Tag Archives: Domestic Violence

Moving On, Thirty Years Later

26 Saturday Aug 2017

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A Boeing 767 Delta flight at takeoff, JFK Airport, Jamaica, Queens, NY, circa 2011. (http://panynj.gov).

I am now three full decades removed from Moving Day 1987, the final Wednesday in August, when I moved for my freshman year of college to Pittsburgh. I was leaving Mount Vernon and 616, but neither would begin to leave me, at least for another year or so.

It was a day of days. But really, it wasn’t the hardest leaving day I faced. In the summers I’d come home to work and watch after my younger siblings, the end of those Augusts were tearful ones. I played music for me and my siblings to sing to before I left at the end of the summer of ’88. I added an extra week to my stay in 1990, just so I could spend extra time with Maurice, Yiscoc, Sarai, and Eri, teaching them how to ride a bike and how to tie their shoes, and missed a week’s worth of classes at Pitt to start the fall. Even in ’92, when I came back to 616 to work for two months that summer at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health because I couldn’t find a teaching gig at Pitt, I stayed an extra week. That was my life outside of college, grad school, and Pittsburgh for a good decade after my first trip to Pittsburgh. It got easier to leave as my life became about working, teaching, dating, and writing, but leaving was always hard.

My hardest leaving day was in late-August 1989. After a full summer of work, between two jobs, the end of my Mom’s marriage (finally!), my older brother Darren moving out, and my schedule of activities with the younger Gang of Four, I saw going back to the University of Pittsburgh for my third year as a vacation. But it wasn’t going to be one for Mom. She would be completely on her own with my younger siblings for the first time once I left. And I knew the thought of being with them without any help, or least, without any enemies at 616 to war against (like my idiot ex-stepfather Maurice) terrified her.

Screen shot of 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, June 2016. (http://maps.google.com)

I stayed an extra five days before leaving on August 30, because Mom still had two weekends of summer courses left to finish at Westchester Business institute. Mom made the decision to not finish up her business law and accounting classes that session the Saturday before I left. She said to me, “Go on to Pittsburgh, Donald. I’ll be all right.” It didn’t make sense to me. She had an A in the business law class, and likely could’ve talked with her instructor about taking an incomplete and then the final exam once my siblings started school after Labor Day. I said as much, but Mom, per usual, didn’t listen to me. She ended up with a D in the business law course, and an F, of course, in the accounting class. Mom wouldn’t return to Westchester Business Institute to finish up her associate’s degree until January 1996.

I felt guilty at the time that I put my own education over my Mom’s. I felt guilty that I couldn’t help out more. Mostly, I felt guilty that despite what I saw back then as “my responsibilities to the family,” I wanted to leave, and part of me wanted to stay gone. I didn’t want to come home for Christmas, my birthday, and New Year’s every single holiday season. I didn’t want to spend my summers living at 616 while working in Mount Vernon or White Plains. And though I wanted to help the Gang of Four out as much as I could, I would’ve preferred bringing them to Pittsburgh, and not going back to Mount Vernon over and over again.

Looking back, though, I realized the truth. Mom really didn’t enjoy school. Mom decided to go to Westchester Business Institute because I was in college. And as a professor who has taught hundreds of adult learners (students twenty-five and sometimes much older), I know that earning a degree with your kids can be a great motivator for enrolling in higher ed. It just can’t be the only motivator. At some point, it has to be about more than a friendly familial competition or even about using the degree to earn a few extra dollars. It has to be about improving yourself and the people around you. Mom wasn’t ready to juggle that burden, and likely had gone through too much that summer to spend another fifteen months in school while also watching after my younger siblings.

Boy, it was hard to leave that last Wednesday in August ’89. I was nervous for Mom, sad for my siblings, and maybe even a little angry with Mom and God about the impossible choice I thought I had made at the time. But I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be any good to anyone if I couldn’t finish my degree and use it to help others. I reminded myself that I was still only nineteen years old, that, my outward maturity and 616 aside, I still had a lot to learn about life.

When Enough Isn’t Close to Enough

23 Sunday Jul 2017

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Yiscoc Washington, July 5, 2017. (http://facebook.com).

“I took care of my kids! I put food on the table, put a roof over y’all’s heads, put clothes on yo’ back! I did the best that I could, and none of y’all can tell me different…” That’s what my Mom yelled at us the day before Sarai’s funeral seven Julys ago. It was an excited utterance, after she had spent five days in a trance, unable to do as much as eat a piece of toast. We were in the living room of Mom’s flat at 616, me, Mom, Maurice, Yiscoc and Eri, being yelled at over a lifetime of disappointment and frustration. Ours and hers.

Today is my brother Yiscoc’s thirty-sixth birthday. That he’s here at all is a bit of a miracle. Especially with the number of times he ran away from 616 between 1989 (when he was eight years old) and 1994, with his one-time video game addiction, and with muggers and pedophiles out there and all too willing to take advantage of a vulnerable preteen.

I started with Mom, though, for a reason. Her yelling at us was probably meant for me, but it was in response to Yiscoc, who shared a personal secret with her for the first time. Mom’s response was to defend her record as a parent, to tell us that we had no right to judge, critique, or assess her record. That she added, “That’s what you get for…” in response to Yiscoc’s tearful sharing session was shameful and disgusting.

“You’re So Vain” (1972), by Carly Simon, 45 cover, cropped, July 23, 2017. (http://avclub.com).

“But you don’t understand, your Mom was mourning the loss of her only daughter,” would be the response of Mom-defenders everywhere. To which I say, really? Your Mom’s response is to push four of your five living children away with a tirade? One where she says, “this fucked up, piece of shit life I helped set up for all of you was the best I could do, and if you don’t like it, that’s on you, and you can kiss my Black ass!” Would that really be acceptable under any circumstances, much less during a week of mourning?

Yiscoc ran away from home, hung out with several wrong crowds, and dropped out of Mount Vernon High School a year and a half before he could have completed his coursework. Seventeen years later, and Yiscoc still doesn’t have his GED (the last two times, he failed the social studies portion of the exam — ain’t that a kicker!). I’m not laying all of this at my Mom’s feet. But Yiscoc’s adult life wasn’t exactly set up for success by his growing up years. The normative permanence of systemic racism on the one hand, and domestic violence, welfare poverty, and the 616 fire of 1995 that left Yiscoc and my other younger siblings temporarily homeless on the other, would make any kid itching to run away.

A second younger brother has now reached the second half of his thirties. Yiscoc’s the same age I was eleven and a half years ago, when I began working on Boy @ The Window in earnest. One of the things I figured out in writing such a torturous book was that I blamed myself for so many of my parents’/legal guardian’s failures and sins. I had blamed myself for not putting an end to the domestic violence at 616 since I was twelve, for not doing enough to support Mom and my younger siblings since I went away to college at Pitt in 1987. I also came to understand how much Mom deflected, defended, and denied when it came to her parenting, especially when we called on her to do more than find temporary shelter, meager food options, and threadbare clothing. Mom was and remains one of the vainest and unaffectionate people I have ever known — vain, insecure, and likely clinically depressed.

“Flash Memory #2” (an unmasking), in stainless steel, by Liu Zhan, Kuang Jun, and Tan Tianwei, 2009. (http://elhurgador.blogspot.com/2012/05/unmask-group-escultura.html; H.T. Gallery, Beijing, China).

I also know that Mom has passed these traits down to each of us. I’ve been dealing directly with them for three decades. I’m not sure Yiscoc has ever peered behind his mask long enough to see Mom lurking in the shadows, warts and all. If he has or ever will, it has been or will be an ugly sight. But if we are truly attempting to rebuild and remake ourselves, it is a sight we must endure. A painful process of honesty, soul-searching, revelation, and admitting that on some level, we’ve fucked up, and been fucked up, by life, oppression, and parenting.

Happy Birthday, Yiscoc. Know that despite everything, I do love you. I hope that this next year brings you closer to the person you want and need to be.

My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by 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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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.

How I Met My Son

31 Sunday Jul 2016

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

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Noah's birthday cake, Cheesecake Factory Original Cheesecake, adorned with candles, July 30, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

Noah’s birthday cake, Cheesecake Factory Original Cheesecake, adorned with candles, July 30, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins).

My son turned thirteen yesterday. That sentence by itself speaks volumes. That I have a son, that he’s reached an age where he’s in the midst of puberty, with a discernible personality, with a set of abilities and potential for developing more talents. Wow! Noah loves art, anime, and apples. He’s a classic contrarian who’s just beginning to realize that he has academic and athletic talents. He’s mostly observant, thoughtful, and independent thinking enough to deal with this crazy world outside our home. That he’s managed to get to this point without me messing him up with my own baggage as his father. To me, that’s not just amazing. That’s a miracle.

As late as the early spring of ’02, a half-year before me and my wife conceived our one and only egg, I had some doubts about ever being a dad. But those small doubts mattered little compared to where I’d been the summer and fall of ’01. I wasn’t dead set against becoming a parent. I just felt that in this dangerous, chaotic, racist, oppressive world, how could I be so selfish as to bring a child into this life?

Daddy Emperor Penguin with baby penguin, accessed July 31, 2016. (National Geographic via http://pinterest.com).

Daddy Emperor Penguin with baby penguin, accessed July 31, 2016. (National Geographic via http://pinterest.com).

I wasn’t just thinking of Amadou Diallo or the aftermath of 9/11. This wasn’t just about the expense of raising a kid. Mostly, it had to do with growing up as the second of six, but with ALL of the responsibilities of a first-born Gen-Xer watching over four siblings ten to fourteen years younger than me, not to mention my wayward older brother. It was the trauma of living through eight years of abject, unrelenting poverty with an abusive asshole of a bully who frequently threatened my and my Mom’s existence. It was having to swallow shit from all of my legal guardians about my lack of observable Black testosterone coursing through my brain cells. Add going through a magnet program from middle school to high school and going to the University of Pittsburgh to this baggage. What I was by twenty was a hopeful but yet emotionally exhausted human being.

So, I was never someone who had this American evangelical desire to get married or have kids (which is also a passion connected to Whiteness, by the way, to propagate their numbers, but not just). Even when it was obvious that me and my wife were heading toward marriage by 1998, I was more against having kids than in favor of the idea. I was still occasionally sending money to my Mom and my siblings to help them out, and taking trips to 616 to put out figurative fires. I had changed enough diapers, made enough bottles, dressed, lunched, dinnered, and laundered enough for my siblings to say “I’m good” when it came to having my own child.

But when my youngest brother Eri beat me to the punch by siring his own kid with his high school girlfriend at seventeen in the spring of ’01, I lost it. I couldn’t sleep soundly for months. I listened to my Mom complain week after week about him and his post-high school dropout future. My brothers Maurice and Yiscoc weren’t doing much better. My family was a cyclone of a disaster, and nothing I had done to blaze a trail for them since 1982 had done much good.

This was when I decided to do my intervention, to go after both my Mom and my siblings. Not so much out of anger, and yes, I had enough anger to keep my current iPhone powered for three days. No, this was a combination of righteous indignation and, well, love. I did my due diligence to dig into my Mom’s life with a few questions that I already knew the answers to, about when and how it all went so wrong for us all. And then I did the intervention, in January ’02, right after the birth of my only nephew.

Only later did I realize the intervention I did was really for me. Only later did I figure out that the 616 intervention had freed me from my self-imposed burden to help lift my family out of poverty. The constant anguish and exhaustion I felt when dealing with my family went away in the weeks after the intervention, and I was able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, maybe years.

Noah in portrait, May 16, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins)

Noah in portrait, May 16, 2016. (Donald Earl Collins)

That’s when I was ready to do my part in the miracle of conception, childbirth, and parenting. Giving myself that permission and then having the recognition of the baggage I carried going in has made fatherhood and parenting much easier (not easy, just much easier) than it would’ve been if I had done like Eri or followed Phil Knight’s “Just Do It” advice.

It’s hard to really be passionate about having a child when nearly all your free time with family between the ages of twelve and thirty-one has been to participate in raising kids. Since my little egg arrived thirteen years ago, though, I’ve reserved my parenting for him. I’m the father penguin in -100°F temps, braving blizzards in eighty-mile-an-hour winds to see my son through. I think it’s paid off so far.

Fife and Shalom

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afrocentrists, Evangelicals, Hebrew-Israelites and the False Revolution

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer's Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland, Believer’s Voice of Victory television broadcast, November 23, 2011. (Carpetsmoker via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

For nearly all of my life folks with even a kernel of authority have tried to convince me that there was one right way to live, one true path to liberation. Mostly religion has been the means through which others have attempted to box me in, although ideologues around Marxism, Afrocentricity, and Capitalism have all been in my figurative kitchen over the years. And like any well-meaning human being, at times I tried real hard to adapt myself to these right ways of thinking, of living out the one correct way to live. Only to fail, or rather, to recognize that none of these ways are the one right way, unless you are a closet right-winger, a conservative (non-ideological) wearing revolution-esque clothing.

My introduction to this madness began with my years as a Hebrew-Israelite, from April ’81 to April ’84 (although I wore my kufi until September ’84). That any parent could suddenly impose a new religion on their kids without explanation is abusive enough. When combined with vague notions about the Lost Tribes of ancient Israel and the wearing of clothes that set us apart culturally while in the middle of puberty, it was a forced societal ostracism. Even still, I tried to live by these strictures. “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Eat kosher food, don’t use Ivory soap, shop only at Black or Hebrew-Israelite stores, avoid “unclean issues of blood.” But the physical abuse and poverty that came with being a Hebrew-Israelite in the Judah ben Israel madhouse of contradictions at 616 made me despise anything involving Hebrew-Israelite pretty much for all time.

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Molefi Asante speech, Philadelphia, PA, September 13, 2014. (AP photo/file).

Fast-forward a few years to the early 1990s, to the rise of Afrocentricity and the Afrocentric ethos. After three and a half years of being around Hebrew-Israelites, these kente-cloth wearing fools made me weary more times than not of their exclusionary our-way-or-no-way Blackness. Molefi Asante and the late Frances Cress Welsing were just the tip of a much larger iceberg in search of revolutionary “authentic” Blackness. From the Afrocentric undergrads who hijacked the Black Action Society leadership at the University of Pittsburgh in 1991 to folks who picked arguments with me for “sounding White” while I was in grad school, I saw them the same way I saw my now idiot ex-stepfather and the obnoxious Estelle Abel from my high school days. They were well-meaning but stupid. As far as I was concerned, they thought that their words alone would foster a revolution, that being Black meant turning one’s back on the world while also indirectly embracing an ethnocentric capitalism. Or at least, a Black American collective individualism, otherwise known as an “Afrocentric cool.”  I could not, I would not, exchange one form of oppressive uplift in Hebrew-Israelites for the shiny fool’s gold that mostly represented the Afrocentrists.

The neo-Marxists I met in Pittsburgh throughout the 1990s were no better. For all their revolutionary rhetoric, theirs was a world of theoretical activism, of scholarly examples of past oppression. Most of them didn’t know poverty and didn’t comprehend oppression beyond their own limited experience. Most of all, they couldn’t find a connection between American racism and class oppression if I gave them an industrial strength magnet. The fact that most of them hadn’t read Franz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, Derrick Bell, Angela Davis — but could quote Karl Marx the way Hebrew-Israelites could quote the Torah and Afrocentrists could quote Asante and Welsing — I found troubling. That’s putting it nicely. I found it contemptuous that folks who didn’t know my experience or who would all but refuse to read folks who written about experiences like mine would expect my allegiance to an ideology that was never meant for people who look like me.

The evangelical Christian part of my life was literally the last of the major dogmas to go. It was the hardest for me because I literally had given my life to Jesus in the midst of the whole Hebrew-Israelite crisis, Easter Sunday ’84. With my Mom coming down the same path by the late-1980s, it made it easier to not interrogate my Christianity as thoroughly as I would excoriate Afrocentrists and Marxists in graduate classes and in articles and papers a decade later. But even at nineteen, I realized that the Van Impe’s weekly predictions of the Apocalypse were as ridiculous as Welsing’s exulting of the magical properties of melanin. Or, for that matter, a fake Balkis Makeda cautioning against the use of Ivory Soap among her Hebrew-Israelite flock because of a dream she had.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge Magazine on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, Chicago, July 9, 1896. (Wikipedia). In public domain.

I went along to get along for years, until the hypocrisy of evangelical Christianity’s Gospel of Prosperity became too much. They took the metaphor of William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold and actually went literal and nuclear with it. Somehow being Christian now meant blind patriotic allegiance to anything US and fully supporting capitalism, and yet an exclusionary separation between “true” evangelical Christians and the rest of the world. Especially on Rapture Day.

The last time I sat comfortably in a pew was in January ’97, although I’ve been to churches of various denominations dozens of times since. I still believe in Jesus, the life and the death and even the resurrection. But I don’t believe in most who claim to represent him, yet turn around and ignore the vulnerable standing right in front of them, making weak claims around individualism and poverty in the process.

In so many ways, evangelicals, Marxists, Afrocentrists, and Hebrew-Israelites are more alike than different. They all insist on a singular path, a quintessential truth. While some aspects of their thinking are appealing, I find accepting their bullshit in entirety poisonous to my spirit, mind, and gastrointestinal tract. There still may well be a revolution or even a rapture, but it won’t be because of any of these groups.

Holiday Traditions (really, not having any)

12 Saturday Dec 2015

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

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Christmas Holiday and Traditions Around The World ornament bulb, December 12, 2015. (http://johnseville.benchmark.us).

Christmas Holiday and Traditions Around The World ornament bulb, December 12, 2015. (http://johnseville.benchmark.us).

At my chiropractic appointment yesterday morning, my bone-cracking doctor of fourteen years and I got into a discussion of our holiday plans over the next couple of weeks. Her and her family will visit with extended kin in Virginia, while we’re heading to Pittsburgh to see my in-laws. During our conversation, my chiropractor brought up some of the family traditions she’s preserved with her handful of Christmases with her young daughter and two sons. Traditions like Danish pork roast for dinner, ornaments and other hand-me-downs from her grandparents and other ancestors as part of trimming the tree.

“I wouldn’t know anything about traditions. Matter of fact, there were eight years growing up where we didn’t even celebrate Christmas,” I said, with no forethought about what her reaction might be.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” my chiropractor said in a quiet yet somewhat shocked tone, as if I’d ruined the Christmas spirit for her kids.

“That’s what happens when you go up in poverty,” I said apologetically, realizing that I might have cost my chiropractor some peace of mind this holiday season.

Even at nearly forty-six, I can still say things without thinking, causing others to have to think more than they normally would. Sometimes, it’s without intent or malice, sometimes it’s because I don’t give a crap what people may think. Regardless, it’s certainly not because I want people to feel sorry for me or to give me a hug.

The truth is, the only holiday traditions I have come either from my wife or her family or were born out of my circumstances. Like making super-sweet, two-packs of Fruit Punch Kool-Aid and mixing it with either ginger ale or Sierra Mist for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Or getting our son’s Christmas presents ready for him without him knowing the night before. Or me making some holiday/birthday cake for me and us (since my birthday is two days after Christmas). And often going to a soup kitchen, homeless shelter or other venue to give away clothes, toys, money, my time in knowing that no matter how I might feel about my life, plenty others have it much worse.

The truth is also more complicated than simple poverty. Up until my eighth birthday in ’77, my Mom and me and Darren (with either my father or my idiot stepfather) celebrated Darren’s birthday, Christmas and my birthday as separate or nearly separate events. Some of my best times growing up were those days. Then, when the hyperinflation of the late-1970s kicked in — along with a second marriage and two more mouths to feed — Christmases ’78 and ’79 consisted of a fake two-foot table tree, a new shirt or sweater and a new pair of slacks. There were no birthday celebrations for me.

A contemporary Candelabrum in the style of a traditional Menorah. United Kingdom, Chanukah service, December 2014. (Gil Dekel; http://www.poeticmind.co.uk; via 39james via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-4.0.

A contemporary Candelabrum in the style of a traditional Menorah. United Kingdom, Chanukah service, December 2014. (Gil Dekel; http://www.poeticmind.co.uk; via 39james via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-4.0.

Between Christmas ’80 and Christmas ’88, we didn’t even have the fake dwarf tree. Of course, four of those years we were Hebrew-Israelites. But there is this holiday known as Chanukah that also occurs in December, in which Torah believers celebrate the Festival of Lights with eight days of gifts and giving. But these were also the worst of our poverty-stricken years, and we could barely afford one candle for the menorah, much less eight or nine. The best gift I got those years was my idiot stepfather being out the apartment at 616 and on the prowl for other victims for his fast-talking nonsense about making money and living a godly way-of-life. I also attempted suicide on my fourteen birthday, not exactly a tradition worth repeating.

Finally, in December ’89, we had our first Christmas at 616 with my Mom having divorced my now idiot ex-stepfather. She bought a fake full-sized tree. I bought my four younger siblings gifts big and small for the holiday. My mom even made me a Duncan Hines chocolate cake with vanilla icing for my twentieth birthday that year. We didn’t have much, but what we did that year meant so much as we moved into the 1990s.

In all of my adult Christmases, I’ve actually only done one in Pittsburgh prior to our trip coming up in eleven days. It was Christmas ’98. That week, perhaps the only important tradition I’ve ever been a part of began. I moved in with my then girlfriend Angelia, mostly as a cost-cutting measure, partly out of love and concern for our respective futures. We’ve been living together and celebrating the holidays ever since!