Category Archives: Pop Culture

A Question of My Blackness, Sexuality and Masculinity

01 Thursday Sep 2011

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

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Boyz N The Hood (1991) Screen Shot, September 1, 2011. (Source/http://freeinfosociety.com). 20 years since this movie, and we still inquisition Black males about their masculinity. By the way, I was NEVER this cool growing up.

About this time a quarter-century ago, I received regular reminders from the people in my life as family and classmates that I didn’t fit their definition of how a heterosexual Black male should behave. At least in Mount Vernon, New York. You see, I didn’t have to be a young Barack Obama or Lenny Kravitz to learn at an early age that I wasn’t Black enough, man enough or heterosexual enough for many folks in my life. The fact that I didn’t run around with the other boys skipping school and sniffing skirts was evidence enough of how different I was.

One of the more subtle forms of interrogation I experienced occurred at the end of eleventh grade, going into the summer of ’86. That day I walked into English class, and Crush #2 asked me about that song of the day, which happened to be Level 42’s “Something About You” Something About You. When I told her who it was, she started snapping her fingers to it. LJ, an on-and-off again classmate since third grade at William H. Holmes Elementary, walked by as we were talked. “Are they Black?,” she asked. When I said “No,” LJ shook her head and walked away. The group was White and from the Isle of Wight, no less, a bunch of off-shore British White guys. Somehow I’d violated some kind of code in LJ’s eyes. It was the last conversation we had before we graduated a year later.

South 10th Avenue, Mount Vernon, New York, November 19, 2006. (Source/http://weichert.com). The egg-shell white house in the center of the photo is where my father Jimme lived in ’86, an attic room. Looks better now than it did then.

I received a far less subtle hint that made LJ’s disgust look like romance by comparison. It was an incident just a week before the start of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, something I’ve posted about before. By the time I’d gotten a crush on Crush #2, my sexuality was no longer in question, although I’d never seriously questioned it before. My father, though, still had his doubts. I’d hardly seen Jimme most of the summer of ’86, only coming over occasionally to see how he was doing or to bum a few bucks off of him. I found Jimme that last Saturday morning in August, hanging out on the street around the corner from his place, having already drunk his fill.

His mood was especially foul that day, like his body odor. He refused to give me any money. “I don’ give my money to no faggats!” Jimme yelled at me as he came walking and stumbling down his block toward me. He’d seen me come out of the front yard of the house in which he rented a room. I wasn’t in the mood for his crap. “I’m not a faggot and I’m not gay,” I yelled back. When he got closer, I could see that he’d been out too long already. Jimme’s clothes were a mess, and his face was in a twisted rage. He grabbed me by my arm.

“Did you get yo’ dict wet?,” he asked as usual.

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I said.

“YOU’RE A FAGGAT,” he yelled again.  (see my “In the Closet, On the Down Low” from June 1, 2009 for the full conversation and incident)

As I saw it then, I was a year away from college, and I was still in the streets dealing with my drunk ass father, my jealous and institutionalized older brother, a sham of a marriage at 616 and four younger siblings who were high on sugar all of the time. I’d done so much to change my life and yet almost everything in my life was the same. Up to this point the only things that had kept my head from exploding were God and school. As my senior year approached, I wondered how much longer I could maintain emotional control before I finally just lost myself in years of growing pain, like a volcano about to super-erupt.

As I see it now, it remains a shame that we as Black males have to run a gauntlet in our communities in order

A Question of Freedom (2009) Hardcover Cover, September 1, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

to become Black men, at least in the eyes of others. We can talk about the K-12-to-prison system that is public education in many a community of color. Or the drug trade. Or the sheer lack of quality public services and interventions in our communities or lives, other than police forces. Or even the daily images that tell so many of us that aspiring to be a rapper, football or basketball player, or just to be cool is so much better than knowing anything. The latest good memoir on this is R. Dwayne Betts‘ A Question of Freedom (2009).

But we must also admit that the people who attempted to raise us — our families, relatives, neighbors and classmates — are just as often at fault for turning out Black males who aren’t ready to be Black men, human adult males with ideas and aspirations outside of the box. Until we get serious about the fact that those closest to us have put such idiotic notions of masculinity, heterosexuality and Black coolness in many a Black male’s head, we get nowhere in helping to transform the lives of people like me when I was a teenager.

For we can’t depend on people like me becoming homeless, embracing solitude, and leaving my community as the best way to learn how to be a man, an adult, a really serious yet compassionate (and goofy) human being.

The Whore of Babylon (and other wacko comments)

22 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Televangelist John Hagee sans glasses compares Texas Gov. Rick Perry to Abraham Lincoln, The Response, Reliant Stadium, Houston, August 6, 2011. (Source/http://www.businessinsider.com).

I used to be one of them. One of those evangelized Christians. Coming off of three years as a Hebrew-Israelite, I became a Christian in the spring of ’84, without a church, and without an immediate family member who had any real experience as part of a Christian family or community.

So naturally, when my mother — who still appeared to be a practicing Hebrew-Israelite — would tune our one working stereo radio to the Christian AM stations in the New York City area in the summer that followed my secret conversion, I’d listen. I’d hear everything from Amy Grant’s “Angels Watching Over Me” to folks like Jimmy Swaggert and Kenneth Copeland on those two stations. Plus, there was the 700 Club, Oral Roberts and Frederick K.C. Price on our TV at 10 am Monday-Friday, and Sunday mornings between 8 and 11 am.

With the exception of Price, a good portion of what these televangelists and radio preachers would talk about was the Book of Revelation of St. John. They’d outline in detail everything from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the gigantic sucking sounds of great death as the Lord opened one seal after another. As a fourteen-year-old and brand-new Christian, it was scary listening to them. So scary that it seemed unlikely that I’d make it to thirty before the entire world was on fire.

The Whore of Babylon, from a 1800s Russian engraving. (Source/Wikipedia). In public domain.

When Swaggert or Roberts or Robertson would get to the part of Revelations that talked about “the whore of Babylon,” they’d lament about how America was the “whore” that John of Patmos had described in his letters to the Christian churches in what is now Turkey — 2,000 years ago. But for Swaggert, Roberts, Robertson, et al., it was because of gay rights, or because of Blacks having kids out-of-wedlock while collecting welfare, or because women were on an assembly line to have abortions, or because of out-of-control government spending that America had become the ultimate harlot.

I put much of what they said aside even then, because my life at 616 and in Mount Vernon was scary enough without thinking about the fate of four or five billion humans. But all of this came up again, especially once my mother revealed herself as an evangelical Christian in ’89, in the last days of her marriage to my idiot (ex-) stepfather. In the years that followed, whenever I visited over the holidays or came home to work for the summer, I’d see more of Kenneth Copeland, Oral and Richard Roberts, Pat Robertson than I’d see of regular television.

In particular, a “new” guy, Jack Van Impe, along with his wife, was on. Every week in the summer of ’90, my

Jack Van Impe, circa 2010, predicting an Apocalypse via Iran. (Source/http://wn.com).

mother would make me sit in front of the TV to hear this guy relate things like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of that year to the Rapture and the Apocalypse. Somehow, the evil spiritual forces intent on world domination and human corruption were unleashed by Iraq and the US response to Iraq that summer. Van Impe was so worried about the rebuilding of the Roman Empire via the expanding European Union that he looked like he was about to collapse from a brain aneurysm.

My mother once said, “You think they crazy, but when the Rapture comes and you’re stuck here, you won’t.” I didn’t think that they were crazy — I knew they were. But more importantly, what I was really thinking was, why is she watching this, and making me watch this stuff, too? It’s not as if anyone, whether an atheist or a Zen Buddhist, didn’t or doesn’t really know that our world faces a multitude of challenges that could lead to a perfect storm of global crises, causing immense destruction and death. That’s true. Still, I couldn’t see how any of us could make sense of what we face as a planet by using the Book of Revelation as a guide.

So, when Rachel Maddow decided to go after Governor Rick Perry and “The Response” party down in Houston earlier this month on her show, I, unlike most Americans uninvolved in mind-bending forms of Christianity, wasn’t surprised. I didn’t feel shock that there was such a thing as the New Apostolic Reformation, because there isn’t anything new about it. I wasn’t even surprised that the likes of John Hagee would consider Oprah Winfrey the “Whore of Babylon” because of her ability to use verbal voodoo on the millions of people who worship everything she does. And I was unsurprised, unfortunately, that a snake-oil salesman like Perry would fall into their camp.

Oprah Winfrey at her 50th birthday party at Hotel Bel Air 2004. (Source/Alan Light/http://www.flickr.com/photos/alan-light/216012860/). In public domain, cc-by-2.0.

Quite frankly, there are only two things that surprise me. One is that there are millions of people like me who could find more holes in the evangelical apocalyptic paradigm in one nanosecond than Maddow could in one day, yet we’re never called on to refute and inform. The other is that it’s taken this long for mainstream media to really pick up on what has been a four-decade long trend in the meshing of the wackiest of “Christian” ideas with politics that exploit America’s imperial fears. That our days as #1 are at an end.

Larry Glasco and the Suzy-Q Hypothesis

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Sports

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Hostess Suzy-Q's 8-pack with Reggie Jackson baseball cards, circa 1979, just the way I remember them (made with lard), September 24, 2007. (Source/http://www.flickr.com/photos/wafflewhiffer/1436601166)

I sometimes think that me being a weird dude — because I often spend my time in contemplation — often attracts people in my life of all types. Including people weirder or more eccentric than me. As those closest to me can attest, I’ve awaken many a morning with ideas to write down, with dreams to interpret and deep epiphanies to discuss. All while still needing to pee and brush my teeth — so I multitask!

Twenty years ago, I was in deep thought almost every day going into my first semester of grad school. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t part of my original plan to earn a master’s degree. And it was obvious from dealing with the folks in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh that many didn’t want me there (see “The Miracle of Dr. Jack Daniel” from May ’11). Either because of my familiarity with them, or because I was Black, or because I was still only twenty-one, or because they knew I’d study race more than class and neo-Marxist theory.

Whatever the case, I knew one thing for certain. That Professor Larry Glasco would end up being my advisor. Glasco was the only professor out of twenty-nine in the department who specialized in African American history, and he’d been there since the year I was born, ’69. He was likely hired in the midst of universities, fearful of black student groups and their protests over mistreatment and lack of diversity — hiring one Black here and one Black there to meet the protesters demands. Actually, not likely. Glasco, like the start of the

Larry Glasco delivering a special lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, October 12, 2007. (Source/http://www.chronicle.pitt.edu/?p=1002).

Black Studies (now Africana Studies) Department and the hiring of Dr. Jack Daniel, was all a response to protests and a major sit-in by the Black Action Society in the 1968-69 school year.

But I digress. I’d taken a history majors reading course with Glasco my junior year, and we occasionally talked. Other than that, I didn’t know much about the fifty-year old, six-foot-five and very light man.

Though I did begin to find out. Mid-August then and now is big in Western Pennsylvania, as it’s football preseason. Since my NY Giants had won the Super Bowl that January, I was satisfied and not at all in a football mood. I’d gone out that third Sunday in August to go to Hillman Library, continue my work on my multicultural education article, grab cheap grub at 7-Eleven, and sit at one of the benches outside of William Pitt (Student) Union to eat and smell the sulfuric air.

Glasco walked up and greeted me. We talked, mostly about how I planned to fulfill requirements like proficiency in a foreign language (I decided on Swahili, much to Glasco’s chagrin) and what my master’s paper should be about. I didn’t understand — and quite frankly, I still don’t now — why many professors practice this opaque way of giving advice to students, advice that can easily come off as commands.

Anyway, Glasco then chatted me up about the upcoming ’91 NFL season, about the Steelers and the injury bug. Some major draft pick had blown out his knee, torn ACL and MCL. Between that and what happened to then LA Raiders great Bo Jackson in the ’90 playoffs against Cincinnati, Glasco said, “Maybe it’s their diet. Maybe they’re eating too many Suzy-Q’s.”

My mouth fell to the table attached to the bench where I was sitting, keeping it from hitting the sidewalk three feet below. Over-trained muscles, steroids, Astroturf, vicious hits, and your answer is “Suzy-Q’s,” I thought? Really? I didn’t think that what Glasco had suggested was dumb, just weird. Really weird. I said, with a post-gasp chuckle, “Well, I don’t think that eating Suzy-Q’s has much to do with a ligament tear…” Before I could complete that thought, Glasco continued for another ten minutes about diet and how these athletes don’t watch what they eat compared to the guys in football in the ’60s and ’70s. I thought and said, “Really? Because I remember guys who’d smoke during these games, not to mention drinking and eating hot dogs.”

Of course, years of sports research and Sports Illustrated articles confirmed everything I learned from watching and playing sports by the naive old age of twenty-one. Not to mention a former wide receiver by the name of Marvin Harrison, who for years made a point of eating a pack of Suzy-Q’s before a game, only to turn in one of the all-time great NFL careers with the Indianapolis Colts.

But the bigger point from my conversation with Glasco was that I’d found a professor and advisor who was a nice guy, but actually weirder than me. And made me feel strangely comfortable with him and with being at Pitt for my master’s. Still, I sensed that I’d eventually need to go someplace else if I wanted to start and finish a doctorate or do something else educationally. A Suzy-Q hypothesis could only take me so far.

Crazy

13 Saturday Aug 2011

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Seal, CD Cover (1991), August 13, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m a late bloomer. I came to find myself a teenager in a twenty-one year old’s body twenty years ago, just as I’m a thirty-five year-old in a forty-one-and-a-half year-old’s body now. As the summer of ’91 began to wind down, though, I realized that I needed to go into my first year of grad school at Pitt with some inspiration, with a chip on my shoulder, really.

It didn’t take more than a simple thought to find that inspiration and chip, either. Between working for a bunch of folks at my Western Psych job who still thought that hunting down half-and-half was the extent of my work there on the one hand. And professors like Reid Andrews telling me after I’d received my grad school stipend award letter that I wasn’t “graduate school material” on the other hand. Livid is the minimal word I’d use to describe my mood in the three weeks before the start of my five-and-half-year odyssey. One of doing cartwheels at least three times better than my colleagues to prove that I was as good as anyone.

But I’m jumping ahead of the story here. I found some inspiration from music, as usual, in this case, on one of my daily walks home from work in Oakland to my studio apartment in East Liberty. Still searching for more new music for my ’90s collection, I found a radio station playing Seal’s first big hit, “Crazy.” I’d heard parts of the song before, all during that summer, but never from start to finish. As I reached the end of Ellsworth Avenue, where I’d walk up the steps to a bridge on Highland Avenue, one that went over the train tracks and busway into East Liberty, I heard the lyrics, really for the first time.

“In a sky full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy
In a world full of people only some want to fly/Isn’t that crazy/Crazy
In a heaven of people there’s only some want to fly/Ain’t that crazy”

Seal, "Crazy" 45 Single Cover (UK), January 8, 2009. (Source/http://cover6.cduniverse.com/MuzeAudioArt/140/141811.jpg). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, as version is of low resolution for reproduction, and is part of larger commentary.

And yes, I wanted to fly. Besides, as far as most people were concerned, I was crazy anyway. For wearing that godforsaken kufi to school for three years. For becoming a newborn and sanctimonious Christian after that. For trying out for football, and later, baseball instead of basketball. For listening to Mr. Mister and Tears for Fears and Sting instead of bopping to Run-D.M.C. For walking way too fast, and talking a little too slow. For going off to college out-of-state, to a no-name school no less. For taking a grad course my junior year at Pitt. For deciding to go to grad school in history instead of law school or Black studies.

The list is as long as an introspective Eminem rap sequence, airing every negative ever tossed my way. I was crazy, and still am. But, as far as my first year of grad school was concerned, I made two deals with myself about the process. One was to not compare myself, my abilities, my limitations, to anyone else in the program. The other was to put aside all of my preconceptions about my professors, or the difficult courses ahead, or whether I would complete the master’s degree and move on to the doctoral portion of the program.

I didn’t want to limit myself to what others may have expected of me, or to what I could’ve possibly expected of myself at the time. I didn’t even like my friends saying that “the sky’s the limit,” because I didn’t want to limit myself to the sky. I simply wanted to be crazy enough, humble yet arrogant enough to know my limits, but push the envelope as hard as I could in order to make graduate school work for me.

Howard Hughes standing in front of his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane, Inglewood, California in the 1940s, May 31, 2005. (Source/Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-63333 - In public domain). One of the craziest, yet great, innovators of the 20th century. Guess it works better when you're a rich White male.

That kind of thinking affords a very single-minded intensity — to the point of a near-psychotic passion — that leads to excellence, miracles and the exceeding of what may have been your craziest expectations. I know it was that way for me. It had to be. If I’d bought into all that my most hateful Humanities classmates, my mother and ex-stepfather, my father Jimme, my fellow Mount Vernonites and some of my teachers and professors thought of me, who’s knows? I’d likely become a sexually confused and frustrated Black male, a college dropout, wandering from one minimum wage job to another, living alone in a boarding room, as miserable as a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

I’d become a psychopath, not just crazy enough to believe in myself and the miracles of God in my life. I need to do be a little crazy now, even at this stage of my life. We all need to be a little crazy, not in a Tea Party sense, but much more in an Arab Spring kind of way. After all, “we’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.”

Sometimes, I Am Walter White

17 Sunday Jul 2011

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Bryan Cranston as Walter White Screen Shot, Breaking Bad, Season 1, Episode 1. Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because picture is part of post describing the character and series.

Season Four of Breaking Bad begins tonight at 10 pm EDT on AMC in my part of the world. I’m a late comer to the show, and only because my wife had sat on her Netflix delivery of the first two disks of the first season back in March. But boy did I catch up, watching the first two seasons in a span of ten days! Overall, I find the first six episodes of Breaking Bad the most intriguing. Those episodes provide me the reasons for why I support Walter White (the main character played by Bryan Cranston), because I can see some of myself and my life in his.

For those of you who haven’t watched or aren’t fans, Walter White is a brilliant yet foolish has-been-who-really-should’ve-been-somebody high school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He’s fifty years old, married for seventeen years, with a fifteen-year-old who has cerebral palsy, and with a surprise baby well on the way, as his wife’s in her third trimester. When he discovers after collapsing at his other job (at the local car wash) that he has advanced lung cancer and maybe six months to live, he decides through serendipity to use his training as a biochemist to produce high-grade methamphetamine, or crystal meth, in order to provide for his family before kicking the bucket.

I’m not terminally ill, at least as far as I know. Nor am I a biochemist. But like Walter White, I am an over-educated person with tons of skills and experience, but woefully under-applying them in my current work as an adjunct professor and consultant. I wasn’t pushed out of a venture with a biotech company in which the other partners made billions of dollars off of my ideas. But I’ve had people in my life who’ve attempted to keep me from expressing my ideas, from getting a job, even made up stories to derail my career.

Unlike Walter White, I’m at least teaching college students, if only in the technical sense that the students I teach are in college. Although, given the sporadic nature of my consulting when combined with my teaching, it may be time to do like Walter White and obtain certification to teach high school social studies. For unlike in Albuquerque, teaching at the high school level out here often pays better than being a college professor, and can yield better results academically for the students involved.

Given where Walter could’ve been in life by the time he reached middle age, it’s small wonder that he has a

The Hulk Screen Shot, May 1, 2008. (Source:Lawrence Cohen/http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/theincrediblehulk/large.html). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because its a low-resolution depiction of a character as described in this post.

deep well of pent-up rage to draw from throughout the series. I understand that rage because I’ve seen it in myself over the years. But my rage comes from a life of deprivation and working my ass off to overcome it, only to feel as if there’s still tons’ more work to do. With the struggle to become a successful writer, and not just an academic one with a book and a couple dozen articles to my credit, I’m already tired. But the struggle for more work in a field in which you know you’re well qualified and already have done a ton of work can lead to Walter White rages. Or, for that matter, Bruce Banner each time he turned into Hulk.

Really, I realize that on the whole, I’m not Walter White. I’ve been written off too often in life to see myself that way. But I can understand after spending the better part of three decades working to turn “No!” into “Yes!,” to prove myself as a thinker, educator, historian, manager and writer. Not only to myself, but to my God, and those manning the gates to jobs, publishing, grants and degrees. I get it as to how and why rage can build up. I guess that if I found myself with Stage 3 lung cancer, I could use my talents to write other people’s books and dissertations, or even to write scripts for porn, but that wouldn’t exactly be me.

No, under Walter White’s circumstances, I’d probably call in every favor that I’ve been owed since seventh grade. I’d contact every writer that I’m a fan of, every contact I know associated with publishing books, magazines, scholarly journals, and make myself a royal pain in the ass. That is, until getting a book contract for Boy @ The Window, publishing several pieces I’ve been working on with occasional bursts of writing for the past two or three years. I’d do whatever I could to make sure that Noah and Angelia were taken care of before I passed.

Come to think of it, what I’ve just written should be my mantra, impending death or otherwise. As Nickelback says in “If Today Was Your Last Day,” “against the grain should be a way of life.” That’s been me for the past thirty years. So I’m really only sometimes Walter White.

Rajon Rondo, ultimate against the grain drive before hard foul, 2010 NBA Eastern Conference Finals, May 1, 2010. (Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images).

Patriotism, Post-Racialism and Prima Donnas

04 Monday Jul 2011

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US Flag and Lower 48, July 3, 2011. Source: http://mapsof.net

It’s yet another 4th of July, number 235, and I find myself tired of how the prima donnas in this country think it their right to define for me what patriotism is and isn’t. Last I checked, carrying an M-16 rifle and wearing a uniform overseas isn’t the alpha and omega of patriotism here or anywhere, and saying that it is doesn’t make it so. By that definition, it would mean that Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony weren’t patriots, while Timothy McVeigh and John Allen Muhammad were. Those who serve in combat are obvious American patriots. But hiding behind our military in defining patriotism allows us as a nation to ignore so many things that contradict our sense of nationalism and patriotism.

Call of Duty Screen Shot, July 3, 2011. Source: http://independent.co.uk

Patriotism is about much more than guns, battles, taking flanking positions or making perfect speeches wholly incompatible with the imperfections of our society and people. As anyone in the education field knows, Americans in general know about as much history as my son knows right now, and he just finished second grade.

Our aversion to history is especially noticeable when it comes to race. We’ve declared ourselves post-racial when we haven’t even been pre-racial. Meaning that in order to get beyond race, we actually have to deal with it directly, head-on, without holding back, the ugly history of race and racism that is as American as apple pie. I’m afraid that it’ll take a national tragedy, though, for more Americans to dare be that brave, that honest, that, well, patriotic.

It’s sad, because most of us are prima donnas, or rather, imperial narcissists who talk about patriotism without understanding that being a patriot often means using one’s brain and vociferously resisting the status quo. We’re more concerned about winning Mega Millions and Powerball or the price of gas than we really are about troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan or making US foreign and economic policies more equitable abroad and at home. We somehow assume that “America is #1!” is our birthright, even as many of us haven’t the socioeconomic capacity to partake in America’s remaining riches.

Alexandra Pelosi (a documentarian and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter) has been doing the media circuit talking about her latest film, Citizen U.S.A., the story of immigrants becoming naturalized

Citizen U.S.A. Poster, June 2011. Source: http://www.jfklibrary.org

American citizens and their appreciation of what they believe America is about. Her message has essentially been “shame on you” to native-born Americans for not seeing our nation the way these immigrants can and do.

But even Pelosi’s perspective is limited in its prima-donna-ness. There are millions of us who see the direction of the nation and work not to illuminate its already over-hyped greatness — a classic sign of imperialism, by the way — but to make the nation a better one, a nation that lives up to its ideals. Isn’t this another example of one’s patriotism, one that’s forward-thinking enough to work for the long-term success of a nation, rather than chest-thumping about greatness in the present?

It seems to me that we should illuminate the fact that we expend so much energy making millions of Americans who are not with the prima-donna program into unpatriotic outcasts. So much so that most of us have never had an independent thought on this topic in our entire lives. And if the 4th of July is to be about more than guns, speeches, guns and denigration, we need more people to think for and beyond themselves about patriotism, even if some of us are incapable of accepting independent thought and criticism from them.

The Curious Case of Mrs. O’Daniel

30 Thursday Jun 2011

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I meant to do a post on this last month, but got caught up in other work and other posts. This one’s about the unique experience me and about thirty of my William H. Holmes Elementary School classmates had between ’77 and ’81, and my unique experience in particular. That experience, at least for me (and to a slightly lesser extent, for my classmates), was in having a number of caring, highly qualified Black teachers before we went off to the vicious worlds of A.B. Davis Middle School, Nichols Middle School, and Mount Vernon High School.

Starting in first grade in ’75, I had Ms. Griffin at Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker Elementary), Mrs. Shannon — my first teacher crush — in third grade at Holmes, and Mrs. Bryant, a great teacher, in sixth grade. But the toughest and yet very caring of all the Black teachers I had in K-6 in Mount Vernon was Mrs. O’Daniel, my fifth grade teacher. She was the teacher that made me realize how troubled the world around me really was.

I and we learned early on how not to cross Mrs. O’Daniel. Once early in the school year, when our class was wound up and acting out, Mrs. O’Daniel threatened to “introduce [us] to the Board of Education. Do y’all know what that is?” After raising my hand, I said, “Yeah, it’s the building next door to us.” “No, not that Board of Education,” Mrs. O’Daniel said with a slight smile, “this one.” This Board of Education was three yard sticks taped together, and she tapped the palm of her left hand with it to emphasize what it was for — our behinds.

She used it on me one time, because I happened to take something that wasn’t mine from her nook in the classroom, what, I don’t remember. Five taps with the Board of Education across my hand was quite enough for me in the ’79-’80 schools.

Mrs. O’Daniel, though, did much more than provide discipline for our classroom. She spent a lot of our time that year on history, American history, African American history, reading and writing. I read parts of W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk in her class that year and wrote a small and wholly inadequate book report on it. I learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time in May ’80. I learned so much about MLK and Malcolm X that year, more than I’d learn all through middle school and high school.

I also discovered how far behind some of my classmates were. We had two twelve-year-olds and a thirteen-year old in our class, and all of them read well below the fifth grade level. Mrs. O’Daniel assigned me and two other classmates the task of working with the older classmates to help them build up their reading and writing skills. That spring, I spent a month working with the oldest member of our class, going over words that I once struggled with in second and third grade. I felt bad for him, but even more puzzled about how a teenager could be stuck in fifth grade reading only on the second grade level.

There was a mystery to Mrs. O’Daniel as far as I was concerned. I still can’t remember if she’d grown up in North Carolina or Alabama, or if she had any kids or grand kids, or if her husband was still alive. When she announced in the early spring of ’80 that she had just turned sixty, we were stunned, thinking of how old sixty was compared to ten, eleven or even thirteen. She seemed a bit strange, but certainly not old beyond our knowledge that she was born in 1920. Mrs. O’Daniel was as tall as teacher as I ever had, but hardly frail or old outside of her salt and less salt hair.

She died in ’83, sometime during my first weeks in Mount Vernon High School. Some of my former Holmes classmates, who were now in Humanities in ninth grade, broke down and cried when they heard the news. I must admit, I was stunned. I’d never known anyone who had contact with me and died before. All I knew was that an older person who cared about me, about all of my classmates, had passed away.

It made me sad, but it didn’t sink in until much, much later how fortunate I was to have had Mrs. O’Daniel and Mrs. Bryant, Mrs. Shannon and Ms. Griffin as my teachers early on. I had no idea that the only teacher of color that I’d have until I reached the University of Pittsburgh would be Ms. Simmons, a first-year, seventh-grade math teacher I stood toe to toe with by Xmas ’81. I think that my understanding of African American history and culture would’ve been much more limited prior to my Pitt years if it weren’t for Mrs. O’Daniel. And for that, and so much more, I thank her.