Category Archives: My Father

On Ducats, Duckets, and “Cash Money”

13 Friday May 2022

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,


Netherlands 1 Ducat (1818 Willem I Trade Coin), accessed May 13, 2022. (https://www.foreigncurrencyandcoin.com/)

For a while at least, my parental guardians actually saw me as some sort of rainmaker. It was around the spring of 1985 when my idiot stepfather started calling me “Duckets.” Especially when it came to anything he said that wasn’t about ordering me to do things, I ignored him. I assumed “Duckets” (or really, “Ducketts” as I spelled it out in my head) was just him making fun of me, like every other kid did in those days. The ones so corny and wack in their coolness, calling me “Donald Duck” or “Ronald McDonald” upon learning my name. 

One Sunday that May, after somehow wrangling $120 out of my dad despite him being on a spring-long drinking binge, Maurice called me “Duckets” again. I had just come home from breaking off some of my Jimme money to wash clothes at the local laundromat for the eight of us and going to C-Town for food when he called me this. And he saw my face, the look I had. I was tired, pissed at doing work for his lazy ass and for my younger siblings and for my mom, and insulted at his joke. 

Then, the abusive asshole did something he rarely did. He actually explained himself. 

“Duckets is a compliment,” he said. “They’re Dutch coins made of pure gold. That’s who you are. You make Duckets come out of nowhere.”

I was gobsmacked. Really, you think I’m making money come to me by having to drag my dad out of bars every other weekend? Spending half of the money I get by helping to take care of your stinkin’ ass and my mom and your kids? Seriously? That’s approximately what I would have thought in that moment (now, a few f-bombs would have dropped, too). But I also thought exactly this: What’s he up to? Is he trying to get on my good side now?

Yes, Maurice was. But life is full of both-hands, and even evil abusers can be complimentary and right about aspects of people they otherwise refuse to get to know well. I was bringing in income when I technically wasn’t drawing a paycheck, and had in fact been doing so for nearly two and a half years by then. Even my older brother Darren was dependent on me to either get my dad to give him money or to find work to get us both paid. 

I had to. I couldn’t just take $50, $60, $100, or $200 from my dad, go back home to 616, and sit there eating Wise Cheez Doodles or preemo chocolate donuts from Clover Donuts or those bomb brownies from the eatery in Wakefield. All while Sarai, my two-year-old sister with sickle cell anemia, couldn’t have an occasional bottle because my mom didn’t have enough WIC to buy formula for two (my brother Eri was barely one in May 1985). All while even with food stamps and the elder Maurice gone about half the time, we still could go anywhere between three and 10 days without food in the house every single month. If we had had a well-muscled dog like my dog Jacobi back then, believe me, that dog would have become a roasted dinner or a stew back then. And our 616 neighbors would never have asked about it afterward.

Jacobi in a dead-dog’s rug pose, February 13, 2022. (Donald Earl Collins).

Maurice continued his “Duckets” campaign with me until he and my mom finally separated in June 1989. Since he was the only person to call me this weird nickname, I didn’t do much to research it. I still hated the man. If Skull Island’s King Kong had reached down his mouth and pulled on Maurice’s tongue hard enough to rip out all his innards, I would’ve laughed and cried happy tears. A suffering death still wouldn’t have been enough for me (even now, a part of me still lingers a few seconds too long on this thought — this is why a commitment to forgiveness is a daily chore!). 

It was pretty easy to bring in “cash money” back in the day, though, even once I started working in jobs not dependent on my dad’s cashflow or his connections to backbreaking work. When no one has work, I’m going to look like a rainmaker by comparison, making $3.40, then $3.65, then $4.15, then $5.50, then $5.90, then $7.70 an hour in the years between 1986 and 1990. I was averaging $6,000 a year in part-time or summer full-time income, and between 20 and 30 percent of it was going to 616. 

Whether Ducats, Dukets, or Duckets, or the Guilder or the Florin, gold coins are all signs of wealth, of colonial, imperialist national pride in such wealth, of good fortune and truly good luck. At least to those who have such coinage. But I am no Scrooge McDuck, and I’m certainly not made of money. My times of unemployment in 1988 and with homelessness too, of even a few weeks of unemployment in 1993 and 1997, and underemployment from 1997 to 1999 and from the end of 2008 off and on through 2011 are proof of this.

If taken symbolically, then the Ducat is a symbol of goldenness, of one’s ability to shine and grow and prosper, even if that isn’t mere financial growth. We have managed even when my income dropped like a rock because of the economy and the feast and famine nature of consulting work. I have continued to find ways to generate income, finding some doors ajar even as folks have slammed others in my face. (I do have a tendency to make difficult, even seemingly impossible things happen in my life, but that tends to happen in a virulently racist and classist country like the US.) My nemeses and enemies still attempt to steal from me and my work, even as they refuse to credit me for the creative I am. (It’s a weird-ass compliment, though, when people plagiarize me. Wow, you are that unoriginal and lack that much imagination!, at least that’s what I think about these assholes).

But don’t get it twisted, and do not call my Duckets or Ducats or Duck or Donald Duck or Ronald McDonald. I will block you on social media and drop you faster than I can drop a 450ºF panhandle. I can actually make it rain sometimes. It takes years to make this happen, through patience, prayer, perseverance, and understanding the nature of living life in deserts.

Signs of Elitism

17 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,


Front cover, Joel Stein’s In Defense of Elitism (2019, cropped), January 16, 2022. (https://amazon.com).

I have spent four-fifths of my life in elite spaces among affluent whites, middle class Blacks, and Americans elites in general. I have so little in common with them aside from eating, drinking, breathing, and having a sex drive. So little that I sometimes think that God made a mistake and missed my exact time and place for my existence by 20 or 30 years, meaning 1949 or 1994 would have been better years for my birth. 

But it’s not when I was born so much as the lack of material resources with which I lived growing up in the most resourced area in the US. And that has brought consequences for me since the year I began puberty. The years in Humanities in middle school and in high school in Mount Vernon, New York. Hearing about everyone’s summers those first days of school between seventh and 12th grade, for example. Black and Black Caribbean classmates regaling us with their summers spent down South, in Jamaica or Barbados or  Trinidad and Tobago visiting close relatives. Or, their trips around the US, from the Grand Canyon to cities I wouldn’t travel to until I was 24 or 35. Or my white peers spending their Junes, Julys, and Augusts in France, the UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, or Israel. I lied about going to Tel Aviv my first year.

I rarely left Mount Vernon and New York City those years. Albany was the furthest I’d been away from home, on a school trip in October 1985. My walks occasionally took me across the New York-Connecticut border (in 1986 and in 1987), but that was somewhat accidental.

In grad school, especially once I transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my PhD, these awkward communications involving my lack of socioeconomic privilege and my white classmates’ rose-colored worldviews continued. In my final semester of grad courses in Spring 1994, I took Comparative Urban History with Katherine Lynch. One week, we were in a discussion of Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, about the correlation between suburbanization and the expansion of the white middle class. Jennifer, one of my classmates, contributed her not-so-insightful analysis of what this correlation meant, about how “most Americans benefited” from the growth of suburbs between 1945 and 1980. 

I was not happy with her elitist worldview. I already knew that she was 23 or 24, married, and from suburban Philly (think a place like Cherry Hill, New Jersey). I also knew that Jackson’s point correlated well with White Flight from increasingly Black and Brown cities like Philly, New York, Boston, DC, Detroit, and Chicago. Being in my third year of grad school overall and surrounded in this course by first-years, I had one advantage. I was almost as well read on topics of inequality as most of my professors. 

So I said to Jennifer and the rest of the class, “Well, if by ‘most Americans benefited,’ you mean white Americans, then yes, suburbanization was a good thing. But cities’ tax bases didn’t benefit, and neither did the African Americans who moved into cities that whites flew out of. Redlining and restrictive covenants made it harder for middle-class Blacks to ‘benefit’ from suburbanization. And last I checked, poor people live in suburbs, too.” That last past was a direct reference to my growing up with poverty in Mount Vernon, and the scores of poor Black and Latinx and Black Caribbean folk I knew in Mount Vernon and throughout the New York area, suburban and urban. 

During the class break, Jennifer came up to me as I was standing outside the seminar talking with my other white classmates congratulating me for my eye-opening perspective on how to break down Jackson’s book. She brought all five-foot-three of her frame to bear, almost as if she had attempted to stand on a soap box (even with one, at six-three, I would’ve had to bend down to see her ire). She had tears in her eyes and one running down each cheek. “I can’t help how I grew up. I am not a racist,” she said, and then walked away in a huff. “I guess I struck a nerve,” I said in response to one of my other peers.

I really didn’t give a rat’s ass about her crying. None of it was going to make the lives of Blacks and Latinx people with poverty in Camden or Philly or even Cherry Hill any better. White women’s tears and crying foul when challenged for their elitism had already hardened me against placating them. My experiences matter, damn it!, was what I thought after that exchange.

Even outside academia, the elitism wafted like millions of gallons of human shit at a sewage treatment plant. Between Presidential Classroom and AED, I spent much of my nonprofit years (meaning, a good portion of my thirties) proving to others that despite my background, I could do work on behalf of others. My bosses held it against me that my parents weren’t GS-12 or higher federal employees, or diplomats, or advisors, or members of country clubs. Or, especially in AED’s case, that neither I nor my parents ever served in the Peace Corps or traveled overseas. I practically had to do somersaults and cartwheels to do my work between 1999 and 2008, but could not maintain social connections, because my doctorate from Carnegie Mellon would never be good enough.

Maybe I’ll discuss Black middle class folk and their rites of privilege and passage, especially fraternities and other organizations. But I’ve already written quite extensively about why I’ll never fit it with such groups. And at 52, I’m not entirely sure I want to. I guess after a lifetime of my peers ignoring me or erasing me or acting as if only their socioeconomic and racial privileges matter in explaining how the world works, I simply don’t care anymore.

My mom grew up as part of a sharecropping family in southwestern, Red River Arkansas. She’s the oldest of 12 children. She worked mostly in the kitchen of Mount Vernon Hospital or in the billing department of Westchester County Medical Center in Valhalla as a paraprofessional for 34 years, with a 16-year period on welfare in between. My dad worked as a janitor or a supervisor of janitors and building cleaners all his time in New York and in Jacksonville. He grew up as a tenant farmer (before his family bought out their land) in rural south-central Georgia. He barely finished seventh grade. His two sisters were the first in the family to go to college, and both spent years teaching during segregated times. Despite it all, I am proud of their work. No pedigree is fine with me.

The Sacrifice of the Lambdas

28 Wednesday Jul 2021

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Cleaning, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,


Lambs from living to skewered (cropped and collaged), July 27, 2021. (Donald Earl Collins, via https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/greek-lamb-souvlaki-recipe-skewers-with-pita-bread/ and © Alison Toon/Adobe stock)

Most people I’ve met and known over the past 30 years have no clue as to what it is to teach high school, college, master’s and doctoral students. None. They think we who are serious educators just wing it and lecture to death, with no preparation at all. They have no inkling of what it takes to research topics, write articles for different audiences, to work on a book-length manuscript, or to publish one. Nor do they understand the job market — any job market, not just in higher education — or the psychological and emotional burden of holding students’ trust, or the constancy of systemic elitism, racism, sexism, in these elite white and elite Black spaces. 

I know my mom and dad never have. “You might as well have another high school diploma,” my mom said of my 10-year pursuit of my bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD, on the week of my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon University. It was the day after she had finished her associate’s, a ten-year trek on her part.

My dad during one drunken stupor accused me of lying about having earned my master’s in barely two semesters. “Anybody coulda gone somewhere and made up a fake one,” he said in 1992 during my summer visit to New York, when I showed him my actual degree from the University of Pittsburgh. A few weeks later, after talking with his two white bosses, the Levi brothers, my now hungover dad admitted, “they say you can get a master’s in a year.” I said in response, “Really? I had no idea!”

But that’s only the beginning of the sacrifices people like me with advanced degrees and training make in earning these degrees and pursuing careers related to them. I know people whose first jobs were in weird and not-quite-ideal places. University of Maine at Machias. Austin College in North Texas. North Dakota State University. Washington State University. University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Sam Houston State University. University of Mary Washington. Northern Illinois. Illinois State.

Now, before anyone says, “Why, these seem like good places to work,” my response is, “Sure, if you are white!” Yes, I said it. If you are Black, Brown, Indigenous, man, woman, or transgender, most of these are between weird and horrible places to work. The communities around many of these campuses could be or would have once been sundown towns. Or, one could be a place where they tried to lynch someone like me 10 or 20 years earlier. The only people on many of these campuses who know your needs for culture and community play Division I sports or are the other three or four colleagues who aren’t white. To go through two, even three jobs to land at a place that provides one a tenure-line or tenured position — this is a massive sacrifice.

It means living a sort-of half-life, of only focusing on your professional development, or of partners putting their lives on hold so that you can build your career. And all while dealing with an everyday deluge of direct racism, isolation, marginalization, and erasure on the job. If one is lucky, you find community off campus in some of these places. In more white-bred (or more accurately, white-corn-fed) communities, that deluge can turn into a tsunami, and might force you to stay at home and away from these racist and misogynistic and homophobic Children-of-the-Corn-types as much as humanly possible.

There are those like me who never fully believed in making these kinds of sacrifices in order to publish a scholarly article or book, just so that we could get the plum job at a major university. But that choice means sacrifices, too. Like leaving your research and writing behind for a steadier and better-paying gig. But, at least in my case, I couldn’t ask my partner to drop her own aspirations while I took a job in the middle of Nowheresville (Colgate University, Slippery Rock, and Northern Illinois all come to mind here). 

So my first post-PhD job search between 1997 and December 2000 was an urban, mostly East Coast one. I turned down as many job interviews as I took on. I ended up in the nonprofit world in the DC area, though, and the abject racism I faced there was still not as bad as the elitism I dealt with during a job interview I had at Howard University. I said no to the only tenure-track job I was ever offered, with few regrets. But it still meant that I would lack the job stability necessary to build my writing career and to keep a steady paycheck. Not all sacrifices turn out the way any of us expect. 

My parents and other people born before 1955 have had the tendency to say to me in one version or another, “See, that’s why all that book learnin’ aint all that good for you. Better to do work with your hands. That’s how you become a man.” It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d become an award-winning author and full professor, or a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation. As far as they have always been concerned, I was sacrificing my mind to “useless facts.” If I had become divorced or homeless because of my path, on the other hand, they would’ve said, “I told you so.”

For the rest of folks in my life, mine is a “lazy” life, where my liberal butt “gets paid a lot of money to sit around and indoctrinate students.” All built on the fact that I and other faculty only teach for a few hours a week, instead of working from 8:30 to 5 like real Americans. They have no idea that I’ve given up ten years worth of weekends and holidays to prepare for my classes, review papers, grade assignments, to write a piece, to work on a manuscript or a new project, just in the past 13 years alone. Or, to meet with students struggling in the classroom or in life in general. The emotional toll of learning about some student or colleague’s trauma or abuse is incalculable. But, yeah, I’m “lazy” when I take a nap in the middle of the day, because it’s the only way I can get to seven hours of sleep in a 24-hour period five days out of seven.

They have never experienced what it is like to have the same qualifications and make some of the same sacrifices as my more successful colleagues, and not get a specific job or a particular grant. Just recently, I learned that I will not get interviewed for a term faculty position in my department at American University. The job is the same job as the one I have worked at AU for the past three years, but as contingent faculty. Patting me on my head to tell me that I’ve made “valuable contributions to the university,” to students, and to the department does not make up for my sacrifices as a writer, as an educator, and as a historian.

And I still have it much easier than my less lucky colleagues, who may be working at three or even five universities to generate a full-time-equivalent income. Or those who have had nervous breakdowns from the brutal conditions of working for abusive institutions within the nested doll of this matrix of elitism, racism, misogynoir, and other -isms and -phobias that is the United States. Or those who are burned out husks of the educators and writers they used to be. Or still, others who’ve died because of their sacrifice. 

Not all sacrifices are worth it. Then again, assuming my mind and spirit remain intact, I might be able to drill NBA-range 3s and run faster than most of my students until my 75th birthday.

The Things I’d Like to Give for the Holidays, But Can’t

27 Sunday Dec 2020

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


My copies of Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House (2019) and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), December 26, 2020. (Donald Earl Collins).

The holiday season is a time for giving unto others (apparently unlike the other 11 to eleven-and-a-half months out of the year, when it is your right under capitalism to give to yourself every single day). Except when your own life has shown time and time again that gift-giving without resources is hard. It has meant going years without receiving a gift, without your parents or guardian even buying any of us a card. It is doubly difficult when your birthday is in the middle of the holiday season, two days after Christmas, the second day of Kwanzaa, and at least one year where lunar calendar for Chanukah and my born date aligned.

But, as an adult, I made the most of trying to give to family and sometimes friends. I started buying my mother birthday and Christmas cards when I was 14. I began to buy my siblings cards and presents in 1989, just as I was turning 20. Over the years, I have bought video game systems and clothes, replaced TVs, given money, special-ordered flowers, taken my younger siblings to movies, Toys “R” Us, and other comical holiday ventures for a young man without a car.

Starting in the late 1990s, I began to switch to books as gifts. I figured that to really help my family and to get through to my sibs, books were key. They had been for me, and I assumed that it would be the same for them. I was so wrong! If the books got read by them at all, they generally didn’t say, or they said that they didn’t like them. When I finally got around to buying books for my Mom, she’d say, “What I need this for? I know all about racism already. I done lived it.” I guess my thirty-something years, and not my expertise on the topic, should have been sufficient for me, too.

As with all issues related to my Mount Vernon family, this giving issue became tortuous. It is hard buying gifts for people who only talk to you when they have to or when they want something from me. As adults, I have gotten to know very few of their likes, dislikes, and habits and wants and needs. Also, I found myself in the boom-and-bust cycles of teaching and consulting during the Great Recession years (especially between 2010 and 2015). So, I either sent holiday cards with gift cards or just cards.

But then it dawned on me right about my 45th birthday that none of my younger sibs had ever sent me anything. Yes, I know that gifting need not be transactional or reciprocal. Still, I had struggled every year to remember birthdays, special occasions, and Christmases to send them something from the heart. They never saw me as someone to give unto, as if my degrees and relative career stability made me not need and not want, materially, emotionally, or otherwise.

So in 2015, I stopped with the giving. Except for my older brother Darren and my Mom. And even then I mostly send cards and the occasional gift card. The latter gets reactions like, “What I’m gonna do with this?” It was my Mom’s gut punch to the cliché, “it’s the thought that counts.”

One thing I’d like to do again with family in New York is to send books that I’d think they’d enjoy, books that I found entertaining and educational, books that set my mind and spirit in order. Especially in this year of pandemic-driven isolation and putting my and my family’s safety over travel, my recent excursion to Pittsburgh to help make funeral arrangements for my mother-in-law excepted.

The last two books I have completed in recent weeks stand out because of the things I observed and experienced growing up and growing into grown-ass adulthood, between Mount Vernon, New York, Pittsburgh, and my first three years in DC and Silver Spring, Maryland. The two books happen to be Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Both books are by Black women who grew up in the Deep South but sojourned their way to cold Northern cities like New York and Pittsburgh, just like my Mom. And with those physical and spiritual journeys, family and the connections with family were big themes for them both. Or, really, the fault lines and the disconnection that can and does happen over time. Being unmoored, an outsider to one’s own family, Broom and Philyaw cover so well in their books.

Yes, I know that Broom’s National Book Award winner is both genealogy and memoir at the same time, carefully not revealing certain things about herself until her Acknowledgments. Yes, I know Philyaw’s NBA finalist is a collection of short stories connected by the theme of The Church and hypocrisy, fictionalized but with elements of the author’s life that she unveils anyway. The two books are quite different in their approaches to history and family, but they both address history and family anyway.

And it is how they handle family and family secrets that propelled me through both books. Broom is extremely circumspect about what and whom she does put in The Yellow House, explaining why and her conflict about doing so throughout (she makes me look like a gossip by comparison in Boy @ The Window). “Why do I sometimes feel that I do not have the right to the story of the city I come from? Why, when I want to get down to it, just say the damned thing, do the thoughts pool and ring out in a loop in my head a childish chorus of ‘Oh, oh, oh, don’t tell on your place.’ Telling on. Like giving it all away. Giving what away?,” Broom writes on page 329.

I completely understand, between the Mount Vernonites who have declared my growing-up experiences invalid because I was “weird” and family members who have all but stopped talking to me because I unearthed something they didn’t like about themselves. That, and Broom’s use of “The Water” to demarcate the East New Orleans of her, her family’s, and her ancestors’ lives and the East New Orleans after Katrina in 2005. It was the fire of 1995 that was the break between the chaos of 616 and the life of uncomfortable distance between me and family for me. Broom being unmoored caused her to eventually seek deeper bonds. I tried too many times to count, and failed. But then again, family ain’t just blood, and it’s way deeper than the roots of any marriage.

Philyaw’s collection conjured memories of my Black evangelical Christianity years (and so did Broom’s chapters about her feeling the spirit, speaking in other tongues, and passing out in self-induced trances that lasted for hours, but I digress) and my unfortunate Hebrew-Israelite years. Years where Black patriarchy and toxic hypermasculinity ruled the roost. Some of these men practically dripped pre-cum while preaching the promise of Jesus and Yahweh in those days of temple and Covenant Church of Pittsburgh. Philyaw gets at this in so many ways. For so many of her readers, the stories “Peach Cobbler” and “When Eddie Levert Comes” were their favorites. The amount of behind-the-scenes cheating and familial conflict is enough for anyone on the fence to declare themselves an atheist.

For my money, though, “Jael” is the story that will stay with me. I knew at least one, maybe two Jaels while growing up in the New York City area. One of them tried to molest me when I was 12. I somehow knew — despite forgetting about the particulars of my previous sexual assault until this time six years ago — that telling my Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, or my father about this was out of the question. But she was a Jael, alright, another traumatized kid, like me, yet willing to prey on others as a coping strategy.

Even though I wasn’t a Jael, my Mom prayed over me like I could be one, in order “to make a man out of you,” as she used to say. That she could actually say the words, “Or you could be a rapist” to me the same month I’d end up homeless at Pitt for five days was so telling. It told me that my Mom didn’t know me very well after all. Philyaw has me considering the possibility that with family, anyone could be a Jael, even the folks responsible for raising us.

Here’s what I know, though. No matter how I’d couch it, most of my family wouldn’t read a single word from The Yellow House or The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Queerness, hypocrisy, intersectionality, symbolism, stories that parallel their own? I might as well be sending my Mom a stereotypical Hollywood version of a voodoo doll with pins for her to push in it. For my younger siblings, a steaming hot plate of fried beef liver and kidneys smothered in onions and gravy over rice would be more appealing. So this post will have to do. A gift, I suppose.

“Let Me Tell You About Ms. Martha…”

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,


Ms. Martha with her grandson, Silver Spring, MD, December 25, 2009. (Donald Earl Collins)

I’ve been reluctant to write this post. Not because I have nothing good to say about my late mom-in-law, someone I’d known for nearly half my 51 years. I have nothing but good things to write about her. Not because I’m grieving. I often write when I’m in an altered state emotionally or psychologically. No, I’m a bit nervous because this will be my first blog post about any specific member of my wife’s family, Thanksgiving 2001 excepted. I’m mostly concerned that some will see what I have to write about my mom-in-law as an indirect slap toward my own mother and parents/guardian in general.

Trust me, it’s not. That I first met Martha Mae Guinn Levy (1931-2020) a month after my twenty-sixth birthday meant the nature of this relationship was never going to be strictly parent-to-child or mother-to-son.

The truth is, Ms. Martha really did treat me that way. But not just that. Sometimes our conversations could be contentious, like professor-student, or like two bickering friends, or brother-sister. The woman had nearly 39 years on me, but the battle-axe of a geezer could just as quickly be affectionate and a never-ending fountain of love and optimistic clichés. There are so many conversations, so many arguments, so many moments I could discuss that made me see all the facets and contradictions of my mom-in-law.

Ms. Martha made herself available for nearly every important event in my life since my then girlfriend introduced us on the last Saturday in January 1996. She attended my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon the following year. She drove me and her daughter to the Greyhound bus station in “dahntahn Picksburgh” in August 1999, so that we could begin our 20-plus years of living in the DMV, the Washington DC area. She shared a hotel room with my mom in 2000, just a few months after me and her daughter eloped. She came here to Silver Spring and watched at Sibley Hospital in DC as my wife gave birth to her one and only grandchild in 2003. She stayed with us for six weeks to watch her grandson in November and December of the same year, so that my wife could go back to work, and just before our son would start daycare.

But there’s one conversation that really and truly encompassed the evolution of our relationship over the years. It was in December 2013, just a few months after I had self-published Boy @ The Window. A week earlier, I had called my father about his yearly Christmas ritual of sending barely cashable Western Union money orders to give to his grandson for the holiday season. Instead, he mumbled and gave gruff one-word answers to my questions. “What’s wrong?,” I asked. “I told you not to put me in your book,” he said, sounding hurt and embarrassed. “I didn’t want nothing to do with your book. You shoulda left the past in the past.” My dad actually hadn’t said any of these things in the seven years between first sentence and the rough final draft I ended up publishing that April. I had been completely open about what I was going to write and why. I guess having a paperback copy of Boy @ The Window in his hands to leaf through was too much for him.

The weekend before Christmas 2013, Ms. Martha called. She dialed up my partner on her cell phone to talk to me (mind you, she had my direct number, but called her daughter first). When I picked up Angelia’s phone, I heard “Hey Donald” in Ms. Martha’s gravelly voice. After a brief exchange, she said, “I wanna talk to you about your book.” I mailed Ms. Martha a copy of Boy @ The Window, along with my dad and a few others, but I hadn’t expected her to read it, at least not so quickly.

“I started reading and I didn’t wanna put it down,” Ms. Martha said. I was surprised. Really, I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t expected this response at all. Not because Ms. Martha didn’t read. I figured, Oh, she’s just being polite, especially after hearing from my dad a little more than a week earlier.

We talked about my book for nearly an hour and a half on my wife’s iPhone. I might as well have been doing a book talk as conversation with my mom-in-law. Ms. Martha asked questions about my Boy @ The Window years, wanting more details beyond the stories I did include. There were a lot of “I didn’t know…” and “I couldn’t believe…” comments about what I and my family lived through. She asked at least a dozen questions about my mom and her decision-making, about my brothers and sister, about my asshole classmates.

Mostly, she doted on me. “Oh boy! I liked this sentence here…,” Ms. Martha said while reading me back to me a number of times. When I explained away my accomplishments or challenges, she’d say, “…as far as that matter goes…” to remind me that what was normal for me was not normal for most tweeners or teenagers, not even Black ones living with poverty. “This was a joy to read,” she said so many times. She said she laughed and cried while reading the book, and laughed and cried while talking to me about it.

I ended that conversation with Ms. Martha thinking, Wow! This tough old woman really loves me! It made me feel better about writing Boy @ The Window. It made me feel better at a time when I felt low, about my writing, about switching careers, about life in general.

And yes, I truly loved and love Ms. Martha. I will miss our conversations, our rational disagreements, our out-of-nowhere arguments, our hugs, our embraces, and her love for me, her daughters, her grandson, for family and community more broadly. I will miss your presence and your voice in my life. May God bless you and keep you…and give you peace, in your life after life.

About That Time at Van Cortlandt Park, and Other Bricks in the Wall…

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Van Cortlandt Park screen shot (parade grounds, cropped), June 4, 2020. (https://www.thisisthebronx.info/a-van-cortlandt-park-living-room-picnic/).

I don’t consider myself to be a seer. Not exactly. I might have gotten a thing or 1,000 predictions correct in my life. But since I usually prefer to expect good outcomes, I do not indulge the dreams I have of destruction, or the muses who conjure the possibilities of apocalypse, whether for me, my family, or at larger scales.

But the last half of 1980 was different for me. I’d come into my own as a kid. I finally had a posse of classmates and friends, between the two Joes, Starling, Chris, Ronald, Vanessa, Eric, Ray Ray, Sean, Lajuan, and Dahlia, among others. I was kicking ass academically, and was on the verge of discovering other talents, including writing. After my last summer camp with Darren at Clear View, and rereading the late Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, I understood my Blackness, really and truly, for the first time.

But I chose to see the glass as half full, both for myself and for Black folk in the US. Why wouldn’t I have? Somehow, in the middle of what I call “deep summer,” when the previous school year and the start of the first day of the next school year are about equally far away, it happened. My stepfather Maurice got a call from his music-obsessed friend Dennis (who was also a professional musician, by the way) in the middle of a Sunday afternoon in mid-August about going to some concert in the park in the Bronx. There was no mention of who the headliners were. I just remember playing Peanuts Land with my Matchbox cars and driving down along the shoppes in the nightlife district of the city underneath my bed when Maurice came in and rushed us to get dressed.

Mom, Maurice, Darren, little Maurice, and me. We piled into a cab over to Van Cortlandt Park, where we met Maurice’s friend Dennis. He knew a couple of the headlining people who were playing. I don’t recall tickets, but I do remember flyers everywhere. It seemed like this was a spontaneous gathering, where people somehow knew where to go and where to gather. I remember it being sometime around 7 or 8 pm when the jamming began, with all the music of the late-1970s and 1980. It was mostly an MC mixing a string a songs together, between Chic and “Good Times”, The Whispers’ “And The Beat Goes On,” and Michael’s “Off The Wall.”

But maybe 45 minutes in, three guys got on the stage to do their performance, Sugar Hill Gang, and the crowd of hundreds erupted into a roar as they rapped to “Rapper’s Delight.” They did a bunch of songs beyond the “a hip, hop/the hippie, the hippie/To the hip hip hop/a you don’t stop…” I was into it like everyone else, doing my terrible version of a Michael Jackson dance routine while clapping my hands to the beat. Sometime between 10 and 11, we left, I think, between a cab and Dennis giving Maurice and Mom and little Maurice a ride home. Even Mom looked like she had a good time. It would be just about the last good time we would have as a sort-of-family.

But the music didn’t stop with Van Cortlandt Park or the Sugar Hill Gang. The spring and summer of 1980 was the transition to a new decade of music, as homophobes from New York to Detroit and L.A. had spent the past year killing disco by smashing vinyl and smashing in Toyota Corollas and Datsun Zs. (By the way, for those who are still kicking and screaming over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” go on YouTube and listen to the late Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby“. It’ll probably make you question the meaning of your false sense of morality.)

Kool and The Gang had crossed over with “Ladies Night,” and were about to walk the fine line between success and selling out with “Celebration.” All summer on the bus back and forth from Clear View with Darren, SOS Band’s “Take Your Time (Do It Right)” was on at least once a day. There was also Teddy Pendergrass, the one, the only, and emerging, Luther Vandross’ “Searching” (yes, not his official solo debut, but), and of course Stephanie Mills with “Never Knew Love Like This Before”. And all that because my father had introduced us to Toni, a new drinking budding of his, herself a professional singer. Not to mention, a couple of bartenders in Mount Vernon and in the Bronx who didn’t mind a 12 and a 10-year-old sitting around on off nights in July and August.

On the AM side of things with 770 AM WABC radio, there was still Billy Joel, Kenny Loggins, Barbra Streisand and her collabs with The Bee Gees, “Guilty” and “Woman In Love.” Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was the second half of the summer of 1980, old and yet new, at least to me.

But as that summer moved into fall and 6th grade, I sensed something was changing, and not for the better. I sensed it in music, more than I did with Jimme’s alcohol abuse and fewer visits, more that even in Mom’s inability to keep food in our stomachs or in her failing marriage with Maurice. The music seemed more sinister, less hopeful, darker somehow. Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” somehow conjured “No mas! No mas!” and Roberto Duran giving up against Sugar Ray Leonard that November, the same month Reagan beat a beat down, haggard Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The beginning of four decades’ worth of hollow promises to White Americans, millions willing to sell the rest of us to Hell for their macabre pleasure and some tax breaks.

But no song signified the transition of the US for me in 1980 more than Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. It was likely the first true music video I ever saw, courtesy of my 616 friend Tré, who lived on the second floor. I spent a lot of time hanging with Tré, his older sister Renee, and her friend Stephanie (who I had the tiniest of crushes on, but I digress). It was during the months after Maurice and Mom had separated, with him taking the TV and a month’s supply of mail-ordered meats out of our two freezers. Tré, Renee, and their mother made me feel welcome between that first Saturday in October and when the Hebrew-Israelite bullshit began six months later.

“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control…” It was about much more than strict teachers and social control over students. It was a prediction of a future, my future, our collective futures. That’s what I thought about this time 40 years ago. I had conversations with my classmates about this, about Reagan, about double-digit inflation and unemployment, about the Iran hostage crisis, about the rumors that the US had given Israel nukes, and Israel had, in turn given nukes to apartheid South Africa. “You’re so weird!” they’d say. Or, more often, “You worry too much, Donald!” Only Starling understood. But he expected me to “become one with Jesus,” as if Jesus alone could stop me from worrying about the future.

In short order, the Reagan Years came and gutted the relative economic security of the US, disrupting the shaky gains Blacks had made in the years between 1946 and 1980. Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon to ring in the holidays, and Blondie’s Debbie Harry badly rapped her way through their January 1981 hit “Rapture” while Mom began to talk about being raptured up for the first time. My family was at the edge of an abyss, a mini-apocalypse that would ultimately transform all of us. It would certainly sidetrack me from my calling as a writer for years to come.

But the world didn’t stop spinning. Nor did life stop handing me days of happiness, of contentment, of miracles and even some joy. It just meant that I would be more cautious, anxious, depressed, worried, on edge. Because America believes itself above reproach, even as it deals in shit and blood, and drags the rest of us into the burgundy-soaked muck with it. The distance between 1980 and 2020 might be 40 years, but with Trump and his army of minions, I might as well be in the same moment. Only, I’m 50 now, and I know much better about listening to my inner voice and my muses.

Intermittent Starvation

22 Sunday Mar 2020

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,


Empty fruit and vegetable section shelves, Asda store, London, UK, March 14, 2020. (Yui Mok/PA via AP; https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/mar/15/trump-tells-people-stop-hoarding-and-buy-normal-am/).

A fair number of people I know have gotten into this trend we collectively call intermittent fasting. It’s the idea that you reduce your caloric intake by either reducing you total number of meals per day or take a set of days to not eat at all. When combined with rest, sleep, and exercise, one can become healthier, lose weight, and roll one’s body back to the days of normal blood pressure and glucose numbers. In the somewhat Apocalyptic times in which we live, some have said that intermittent fasting may be the new normal. Especially if or when stores and supermarkets begin to run out of foodstuffs. We will see what we will see come May, June, and the summer.

In the department of limited food intake, I have years of experience. Between the fall of 1980 and the winter of 1999, there isn’t a year where I didn’t have to scramble for scraps. I unknowingly made the lack of food at 616 part of my escapism in those earlier years, especially in Peanuts Land, where I used empty styrofoam McDonald’s and Burger King containers to construct the eatery sections of my imaginary capital city. It was partly why I liked it when my father would show up every third Saturday between April 1979 and April 1981 to take me and my brother Darren out for a few hours or even the whole weekend, sober or drunk. It didn’t really matter to me. Being able to eat fast food was a godsend this time four decades ago. Arthur Treacher’s Chicken and Chips, Mickey D’s, Carvel’s soft-serve ice cream, Papaya’s hot dogs, Wakefield’s brownies and greasy-spoon diners. Once, I even ordered and ate three Big Macs in one sitting at the one-time McDonald’s on the Avenue in South Side Mount Vernon. I was ten in 1980! Ah, those were great days!

But those days came after many days of well-balanced but often meager food options that Mom provided. Chicken and dumplings, pinto beans or black-eyed peas with rice, pork neck bones, and corn bread, and cabbage, cabbage, cabbage! By the end of 1980, cereal was no longer a regular household staple, and snacks were a rarity. Heck, when Mom and my idiot stepfather Maurice separated for six months that October, he cleaned out weeks’ worth of pork chops, lamb shanks, chicken, ground beef, and steaks on his way out of our apartment.

Then, the Hebrew-Israelite years came, and with it, intermittent fasting. That is, with extreme urban poverty. With the start of middle school in September 1981 came days at a time where I didn’t eat or ate very little. Our conservative take on Judaism meant that we would all have to fast for three days prior to Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Since Darren and I weren’t adults, we were supposed to fruit and juice fast. That would have worked if there had been fruit juice and fruit in the house regularly! Our first Rosh Hashanah was the only time in those three years where I ate oranges, apples, grapes, and bananas for all three days. But with my family’s economic decline came days where I simply went to school and did not eat at all, upcoming high-holy day or otherwise.

So many days I watched my classmates eat full lunches while my stomach growled from drinking water. Pride and watching the older students clown others for being on free and reduced lunch kept me from picking up and filling out the application. And even if I hadn’t been raised to not expect handouts and to not see free-lunch as a sign of familial failure, the Hebrew-Israelite years complicated matters for me. Most Fridays at school, the cafeteria served grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches with French fries.

It got way worse before it got better. From October 1981 through April 1984, we went between seven and 10 days every single month with little or no food at 616. After the 20th of any given month, I knew I’d miss meals, or it would be cabbage and corn bread or Great Northern beans and rice again. Keep in mind, Mom worked at Mount Vernon Hospital for most of that time as a dietary supervisor, so she worked around food while often hungry herself. One weekend in October 1982, all we had in the kitchen was some dried up cabbage, sugar, a little bit of flour, and a one-year-old box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food cake mix. Things were so bad the summer and fall of 1982 that Mom was bringing home scraps from her job for us to eat. I got sick of days’ old Boston Creme Pie, hospital version.

Life improved slightly when Mom went on welfare after my late sister Sarai’s birth in 1983. But the food shortages continued into 1985, when Darren and I began working with my father regularly, and then began getting our own jobs. But while the malnourishment and starvation left me scarred, they also left me prepared for future crises that for many would have been calamities. Homelessness, malnourishment, and no money while at Pitt in 1988. Difficulties with rent, bills, and food in 1990 and 1991, when I graduated from Pitt. Summers looking for work and living off fumes in 1992, 1993, and 1997, when I was in grad school and after I finished my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon. The beginning of 1999, when me and soon-to-be-wife stretched $20 over ten days, eating makeshift gravy with instant mashed potatoes while teaching nearly every day for a week at Duquesne.

Maybe that explains why I once thought about becoming a chef while growing up. Maybe that’s why I took so quickly to cooking family-sized meals when I was 14. Maybe that’s the reason I made a point of cleaning off every plate of food I fixed or someone else put in front of me until I was 31. It’s certainly the reason behind my OCD around shopping, cooking, storing, and giving food, for myself, my family, and for others, for so many of my 50 years. It very well could explain my G-I tract issues and IBS for much of my adult life.

But with this COVID-19 pandemic could come food and other shortages. The land of endless plenty could have pockets of starvation if millions get sick and stay sick for too long. I have thought for years about buying a composite bow and some arrows with which I could shoot a deer in the neck. I already know I can do it, having killed two dozen mice and rats over the years — some with a broom handle, a hammer, and my bare hands. I have beheaded and gutted fish, chickens, and turkeys. I have eaten venison and rabbit stew before. Or, I could hop on down to Home Depot and buy some seeds to grow snap peas, green beans, maybe even squash or potatoes. We do have a back yard!

Maybe this is all overblown. Maybe this isn’t the Apocalypse. We still have electricity, cable, and wi-fi, after all. Yet the Romans still had gladiatorial games at the Coliseum during two years of siege and starvation at the Visigoths’ hands before it fell in 410 CE. Thousands and perhaps a few million could go without food, even if the power plants and Comcast and Verizon never shut down.

So, intermittent fasting may well work for many. As for me, I’ve tried it, and I still do it from time to time. But you cannot fast your way out of a crisis. You can hunt and grow your way out of one, though.