Category Archives: Religion

Know Food, Know The World

04 Saturday Jun 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balkis Makeda’s 2nd Coming

23 Monday May 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Mother’s Day and Areas of Gray

07 Saturday May 2011

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My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my mother yelled to us the day before Sarai’s funeral last July. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of our place at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Folks have been posting all week on Facebook and Twitter about their wonderful, loving and supportive mothers, practically requiring people like me to do the same. As if all mothers all alike. As if all mothers are either the best or the worse. As if a good mother should be put on a pedestal like a trophy or gold medal, and a bad mother to not be mentioned at all. After all, most of us prefer not to hear bad news.

My mother was neither the best nor the worst mother in the world. She ultimately was and remains a contradiction of advice and action. She told us growing up never to depend on the government for handouts, but ended up on welfare from ’83 to ’99. She’d advise us to go to school and college, yet did almost nothing to help any of us get there. She’d complain about us not getting along as a family. Then call my younger siblings “Judah babies” and tell me that I was just like my alcoholic dad.

I’d dealt with all of this, all of the awful decisions and refusals to make any decisions about family, her life, her marriage to Maurice, the abuse that I had to put up with. The intervention I did for my younger siblings, for me and for Mom back in January ’02 had in most respects put the issue of my mother’s mistakes to bed for the family. Or so I thought.

My Mother's Associate's Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

All of that came back to me as I listened to my mother yell at us from seemingly out of nowhere that terribly hot and sticky Friday, the sixteenth of July last summer. I stood, then sat, on the new yet cheap beige couch in the living room, sweating next to a barely working window fan. I watched Mom’s contorted face spew its sharpen words, like arrows raining down on us. I could only think, “Not good enough, Mom! Your best wasn’t good enough.” I didn’t say it. Because I’d already said it back in ’02.

Her best hadn’t been good enough that week. Neither Sarai nor Mom had taken out life insurance, so it was either “ask Donald” or pass-the-hat time. Mom’s best hadn’t put food on the table one out of every three days between the end of ’81 and the middle of ’86. Her best left us behind in rent for nearly three years, had lost her a job with Mount Vernon Hospital, had led us to welfare. Doing the best that she could had made us Hebrew-Israelites and left us with an abusive, cheating Maurice/Judah as the alleged man of the house for most of the ’80s.

Most importantly, Mom’s fatal flaw as a mother was her lack of love and support for us as we moved from baby to toddler, toddler to little kid, kid to preteen, teenager to adulthood. We were all one group of burdens dumped onto her by a God that used us as a test of her as a mother and person. Mom said as much, multiple times, over the ’80s and ’90s.

I know that some of you will find this post offensive simply because I’m talking about my mother, the woman who gave birth to me. That’s just too bad. There’s a lot of gray between a great mother and a horrible one. My mother made a lifetime’s worth of bad decisions and path-of-least-resistance non-decisions that scarred me and my other siblings for life.

I love my mother for all the good that she did and all the good that she did teach me growing up. But that doesn’t me I should gloss over her record as a mother, provider and worker, especially during my growing up years. It means that there’s a lot I don’t like about my mother, who she was and is, and things she didn’t do well or didn’t do at all. It means that she has a limited sense of the responsibility she had when giving birth to me and to my five other siblings.

It also means that Mother’s Day for me remains very complicated. I’ve been buying my mother cards since ’84, and will continue to do so. And every year, finding the right card is hard, like looking for a good shoe for my nearly flat, quadruple-wide, size-fourteen feet. Still, I do the very best I can, because after all, she’s still my mother, and I love her with all of my heart.

Humanities Origins: Goofball

05 Thursday May 2011

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This week marks thirty years since I learned that my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Della Bryant had recommended me and two other classmates into Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. It was a great achievement, but it felt bittersweet at the same time. For it came a week after the end of my friendship to Starling, and three weeks into the bizarre-ness of being a Hebrew-Israelite. It was the beginning of six long years of learning life’s lessons the hard way, like a soft-shelled crab in the middle of a hailstorm.

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Mrs. Bryant had pushed for my acceptance into Mount Vernon’s Humanities Program at the beginning of May. Between my SRA scores (Reading, 12th grade level; Math, 11th grade level), three years as a straight-A student and her recommendation, it was pretty much a slam dunk. This meant that I could spend as much as the next six years taking accelerated courses with the brightest students in Mount Vernon. When Mrs. Bryant told me about her recommendation, I bounced the seven blocks home to tell Mom about the opportunity. Mom asked, “Are you sure about this?,” as if I was planning to become a Catholic priest. I responded with an emphatic, sportscaster Marv Albert-esque “Yes!”

Of all the things that I was first asked to do after Mrs. Bryant told me that I was in, I had to pick a language of study — for the next four years! I didn’t think much past the next couple of weeks, except when waxing philosophic, so four years might as well have been forty. I opted for Italian over Spanish and French, mostly because of my love for spaghetti and pizza and Italian cheeses, a desire to visit Little Italy, and because the other six Holmes School classmates who had been accepted into Humanities chose the other languages.

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But with the loss of Starling as my best friend, it was hard to celebrate without feeling lost and loss. I hoped that, at the least, that I could connect with the other kids that would make up Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. I hoped that I would do as well as I’d done between fourth and sixth grade, that I could prove myself as among the smartest — if not the smartest — kid in the program. Most of all, I hoped that I’d be challenged in ways that fourth, fifth and sixth grade hadn’t.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Humanities Wing, November 21, 2006. Donald Earl Collins.

As it turned out, I was challenged. Thoroughly. My future and now former classmates challenged all of my assumptions about people and life, about how the world works, about relationships, tolerance and acceptance. I faced challenges that I couldn’t have possibly anticipated three decades ago.

I attended William H. Holmes Elementary, a school that was 99.8 Black and Latino, with high number of kids from poor and low-income backgrounds. I assumed that with a greater degree of intelligence came a greater degree of acceptance, but I hadn’t learned anything about eugenics or Nazism as an intellectual practice yet. (Not that Humanities was an incubator of Nazism, but it shows how poor my assumptions were.) I was arguably the highest performing student in my class, but that’s like saying that I’d won a hot-dog eating contest against a two-year-old.

But that was all to come with the transition to middle school, the economic collapse of my family and the puberty process. In the moment of origin in May ’81, I was on an academic high that I wouldn’t achieve again until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. I was a newborn baby, beautiful yet naive, not yet ready for the torture of the growing pains that would follow.

Noah’s Ark, Judges & Lessons Not Learned

03 Tuesday May 2011

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Celebration of Osama bin Laden's death outside of White House, May 1-2, 2011. http://cfnews13.com

One of the really cool things about having lived an eclectic life — whether by choice or parentage — is that I often see things around me very differently from most people. It may make me goofy or an oddball, but it also makes me the thinker that I am.

Even on matters of belief, I find myself at odds with most Christians. It’s made it hard for me to find a church that I’m comfortable with for more than a few services. Today’s American Christians, Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical or otherwise are for the most part a bunch of hypocritical and self-absorbed — but hardly self-reflective — imperialists who use scripture and religious traditions at every turn to thwart equality and peace. We lack the wisdom necessary for real faith, and knowledge necessary for real understanding.

In the case of global warming and climate change, this deliberate ignorance has bothered me for years. The fact that so many have been willing to ignore droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes in favor of “drill, baby, drill” has been a point of disgust. Add to it the belief for many that these are the signs and wonders of the book of Revelations is somewhere between absolutely stupid and arrogance unlike few

Johan's Ark, a half-sized replica of Noah's Ark, in the port of Schagen, The Netherlands, September 3, 2006. Ceinturion (via Wikipedia), in public domain via Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license versions 2.5, 2.0, and 1.0.

other than God has ever seen. Even theologians have trouble interpreting the many contradictory messages of Revelations. Yet most of us prefer this explanation to the scientific proof that our burning of oil, coal, forests and vegetation over the past 250 years has done damage to the global climate.

Fewer who claim to be Christian use the Bible as a way to understand what’s happening beyond fire, brimstone and thunderbolts, making these folks no different from Norse or Greek pagans scared of Thor or Zeus’ wrath. Take Genesis and the story of Noah. It’s ultimately a story of great faith and climate change. Noah had the unique wisdom — some would say revelation — that a great flood would eventually arrive, and dutifully prepared for it while everyone else refused to believe and conducted business as usual. Eight millennia later, with enough scientific evidence to convince a doubting Thomas of climate change, and denial and debating Revelations is all that most of us do.

Or take the historic announcement Sunday night. After nine years, seven months and twenty days, the architect of 9/11 — not to mention the embassy bombings in ’98, attacks in Indonesia, the UK, Spain, and other parts of the world — Osama bin Laden, was killed by US special forces in Pakistan. As conflicted as I can be about many things, I wasn’t conflicted about US forces capturing or killing him. Not because I’m a bloodthirsty person, and not because I believe in the cause of invading other countries to capture leaders of a global terrorist organization. But because a billionaire global terrorist leader is a danger to us all.

So relief, a little bit of vindication, even, is what I felt, followed by the thought that this helps Obama and completely invalidates Bush’s preemptive war and occupation doctrine for both Afghanistan and Iraq. Not to mention thousands of dead and $4 trillion spent. Then followed by dread, because of the idiotic giddiness and hyper-patriotic vitriol spewed Sunday night and all day Monday by my fellow Christians. I’m not arguing that some folks shouldn’t have been a bit happy, felt some relief, and shouldn’t have been in tears. It’s been a long decade of intolerance, ignorance and insecurity that’s followed 9/11. But “USA! USA! USA!”? We took out one man. Al Qaeda still exists, along with a whole bunch of other homegrown and foreign terrorists, many unaccounted for.

Many of my fellow Christians would deny a peaceful afterlife to bin Laden’s spirit because of the evil that he did while here on Earth, playing the role of judge, jury and executioner. Not entirely unlike the judges in the Old Testament, providing law in a leaderless land of lawlessness. I’m hardly suggesting that we should all forgive and forget, even though that’s what we should ideally do. I doubt, though, that expressing glee equivalent to the Pharisees after the Romans crucified Jesus is high on the Christian playbook list.

All of this also leaves me sad. Because it shows that there’s no way on what’s left of God’s green Earth that most of us American Christians can repair the damage we’ve done to ourselves, our country, and the rest of the world. We won’t admit that jobs and gas for our cars today are more important than the environmental, economic and geopolitical future of our children. That the underlying conditions that led to the rise of Osama bin Laden — US political and economic imperialism all over the rest of the world — haven’t changed enough to prevent the rise of another in his place. We might as well keep doing what we’re doing. Chanting patriotic slogans while waiting on the side of a road, bags packed, waiting for Jesus’ return. While the world around us burns.

The Tyranny of Salvation

18 Monday Apr 2011

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Foot On My Neck & Head, symbolic of my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, April 18, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

Thirty years ago this date, on a sunny Saturday in April ’81, the false prophet known as my stepfather came back into our lives with a new religion, delaying my spiritual growth by at least three years. The day before both Easter and Passover that year, me, my mom and my older brother Darren became Hebrew-Israelites, Black Jews, Afrocentric Jewish Negroes, strange folks among strange folks in our strange land. It was supposed to be my and our salvation, the beginning of glorious times. Instead, it was a hell on Earth like no other, with fists, kicks and empty stomachs to look forward to for the next three years.

An excerpt from Boy @ The Window seems appropriate here:

Maurice returned to our lives in April ’81 after a six-month separation from my mom (sort of, because unbeknown to us, she was pregnant with my younger brother Yiscoc, a Hebrew variation for Isaac) claiming that he was a different man, a changed man, thanks to an allegedly reincarnated Balkis Makeda and his Hebrew-Israelite conversion.

This was the religion my stepfather converted to after he and Mom had separated. In the period before his return, my stepfather had been working on Mom, attempting to convince her that he was now a good man and could be trusted as the man of our house. He loved Jehovah, had stopped smoking, and had learned how to love himself. And he had changed his name to Judah ben Israel, not legally, mind you. The name literally means “Lion of God and of Israel,” and referred to my stepfather as a royal descendant of Jacob/Israel, the immediate father of the Israelite people. It was in this context that my stepfather gained a sense of himself and control over his world.

I didn’t know what to think at first. After I had watched Maurice load up on lamb shanks and pork chops on the first Saturday in October six months earlier, I hadn’t expected him to come back at all. I already thought of the man as the great pretender after three and a half years of living in the same 1,200 square-foot space together. That, and eating like he was Dom DeLuise at a banquet, were his only true talents. As few and far between my visits with Jimme were after Mom’s divorce became final in ’78, I’d always seen an inebriated Jimme as more of a father than Maurice could be if he really tried.

Still, despite my confusion and skepticism, I worked extremely hard to convince myself that Maurice’s conversion was real. Especially since Mom had decided to welcome him back into all of our lives. I had to. Because becoming a Hebrew-Israelite wasn’t exactly a process in which free will was involved. Our mother told us that this would be our religion “for the rest of our lives.” Then our stepfather came to explain this “way of life” to us, and we put on our white, multi-holed, circular kufis for the first time. I had no idea what Mom and Maurice had pushed us into.

A part of me was on the outside looking in, thinking, “this is crazy.” But we were already the children of one divorce, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see another one so soon. Darren, to his credit, played along as if being a Hebrew-Israelite was just a role in a school play.”

I lost many of my sixth-grade friends when I showed up to school the Tuesday morning after Easter and Passover with a kufi on my head, including my best friend Starling.

I might not have lost my childhood thirty years ago on this date. But it was the beginning of eight years wandering in the wilderness. It was a bitter, tyrannical wilderness, populated by wolves in sheep’s clothing, Maurice Washington number one among them. I stepped on many landmines in the process of finding myself again.

Still, those years are ones I can’t get back. It’s amazing that I found God at all, given all of the crap we’re told by spiritual leaders about the road to salvation.

Never As Good As The First Time

12 Tuesday Apr 2011

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I know. Today marks 150 years since a bunch of rebel rednecks besieged a fort in South Carolina after months of talk of civil war across the South and North, beginning the bloodiest conflict to date in American history. I’ll get to this in the next couple of days. Today, though, marks a more personal and bloody anniversary for me. You see, today’s the twenty-ninth anniversary of experiencing unadulterated child abuse for the first time.

Although much of what I’d gone through prior to April ’82 in terms of my parents’ and stepfather’s use of discipline would be considered abusive now, I wouldn’t have seen it that way when I was twelve. You run away from home, you get an ass-whuppin’. You tell a lie about your brother, you get whupped with a belt. You don’t clean up the kitchen properly, you stand in a corner of your room with the lights off, with one leg up in the air and your two arms balancing books for an hour.

Yeah, that was life at 616 before Maurice, Judah, whatever you want to call the man, became almost psychotic (based on my experience, actually bipolar) after becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in ’81. And, in the process, also making us Black Jews. Poor, misguided, conflicted Hebrew-Israelites we were. But not him.

Suge Knight Mugshot. Face and beard of my ex-stepfather from 30 years ago.

My idiot stepfather’s ego was stoked in this religion.

And it came out in the worst way on this second weekend in April ’82. It was a week after a freakish late winter/early spring storm had dumped 12-18 inches of snow on the New York City area — Mount Vernon included — and kept the schools closed for a few days. In the previous couple of months, Maurice had become a hanger-on at a newly opened Karate studio down the street from 616, next door to the old dry cleaner business on East Lincoln Avenue. He made me come to the studio because he wanted to show me “how to be a man.”

But when I’d see him on my almost daily runs to the grocery store, he mostly hung out with young Turks and wannabe thugs from the Pearsall Drive projects across the street. Maurice smoked up a storm of Benson & Hedges Menthol while talking about women, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and about me as his “book-smart kid,” at least when I happened to walk by.

I knew what that meant. My stepfather was making it known that he thought of me as soft. This would have disastrous consequences for me later on in ’82, as I’d come to be robbed by a guy called “Pookie.” But as far as this part of Mount Vernon was concerned, it was nothing like the poorer, almost exclusively Black South Side. At least where we lived, people didn’t go into parks with baseball bats attempting to put people’s heads in orbit, like with my father Jimme the year before.

Maurice had tried to teach me and my older brother Darren Isshin-ryu Karate two years earlier. Beyond that, he’d been showing us a variety of basic moves since ’77. Despite myself, I did pick up a few moves. Now he decided that I would learn how to fight no matter the consequences. It was all about breaking bones and inflicting maximum pain. When I told Maurice that I didn’t want to learn, he said “You will

D'Angelo Mugshot, circa 2010. A slightly better doppelgänger for idiot Maurice Washington from '82.

learn because I’m your father” as he started to throw hard punches into my midsection.

After I yelled “You’re not my father!,” he drop-kicked me to the floor. Maurice, all six-foot-one and 270 pounds of him, then pulled me up by my arms, slammed me back-first into a mirrored wall, and punched me several times in the head, chest, and stomach until several of the men in the studio surrounded him. My stepfather, completely exasperated and winded, yelled “Don’t you EVER say that again, muthafucka! I’ll kill you next time!” I ran for home with a knot on my forehead that didn’t go down for almost a week.

By the time that knot on my forehand began to shrink, I’d been feeling lonely and betrayed for nearly a year. It’d been exactly fifty-two weeks, a full year, since the asshole had come back into our lives with this earth-shattering religion. Now we were more broke than ever, I had lost my best friends, and in fact, had no one I could call friend. With this latest karate episode, I knew I was cursed, at least, that’s how I felt back then.

I wasn’t a normal kid before the Hebrew-Israelite period in my life. So I didn’t have a natural progression toward adulthood — I was struggling to remain a kid but succeeded at only having adult issues by the time a drop-kick knocked me to the floor of a karate studio. So, because of my virtually photographic memory and those terrible times, I often flip one of Sade’s refrains from “Never As Good As The First Time.” The thorns I remember, the roses, I forget (except for Crush #1). And Maurice second stint as a husband and father “didn’t live up to the dream,” ‘cuz his second time with us was “not quite what it seemed.”