Fife and Shalom

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

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

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Black Male Identity, Black Masculinity, Chorus, Domestic Violence, Fife, Judah ben Israel, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mentoring, Music Lessons, Oppression, Poverty, Pulaski Day Parade, Summer of Abuse, Tamrin, Trombone, Type 2 Diabetes, William H. Holmes Elementary

Civil War-era wooden fife, May 19, 2004. (Kevin Saff/National Parks Service via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One thing I never discussed here or in Boy @ The Window were the handful of “leisure” activities I had during the Hebrew-Israelite years. The world in which we lived back in the ’81-to-’84 period had precious few resources and even less room for things like summer camps, overseas travel, baseball games, amusement parks, or even a free impromptu rap battle at Van Cortlandt or Hartley Park. Heck, the Kool cigarettes’ music series that sponsored “Teddy Pendergast” or “Rufus and Chaka Khan” in those days might as well have been a trip to see the World Cup in France compared to our pitiful roach-and-belt circumstances.

One of my idiot stepfather Maurice’s Hebrew-Israelite friends, though, did provide a free service for us males in ’81 and ’82. His name was Tamrin. He was a heavy-set dude, probably about five-foot-eight, maybe 120 or 125 kilos (between 245-260 pounds), and likely in his late-thirties. Unlike so many of the Hebrew-Israelite men I had the curse to meet in those naiveté-shattering years, Tamrin had a lighter touch. His idea was to put together a boy’s band of fifes, drums, bugles, and other marching instruments to lead us Hebrew-Israelites in marches through the street of Mount Vernon, as well as temple sites in the Bronx, in Harlem, and in Brooklyn (specifically, Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, if memory serves). Even at twelve, I knew how ridiculously uncool that idea sounded.

That was his plan, anyway. So off and on, between August ’81 through the second week in July ’82, Tamrin gave me and other kids music lessons to play overly bombastic marching band music. These were the kind of joyless songs which one was mostly likely to hear at Moscow’s May Day parade of soldiers and nuclear missiles than hear anywhere in ancient Israel. I was picked out because I had musical training in my immediate pass. I played the trombone in fifth grade. Or rather, I had six months of trombone-playing lessons at William H. Holmes ES before my music teacher had a heart attack and died in March ’80. I sang in chorus all through sixth, seven, and eventually, eighth grade. I could read music, though I struggled in transition between half-notes and quarter-notes.

Pulaski Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, October 6, 2013. (http://www.posteaglenewspaper.com).

So Tamrin would come over about twice a month, usually on Saturday afternoons, and spend a couple of hours with me playing the fife. (Can you imagine that? A twelve-year-old, kufi-wearing Donald playing such a small and delicate reed instrument? Really? Really!) Tamrin took us to the Pulaski Day Parade down in Manhattan the first Sunday in October ’81 to see how the pros do the fife-and-drum thing. The costumes I found fascinating, but I dreamed of food, not of marching around with fife.

Once Mom’s already pitiful funds got down to a disposal income of $5 per day — that was in December ’81 — Tamrin didn’t come around as much. Though he wasn’t getting paid much, I think he still expected $10 per lesson. Still, he came around even when he wasn’t getting paid, though it was only once a month during the ’81-’82 winter. That’s when I noticed, though just barely, that Tamrin had diabetes. His fingers had swelled during the winter, and he moved slower, too.

From mid-April to the beginning of July, Tamrin was around nearly every Saturday for an hour at a time, working with me on marching while playing fife, polishing up fife-ful flourishes, and getting me to learn more bombastic music. There were a couple of times I played with the other preteen and teenage Hebrew-Israelite kids. They seemed about as cool with this fife-and-drum band as I was with having an abusive stepfather.

And that’s who stopped my participation in Tamrin’s pet project. After my summer of abuse began in earnest on July 6, ’82, Tamrin came around that Saturday, July 10. I played my fife to some music, but the knot on my head, the bruises to my left cheek and jaw, and my busted lip would’ve been obvious to any observer in the week after Maurice tried to beat me into submission. I kept playing my music, but I knew that Tamrin and Maurice were jawing at each other about something or other, hopefully not me. All I know was, that was Tamrin’s last time working with me to play the fife. I’d continue to see Tamrin at temple. But that second Saturday in July ’82 would be the last he’d come over to 616 to teach me terrible music for the fife.

Oppression graffiti, January 15, 2013. (Students for Liberty via http://genderlitutopiadystopia.wikia.com).

Did I play a good fife? Tamrin thought so. Compared to my Hebrew-Israelite comrades, I’m pretty sure I did. But like with so many things Hebrew-Israelite during those years, it was a bitter march to nowhere. The fife was part of a Hebrew-Israelite physical and spiritual gulag that put me into more chains, rather than freeing me to be me. Despite Tamrin’s intentions, the idea of molding me and others into men in conditions that would make most “men” contemplate homelessness or running away was a ridiculous pipe-dream.

That Tamrin was likely the only adult male in the Hebrew-Israelite camp who saw Maurice for the lying, abusive, womanizing asshole he was made me realize not everyone in this world was against me. But in a religion that when practiced helped oppress me and others more than the outside world, what was any Tamrin to do?

Dwayne and Cindy

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Art, Black Identity, Black Male Identity, Comic Strips, Creativity, Depression, Genius, Identity Crisis, Infantilization, Mental Retardation, Potential, Reading, Sibling Relationship, Sibling Rivalry, The Brady Bunch (1969-75), The Clear View School, What's Happening!! (1976-79), Writing

My older brother Darren, with nephews Roshad and Noah (my son), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

My brother Darren turns forty-six years old today. With all that’s happened in our lives, it would be easy for me to forget that Darren’s my older brother, that he learned how to read on his own at three years old, that he taught me how to read right around my fifth birthday. Yet if I go back in time far enough, I can still see the Darren that was before his fourteen years at a school for the mentally retarded in Clear View at Briarcliff Manor had permanently screwed him up.

Between the ages of ten and sixteen (or, between late ’77 and early ’84, my brother worked on his own personal comic strip series, one he called Dwayne and Cindy. I guess he got the character names from two of his favorite shows, What’s Happening!! and The Brady Bunch. Darren started slowly at first, figuring out how to draw his characters. They were both Black, kids that were about the same age as we were. They were best friends who went outside to play, went on walks or otherwise hung out at Dwayne’s place playing or watching TV.

So when Darren added his bubble captions to tell his stories, they were simple strips about life in the suburbs, about going for walks to the store, about school and homework and how their parents were always too hard on them. As with all things that required creativity, Darren drew from what he knew from living in Mount Vernon and going to school at Clear View, which back in the late-’70s was in Dobby Ferry, and not so Bruce Wayne-stately-manor-looking as it is today.

What's Happening!! (1976-79) screen shot, December 27, 2011. (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/whatshappening/whatshappseason3-1%20(Small).JPG). Qualifies as fair use -- low resolution pic without alternative image.

What’s Happening!! (1978) screen shot, December 27, 2011. (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/whatshappening/whatshappseason3-1%20(Small).JPG). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution pic without alternative image.

As Darren got older, he fleshed out Dwayne and Cindy some more. They had similar personalities, where they used each other to escape what seemed to be a harsh world outside of their bubble. But Darren would never draw nor talk about this harsh world in his strips. He wanted them to be funny and goofy, after all, not just a reflection of everything that was going on at 616 and with our parents/idiot stepfather.

At the same time, though, Darren as a comic strip writer hadn’t grown to the point where he could capture more complex issues in his form. I said as much when he asked me to look at a more mature version of Dwayne and Cindy in ’82. “Why do Dwayne and Cindy say the same thing all the time? Don’t they grow up or think about other stuff?,” I asked with some impatience, hoping that Darren would want to talk about race, or growing up, or make Dwayne and Cindy into teenagers.

And on this one, Darren didn’t immediately give up. For two more years, until the beginning of the summer of ’84, he did try to make Dwayne and Cindy more mature. But between the loss of our bedroom to younger siblings and then the whole Balkis Makeda affair in ’84, combined with the completion of the institutionalization process at Clear View, Darren no longer had the creative spirit. His psychological reserves to see himself as normal, as a whole human being, as a young Black man, were all but gone, and have never returned.

I sometimes think that Darren had a window of opportunity to pull himself out of the psychological hole that my Mom, my father and Clear View put him in between ’74 and ’88. And he did. Through me and through that Dwayne and Cindy comic strip of his. In so many ways, his was a genius with the potential of an Aaron McGruder, some of which did rub off on me.

I DRAW COMICS sketchbook, September 2012. (Matt Marrocco via http://www.kickstarter.com).

But being around the severely mentally retarded and a group of teachers and psychologists who coddled and infantilized the toughness out of him, the toughness Darren needed to succeed as well as survive our ordeal at 616. That, more than anything, extinguished Dwayne and Cindy and his chances at a rich life before he was old enough to vote. Which is why on every ninth of December, I’m so sad, for him and for me. Yes, I feel guilty, and yes, I know it’s not my fault, but I still miss the promising version of my older brother. I wish that Darren could’ve published Dwayne and Cindy, even the simple versions he began to draw and write thirty six years ago.

Salutatorian Story

07 Wednesday Mar 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Youth

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Black Male Identity, Boy @ The Window, Class of '87, Harold Meltzer, Humanities, Identity, Mitt Romney, Mount Vernon High School, Narcissism, Popularity, Sacramento, Salutatorian, Self-Reflection

Caravaggio’s Narcissus (1594-96) – talk about someone with interpersonal issues – May 15, 2011. (Masur via Wikipedia). In public domain.

As I began to work on Boy @ The Window six years ago, I realized that my story would be far from complete without the words and thoughts of my former classmates, teachers, and family members in my head. Thoughts about themselves. Thoughts about Humanities. Thoughts about me. Thoughts about our world and our times. After all, I hadn’t thought about most of these folks in nearly two decades.

I had already started with my late, wonderful teacher and mentor, Harold Meltzer several years earlier. My first interview with him was in August ’02, but the first time we discussed the possibility of me doing Boy @ The Window goes back to February ’95. I was working on my doctoral thesis, living in DC for a couple of months while hitting the archives and libraries up for dusty information. In need of a writing break, I gave him a call on one cold and boring Saturday afternoon.

Meltzer answered with his usual “H. MMMMMMM. here?,” the M’s strung together like a long string of pearls bouncing slightly as you’d lay them gently on a table. When I said who it was, he said, “DONNIE!! Why, it’s so good of you to call!” in his halting suburban New York accent. Little did I know that this was the start of a three-hour-long conversation.

We spent a lot of time talking about the salutatorian of my class, the Class of ’87. To me, he — let’s call him ‘S’ — was always an enigma. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

I felt the side effects of S’s success. Teachers telling me that I should be more like S, as if I was S’s younger, underachieving brother. I saw how S occasionally cashed in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be S or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me.

I said as much during a three-hour meeting we had during my first work-related trip to Sacramento during the second week of March ’06. When S asked what I thought of him, I said, “I thought that you were…obsequious, ingratiating…no, that’s too strong…I sensed that you needed to be liked by our classmates and teachers.” I don’t know exactly what S thought about my description of him, but then again, he did ask.

Mitt Romney’s proof positive that short of himself, calling someone obsequious is a strong statement. Romney at CPAC 2011, Washington, DC, February 11, 2011. (Gage Skidmore via Wikipedia). In public domain.

S asked during our first meeting and interview in March ’06, “What do you think I thought of you?”

“For the most part, as far as you were concerned, I didn’t exist . . . I mean, I was there, of course, but I wasn’t in any of your circles, so I didn’t really exist for you as a real person,” I said in response.

I based that answer on S’s rare attempts to make conversations with me, ones that were mostly of the shaking-his-head-in-confusion ones. He didn’t get my attraction to the pop/rock band Mr. Mister, an ’80s prelude to Creed, I guess. “They can’t sing,” S said to me in Warns’ English class once as a reference to Mr. Mister’s #1 hit “Broken Wings.” The incident on the school bus on our Albany/FDR trip was another example (see my “An a-ha Moment” post from October ’10).

Meltzer never made me feel like a was a freak. Nor did he ever engage in comparing me to S. But he obviously was concerned about him, and had been so even when we were in eleventh grade. As for me, he said, for probably the one-hundredth time, “I never worried about you, Donnie.”

At the time of my ’95 conversation with Meltzer, I’d recently published an op-ed in my hometown and county newspaper, “Solving African American Identity Crisis,” Somehow our discussion of that piece led to a discussion of S. Meltzer told me that S “had a really hard time at Harvard” and that he’d “graduated with Gentleman’s Ceeeeeeeee’s,” the C’s rolling off his tongue in the process.

Meltzer asked if I knew what S’s problem was when I brought up the whole June ’89 conversation I had with S, the one that showed me his obvious confusion about himself (see my “Strange Days” post from June ’09). After an unusually long pause on the phone — it was long even by Meltzer’s own standards — he said, “You’re exactly right.” We spent the rest of our S discussion talking about him in high school and his need to be liked as a significant part of his identity issue.

I thought of all this as me and S ended our meeting that cloudy Northern California day six years ago. As I explained my plans to track down Crush #1 as part of what would become Boy @ The Window, S warned that she “has some interpersonal issues.” As if she were somehow off her medication when she visited S in ’04. I said, “Don’t we all?” in response. Neither of us had any room to talk about anyone else’s issues.

Strange Days

24 Wednesday Jun 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, race, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Black Male Identity, College Years, Crush #1, Humanities, Identity, Mount Venron HIgh School, Popularity, Salutatorian, Self-Reflection

Cover for the album Strange Days by The Doors, September 1967, scanned June 27, 2008. (Father McKenzie via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of scanned album cover.

Being on campus at Princeton teaching for a few weeks and working with college-ready high school students sometimes takes me back into my past. It’s funny really, realizing that the “best and the brightest” were hardly the best and weren’t quite so bright, even at the time I went to school with them. That’s not to say that the students I’ve had or have now at Princeton or the classmates I graduated with didn’t or don’t have loads of potential. They did and do. It’s more about what can happen when teachers, administrators and parents fill our heads full with delusions of grandeur, with ideas of intellectual greatness based on signs of academic excellence. It’s what can happen when students spend more time trying to keep up with the image of high academic achievement that others have created for them rather than finding their own path, one that allows them to be themselves and to tap into their potential.

I know, I know, some students strive and thrive even with the pressures from their parents, the doting of teachers, and the turning-the-other-way of administrators. I could also be accused of playa hatin’, I suppose. After all, I was far from popular in my glory days of high school, and only found myself in the last two and a half years of college. But that’s just it. Even I had to come to grips with my family’s expectations — especially the lack of them — in high school and college. I needed to find myself in order to be all that I could be in college and in grad school. I needed to make a clean break from the doubters in my life — including of course, my teachers and administrators.

That’s the unfortunate truth I faced in my last two years at Mount Vernon High School. Especially when the class rankings came out a month into our senior year. Out of 545 potential graduates, I was ranked fourteenth. I was a little disappointed because I didn’t crack the top ten, mostly because I knew I needed scholarship money and a good financial aid package to help pay for college, wherever I went. I had already learned that my performance wasn’t good enough for my teachers in eleventh grade. They kept reminding me that I was doing nothing in comparison to the salutatorian in our class, an involved-in-everything Black male. I guess I could’ve argued that they should’ve been comparing me to our Class of ’87 valedictorian, but my teachers saw the second in our class as a much more well-rounded student. At the very least, I knew from the comparisons that the person I was supposed to be more like had a charming way with our teachers.

I saw this particular classmate as more of an enigma than many of the other ones I had done time with in Humanities. I genuinely felt both in awe of and disheartened by his presence in my life during the Humanities years. I thought it was amazing that he was able to do as much as he did. The high school band. The mock trial team. The school newspaper. Our yearbook. An appearance on Phil Donahue! At least he wasn’t a star basketball player too, especially in Mount Vernon.

Yet I saw the results of all of that involvement on his part, and not just in terms of how teachers saw me. As far as teachers were concerned, it was as if I was this classmate’s younger, underachieving brother. But I also saw how the young man occasionally worked his reputation to his advantage, cashing in on his built-up academic capital to give himself more time to work on assignments no one else got a second of overtime to do. I don’t think I ever wanted to be him or become close friends with him, though. Something about his need to be well-liked by our peers and teachers bothered me. So I was happy in more ways than one to see our salutatorian gallop into the sunset with his diploma, a law firm job in Manhattan, and his ticket to Harvard punched some twenty-two years ago.

Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett in Strange Days (1995), screen shot, November 12, 2009. (http://ugo.com via Fox Entertainment). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of screen shot, not meant for redistribution.

Something strange happened in the days after the final fight between my mother and ex-stepfather in June ’89 (see my “The Miracle of Divorce” post from earlier this month). It was a week after idiot Maurice had moved out for the last time. Me and my older brother Darren were on our way to my father Jimme’s for money and because Darren was in the process of moving out of 616 — God knows he needed to. Along the way, we bumped into Crush #1, which is a story unto itself, a good one that is. Ten minutes later we bumped into salutatorian off The Avenue and West First, still trekking toward Jimme’s. This surprise meeting trumped my Crush #1 conversation and made a lasting impression on my understanding of myself as a Black male. So much so that I had a long conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about it years later.

When I bumped into the man en route to Jimme’s with Darren, he’d just gotten off work at his summer law firm job in the city, his third summer working there. He was wearing a hideous green-and-white-checkered dress shirt with dark green suspenders and even darker green slacks. Why hideous? Because on a hot and hazy day in late-June ’89, a day in which batting an eyelash required some degree of sweat, the guy was dressed like it was the middle of March. The color scheme didn’t blend at all with his dark chocolate skin, and his face was both greasy and sweaty from a long, hard day. But the biggest shock was his hair. It was conked — or fried as some folks say — ala Miles Davis or Malcolm Little before he became Malcolm X. This was the first thing I noticed, even before the Green Giant getup. Since I was already in a pissy mood, one only mildly moderated by my Crush #1 sighting and conversation, I didn’t outwardly react to it.

I realized as I stood there with Darren talking to my former classmate what had bothered me about him

Jolly Green Giant statue in Blue Earth, Minnesota, May 20, 2006. (Jonathunder via Wikipedia). Released into public domain via CC and & GFDL.

during all of our years together in Humanities. I had called him an “Oreo Cookie “—Black on the outside, White in the middle — in my head and under my breath on a few occasions during our Humanities years. Yet this sighting and conversation let me know that I was wrong. Sadly, I realized that our salutatorian didn’t have any identity at all. He made himself into whomever others wanted him to be. To his family, he was the mild-mannered and religiously faithful kid who just happened to be smart. To our teachers, he was super-intelligent, an overstretched overachiever whom teachers gave the benefit of the doubt if his assignment was late and he needed an extra day. To many of us, he was the polar opposite of our eventual valedictorian, a talented competitor who was far more worthy of our school’s number one status. I’m sure to a fair number of his Harvard classmates saw him as a marvel, either not “Black” enough or too much of a “credit to his race.”

The person I saw that day wasn’t the confident, take-on-the-world with a-smile-on-his-face person I’d seen in action for six years in Humanities. He was confident enough to attempt to act that way toward me, though. I got the story about how life at Harvard was good, that he was succeeding academically and that he’d found a way to fit in with his mostly White, six-figure and two-comma classmates. He also still intended to go to law school. And though his job at the law firm was difficult, he said that he enjoyed that also. My former classmate must’ve thought that he was talking to the uncultured twelve-year-old I once had been. His utter lack of details about classes, people, majors or professors let me know right away that life for his at America’s preeminent university was somewhere between rocky and a living hell.

My conversation with the person folks thought I should be much more like was a major revelation. It explained why it took until I was a sophomore in college to find my footing. We all had significant identity issues, exaggerated by our competitive conditioning as Humanities students. These weren’t typical teenage struggles over being cool or not. Especially when being cool meant being “Black” or “Italian” or “anti-intellectual” or a “brainiac,” not just “cool” in general. You could say that our grades and ranks—or shunning them as the case might’ve been—were as much a part of our individual identities as being affluent or Jewish or Black. Our salutatorian may well have been an extreme example of this, but he was hardly alone. Everyone in Humanities, even the “cool” cliques within had their share of identity issues to reconcile or struggle with.

My own identity issues were many and varied. In my case, though, I’d been working on reconciling mine since the middle of seventh grade. I realized that the battle I’d been waging for so long came out of my identity crisis, one that started as a spiritual disconnect between being a Hebrew-Israelite and watching my stepfather break every rule in the Talmud while attempting to break me and my mother. That battle didn’t even begin to subside until I decided to embrace myself for who I was, good, bad and ugly. Once I took that proactive step, shooting for the best person I could be and small miracles like real friendships were only a matter of time. It’s a lesson that I hope the high-potential students I’ve taught the past couple of years learn, and learn well.