Category Archives: race

We Are Family

04 Saturday Apr 2009

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Skyline of downtown Houston from Sabine Park, Houston, Texas, July 15, 2010. (Jujutacular via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

This weekend marks fifteen years since visited my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta (believe it or not, Atlanta is technically farther west than Pittsburgh) or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

I was really on my way to New Orleans for the first time. A conference presentation proposal I put together with my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, my professor, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April.

The only reasonable flight I could book was with Continental, flying me into Houston first, then a crop duster connection to Nawleans. Since I knew I had family in Houston, I managed to get something that is very hard to do in the post-9/11 age — an extended layover. Because my mother only had infrequent contact with her brothers, I had to do some pre-Google detective work. I went to Hillman Library and pull out old phone books to look up numbers for my uncles Paul, George, Hobart, Darryl and Robert.

It turned out that my Uncle Paul was no longer in Houston, that my uncles George, Hobart and Darryl constantly moved — their numbers weren’t always up to date — but my mother did have my Uncle Robert’s number. But him and his wife had fought over a telephone bill in ’89. And because my Uncle Robert refused to pay the bill, their phone service had been cut off for nearly five years. So I wrote my Uncle Robert about a month before to let him know I was coming. I also lucked out, finding a recent number for my Uncle George, which linked me to his new number. Between the letter and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

It was a 6 am flight that my Carnegie Mellon colleague Marilyn Zoidis dutifully dropped me off for, picking me up around 4:30. It was still in the 40s, with the high that cloudy day 53 degrees. I barely went through security and boarded my flight at the barely two-year-old Pittsburgh International Airport when I just fell asleep. I was on my first flight to somewhere other than New York or Pittsburgh, and I slept through it as if I took this flight all of the time. I remember being more excited about meeting them than about the AERA annual meeting. Yet the only thing I thought of for two and a half hours was something in the middle of dreamland.

We landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they knew me a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

We got in George’s car, but about five minutes in, I had to ask them to open up the windows. It was 78 degrees in Houston, and it was just after 10 am by the time I had taken off my Georgetown sweatshirt. We stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the third ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them like me calling them “Uncle,” with me twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my mother] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of slightly younger brother at forty-three or forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

I found out that someone on the Gill side besides me and my mother had made it to college, that my Uncle Paul used basketball to make it to the University of Houston, as part of Phi Slamma Jamma in the early ’80s with Clyde Drexler, among others. He left a year early to play in the NBA for the 14-68 Houston Rockets in the ’82-’83.  My Uncle Paul played 28 games that year, before his knee problems and relative lack of talent (he’d likely be a starter on one of today’s weaker teams) left him without a basketball career after that season. But he also pulled himself up, went to ITT Technical Institute to learn about using laser technologies and lighting for entertainment purposes, and broke into the world of entertainment as a freelance laser light and lighting technician. As I’d learn more about the following month when I visited my Uncle Paul in Atlanta, he had worked with Earth, Wind and Fire and New Edition on their tours in the late ’80s, and was living as if he were playing in the NBA.

I learned a lot that weekend, had a lot of fun with family, and learned more about my mother’s side of my family in two days than I had in my twenty-four years on planet Earth. That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. Although they did follow my mother’s example by playing sports, getting their high school diplomas, and leaving Bradley, Arkansas and cotton country for a better future somewhere else. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

On People and Stress

28 Saturday Feb 2009

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

Stress sandwich in the form of a brain, November 16, 2013. (http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/).

As February draws to a close, I’m reminded of the fact that, like now, the last days of February in ’89 and ’90 for me represented small yet telling changes in my life. Like buying my first CD player in February ’90. It changed my relationship to music forever, as I never fell behind any trend I wanted to keep up with again. It gave me more opportunities to experiment with and experience jazz, smooth jazz (formerly known as jazz fusion), rap, Latin music, and even grunge. That Aiwa player lasted me through all of grad school, and made it easy to forget that there was ever a time when I didn’t have access to music.

But enough with more pleasant experiences in late February. Overall, the two and a half years between my five days of homelessness at Pitt and a semester of financial woes and the start of grad school were fun times, but were stressful times, with a steep learning curve to boot. Obviously, they weren’t as stressful in most ways as now — but they reflect how my world view began to grow up in the months after recovering from being on the edge of dropping out from Pitt.

By the end of February ’89, I found myself in a bit over my head as a student and worker. It was manageable only because I had already begun the process of leaving all things 616 and Mount Vernon at 616 and in Mount Vernon when I wasn’t home or on one of my weekly phone call listening to my griping mother. Even though I could see that the day was coming when my stepfather would no longer be my stepfather, I had decided to leave that situation be — unless he was attempting to hurt my mother again, of course. It was a pattern that would continue beyond my mother’s second marriage until the summer of ’91, when I had made the switch to Pittsburgh as home. It’s funny to think about now. Having pushed all of my past, my feelings and thoughts about Mount Vernon to the back of my brain stem during those school years. Putting aside what was going on at Pitt during the summers I worked at home.

I did slip up sometimes. I paid a heavy price when I slipped up in Mount Vernon, especially around my mother. I had to explain away my anger, changes in language (it was harder for me to code switch back then), and education whenever I displayed the Pitt version of me. It scared her that I was “puttin’ on airs,” as if I could hide years of accelerated education. It was hard enough hiding my rage against all that had happened at home after ’81.

At Pitt, I acted as if I didn’t have a past before the summer of ’87, so my slip ups were pretty rare. But when I did slip up, it usually involved a woman at some level. The spring of ’89 was no different. I had already set myself up for a rough semester. Sixteen credits of courses in existential philosophy, macroeconomics, Shakespeare, the second half of Biology, and the writing seminar for history majors. The last was a course I’d been advised to wait to take until my senior year. On top of that, I was working for Pitt’s computer labs on a near full-time schedule. From the end of January through the second week in April, I averaged thirty-six hours a week. And all for $4.15 an hour. We were short-staffed, and after a semester of near starvation, I needed the money. That I had a 4 pm to midnight shift at the Cathedral of Learning labs on Mondays and an 8 am Tuesday macroecon lecture on Tuesdays didn’t help — I rarely made it to that class. Other than the occasional outing or movie, I had no social life for most of that jam-packed semester.

It was during my work days that I began working with P. She was a twenty-six-year-old peroxide-blond party girl who’d come back to school and ended up an Information Systems major. Sometimes I ended up paired with her on my Monday evening shifts. I liked talking to her during those shifts to pass the time when I couldn’t concentrate on evolutionary theory in second-semester Bio or didn’t feel like reading more existential philosophy. But I wasn’t interested in her. Despite the fact that she was the first White woman I’d met in Pittsburgh that had anything other than a flat butt and that she’d occasionally said something interesting, P. was out-of-sight and mind when my shift was over.

Three weeks into the semester, the reason we became so short-staffed had thrown a party at his apartment on North Craig in North Oakland. This co-worker had taken a job to work for AT&T somewhere in Virginia, a job that would start at the beginning of March. He wanted to celebrate, so he invited all of us over. I liked the man, so I went. I got there and it was as insane a scene as I’d seen in the dorms my freshman year or with my father at the bars in the city. The place was barely lit. It had this moody dark red glow in his living room, with every other room lit for making out. Booze and boozers were everywhere, and almost everyone was in some phase of inebriation.

I got in, and P. started talking to me all crazy, as if we’d been in conversation about our sexual preferences in the past. I pulled away from her, had conversations with my former computer lab boss and a few co-workers, had a customary drink—my first beer since just before Thanksgiving ’87—and left.

At least I was trying to. As I began putting on my coat and scarf, P. came out and put her arms around my neck and her left leg in between mine, pushing me up against the foyer wall in the process.

“You can’t leave now,” she said, her eyes glazed and bloodshot.

I didn’t say anything, I just tried to get her arms from around me.

“I know you’re attracted to me . . . that you like this White girl,” P. said as she tried to kiss me.

“You’re drunk!,” I said in response as I finally managed to unhook her from my neck and body.

“I might be drunk, but you can still get laid,” she said as I shook my head and left.

I assumed that P. had too much to drink and that what happened at the party was the end of it. It wasn’t, not by a long shot. All through February and early March she worked hard to bait me into conversations that were all about sexual innuendo. During one Saturday project when we were installing new PCs and new software, P. called me a “useless prick.” I responded, “Just because you think you have a nice butt doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be attracted to you!” I pretty much tried to avoid her after that.

That was hard to do, because I worked so many hours that semester, and because our new boss was a high school friend of P. Once I finally cut my hours so I could concentrate on being a student again, at the beginning of April, my boss, who knew what was going on, told me that I had a “bad attitude” and that I needed to settle up with P.

My response was to resign my position before I found myself fired or accused of sexual harassment by the very person who was harassing me. I sent a detailed email at the end of that semester to my boss’ bosses about the incidents with P., about the lack of persons of color on staff, about the state of computing labs at Pitt in general. It made me a bit of a muckraker, but I noticed that there were more students of color on staff when I came back to Pitt that fall.

It didn’t really help my view of White women either. Not that I had formed any real opinion about them. It did make me realize how difficult it would be to be in a mixed relationship, especially in the conservative world of Western Pennsylvania. The race issue and all of the innuendo and stereotypes would likely get in the way, unless both folks in the relationship were far more enlightened than a twenty-six-year-old party girl and a nineteen-year-old discovering himself for the first time. I wasn’t even ready for a relationship with my nerdy yet attractive Black female friends. Anything more complicated, even a one-night stand with a White woman, was the equivalent of achieving peace in the Middle East, that’s how alien it seemed to me at the time.

Still, I was kind of thankful to be done with computing labs and being seen only as a “computer guy.” I had changed my major to history, been journaling on my own for the first time since I was fifteen, began hanging out with a diverse group of friends and acquaintances, and discovered myself as attractive for the first time in years. I left Pitt more content than pissed about what happened that semester. I left that semester knowing that I had the capacity to handle any situation, even the adult ones, as an adult.

On Public Enemy and Eclectic Music

31 Saturday Jan 2009

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PE, Fear Of A Black Planet (1990) Album Cover

Tomorrow’s an important milestone in my life. Nineteen years ago, I went to a Public Enemy concert with one of my Pitt friends. It was a Thursday evening engagement at the old Syria Mosque, a weird name for a place that was a entertainment hall, not a place of worship. I believe it was a Masonic temple, one located less than two blocks from Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning on Bigelow Blvd near or on Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t the beginning of my interest in hip-hop, my friendly date for that evening, or maintaining an eclectic sense of thought and style. But it confirmed in many ways how unbounded my mind was, regarding music and so much else.

I’m still amazed at times what I’ve come to like over the past three decades of almost continuous music consumption, as reflected when I allow my iPod to randomly select from some 1,300 songs. My home life at 616 wasn’t much of a guide. My mother liked Al Green, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Temptations and The Four Tops. My idiot stepfather loved The Ohio Players and The Commodores. My alcoholic father was into anything that he could snap his fingers to off- rhythm, including Motown, and especially James Brown. I guess that makes sense, since Jimme and the Godfather of Soul spoke in the same incomprehensible cadence. For me, it all started with Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Fantasy.” I just happened to catch it on the radio one day, it must have been on WBLS 107.5 FM, sometime in second grade, ’76-’77 for me. I loved the song, I don’t know why, but it was literally the first time I consciously came into contact with music.

Two years later, I had a much easier way of gaining exposure to music without waiting for my mother or stepfather to turn on my mother’s beat-up stereo system from her days with my father. One of the first things Jimme bought me and my brother Darren after we started our occasional weekend times with him was a small transistor radio. It had both FM and AM, which in the days of the late ’70s was a relatively new technology. Both me and my older brother would play around with the radio, but I used it more often. I eventually settled on two stations — WABC 77 AM and WBLS.

Because I had no immediate guide as to what to listen for, my criteria for music was to like whatever sounded good as it bounced around my ears and brain. Frank Sinatra, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, E ,W & F, Christopher Cross, Michael Jackson (the Off the Wall album), Stephanie Mills, Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, The Commodores (post-funk — my stepfather made me sick of “Brickhouse“) and so on. I loved how WBLS signed off at the end of the night, with “Moody’s Mood for Love,” a song from the mid-’50, with the “there I go, there I go, there I go” refrain at the beginning of the song. Call me weird, but this is where my eclecticness started.

The summer of ’80, just before my mother and stepfather separated for the first time, we went to a concert in the park, somewhere in the Bronx, most likely Van Cortlandt Park between 242nd and 262nd. It was a rap concert, my first one, and it featured Sugar Hill Gang among others. I kind of liked it, especially since I couldn’t believe how quickly the rappers put words together in combination and in rhythm. It was as silly as it was profound, at least for me at ten. I liked it, but it wasn’t exactly playing on every radio station in New York. Even WBLS almost completely ignored rap in those days. My stepfather bought their album soon after that concert.

For the next year, my musical tastes continued to take shape, including Pink Floyd, Queen, Luther Vandross, REO Speedwagon, Kenny Rogers, Kenny Loggins, Genesis and Phil Collins, along with what I already liked. Then my stepfather came back into our lives with his Hebrew-Israelite religion, disrupting the songs in my head for a few years. My saving grace, in the weirdest of ways, was being in Humanities, the gifted track program in which I was enrolled for six years.

I’ve counted off numerous negatives about this program in this blog over the past nineteen months. One positive, though, at least for me, was the rich mix of pop culture in the classroom. I could vicariously keep up with music through the singing of classmates, the music that some of them would play on their radios, boom boxes, and their first Walkmans. I learned to despise The Who, like The Police, tune out the heavy metal, continue to feel ambivalent about rap, and wish I didn’t have to wait for my classmates or for a trip to a grocery store to keep up with music’s constant evolution. Much of the rest around my explorations of pop music and rock, of silliness and search for spiritual meaning, I’ve described in my previous postings.

Like many folks in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I became caught up in this sense of affirming or reaffirming my sense of Blackness, of understanding my world through the lens of race, of attempting to make sense of Afrocentricity and how I fit or didn’t fit into it. One of my grad school friends tried to define this as a period of renewed Black pride, between roughly ’88 and ’92, with the rise of what he called “Afrocentric rap,” including Arrested Development, Digable Planets, Wu-Tang, and of course, PE. I think that’s a bit too cerebral, and that’s saying a lot. For me, it was a period of experimentation and discovery, between ’87 and ’95, when hip-hop evolved and devolved between socially-conscious messages, materialism, and socially-conscious messages through materialism. That’s what PE represented for me, even before I left for Pitt in ’87.

By the beginning of the new decade, the ’90s, I’d already been reconfiguring my inner and outer musical soundtrack for more than two years. I had already weeded out such wonderful artists and groups such as Thompson Twins, Starship, Glass Tiger (don’t ask), Whitney Houston (can’t listen to anything from her first two albums) and other things that one should only listen to while snorting coke. As soon as I found out that PE was coming to Pittsburgh to play songs from Fear of a Black Planet and from their other albums, I went over to Syria Mosque and snapped up two tickets, presuming I could get one of my friends to come with me to see them perform.

I knew who to ask and why. As much as any person over the years, this friend made me feel all right about my eclectic music tastes, partly because hers were almost as eclectic as my own. Other than my wife, who loves Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry along with Talib Kweli and Blind Willie Johnson (’20s era Blues), I can’t think of another person who’s influenced my musical likings more. I mean, how many Blacks did I know who both liked The Beatles and PE, unless they were artists like Doug E. Fresh or Grandmaster Flash?

It was a great concert, probably the best concert I’ve ever been to (not that I’ve been to all that many over the years). It made me realize that music was truly universal, that there was some merit to any music genre, no matter how silly, serious or scintillating. I felt connected again, in that music was about more than my enduring march of miracles and fantasies, of using it as an escape or as a way to motivate myself academically or otherwise. It was something to enjoy, to read into it as much or as little meaning as I wanted. It was a way to build connections to other people, to form friendships and relationships. And it was a way to map the events that unfolded in my life. That PE concert wasn’t the beginning of my modern eclecticism of music, and it was hardly the end. But it really did help.

Early November

08 Saturday Nov 2008

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I don’t usually have much to say about my life during the month of November. It’s usually been a lackluster month, at least until Thanksgiving. But there are a couple of interesting things to note about early November that have occurred in my life in recent years.

Election Day 2000, Tuesday, November 7, was the day of my first interview with my last full-time employer, a nonprofit organization called AED (aka Academy for Educational Development). I wasn’t exactly euphoric about Gore’s prospects at beating W, but I was hopeful. I brought that sense of hope and optimism with me to my first interview. After a year and a half of working with a small civic education organization that didn’t care very much about education, I was ready for something more in line with my interests in helping others and a better fit for my talents as an educator and thinker. I was blown away by the ambiance of the organization. Its expensive artwork, spacious conference center and conference room, its professional, almost corporate style gave me confidence that I would be a better fit with them than with my employer at the time.

If I’d paid closer attention, I would’ve recognized two or three glaring signs that would’ve warned me against taking a job there. One was my eventual immediate supervisor, who seemed extremely nervous around me. At the time, I took it as him being a generally nervous man. Yet given how often he mentioned his two masters degrees during the interview process, I should have acknowledged that gnawing sense that was forming in the back of my mind. That my doctorate intimidated him. That he had serious qualms about hiring a thirty-year-old Black man with a doctorate and with career accomplishments that were nearly on par with his own. I should’ve recognized this, but didn’t.

I should’ve also known based on the number of indirect questions about it that I was overqualified for the position that I would eventually accept. I assumed that a program officer position was the same everywhere, whether working for AED or the Ford Foundation. That’s what happens when most of your job experience has been with government or in academia. My degree and my years of experience put me at a senior program officer position with the organization, but no one in HR bothered to put it in those direct terms. Given the low salaries of a full-time academic position, a job paying $50K seemed great by comparison.

Then there were the little things that I either didn’t ask or didn’t notice. Like the fact that each project within the organization had as part of their charge the heavy responsibility of sustaining itself. Projects came and went regularly at AED because there was little organizational support for sustainability. I never asked about it. Nor did I ask questions about travel expenses. AED didn’t and doesn’t provide corporate cards, and you have to risk your own credit to get one that’s business-related. I asked about benefits, but not about salary increases. I asked about organizational culture, but didn’t pick up on the fact that most staff of color worked in HR, accounting, facilities and contracts.

When I was offered the position on November 17, I probably should’ve said no. I wanted to do something wonderful, something that had symmetry with my educational background, my interests as an aspiring author and writer, something that would leave me inspired everyday. I wanted to have a job and career that was fulfilling. One of my graduate school mentors was a senior program officer and director of the Spencer Foundation’s Dissertation Fellowship Program at the time. I had the image of that kind of work and that kind of career trajectory when I said yes to my first job at AED. Boy was I wrong! Still, given the circumstances of my work prior to AED, I don’t think I had many options other than to say yes. I just should’ve left much sooner.

Tomorrow marks a year since I tendered my resignation letter to my last supervisor at AED. The letter cites all of the issues I sensed during my first interview in 2000. The lack of job and financial security as being part of an initiative whose money was about to run out. The knowledge that I was hired in a position that was beneath my actual level of experience and expertise. The fact that I had frequently used my own credit and money to pay for business-related travel and expenses. Despite all we face financially right now, it was a good decision for the long-term.

There are other November issues to remember related to money and carving out the best possible future, but those will have to wait.

To My Ex-Stepfather

29 Tuesday Jul 2008

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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It’s been a good decade and a half since the last time we had contact. Not that I’ve ever really wanted to. I’ve spent the past twenty-six years of my life undoing most of the damage that you brought to my family, my brother Darren, my younger siblings and me. It’s been a long hard road, and though I know that I’m near the end of my journey in reclaiming myself, past, present and future, I also know I can’t finalize this without speaking my piece and finding it with you in the process.

You see, even though it’s been a good twenty-two and a half years since the last time you put your hands and fists on me in anger, I still bear some of the scars from those episodes of abuse. Some of my dental work, to be sure, is a result of one too many punches to my jaw and a few too many chipped pieces off of my two front upper teeth. A small but thick and dark scar remains on my right hip from the time you literally whipped me when I was twelve. And the constant stress of living in the same apartment with you is likely the single biggest reason for my irritable bowel syndrome.

My psychological scars are even deeper than my physical ones. Even with me forgiving you so long ago for all the horrors that you caused, your face still symbolizes evil in my nightmares. For the first ten years after my mother’s so-called marriage to you ended, I could count on you showing up in my dreams about once every six weeks. It was a brief reminder that no matter how well things might have been going, that I shouldn’t be but so happy, so content, so at peace with myself and my world. Even as a man who’s been married for eight and a half years and has a truly wonderful five-year-old son, I still occasionally have to fight the evil that you represent off in my scariest of dreams.

Yes, I forgave you ages ago, soon after you left 616 for the last time, the summer of ’89. I didn’t forgive you just because the Bible says to do so. I certainly didn’t forgive you because of the rare occasions you might have done something good in our lives. I forgave you because I knew that I couldn’t live my life, that I couldn’t begin trusting others again until I let go of my hatred toward you.

But because of the mind that I’ve been blessed with, I can’t truly forget all that you did. I can’t forget how you allowed me to be mugged by your good-for-nothin’ friends just so that you could “make a man outta me.” I can’t forget how you knocked my mother unconscious in front of me. I can’t forget how I discovered that you were a overeating, womanizing, abusive asshole who used being a Hebrew-Israelite–the most bizarre cult that anyone could possibly join–as an excuse for your misogyny and violence. Despite forgiving you, I still have a part of me that has yet to heal from you snatching my childhood away.

Yet you know what I’ve come to realize? That forgiveness is a choice that I have to make everyday if it’s to mean anything in my life, especially when it comes to you. It’s like being married or being committed to raising your children in the best possible way. It’s a choice that allows me to grow as a person, as a husband and as a father. It’s a choice I simply cannot afford to ignore.

And in the past two decades, as I’ve continued to make the hard choice to stand in forgiveness, I find myself feeling sorry for you. Not so much because of what made you who you were back then. More because you have numerous opportunities to make the right choices in life for yourself, your children, and for my mother, and chose instead to make the wrong ones. There are many things in life that aren’t black and white, but most of your choices were, and yet you still chose evil over good. The single worst choice you made in life was to delude yourself and attempt to delude us by believing that becoming part of a wacky Afrocentric Judaism would make you a better person, a benevolent father, a beneficial husband.

By not getting to the root of your issues, your emptiness, your contempt for yourself, your fear of the world outside of your definition of the so-called streets (as if Mount Vernon was South Central LA), you came to us in the spring of ’81 to start a wave of terror that could only end with me leaving for Pittsburgh and my mother finally standing up to you six and eight years later.

For me, the cruelest irony about those years was that my alcoholic father and my late eccentric AP History teacher Harold Meltzer served as better role models for manhood and human hood than you did as a sober kufi-wearing and Torah-quoting descendant of Abraham. Yet you spent as much time as you could telling us how to be men, even though you didn’t know how to be one yourself. From what my younger siblings have told me over the years, you’re still searching for an identity as if you can go to Madison Avenue and West 47th and buy it as the latest and coolest fashion. Luckily, I did learn quite a bit about what not to do with kids from your example. Maybe that’s a part of the reason why Noah’s thriving as much as he is.

So my plan from here on out is this. Just because I find myself liking something that you may like or might have liked in the past does not mean I should automatically hate it myself. I’ve picked up a new appreciation for martial arts in no small part because of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Just because you used your fourth-degree black belt in Isshin-ryu karate to knock out my mother and put a knot on my forehead doesn’t mean I should shun the idea of spiritual balance and finding peace within myself.

Just as I need to rededicate myself to forgiveness in order to save myself from time to time, I also need to continued to resolve to both be at peace and enjoy life. All without the gnawing sense that something or someone will betray me and take those things away from me. So, for this piece of hard-earned wisdom, if nothing else, I thank you.

Hunger

23 Monday Jun 2008

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

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This past weekend was an interesting change of pace. I came up to Princeton University on Saturday to begin teaching a one-month summer intensive in AP American History as part of the Junior Statesmen program. My students are wonderful. Princeton’s still potentially as lily White and intimidating as it is opulent. But that’s hardly what I’ve thought about in my first few days up here.

Besides missing my wife and son, the thing that I’ve thought about the most are the days leading into my first day in the late Harold Meltzer’s AP American History class at Mount Vernon High School. The week of 16 June ’85 was an up and down one for me, and one that left me disgruntled with Humanities, with 616 and with Mount Vernon in general. It reflected the disillusionment that I had felt all year after defying my stepfather and letting my classmates and teachers know that I had converted to Christianity. Lots of things still weren’t going my way. I had few acquaintances, much less friends. I knew that despite my weirdness that some girls liked me, but I had no idea what to say to them.
My teachers sucked. Period. One was a chain-smoking chemistry teacher (teachers could smoke in front of us back then) who was horrible in conveying anything other than tartar buildup. Another knew as much about trigonometry as I did about quantum physics and romance (at least in ’85). Our English teacher lounged on the couch in the classroom most of the year, while our so-called World History teacher spent most of the year annoying us with stupid comments and stupid tests on Baroque music and architecture. Our Italian teacher was fired two months before our New York State Regents exam (he apparently now owns the largest car dealership in the state of New York). He was replaced by a Spanish teacher, who made us realize that most of us hadn’t learned much Italian over the previous four years.
So the week of endless tests and Regents exams came at the worst time for me. The cupboards and fridge were as bare as they had been since the days before my mother had gone on welfare. There was only enough milk for my younger siblings, and besides cornbread and cabbage, we were SOL. That Monday we had our exams in World History and English. Tuesday was the Trig Regents, which I started preparing for at the end of February because our teacher didn’t know the difference between sine, cosine and tangent. All of those went pretty well.
Then we ran out of food Tuesday night. I woke up the next morning with water, milk, ice and freeze-dried meat as my choices for breakfast and 50 cents in my pocket. I chose water and only water for the morning. And Wednesday was the busiest day of all. There were two Regents exams, one that morning in Italian, the other in Chemistry. I went to school feeling like I could overcome my hunger and do decently on the test. After all, I had been taking Italian since seventh grade, and I already knew I had scored an eight out of ten on the oral part of this exam. But deep down, I knew I just didn’t have the energy to get through the exam. I had a headache from the lack of food, which grew worse as I started to forget the difference between Italian in past, present, future and present perfect tense. I finished the exam and found myself just hoping for a 70 (anything below a 65 was an F, and the exam counted for a third of my total grade for the course).
I went to lunch and walked over to Chester Heights (Eastchester) to a deli and bought the only thing I could think of to eat: one Sara Lee Brownie. It cost 45 cents, and it was probably the best investment I had made up to this point in my life. I walked back to MVHS, slowly ate the brownie to make it last, and had just enough time to drink some more water before we sat down to take the Chemistry Regents.
When I opened up the exam booklet I started laughing. Our idiot Chemistry teacher had told us the month before to “not worry” about organic chemistry as part of the Regents exam even though he had never covered it in class. Listen to him had me averaging a C in his class all year, with my highest exam grade an 86. So I bought a Chemistry Regents test prep book the weekend after his pronouncement, and did nothing but study organic chemistry for this exam. It turned out that the first ten questions on the exam were organic chemistry ones. With my brownie digesting, I was ready to kick some butt.
It turned out that I had failed the Italian Regents, with a total score of 45–I only earned a 37 out of 90 on the written exam. On the Chemistry Regents, I had the third highest score in the school–a 95 out of 100, as about a third of the questions were in organic chemistry. I was bummed, ecstatic and pissed at my teachers and with myself, all at the same time.
Luckily on the Friday we found out our scores was also the same day we were to meet our AP American History teacher. I’ve already described my late friend and mentor in a previous post. But it’s worth mentioning again how he broke down my protective wall to talk to me about things I’d never discuss with my classmates or my mother or Jimme. One of those issues was hunger. Not just my constant need for food even when there was food at 616. My hunger, my drive for something better in life. Meltzer noticed it, and gradually got me to exhibit that side of myself in class. For years after AP, he would tell me over and over again how he never worried about me. I guess it was because I didn’t take the world around me at face value. I wasn’t intimidated by my classmates, but I wasn’t going to allow myself to engage in worrying about grades and pleasing teachers the ways in which they did.
Meltzer picked up on this, and laughed about it all the time. He said that I had that one-of-a-kind look of a student who wasn’t just hungry for good grades, but hungry for knowledge, hungry for something to make sense of a senseless world. I guess that this is all true. I just hope that the students I have, as privileged as many of them are, are equally hungry to learn about themselves, their classmates, what they hope their hopes are, as they are about earning a 5 on the AP exam next year.

My Post-Doctoral Life

18 Sunday May 2008

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PhD Graduation Group Photo – May 18, 1997. A great photo, except for the one (my mother) who was missing – note my mother-in-law gesturing to her. (Angelia N. Levy).

Today is the eleventh anniversary of my marching across stage to officially end the formal student phase of my life. Around 2 pm, I shook hands with the president of Carnegie Mellon University and the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences to accept my PhD in History. It could’ve and should’ve been a joyous moment, but it wasn’t. After all, I had learned that my mother was about as happy for me as some of my former fellow grad students, who threw around words like “envious” and “jealous” in the year before my official graduation.

I tell this story in Boy At The Window this way: “The proverbial someone once said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But…even in the age of megapixels, pictures miss what words can say. Such is the case with a picture of me and my closest folk on my PhD graduation day in May ’97. On this sultry and sunny spring day, I stand in my polyester black cap and gown with my future mother-in-law dressed in a yellow-gold blazer and flower-print skirt on my right, and my longtime high school friend on my left. My friend’s one-time ‘surrogate’ son and her twenty-three-year-old sister, as well as my graduate-school friend and colleague Ed are also in this picture, from my friend’s left through the rest of the four-by-six-inch print. They all look hot and happy, as if they went through the doctoral thesis process in one afternoon. At the least, they looked ready for air conditioning or shade. I’m happy too, if only for that moment.

The Carnegie Mellon University-wide ceremony was anticlimactic. I’d finished my dissertation with approval from my committee six months before I marched across stage. Yet I had reason to smile the smile of relieved happiness. Relieved that the outdoor graduation ceremony had concluded and happy to see my then girlfriend Angelia grinning ear-to-ear as she snaps the picture of the six of us. Noticeably absent from this picture is my mother, who stood outside of our huddle (to the right of Angelia’s mother). If you look closely at the picture, you can see Ms. Levy gesturing—presumably to my mother—to get her into the picture. What you don’t see is my mother shaking her head and looking at the rest of us with discomfort as we set up for Angelia’s shot. What you also don’t and can’t see is the pride that everyone involved in the picture possessed about my accomplishment. It was an almost overwhelming experience to receive so much emotional support after so many years without it.

But pictures, no matter how well orchestrated, only capture a moment in time, a moment that could be connected to a string of events or an off-the-beaten path tangent from events already in motion. Or a picture can be a snapshot of a transition point between events. For all of us, I think, this picture symbolized major turning point in our lives, ‘the way we were,’ if you will. My relationships with my mother, my soon-to-be mother-in-law and wife, and my friends all changed or were in the process of change.

How I saw my mother had changed forever a few days before Angelia snapped the picture of me and the others. The best evidence of this is the next picture in this photo album, at the time the next picture in the roll of film from that day. It was of me angrily stomping down a spiraling flight of stairs at The Thackeray Club on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus. I held my doctoral diploma for the camera as if I wanted to hit someone with it. My face looks dark, and not just because I’m Black and had been on five hours’ sleep per night for the past ten days. My face looks frozen between anger and disappointment. Anger about my mother comparing my nine and a half years of undergraduate and graduate education to being ‘in school long enough to earn another high school diploma.’ Disappointment in her later telling me, ‘I don’t have to tell you that I’m proud of you. I tell other folks, just not you.’

Angelia’s picture captures the dark mood that my concrete expression struggled to show. I privately acknowledged that my mother had never cared about my degree or other accomplishments because I somehow was ‘showing her up.’ I had worked for nearly fifteen years to make this moment in my life happen, a moment where my dreams, my ultimate make-believe fantasy life had finally begun to merge with 3-D reality.

Then my mother had decided at the last minute to catch an earlier flight. And just as my individual, Department of History celebration was about to start. To say that my reasonably close—sometimes too close—relationship with my mother hasn’t been the same since would be like saying Hiroshima was never the same after the Enola Gay unloaded her deadly payload.

She needed to go to the airport for her flight to take care of ‘the kids’—my four younger siblings. ‘The kids’ were between thirteen and eighteen years old, and had been without my mother’s supervision for two full days before her airport request. During the trip to the airport in my graduation robe, I thought about crying, yelling, even about shaking my mother to see if she could show any emotion other than a blank disdain. I chose instead the most uncomfortable silence I could summon.

When we arrived at the gate, I finally said to her that she had ‘ruined every event in my adult life’ that I had given her the opportunity to attend. And this was the first opportunity my mother had taken advantage of—she couldn’t get to my other graduations because neither of us had the money to pay for her transportation. I certainly understood that reality, because I grew up in it. This was different. This was telling me that even if money weren’t an issue, my mother wouldn’t have been able to show any sense of pride or joy in what I had done. The irony of that fateful day was that my mother’s six o’clock US Airways flight was delayed more than two hours due to thundershower activity in Pittsburgh and New York. It was after eleven by the time my mother arrived home, according to one of my brothers.

It would be a month before we talked again, and that only occurred because my seventeen-year-old brother Maurice was about to graduate from Mount Vernon High School….In the years since my graduation, I’ve learned that even a parent can be jealous of their children. Especially if a parent attempts to live the life that they would like to have through them.”

What I don’t discuss in the manuscript are other details to this week eleven years ago. Including the fact that I was living on four or five hours of sleep for a week and a half. That I started the week of my Carnegie Mellon graduate in New York interviewing for an assistant professor job at Teachers College. That my mother marched for her associate’s degree at Westchester Business Institute in White Plains five days before my graduation, and that her comment to me about my years of working on a second high school diploma came the day after her graduation ceremony. What I don’t talk about is how my mother and eventual mother-in-law, in their first-ever meeting during my mother’s time in Pittsburgh, spent three hours discussing their failed marriages and the horrible nature of Black men the day before my graduation. And finally, that for the next four days after my graduation, I had a severe gastrointestinal infection, no doubt made worse by my sleeplessness and emotion distress.

The last eleven years have been a struggle to have a career as satisfying and as successful as my post-high school academic experience, with many more positives than negatives. At the same time, my struggles in career and in my life in general are the reason that I find myself in constant self-reflection about my life. It’s this self-reflection that helped me in writing Boy At The Window in the first place.

But the most difficult aspect of the things that I do struggle with centers on trust. Between my mother and my former advisor, not to mention some of my former fellow grad students and others on my dissertation committee, I felt a sense of betrayal that I hadn’t felt since the day my stepfather had knocked my mother unconscious. It took about a year and a half for me to recover from the dissertation process and from what my mother did during my graduation weekend.

I certainly was sarcastic before, but I know that I’m jaded about trusting others these days. Especially folks in positions of authority who happen to be somewhere between flighty and absolute fakes. Some people I’ve worked with in publishing come to mind. Others I’ve worked with and for, though, are far more typical in my world of being careful with whom I divulge my information and life experiences to. Most of time, I find myself much more deliberate about the company I keep and the folks I talk to about my world beyond my job, my teaching and my writing.

I’ve had to learn a second time how to overcome betrayal and distrust. The first time, I could almost trust anyone. This time, I have much more choice as to whom I trust and for how long, which also makes it all the more difficult. As for my mother, I have long since forgiven her for the things that she did and said eleven years ago, although I have to work hard at standing in that forgiveness sometimes. But with my memory, in which I can tell you what I had to eat for dinner on May 12th of ’97, it’s hard to forget.