Looking Back to My Future

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Blair Kelley, Dr. Jack Daniel, Familial Obligations, Forbes Quadrangle, Fordham University, Grit, Homelessness, Hunter College, Pedro Noguera, Pitt, Poverty, Resilience, Ron Slater, Survivor's Guilt, Wesley V. Posvar Hall, What Ifs

The power of “What If?,” September 4, 2016. (http://giphy.com).

I don’t “what if” my past moments nearly as much as I used to, thanks in part to one of my first Twitter conversations six years ago. It was with Blair Kelley, a professor and dean at North Carolina State University. I brought up the fact that I sometimes indulged my students’ “What if…?” scenarios regarding slavery and other issues in US history in order to help them find the truth. She said that this was a waste of time, that “What is…?” is already hard enough for students to understand, much less playing out a “What if…?” to get to a “What is…?”

Kelley was right. Students often play the “What if…?” game to deflect from what actually happened, out of potential pain or discomfort with historical truths, or because their conception of history doesn’t allow for humanity and human nature as significant factors. So I stopped humoring my students in fantasies about the South winning the Civil War or Nazi Germany winning World War II in Europe. It hasn’t made my students any happier, but it has made teaching them easier.

As for my own “What ifs…?,” I still think of a few on occasion. Like what if I had gone to college at Columbia or another elite institution instead of Pitt? Or what if I had possessed the courage to act on my crush on Wendy in seventh grade, or not wear my kufi to school during the Hebrew-Israelite years at all? Those can be very good mental distractions when I’m running a 10K or working on a boring set of revisions to an education piece. But they’re also rather silly distractions, with me knowing full well why I did or didn’t do most things, even knowing my thought process at the time they occurred in ’81, ’82, or ’87.

With this weekend being exactly twenty-eight years since my five days of undergraduate homelessness on Pitt’s campus, I have a real “What if…?” scenario to reconsider. What if I hadn’t bumped into my friend Leandrew, who had told me about the dilapidated fire-trap rowhouse he lived in on Welsford? What if I hadn’t met with my landlord Mr. Fu and gotten my 200-square-foot room with a literal hole in the wall so that two rooms could share a single radiator, all for $140 per month (about $285 in 2016 dollars)? What if I had to spend Labor Day weekend on a closed Pitt campus sleeping on that top floor concrete landing in a Forbes Quadrangle (now Posvar Hall) stairwell, where I had already spent three nights?

The mythical 6th-floor landing I slept on for three days (leading out to the roof), Wesley Posvar Hall, September 29, 2013. (Donald Earl Collins).

I already know the answers to these questions. I decided on this after praying about this on Wednesday, August 31 in ’88 while in that stairwell, laying on some of my clothes and my book bag. If I came out of Labor Day weekend without housing, I’d have to take my remaining $300 and go back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to 616. I’d have to drop or withdraw from my courses at Pitt. Maybe, with add-drop still going on, I could have some of my financial aid refunded, after Pitt deducted the $819 I owed them from my freshman year. I could enroll at Fordham or at CUNY’s Hunter College for the Winter/Spring 1989 semester, maybe find work somewhere in the area, and gut it out a few months at 616 with my nonfunctioning family.

I knew then that this was a scenario as ridiculous as Napoleon conquering Russia in the dead of winter. One of the reasons (but not the main reason) I left for the University of Pittsburgh in the first place was to get away from my family, to meet people unlike my Mom, my idiot stepfather, my five siblings at crowded 616, and the asshole Humanities classmates I’d gone to school with every day for the previous six years. I knew I had to have the mental space I needed to find myself, to figure myself out, all in considering whether I even had a future, much less how that future would take shape or how I’d shape myself into a future.

If I had gone with my cockamamie idea, the best case outcome would’ve been me transferring to Hunter or Fordham with my first year’s credits from Pitt, and me making it through a few semesters full-time before becoming a part-time student. I have no idea if I would’ve finished with a degree in history or something else from Hunter or Fordham. But given how exhausted I was each time I went back to Pitt after a summer of paid and familial work, I likely wouldn’t have even considered grad school.

The weight of guilt, survivor’s and otherwise, September 2014. (http://www.fumsnow.com/).

Why? I would’ve been at 616. I would’ve been obligated to help out with everything, from dealing with my idiot stepfather before me and my Mom finally forced him out, to providing food, entertainment, and childcare for my four younger siblings. I know this because during my college years, I did come back to 616 to work each summer and during the holidays. Those additional responsibilities were ones I felt obligated to fulfill until I was in my early thirties, and felt most intense when I had to face my family’s poverty head-on.

Keep in mind, this is the best-case outcome. Most likely, I would have stopped going to school all together after my bout with homelessness. I would’ve found part-time or full-time low-wage work, first to help out, then to find a roach trap somewhere in Mount Vernon or in the Bronx, and been relegated to the torture of “What ifs?” around getting a degree and having a better life. Maybe, just maybe, I would’ve been bumped around enough by that rough life to try again, to seek help from the likes of an ombudsman like Ron Slater or a provost like Jack Daniel. But I barely knew how to seek help when I first went about doing it as a homeless and broke-ass student in ’88. Given my mental makeup back then, it would’ve been a monumental task to trust that much after years of low-wage work and unrelenting poverty at 616.

UCLA education professor (although he is so much more than that) Pedro Noguera reminded me of something I’ve come to disdain in recent years. This idea that philanthropists and researchers can use kids and families as experimental subjects on the issue of “grit” or “resilience” is one I find disgusting. The idea that oppression and inequality can be overcome if you or I simply toughen up, grow a thick outer shell and just push through? The idea that with grit and spit and sweat, anyone can just overcome through sheer will power a lack of preparation, a lack of resources, a lack of access to resources, a lack of connections, and a lack of knowledge? Are you kidding me?

Quaker Instant Grits, Super Family Size, September 4, 2016. (http://soap.com).

I had just about the best academic preparation anyone could have going into college, and I still came within three or four days of dropping out and heading back to 616. I was staring into the abyss of my future. The only grit I knew that would’ve worked for me on August 31, ’88 would’ve been a gigantic box of Quaker’s Instant Grits. And that was assuming I found a place to live in Pittsburgh so I could buy a pot and cook them. I didn’t want to be resilient. I’d always been resilient. But I didn’t call it that. I called it surviving.

And without help, without knowing how to ask for help, without some occasional divine or quantum-level intervention, my grit, resiliency, or survival up to August 31, ’88, wouldn’t have mattered. Philanthropists, educators, and social scientists need to stop asking individuals, families, and communities in poverty to be part of their test of resiliency as if we’re all rats in their maze. They need to start asking all of us not just how we survive, but what we need to succeed. Then again, they shouldn’t even need to ask. It’s not as if this is a “What if…?” The Great Society and War on Poverty efforts in the 1960s have already provided a roadmap. Go study that.

How I Met My Son

31 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 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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616 East Lincoln Avenue, 9/11, Abuse, Amadou Diallo, Baggage, Black Masculinity, Burden of Success, Child Abuse, Darren Gill, Domestic Violence, Eri, Family Intervention, Father-Son Relationship, Humanities, Maurice, Maurice Eugene Washington, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Noah, Parenting, Penguins, Poverty, Self-Reflection, Siblings, Teenager, Yiscoc

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).

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)

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 decollins1969 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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A.B. Davis Middle School, Black Male Identity, Black Masculinity, Chorus, Domestic Violence, Fife, Judah ben Israel, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mentoring, Music Lessons, Oppression, Poverty, Pulaski Day Parade, Summer of Abuse, Tamrin, Trombone, Type 2 Diabetes, William H. Holmes Elementary

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).

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).

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?

Holiday Traditions (really, not having any)

12 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by decollins1969 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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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Chanukah, Chiropractor, Christmas, Domestic Violence, Family, Giving, Haves and Have-Nots, Holiday Traditions, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Poverty, Receiving, Suicide, Womanizing

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.

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!

Aside

Leaving Mount Vernon

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Emotion (Ain't Nobody)" Remix (2014), "Swimming Pools (Drank)" (2012), Child Abuse, College, Domestic Violence, Emotions, Family, Kendrick Lamar, Leaving, Loneliness, Maverick Sabre, Moving, Pitt, Politics of Respectability, Poverty, Respectability Politics, Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery

I left for Pittsburgh and for the University of Pittsburgh on this day/date twenty-eight years ago, my first trip on my own. It was my first trip out-of-state since my Mom took me and my brother Darren on a bus trip to Pennsylvania Amish country in June ’78, nine years earlier. At 5:51 am on the last Wednesday in August ’87, with my older brother Darren’s help — and with my Mom and three of four younger siblings watching us from the living room window — I packed my luggage, Army sack, and two boxes of bedding and materials into a Reliable Taxi. We headed for East 241st to meet up with my dad. From there, we took the 2 Subway all the way to Penn Station, with enough time to board and get all of my stuff on the 7:50 am Pennsylvanian train to the ‘Burgh. For the second time in a row, my dad was sober, and gave me a glassy-eyed hug and shoulder squeeze. Darren was both sad and happy to see me go.

Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian train pulling out of Altoona, PA station, heading east for Philly, NYC, uploaded February 2013. (Dustin F.; http://www.northeastrailfans.com/).

I’ve gone over the trip to Pittsburgh and my transformation from a seventeen-year-old with the pent-up emotions of someone who hadn’t left May 31, 1982 behind throughout my eight years of blogging and through my memoir. I’ve written about moving on to Pittsburgh before. What I haven’t really written about fully is how I thought and felt in leaving Mount Vernon, New York behind. The short answer is, I was somewhere between terrified, joyous, embittered, and sad to go, and all at once.

I was terrified. It was my first trip on my own, to a city I’d never been to before, to a university I never visited prior to saying yes. I could meet people who might catch on that I was someone who had spent the previous six years with few acquaintances, much less friends. I was hopeful, but had zero idea what to expect.

But I really was happy to leave. Between my decade living at 616, the abuse, the poverty, the Hebrew-Israelite years, the constant ridicule, the years in Humanities, the constant work of watching after Mom, my dad, my siblings, I was through. Throw in a summer of obsession with and emasculation by Phyllis, and five years of realizing that I needed to get out, and going to Pittsburgh was a no-brainer. Heck, if I’d been a bit smarter about my application process, I could’ve just as easily applied to the University of Washington, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Michigan, University of Toronto and UPenn and almost certainly gotten in. It didn’t matter where I was going, really. I just needed to go and find my myself, and my education with that.

That last year or so in Mount Vernon had let me know that even with an academic scholarship (after a private investigation) from Columbia, staying would’ve been a huge mistake. Between the silent disdain and snickering of Black teachers at Mount Vernon High School around my sullen presence and the whole Estelle Abel episode at the end of four years of torment. Add to that the years of Black middle class folk talking at me about how my life was so much better because they marched or protested somewhere before I was conceived, or because they prayed for me. Add to that this insistence that I “give back to the community.” As if Black Mount Vernon had given me anything but a hard way to go since I was knee-high to a boil weevil.

Viewing and wake service for Heavy D, Grace Baptist Church, Mount Vernon, NY, November 17, 2011. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images; https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/).

As I saw it, the only difference between the vapid, seething facade of White liberalism among paternalistic White Mount Vernonites and the false smiles and frequent excoriations of Mount Vernon’s Black middle class was skin color. They drank deep from swimming pools full of what we now call respectability politics, born out of a need to be good examples to the world, like Kendrick Lamar described in “Swimming Pools” (2012). (Pour up [drank], head shot [drank]…faded [drank]). This isn’t the same as doing the right thing at the right time or speaking truth to power. You make money, wear nice clothes, drive a nice car, stand up straight, look a White man in the eye while firmly grasping his hand. And apologize for not being as assimilable as you pretend. It was 100%, USDA-approved bullshit, and it smelled like it a lot of days, too.

I was sad to leave, too. There was a part of me that still wanted to fit in, out of loneliness, if nothing else. I still liked Clover Donuts and some of the breakfast places on the South Side. I longed for some sort of acceptance, an acknowledgment that I was a real person, even though that would’ve required being around real people at 616, and in Humanities, and in the rest of Mount Vernon. I knew that I’d miss the close proximity to The City. I’d put my hopes and dreams in a place in which I knew I couldn’t afford to stay, literally and figuratively. That longing would come to haunt me in the coming year, but I’d eventually learn, I could always visit New York.

Aside

Part of My Real-Life Hunger Games

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

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"Things Can Only Get Better" (1985), 10th Grade, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Addie Viggiano, Authority Figures, Chemistry, Disillusionment, Harold Meltzer, Howard Jones, Humanities, hunger, Iced Fudge Nut Brownie, Italian, MVHS, New York State Regents Exams, Paul Lewis, Poverty, Sara Lee, Trigonometry

Consequences of hunger in schools, NOKID Hunger, January 2015. (http://www.youthonassignment.org/).

This time three decades ago I’d started to recover from a week of seemingly endless tests and Regents exams at Mount Vernon High School, which couldn’t have come at a worse time for me. The cupboards and fridge at 616 were as bare as they had been since the days before my Mom had gone on welfare. There was only enough milk for my younger siblings, and besides cornbread and cabbage, we were SOL. That Monday we had our exams in World History and English. Tuesday was the Trig Regents, which I started preparing for at the end of February because our teacher Ms. Viggiano didn’t know the difference between sine, cosine and tangent. All of those went pretty well.

Then we ran out of food Tuesday night. I woke up the next morning with water, milk, ice and freeze-dried meat as my choices for breakfast and 50 cents in my pocket. I chose water and only water for the morning. And Wednesday was the busiest day of all. There were two Regents exams, one that morning in Italian, the other in Chemistry. I went to school feeling like I could overcome my hunger and do decently on the test. After all, I had been taking Italian since seventh grade, and I already knew I had scored an eight out of ten on the oral part of this exam. But deep down, I knew I just didn’t have the energy to get through the exam. I had a headache from the lack of food, which grew worse as I started to forget the difference between Italian in past, present, future and present perfect tense. I finished the exam and found myself just hoping for a 70 (anything below a 65 was an F, and the exam counted for a third of my total grade for the course).

Sara Lee Iced Fudge Nut Brownie (yes, they still make them), 2014. (http://saraleefoodservice.com/).

I went to lunch and walked over to Chester Heights (Eastchester) to a deli and bought the only thing I could think of to eat: one Sara Lee Brownie. It cost 45 cents, and it was probably the best investment I had made up to this point in my life. I walked back to MVHS, slowly ate the brownie to make it last, and had just enough time to drink some more water before we sat down to take the Chemistry Regents.

When I opened up the exam booklet I started laughing. Our idiot Chemistry teacher Mr. Lewis had told us the month before to “not worry” about organic chemistry as part of the Regents exam even though he had never covered it in class. Listening to him had me averaging a C in his class all year, with my highest exam grade an 87. So I bought a Barron’s Chemistry Regents test prep book the weekend after his pronouncement, and did nothing but study organic chemistry for this exam. It turned out that the first ten questions on the exam were organic chemistry ones, and something like thirty-five out of 100 total covered organic chem. With my brownie digesting, I was ready to kick some butt. I left that afternoon knowing that I did pretty well. But after that shaky morning, I found myself still wondering, did I do well, or was my malnourished mind playing tricks on me?

I found out on Friday, June 21st that I had failed the Italian Regents, with a total score of 45 — I’d only earned a 37 out of 90 on the written party of the exam (I’d taken the oral part with Ms. Maldonado a couple of weeks earlier). On the Chemistry Regents, I had the third highest score in the school — a 95 out of 100. I was bummed, ecstatic, pissed and disillusioned with my teachers and with myself, all at the same time. The goofy-assed Howard Jones tune “Things Can Only Get Better,” a hit at that time, popped into my head from that morning and off and on for the rest of June.

Luckily on the Friday we found out our scores was also the same day we were to meet our AP US History teacher. I’ve already described my late friend and mentor in a previous post. But it’s worth mentioning again how he broke down my protective wall to talk to me about things I’d never discuss with my classmates or my Mom or Jimme. One of those issues was hunger. Not just my constant need for food even when there was food at 616. My hunger, my drive for something better in life. Meltzer noticed it, and gradually got me to exhibit that side of myself in class.

NO KID Hungry campaign logo, Share Our Strength, June 24, 2015. (https://www.nokidhungry.org/).

For years after AP, Meltzer would say, over and over again, “You know, I never worried about you.” I guess it was because I didn’t take the world around me at face value. I had a healthy disdain for authority figures and the daily bullshit that the world attempted to feed my mind with every day. I wasn’t intimidated by my classmates, and I wasn’t going to allow myself to engage in worrying about grades and pleasing teachers the ways in which they did.

Meltzer picked up on this, and laughed about it all the time. He said that I had that one-of-a-kind look of a student who wasn’t just hungry for good grades, but hungry for knowledge, hungry for something to make sense of a senseless world. I guess that this is all true. Boy, it’s remembering days of hunger past that I miss people like Meltzer the most.

The Importance of The Great Society, 50 Years Later

10 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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13th Amendment, Appomattox, Back To The Future (1985), Claiborne Pell, Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, ESEA, Great Society, HEA, Higher Education Act of 1965, Juneteenth, LBJ, Legacy, Michelle Rhee, Poverty, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Public Education Costs, Racial Discrimination, Racism, Roland Fryer Jr., Segregation, Technocrats, The Great Society, UN Conference on Women, Vietnam War, Voting Rights Act of 1965, War on Poverty, Wendy Kopp

Cartoon about American politics and the economy during the Great Recession, May 9, 2010. (Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws (low resolution, relevance to subject matter).

This weekend marks a half-century since President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the first series of bills into law that signified his Great Society/War on Poverty work. We won’t hear much about this, though. Not with 2015 being a benchmark year for commemorating and celebrating so much else. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. Appomattox at 150, along with President Lincoln’s assassination, Juneteenth, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, ending legal slavery (except for prisoners, of course). The trench warfare of World War I, and the Battle of Gallipoli (if one’s a real war trivia buff). Even the 30th anniversary of Back To The Future and the UN Conference on Women, which gathered in Nairobi, Kenya in the fall of 1985, will likely get more air time, cyber time, and ink than the first of LBJ’s Great Society programs.

But the Great Society was supposed to be a grand experiment and experience. It was supposed to wipe out poverty, end all legal forms of discrimination and segregation, and make the opportunity to achieve the modern American Dream of a middle-class life or better a reality for almost everyone. And it would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those pesky kids, um, LBJ’s pesky decisions to go escalate the Vietnam War. The war cost $269 billion in 1970 dollars, or, $1.7 trillion in 2015 money.

What $1 trillion looks like, January 2012. (http://usdebt.kleptocracy.us/ via Elsolet Joubert).

Yet it’s not exactly true that it would’ve worked, or that it didn’t work. You see, despite the best efforts of an elitist, right-wing and ineffectual federal government corrupted by plutocrats and its military-industrial complex, the Great Society programs are still with us. For starters, there’s the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 and Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, the first one LBJ signed into law on April 11, fifty years ago on this date.

Without these laws, the modern era of educating millions of children whom states, colleges and universities and local school districts had shut out of K-12 and higher education wouldn’t have occurred at all. With federal government dollars and regulations, not to mention a foundation in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ESEA and HEA in its initial years provided real hope for “an equal opportunity for all.”

This wasn’t and isn’t just about Jim Crow and racial discrimination and segregation, whether de jure in the South or de facto via residential segregation and redlining in cities outsider the South. This became about opening doors for whole classes of children and adults that had been steel-reinforced-concrete walls before.

Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer at American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, July 16, 2007. (http://aei.org).

Technocrats and other public education crises gurus of the likes of Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, and Roland Fryer would have us think that the $600 billion that states and the federal government via ESEA spend on public education each year is all wasteful spending. They say that we have about the same number of students in schools today (about 50 million) as we did in 1970.

Of course, they don’t tell the whole story, leaving out a lot of truth for us. For in my lifetime, students with disabilities (cognitive, physical, emotional) have gone from shutout to included in public schools as part of the Americans with Disabilities Acts of 1989 and 1992, and of course, ESEA. Students with language proficiency issues became part of the public education fabric under the Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court decision in 1974, with funds provided out of ESEA. Charter schools, magnet programs, school counseling, and so many other things that have made public education more inclusive and also more expensive wouldn’t have been possible without ESEA. Meaning, technocrats, that public education was severely underfunded and exclusionary prior to 1965.

The HEA hasn’t had the same effect, primarily because we as a society tend to think of higher education as a luxury and not a right, and have fought hard to make many colleges and universities the exclusive domain of “the worthy.” Still, without HEA and the Pell Grants (named after former Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-RI, 1961-97), the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, the Direct Student Loan Program, and the Supplemental Loan Program, a whole generation of low-income and middle-income families wouldn’t have been able to send their kids to college. They were often the first in their families, as Blacks, as women, as Black and Latino women, as working-class Whites with only a steel mill or automobile plant in their future. At least back then.

President Lyndon Johnson signing the Higher Education Act of 1965, Master’s Gymnasium, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, November 8, 1965. (http://smmercury.com/). In public domain.

There’s also the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Head Start program, and Congress passing Medicaid and Medicare, providing health coverage for the elderly and deeply poor for the first time. And all in 1965.

What does all of this mean in 2015? That despite the mountains of books written on LBJ and the failures of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, that these programs worked and work in ameliorating poverty and expanding opportunities for all, even across racial lines. Would they have been more effective with more investment, especially in those initial years, when Vietnam became more of a priority? No doubt.

That’s just it, though. Most Americans — who despite the fears of Ted Cruz and Rudy Giuliani, remain White — didn’t care about poverty and racism and the structures that supported it then, and they mostly don’t care now. They want Congress to work, just not on issues that would permanently unbalance the social hierarchy that they’ve assumed as their birthright for two centuries.

Hence the constant one-two punch of a relationship they see with poverty and those with black and brown skin. Hence the constant carping about taxes and needless spending on food stamps and welfare, even though the true face of government assistance in the US has always been a haggard White one. Hence the constant media tropes about hard work and so-called self-made men worth billions making their money without holding a college degree, who somehow can tell the rest of us how to live. The Great Society, for all of LBJ’s foibles and its weaknesses, remains a great legacy of what America could be, and at times, has been, but overall, refuses to be.

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Tag Archives: Poverty

Looking Back to My Future

How I Met My Son

Fife and Shalom

Holiday Traditions (really, not having any)

Leaving Mount Vernon

Part of My Real-Life Hunger Games

The Importance of The Great Society, 50 Years Later