Tag Archives: Boy @ The Window

The Audacity of Low Expectations/Jealousy

19 Monday Sep 2011

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Mimi and Eunice, “Low Expectations,” September 19, 2011. (Source/http://mimiandeunice.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because of image’s low resolution and without the intent to reproduce or distribute for profit.

It seems to me that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past three decades overcoming other people’s psychological issues. Regarding race, race and gender, race, gender and class, not to mention performance issues, success, jealousy and envy, and other psychoses that had little or nothing to do with me. It’s something that most folks who aren’t Black, male, grew up in poverty and had some success (however one defines that) really can’t understand unless they have parents who’ve told them every single day that they “weren’t good enough to live.”

Still, these issues have mostly cropped up for me when I’ve experienced what most people would recognize as success, as if the only role I was ever supposed to play in life was that of a doormat. The first time I went through this process of blowing up other people’s low expectations of me was at the beginning of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, about this time twenty-five years ago. A couple of weeks into the school year, MVHS released our class rankings. Out of the 545 or so students eligible to graduate as part of the Class of ’87, I was ranked fourteenth with a 3.83 average.

My MVHS trascript, courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Admissions Office, January 7, 1987. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Note the circles from the admissions officer all over the transcript.

I understood that this was pretty good, but I was also disappointed that I hadn’t cracked the top ten. In fact, the top twelve students in our class all had GPAs above a 4.0, all because of our weighted Level 0 and Level 1 courses. Crush #1 finished just ahead of me, thirteenth in our rankings, something I saw as ironic. Despite this sign of academic success, I hoped and wished for more, and spent several late-night walks over the next few weeks second-guessing my work in tenth grade.

My classmates started to show their darker sides, some for the first time since the days of 7S. One came up to me after my AP Calculus class soon after the rankings were posted. “The only reason you’re in the top twenty’s because of history!,” implying that I was an average student in all of my other subjects. Another, much shorter and much more condescending classmate chimed in a few days later, saying that “the only thing you can do with history is play Jeopardy.” I wasn’t exactly walking around school celebrating my good fortune. I chalked it up to the stress of years of academic competition, the boiling over of senioritis and the rage associated with college preparations. The possibility that jealousy was involved didn’t cross my mind until much later. I didn’t think that anyone could be envious of my standing.

Fast-forward four years to the fall of ’90, as I prepared in earnest for grad school. Not only had I endured a short conversation at the beginning of that year with the great Sylvia Fasulo and her attempts to discourage me from pursuing grad school, law school or a career in law (see my “The Legend of Sylvia Fasulo” from September ’09). I had two professors from Pitt who told me that they weren’t sure about my chances for getting into grad school, and Reid Andrews, who flat-out told me that he didn’t think that I was “graduate school material.”

I have no doubt that if these yahoos were jealous of me at all, it was because of my age, and not my potential. They simply didn’t see how a 3.4 GPA and a 3.82 in my history major would be good enough to get me into a master’s — much less a doctoral — program. The fact that I completed my master’s degree in two semesters within twenty months of essentially being told that I was a fool left Andrews, at least, at a loss for words.

There are so many other instances in which a grad student, a professor, a supervisor, even my siblings, have expressed their low expectations and jealousy over my tiny little crumbs of success that it has left my head spinning on a broom handle. I mean, what did I really do to earn or deserve that kind of attention? I don’t own a house or have a million dollars in gold lying around. I have yet to publish an article in Rolling Stone or in The Atlantic Monthly. I don’t exactly have LeBron James or President Obama on speed dial.

So what is it about me, I’ve asked myself so many times? And then, I’ve reminded myself of something I figured out about twenty-one years ago. That the only expectations that I ultimately need to meet or exceed are my own. That what other people say about me, no matter how distasteful, really doesn’t matter, for those folks were never going to be there for me anyway.

Maybe it’s my refusal to live under someone else’s low expectations, to not allowing myself the luxury of envy, that irks those around me. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s as simple as misery loving company, and not loving mine. Either way, it’s ironic that we live in a time in which we prefer to tear each other down rather than help each other get going in our lives. Which makes my relationship with the rest of humanity so bittersweet. I guess I really am a writer!

Standing at the Crossroads

28 Sunday Aug 2011

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Cast Away movie (2000) screen shot, August 27, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because it is of low resolution and is in no way being used to reproduce the original film.

It’s funny how things in our lives happen in cycles. Sometimes it’s because we haven’t heeded the wisdom we’ve accumulated in our lives to keep us from following that same bad habits, ones that lead to serious problems for much of our lives. Relationships with men and women, addictions and other vices, behaviors that lead to indecision. That last one has been a big one for me to overcome in my life, and it still has the power to keep me for achieving all that I know I can do in life.

It has led to several crossroads in my life. They usually occur in August or December. August, because of the twenty-two years I spent as a student (not to mention fourteen off and on as a professor). And December, because of Christmas, Jesus and my birthday. But Augusts, especially the last five days in August, tend to stand out as times of contemplation and revelation. August ’91 was the start of grad school, while August ’93 made me rethink how to approach grad school. August ’97 left me with bitterness about being unemployed, while August ’99 gave me a new appreciation for having a job, any job.

But, aside from now, no August was more revealing about my character than the one in ’88. About two weeks before I needed to go back to Pittsburgh for my sophomore year, I went to search for Jimme. I was still steamed with him for not getting me the money I needed to secure a dorm room for the upcoming school year. I hardly swung by to see him that summer, too busy taking care of my siblings and recovering from my second roughest year in the decade, one of four months of unemployment. So on the next to last Friday before I needed to get back, I bummed ten dollars from Mom and took the Metro-North down from Pelham to the city. I got off, took the shuttle over to Times Square and the 2 to 72nd before walking over the Levi brothers’ office on West 64th. Jimme wasn’t there, but Glen was. “He’s over at my brother’s on East 59th,” he said. I’d forgotten that Bruce Levi had his own cleaners and business on the East Side.

I walked the dozen or so blocks there. And there Jimme was. I caught him just as he was getting paid for the week. “Bo’ whatcha doin’ up here?,” he said with complete disbelief. We talked for just a few minutes, with me mentioning more than once how I needed money to secure some sort of apartment at school. “Donal’, I done messed up too much money dis summer,” Jimme said. Apparently my father had spent most of Summer ’88 going through one of his drinking binges. The Levi’s had bailed him out several times, as his landlord Mrs. Smalls had toyed with the idea of evicting him. Jimme gave me $100 on the spot, and promised to get me more money before I left. When I went to see him at work the following week, he’d given me $300 more.

In rapid succession, I packed up my stuff in the five-suitcase set Mom had bought me the year before. Two suitcases, two duffel bags, and a garment bag, all of which she’d ordered from a catalog for a measly eighty bucks. I went down to a travel agency that was down the street from the Pelham Metro-North station and C-Town and found a cheap one-way ticket on USAir for $35. I couldn’t buy a good steak dinner in midtown Manhattan for $35! I got myself mentally ready for finding an apartment, ideally a one-bedroom.

By that last Sunday in August, everything was ready, and I had everything I needed. I played songs with my siblings for almost two hours before I left. I gave them my Michael Jackson tapes and my radio cassette player, taking my beat-up Walkman with me. We all hugged and cried, much more so than we had the year before. Part of me really didn’t want to leave, and part of me knew that I wouldn’t be whole again if I didn’t.

I had no idea how tough the next five days would be, between that Sunday evening, August 28 and that Friday, September 2. I was homeless for five days, and within three days of heading back to New York and Mount Vernon when I finally found a one-room death-trap in a row house in which to live.

Fork in the road, August 27, 2011. (Source/http://optimumsportsperformance.com).

I was within three days of becoming a college dropout because I didn’t trust anybody. I was so close to losing something I’d dedicated seven years of my life to achieving because I had spent the previous year indecisive about whether what I wanted out of life was more important than helping out my mother and my younger siblings at 616. It made me think. What meaning could I draw from putting up with all the put-downs and disapprovals of classmates, teachers and families if things hadn’t worked out? The answer would’ve been, none at all.

Now, as then, I face a crossroads in many areas of my life. One where I have to decide, which part of me is most important in achieving my dreams, fulfilling my calling, providing for my son and family, possibly even in maintaining a marriage? Whatever decisions I do make, I need to stand firmly in them, to be decisive, to see them through. That formula has guided me for twenty-three years. And it has yet to let me down.

Writing For The First Time, Almost The Last Time

14 Thursday Jul 2011

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I spent most of the summer of ’81, my summer before seventh grade, A. B. Davis Middle School and Humanities writing my first book. I’d been inspired by my second-place finish in Mount Vernon’s city-wide, K-12 writing contest, which came with a $15 check. It wasn’t really a book in any adult sense of the word, but for eleven-year-old me with all my interests in war and weapons back then, it was a magnum opus. It was a book about the top-secret military hardware the Department of Defense didn’t want the rest of America to know about. I remained consumed with reading about war and military technology in my spare time — I wouldn’t have learned the word “fortnight” otherwise! Everything from the B-1 bomber to the M-1 Abrams tank to the Trident submarine and MX missile was to be in this scoop on the latest in military high-tech.

M-1 Abrams with 105 mm cannon, circa 1980. (Source/www.cj-jeep.com)

I even wrote a letter to the Pentagon for declassified pictures of these weapons, which I received in mid-July. It would be another two years before the M-1 Abrams with the 120mm cannon went beyond the prototype stage, so I knew even then that someone at the Department of the Defense had made a mistake in sending me these photos.

By the time of my brother Yiscoc’s birth (one form of Hebrew for “Isaac” and pronounced “yizz-co”) later in the month, I’d written nearly fifty pages on these weapons and why they were so cool for the US military to have. Especially in light of the Soviet military threat. Unfortunately, they didn’t declassify the fact that America’s latest tank used depleted uranium in parts of its hull or in its cannon shells. That would’ve been a real scoop at the time.

Three weeks after Yiscoc came into the world, all of us spent the afternoon at White Plains Public Library. I did some more research for my military book. But I deferred on this book, not really sure that this was what I was meant to do and be. Not only would it be the last time I worked on my military hardware book. It would be the last time I’d write anything that I’d hope to publish for a decade.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I stopped writing, except for school or to journal about getting beat up by my

Peacekeeper (MX) Missile test launch, November 26, 2002, Vandenberg AFB, California. (US Air Force). In public domain.

stepfather Maurice. Maybe it was because of the cares of this world, the steady drop into poverty and welfare, the very nature of being a Hebrew-Israelite for three years, or having a stepfather who terrorized us for so long. Or maybe it was going from one to two, then three by ’83, and four by ’84, younger siblings in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. Maybe I just looked at myself through the eyes of my Humanities peers and saw someone who could only play Jeopardy! and sing high-falsetto, not a person with a gift for the written word.

As I’ve thought about those lost years — an eight-year writer’s block, really — three things come to mind. One is that my father Jimme was completely absent from my life for more than a year between April ’81 and August ’82, mostly because of a baseball bat (more on that next week). Two is the reality that I grew to hate, actually, literally, hate, my stepfather, who saw himself as a writer (he was an okay writer, never published, but not really the point). I dare say that I couldn’t hate him as passionately as I did and then turn around and embrace myself as a writer at the same time.

But the third thing involved answering the question, what kind of life would it be for me to pursue writing as a passion, a career and calling? The only people who ever asked me that question were my teachers. My eighth-grade and twelfth grade English teachers Mrs. Caracchio and Ms. Martino and my Western Civ II TA Paul Riggs. They at least made me realize that my biggest fear was being as impoverished at forty or fifty as I was at seventeen or eighteen.

Luckily, once I left Mount Vernon for Pittsburgh and Pitt in ’87, I became interested in writing again. And then once my stepfather became my ex-stepfather two years later, I found myself writing for me in volume for the first time in seven years. It wouldn’t be the last time I’d have writer’s block. Still, the longest I’ve had writer’s block since ’89 has been a day or two.

Yes, I’m still a struggling, though published writer. But I’m not Edgar Allen Poe, like I thought I’d be in pursuing this calling.

Milky White Skin

21 Thursday Apr 2011

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Bethesda Literary Festival logo, April 21, 2011. http://www.bethesda.org

I attended the Bethesda Literary Festival last weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to any conference involving writers, wannabe writers, published authors and other curiously weird types. I usually find these events somewhere between dreadfully boring and undeniably soul-sucking. I wish that I could say that the festival held at various parts of downtown Bethesda were an exception. But what I can say is that the Bethesda Literary Festival provided the best desserts — especially the cupcakes (my guess, from Georgetown Cupcakes) — I’ve had at any literary event.

Bethesda Literary Festival 2011 Logo, April 21, 2011. http://www.bethesda.org

The most poignant event at the festival for me was the Essay and Short Story Contest winners for ’11. Grouped into two categories — over 18 and young adults — the winners were announced and had the opportunity to read from their stories and essays. I must admit, some of the stories were compelling. (That word, compelling, a common word lit agents have used as a reason for rejection of Boy @ The Window. I often think that they’re working from an unspoken definition of what compelling really is.) But I also found most of the stories cliché, typical, White both in terms of the actual color as well in racial and cultural terms.

Listening to these aspiring authors, young and talented writers read their work reminded me so much of a line from Finding Forrester, where the character played by Sean Connery says, “Writers write so that readers can read. Let someone else read it.” It’s difficult for any writer to read something they’ve written with the passion and emotion contained within their own words. And with two exceptions — a mother reading for her daughter about a dying aunt, and a seventeen-year-old reading his essay in poetry slam fashion — the Forrester axiom was in full effect.

I kept checking my watch, hoping that I’d hear something that would inspire me or at least pique my interest. The latter did occur, but not in the way in which I would’ve expected. I listened to one forty-

Ridiculousness of Milky Skin, April 21, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

something short-story honorable mention read about a “tongue licking ice cream.” Earlier, there had been a young adult winner, reading phrases like “Same cloudless indigo eyes. Same auburn, frizzy locks. Same childish, pearly pudge of skin…”

It all took me back to novels and other pieces of literature from my high school days. Like Shakespearean plays in which actors described some young English woman as having “milky skin,” as a point of attraction and lust. That kind of writing, the constant shifting and sliding of adjectives and adverbs. It drove me crazy in ’85. Last weekend, it made my eyes glaze over, with both looking like the clear frosting on a glazed donut.

I yawned with the anticipation of more of the same stories that writers and publishers have been selling for as long as I’ve been alive. I knew what was coming. Stories of epiphanies and social consciousness, upper-middle-class-White-Bethesda-and-Potomac-style. Stories of parallel and pain, from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and grave illness to autism to death and dying. Universal stories that somehow were milky White, told in a style that made the messy truth of it as palatable as a slice of key lime pie.

I don’t write that way. But not because I can’t. I could write page after page in vivid description of Crush #1. I could count each hair on her well-muscled forearms on the way to measuring every mole on her shoulders, every tooth in magnitude of whiteness, every capillary in her eyeballs. I could spend a few pages describing the different smells of flatulence and excrement I grew up with at 616. From the sweetness of a spaghetti and meat sauce fart to the lingering death-knell scent of a bathroom after the flushing of what once was a combination of coffee, beer and fried chicken.

Literary nonfiction, memoir, or other serious writing endeavors, though, are about the balance between the sweet milky whiteness of the literary and the messy realness of me as the writer. In the case of Boy @ The Window, of me as the main character as well. Descriptions of milky or caramel colored skin do reside among its pages. But so do descriptions of conversations, characters, actions and emotions. All as part of telling a story, sharing some truth, beyond the romance of the purely literary.

The Turd Dream

24 Monday Jan 2011

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Russet Potatoes, January 23, 2011. Source: http://www.Fotosearch.com. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the limited use of picture and because its use is for illustrative purposes directly related to the topic of this post.

I found myself at a party one cold and starry evening, standing in an equally cold kitchen. It was really bright in the kitchen, almost to the point of overpowering my eyes. The walls and cabinets were all-white, the counters made of formica, and the floor light blue-and-white tiled. This was in stark relief from the adjacent living room. It was in a red-brown, ’70s dimmed-light den mode, with beads hanging over the doorway leading out of the kitchen to it. It was the kind of party I never had the chance to go to in high school.

But everyone was there. Even people I hadn’t seen since my Davis Middle School days. The class valedictorian and salutatorian, the affluent and middle class types who went to Pennington Elementary, Crushes #1 and #2, members of the Italian Club, and so many others were there. Two of them were peeling potatoes and throwing them into big pots of boiling water. They started slicing and dicing them, laughing as they were throwing the pieces into the bubbling clean and clear liquid.

Except these weren’t potatoes. These were turds, each shaped like a large Russet, being peeled and chopped, looking white but quickly turning crappy-brown upon contact with the air. The two turd-peelers shared the boiled and mashed turds with my former classmates, who were smiling in glee and eating them up with delight. I then looked at this six-foot, trapezoidal pyramid of a rack in the middle of the super-bright kitchen. It was full of turds, stacked on each one of its seven levels. It was enough to feed the guests several times over.

When I sat up from this dream in my small room in a shared row house on Welsford in Pittsburgh and found myself in the present, the first Saturday of February ’90, I gave Mom a call. I told her about the dream in all of its strange details. I asked her what she thought of it. “You’re friends are full of shit,” she said. After laughing so hard that I nearly rolled out of bed, I said, “That can’t be. It’s got to be more complicated than that.”

Yet I knew that Mom was absolutely right. Most of the people I knew during my years in Humanities — classmates, teachers, administrators, family members and neighbors — were full of crap when it came to me. I certainly included myself in that category. I might’ve made sure of or accidentally given myself a couple of enemas between 7S and the University of Pittsburgh. But it would’ve been hard to stay clean around all the filth on which we dined growing up. This was thanks in large measure to our community leaders and all of the racial and socioeconomic strife that was part of everyday politics and conversations at school and at city hall.

What Mom said was ironic, too. For better and mostly for worse, Mom, father and ex-stepfather had crapped up our lives with their baggage. The turds from their lives were the reason why my dreams had grown to be so vivid, so complicated by the time I reached adulthood. Mostly, my dreams and nightmares brought me to anger, as if someone were trying to steal my life from me, which, as it turned out, was how I felt most of the time when I was awake. And that also made me resolute whenever I left my dreams for the conscious world.

This was the final break between my immediate past of Mount Vernon, the whole Hebrew-Israelite and Humanities thing, and all of the ridicule, ostracism, poverty and abuse that came with those things. My past experiences were all now a part of my dream world. It was an occasional reminder that I wasn’t really myself in the relatively recent past.

That was nearly twenty-one years ago. Except for the occasional email from an ex-teacher or ex-Humanities classmate, the only reminders I have of the time before I became myself again are my Boy @ The Window project and manuscript. And though I don’t necessarily see the people whom I grew up with and around as being full of crap these days, I do see how our collective community baggage would make it difficult for many of us to find our way, our calling. Even in the midst of the best education our city had to offer.

A Musical Mirror in Time

13 Saturday Nov 2010

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My iPod, November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

A side benefit to working on Boy @ The Window has been walking down memory lane in describing the music of those times. The music I listened to for inspiration, out of love, rage or goofiness. Or music that provided my means of escape from the drudgery of poverty at 616, the organized chaos that was Humanities and Mount Vernon public schools. Music that I stumbled upon, or deliberately discovered or discounted.

I’ve wondered off and on what the tunes in my ear and head would’ve been like if all the music that I’ve been exposed to since the end of the ’80s had all been at my fingertips in ’81 and ’82. I know one thing for sure. Had I the ability to send my eleven or twelve-year-old self my iPod from ’10, weird or not, Hebrew-Israelite or not, I’d been one of the coolest kids in school. Assuming that I wouldn’t have had to defend my improbable toy against bullies and muggers, that is.

So, now that I have access to music from any time and any year up to 2010, what would I’ve listened to

My iPod, Sting's "Desert Rose", November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

during the Boy @ The Window years? Thinking about Crush #1, the music I had available in mind and in ear was Stevie Wonder’s “As” and “That Girl,” and The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” between March and June ’82.

Fully acknowledging that I was in some sort of love then, gee, what would’ve fit my mood? What would’ve been appropriate to the chaos in the rest of my life? U2’s “Beautiful Day” — where “you’ve been all over, and it’s been all over you?” Or Coldplay’s “Clocks,” Sting’s “Desert Rose,” Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk,” and Celine Dion’s “That’s The Way It Is,” all songs of shyness and unrequited love? Talk about framing a mood!

Well, what about Crush #2, my obsession with her, and the pain she helped cause? What could complement music like Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better,” Paul Carrack’s “Don’t Shed A Tear,” or Geto Boys’ “My Mind Playin’ Tricks On Me”? Going back to January ’88, Live’s “White, Discussion” would’ve been a place to start. White male angst about race and possibly love — “Look what all this talking got us, baby” screamed at maximum lung-ness by lead singer Ed Kowalczyk — could’ve just as easily been my sarcastic and rage-laced refrain regarding Crush #2.

Other, more goofy and less epic tunes to lay out my anger and disappointment — or to get over it — hmm. Probably something like Michael Bolton’s “Time, Love & Tenderness,” Mariah Carey’s “Can’t Let Go,” or Annie Lennox’s “Walking On Broken Glass.” Music from the ’90s. So much better for coping with crushes and trifling people.

On a more serious tip, what from my present would’ve soothed my constantly worried mind back in the days when mp3 would’ve been thought of as a kind of motor oil? My faves of the ’80s were Mr. Mister’s “Kyrie” and “Broken Wings,” because the songs met me where I was, a teenager struggling to find his true self, to succeed in school, to survive life at 616. Other than some social justice-lite songs like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On,” Sting’s “They Dance Alone,” or Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” there wasn’t much of a message in most of the music from the mid- to late-80s — at least related to my life.

My iPod, Nickelback's "If Today Was Your Last Day," November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins.

But bringing music back from the future would’ve helped. Like Anthony Hamilton’s “Comin’ From Where I’m From,” Creed’s “Higher,” Sounds of Blackness’ “Optimistic,” even Nickelback’s “If Today Was Your Last Day.” The line of lines — “Against the grain should be a way of life” — has been when I’ve gotten the most out of myself, my God and my life.

I can only imagine what life would’ve been like with a piece of second-decade, twenty-first century

My iPod w/ U2, November 13, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

technology in the early ’80s. It made have made most of my embarrassing, disheartening and sorrowful moments easier to bear. But without those moments, I certainly wouldn’t have as full an appreciation of the music I listen to now and the blessings that have occurred in my life in the three decades since. As Anthony Hamilton would say, “Sometimes you gotta walk alone,” although with music, not completely alone.

This Is Why I Write…I Think

09 Tuesday Nov 2010

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A Younger Me, Thinking, Central Park, New York, NY, December 23, 2002. Angelia N. Levy

In the course of the past half-decade of struggle over a now 360-page manuscript, even I’ve asked myself, why? What am I doing? Why in the world would I want to dredge up and relive twenty-three, twenty-five and thirty-year-old memories? Of all the books I think I have left in me, why a memoir about the years of my life I’ve tried hardest to forget, to not even discuss? Wouldn’t it be easier to write fiction, a novel that includes elements of that life without a detailed account of it? Why take the risk of offending my first hometown, my former classmates and teachers, my family? Why, dummy, why?

 

Well, it’s not because I get some perverse pleasure out of describing myself as a loser, or torturing myself with unfulfilled love, or because I’m trying to hurt other people’s feelings about Mount Vernon, New York or the Humanities Program. There are lots of reasons. Some of them start with my seven-year-old son. At the very least, I want him to understand his old man as he grows up better than I understood myself

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Cover Picture, November 9, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

growing up.

 

But it’s more than that, much more. I’m tired of sitting in interviews and in on staff meetings (when I worked full-time and had more consulting work) and hearing about the tiny number of highly educated Black males in the pipeline for high-level professional jobs. I’m tired of the narrative that says that Black males — and other males of color, for that matter — have to fuck up their lives in order to find the right path. It makes me groan — in my mind and out of my mouth — when I hear over and over again how few males of color even consider college, much less graduate or go on to advanced degrees.

But that’s not all. It’s disheartening to see these narratives play themselves out in African America, in America writ large, and in the publishing world. Like with my growing-up hometown. For the most part, entertainers and athletes — from the Williams and McCray brothers of the NBA past to Ben Gordon, from Denzel Washington to Al B. Sure — are the only ones with cred. Basketball, music, and occasionally, acting and dance are the ways other Blacks are inspired to have aspirations. Intellectual abilities, especially the ability to retain and then critique knowledge, are discounted. People like me growing up were nerds, or worse, just plain weird.

I write what I write because I know that in communities and in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, the constant ridicule and the stifling of creative thinking and intellectual development can easily lead to stunted lives. I was lucky in a lot of ways, because I was deliberately naive, because of Humanities, because some of my classmates were almost as weird as me, because we had some wonderful teachers. But that doesn’t represent the Mount Vernon educational experience, not by a long shot.

I’m tired of students of color — especially males of color — falling through the cracks of horrible K-12 education because of bad policies, racial and economic politics, and principals as prison wardens. Not only in Mount Vernon. Pittsburgh. DC. PG County, Maryland. Baltimore, Sacramento, Oakland, New York City, Cleveland, Jackson, Mississippi, Jacksonville, Florida, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and so many other schools and school districts I’ve visited for work or research purposes over the years.

The narrative that a Black male can only find their way out of poverty through committing criminal errors that lead to prison time and enlightenment goes all the way back to Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy. The one about Black males finding a niche in the world of entertainment — as athletes, musicians, rap artists, actors and comedians — has its roots in original Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The narrative that involves Black males who used education and their intellectual talents to overcome their circumstances and these stereotypical narratives is seldom heard from in the publishing world.

 

616 Living Room Window Screen Shot, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

That’s likely because some folks think that this story’s been overdone. Even though anyone can count those memoirs and novels on their fingers and thumbs. Maybe it’s not entertaining enough to describe a life full of violence and psychological torture, but with no crimes committed by the main character, no veins injected with heroin, no women knocked up with kids. I write my manuscript because I lived long enough to have learned that there are tens of thousands of Black boys and other boys of color — not to mention their teachers, parents, principals — who languish in the struggle to succeed because they’re not scoring touchdowns, spittin’ rhymes or dunking on rims. Or trying to live the thug life, for that matter. These are the kids that need to be saved, as much as the kids who are already on the brink of prison life.

 

For all these reasons, I write Boy @ The Window. For all of these reasons, I post on this blog as much as I do. To say what I’ve thought, but often haven’t said. And to do it without sounding as serious as an academician. Nor as entertaining as a stoned Baby Boomer trying to make the 70s sound cool. It’s a balance, and I’ve made many mistakes along the way. And will likely make more. But in all of this, I’ve found so much more of my humanity than I thought possible. I just hope that it’s really worth it.