive and found her work interesting, if not fascinating. While we walked up and down the factory floor, um, second-floor corridors of Baker Hall, I walked by a flyer for an upcoming talk on “The Dying of Young Women’s Children.” I decided that this would be the scaffolding for my paper’s title, right then and there. Only, I’d change “Young” to “Black” and give a footnote of credit to the flyer title.

I submitted my paper to Larry for my independent study, which I was now taking purely as pass/fail (or satisfactory/unsatisfactory), and not for a specific grade. After Larry learned of my departure, he never gave me feedback on the paper. As the end of the semester approached — and I became short on cash — I submitted the paper to the Women’s Studies Program’s Student Research (undergraduate and graduate) contest.

Pitt’s Women’s Studies Program Annual Prize for Student Research on Women and Gender, June 1993, March 27, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Two months later, in June ’93, I learned that I’d finished second in the graduate student category, and earned a check for $75, a week’s worth of groceries! My friend Matt, upon learning of my good fortune, said, “You won that prize because of that title,” adding that I “stole it” from a flyer.

Matt was right, of course. But I also learned something important through “The Dying of Black Women’s Children.” That all writers borrow from others’ words and ideas, and then make them their own.

Toto’s “Africa” & “Reading” Too Much Into It

02 Saturday Mar 2013

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

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"Africa" (1982), "The Catch", A.B. Davis Middle School, Africa, C-Town, Dwight Clark, Fever, Football, Herschel Walker, Humanities, Imagination, Joe Montana, NFL, Pelham, Puberty, Racialism, Reading, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Tarzan, The Jungle (1906), Toto, Toto IV, Upton Sinclair, USFL, Whiteness, Writing

Toto’s “Africa” (1982) Singles Sleeve, March 1, 2013. (http://eil.com).

There are as many reasons my musical tastes are eclectic as there are songs that I like and love. I can’t explain it. There’s no way I can explain why I think one song sounds as unimaginative and boring as Drake’s “Started From The Bottom,” while Nickleback’s “If Today Was Your Last Day” has been one of my favorite songs over the past three and a half years.

My imagination could take the corniest song and make it epic, a mantra, my theme music. Even a song like Toto’s “Africa” (’82-’83), a song that could be interpreted as reflecting White racialism as it related to Tarzan movies of a not-so-bygone era. Yet I’ve seen their video, and probably heard the song at least 3,000 times. It ain’t that deep, but it’s still a song I like.

So, a bit of context. My grades in the early Reagan years — especially in ’82-’83, when I was in eighth grade — didn’t at all reflect our family’s slide into welfare poverty, my ongoing issues with my idiot stepfather, my suicidal struggles or my search for a real relationship with God. What I had to lean on, more than my amazing memory or World Book Encyclopedia, my parents or even God, was my imagination.

The Spark of Imagination (via x-ray), March 1, 2013. (http://esquire.com).

With puberty and what would turn into a ten-inch growth spurt in a span of twenty months, I became enamored with sports. And the sport I became most interested in early on was football. The strike-shortened ’82 NFL season combined with the formation of the USFL and the coming-out party for soon-to-be draft pick Herschel Walker to get my attention. The vicious hits, the acrobatic catches, the powerful throws were things that I’d seen before. I saw them through the lens of an underdog now, a downtrodden member of an abandoned family who wanted to see folks who’d overcome impossible circumstances achieve great things.

The first person who represented that for me in sports was Joe Montana, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. The only ending to a football game I’d ever watched was the end of the NFC Championship Game the year before, with the play known as “The Catch.” I didn’t even know who Joe Montana was, even after watching Dwight Clark go up and catch a ball that was only meant for him.

He was the kind of person I wanted and needed to be in order to overcome what I thought was an impossible deficit. As far as I was concerned, I had to score about a hundred touchdowns to go from welfare to college, let alone anything after college. Yet it didn’t stop me from dreaming about rolling out right to the sidelines on fourth down, sucking in Dallas’ defense, and throwing a ball toward the right-side of end zone, toward the back line, just high enough for Clark to catch and Emerson Walls not to.

It was a dream that required some theme music, and luckily for me it was ’83. Michael Jackson’s Thriller had come out at the start of eighth grade, The Police were big, Toto and Rick Springfield were at their peak, and New Edition had put out there first hit, a Jackson 5 remake. All of it gave me something more modern to move forward with, to get silly about, to “march down field” to when I needed to gear up to get an important A. I’d accidentally found a way to escape my life without ever leaving Mount Vernon.

The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair, 1st Edition, March 31, 2011. (GrahamHardy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Demontravel’s and Carraccio’s classes were the first two places in which I applied this approach to my life and studies. In Carraccio’s case, it was the reading and essay assignment for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) a muckraking tale of first-generation, Eastern European, Chicago meatpackers who worked and lived in grueling conditions and where some of them gave their lives — and livers — to Swift and other companies. I’d caught a cold, had a fever, was going to the store for Mom, and had just heard Toto’s “Africa” playing at C-Town in nearby Pelham.

The song served as my background music, giving me the energy and drive I needed to finish the book. I read The Jungle in one night, three hundred pages of it in four hours. I think Carraccio gave me a 95 on my essay. She pulled me aside to say, “You know, if you wanted, you could be a really good writer.” It might’ve been the only thing she said that I thought was right on the mark all year.

Yeah, you could say that I was seriously music deprived, didn’t understand the cultural symbolism or archetypes in the song or video, or simply had and have bad tastes. Y’all may be right, too. But for me, Toto’s “Africa” struck the right note, lifted my imagination, and found the goofball within.

Fear of Flying Solo (Not Literally)

19 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"Sign 'O' the Times (1987), Blackness, Busch Beer, Continental Airlines, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Depression, First Flight, Homesickness, Infatuation, Loneliness, Love, Lust, Manhood, Obsession, Prince, Self-Discovery, Theft, University of Pittsburgh

Continental Airlines B737-200 (similar to one I flew on in November ’87, logo included), Providence, RI, 1990, January 2, 2009. (Phillip Capper via Wikipedia). Releases to public domain via cc-Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

This week twenty-five years ago, the pressures of college, “homesickness” and Crush #2 had screwed up the inner movie and music soundtrack (think Enigma’s “I Love You, I’ll Kill You” [1993]) that had been my coping mechanism for the previous half decade. I was in the midst of a psychological breakthrough, but it felt more like a combination of depression and a nervous breakdown at the time. Such were my times as an emotionally tortured seventeen-year-old who should’ve left Mount Vernon a full year earlier (see my post “A One-Year Sooner ‘What If’” from June ’11).

The downward spiral of my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh started with a burglary the third week in October ’87. While I took a bathroom break at my computer lab job in the Cathedral of Learning, someone stole my Calculus textbook. I felt violated, especially since it happened at work. It made me more distrustful of the people I worked with and of Pitt students in general. Of course, I didn’t really even trust myself at the time, and the loss of my textbook didn’t make it any easier. I was out of money to boot, which meant that I wouldn’t be able to replace this loss.

Excerpts of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times (1987) liner notes, November 19, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution illustration of text-like writing style for this post.

Crush #2’s response to my letter about her emasculating comments back in the summer made matters worse (see my posts “Origins of the Obsession” from June ’12 and “A Dream That Had to Die” from July ’07). Her letter, dated November 2, was in purple ink, with heart-shapes and circles for dots over “i”s. Reading her letter was like reading the liner notes off of a Prince album in those days. Like the song “I Would Die 4 U,” Crush # 2 had decided to limit her English skills to the ’80s equivalent of text messaging, a real revolution on both their parts. She started, “Thank U 4 your card 2day,” an insult to my intelligence. She wrote indirectly that she did like me at one point in time, but added “but we’re in college now . . . around lots of nu people” She admitted that I was her and her sister’s topic of conversation back in July, but “I needed 2 get over that.” She hinted that I shouldn’t write her again, and that was it. No apologies, no attempt to understand how I felt.

16-ounce “Pounder” can of Busch Beer, November 19, 2012. (http://price2watch.com)

After Crush #2’s wonderful, text-message-like response, I all but stopped going to class. I missed eighteen of twenty-four classes at one stretch between November 3 and Thanksgiving, only showing up for exams or if my black-cloud mood had let up long enough to allow me to function. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I allowed my dorm mates to cheer me up by getting a couple of cases of Busch Beer. These were the pounder type, sixteen-ounce cans of Busch beer. I downed four cans in fifteen minutes, and was drunk within a half hour. I started throwing around the word “bitch” as if it was part of a drinking game. I spent the next day vomiting and trying to regain my balance.

I barely recovered from my bender in time to go home for Thanksgiving that Monday, November 23. I still managed a few firsts, though. That trip back home was my first ever on an airplane. I took a Continental flight from the old and decrepit blue hangar that was Pittsburgh Airport into Newark, with the late Craig “Ironhead” Hayward on the flight sitting in first-class. He was a senior and the starting running back for the Pitt Panthers. Besides being a great player, he was a bit of a party animal and had gotten into fights with Pitt Police. I remember the student newspaper having him in their police blotter, allegedly body-slamming a patron at the O while being arrested for a being a disorderly drunk.

It was the first series of events in which I couldn’t use music, sports or my imagination to escape (see my post “Coping In The Boy @ The Window World” from October ’12). I hadn’t realized that I was attempting to escape myself, not just my immediate past or Mount Vernon. I spent those last weeks of ’87 as if draped in a fog, unable to face the world. I fully understood, though, that I couldn’t drink my way out of my problems. I was obsessed with a woman whom felt sorry for me, had friends at Pitt who weren’t really my friends, and was homesick for 616, a place that was never really mine to call home in the first place.

Male duck swimming solo, Chicago River, Chicago, IL, June 16, 2002. (Donald Earl Collins)

Most of all, after five years of hiding my emotions and opinions, I no longer knew how to be me. Luckily, thinking about Crush #2 as a “triflin’ ass” was, for better and worse, a good start toward recovery for me. And, for that moment in my life, I needed that anger to be a better student, to be a better me. Because as far as I was concerned, I was out in Pittsburgh, alone, facing down my past and present all at once.

Post-Mortem Post

12 Monday Nov 2012

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Child Abuse, Death, Declining Health, Domestic Violence, Eulogy, Ex-stepfather, Fatherhood, Forgiveness, Judah ben Israel, Kidney Failure, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Mourning, The Wizard of Oz (1939), Type 2 Diabetes

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt, November 12, 2012. In public domain.

My idiot ex-stepfather died over the weekend, sometime Saturday evening, November 10. He was three months past his sixty-second birthday. I learned of his death early Sunday morning, as two of my younger siblings (technically half-brothers, I suppose) had posted on Facebook their grief over their father’s death overnight. As I read their posts, I realized that I myself felt no particular emotion over the final physical demise of Maurice Eugene Washington.

For the longest time while I was in my teens and early twenties, the song “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz (1939) would come to mind when I thought about how I’d feel if the man collapsed from his own obesity and died. As far as I was concerned, my ex-stepfather could die a horrible death every day for eternity, and it still wouldn’t have been enough. A steamroller crushing him one day, a stabbing the next, getting smashed into by a semi-tractor trailer doing eighty miles an hour the day after that. Thoughts like that in the ’80s and early ’90s were a regular part of my mindset on Maurice Washington, not to mention a part of my dreams once every six weeks.

But, as I learned to forgive him — for my sake, certainly not for his — I found myself still frequently angry, but also feeling sorry for such a lost person. Whether in exacting abuse on me or my mother, eating himself into kidney failure and Type 2 diabetes, having affairs and producing kids out of those affairs, or in his bouncing back and forth between a Christian and a Hebrew-Israelite life, he was in search of love and stability. None of which, though, he could find from within. A life with only kids from at least three women and damaged lives to show for it. Not to mention a two-decades-long physical decline, in which the man lost both of his legs.

The Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz (1939), November 12, 2012. (http://time.com).

They say living your life to the fullest is the best revenge for survivors of abuse like myself. I suppose that’s true. But what they don’t say is that eight years’ of living in fear for yourself and your family leaves scars, physical, emotional, psychological, even spiritual. I’ve spent nearly a quarter-century recovering from those years, making sure to make myself a better person, and hoping that I don’t pass my scars on to my nine-year-old son in the process.

Two of my more popular posts over the past year have been “Ex-Stepfather’s Balance Sheet” (August ’10) and “Whipped and Beaten” (July ’12). I don’t think that this is random. There are millions of us who’ve grown up with physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and most of us have no one to talk to about these hellish experiences. And nearly as often as not, there are folks who will say, “It wasn’t really that bad, right?” Or, in the case of the very first comment I received on my blog back in July ’07, “you should be grateful, he was just trying to make you a man. Obviously he didn’t do enough.”

So, though I’m not gleeful that Maurice Washington is dead, I’m not exactly in mourning either. I had to kill him as an abuser in my heart and mind a long time ago in order to move on. I feel for my younger siblings, but they didn’t really know their father either. I did, mostly for the worse. May he — and a part of me — now rest in peace.