My Busing Blues

25 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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425 South Sixth Avenue, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Boston, Busing, Classism, Common Ground (1985), Community, Desegregation Orders, Divorce, Economic Inequality, Educational Equity, Friendships, J. Anthony Lukas, Ms. Hirsch, Nathan Hale Elementary, Ostracism, Racism, School Desegregation, Second Grade, William H. Holmes Elementary, Youth

TFD bus (they're still around?), South Side, Mount Vernon, NY, May 25, 2016. (http://zztalon.tripod.com/).

TFD bus (they’re still around?), May 25, 2016. (http://zztalon.tripod.com/).

Schooling and friendships have been the main theme of my posts this month. I find myself in deeper reflection about my years before the Boy @ The Window years these days. Maybe because I’ve come to realize that those years between ’74 and ’81 were far more influential in how I saw the world than I’d previously given credit.

One issue that I think I’ve had insight into for years before actually becoming an educator is busing. Maybe not so much in relation to school desegregation, though. As a seven-year-old, it would’ve been in terms of friendships and belonging. The only time I faced a no-choice busing situation was my last two and a half months of second grade, between April and late-June 1977. My Mom and Maurice had moved in together and moved me and my brother Darren to North Side Mount Vernon and 616, the house of horrors that would become the central locale of my memoir.

The Soiling of Old Glory, Boston, MA, April 5, 1976. (Stanley Forman/Boston Herald American via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use due to historical important of photo and low resolution.

The only thing I knew of busing before the move from 425 South Sixth to 616 East Lincoln was that Darren had been taking a bus to Clear View School in Dobbs Ferry every school day since my first day of kindergarten in ’74. Also, the images in my head from national news on the three main networks about Boston Public Schools and protests in ’74 and ’75. I had no idea in the spring of ’77 that many White and more than a few Black parents were fighting a desegregation order that required widespread busing in Boston. All I knew at the time was that a lot of angry people with signs and bricks and bottles were on my TV screen at the beginning of September almost every year.

My spring of busing was one of misery. Not because Mount Vernon was under any desegregation order, which it was. Mom had made the decision to not disrupt second grade for me by keeping me at Nathan Hale Elementary, the school that we had lived two doors down from prior to our 616 move. The other option was for me to start at William H. Holmes Elementary five months sooner, so that my transition to third grade would’ve been easier. Thanks, Mom.

Even at the time, I wished she had. Mom had been sick for half that school year. She and my father Jimme were in the midst of a nasty divorce. We had already moved. It made no sense for me to continue to go to Nathan Hale Elementary. I couldn’t stand my teacher Ms. Hirsch. She was the only teacher prior to Humanities, and especially Humanities at Mount Vernon HS, who thought of me and other students as essentially kids without a future. Ms. Hirsch was the only teacher prior to my senior year at MVHS who told me that I wouldn’t “amount to anything.” I hated, hated being in her classroom. It was a feeling I wouldn’t have again until David Wolf and AP Physics my senior year, and even then, that feeling only lasted for forty-five minutes, and even then, it wasn’t with me every day.

By the end of second grade, I was without any friends. Not because I did anything weird, which I’m sure I did. The constant disruptions in our living arrangements meant that I no longer played in the playground next to Nathan Hale after school, where I could hang out with other first, second, and third graders. (I was scared to go there by myself otherwise, anyway — this issue, to be continued.) A bunch of my first grade friends from Ms. Griffin’s class had left during the summer of ’76, leaving Winston, a first grader, as my only friend at Nathan Hale. Yeah, I talked to Lauren and one other girl in Ms. Hirsch’s class, but that was pretty much it.

Now and Later candies, made by Farley’s and Sathers, October 26, 2010. (Evan-Amos/Vanamo Media via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Taking the bus to and from school for those last fifty days or so of school was torture. Not because kids make fun of me, which they didn’t, or because I was part of some experiment related to desegregation, which I wasn’t. I hated the smell, of bubblegum and Now-&-Laters, of sweat from recess and gym, of exhaust fumes from cars because our little TFD bus wasn’t air-conditioned. Mostly, I couldn’t stand the forty-five minutes or hour that it would take to go from 616 to Nathan Hale, picking up kids all through Mount Vernon along the way.

Fourteen years later, in an upper-level US urban history undergraduate course (my last history class before grad school) at the University of Pittsburgh, one of my required readings was J. Anthony Lukas‘ Common Ground (1985), his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on busing and school desegregation in Boston. There were so many powerful parts of Lukas’ book that piqued my interest. His coverage of parents from all sides of the busing controversy. The sense that school desegregation was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory legally, but not so much culturally, because of the “hearts and minds” issues around race. What struck me, though, was the limited perspective Lukas provided on kids who had to ride these buses between Black, White, and Puerto Rican neighborhoods to get to these schools throughout Boston.

Front cover of Common Ground (1985) by J. Anthony Lukas, September 3, 2014. (http://goodreads.com).

I imagined what it would’ve been like to bus in Boston during my K-2 years. I had it hard enough as a child of abuse and divorce, with a move to an uncertain future, and with at least one teacher who saw me as little more than human garbage. Add screaming and spit-flying from White parents raging over school desegregation? I really could’ve been written off, never having a chance to become a good student, and more importantly, a lifelong learner. Maybe the only lesson I would’ve learned from busing was that Whites against busing have serious high-blood pressure issues. Or, more realistically, that White parents didn’t want me to become friends with their kids.

Either way, Lukas helped me realize, maybe for the first time, how twisted and evil American society would have to be to expose kids to blatant racism and not-so-blatant economic inequalities as demonstrated through busing.

Kidneys, Baking Soda & 240 East Third Street

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

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

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240 East Third Street, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Arthur, Baking Soda, Black Migrants, Black Migration, Callie Mae, Cecil Parker Elementary, Child Neglect, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Drinking Buddies, Drug Abuse, Flu, Ida, Kidney Failure, Kidney Transplant, Lo, Mount Vernon Hospital, Nathan Hale Elementary, North Side, Poverty, South Side

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, 1lb Box, circa 1970s, February 6, 2013. (http://wackypackages.org).

I wrote at length thirteen months ago about the devolution of my mother and father’s marriage in ’76 and ’77, and how that led to an incident with a coffee table on or around my seventh birthday (see my post “Stomping in Coffee Table Glass” from December ’11). It was a difficult time in all of our lives, and my grades in second grade reflected this. Me and my older brother Darren had a different living arrangement from week to week between September ’76 and April ’77. But for my mom, it was life-threatening. No wonder my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father Jimme as if he were Deacon Jones and my father was Johnny Unitas!

Despite my mother’s (real and imagined) infidelity and her filing for divorce — or because of it — my father refused to move out of our second-floor flat at 425 South Sixth. From September ’76 through March ’77, he’d come and go as it pleased him. Jimme would be home for a few hours on a Wednesday, cut the cords to the telephone or dump my mom’s mink stole in a bathtub, and then be gone for another five days or a full week. If my mom somehow was home when Jimme was, they’d fight all hours. On the nights my mother was out with her bowling league, or with friends, or (presumably) with my eventual stepfather Maurice, she’d call us to make sure we were okay, only to find Jimme at the other end of the line, threatening to kill her and us.

Starting at the end of that September, barely a month into the school year, Darren and me found ourselves spending more and more time with our babysitter Ida at 240 East Third Street. For folks who have never been to this part of the Mount Vernon, New York’s South Side, the best thing to say about 240 East Third was that it was next door to an environmentally hazardous scrap metal yard. It was a dangerous place, one of extreme poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, a place in which the most recent of Black migrants from the South and their sons and daughters tried to make into a home.

240 East Third Street, Mount Vernon, NY, September 2007. (http://googlemaps.com).

Ida had been our babysitter for as long as long as we could remember. One of my first memories was calling her a “bitch” when I was three because she had made us a bubble bath out of very itchy Tide detergent. I didn’t know the full meaning of what I said, but Ida took a switch and whupped me anyway. Now we were living with her for days at a time, having to walk a mile down East Third, then South Fulton Avenue, and then Sanford Blvd to get to Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker Elementary). The irony was that our real home was just two doors down from the school.

That wasn’t the only irony. On the many days we spent with Ida, we also spent time with her friends, Callie Mae, Lo (short for Lorenzo) and Arthur. The reason we could spend so much time with these friends of my mom was precisely because they were Jimme’s friends originally. They were part of his circle of drinking buddies! And, with us already at 240 East Third, my father would swing around and drink to his heart’s content with all of them.

My mother, meanwhile, began experiencing what the doctors at Mount Vernon Hospital thought was mere signs of stress. Her kidneys, though, were shutting down, causing a multitude of health issues. She’d gone to see her primary care physician about this in October, then again in December and January. By the end of January ’77, my mother was stuck at the hospital, as her doctors at one point thought that she would need a fast-track to a kidney transplant. Keep in mind that this is ’77, so kidney transplants weren’t the exact science that they are today.

I ended up in the hospital with her in early February ’77, with a fever of 105°F. They put me in a bed near my mom, stuck a thermometer in my butt, and figured out that I had the flu. That I still have positive thoughts of this visit is a sure sign of delusion and the grimness of that time in our lives.

One human kidney, sliced open to reveal hydronephrosis, typically the obstruction of the free flow of urine from the kidney, February 6, 2013. (http://meducation.net).

Luckily, my mom and her doctors were smart enough to have a specialist from Westchester County Medical Center come in to check out her candidacy for a kidney transplant. He took one look at her labs and realized that she didn’t need a transplant after all. It turned out that my mom’s sodium levels were so low that they had caused the flow of fluids and waste through her kidneys to drop by something like 80 percent. The doctor’s solution was really simple. “Eat baking soda,” he told my mom and her doctors. That was in March ’77.

Two teaspoons of baking soda a day, to be exact. That’s what it took to bring my mom’s kidneys back to life and for my brother and me to finally move toward a more stable home situation at 616 (at least between April ’77 and the Hebrew-Israelite years). It wasn’t that I hated 240 East Third. I just hated what being there meant for us and for my mom.

Marriage in the Un-marriage Age

29 Thursday Apr 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, Marriage

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Communication, Divorce, Marriage, Trust

DNA Marriage, April 28, 2000

Yesterday made it ten full years since me and my wife Angelia exchanged marriage vows. Even though this is a great thing, this marriage and love of ours, it ain’t been a crystal stair either. Meshing our ways, our likes and dislikes, our approaches to life, and our baggage can still cause me and Angelia more gray hairs, not to mention ulcers. Noah has taken up much of our lives and time over the past seven years, leaving precious little time to work on our relationship. None of this takes into account the ups and downs of job security, financial stability, going back to school, and taking chances with our careers that can take their toll on any marriage, no matter how much spouses love each other.

The average long-term marriage lasts about fifteen years, so if I or one of you were to take a cynical perspective, you could say that our marriage has already reached the zenith, due to decline into a slow, painful cycle before the big D occurs. After all, we all have our issues, me in particular. With my socioeconomic background, I still find it amazing sometimes that anyone would fall in love with me, much less marry me. Prior to 2000, I never made more than $21,000 in a year, and the most I’ve made in any year in our ten-year marriage is $80,000 (although, that number represents most of our years together). With the financial problems we’ve had the past three years, including the feast and famine of consulting work — not to mention my work to publish Boy @ The Window — most women would’ve moved on for that reason alone. That’s the nature of marriage in an age in which money justifies almost everything people in our world do.

But there’s more, much more. I’ve discovered through a decade of marriage how truly imperfect and human I am. The high level of emotional control that I demonstrate in the workplace or in the classroom can be missing at times in my marriage. I care so much about making all of our lives better that I sound like I don’t care at all. I’ve been tempted — although not seriously so — about three or four times by other women over the years. Nothing approaching adultery has ever actually taken place. But temptation in one’s mind is still a challenge, one that all of us adult humans face. I’ve felt a number of times that a week away by myself on South Beach would be a good thing for both of us. And all of these things have been expressed in so many ways by Angelia over the past ten years as well.

So how does this thing work, this marriage, when our lives are so unbalanced, when we’re still growing and maturing as individuals, when dramatic changes occur in our lives, when there are children involved? I don’t have any major words of wisdom. All I know is, that after ten years, I still enjoying talking to my wife about everything. God, social justice, education, teaching, sports, music, sex, politics. I don’t tell Angelia every thought I have at every moment of every day the way I used to. But I do prefer to share things with her first before approaching any of my friends or current and former co-workers. I really can’t imagine having this kind of relationship with anyone else.

If I had to do this over again, would I get married again? Probably not. I’ve learned that when it comes right down to it, any serious relationship, in order for it to be a successful one, requires commitment, communications, and a rooted and grounded love. Having a piece of paper in the form of a marriage certificate, or even exchanging vows before God does not guarantee much but heartache and debt if the marriage doesn’t work out after the honeymoon. Marriage as we know it today is a two-century-or-so institution that sells us the dreams of harmonious, monogamous heterosexual relationships that are nominally sanctioned by God, but more directly, sanctioned by our government and economic system.

Knowing this, knowing all of the hard work that’s involved in maintaining a marriage, requires the ability to separate a relationship from the junk that has accumulated in our minds about how a marriage ought to be. Whoever thinks about their marriage in this way has ignored the human factor, the fact that we married another human being, not a robot that can only express unconditional love. Ultimately, for a real marriage to work, it means rejecting most of what we’ve learned about marriage from poets, priests and politicians (as Sting and The Police would say). It means having a marriage based only on who you are and who your spouse is, not one on societal, religious or others expectations. Which is why I would have the nerve to suggest that, looking back, I might not have gotten married to Angelia, at least in the way we define it these days.

Oh, I can hear it now. The voices of my more godly acquaintances, of men and (mostly) women complaining about what I’ve suggested. That I should feel lucky that I’m with a woman who understands me and would be willing to allow me to post this sacrilegious document. And how dare I go against the dictates of my God and Christianity. Fine. Believe what you will about me. I actually don’t care. But understand this. Any real commitment to another human being that involves supporting each other’s growth and maturing, the development and raising of another child, a love that endures through hardship and suffering as well as the good times, doesn’t need marriage as justification.

And yes, I’m a lucky man. To have the love and support of a wonderfully weird woman who understands me in ways few people in this world, including my mother, have even attempted to. To have been able to spend almost fifteen years in love with my best friend, with ten of those in marriage. If it somehow doesn’t last, if the worst occurs somehow, I still believe that I will always cherish the years we’ve had together, and the future that we will continue to strive for and in.