Category Archives: race

Beyond The Asexual Me

14 Tuesday Jun 2011

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Janet Jackson & Justin Timberlake, one second from revealing more than concealing, Super Bowl 2004. Source: http://www.eurweb.com

The art of the personal essay or larger memoir is the balance between revealing and concealing. You don’t want to reveal too much, but just enough to tell a good and compelling story. You also don’t want to hide too much, because concealing degrades the honesty of the work. For me, though, today’s post reveals a bit more than I’m comfortable with, even though it may not reveal enough for some of you.

This time twenty years ago, even as much as I’d become a more open person and young man in most respects, I still struggled with my heterosexual identity. I’d dated off and on as an undergrad at Pitt and had a few sexual encounters. But I really wasn’t comfortable with any woman within three years of my age. They were often confused about men, themselves, and life in general. I had enough confusion in my life already from my Mount Vernon, New York years without spending time with another confused twenty-two-year-old whose goal in life was to be a professional student.

The personification of “another confused twenty-two-year-old” was my sometimes friend, sometimes more in “Another E” (see my post “The Power of Another E” from April ’09). By the time June ’91 rolled around, she’d bitterly disappointed me — again. E had stood me up for a date to see Godfather III, had stopped returning my phone calls, and somehow managed to duck me for lunch for more than two weeks. I was angry, more with myself than her, about how turned around I felt about this sudden loss of contact.

I wanted to move on, to get over the pedestal-building, damsel-in-distress paradigm that had been my relationship with girls and women since the days of Crush #1 (and the need to save my mother from my ex-stepfather) from so many years before. So I deliberately sought advice, deciding for once that I could live with the shame and embarrassment of liking a female who may have liked me well enough, but also enjoyed the thought of taking advantage of me.

A Black guy I worked with at the PAARC project at Western Psych was my key counsel. We’d become good acquaintances over the previous couple of months while he complained about his doctoral courses and I complained about the flat-butt Whites in charge of the project. On the first Saturday in June, he invited me and a couple of his closer friends over to his place on the North Side for barbecue and basketball. He killed me on the court, not telling me until he won 21-12 that he’d played as a starter on Grambling’s basketball team.

Later we talked about my troubles with E, in between the ribs and the beer on his over-leathery couch. After

Woman on a pedestal, with a man on his knees, in this case, me from '82 to '91, June 14, 2011. Source: http://elephantjournal.com

two minutes of hearing me pine and opine, he said, “She’s trifling, dude. Just ignore her and move on.” I said, “I’m not sure I can,” thinking, I don’t want to play games here. Then my friend explained that I needed to see E exactly the way I saw myself, as a flawed human being with human needs. That if she really liked me like she said, then she’d eventually give me a call or try to contact me. If not, then get out there in the world and find someone else to hook up with.

I left, reluctant about the man’s advice, but determined to do something besides feeling lonely all summer. For nearly a year, I’d lived in the East Liberty neighborhood, about a block away from a hole-in-the-wall bar that’s now a CVS on Penn Avenue. I’d thought about going in before, but that second Saturday in June ’91, I finally did, by myself, with no plans other than to observe the wild life. I witnessed two fights, at least two women too drunk to stand up, and a bartender that mixed drinks about as well as a seven-year-old making Kool-Aid.

Then I met her. An older woman — at least by my twenty-one-year-old standards — who was in much better shape than anyone I’d been in undergrad with. She started a conversation with me, and I engaged, something I usually avoided. After about fifteen minutes, our small talk that suddenly became very direct. We left, for my place.

It turned out that she was thirty-four, had been married once, and had two kids between ten and fifteen years old. She also had experience (no, not just that kind of experience) that taught me quite a bit in those months before my first year of grad school at Pitt. I learned that I liked older women — if by older, women between twenty-four and fifty — and that I was much more of a butt man than I was a breast man.

But I learned something much more valuable than developing a mental tape measurer. I learned that I could be intimate, really intimate with another person, with a woman, about who I was and wanted to be, without putting them on a pedestal and making them untouchable, heavenly beings. I learned that a sexual encounter could be both awkward and fun at the same time. I learned to see myself as a man, not just a young man or a man-child, but as a man and only a man, in no small part because of that encounter and that summer.

My Last Day

10 Friday Jun 2011

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My last day at MVHS was a complete blur of “goodbyes” to teachers and classmates who I considered friends and “good riddance” to some classmates and my wonderful incompetent and uncaring guidance counselor, Sylvia Fasulo. My eighth-period Health class was the last class I’d ever have at MVHS. It was the class where a drug-dealing-student who lived near East Lincoln and Sheridan had suggested that Saran Wrap was a good substitute for a condom. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that. After class, I walked down the second floor steps and the first floor halls of the high school to my locker one more time.

While clearing out my locker, Estelle Abel walked by and asked to meet with me. I went over to her office, and for the next fifteen minutes, she proceeded to explain to me how much of a disappointment I was while a student at MVHS. Abel claimed that I had underachieved throughout my four years as a student, that I should have been ranked in the top ten of my class, and that my performance in AP Physics was beyond abominable. All I could focus on was the amount of anger and emotion she possessed in her voice and eyes. You’d have thought that I’d been expelled from school or had raped her daughter.

There were two really odd things Abel said during her attack on my character. One was that I had let down the Black students of the school and “my community” by not finishing closer to the top of my class. She said, “You could’ve been a shining example of achievement to us,” all but hinting at Sam as the person I should’ve been like. I guess I did let my Black classmates down. I only ranked second in GPA among Black males and eighth among all African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in my class.

Abel’s other comments really surprised me.”You don’t have any excuses! There is nothing going on at home that could justify your performance.” When I disagreed, the Science department head’s face turned stern. She said that nothing occurring in my life would ever compare to the problems Blacks faced “back in the 1960s . . . I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King!” My mind clicked off my eardrums at that point. Short of showing her my war wounds and having her meet my family, what could I possibly do or say to that?

I left her office feeling like my years at MVHS and in Humanities were just bullshit. I was in a mood and in a mode in which I needed someone to be there for me, to not judge me, but to save me again. If anyone had walked up to me on my way home to tell me how great a place Mount Vernon was to live in, I would either chewed them out or punched them in the jaw. Mount Vernon, MVHS, Humanities, 616. I saw them as different sides of the same box, a place of isolation, ignorance, abuse and apathy, a macabre place where only the stereotypical and the cool could survive.

My opinion about Mount Vernon hasn’t changed much in the twenty-four years since Estelle Abel acted an ass with me present. Despite all attempts by former classmates and former neighbors to make Mount Vernon sound like, say, the Black suburbs of Atlanta, it isn’t that place, not by a long shot. When one in five residents are below the poverty line, with a school district among the worst in the state (even though I know it’s getting better), a crime rate that would make folks in the DC area take notice, and with a generational and ethnic divide still in existence, I think that it’s difficult to argue that Mount Vernon is a great place to live. But then again, I’ve seen the worst the former “city on the move” has to offer.

I guess that it wasn’t all bad. I miss Clover Donuts, Papa’s Wong’s, Prisco’s Used TVs and Radios, the Army-Navy store, Mount Vernon Public Library, some of my teachers, and a few folks I did get along with. Those places of business mostly don’t exist, the libraries I go to now are just as good and the buildings much better maintained, and many of the folks I liked are either dead or scattered to the four corners of the Earth. I guess that you can’t go home again, in this case, thankfully so.

With the exception of a few friends, 616 and Crush #2, I really had left Mount Vernon in my mind by the time I walked out of MVHS for the last time as a student. There are some things I wished I could’ve done growing up there. Like hanging out more, going to the basketball games and other sporting events. Or spending more time at public gatherings in Hartley Park or at th Wilson Woods pool. Yet it wasn’t to be. I was a Mount Vernonite, in it, but certainly not of it.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like I’ve ever really had a hometown, why I prefer my remains to be scattered in Seattle or in the Atlantic than buried in the city of my birth. All I know is that by the time of my last day at MVHS, twenty-two years ago to the date and day, my hometown had shown no interest in me or in my success. That, folks, is reason enough to not see a place you grew up in as your own.

Eugene Robinson Disses Black Generation X

08 Wednesday Jun 2011

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Disintegration Book Cover, June 8, 2011. Donald Earl Collins. Note the beat-up look of the cover, thanks to my wife, who had it for more than five months before I read it last week.

I finally got around to reading Eugene Robinson’s Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America this week. Despite my doubts, I hoped that the famed Washington Post columnist, MSNBC rock star and Pulitzer Prize winner would say something profound, or at the least, provocative. Not only did I not learn anything new in the three and half hours it took for me to read Disintegration. I learned that Robinson, like so many accomplished Blacks of his generation, doesn’t see Black Generation Xers when talking about the state of African America. The generational divide, perhaps the greatest example of disintegration that Robinson should’ve discussed, he rendered invisible throughout his book.

I know I’m late by Black literati standards in taking so long to sit down and read this book. After all, I bought the book this past Christmas as my personal birthday present. I had a feeling, though, that somehow, this book really wasn’t for me, a forty-one year-old Black Gen Xer who’s spent about half of my life thinking about this and other related issues. To slightly misquote Arnold Schwarzenegger from Total Recall, “Welcome to the party, Robinson!”

Over and over again in Disintegration, Robinson referred to the positions of Black Baby Boomers in a splintered Black America, as well as to the hopes, fears and aspirations of millennial generation African Americans (particularly on issues like the decline of interracial prejudice and educational attainment). I guess because Robinson mostly relied on his personal journey as a guide to understanding the history of African America’s disintegration — including using his sons as a time line template — it meant that folks born between ’65 and ’85 didn’t really count.

Unless, of course, they were part of the Abandoned class, the ones who found themselves increasingly poor and isolated after ’68 in communities like Shaw and U Street in DC. Or, in my case, on the South Side and other pockets of Mount Vernon, New York by the late 70s and ’80s. Then Robinson’s sympathetic voice kicked in, one which acknowledged all of the ills that one in four Blacks face every day. Still, Black Gen Xers are only in the Abandoned in Robinson’s mind and words by proxy.

There are far more obvious errors of omission in Robinson’s somewhat thought-provoking, 237-page column than leaving out an entire generation of post-Civil Rights era Black folk. Like Robinson stumbling his way into Thomas Sowell’s “model minority” argument like a punch-drunk boxer in the final round of a fight. Or, really, like a writer running out of steam at the end of a manuscript.

Robinson’s fifteen-page chapter “The Emergence (Part 1): Coming To America” is all about a new immigration wave of Blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean who are more highly educated than any other immigrant group arriving these days (and are better educated than most Americans, for that matter). Yes this is true in the aggregate. But besides a few examples that serve to exaggerate more than enlighten, Robinson’s analysis sounds like Sowell’s arguments from ’72. Only without the conservative policy implications and with a generous lack of sophistication in understanding the diversity within these immigrant groups.

There’s also the use of these troubling terms of Transcendent and Mainstream, both of which evoke a ’70s-style thinking about African Americans who’ve “made it.” How about “New Black Elite” and “Successful Yet Struggling Black Middle,” both of which are more accurate descriptors? I understand that Robinson’s purpose with Disintegration was to poke and prod readers, albeit in a light way. Still, the book seems written for what he would describe as aspiring Transcendents who are far too busy climbing social ladders to think about cultural and community disintegration post-1968, rather than those of us who do.

Which brings me back to Robinson’s Black Gen X blind spot. How is it possible that someone with the panache and diligence of Robinson could forget about the 26-46 year-old demographic in Disintegration? The reasons are as plain as the positions of prestige that Transcendent African American Baby Boomers occupy and cling to like a man with a fingernail death grip on a precipice. (And, despite Robinson’s protestations to the contrary, by his own definition, he and his family are Transcendent. Who else gets to hang out with Oprah and Vernon Jordan or do interviews with President Obama without being Transcendent?)

Me and my generation of Blacks had been written off by Robinson’s gangs of elites and wannabe elites by the time I was a college freshman at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87. Our ideas about the disintegration of Black America and what that has meant over the past forty years are undoubtedly fresher. Yet we as a group aren’t asked about our ideas. Apparently when Black America disintegrated, we fell into a black hole. At least in Mr. Robinson’s neighborhood.

Know Food, Know The World

04 Saturday Jun 2011

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Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Icing, 2011. Source: http://www.tastebook.com

I don’t really dedicate much of my blogging to what I do these days, my college teaching work. I guess that I kick up enough dust talking about my Mount Vernon years, my Humanities years, my Carnegie Mellon years, and my former jobs and bosses as it is.

But this is a fairly positive post (mostly, anyway). It about something that I learned recently while teaching one of my World History courses. Something so simple that it’s amazing sometimes how stupid I can be.

I realized one day in discussing the age of exploitation, um, well, exploration that one of the best ways to think about this period — heck, any period in world history, really — begins and ends with one word: food. I’d taught this course a couple of times for University of Maryland University College already. Not to mention having served as a teaching assistant under the great Peter Stearns while a grad student at Carnegie Mellon a decade and a half before (see my “Ego Inflation” post from last month).

German Chocolate Cake, 2011. Source:http://blogs.courier-journal.com. Meet a cake that was never German, but named by an English guy. And, since when do coconuts grow in Europe or the US?

But on that fall evening in ’09, looking at exploration patterns, commerce patterns and the state of the world circa 1600 CE, it hit me how I could just about reorganize every aspect of the way I’d been teaching World History by just looking at how much food has influenced it. Every bite we take, everything we imbibe, has some history attached to it, and with it, stories of bloody conflict, imperial conquest or rare attempts at true humanity and cooperation.

This is about much more than Jared Diamond’s books on the rise and fall of civilizations because of resources and the lack thereof. Commodities like salt, sugar, black pepper and olive oil have all been written about over the past fifteen years. It’s fairly obvious that these spices and other foodstuffs were fundamental in the histories of the Middle East, ancient Greece and Rome, India, Timbuktu and Western Europe over the past 5,000 years.

Still, I’m not really talking about that kind of history, either. It’s more about something as simple as taking a modern dish and using its ingredients to tell a story. Take something like a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. If the ingredients are natural and not ones cooked up at a chemical plant in northern New Jersey, then they’ve come from all over the world. Cocoa, the main ingredient to mix with the flour, is from the cacao plant, which originally from South America, but is primarily produced in sub-Saharan Africa. Sugar’s needed to sweeten it, and though originally from India, has been grown in Florida, Louisiana and in the Caribbean for centuries. One of the main economic drivers for the enslavement of Africans was the European need to rot out their teeth with the stuff.

Vanilla extract or vanilla beans are originally from Mexico and other parts of Central America. But the largest producers of it are Indonesia and especially Madagascar. There’s history in every gram of devil’s food cake with vanilla icing that we eat.

You could do the same thing with a “traditional” Chinese stir-fry. Especially if ingredients like baby corn or

Sweet-and-sour-chicken, 2011. Source: http://www.foodnetwork.com

sweet and sour sauce are added to the mix. That’s because baby corn and tomatoes (the latter the main ingredient in sweet and sour sauce) are both from the Americas, not Asia or Europe. Both arrived in Ming China nearly 500 years ago.

Every dish, whether invented in 2011 CE or 2011 BCE, has a rich story attached to it. From that story, we can all find important patterns in world history, cultural development, domination and destruction within. It may not be the most profound thing I’ve ever stumbled upon. Still, I didn’t get this from Peter Stearns or Jared Diamond. If anything, I might’ve gotten this from Forrest Gump.

GOP/TPers’ Theme Music for Election 2012

30 Monday May 2011

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Huckabee with Ted Nugent on guitar, Huckabee Show, FOX News Channel, May 14, 2011. Source: http://dailymail.co.uk

Ever since Mike Huckabee announced that he wasn’t running for POTUS in the Election ’12 cycle (after playing chords with Ted Nugent), I’ve been thinking about an appropriately snarky and sarcastic way to understand the GOP/Tea Party candidacy process. It’s been a bit confusing. Between Trump and Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain, Pawlenty and Romney, Palin and Bachmann, I’d have a hard time finding a candidate I’d vote for even if I were a true American conservative.

But I do know what would help. Theme music to get our juices flowin’, to rile us up about how excited we should be that among these candidates is a challenger worthy of President Barack Obama. Heck, it’s worked before. Ed Meese and Don Regan used Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses” as theme music in ’84. This despite the fact that these were protests songs of an America anti-common man and pro-war.

GOP/TPers can do the same in ’12. Here’s a list of songs to usurp — oops, I mean use — between now and November 6 of next year.

1. Genesis, “Illegal Alien” (1983), as in, “It’s no fun/being an illegal alien” — especially if the GOP/TPers take over in ’12.

2. James Blunt, “No Bravery” (2005), a truthful description of what it takes to run on the GOP/TP ticket, i.e., no independent thought.

3. ABC, “How To Be A Millionaire” (1985), which should be retitled, “How To Be A Billionaire,” since that’s the ultimate goal of the leaders of the GOP – “a million is not enough” could be the party’s new slogan.

4. U2, “Crumbs From Your Table,” (2004), which, if these folks are elected next year, will be all we’ll have to eat by the ’16 election cycle.

Crumbs on my table, courtesy of Noah's old elephant and a Lipton tea bag wrapped around trunk, May 30, 2011. Donald Earl Collins.

5. Chicago, “Hard Habit To Break,” (1984), especially in the refrain, “I’m addicted to you,” meaning easy money from top 1%, debt and low taxes, and oil, oh, sweet crude oil!

6. The Cranberries, “Zombie,” (1994), the sincerest hope of the GOP/TPers when it comes to what’s left of our voting populace.

Herman Cain, They Think You're Stupid Book Cover (more like We Think You're Stupid), 2009. Source: National Black Republican Association, http://nbra.info

7. Al Green, “One Of These Good Old Days,” (1972), a tribute to the way the Party of Corporations wants things to be for rich – it’s their climax song!

8. Prince, “1999,” (1983), except they would definitely change it to “1899,” the height of affluent largesse, corporate greed and monopoly-building (until the ’00s), and acceptable racism.

9. Creed, “My Own Prison,” (1997), one of the ultimate dreams of the GOP/TPers, that we’d build our own prisons and then put ourselves in them so they don’t have to worry about job creation.

10. Grover Washington, Jr., “Summer Chill,” (1992), what the party hopes their paid-off scientists can “prove” in a new study funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, and the Scaife Foundations, making “Drill, baby, drill” a reality in ANWR.

11. Public Enemy, “Welcome To The Terrordome,” (1989), most likely would be used by the GOP/TPers to promote gladiator-like games as a way to bring the unemployment rate down for those they can’t get to build their own prisons.

12. Sade, “The Sweetest Taboo,” (1985), a tribute to all of their in the closet and anti-gay party members willing to sacrifice the civil and human rights of LGBT Americans everywhere for a seat in Washington.

13. Maxwell, “…Til The Cops Come Knockin’,” (1996), the general plan for all elected GOP/TPers until they’re caught in illegal activities.

In addition, there’s Alexander O’Neal’s “When The Party’s Over” (1987), another example of what would happen to us, our country and our world if the GOP/TPers reclaimed and remained in charge. They’d suck the bottom ninety-nine percent of us dry until the good times are over, and then blame us for not letting them steal the plumbing, too. Please add to this list. I could’ve created an iPod list of a hundred appropriate songs, but fourteen’s just a start. Eat your heart out, Ted Nugent!

Black Male Id-entity & the F-Bomb

26 Thursday May 2011

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Gay Rights Month isn’t for another six days, as it’s still May. But in light of Joakim Noah’s unfortunate anti-gay slur outburst, “Fuck you, faggot!,” it makes sense to start this year’s conversation a week early.

This is more than about the NBA, gay athletes in the closet or what professional athletes should and shouldn’t say to fans and to each other. The behind-the-curtain issue here could just as well be about Black male identity (whether heterosexual or gay) and how Black males express themselves to each other and to the rest of the world.

My first memories playing with a group of Black males in Mount Vernon, New York are all negative. When I was six in ’76, a group of preteens on the neighborhood playground near Nathan Hale Elementary on South 6th Avenue tried to force me into sucking one of their dicks, practically sticking it in my face to do so. I got away before being truly scarred for life. After we moved to 616 East Lincoln Avenue in April ’77, our first time playing outside was spent running away from the other kids, who greeted us by throwing rocks at us and calling me and my brother Darren “faggots.” (see my June 1, 2009 post, “In the Closet, On the Down Low” for more).

When I was nine, I played basketball on a court near 616 for the first time with a group of kids from my building. After throwing up an awkward brick and an air ball, I got five minutes of “You terrible!,” “You need to sit down!,” “You’re never gonna be an athlete!,” “You need to get back to reading them books of yours!,” and “You shoot like a faggot!”

Even though I eventually learned how to dribble with both hands, shoot a j, make layups, block shots, and on rare occasions, dunk a basketball, I’ve been leery being around other Black males on the basketball court. One would think after playing pickup with former Pitt basketball players while in grad school that I’d completely forgotten what happened to me back in the spring of ’79. But I hadn’t, at least on an unconscious level. I often watched what I said, I mean, down to every single word. Not to mention how I walked, where my arms were, and how I held my head. Still, I sometimes felt inadequate on the court, whether I went 8-for-9 or 2-for-7, blocked a shot, stole a ball, or got knocked down guarding someone six-foot-six and 260 pounds.

But I figured out something in those years of playing pickup at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon and other places in Pittsburgh and DC over the years. That blending in doesn’t matter. Fools — even ones with momentary lapses in judgment like Joakim Noah — will be fools because on the playground or court, it makes them cool in the minds of their peers.

Yes, this isn’t just a Black male issue. Sean Miller, currently coach of the University of Arizona men’s basketball team — not to mention an all-time Pitt basketball great — once played a prank on me our freshmen year. He called me up in my Lothrop Hall dorm room late one night, offered me a blow job, and called me a “faggot” in the process.  So being called a “faggot” or saying that something or someone is “gay” is part of our culture on and off the basketball court, for Black and White males to be sure.

But unlike Michael Wilbon, I can’t excuse it because it’s commonplace and therefore it may be difficult for some young men to immediately stop themselves from saying “faggot.” Nor can I rationalize this like Touré (a.k.a. TouréX on Twitter) attempted to do in a Twitter exchange with me a couple of days ago. He compared the use of “faggot” to “nigga,” with the idea that both words have more than one meaning and that the meaning can sometimes be positive, depending on context.

I can see the argument for “nigga,” even though I don’t like it when younger men use it to affirm each other and especially me. But “faggot” meaning “less than a man?” Or “stupid” or “dumb?” So is Noah or Kobe more of a man for telling someone else they’re not a man? Even in context, this isn’t positive — it’s potentially soul-destroying, and not just for someone being called a faggot.

Of the preteens and young boys who called me “faggot” growing up, at least three have served hard time. Is there a direct connection? Of course not. Still, it seems that a culture steeped in the requirement of being cool, finding quick and easy success and putting down others while doing so lends itself well to a crash-and-burn mentality that so many of us have about our lives.

Balkis Makeda’s 2nd Coming

23 Monday May 2011

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Queen of Sheba traveling to Solomon: A fresco in Ethiopia, Date Unknown. Source: http://www.expedition360.com/journal/archives/2007/05/. In public domain.

Yesterday, my youngest brother Eri turned twenty-seven (Happy Birthday again, bro!). He was the fourth baby my mother gave birth to in a five-year span. I’d been pissed before about all that had happened with us regarding my mother, my stupid (ex)-stepfather, our poverty and being on welfare, and the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing. But now, along with Eri’s birth, came with it an elderly trespasser at 616, courtesy of the fifty-four-inch waist — and waste — of an idiot Maurice.

You see, my stupid stepfather invited his Hebrew-Israelite matriarch “Balkis Makeda” to stay with us. The woman claimed to be a reincarnated Balkis Makeda (Queen of Sheba and wife of King Solomon of the ancient Israelites), and was the catalyst in Maurice’s Hebrew-Israelite conversion during his separation from Mom between October ’80 and April ’81.

Because of Maurice — um, excuse me, Judah ben Israel — and our fearless leader “Balkis Makeda,” we followed a number of un-Torah-like practices. This included the requirement that we all were to believe that she was the reincarnation of the Queen of Sheba, living among us in the twentieth century as an average person and showing us the way to Yahweh and ultimate truth.

Bar of Ivory Soap, December 28, 2009. Source: Erin Gifford, http://couponcravings.com/2009/12/cvs-free-ivory-soap.html.

We stopped using Ivory Soap at home because our leader had a dream once about rats gnawing on a bar of it. Baby Maurice couldn’t use a soap that’s 99.44 percent pure because of Makeda’s dream, and we switched to Zest. (The real reason, I think, was because the soap was white — like Whites ethnically — and considered the opposite of pure by many in the Hebrew-Israelite community).We weren’t allowed to use the word “Hello” when greeting someone in person or when answering the telephone. Maurice explained that “Hello’s got the word Hell in it, you know, Hell-low!” We’d somehow be committing someone to eternal damnation with a universal English greeting.

Now in her seventies and in declining health, the geezer was moved in before Mom could seriously object. What a situation! Six kids, including me, plus Mom, Maurice, and an old woman living together in a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. We now needed to behave like good little Hebrew-Israelites with this woman in our house, so as to not embarrass my stepfather. Yeah, right!

One of the other rules of our absurdly orthodox practice was that Mom couldn’t cook or do any familial tasks for the next three months. She was “unclean” because she’d just given birth to Eri. This might’ve made sense in the deserts of ancient Canaan, with no antibiotics and drugs to deal with unclean issues of blood and other bodily fluids. It didn’t now. Plus I didn’t remember Mom not cooking for three months after Yiscoc and Sarai were born. This was suck-up time, plain and simple.

Maurice made what was an abyss of bad even worse by cooking dinner for three days. Three straight nights of over-boiled and under-ripened cabbage drenched in its own juices and seasoned to high heaven with red and black pepper. My stepfather could’ve been the founder of a new weight-loss diet. Mom, of course, asked me to take over her cooking duties, which I did for the next six weeks (see my “Top Cook” post from May ’09).

The woman couldn’t stand us, and especially couldn’t stand me. She probably sensed how much I couldn’t

A child in the Black Hebrews community, in Dimona, Israel, September 5, 2005. Source: Dror Eiger, http://flickr.com/photos/95465714@N00/41252116. In public domain, as file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

stand her and her idiotic notions of Judaism, even with the context of being a Hebrew-Israelite. All I knew was that when I cut through all of the words and nuggets of truth, ritual and superstition, that “Makeda” was full of crap, and had fostered the conversion of my stupid stepfather, the only person I knew who was even more full of crap than her. I was already a Christian in the closet by then. Now I faced the prospect of revealing my spiritual conversion in the middle of such a grand mess. But I knew I had little other choice.

Within weeks of “coming out” to Mom, Maurice and my classmates at Mount Vernon High School (see my post “Kufi Emancipation Day” from September ’09 for more), the older woman moved out, under pressure from Mom. Both, ironically, were under pressure from me, as I threatened to move out myself. She died in Section 8 housing on Mount Vernon’s South Side in February ’85. I dare say that she wasn’t the reincarnated Makeda. For the only one who could’ve learned a lesson from a lifetime of poverty and cult-like rituals would’ve been her, not us.