Colorism and the Enduring Power of School Daze

11 Monday Mar 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Brown Paper Bag Rule, Cafe au Lait, Color Struck, Colorism, Dark-Skinned, Fraternities, Giacarlo Esposito, Hazing, HBCUs, Hedonism, High Yellow, Internalized Racism, Intrarace Relations, Laurence Fishburne, Light-Skinned, Mo' Better Blues (1990), Pitt, Redbone, School Daze (1988), Shunning, Sororities, Spike Lee, Tar Baby, The Silent Treatment, Tisha Campbell, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Snipes

School Daze (1988) movie poster, September 17, 2012. (QuasyBoy via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as depicts subject of blog, is scaled-down and is of low-resolution.

One of the few films I saw soon after it came out in theaters during my Boy @ The Window years was School Daze. It was in fact on this date twenty-five years ago that I went to the old theater in Pittsburgh that once was on Forbes Avenue near the Oakland Primanti Bros. sandwich place to see the film. It gave me some serious food for thought that Spring Break Friday evening, so much so that the lessons of School Daze have stayed with me to this day. Considering that I turned down a date with an upperclassman not interested in seeing the film in the process, School Daze was more than worth it.

The biggest lesson for me was on colorism. Not the macabre hazing of Q-dog frat boys and the cliquish AKA and Delta soros. Not the lack of care for the academic or the step-show battles. Not the hedonist behavior of Black middle class Gen Xers hell-bent on doing everything other than graduating from college. I already knew students like this at Pitt. Really, I already knew former classmates from Mount Vernon High School who attended HBCU’s like Howard, Morehouse, Hampton and Spelman, the kind of people who’d be perfect candidates for this Spike Lee joint. That they would psychologically and physically abuse each other in bed and on campus didn’t surprise me in the least.

“Good and Bad Hair” scene, School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins via YouTube). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

No, it was the issue of being color-struck that was truly eye-opening for me. For I think I always knew on a semi-conscious level that colorism was alive and well among Black folks I’d come to know in Mount Vernon and in my first year at Pitt. It was frequently subtle, but also occasionally out in the open. With terms like “café au lait,” “redbone,” “mocha,” “caramel,” light-skinned,” “high yeller,” “dark-skinned,” “tar baby,” “chocolate-brown,” “good hair,” “nappy head,” “paper-bag brown,” and “light, bright and almost White,” among others. With obvious preferences among my male and female counterparts for young Black women and (sometimes) young Black men who passed the brown-paper-bag rule. (For those unfamiliar, if a Black male or female’s skin color was lighter than a brown paper bag, they were light enough to be attractive and acceptable by others. In terms of beauty, sometimes in pledging to a sorority or fraternity, often in terms of being part of a popular and better connected circle of Black folk.)

I certainly saw it with my father Jimme, who threw around the word “redbone” in my last year of high school as if the only young women in my NYC-area universe were light, bright and almost White. But I also saw it in the cliquishness and popularity of some of my classmates and other MVHS attendees and alumni. The most prominent of them at the time was Albert Brown, aka, Al B. Sure. Despite the uni-brow and limited talent, he went a long way in terms of popularity with his Class of ’86 and in the years immediately after high school. But there were others, classmates with bit-role appearances on ABC’s All My Children, folks whose entire circle of so-called close friends met some internalized color line.

It’s safe to say that by the time I left the theater — about 9 pm that Friday — I was actually angry. I wanted to take Giancarlo Esposito behind a building and beat him into another world. But more than that, it put some of the issues I had with high school and my first year at the University of Pittsburgh in perspective. Obvious and subtle forms of bigotry, individual racism and institutional/structural racism are all things I expected to face. This internalized bigotry on the basis of skin color, though, explained some of the shunning that I’d faced in my last couple of years of high school (see my post “The Silent Treatment” from June ’11) especially.

Hazing scene from School Daze (1988), March 10, 2013. (http://tumbler.com). Qualifies as fair use (see previous picture).

Yeah, I was weird because I was in a weird place in terms of domestic violence, child abuse and welfare poverty in those years. I didn’t help matters by being down with Tears for Fears and Sting and Mr. Mister and by often walking at Warp Factor Three or higher to cover the twenty-acre school between classes. But being poor and looking poor and a darker shade of brown was the first thing the Rick James-Eddie Murphy “Party All The Time” set saw, even before I turned into a blur walking past them every day.

A few years after School Daze, I went to David Lawrence Hall to watch the Pitt Film Club’s showing of Mo’ Better Blues (1990) with Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. A decidedly light-skinned underclassman (who was in my easy-A Intro to Black Studies course – I was a senior at Pitt by this time) – let’s call her ‘R’ – saw me and decided to sit with me to watch the film. Every time Wesley Snipes was on the screen, she commented on how dark he was. Making me uncomfortable, to say the least.

I finally asked, “Well, what about me?,” given her obvious distaste for Snipes. “Oh, you’re fine. Wesley’s just too dark,” R responded. I did a double-take, realizing that her perspective on skin color was just too odd for words. A quarter-century later, and my guess is that there are Black folks (and Whites who love “dark”-skinned Blacks) who still need to “WAAAAKKKKKE UUUUUUPPPPPPP!”

Clover Donuts and Papa Wong’s

07 Thursday Mar 2013

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Arson, Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips, Carvel Ice Cream, changes, Chicken and Chips, Chocolate Cake Donuts, Clover Donuts, Community Changes, Food, Foodie, Glazed Donuts, Gramatan Avenue, Papa Wong's, Pork Egg Rolls, Poverty, quality of food, Quality of Life, Sue's Rendezvous, Suspicious Fires

Pork Egg Rolls (like the ones Papa Wong’s once made), Golden Gate Restaurant, Wyoming, MI, December 6, 2008. (stevendepolo via Flickr). In public domain.

Poverty influenced so much of my worldview in the years prior to finishing my doctorate. Including my taste buds. I’m sure that if I used my taste buds today to evaluate the Sicilian slices I used to eat from the pizza shop on East Lincoln, I’d throw it in trash and demand my money back. Yet I could say at thirteen — and say now at forty-three — some foods stand out more than others, foods that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. In the case of these Mount Vernon/NYC foods, I really can’t go home again.

Eating at Papa Wong’s restaurant on Gramatan Avenue was a real treat for me even at seven or eight. They had great egg rolls, pork, shrimp and chicken fried rice. I loved the place. It smelled the way I thought a Chinese restaurant ought to smell. Ginger, sesame, soy, onions, scallions and garlic. It’s too bad the restaurant burned down suspiciously in ’82, with nothing to replace it with but a parking lot for nearly a decade afterward. The circumstances behind the fire — as with so many on Gramatan and South 4th Avenue in the ’81-’84 period — remain suspicious to this day.

There was also good eating for me at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips on Prospect and Park before it closed down that corner for two years at the end of ’82. I loved their crispy chicken medallions with the chips — awesome! Carvel’s Ice Cream shop a block west on Prospect was also a good place to eat, even if the customer service sucked more times than not. I think I drove myself to lactose intolerance about five years early because of that place. Man, I miss those chocolate-on-vanilla ice cream sandwiches!

Chocolate Honey Dip Donuts (not quite like the ones Clover Donuts used to make), March 6, 2013. (http://honeydewdonuts.com).

But nothing for my precious few dollars topped Clover Donuts. If you could take a Krispy Kreme glazed and genetically cross it with a Dunkin Donuts glazed, you’d end up with the best glazed donut ever! And that’s exactly what Clover Donuts sold. Not to mention those juicy, grilled and amazing Sabrett Hot Dogs. It was all a “kick in da head” for me growing up. On almost every visit I made to Mount Vernon after I went to the University of Pittsburgh, I made a stop there for a glazed donut, their nugget-y yet soft chocolate glazed donuts, and a hot dog. I might’ve not liked many things about Mount Vernon, but Clover Donuts was one thing I really enjoyed.

By the time I hit my mid-teens, though, I realized that Mount Vernon’s food had changed, and not for the better. Papa Wong’s was long gone, and so was Arthur Treacher’s. My home life at 616 meant that most of my shopping time was spent in Pelham at C-Town or in one of their inferior eateries. The pizzerias made slices that varied from absolutely sucks to pretty good, but were common and unimaginative enough that they blended together for me. At Mount Vernon High School, the deli in nearby Chester Heights easily surpassed anything I’d eaten sandwich-wise outside of the city.

Speaking of, going down to 241st in the Bronx, and then to Manhattan, changed my view of food for good. My years working with Jimme and Darren in Midtown, on the Upper East and Upper West Side, near Spanish Harlem on 90th and around Lincoln Center introduced me to great delis and bodegas. The best deli food I ever had from one at the crossroads between Broadway and Columbus between 65 and 66th Street, across from Lincoln Center. The smell of pastrami sizzling on the grill, the thick cuts of turkey and corned beef, the interracializing of cookies, my first taste of a blondie. It all happened there for me in ’84 and ’85, and sorry to say, I was spoiled by that food. Unlike the food I find outside of my kitchen these days (see my post “Washington, DC – Where Bad Food Abounds (DC/MD/VA)” from last month).

Sue’s Rendezvous, a strip club a block away from where Papa Wong’s used to be, Mount Vernon, NY, March 6, 2013. (http;//twitter.com).

It’s safe to say that these experiences had as much of an influence on what I eat and what I like to cook as growing up with a great cook in my mother at 616. I’d love to add Clover Donuts’ glazed donut and chocolate cake donut recipes to my repertoire. Not to mention those super-crispy pork egg rolls from Papa Wong’s. I loved it all, and I miss them all as well.

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"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.

Kufi Battles

15 Friday Feb 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"The Man In Black", A.B. Davis Middle School, Abuse, Bigotry, Bullying, Esau and Jacob, Fights, Geometry, Intimidation, Intolerance, Italian Club, Kufi, Lost (2004-10), Louis Cuglietto, Masculinity, Multicultural Education, Puberty, Rage, Tackles, The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

Slow-motion punch frame from Matrix Revolutions (2003), February 15, 2013. (http://theathleticnerd.com/).

Slow-motion punch frame from The Matrix Revolutions (2003), February 15, 2013. (http://theathleticnerd.com/).

My days as a kufi-wearing Hebrew-Israelite at school is one of those things I don’t spend much time on this blog talking about. Mostly because it involved defending myself to protect a piece of clothing and a religion in which I never fully believed, especially after early ’83. Plus, it involved fairly rare attempts in which dumb asses attempted to bully me. Compared to my now deceased idiot ex-stepfather’s abuse, no kid or wannabe thug after the summer of ’82 really stood a chance.

There were three incidents in eighth and ninth grade in which a kid got into a scuffled with me over my kufi, for whatever reason they’d invented in their head. The first was in February ’83, as one Black kid — probably about fifteen — snatched my kufi from my head and started to run up the basement hallway with it at Davis Middle School. The incident occurred as I, A and another member of A’s “Italian Club” entourage were in the middle of an errand for a teacher. I immediately ran the boy down, knocked him to the floor, dusted off my kufi, and put it back on my head. The boy got up and threatened to beat me up. It was at this point that A intervened, saying that he would “have to take us all on” if he wanted to fight me. A’s moment of support notwithstanding, I would’ve beaten the kid in the face as many times as it would’ve taken to get my kufi back.

Pittsburgh Steelers’ James Harrison sacks Baltimore Ravens QB Joe Flacco, AFC Division Round, January 15, 2011. (http://espn.go.com).

The second incident occurred a month later, prior to the opening morning bell at Davis. Out of the blue, “Little J” picked a fight with me, calling me a “dickweed” and a “shithead” for no reason at all. I hardly knew the Jewish kid, who immediately came at me to push, shove, throw punches, and grab at my kufi. It really was crazy for Little J to think that he had a shot at doing any damage. I was already five-eight. He was lucky if he was four-eleven and one hundred pounds after a potato latkes breakfast.

This wasn’t a fight. It was a pushing and shoving match, with me doing all of the pushing and shoving and Little J landing in bushes or on his ass. For seven minutes, he kept running at me, trying to throw a punch or kick me. I caught or blocked his attempts, grabbed him, and shoved him into the bushes near the boys’ entrance to Davis. By the sixth time, Little J was crying and his cheeks were fire truck-red, I was laughing and shaking my head, and the other Black boys at Davis were asking me what was going on. When I told them, they started laughing as well.

Beyond him grabbing at me and my kufi, I never knew what Little J wanting to fight me was all about. My guess then was that Little J was playing the role of Esau (the hairy brother of Jacob from the Bible, Torah and Qur’an) and didn’t like the fact that I claimed to be a descendant of the father of ancient Israel and his people.

The Man In Black (presumably Esau; played by Titus Welliver) with Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), from TV series Lost (2009-10), February 15, 2013. (http://magiclamp.org).

Incident Three occurred on my second day at Mount Vernon High School. After a day of assignments and learning the names of our new teachers, I went to Louis Cuglietto’s eighth-period Geometry class. It was on the first floor of the school, just to the right of the front entrance and the cafeteria. As I milled around the classroom looking to take my seat, my Latino classmate “N” came out of nowhere and snatched my kufi off my head.

“Give it back now!,” I yelled.

“Make me!,” N responded with a bit of sarcasm.

Just as he was about to throw it to another classmate. I grabbed N and knocked him to the floor. There we were, on the floor by the dark green chalkboard, me on top of N, who was struggling to hold on to my kufi. I lay on top of him, punched him in the face a couple of times, and took my kufi back from him just before Cuglietto came into the room. By this time everyone in our class had formed a circle to watch the spectacle. I don’t remember all of what Cuglietto said, but he did ask, “Do you want to get suspended?” After we dusted ourselves off, we went to our desks and got back to work.

For me, the incident marked a transition point in my life at school. This would be the last fight I’d have in school. Some people continued to try to verbally intimidate me. But they left it at that, probably because my height and my face said “Don’t mess with me” before I’d say anything.

The more immediate result was that I began to question more consciously my motives for defending myself as a Hebrew-Israelite. “Why do I care if N snatches my kufi from me?,” I said to myself on the way home from school that day. It wasn’t as if I truly believed in any of the teachings anymore. I definitely didn’t want anyone messing with me at home or in school. At the same time, I didn’t want to use up energy defending something in which I didn’t believe.

The Story of a Picture

12 Tuesday Feb 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, C-Town, Emotions, Greasy Face, hunger, lunch, Milk-n-Things, Mount Vernon High School ID, MVHS, MVHS ID Picture, Pictures, Poverty, Self-Reflection, Tandy, Tired, TRS-80

MVHS ID Picture (with horizontal flip), February 12, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

Many thanks to those of you who’ve responded so far to my post “Potential Boy @ The Window Book Covers” from last week. I truly appreciated all of the feedback and well wishes.

I’m sure that you noticed the one thing every potential front cover for the manuscript had in common — at least, besides the title. The picture I used on all the draft covers was of me not quite two months from my sixteenth birthday, my second Mount Vernon High School ID picture, taken in November ’85. I use this picture because there are only have a dozen or so surviving pictures of me from the period between February ’75 and November ’95.

Who knows? Between the extended Collins and Gill families, occasional photos taken by friends, acquaintances and colleagues, there could be another half-dozen more. A Sears portrait picture of me in March ’75, a couple of pictures that happened to include me from my senior year at MVHS, and a picture of me with my Uncle Sam at my graduation on June 18, ’87. That’s all I have to work with from the Boy @ The Window years, 1981-89.

There weren’t many opportunities for me to capture myself in picture mode during those years. But if I had to have one and only one picture that could encompass the physical and psychological strain, the emotional strife and torment that life and school was for me back then, the MVHS ID picture would be the one. As my good friend Cath already noted, I looked tired with “Samsonite” bags underneath my eyes the morning I took that picture.

That morning was Friday, November 8, ’85, and not a particularly memorable one at that. It seemed like I was always tired, especially before lunch, which was sixth period that year. Maybe I was hungrier than normal that morning, because I often went without. Or maybe, as usual, I hadn’t gotten a full night’s rest, sleeping in the same room with my older brother Darren and two of my younger brothers Maurice and Yiscoc. Or maybe it was a week of making extra runs to C-Town in Pelham or Milk-n-Things for food. It may well have been that I expended too much energy in Meltzer’s AP US History class second period, and I hadn’t properly paced myself.

Whatever it was, I was tired, more tired than usual. I was also fed up with the whimsical decisions of the mercurial staff at MVHS. They were the ones a full two months behind in taking ID pictures for our class, as our ninth-grade IDs were only designed to be actively used for two years. Yet they saw fit to pull us out of class fifth period to take pictures that second November Friday.

Tandy TRS-80 III, February 12, 2013. (http://oldcomputers.net/pics/).

It was bad enough I had to miss Ms. Walters’ Pascal class, where I was just starting to feel comfortable with the material and the Tandy TRS-80s (or Trash 80s, as we nicknamed them). Now the idiot powers that were had the entire Class of ’87 — more than 600 of us at the time — standing in a wrapping-around-the-room line adjacent to the cafeteria, waiting for them to take our ID pictures.

The process for me lasted over an hour, but not quite seventy-five minutes. By now, it was time for my sixth-period lunch. I’d grown tired of idiot kids trying to cut the line, hearing dumb-ass conversations about music and sports and hair, and standing while the numbskulls with the camera and laminate machine took forever to process one picture at a time.

When I finally came up, I was imagining myself with a baseball bat smashing up everything while screaming as loud as I could. Only to hear the idiot with the camera yell, “Smile for me, honey!” I was nobody’s “honey,” especially the middle-aged Italian woman yelling at me to smile on command! So I narrowed my eyes — and stopped just short of rolling them — and bit down on the right corner of my lip as they took my picture.

That I was in my ripped gray zip-up hoodie, with a faded powder-blue Puma t-shirt underneath it wasn’t a surprise. It was one of a combination of clothes I wore to school as part of my “five-day rotation,” as I called it back then (an homage to baseball). I wouldn’t have worn that combination, though, had I known that MVHS would have my picture taken that day.

I left the room, grabbed what I believe was “murder burgers and suicide fries” for lunch at the cafeteria, and torpedoed them down my throat about fifteen minutes before gym. I was poor, hungry, tired, pissed, determined and greasy, in so many more ways than one, that day — in fact, every day. For one picture on one day, though, I inadvertently showed it all.

Sarai, 30 Years Old Today

09 Saturday Feb 2013

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Child Abuse, Death, Forgiveness, Genetics, God, Hatred, Health Care, Ignorance, Mount Vernon Hospital, Neglect, Racial Stereotypes, Sarai, Sarai Washington, Sickle Cell Anemia, Stereotype Threat, Trait, Welfare

My sister Sarai (with Maurice) at 12 years old, Yonkers, NY, November 21, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

It’s another February 9, more than two and a half years since my sister Sarai Washington passed away from complications due to sickle-cell anemia at the age of twenty-seven. Today would mark her thirtieth birthday. But given how Sarai’s life began, given her disease and the average life expectancy of people with it, it’s just as well that she isn’t here to become thirty. Sarai would likely be in pain, with skin bruises and lesions, laying on a hospital bed, in the middle of yet another blood transfusion.

My sister’s life and death is a constant reminder to forgive. It especially reminds me that forgiveness for us simple, linear humans is a constant process. It’s one in which we overcome our own feelings with the determination to love and to seek wisdom and grace. That Sarai had to endure sickle-cell anemia for twenty-seven years, five months and two days — or 10,015 total days — could feel me with enough anger so that I’d spend the rest of my life in hatred and contempt.

Not so much toward God. Even in eighth grade, I knew enough to know that people often cause their own calamities, and yet choose to blame God for the perditious decisions they made. No, there was a time I blamed my Mom, from the time I learned that she was pregnant with Sarai and for years afterward. Why? Because I also knew about sickle cell anemia, how it was a genetic disorder, and how two people with the trait had a one-in-four chance of passing on the full-blown disease to one of their progeny. And I knew this because my Mom explained the basics of it to me when I was eight years old!

My mother worked at Mount Vernon Hospital, where they very well could’ve run a genetic test for the disease at the prenatal stage. Of course, that would’ve given my mother a rather difficult decision to make about my eventual sister’s viability. But then again, she knew before the birth of my other siblings Maurice and Yiscoc that my now deceased idiot stepfather also possessed the sickle-cell trait. That she didn’t have any of them tested was, well, lazy and shameful.

I could’ve easily blamed my now dead ex-stepfather Maurice. He was a walking disaster area, as everything he touched turned into crap. Maurice never did anything in his life that didn’t hurt someone at some point. He never once cared enough about Sarai (or any of his other kids, for that matter) to make sure they were born healthy and whole. Forget about what happened to them after they were born. Maurice’s only real interest was telling guys standing on corners about his latest sperm injection. He also liked to buy cigars after the women had to endure the pregnancy and labor, abandoned by him in all meaningful respects in the process.

And there’s the grudge I’ve held against myself. As I’ve said in Boy @ The Window and in various blog posts (including “Pregnant Pauses” from November ’12), I never wanted Sarai here in the first place. Not because I hated kids or her. I knew what her birth would mean, especially after a year in which we were without food at 616 one-third of the time and three weeks’ behind on rent every single month. With my mother’s hours cut at Mount Vernon Hospital, we were on the verge of going on welfare, and I’d been taught by my mom to hate that. We were about to become a racial cliché, living and breathing racial stereotypes, and that went against everything my mother and nearly two years of living as a Hebrew-Israelite had taught me.

So how do I forgive? It’s simple, really (well, maybe not so simple). Forgiveness for me is a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) moment. Jesus said on the cross, just before he died, “Forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” I realize that even when we think we know what we’re doing, we don’t really know — we’re not omniscient, after all. We’re never fully aware of the effects of our decisions and actions, of all the intricacies and long-term implications.

That’s why and how I forgave and forgive — my mom, Maurice and myself. It’s the one thing I can honestly say I learned from Sarai, especially today, on her thirtieth birthday.

Kidneys, Baking Soda & 240 East Third Street

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

240 East Third Street, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Arthur, Baking Soda, Black Migrants, Black Migration, Callie Mae, Cecil Parker Elementary, Child Neglect, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Drinking Buddies, Drug Abuse, Flu, Ida, Kidney Failure, Kidney Transplant, Lo, Mount Vernon Hospital, Nathan Hale Elementary, North Side, Poverty, South Side

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, 1lb Box, circa 1970s, February 6, 2013. (http://wackypackages.org).

I wrote at length thirteen months ago about the devolution of my mother and father’s marriage in ’76 and ’77, and how that led to an incident with a coffee table on or around my seventh birthday (see my post “Stomping in Coffee Table Glass” from December ’11). It was a difficult time in all of our lives, and my grades in second grade reflected this. Me and my older brother Darren had a different living arrangement from week to week between September ’76 and April ’77. But for my mom, it was life-threatening. No wonder my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father Jimme as if he were Deacon Jones and my father was Johnny Unitas!

Despite my mother’s (real and imagined) infidelity and her filing for divorce — or because of it — my father refused to move out of our second-floor flat at 425 South Sixth. From September ’76 through March ’77, he’d come and go as it pleased him. Jimme would be home for a few hours on a Wednesday, cut the cords to the telephone or dump my mom’s mink stole in a bathtub, and then be gone for another five days or a full week. If my mom somehow was home when Jimme was, they’d fight all hours. On the nights my mother was out with her bowling league, or with friends, or (presumably) with my eventual stepfather Maurice, she’d call us to make sure we were okay, only to find Jimme at the other end of the line, threatening to kill her and us.

Starting at the end of that September, barely a month into the school year, Darren and me found ourselves spending more and more time with our babysitter Ida at 240 East Third Street. For folks who have never been to this part of the Mount Vernon, New York’s South Side, the best thing to say about 240 East Third was that it was next door to an environmentally hazardous scrap metal yard. It was a dangerous place, one of extreme poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, a place in which the most recent of Black migrants from the South and their sons and daughters tried to make into a home.

240 East Third Street, Mount Vernon, NY, September 2007. (http://googlemaps.com).

Ida had been our babysitter for as long as long as we could remember. One of my first memories was calling her a “bitch” when I was three because she had made us a bubble bath out of very itchy Tide detergent. I didn’t know the full meaning of what I said, but Ida took a switch and whupped me anyway. Now we were living with her for days at a time, having to walk a mile down East Third, then South Fulton Avenue, and then Sanford Blvd to get to Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker Elementary). The irony was that our real home was just two doors down from the school.

That wasn’t the only irony. On the many days we spent with Ida, we also spent time with her friends, Callie Mae, Lo (short for Lorenzo) and Arthur. The reason we could spend so much time with these friends of my mom was precisely because they were Jimme’s friends originally. They were part of his circle of drinking buddies! And, with us already at 240 East Third, my father would swing around and drink to his heart’s content with all of them.

My mother, meanwhile, began experiencing what the doctors at Mount Vernon Hospital thought was mere signs of stress. Her kidneys, though, were shutting down, causing a multitude of health issues. She’d gone to see her primary care physician about this in October, then again in December and January. By the end of January ’77, my mother was stuck at the hospital, as her doctors at one point thought that she would need a fast-track to a kidney transplant. Keep in mind that this is ’77, so kidney transplants weren’t the exact science that they are today.

I ended up in the hospital with her in early February ’77, with a fever of 105°F. They put me in a bed near my mom, stuck a thermometer in my butt, and figured out that I had the flu. That I still have positive thoughts of this visit is a sure sign of delusion and the grimness of that time in our lives.

One human kidney, sliced open to reveal hydronephrosis, typically the obstruction of the free flow of urine from the kidney, February 6, 2013. (http://meducation.net).

Luckily, my mom and her doctors were smart enough to have a specialist from Westchester County Medical Center come in to check out her candidacy for a kidney transplant. He took one look at her labs and realized that she didn’t need a transplant after all. It turned out that my mom’s sodium levels were so low that they had caused the flow of fluids and waste through her kidneys to drop by something like 80 percent. The doctor’s solution was really simple. “Eat baking soda,” he told my mom and her doctors. That was in March ’77.

Two teaspoons of baking soda a day, to be exact. That’s what it took to bring my mom’s kidneys back to life and for my brother and me to finally move toward a more stable home situation at 616 (at least between April ’77 and the Hebrew-Israelite years). It wasn’t that I hated 240 East Third. I just hated what being there meant for us and for my mom.