Category Archives: Hebrew-Israelite

How Libraries Got Me Through

07 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Mount Vernon Public Library’s east entrance, Mount Vernon, NY, July 2, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

I’ve been enthralled with books since my brother Darren helped me decipher the code of the English language during Christmas ’74. Going to the library for most of my life — especially my growing up years — was always a break from the Grade II bone bruise that my life often seemed to be. I remember the first time my Mom took us to Mount Vernon Public Library, in August ’74. It was only a few blocks from our old place, 48 Adams Street, and about seven blocks from 425 South Sixth. I was too young to get a library card, though, and I started complaining. “May-wa! May-wa!” — that’s what I used to call my Mom (a combination of her name Mary and Mama) — “Why can’t I get a card?,” I cried on my way out the door.

A New Rochelle Public Library card (a close approximation to my first card from 1975), March 1987. (http://flickr.com).

I got my first library card in first grade. It was a class trip, as me and the rest of Ms. Griffin’s class walked to and from Nathan Hale ES to Mount Vernon Public Library. The librarians gave us a tour, during which a thunderstorm erupted. It was sometime in September ’75, a Friday I think. But feeling that small, round-edged MVPL card in my hand with that stamped metal plate on it made my otherwise rainy day. That it had my name typed on it helped as well.

I spend many hours at Mount Vernon Public Library over the years. I needed to. I had so much to learn, more than the 28-volume World Book Encyclopedia set from 1978 could teach me. And certainly more than what my parents and idiot ex-stepfather Maurice knew, much less what they decided not to share. MVPL got me through my spiritual crisis of 1983-84, because I had access to the Qur’an, Torah, and other spiritual texts from which I could make a decision and move on from the cultish Hebrew-Israelites in my family and life. I wouldn’t have considered majoring in history if I hadn’t been able to check out dozens of dusty World War II books between 1980 and 1982. My love for all things Charles Schulz and Peanuts couldn’t have developed without the help of MVPL’s weekly Bookmobile visits at Nathan Hale on Tuesdays or William H. Holmes ES on Wednesdays, usually between 1:30 and 2 pm.

But by the summer of ’80, I began to realize that not all libraries were like the enormity of Mount Vernon’s. Nearby Pelham Library was on the ground floor of Hutchinson Elementary School. It was the size of a small bookstore, with maybe two tables and six chairs to sit in (they didn’t move into their own building until 1995). New Rochelle’s library was 1970s-style modern, with ugly shapes and colors. But both had more air conditioning and bathrooms that didn’t smell or weren’t under repair half the time.

From high school on, I used libraries mostly as a form of escape from my then-idiot stepfather and a gaggle of younger siblings. Or to escape the desperate poverty and chaos that enveloped my life at 616, and to a lesser extent, parts of Mount Vernon and other parts of the New York area. I first got the courage to go into the vastness that was the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd and Fifth in the fall of ’84. I infrequently went to White Plains’ public library. At least once between 1984 and 1988, I went to nearly all of the libraries between Wakefield in the Bronx and the various tiny libraries in southern Westchester County. But no library outside of NYPL’s main branch had both the collection and as easy access to the stacks as the one in Mount Vernon.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Oakland (Main) Branch, front entrance, Pittsburgh, PA, April 5, 2008. (HoboJones via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-BY-SA-3.0.

I had more appreciation for one of the few pleasures offered by my original hometown during my twelve years in Pittsburgh. Within 230 yards of each other were the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s main Oakland branch. If it weren’t for their extensive collections and my alumni status after the spring of ’91, I couldn’t have attended graduate school. Pitt’s policies toward alumni alone saved me $3,000 in book and printing costs, as well as from an additional year of dissertation research. And as many times I could pick up a book, any book, go to the African American Literature section of Hillman, put two lounge chairs together, read, fall asleep, and read some more? The only other thing I could’ve asked for was a blanket and room service!

Since moving to suburban Maryland and DC in ’99, I have been struck by the lack of in libraries around here. Lack of books, lack of extensive interlibrary networks, and a lack of substances over style. The Montgomery County library system had two new ones built in Silver Spring and in Rockville. Each has enough space for a half million volumes, it seems as if their designers built them on the assumption that everyone uses a tablet or an iPhone to read books these days. If it’s nonfiction and a bestseller, they likely don’t have it. Though DC Public Library’s main branch in Gallery Place — the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library — has an extensive collection of DC artifacts and histories, and African American nonfiction and scholarly volumes, patrons cannot borrow these volumes at all. Like the Library of Congress, the MLK library is mostly a museum with books. And by the way, the main branch is now closed for the next three years for modernization, leaving the homeless, researchers, and book lovers like me with even fewer DC area options.

Silver Spring Air & Space Museum, er, Public Library, Silver Spring, MD, June 2016 (http://www.adtekengineers.com/).

Georgetown and Johns Hopkins both have wonderful main libraries with friendly security guards and extra-helpful librarians. But they’re not Hillman. Even as a professor, if I fell asleep in a lounge chair, I’d likely get kicked out. Plus, in our era of smartphones and tablets, most patrons are stuck in social media in between hectic moments for exam cramming and last-minute paper writing. This, though, is still way better than George Washington’s main library, or NYU’s and Columbia’s, for that matter. You can’t walk into either without a form from a staff or faculty member giving you permission to walk through the door.

The building that houses MVPL, built interestingly enough with Andrew Carnegie’s money between 1897 and 1904, is in serious disrepair. The men’s bathroom is nearly always out-of-order, and the collection of Mount Vernon history materials has been closed for years. A friend recently commented on the fact that an older man relieved himself in the snow after leaving the library before going back in to do his whatevers. The money is simply not there to build a brand-new home for one of the largest collections in New York State.

Still, I know how good a library Mount Vernon has. It carries the first three of my former advisor Joe Trotter’s books. I have to go to a university library for that around here. It also has my memoir, and it may have Fear of a “Black” America as well (not so sure about that). I just know that the affluent of Montgomery County have never put that much in resources into the library system I frequent now. I hope and pray that the folks raising the money MVPL so desperately needs for a major renovation, maybe even a new building, are able to meet their goals before my son is old enough to remember when libraries actually held bound books in their collections.

Lit on Moonlight

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

I finally, finally saw Moonlight with the wife and son at AFI Silver Spring yesterday, months after the in-crowd had already seen it and attempted to spoil it for the rest of us. It was excellent. The cinematography, the loud and incredible silences, the small moments, when actors just being in the moment with their facial expressions did more than any dialogue could to move me and anyone else watching. Mahershala Ali was only in five scenes. But his first scene set the tone for the whole movie. As Juan, Ali channeled both the need for hard hypermasculinity and the vulnerable fragility of such in just one scene. His time with the youngest version of Chiron made me laugh, cry, sad, and angry, and left me wondering if I’ve seen this much intimacy between Black man and Black boy on screen before. I know I have (Antwone Fisher, The Wire, even Roots comes to mind), but on-screen doesn’t reflect this anti-stereotypical slice of truth nearly as often as it should.

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Yet I was also not as impressed as I expected to be. Not because I didn’t like the performances — I loved them. I thought every actor in the film was legit, every scene was moving in some way. Naomie Harris I’ve been fond of for years, André Holland and Janelle Monáe’s work I already knew, and Trevante Rhodes and Barry Jenkins, well, the two need bigger platforms for doing more great work. Moonlight wasn’t a film. It was a collage, a kaleidoscope of precious moments, blood-churning episodes, and tender images. Jenkins’ treatment of coming-of-age, Black boyhood into manhood, and Black masculinity, hypermasculinity, and vulnerability was avant-garde.

Still, I felt like I’d seen Moonlight before. Or, really, lived parts of Moonlight in my own past. No, I did not befriend an older, Afro-Cuban crack dealer in 1990s Miami, have a drug-addicted, abusive mother, or have a group of kids chase me around and beat me up off and on for ten years. But I didn’t look at the world the same way as my peers. I didn’t sound like a Noo Yawker, walk and talk and code switch like Denzel Washington, or try to fit in like so many of my 616 neighbors and my Mount Vernon school mates during my growing up years. And I paid for it, dearly, with few friends before I turned eleven, and no friends in the six years before I went off to the University of Pittsburgh.

But on Chiron and that most pernicious issue of hypermasculinity, the need to be hard all the time, I’ve been there too. I’d been called “faggot” (or in my father’s case, “faggat”) enough times to occasionally question my own sexual orientation growing up. My senior year at MVHS one day, I hit a three-run homer during a softball game in gym class. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. But for one Jamaican dude, me drilling a ball 350 feet off his slow fastball was an affront. He called me a “faggot” after the game, and threatened to wait for me after school with a machete to chop me, adding “bumbaclot mon” at the end of his threat. I left school as normal and waited for him. He was lucky he didn’t show up that day.

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

You see, my rage didn’t need years to build up. All before I’d finally lose it one day, and take out a bully with a wooden chair and break it across his back, like the way Chiron did at the end of II of Moonlight. I didn’t have bullies at school per se. There were a couple I dealt with at 616, but they weren’t regular. Many folks would make a crack, but generally left me along. Any bullying I faced in high school was completely random and momentary, because I stood up for myself. Because if I could face down a six-foot-one, Isshin-ryn black belt of an abuser in my idiot stepfather Maurice, a stupid football player was gonna get hurt trying to hurt me.

No, the bullying I faced was in middle school, from a bunch of overwhelmed and racist Italian classmates in Humanities. I’ve named them in Boy @ The Window and here in this blog before. Alex, Anthony N., Andrew, Anthony Z., etc, the Italian Club. That things were much, much worse at home meant that I saw them as background noise. There was always a part of me, though, that had enough rage, even in seventh grade, to take a desk and smash Anthony N.’s head in with it until his fuckin’ Italian brains spread out all over the floor and walls!

I ended up beating up a wannabe bully in JD that year instead. I won kufi battles in eighth and ninth grade. I wore a blank face that most of my more dumb ass classmates interpreted as a smile. I made plans to get out, because I never wanted to fit in. I was already awake, coping with the day-to-day, but in it for the long-term. I had that President Barack Obama, audacity-of-hope-beyond-failure, beyond reality thing goin’. When I saw Chiron as played by Ashton Sanders, I wanted to hug him, beat up his bullies for him, and tell him that you can love who you want to love, even if they never love you back. And to always, always be your best self, and not some “I don’t want to feel pain again” version.

Yes, I’m A Sexist Feminist

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

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

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Hostile vs. Benevolent Sexism, March 10, 2015. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

Hostile vs. Benevolent Sexism, March 10, 2015. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

I finished up a chapter in Boy @ The Window with the closest approximation to my contemporaneous thoughts about Phyllis (a.k.a., “Crush #2” at times on this blog) in August 1988:

screen-shot-2016-12-27-at-7-43-51-am

I must’ve rewritten these two paragraphs at least a half-dozen times before putting the book out for limited consumption. The thought process that I went through at eighteen years old bothered me then, and looking at the words even today leaves me wanting. Probably because there is more than a bit of sexism contained within these words.

But I wasn’t wrong, of course, not in ’88, not when I wrote and rewrote these paragraphs between 2007 and 2011, and not now, at least in terms of how I perceived things then. While I believed in reproductive rights, in equal pay for equal work, and in passing the Equal Rights Amendment growing up, I also believed in saving damsels from distress and in distinguishing between “ladies” and “bitches.” Or, as my father put it when he argued with my Mom in front of me when I was four years old, “You’s a black bit’!” Or, my contradiction could’ve fully formed when my father tried to set me up with a prostitute a couple of weeks before my seventeenth birthday, in December 1986.

There was no way in 1988 I could’ve understood the contradictions between the idea of feminism (in any form) and the notion of “being a nice guy.” I hadn’t been exposed, or, rather, exposed myself to Paula Giddings, Elsa Barkley Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, and Zora Neale Hurston. I hadn’t yet been engaged in the hundreds of conversations I’d eventually have with women folk I’d become friends with, people with whom I bonded because of their suffering, people from whom I’d hidden my own suffering during those years. Date rape, physical abuse, the more typical abuse of serial cheating, among other issues. With many of these women, I recognized the sexism and misogyny I saw in myself in 1988, and saw them again when I wrote down my contemporaneous thoughts in Boy @ The Window. It didn’t occur to me until the mid-1990s that women could be just as sexist and misogynistic as men, and often could pass down their notions of masculinity and patriarchy to their children. And that thought scared me.

Imprisoned brain (or, maybe, Culture Club and "Church of the Poison Mind" [1983]), December 27, 2016. (http://mdjunction.com).

Imprisoned brain (or, maybe, Culture Club and “Church of the Poison Mind” [1983]), December 27, 2016. (http://mdjunction.com).

It scared me because I realized I may have learned more of my contradictions from my Mom than from my father or idiot ex-stepfather. After all, she was the one constant in my parenting, the one person who engaged me in ideas like chivalry and manliness, who through her acquiescence to Maurice might have made it okay for me to see women, especially Black women (and to a lesser extent, Latina women) as ones in need of help, even when they decide not to take it.

And it may have made it okay for me to see myself as the victim in my incident with Dahlia in June 1987, when I accidentally (the first time), and later deliberately smacked her on her left butt cheek. Maybe I was the victim in a way, at least of my own deluded thought process. And there hasn’t been a time in the past twenty-nine and a half years in which I haven’t regretted that second, deliberate slap, in response to Dahlia accusing of thoughts I didn’t have, because my only obsession in 1987 was Phyllis. I’ve said and written this before, including in Boy @ The Window. To Dahlia, I am so sorry.

Beijing smog alert, Beijing, China, December 6, 2016. (http://ibtimes.com).

Beijing smog alert, Beijing, China, December 6, 2016. (http://ibtimes.com).

I may never be the perfect intersectional womanist feminist I’ve tried to be since I told my Mom to abort my future (and since deceased) sister in 1982. I still believe that professional women’s tennis players should play best-of-five-set matches at the Gram Slam tournaments. I think more women — particularly White women — should stop calling themselves feminists if their feminism stops when dealing with women of color or poor women in general. I think that most men who aren’t feminists are assholes. But I also know that, just like with racism (as now well noted by Ibram Kendi) and with narcissism (my next project, maybe), sexist ideas are as pervasive as smog in L.A. and Beijing. I don’t have to like it or accept it, but I do have to accept that I am a man, and I will make mistakes, including sexist ones. I will have to own up, and keep trying to do better.

Christmas is Carnage!

25 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A white duck? goose?, December 25, 2016. (http://pinterest.com).

A white duck? goose?, December 25, 2016. (http://pinterest.com).

One of the funniest lines in Babe (1995) comes from Ferdinand the duck (who kind of looks like a goose) yelling just before Christmas Day, “Christmas means carnage!,” as he hoped to avoid A. Hoggett’s chopping block for making duck a l’orange. But really, that’s what this holiday has felt like for me for years.

Saying “Jesus is the reason for the season” doesn’t quite help, because that’s only partly true. All the actual evidence points to Jesus’ birthday being either in April or August, not the Winter solstice. The combination of a celebration of Jesus’ birth with either the Saturnalia festivals or the “birthday of the unconquered sun” (sol invictus) commemorations via Constantine and other Roman emperors (take your pick), led to Christmas becoming a December 25th tradition in Europe, the Middle East, and Northern/East Africa. And all of this became formalized by the end of the fourth century CE. So while I believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what Jesus stood for while walking among humans, I don’t see Christmas as a strictly religious, spiritual, or Christian holiday.

The Queen's Christmas tree, Windsor Castle (steel engraving), published in The Illustrated London News, 1848, in "Godey's Lady's Book," December 1850 . (Wetman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The Queen’s Christmas tree, Windsor Castle (steel engraving), published in The Illustrated London News, 1848, in Godey’s Lady’s Book, December 1850. (Wetman via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That’s because of how the holiday came to dominate much of the world. The myth-making in the UK and the US between 1820 and 1870 helped turn an inconsistently celebrated holiday for Jesus’ birth, community, family, and some gift-giving into capitalism at its best and worst. That the Christmas tree didn’t become a common part of the holiday until Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert began taking an annual picture of themselves around a tree in 1850 was a function of German influences and British imperialism, not just the beauty of a decorated tree. Christmas cards didn’t become normalized until a German immigrant to the US thought he could make a fortune selling cards for people to mail each other, in the 1860s and 1870s. Congress didn’t make Christmas a federal holiday until 1870, and did so in an attempt to reunite the country around the common idea of Christmas as a form of family healing. Enacted five years after the Civil War and the loss of 620,000 lives, the Christmas holiday was one thing that formerly slave-owning Southerners and anti-slavery/anti-Black Northerners could agree on.

The British and later American influences on the world — military, geopolitical, economic, and popular culture — made the holiday into the trillion-dollar business that is today. You do not have to be Christian, Muslim, or even Jewish to celebrate the holiday, because while Jesus is important to tens of millions, it is not the unifying theme, and hasn’t been for decades. Commercials and other ads, endless rounds of shopping for the latest in high-tech electronics, the near-global slaughtering of spruce and fir trees, turkeys, chickens, sheep, goats, geese, and yes, ducks. That has been the main theme of Christmas for most, It’s A Wonderful Life’s (1946) annual re-broadcast on NBC notwithstanding.

The bridge scene in It's A Wonderful Life, where James Stewart's character's was contemplating suicide, 1946. (http://salon.com).

The bridge scene in It’s A Wonderful Life, where James Stewart’s character’s was contemplating suicide, 1946. (http://salon.com).

I am not bah-humbugging out about the holiday, though. I just want to remind people to not wallow too much in the mythology they tend to believe is universal about the holiday, because most of what people believe about Christmas is at best only one-third true. The fact is, some folks do bug out this time of the year, from loneliness, from a daily reminder during this season that they are the have-nots in a holiday myth built on fables of abundance. And some people attempt to and actually succeed in checking out — some permanently — this time of the year. I should know, because I almost did thirty-three years ago.

And with social media, we reinforce these tensions of economic inequality, of moralistic exclusion, of reading more spiritual meaning into a holiday that has been a big driver of consumer capitalism for nearly 150 years. We essentially stick up middle fingers at those whose families are distant and dysfunctional. We basically blow raspberries at those who do not have enough resources to do much more than provide the basics for themselves and their loved one, with many more having even less. And we shun those who have the audacity to point out the hypocrisy that is the annual holiday season.

Christmas for me has only been a holiday for me because of my younger siblings (when they were just kids, between 1988 and 1996) and because of my wife and now teenage son. I went nearly a decade of my life without Christmas trees, cards, and gifts, a combination of being a Hebrew-Israelite and abject poverty between 1979 and 1988. So despite the temptations of being in this capitalist world and somewhat of it, Christmas is only a big deal to me because of kids and their vulnerability during this time of year. Otherwise, a moment of thanksgiving and prayer, well-prepared food (but not a Saturnalia feast’s worth), and being around those who truly love and care about me is really all I’ve ever needed. That folks may only get a facsimile of this, and only around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas (if at all), is part of the carnage that is Christmas.

This, by the way, is what all of us need, every day, Christmas or not. So, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, and Merry Kwanzaa, but let’s pay it forward, too!

Songs in the Key of Life at 40

18 Friday Nov 2016

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

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Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life LP/CD cover and sleeve, 1976, 1999. (http://genius.com).

Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life LP/CD cover and sleeve, 1976, 1999. (http://genius.com).

In all the nuclear meltdowns in the last weeks of Election ’16 and in the asteroid impact of Donald Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States, I almost completely forgot about one of the modern era’s greatest milestones. At the end of September, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life double-album turned forty years old!

My wife swears that this was Stevie Wonder’s last great production of genius, that virtually all the music he’s done since has either been merely “that’s nice” or complete schlock. But compared to Songs In The Key Of Life, at least 75 percent of the music produced since 1500 CE would be schlock! I mean, between “I Wish,” “Sir Duke,” “Love’s in Need of Love Today,” “Have a Talk with God,” “Village Ghetto Land,” and my all-time favorite, “As,” who could ask for anything more out of an album or an artist?

My fandom for Songs in the Key of Life has occurred over several stages since its release on September 28, 1976. I was nearly seven when the double-album dropped, and my life couldn’t have been messier. Between my Mom and my father Jimme’s rocky and violent divorce process, my own coping with sexual assault, and my Mom getting kidney sick and ending up at Mount Vernon Hospital as a patient for three months. Add to this having babysitters as primary caregivers during that time, and a second-grade teacher who wasn’t exactly sympathetic to Black kids who couldn’t settle down. It was a rough time, maybe even rougher than my Hebrew-Israelite years.

But songs from the double-LP were there, either thanks to WBLS-107.5 FM, or to people blasting songs off 8-tracks and cassette decks out of their cars in South Side Mount Vernon. Or, in the case of hanging out with my dad, because of his drinking buddies playing Stevie Wonder’s songs over and over again. For those first few years, “I Wish” and “Sir Duke” were my favorite songs from Songs in the Key of Life. That was probably because they were the only songs from the set I’d heard in full prior to 1982.

Then, with the Wendy crush/puppy love/mini-love of the spring and summer of ’82, one of the songs my mind conjured up was “As.” The song’s more than seven minutes long, and I barely knew the words “until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky,” much less the entirety of the poetry of that song, much less its full meaning. But my heart knew how that song made me feel, and for matter, how Wendy made me feel, at least for a time. Once my stepfather Maurice began beating on me, my Mom lost her job, and we slipped into welfare poverty, though, Stevie Wonder’s greatest works slipped from my mind.

Nine years later, and it was my friend Elaine who reintroduced me to Songs in the Key of Life. It was during the spring and summer of ’91, when I both liked and loathed Elaine at the same time. It was also the summer before graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, and it was like my mind and heart knew I needed to feed myself more than Phil Collins, Anita Baker, PE, and Salt ‘n Pepa. I borrowed Elaine’s set of cassette recordings from the genius’ 2-LP set, and spent parts of April, May, and June walking the 3.4 miles between my place in S’Liberty and my job at Western Psychiatric in Oakland listening to Stevie Wonder. I played Songs in the Key of Life straight through a half-dozen times. But of all the songs, “Love’s in Need of Love Today” and “Have a Talk with God” became two of my favorites. After the potential for a more serious relationship with Elaine faded, I gave her back her cassettes in August.

It would be another fifteen years before I finally got Songs in the Key of Life on CD. It was 2006, and I’d finally gotten me and my wife into the iPod era. Between that and my work on my memoir Boy @ The Window, I wanted to explore what made me me musically over the years. In remembering my Wendy-love days, I literally had to go through every song on Songs in the Key of Life again before I remembered “As” in full. I was shocked that after thirty years and so many other Stevie Wonder songs, that it had remained a melody in my heart and mind. It was in the summer of ’06 that “As” became my favorite song off this all-time great album(s).

Given what had occurred in the US over the past decade, and what has been happening to people of color in the US for as long as I’ve been alive, Stevie Wonder’s music from Songs in the Key of Life is always relevant, always uplifting, always life-affirming. Trust me, with Trump’s ascendancy to the White House, “the force of evil plans” will try “to make you its possession.” And yes, I did think “that love would be in need of love today,” because it wasn’t as if “hate” wasn’t going around “breaking hearts” and bodies during the Obama years.

But I’ll close with this, perhaps the most important stanza from “As.” This, to remind myself and all of you America’s may be in more trouble than ever before, but know that trouble has been with America longer than we’ve had the privilege of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life as genius. Thanks to Wendy, Elaine, my former Mount Vernon neighbors, and unknown New Yorkers, for playing these songs for me over the years, whether they meant to or not.

We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space
But you can bet you life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed
So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it
You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell
Change your words into truths and then change that truth into love
And maybe our children’s grandchildren
And their great-great grandchildren will tell
I’ll be loving you

My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

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

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I would be a pretty terrible son and historian to not discuss the fact that this July and August marks fifty years since my mother moved to New York from little ol’ Bradley, Arkansas. For those who think fifty years on anything revolving around race and class is “a long time ago” or “ancient history,” consider the following. At the time Mom moved across the country to Gotham, the Civil Rights Movement had entered its northern, splintered phase, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was barely a year old, and the very first episode of Star Trek with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would air that September.

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966, August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966 (highlighted in blue with yellow dots), August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

On balance, with any neutral but fair eye at all, I’d have to say that Mom’s transition has been more failure than success. Five decades of crisis after crisis, of having a handful of fleeting moments of peace and progress followed by years of abuse, misery, poverty, and sorrow. That could be the summary I’d write about Mom’s fifty years of post-migration experiences in New York and in Mount Vernon.

But, let’s start from the top, through Boy @ The Window:

After drifting a bit after her high school graduation, one of Mom’s first cousins came for a visit to Arkansas in the summer of ’66 and told her that there was good-paying work in New York City. Her cousin lived in the [170s, the Tremont section of the] Bronx, a hotbed of Black migration and West Indian immigration in those years. Without much thought, Mom took a four-day bus trip from Texarkana to New York to what she hoped would be a new life. Given the alternative of tenant farming and generational poverty, New York must’ve seemed like going to heaven.

Mom had it rough long before my father and my older brother Darren and I had come along to be a burden. She lived with her cousin for nearly a year in the Bronx, paying $15 a week for a one-bedroom flat, before good luck turned to bad and then back to wonderful. They had both lost jobs at some factory, but had heard through the other late Black arrivals in the Bronx and Mount Vernon about good paying jobs at Mount Vernon Hospital. When Mount Vernon Hospital hired Mom to be a cook in their dietary department, she and her first cousin went their separate ways living-together-wise. They’d stay in touch until ’78, when Mom’s first cousin moved to Virginia, presumably for work with the Navy.

In the interim, Mom met my father at a juke joint on Mount Vernon’s South Side. It was a place where only Southern Black migrants would be comfortable. They didn’t have to pretend to like the grime, the hustle, the noise, and the taunts that New York and New Yawkers threw at them every day. They could be themselves. They could be shy, apprehensive, even, about their time in a place where everyone joked about their Southern accents and their slow ways. I think that’s what made my father attractive to Mom. Here was someone who made Mom sound much less Southern by comparison. At the same time, my father worked in the city, had a job as a janitor with the Federal Reserve Bank, and knew the Subway better than she knew the route from her one-room flat on Adams Street to Mount Vernon Hospital.

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

Within a year of meeting, Mom gave birth to my older brother Darren. Mom often said that she “wasn’t a teenager” when Darren was born in December ’67, as she had turned twenty six weeks earlier. Yet as I finally pointed out during the intervention fourteen years ago, “But you got pregnant when you were nineteen,” all to let Mom know that the stigma of teenage pregnancy was more about her and her insecurities than it was about what White folks thought, especially back then.

I came along two years later, Mom married my father in ’70, and things started falling apart soon after. Mom never gave herself a chance to live the city, and not just work in it. Mom never gave herself time to grow beyond her insecurities and her vanity about her looks. She never really tried to make her aspirations for joining the Navy or going to college happen. The latter, at least until after I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

As I wrote about Mom’s/our family’s fall into welfare poverty by ’83 in Boy @ The Window,

Sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later, Mom must’ve been thinking that Mount Vernon was a hellish pit that got hotter every time she tried to make her and our lives better. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded, a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The ‘I love you, Donald’ faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

Yes, this is all truly sad. There was way too much too soon for Mom. Family, marriage, abuse, poverty, and internalized issues around race, sexism, misogyny, Black masculinity, evangelical Christianity (and the whole Hebrew-Israelite debacle), and all in New York. It would’ve been overwhelming for anyone whose income never saw $20,000 in any year prior to temp work in ’99, and $30,000 until working for Westchester County Medical Center in 2003.

There are so many mistakes Mom made, with me, my siblings older and younger, in choosing mates, and with work. I’ve written about roughly half of them. But, awful or awesome, without Mom’s momentary hope and courage — often the very definition of Black migration, especially to New York — I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

Fun Times With Stepfather Maurice

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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

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Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Male lion eating carcass (the equivalent of fun times with Maurice), August 3, 2016. (Aljameen Alston via http://pinterest.com).

Today would be my idiot ex-stepfather’s Maurice Eugene Washington’s sixty-sixth birthday. Maurice died almost four years ago, after a twenty-year losing battle with Type-2 diabetes, kidney failure, hypertension, heart disease, limbs lost, and a host of other ailments included. That, after years of abusing his body with food, much more often than he laid a fist or kick on me or my Mom.

Most of the time these days, I feel far more pity for Maurice than anger. Forgiveness does come with the benefit of some empathy. If only because I know that Maurice had less maturity and more confusion in his heart than a sociopathic misogynist in the middle of puberty. Which, in point of fact, would pretty much describe my ex-stepfather from the time his was fifteen until his death in 2012.

So in the spirit of macabre humor, below are some of Maurice’s favorite stock phrases from my being forced to grow up around him between ’81 and ’89. Most of these made it to Boy @ The Window:

“You and your brother [Darren] are gonna be my brown-skinned servants.”

“Take that base outta ya voice, boy, before I cave yo’ chest in!”

Maurice would sometimes sing his threats, bellowing

‘I’m gonna beat yo’ ass, jus’ like a car burns gas,’ adding, ‘And ya KNOW that!’ at the end

It was something he pulled from the disco group known as the The Jammers.

Whenever I reminded him that he wasn’t my father or whenever I told him that I’d never call him “Dad” again, Maurice would yell

Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!

Sometimes, he’d threatened to kick me out of 616.

That boy’s defiant. I won’t tolerant it in my house!

Once I passed fourteen, I knew this was an idle threat. Boy, he loved calling me “boy” or “it” when I stood my ground. Maurice had colorism issues long before I ever knew what colorism was.

Or, Maurice would get all Hebrew-Israelite on me and quote from Exodus 20.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

Even in the midst of busted lips, bruised ribs, and knots on my forehead, I found that last one absolutely preposterous. We owned nothing. This irrational abusive asshole wasn’t my father, and had beaten up my Mom in front of me. Only a god in cahoots with the devil him or herself — or my idiot ex-stepfather — would think that Exodus 20 applied to my situation with this shell of a human being. Mind you, the fool kept quoting this verse to me as late as the week before he broke up with my Mom in ’89!

There is some humor to glean from these, as much as you can find alcohol content in a fresh slice of bacon. I just hope I never say things even in the same galaxy of stupid, demeaning, or threatening to my own son as this idiot said to me growing up.

Sometimes, though, when my son asks, I tell him what it would be like to have an abusive father in the form of Maurice. Sometimes I’ve even imitated how the fool would’ve sounded, and my son will then start to laugh. Luckily, he sees my stories as stories, not the hellish nightmare that my life had once been.