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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Bradley Arkansas

My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Black Migrants, Black Migration, Bradley Arkansas, Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Education, Highs and Lows, Insecurities, Intervention, Mary Louise Gill, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, Self-Defense, Self-Reflection, Southern Stigmas, Welfare Poverty


I would be a pretty terrible son and historian to not discuss the fact that this July and August marks fifty years since my mother moved to New York from little ol’ Bradley, Arkansas. For those who think fifty years on anything revolving around race and class is “a long time ago” or “ancient history,” consider the following. At the time Mom moved across the country to Gotham, the Civil Rights Movement had entered its northern, splintered phase, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was barely a year old, and the very first episode of Star Trek with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would air that September.

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966, August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

Bus route my mother took from Bradley, Arkansas to New York City in late-July 1966 (highlighted in blue with yellow dots), August 23, 2016. (http://maps.google.com).

On balance, with any neutral but fair eye at all, I’d have to say that Mom’s transition has been more failure than success. Five decades of crisis after crisis, of having a handful of fleeting moments of peace and progress followed by years of abuse, misery, poverty, and sorrow. That could be the summary I’d write about Mom’s fifty years of post-migration experiences in New York and in Mount Vernon.

But, let’s start from the top, through Boy @ The Window:

After drifting a bit after her high school graduation, one of Mom’s first cousins came for a visit to Arkansas in the summer of ’66 and told her that there was good-paying work in New York City. Her cousin lived in the [170s, the Tremont section of the] Bronx, a hotbed of Black migration and West Indian immigration in those years. Without much thought, Mom took a four-day bus trip from Texarkana to New York to what she hoped would be a new life. Given the alternative of tenant farming and generational poverty, New York must’ve seemed like going to heaven.

Mom had it rough long before my father and my older brother Darren and I had come along to be a burden. She lived with her cousin for nearly a year in the Bronx, paying $15 a week for a one-bedroom flat, before good luck turned to bad and then back to wonderful. They had both lost jobs at some factory, but had heard through the other late Black arrivals in the Bronx and Mount Vernon about good paying jobs at Mount Vernon Hospital. When Mount Vernon Hospital hired Mom to be a cook in their dietary department, she and her first cousin went their separate ways living-together-wise. They’d stay in touch until ’78, when Mom’s first cousin moved to Virginia, presumably for work with the Navy.

In the interim, Mom met my father at a juke joint on Mount Vernon’s South Side. It was a place where only Southern Black migrants would be comfortable. They didn’t have to pretend to like the grime, the hustle, the noise, and the taunts that New York and New Yawkers threw at them every day. They could be themselves. They could be shy, apprehensive, even, about their time in a place where everyone joked about their Southern accents and their slow ways. I think that’s what made my father attractive to Mom. Here was someone who made Mom sound much less Southern by comparison. At the same time, my father worked in the city, had a job as a janitor with the Federal Reserve Bank, and knew the Subway better than she knew the route from her one-room flat on Adams Street to Mount Vernon Hospital.

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

My Mom at 48 years old, Yonkers, NY, December 23, 1995. (Donald Earl Collins).

Within a year of meeting, Mom gave birth to my older brother Darren. Mom often said that she “wasn’t a teenager” when Darren was born in December ’67, as she had turned twenty six weeks earlier. Yet as I finally pointed out during the intervention fourteen years ago, “But you got pregnant when you were nineteen,” all to let Mom know that the stigma of teenage pregnancy was more about her and her insecurities than it was about what White folks thought, especially back then.

I came along two years later, Mom married my father in ’70, and things started falling apart soon after. Mom never gave herself a chance to live the city, and not just work in it. Mom never gave herself time to grow beyond her insecurities and her vanity about her looks. She never really tried to make her aspirations for joining the Navy or going to college happen. The latter, at least until after I went off to the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

As I wrote about Mom’s/our family’s fall into welfare poverty by ’83 in Boy @ The Window,

Sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later, Mom must’ve been thinking that Mount Vernon was a hellish pit that got hotter every time she tried to make her and our lives better. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded, a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The ‘I love you, Donald’ faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

Yes, this is all truly sad. There was way too much too soon for Mom. Family, marriage, abuse, poverty, and internalized issues around race, sexism, misogyny, Black masculinity, evangelical Christianity (and the whole Hebrew-Israelite debacle), and all in New York. It would’ve been overwhelming for anyone whose income never saw $20,000 in any year prior to temp work in ’99, and $30,000 until working for Westchester County Medical Center in 2003.

There are so many mistakes Mom made, with me, my siblings older and younger, in choosing mates, and with work. I’ve written about roughly half of them. But, awful or awesome, without Mom’s momentary hope and courage — often the very definition of Black migration, especially to New York — I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.

Didn’t We Never Have It All

04 Thursday Jun 2015

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

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"Why Women Still Can't Have It All", Anne-Marie Slaughter, Arkansas, Black Migration, Bradley Arkansas, Conservatism, Evangelical Christianity, Hats, Judah ben Israel, Maurice Eugene Washington, Melissa Harris-Perry, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, MSNBC, Perfectionism, Self-Awareness, Self-Loathing, Self-Sufficiency, Self-Worth, Strikebreaker, Tenant Farming, Vanity, Wear and Tear, Welfare, Welfare Poverty, Xenophobia


Whitney Houston, "Didn't We Almost Have It All" (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

Whitney Houston, “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” (released August 1987) Single 45rpm, from 2nd Whitney album (not exactly a favorite), June 4, 2015. (combined/cropped by Donald Earl Collins; http://musicstack.com and http://rapgenius.com).

I’ve been thinking about this for nearly a year. It started for me last August. Melissa Harris-Perry had a segment on her MSNBC show regarding the multiple hats women of color have worn over the years in taking care of their families, immediate, extended and non-biological. In response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s July/August 2012 piece in The Atlantic about “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” Harris-Perry and her guests made the point that feminism for women of color has been about far more than having a successful, sexist-free career. That throughout American history, women of color have found themselves wearing multiple hats as primary breadwinners, primary caretakers and primary childrearers, often in ways that traditional feminists don’t discuss or recognize. All without fanfare and with many setback along the way.

What I’ve witnessed and been a part of in my own life reflects much of the conversation that Harris-Perry led on her show. The physical, mental and psychological scars from caring for family, friends and children, while struggling financially and dealing with racism and misogyny often manifests in disease and depression for so many women of color. There’s so much more, though, in terms of how my own mother’s multiple hats and habits led me to so many of my own. All initially to help her, but in the end, helping myself become self-sufficient. Not to mention making myself more understanding of where all the wear, tear and lack of care that wearing so much for so long can lead.

My Mom’s Hats and Habits:

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

The Anne-Marie Slaughter image of multitasking/wearing multiple hats (just think what this is like for poor, low-income, women of color), February 4, 2015. (ALAMY; http://telegraph.co.uk).

Before I turned thirteen years old, my mother had been far more than my Mom. She’d been a dietary supervisor at Mount Vernon Hospital, just outside New York City, since 1968, the year before I was born. She had been a high school basketball player, a caregiver to her eleven brothers and sisters, and a cotton-picking breadwinner for her family in segregated southwestern Arkansas, an area located in the Red River Valley, part of the larger Mississippi Delta region. She had become our family’s primary breadwinner in the years after she gave birth to my older brother and me. Not to mention a married young woman now living a thirty-minute train ride from Midtown Manhattan, between the Hudson and Hutchinson Rivers, on the border between affluent Westchester County and the Bronx.

Life didn’t treat my Mom too kindly once she married my alcoholic father in 1971. And it actually went from bad to worse as she divorced him for my stepfather in 1978. By then, she had become a cigarette smoker, a one-time adulterer, and an abuse survivor. My Mom did everything she could to shield my older brother and me from her habits and the realities of our tough life in Mount Vernon in the 1970s and early 1980s. But by the end 1982, as I turned thirteen, all the hats my Mom had worn began to fall to the ground. In taking on the role of a strikebreaker, all of our lives would change forever.

In response to concessions made to the union, who left her unprotected, Mount Vernon Hospital cut her from full-time to part-time. My Mom became the besieged one. She was the old woman in the shoe, with six kids — including four under the age of five — and a cheating, abusive, unemployed, sometimes-at-home husband. It was my Mom’s job to take care of us all. Yet no longer was she a breadwinner. My Mom had become one of Reagan’s alleged welfare queens, pulling in $16,600 in AFDC payments per year from April 1983 until I left for college in August 1987. With all of that, I became a hat juggler myself.

Once Her Hats Became My Own:

For a while during my teenage years, my Mom had been my friend, one in which I could usually confide, albeit out of anger and frustration. All while taking on more and more of what had been her duties, including the brunt of her second husband’s rage and fists. I’d become an everyday grocery shopper, a frequent family cook, and a sometimes provider, the last mostly through tracking down my own father for a few extra dollars every Friday or Saturday at one of his favorite bars. Or, by the time I was sixteen, through working part-time. I provided childcare on afternoons, evenings and weekends. I washed clothes with my older brother on Saturdays or Sundays every week without fail from October 1982 on.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

Hat stall at a Sunday fair, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 31, 2008. (Jorgeroyan via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC BY-SA 3.0.

By the end of high school, I realized too who my Mom wasn’t, maybe for the first time. She wasn’t an encourager, a person who pushed her kids to pursue their dreams. With so many “Are you sure…?” questions my last two years of high school, it’s a wonder I applied to any colleges at all. Mom wasn’t a nurturer either, especially after I became a teenager. My Mom had only said “I love you” to me two times between my twelfth and nineteenth birthdays, including at my high school graduation ceremony in June 1987. She also wasn’t easygoing. Any mistake with money or my time would get a “Serves you right…” sermon about never screwing up.

The Toll Caring For Others Can Take:

All of this has made my Mom a conservatively cautious perfectionist, one living with depression and in constant denial about our shared past. I guess that it was all too much for her, like reaching the Jordan River, but not being allowed to cross it. Our shared experiences had also made me cautious and perfectionistic in my dealings with myself and the world, as I had to wear so many of my Mom’s hats and cross so many of those rivers with her. My mother tried to be all things to me and my older brother especially, and failed more than she succeeded in the process. For that and so many other reasons, despite her mistakes, I love her very much.

It’s been more than twenty-seven years since I moved away for the greener pastures of the University of Pittsburgh. Yet it’s only been in the past decade that I’ve learned to stop striving for perfection in all the things I say and do. It ultimately takes a lifetime to unlearn all the bad habits and prejudices and give up on juggling all the ideas and roles that our parents have put on us. My journey with and without my Mom has been no different. Now that my Mom’s in her late sixties, I just hope that the only hat she tries to wear these days is one to keep her head warm on the coldest of days.

The Life of Mary Louise

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Bradley Arkansas, Depression, Faith, Gill Family, Happiness, Homelessness, Jim Crow, Joblessness, Mary Louise Gill, Mount Vernon Hospital, Resilience, Self-Awareness, Self-Loathing, Self-Reflection, Sixty-Fifth Birthday, Underemployment, unemployment, Welfare


My Mom, Thanksgiving 2006, Mount Vernon, NY. (Donald Earl Collins).

Today, my mother turns sixty-five years old. My mom has now officially hit elderly status, which reads and sounds so weird, considering that she’s only twenty-two years and two months older than me. That Mom’s here at all at sixty-five is really a not-so-minor miracle, considering how hard her life’s been from day one in ’47.

This was what I wrote about my mother’s first thirty-five and a half years of her life, courtesy of Boy @ The Window:

Bradley, Arkansas main road (Route 29) with me and my Uncle Charles in the shadows, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

Mom came from a long line of folk whose lives were hard and impossible ones, where they  couldn’t take handouts even if they wanted to. She was born to Samuel and Beulah Gill in October ’47, their first of twelve children and her father’s second overall child of thirteen. The Gills of Bradley, Arkansas were tenant farmers who lived in the Red River valley in the southwest corner of the state and five miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana border. The town was a one-flashing- yellow-light-four-corner one. Just over five hundred people lived there, with farms, shotgun houses, and ranch-style homes neatly segregated between a few affluent Whites, lots of po’ White trash and the abundantly poor Black side of town. The conditions she grew up in included corrugated tin roofs and outhouses to boot.

Being born into this family in the late-’40s meant that Mom’s life would be a difficult and emotionally tortured one. She started doing household chores when she was five, helping with her siblings when she was six, and graduated to hoeing and picking cotton by the time she was eight. There wasn’t the time, energy, and experience in the household for Mom to receive any affection or nurturing.

My maternal grandfather Sam Gill, Sr. (82 at the time, 93 now), Bradley, AR, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

With all that and her mother’s constant neglect and occasional abuse — she was once beat with the back of a hair brush for not getting ready for church on time — it’s amazing that Mom wanted to get married or have kids. Yet I knew that what little nurturing and affection Mom received came from her great-grandmother, her aunt, and high school basketball. All served that role as Mom grew into an attractive six-foot woman. Her great-grandmother, half-Choctaw and half-Irish and originally from Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), taught Mom to see herself as beautiful despite her dark complexion. Her Texarkana, Texas aunt taught Mom her basic adult survival skills. And high school basketball took her as a senior to the segregated state quarterfinals in ’65, an amazing feat to say the least.

Still, it was a hard life, one that Mom had vowed she’d never live again. That’s why she moved to New York in the first place. I’d heard these stories for years, and like her, I believed that our lives would get better through sheer hard work. Welfare was never to be something we would live with.

After nearly seventeen years in the New York area, never had all but finally arrived. She had spent my whole life up to that point telling us not to take “handouts,” that she’d “never be on welfare.”

By her thirty-fifth birthday at the end of October ’82, my mother no longer had full-time work at Mount Vernon Hospital, with her hours cut and four mouths to feed. That weekend, all we had left to eat in our two-refrigerator kitchen was a box of Duncan Hines’ Devil’s Food cake mix, Pillsbury All-Purpose Flour, and some sugar. That Saturday and Sunday, we truly ate like Torah-era Jews. Mom made us pancakes out of the flour, without baking powder, eggs or milk, and cooked down some sugar in water to make us a crude
glucose syrup.

Between an abusive Maurice for a husband, the loss of an already insufficient income after not joining her union in a strike, and two toddler-age kids (and another one on the way), the period between May ’82 and April ’83 was probably one of the lowest points in her life.

As I’ve realized over the years, though, Mom’s life was always hard. It was simply a matter of degrees, not of distinction or difference. The mistake of marrying Maurice, becoming a scab (see my post “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12) and leaving my older brother Darren at The Clearview School for fourteen years has had an impact on all of our lives to this day. Just as much as fourteen years on welfare, the three-year-long loss of our home at 616 in the ’90s (see post “The Fire This Time” from April ’08 for more) and my late sister Sarai’s twenty-seven year-long struggle with sickle-cell anemia. “Wow” is only the beginning of a description of calamity that has been my mother’s life, about as long as the first hundred digits after 3.14.

What’s made the difference? My mother’s belief in God or Jesus? Her general sense of resilience? Her uncanny ability to deny reality and frequent lack of self-reflection? But I’d say that Mom has learned to expect little from this world and, unfortunately, even less for herself. She often expected the worst, and then being surprised at how not-so-bad “the worst”  was, could continue to soldier on.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam Gill, Jr., Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

So I wish my mother a happy sixty-fifth birthday. One in which she can just spend the day at her church in New Rochelle, and then just rest and be. Only one of my siblings lives at 616 these days, and apparently spends more time out and about than he does at home. So, I hope my mother can relax, knowing that she has endured all the evil that this world could throw at her, and despite her view of life, has come out on the other side, badly damaged, but still here.

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Religion, Youth

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Bradley Arkansas, Death, Finding Peace, Funeral Arrangements, Happy Birthday, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Regrets


 

My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

 

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.

We Are Family

04 Saturday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, race, Youth

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Aunts, Basketball, Bradley Arkansas, Cousins, Family Roots, Gill Family, Houston Texas, Misconceptions, Race, Uncles


Skyline of downtown Houston from Sabine Park, Houston, Texas, July 15, 2010. (Jujutacular via Wikipedia). Permission granted via GNU Free Documentation License.

This weekend marks fifteen years since visited my extended family on my mother’s side for the first time. It was Final Four weekend ’94 when I hopped on a Continental Airlines flight from Pittsburgh to Houston. To think that until April 2 ’94, I hadn’t been farther west than Atlanta (believe it or not, Atlanta is technically farther west than Pittsburgh) or been in any other time zone seems far-fetched now that I’ve crisscrossed this country enough times to earn hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles. To think that for years I never felt I had a family to talk about at all or that what I did have wasn’t worth talking about. That all changed that weekend.

I was really on my way to New Orleans for the first time. A conference presentation proposal I put together with my unofficial advisor in the School of Education at Pitt had successfully made it through the difficult American Educational Research Association’s review process. So me, my professor, and two other School of Education grad students were headed to the Big Easy to take in the sights and the serious scholarship that would be discussed, ad nauseum, the first full week of April.

The only reasonable flight I could book was with Continental, flying me into Houston first, then a crop duster connection to Nawleans. Since I knew I had family in Houston, I managed to get something that is very hard to do in the post-9/11 age — an extended layover. Because my mother only had infrequent contact with her brothers, I had to do some pre-Google detective work. I went to Hillman Library and pull out old phone books to look up numbers for my uncles Paul, George, Hobart, Darryl and Robert.

It turned out that my Uncle Paul was no longer in Houston, that my uncles George, Hobart and Darryl constantly moved — their numbers weren’t always up to date — but my mother did have my Uncle Robert’s number. But him and his wife had fought over a telephone bill in ’89. And because my Uncle Robert refused to pay the bill, their phone service had been cut off for nearly five years. So I wrote my Uncle Robert about a month before to let him know I was coming. I also lucked out, finding a recent number for my Uncle George, which linked me to his new number. Between the letter and my first adult conversation with a Gill relative other than my mother or Uncle Sam, I hoped that someone would be at the airport in Houston to meet me.

It was a 6 am flight that my Carnegie Mellon colleague Marilyn Zoidis dutifully dropped me off for, picking me up around 4:30. It was still in the 40s, with the high that cloudy day 53 degrees. I barely went through security and boarded my flight at the barely two-year-old Pittsburgh International Airport when I just fell asleep. I was on my first flight to somewhere other than New York or Pittsburgh, and I slept through it as if I took this flight all of the time. I remember being more excited about meeting them than about the AERA annual meeting. Yet the only thing I thought of for two and a half hours was something in the middle of dreamland.

We landed in Houston around 9 am local time. I slept well on the flight, but I had only had about five hours total sleep before arriving in Bush country. I expected a dump of an airport, but the George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport (it wasn’t call that at the time I think) was as modern as Pittsburgh. I got down to baggage claim, and there they were. Uncle George and Uncle Darryl were there, grinning and smiling as if they knew me a mile away. “I knew it was you, with that Gill nose,” he said as he walked toward me and gave me a big hug.

We got in George’s car, but about five minutes in, I had to ask them to open up the windows. It was 78 degrees in Houston, and it was just after 10 am by the time I had taken off my Georgetown sweatshirt. We stopped by a gas station near downtown Houston first, to get gas and to get me something to eat and drink. Then they immediately went to the third ward to hang out with friends and play basketball. They only let me take three shots, and I missed all three, tired as I was. “We need real ballers out here,” my Uncle George said.

My uncles were good, but given the amount of time they spent on the court, they should’ve been. They both played basketball in high school in Bradley, Arkansas. Heck, all of the Gill boys played at least two sports growing up. My Uncle Sam played four — basketball, football, baseball, and track — and all of the others at least played basketball and football. George at thirty-two and Darryl at twenty-eight (neither of them like me calling them “Uncle,” with me twenty-four at the time) were still in pretty good shape, though Darryl complained about his midsection. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re a Gill?,” based on three shots I missed, including two that rimmed out.

Eventually I’d meet my Uncle Robert, his wife and sons, my Uncle Darryl’s girlfriend and eventual wife, and a few of Uncle George’s friends that weekend. Of all of the family meetings that took place, none was more meaningful than me sitting down to dinner that Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon with three of my uncles at one time. They grilled me with more questions than I’d get from my dissertation committee some five months later. “How big sis [my mother] doin’?” “Do any of the kids play sports?” “What’s it like livin’ in the big city?” Even though my mother had been on welfare for eleven years, and living in poverty for some thirteen — working or not — they still thought that we were doing better than they were living in the middle of Texas. I tried, but failed, to convince them that our poverty was real.

It was a weird conversation, seeing that it was happening in the dining and living rooms of my Uncle Robert’s ranch style house, a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a carport, backyard and decent front yard in suburban Houston. They owned four cars, and a leaky boat that needed some repairs. Pretty good for a man with a high school diploma and someone who was a shift supervisor for a local trucking company. Uncle Robert was the man, a six-five rail-thin man who looked almost like he could be his brother Sam’s twin instead of slightly younger brother at forty-three or forty-four years old. But Uncle Robert and the rest of them all assumed that since my mother hadn’t come running back to Texas or Arkansas for help that things were all right. They weren’t, as they’d learn a year later when the 616 fire left my mother and younger siblings homeless.

Beyond that, I learned a lot about the family. I confirmed some of the stories that my mother had told me over the years, including the one about my half-Irish, half Choctaw/Black great-great grandmother who was born in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1880. I also learned that my grandmother Beulah was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, that I really did have a great-grand aunt in Seattle, apparently New Edition lead singer Johnny Gill’s grandmother or great-grandmother, making all of us related.

I found out that someone on the Gill side besides me and my mother had made it to college, that my Uncle Paul used basketball to make it to the University of Houston, as part of Phi Slamma Jamma in the early ’80s with Clyde Drexler, among others. He left a year early to play in the NBA for the 14-68 Houston Rockets in the ’82-’83.  My Uncle Paul played 28 games that year, before his knee problems and relative lack of talent (he’d likely be a starter on one of today’s weaker teams) left him without a basketball career after that season. But he also pulled himself up, went to ITT Technical Institute to learn about using laser technologies and lighting for entertainment purposes, and broke into the world of entertainment as a freelance laser light and lighting technician. As I’d learn more about the following month when I visited my Uncle Paul in Atlanta, he had worked with Earth, Wind and Fire and New Edition on their tours in the late ’80s, and was living as if he were playing in the NBA.

I learned a lot that weekend, had a lot of fun with family, and learned more about my mother’s side of my family in two days than I had in my twenty-four years on planet Earth. That my uncles were and remained close was heartening, and that they managed to get decent and good-paying jobs was encouraging. It also gave me some sense of reassurance, if not pride, in the fact that they had put their lives together in Houston without any real guidance from family. Although they did follow my mother’s example by playing sports, getting their high school diplomas, and leaving Bradley, Arkansas and cotton country for a better future somewhere else. By the time I boarded my flight to New Orleans that Sunday evening, I felt like I knew enough to talk about my family, mother’s and father’s side, for the first time.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

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

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

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