My First Walk (and Making Plans)

15 Thursday Aug 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Affluence, Bronxville, Child Abuse, College, Coping Strategies, Domestic Violence, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Making Plans, New Rochelle, Pelham, Phyllis, Poverty, Racism, Tuckahoe, Walking

Thirty-one years ago this week was the beginning of an inadvertent coping strategy that would lead me away from 616, out of Mount Vernon, New York, into Pittsburgh, and college, and grad school. (And eventually, to a worn-out right knee, leg exercises and a running regiment that I’ve adhered to for nearly a decade.) It was a walk that was literally my only time away from home and my summer of abuse at the hands of my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington (or Judah ben Israel). It was a walk in which I began to plan my escape from the madness.

From Boy @ The Window:

“It was August ’82, and I didn’t know if I’d make it to the end of the year.

“If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on another boring August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. First Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616 and walked to Pelham…The four of us walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. I hadn’t been down in the city all year, and my life for most of the summer was spent between Wilson Woods, Pearsall Drive, and 616. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ Darren said.

‘Yeah, and?,’ I said in response.

‘Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,’ Darren said.

“We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into a ritzy community without any warning. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. ‘Look at these houses!,’ I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs.

We walked across another bridge, this one with an overhanging meshed metal fence, across the Cross-County Parkway, and ended up in Mount Vernon for a brief moment. We veered right as we walked up a hill and out of Mount Vernon again. After walking through what appeared to be an enchanted forest, we discovered we were in Bronxville. Even at twelve, I knew that Bronxville was just about the richest community in America. And it looked like it, too. I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

“That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.’ I knew almost intuitively that my choices were to continue to experience abuse without reaching for something that I thought I could do based on my smarts. Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

“So as we walked through the villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe, ending up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22, I began to think about what I wanted to get out of eighth grade. It seemed to me that the most important class for my future was Algebra, since that led to higher forms of math. I knew English and Social Studies would be really easy, but with success in Algebra, I could go into high school with a little more confidence.

“That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was Phyllis, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. Phyllis asked what we’d been up to over the summer. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

“Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister Claudia do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere, somewhere down South to visit family. It looked like they were having a good time, the time of their lives compared to us.

‘Do you live around here?,’ Phyllis asked.

‘Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said in response.

“In the neighborhood. Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, was all part of one gigantic neighborhood. After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing Phyllis and her sister than I was.

“Yet it wasn’t that I was unexcited… I finally had a plan, a long-term plan, for dealing with the situation at 616. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, much less getting a degree…Otherwise I really didn’t have anything else to look forward to, except what I thought would be a very painful life and an extremely early death.”

That walk — and the hundreds of walks (and runs) I went on all through eighth grade and high school –was the difference between becoming a professor and a writer and having died well before the turn of this century. If not literally, then certainly psychologically.

10 Years Come and (Not) Gone

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Movies, music, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Clocks", Child Birth, Coldplay, Father-Son Relationships, Fatherhood, Growing Up, Hopes and Dreams, Noah, The Lord of the Rings trilogy

Two different Noahs, nearly 10 years apart, August 21, 2003 and July 26, 2013. (Angelia N. Levy and Donald Earl Collins).

Today my son Noah turns ten! That’s wonderful! But it’s also a reminder of both the passing of my youthful energy and relative innocence and the path toward his adulthood and future.

I note my son’s birthday in both small and big ways. I’ve been playing Coldplay’s “Clocks” incessantly for the past week and a half, because it was the summer of Coldplay when Noah was born. Every HBO promotion of shows and movies that summer had the “Clocks” melody in it, so I couldn’t get away from it even when I wanted to.

Every time I watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy I think for a moment of the summer of ’03 and Noah’s birth, My wife was literally days away from going into labor when we watched it in a marathon session — at home and in the movie theater.

I think of seeing the crown of my son’s matted hair about five minutes before the final push on this day. I think of the fact that I basically floated on happiness and hopes, dreams fulfilled and exceeded in the year before Noah’s birth. I don’t think that I ever felt so much romantic love as the love I felt for my wife and son this time a decade ago.

But I also think of the regrets of my past and the need to ensure that my son doesn’t make the same mistakes I did. To go after what he wants for his life, for his happiness. To not refuse genuine help, friendship or love when offered. To trust with wisdom and discernment, in himself and in others, knowing that some who may call him friend may yet betray that trust. To be content with being a contrarian, but not too content. To allow himself the opportunity of failure so that no early love in his life goes unrequited, and so that even his parents know his mind and heart.

I think, too, of my son’s future, of how we keep him on the path to college, a career and calling that he doesn’t lose sight of or regret later on, of the connections he’ll need to make along the way. And of the money we’ve already spent to get him this far. A quarter million on housing, $80,000 on child care, a paid-off ’04 Honda Element and numerous other expenditures just to get him to fifth grade. With middle school and high school and high-stakes testing, sports and summer camps, more travels for vacation and family visits to come.

I’m exhausted already, and my son’s my only child. But if nothing else, with what’s left of my dwindling youth, I want to make sure that Noah never has to search for faith, for God or wisdom or hope to hold on to. That, at least, I can secure, if nothing else. Through book and other means, all is with him already.

The Things Dumb Racists Say

27 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anthea Butler, Bigotry, Ignorance, Professor Anthea Butler, Racism, Religious Studies, The American President (1995), Trolls, Tumblr, Twitter, UPenn, Willful Ignorance, Zimmerman Trial, Zimmerman Verdict

John Bauer’s illustration from Walter Stenström’s The boy and the trolls or The Adventure, in childrens’ anthology Among Pixies and Trolls (1915), November 1, 2005. (Thuresson via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I loved, I loved, I loved reading and hearing what Anthea Butler had to say in the wake of the Zimmerman not-guilty verdict from two weeks ago (via her piece “The Zimmerman Verdict: America’s Racist God” and MSNBC). I love the courage and strength she’s shown over the past two weeks in standing up to the trolls in social media who’ve literally called her everything except a child of God in expressing the very racism they’ve attempted to deny.

If I’ve been reminded of nothing else in the past fortnight, it’s the fact that the US has a significant reading and writing crisis. In looking at Butler’s The Things People Say Tumblr page, it’s never been clearer to me that the average American can’t write a single sentence without a significant misspelling or grammatical error, and that angry people expressing their bigotry are even more prone to screw up the English language in any form.

UPenn Professor Anthea Butler, circa 2011. (http://www.sas.upenn.edu/religious_studies/faculty/butler).

Yet the most ignorant thing I’ve seen beyond the indirect threats, the nasty racist name-calling and the demeaning of academia for making Butler one of their “affirmative action” hires is the sheer ignorance about religion, Christianity and the ways in which this group of (mostly) White trolls has use both to justify their vitriol and racism. On one level, it’s pretty simple. How dare this [pick any expletive and add either the N-word or the C-word] say anything to point out how some Whites use Christianity and God to support their racist world views, right?

But this simplicity belies a greater truth. That not one of Butler’s post-Zimmerman trolls understood their own religion and the walk of Christianity. They haven’t a clue as to the sheer work it would take to earn any doctorate, much less one in religious studies. These folks have no idea that a PhD in religious studies doesn’t require becoming a priest or a pastor, or sounding all high-brow and polite in the face of injustice. (Heck, I’ve met religious studies professors who are agnostic or atheists!).

They are ignorant, and willfully so. My guess is, they are a small sample size of maybe 100 million Americans — mostly, but hardly exclusively White — who wallow in ignorance thinking that this will shield them from the inexorable march toward a majority of color country that the US will be well before mid-twenty-first century. The fact is, Butler’s trolls are so scared of change that they are threatened by a seventeen-year-old wearing a hoodie with cellphone, Skittles and iced tea in hand. As well as by a University of Pennsylvania professor who they see as unqualified (a bit of a contradiction to be threatened by someone they see as insignificant, but that’s racism for ya!).

I might have worded it a bit differently, though (but then again, I’m a different writer, no?). As a Christian for more than twenty-nine years, I don’t see my God as one who represents racist Whites. After all, we are commanded to “treat our neighbors as we would treat ourselves.”

Evelyn de Morgan’s The Worship of Mammon (1909), September 7, 2006. (Shell Kinney via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But since Butler’s trolls obviously do think that they worship God, let me at least say this. If you believe in corporate capitalism and the corrections of the market, then your god is money, and the love of/lust for it. If you believe in the criminality of Blacks and Black male bodies, then your god is White. If you believe it’s okay to voice your displeasure by calling Butler a “n—-r c–t,” then your god is one that subjugates women, especially Black women. These beliefs do not and cannot represent my beliefs in God, in the life of Jesus, heck, in life of anyone who has ever spoken on behalf of social justice and human rights in history.

To misquote The American President (1995):

“Professor Anthea Butler has done nothing to you, trolls….You want a character debate? You better stick with me, ‘cuz Professor Anthea Butler is way out of your league.”

The Walking Danger

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Upper West Side, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abuse, Black Males, Distrust, Escape, Exploration, Life, Racial Stereotypes, Stigma of Criminality, Value, Walking, Walking While Black

Justice4Trayvon blackout box, July 12, 2013. (http://jet.com).

Regardless of the verdict in the Florida v. Zimmerman (a.k.a. Justice4Trayvon) trial, there’s one sad and terrifying lesson to take away from the past seventeen months. No Black male past puberty can assume themselves to be safe once they leave their homes to do so much as to cross the street. It doesn’t matter if you’re 6’1″ and 173 pounds, like I was my senior year of high school, or 6’6″ and 300 pounds, like a good- sized high school offensive lineman. We’re not just assumed guilty. We’re assumed to have a value the equivalent of a quart of recycled cooking oil.

It amazes me that with as much walking as I did while growing up in Mount Vernon and in walking all through the city, I only faced a handful of Walking While Black incidents. From the time my Mom and my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice moved me and my older brother Darren into 616, I was a frequent walker. At seven, my Mom sent us to the store for groceries, for soda, for cigarettes and pork rinds. Yeah, the store was a block and a half away on East Lincoln, but that block and a half led to my first mugging at nine.

By then, my walks to the store went into Pelham and Milk ‘n Things, a three-block walk, as well as stores within three blocks of the Pelham border. That led to the first weird stares from Italian store owners. At the same time, when my father Jimme came back into our lives in ’79, we’d walk to Mount Vernon’s South Side. We’d walk to East Third Street and Wino Park on Fulton and Third, to the rib shack across the street from the park, to Sanford Blvd, even into the Bronx depending on Jimme’s alcohol level. That would lead to confrontations with street folks, and even occasional stares from cops.

Wise Cheez Doodles, one of my favorites to buy as a teenager, July 12, 2013. (http://twitter.com).

By the time I hit puberty in the spring and summer of ’82, in no small part because of the collapse of anything resembling a family at Hebrew-Israelite 616, I began to walk everywhere. Some of my walks were because my Mom’s marriage had given her more mouths to feed and no time to go to the store. So me (mostly) and Darren (on occasion) would walk from 616 to stores like C-Town in Pelham (a mile or so away), Waldbaum’s on East Prospect (a mile and a quarter away) or stores in between for food. This became part of an eventual everyday routine, one that would last until well after I began college at the University of Pittsburgh (at least, when I was home for the holidays or the summer).

We also walked to get my younger brothers and sister Sarai out of the stifling apartment, especially because it was quite literally so during the summer months. We walked from 616 to Pelham, Pelham Manor, the Bronx, Bronxville and New Rochelle in those first couple of summers after puberty. The kids helped us look less suspicious, I suppose, because two teenage Black males had no business being anywhere near the six-figure-income-set’s communities in the mid-80s (or even now) otherwise.

I also began walking to explore, escape and think. It was next to impossible to think at home, with the constant noise, threats of abuse and actual abuse and domestic violence. So by the time I’d reached tenth grade, I needed to walk, by myself and with no agenda other than to make plans for my future while clearing my head. I did get followed by Bronxville PD a couple of times. But mostly, lost Whites from out-of-state would stop and ask for directions to the Bronx River Parkway or I-87.

Hershey’s Chocolate Milk (at 17, a 16oz was my favorite store-bought drink), July 12, 2013. (http://www.gifarmer.com).

It wasn’t until after my seventeenth birthday — when I finally began to put on a little weight (muscle, I guess) — that walking around New York, Mount Vernon and nearby environs began to feel dangerous. Or at least, others began to act as if I was the danger. I’d become a regular weekend strap-hanger on the 2 out of 241st Street headed either to the Upper West Side, Midtown or Downtown, as well as parts of the Bronx. To hunt for the latest tapes, to go to a museum or a library, to just walk around and take the city in. But I also knew to be careful, to be leery of the NYPD, to keep my hands out of my pockets whenever I went to Tower Records or Crazy Eddie’s or even Gray’s Papaya.

Still, there were incidents at Milk-N-Things and Tower Records and a general feeling that folks, older, often White but also frequently Black were genuinely afraid that I — a person who’d been mugged four times before my fourteenth birthday — would hurt them.

Walking was how I learned how different I was from a societal perspective. That though a teenage, I was the dangerous Black male, to be treated as if I just escaped the plantation, as if I hope to find a store to knock over and a White girl to knock up against her will.

I’d hoped to spare my son this lesson. Sadly, because of George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin, I can’t. But at least he won’t have to learn this lesson from scratch like I did. And luckily, I knew and did enough to avoid danger — or being seen as the danger — long before I turned seventeen.

Get Rich, Or Whine Trying

08 Monday Jul 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Afrocentric, Business Ideas, Communications Business, Get-Rich-Quick Schemes, Half-Baked Ideas, Limo Business, Ponzi Scheme, Poverty, Pyramid Scheme, Sun-Lion Communications, Underemployment, unemployment, Whining

50 Cent, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ album cover art (2003), June 27, 2007. (Hundredalexander via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of picture’s low resolution.

When people grow up impoverished, there’s a strong impulse to come up with all kinds of scenarios for becoming rich. Some of these ideas require hard work, some require the fulfillment of dreams through tapping into one’s individual potential. Many ideas, though, remain half-baked shortcuts, ones that never reach fruition. Ideas like winning the lottery or Powerball, becoming a professional athlete or a singer or a rap artist. Others involve get-rich-quick schemes, ones that often take advantage of desperate wish of those in poverty to no longer be poor.

I’ve had plenty of experience observing examples of this last point. Especially in growing up at 616. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was susceptible to all kinds of ideas for making money, particularly schemes that required others to invest. I guess I can understand. As the fledgling writer and author I am, I can certainly see the appeal of finding shortcuts to, say, selling 100,000 copies of Boy @ The Window in a month. If only I could somehow get Oprah to endorse my book on her website and on the air!

Bernie Madoff (mugshot), the ultimate get-rich-quick scam artist, March 16, 2009. (US Department of Justice via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But I digress, as my scheme at least has a least a puncher’s chance at working (I have written a book, after all). My then stepfather, having held the jobs of Air Force MP, hospital orderly and taxicab driver, spent most of the ’80s trying to find ways to make easy money without putting forth any effort at all. In ’82, his grand scheme was Sun-Lion Corporation, which later turned into Sun-Lion Communications, the latter his attempt to do the equivalent of Bob Johnson’s Black Entertainment Television. My idiot ex-stepfather intended both the overall corporation and the communications arm to have what we would now call an Afrocentric slant. His vision was to be an emphasis on Hebrew-Israelite or similar foods, clothing, and other products and services meant for Black folks in the New York City area.

Maurice did everything he could to get my Mom involved in these schemes. My Mom went so far as to buy a corporation’s license for $2,500 in March ’82 for Sun-Lion. In the meantime, they argued and fought, and my ex-stepfather beat my mother up once in part over her lukewarm support for his grandiose schemes. At one point, they argued because Maurice wanted to raise $100 million in capital to put Sun-Lion Communications together! God, that man was an idiot!

After getting back on his feet after three years and three months of unemployment as a part-time security guard of an empty Vicks building in August ’82, Maurice came up with more schemes. He went to trucking school for four months between October ’86 and February ’87 outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, but never spent a day as a truck driver. Then Maurice was a car salesman for a few months in ’87, actually making commissions while selling Cadillacs. But of course he couldn’t hold on to a job he was tailor-made for, a gift-of-gab con man!

Finally, in the spring and summer of ’88, Maurice tried to talk his way into the limo business by attempting to get a fellow 616 resident to give him access to a limo or capital. They laughed. My Mom laughed. I laughed. Maurice cried and whined about how no one ever supported his get-rich-quick efforts, not realizing that most of his so-called effort came in the form of getting others to give him something he either already.

“Whine…it’s just not fair!” cartoon, October 1998. (http://allpolitics.com).

When Maurice finally left 616 in June ’89, I thought all those days of ludicrous schemes and bullshit ideas for making lots of money were over. But when you’re poor, you’re vulnerable, and others looking to take advantage sense that vulnerability. In the two periods of my adult life in which I’ve been unemployed or significantly underemployed, people have approached me about selling Amway products. My younger siblings have proven themselves to be susceptible to alleged golden opportunities that were much closer to rust than gold.

This is not a screed in which I’m crapping on pursuing dreams or long shots. What I’m saying, though, is that dreams and long shots need to be tethered to serious plans, hard work, maximized gifts and talents, prayer and even some good luck. Yes, reaching out for help will help, but not in a spirit of draining others in order to help yourself first and only. That’s what my deceased ex-stepfather never learned.

The Road to Boy @ The Window, Part 3: Spencer Fellowship

01 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ambivalence, Berkeley California, Catherine Lacey, Chicago, Disillusionment, Dissertation Fellowship, Epiphany, George Boudreau, Oakland California, Personal Insights, Personal Stories, Revelations, Sandra Stein, Scholarship, Self-Discovery, Spencer Foundation, Writing, Writing Craft

I’ve written before about the epiphanies that came with my status as a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow during the 1995-96 year, particularly during our retreat in the Bay Area in February ’96. What that time as a fellow and at this retreat revealed was that I had pushed much of what I thought of as ambivalence toward academia into my mind’s subconscious. But that splinter in the back of my head driving me crazy was about much more than academia and my pursuit of a doctorate and a job as a history/education professor. No, it was as much about my purpose in life, my writing gift and the need to pursue this calling despite my being within a year of becoming “Dr. Collins.”

You see, there was a civil war of sorts going on in my soul and spirit over the very nature of who I was and wanted to be. I’d spent more than four years in resistance to the idea that every sentence I wrote in academia needed to be a compound sentence. I fought over the idea of making my writing more accessible to readers who weren’t history majors, graduate students or actual history professors. I wanted to write so that what I wrote wouldn’t be forgotten in five minutes because my writing required a cryptographer’s chart to decipher its meaning.

Whether Dan Resnick or Joe Trotter, Paula Baker and a few other professors, their overarching criticism of my writing was that it didn’t sound scholarly enough. It didn’t have the heft of words like “posits,” “tropes,” “archetypes,” “eschatology,” and a thousand other words that required a minimum of a master’s degree to fully understand their meaning. I tried in my dissertation to address those concerns. But after the first few chapters, I decided to write first, and then rewrite second, third and fourth to mold my language into scholar-speak.

Luckily I had the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship by then. It saved me at least a year — and possibly as many as three — in terms of completing my doctoral thesis and degree. I didn’t have to teach for a full year, do research or work for Joe Trotter or anyone else for a year.

And it gave me time to think about the kind of career and future I wanted. Maybe too much time. For the first time, I realized the question that had been on my mind for years was about my competing interests in academia and in writing. Was I a writer first? Was I an academic historian? Would it be possible to do both? And if it were, how would I do both?

The Spencer Fellows retreat in Berkeley/Oakland in February ’96 helped broaden my horizons. Some of my fellow Spencer Fellows were struggling with the issue of their career moves as well. I had only considered teaching in schools of education in passing prior to that retreat. I knew that with my interests in diversity in education, in educational equity, in the process of getting into and through college, a traditional history program would be an uncomfortable fit for my interests and talents. The retreat revealed that much to me, at least.

It revealed far more than that, though. I realized that out of the thirty-three Fellows, I was the only one who actually understood on a personal level how difficult issues of race, poverty and the politics of education made it for someone like me to go to college, graduate, get into a grad program, and eventually finish a doctorate. Oh, my fellow Fellows knew all too well the harassment and hazing and jealousies of their professors and dissertation advisors. Still, issues like welfare poverty and magnet school programs like the one I attended in Humanities were abstractions for them. Most of them hadn’t experienced what they were actually studying. The ones who had some experiences approximating my own became my favorite Spencer Fellows to be around, for those were the greatest of conversations.

So the seed of thinking about my work in more personal terms was planted on a conscious level by the time my Spencer Fellowship ended in June ’96. I hadn’t figured out yet that I was a writer first, an academic historian and educator second, but clearly both in the end. I was too invested in earning the degree and getting away from Joe Trotter as fast as I could back then.

I did think incorporating my experiences around the importance of education, of race, of poverty, of family dynamics in my writing would make what I wrote about much more meaningful. It wouldn’t diminish the scholarship, and would provide a creative outlet beyond the mundane world of academic writing.

Boy @ The Window Update: Barnes & Noble

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barnes & Noble, NOOK, NOOK Books, Promoting/Marketing Books, Writing

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

As of yesterday, Barnes & Noble now carries a NOOK book version of Boy @ The Window on its BN.com website. It was a difficult process, actually, converting the book for Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Books purposes. Will it be worth it? I have no idea.

Still, for those of you who haven’t found or bought a Kindle or iBooks version of Boy @ The Window, but have or prefer a NOOK version, this link is for you:

http://bit.ly/138gkne (translates as http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567).

On another note, the free PDF version of Boy @ The Window will come down next week. Plenty of you have downloaded it, and hopefully read it as well. I will let you all know of up and coming events and other news when plans become more definitive. In the meantime, happy reading!