Hard Work and the Human Race

17 Friday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Politics, race, Work, Youth

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Advantage, Boy @ The Window, Daydreams, Hard Work, Holmes Elementary School, Human Race, Individualism, Mount Vernon New York, New York City Marathon, Race, Social Class

Race card cartoon, no date, August 5, 2015. (Emanu!, http://pinterest.com).

When I was nine years old, my fourth grade teacher at Holmes, Mrs. Pierce — a grouch of an older White woman, really — talked about the human race and attempted to describe our species’ variations. She tried to do what we’d call a discussion of diversity now. It went over our heads, no doubt because she didn’t quite get the concept of diversity herself.

Holmes Elementary. Top left corner was Mrs. Pierce’s classroom in 1978-79 year.

Like the fourth-grader I was, I daydreamed about the term, human race. I thought of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, young and old, male and female, from all over the world, all on a starting line. It was as if four billion people — that was the world population in ’79 — were lined up to run a race to the top of the world. In my daydream, some were faster than others, or at least appeared to be, while others hobbled along on crutches and in wheelchairs. Still others crawled along, falling farther and farther behind those who were in the lead, the ones that looked like runners in the New York City marathon. Before I could ponder the daydream further, Mrs. Pierce yelled, “Wake up, Donald!.” as if I’d really been asleep.

A high school friend recently gave me some much-needed feedback on my manuscript. Her feedback was helpful and insightful, and very much appreciated. But some of it reminded me of the realities of having someone who’s a character in a story actually read that story. Their perceptions will never fully match up with those of the writer, which is what is so groovy and fascinating about writing in the first place.

One of the things that struck me as a thread in her comments — not to mention in so many conversations I’ve had with my students about race and socioeconomics — was the theme of individual hard work trumping all obstacles and circumstances. As if words, slights, and mindsets in the world around us don’t matter. As if poverty is merely a mirage, and bigotry, race and racism merely words on a page. Sure, a story such as the one I have told in this blog for the past three years is about overcoming roadblocks, especially the ones that we set ourselves up for in life, forget about the ones external to our own fears and doubts.

2009 London Marathon. Source: http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/

At the same time, I realized what my weird daydream from thirty-one years ago meant. Some people get a head start — or, in NASCAR terms, the pole — before the race even starts. That certainly doesn’t make what that individual accomplishes in life any less meaningful, but knowing that the person had an advantage that most others didn’t possess does provide perspective and illuminates how much distance the disadvantaged need to cover to make up ground. Those who limp and crawl and somehow are able to compete in this human race have also worked hard, likely at least as hard as those with a head start, and more than likely, harder than most human beings should ever have to work.

Plus, there are intangibles that go with race, class and other variables that determines how the human race unfolds. “Good luck is where hard work meets opportunity,” at least according to former Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Tom Barrasso. Most human beings work hard, but all need opportunities that may provide a real sprint to catch up or take a lead in the human race. Family status, political influence, social and community networks, religious memberships, being in the right place at the right time, all matter and are connected to race and class, at least in the US.

The moral of this story is, hard work matters, individual accomplishment matters. Yet a panoramic view of the race in which humans are engaged matters more in putting our individual successes and the distance that remains in some reasonable perspective. Without that, we’re all just pretending that individual hard work is the only thing that matters, when that’s only half the battle, or half of half the battle.

My Father Jimme — Happy Birthday!

17 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Jimme, My Father, New York City, Work, Youth

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Alcoholism, Boy @ The Window, Forgiveness, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Reconciliation, Work

My Father, August 2007

On Monday, my father Jimme turns seventy years old. Seventy, 70, 7-oh! Amazing! Given the years of alcohol abuse, so much loss, so much pain, so much rage, and to recover and make it to the age of seventy? That’s a big-M miracle, the kind that you can only attribute to sheer strength of will and the grace of God.

I must admit, after the summer of ’92, I had my doubts about my father’s future. The few times I saw him that summer, he was drinking like he had never drank before. The first time I saw him, he accused me of lying about having my master’s degree. “No college gonna giv’ you a degree afta a year,” he said. Only when his Jewish bosses told him it was possible for someone to finish a master’s in a year did he believe me.

The second time I went to see him, his landlord Mrs. Smalls was about to evict him. But my father wasn’t there. Or, I guess he was, in a way. He had made plops of defecation, from the front gate and blue slate walk up to the front steps and porch, into the entrance way and foyer, up the gloomy carpeted steps, all the way to the attic bathroom next to his room. They’d been cleaning for hours, according to Mrs. Smalls, but it sure didn’t smell like it.

Fast-forward two years to Christmas Eve ’94. My mother and my younger siblings and I went on a bus trip to Cross County Mall and Toys ‘R Us in Yonkers. Jimme showed up at the last minute to join us and to regale us with his “po’ ass muddafuccas” and his other favorite Jimme-isms. We were on the 7 bus to Yonkers, packed with parents who were shopping late for toys and Christmas trees. Jimme was so drunk that he fell over on some people on the bus once, and fell into the rear stairwell one other time. I wasn’t embarrassed as much as I was disappointed and saddened.

So by the time I finished my doctorate at the end of ’96, I’d all but given up on my father turning things

Three Generations, May 2006

around. A few months later, my father, unemployed and no longer enabled by his former bosses, finally left New York for the family home in Georgia at the invitation of one of his sisters. By the end of ’97, I heard that he had cleaned up his act and moved to Jacksonville. Throughout ’98 and into ’99, I began to get calls from Jimme about how he was finally sober, had found God, and was getting married, to another woman named Mary.

I thought long and hard about blowing him off. All my life, and certainly all of my older brother Darren’s, Jimme had been an evil drunk, verbally abusive and incapable of staying sober for more than three weeks at a time. But he had also been there for me growing up during my Humanities and Hebrew-Israelite years. He helped keep Darren and me from starving or walking around barefoot in ’82 and ’83. He kept the example of hard work in front of us even as the other parent figures in our lives went on dreaded welfare and laid around as if our lives were over. His money was the reason I was able to stay in school after five days of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt.

So I called him, deciding to give him a second chance. That was February ’99, a two-hour conversation about how he managed to become a recovering alcoholic, a church-goer, and a married man. He admitted that he had made many mistakes, that he was an alcoholic, that he loved me and my brother. It was a conversation, a real conversation, an unbelievable change of relationship. After twenty-nine years and two months, I finally had a father that I really could call father.

That was eleven and a half years ago. I’m still amazed that I’m able to talk to my father as my father, and not as the person I used to have to drag out of bars on 241st Street or in Midtown Manhattan growing up. But most of all, I’m amazed how much I love him and care about him. Happy Birthday…Dad!

My Sister Sarai (Partial Repost)

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Marriage

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Boy @ The Window, Death, Mount Vernon New York, Sarai Washington, Sickle Cell Anemia

Sarai & Noah, November 2003

Yesterday, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven from complications from sickle-cell anemia. It’s a disease that can often claim one’s life before they reach adulthood. Even with our advanced medicine, the average life expectancy of someone with sickle-cell anemia is forty-five years. Not to mention the pain and infections involved in having such a body-draining disease.

As much as I love her, the fact is that Sarai probably shouldn’t have been here. Between the disease and what we were going through as a family in ’82, it’s hard to believe that Sarai managed to survive in the worst of our worst times. I had just gone through my summer of abuse at the hands of her father, my mother had struggled through picket lines because she didn’t want to lose her job (only to get her hours cut in half anyway), and we were eating as if there was a global famine crisis. By the time I found out that my mother was pregnant with Sarai, with my mother working part-time, I knew we were up crap’s creek without a lifeline. My cold and adult-like argument with my mother about aborting my future sister left me even more in search of escape than I had been (see February 9, ’09 post “Sister Sarai”).

For some reason my mother didn’t listen to me, giving birth to my only sister, Sarai Adar Washington on the ninth of February ’83, born in the middle of a snowstorm. I refused to visit my mother in the hospital in New Rochelle. I didn’t want Sarai, and was tired of watching my mother make incredibly bad decisions.

Sarai came home a couple of days later, obviously stricken with the disease, as she looked like she was in pain then. I was so mad whenever I was home in Sarai’s first days. Not mad at her. Mad with my mother. Even at part-time, she could’ve seen a doctor about her sickle-cell trait, and screened to see if her idiot husband had the trait also.

Even in ’82, even without his participation, through my brothers Maurice and Yiscoc, my mother could’ve learned early on whether both her and my then stepfather Maurice had the sickle-cell trait. She long knew that she had it, and I’d known about my trait since I was seven. I’d learn about a year later, in ninth grade Biology with Mr. Graviano, that with two parents, there was a one-in-four-chance with every pregnancy that full-blown sickle-cell anemia would be passed to a child. For the first time in my life, I saw my mother as an idiot.

By the middle of the summer of ’83, Sarai was obviously in trouble. She hardly gained any weight, all of her food had to be fortified with iron, and she only had “three strands of hair,”as my mother put it. It was more like a few dozen in three spots on Sarai’s scalp. She always needed help. Sarai even then was in and out of the hospital, in need of the occasional blood transfusion, and at time in excruciating pain.

With all of this, my mother would say to me, “See, that why you shouldn’t wish for an abortion,” as if I was supposed to feel guilty about what I said to her the year before because Sarai was sick. As if I had anything to do with her being here. I just gave my mother a weak smile whenever she’d say something like that, trying not to reveal my disdain for her path-of-least-resistance decision-making.

Despite all of this, I grew to love my sister, if only because there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t her fault that her parents had about as much common sense as a wino on South Fulton Avenue in Mount Vernon on a hot day in August. Sarai wasn’t to blame for her own condition. And me suggesting that my mother get an abortion — it was obviously too late to get one by the time I yelled the idea at my mother — didn’t make Sarai one sickle-cell sicker than she already was.

Over the years, Sarai did get better, then worse, then better again. I stopped babying her by the time she was a teenager, but my mother didn’t know how to stop treating her like she was a toddler. By the time of the family intervention in ’02, Sarai was obviously ready to leave 616. She moved to Alabama for three and a half years, between ’05 and ’09, to live with her high school friends and to live a slower life away from my mother and the rest of us. Even though she still had many days with pain, and more in the hospital during those years, Sarai lived her life her way. I’m happy for her that she had those years away from 616, from Mount Vernon.

Of course, the story didn’t end there. Sarai’s sickle-cell anemia complications got worse, so bad that she ended up quitting her job and moving back to Mount Vernon from Alabama, where the medical facilities were allegedly better. The last week or two before her death, while far from pleasant, and somewhat expected, was still a shock to the family. For me, most of the shock occurred months before Sarai was born.

I only hope that someone somewhere finds a cure or at least a way to help people like my sister experience less pain and a richer, more vibrant life because of this disease. The good news was, that for most of her last years, Sarai carried on as if she didn’t have a disease.

Donald’s Sense of Something

15 Saturday May 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic

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Boy @ The Window, Cathedrals, Dream Sequence, Writing

St. Patrick's Cathedral, Washington, DC

It felt like my heart had finally made its way home. I found myself in a place where the world seemed far away. For a moment, I thought I was in heaven, far above the concerns of my past. I was in a place filed with the imaginations of my mind. But I was hearing voices, many other voices, contributing their wisdom to my words and images. I was in a big room, in a concert hall or cathedral. I wasn’t entirely sure.

The walls of this huge hall were buttercream-colored, with the brightest, whitest vaulted ceiling and pillars I’d ever seen. The seats in the hall were burgundy in color, on a dark cherry-wood floor so shiny with lacquer that I could see my face reflecting from it. It was a room that smelled of tulips and roses, of honeysuckle and other sweet scents I’ve only smelled in my mind. Flower shops never smelled this exquisite, women never so intoxicating.

At first, I thought that I was in the balcony, a dark place with another set of chairs, these painted black. I looked over there. No people inhabited this space. Just distance whispers, tiny sounds of fear and doubt that would come out of there. Only to be canceled out by my thoughts, my ideas, my images.

A bright light shone through from a glass dome that I somehow hadn’t noticed before, The light was directly on me as slowly began to move from the back of the hall toward the stage and the cream-colored curtains that dressed its sides and top. I realized that I wasn’t walking, that I was somehow flying, but not. It was more like I was walking on air, dressed like I was a scholar, or pastor, or Roman senator. But that wasn’t it, not quite. As I started toward the stage, slowly at first, I heard this soft yet pressing music mingle with my thoughts. It wasn’t religious music, though. It was a cross between classical music and new age, something like Bach combined with Enya. I had no idea what was going on at the other end of the hall. I just knew I had to get there.

Suddenly I could see my thoughts in the light combine with the musical notes that I’d been hearing throughout my air walking across the hall. The thoughts and music came down to me as words on pages. I found myself writing about everything I could imagine. I wrote papers for all of my classes. I scribbled down thoughts and notes for my thesis. I typed out tremendous volumes of materials, some for the world in which I thought I was a part of, many more for another world, another place. I wrote and thought so much that the paper rained down on the audience below, a light and paper shower that would’ve rivaled a torrential rainstorm.

I wrote as if time was running out, for I couldn’t be in this hall forever. And I was right. My pace had picked up, so much so that I was not longer walking on air, I was flying! I looked at myself and saw that I was wearing the slightly off-white robe of an angel, floating about and changing lives with my light and paper shower. The people below had picked my pages up, and were speaking the words that were on them. It was a swirling chant of many, many words and ideas, so many that I was dizzied by them.

Yet the music wouldn’t stop, and I didn’t stop. I kept writing. I kept going, even as friends would disappear below from my view, even as time seemed to march on at light-speed. I found myself above the stage of the hall, giving it one last look as I flew away, writing all the while. I rose above the ceiling, past the stage, out of the clear glass dome and into the light that had been my companion the whole time.

It was the greatest vision I ever had of myself and of my life. Best of all, it happened while I was sound asleep, with none of the distractions of my life in the way. For once, I hadn’t allowed my fear of heights or flying scare me awake. I was completely baffled at first, though. Most of my visions were simple affairs. If my classmates didn’t like me, I knew that they had issues of their own. If I had a fight with my ex-stepfather, I knew how to escape or found a way to beat him up. If my crush from seventh grade showed up, I’d stare at her or maybe give her a short smooch of a kiss.

This one was so complicated that I didn’t quite figure it out. Not on that October day in ‘91, and not in the two decades since. But in my first-year graduate student mind, I first interpreted it this way. I saw myself as someone who would have to write more than I’d ever written in my life to earn my master’s degree, and, if I chose to go on, my doctorate in history. That there would be many people watching my every move, with some of my friends falling by the wayside along the way. That there would be some hoping and praying that I didn’t finish. That my own feelings and fears were the things that I needed to overcome. And that no matter what, God was there with me, shining truth and wisdom on me so that I could write and finish school successfully.

Although that was a fine interpretation to pump me up for finishing my master’s in two semesters and my history doctorate in five years, it was far from an accurate one. I missed so much of the wisdom in that vision twenty years ago. A wisdom based not in the academic, but based on the practical and supernatural. A kind of wisdom that can only visit us from the past and future. Over the past twenty years, I’ve realized that there was a twelve-year-old with a grand vision talking to me while in deep sleep that morning in mid-October ‘91. A boy who knew, somehow, that my destiny was to write about my life, my dreams, my nightmares and my hard-learned wisdom, supernatural and experiential. That boy had a window into a life that I’m only beginning to understand. I must defer to the voice of that boy, for it is he who has a better understanding of visions and how they can change the world, and not I.