Dwayne and Cindy

09 Monday Dec 2013

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Art, Black Identity, Black Male Identity, Comic Strips, Creativity, Depression, Genius, Identity Crisis, Infantilization, Mental Retardation, Potential, Reading, Sibling Relationship, Sibling Rivalry, The Brady Bunch (1969-75), The Clear View School, What's Happening!! (1976-79), Writing

My older brother Darren, with nephews Roshad and Noah (my son), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

My brother Darren turns forty-six years old today. With all that’s happened in our lives, it would be easy for me to forget that Darren’s my older brother, that he learned how to read on his own at three years old, that he taught me how to read right around my fifth birthday. Yet if I go back in time far enough, I can still see the Darren that was before his fourteen years at a school for the mentally retarded in Clear View at Briarcliff Manor had permanently screwed him up.

Between the ages of ten and sixteen (or, between late ’77 and early ’84, my brother worked on his own personal comic strip series, one he called Dwayne and Cindy. I guess he got the character names from two of his favorite shows, What’s Happening!! and The Brady Bunch. Darren started slowly at first, figuring out how to draw his characters. They were both Black, kids that were about the same age as we were. They were best friends who went outside to play, went on walks or otherwise hung out at Dwayne’s place playing or watching TV.

So when Darren added his bubble captions to tell his stories, they were simple strips about life in the suburbs, about going for walks to the store, about school and homework and how their parents were always too hard on them. As with all things that required creativity, Darren drew from what he knew from living in Mount Vernon and going to school at Clear View, which back in the late-’70s was in Dobby Ferry, and not so Bruce Wayne-stately-manor-looking as it is today.

What's Happening!! (1976-79) screen shot, December 27, 2011. (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/whatshappening/whatshappseason3-1%20(Small).JPG). Qualifies as fair use -- low resolution pic without alternative image.

What’s Happening!! (1978) screen shot, December 27, 2011. (http://www.sitcomsonline.com/whatshappening/whatshappseason3-1%20(Small).JPG). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution pic without alternative image.

As Darren got older, he fleshed out Dwayne and Cindy some more. They had similar personalities, where they used each other to escape what seemed to be a harsh world outside of their bubble. But Darren would never draw nor talk about this harsh world in his strips. He wanted them to be funny and goofy, after all, not just a reflection of everything that was going on at 616 and with our parents/idiot stepfather.

At the same time, though, Darren as a comic strip writer hadn’t grown to the point where he could capture more complex issues in his form. I said as much when he asked me to look at a more mature version of Dwayne and Cindy in ’82. “Why do Dwayne and Cindy say the same thing all the time? Don’t they grow up or think about other stuff?,” I asked with some impatience, hoping that Darren would want to talk about race, or growing up, or make Dwayne and Cindy into teenagers.

And on this one, Darren didn’t immediately give up. For two more years, until the beginning of the summer of ’84, he did try to make Dwayne and Cindy more mature. But between the loss of our bedroom to younger siblings and then the whole Balkis Makeda affair in ’84, combined with the completion of the institutionalization process at Clear View, Darren no longer had the creative spirit. His psychological reserves to see himself as normal, as a whole human being, as a young Black man, were all but gone, and have never returned.

I sometimes think that Darren had a window of opportunity to pull himself out of the psychological hole that my Mom, my father and Clear View put him in between ’74 and ’88. And he did. Through me and through that Dwayne and Cindy comic strip of his. In so many ways, his was a genius with the potential of an Aaron McGruder, some of which did rub off on me.

I DRAW COMICS sketchbook, September 2012. (Matt Marrocco via http://www.kickstarter.com).

But being around the severely mentally retarded and a group of teachers and psychologists who coddled and infantilized the toughness out of him, the toughness Darren needed to succeed as well as survive our ordeal at 616. That, more than anything, extinguished Dwayne and Cindy and his chances at a rich life before he was old enough to vote. Which is why on every ninth of December, I’m so sad, for him and for me. Yes, I feel guilty, and yes, I know it’s not my fault, but I still miss the promising version of my older brother. I wish that Darren could’ve published Dwayne and Cindy, even the simple versions he began to draw and write thirty six years ago.

Toto’s “Africa” & “Reading” Too Much Into It

02 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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"Africa" (1982), "The Catch", A.B. Davis Middle School, Africa, C-Town, Dwight Clark, Fever, Football, Herschel Walker, Humanities, Imagination, Joe Montana, NFL, Pelham, Puberty, Racialism, Reading, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, Tarzan, The Jungle (1906), Toto, Toto IV, Upton Sinclair, USFL, Whiteness, Writing

Toto’s “Africa” (1982) Singles Sleeve, March 1, 2013. (http://eil.com).

There are as many reasons my musical tastes are eclectic as there are songs that I like and love. I can’t explain it. There’s no way I can explain why I think one song sounds as unimaginative and boring as Drake’s “Started From The Bottom,” while Nickleback’s “If Today Was Your Last Day” has been one of my favorite songs over the past three and a half years.

My imagination could take the corniest song and make it epic, a mantra, my theme music. Even a song like Toto’s “Africa” (’82-’83), a song that could be interpreted as reflecting White racialism as it related to Tarzan movies of a not-so-bygone era. Yet I’ve seen their video, and probably heard the song at least 3,000 times. It ain’t that deep, but it’s still a song I like.

So, a bit of context. My grades in the early Reagan years — especially in ’82-’83, when I was in eighth grade — didn’t at all reflect our family’s slide into welfare poverty, my ongoing issues with my idiot stepfather, my suicidal struggles or my search for a real relationship with God. What I had to lean on, more than my amazing memory or World Book Encyclopedia, my parents or even God, was my imagination.

The Spark of Imagination (via x-ray), March 1, 2013. (http://esquire.com).

With puberty and what would turn into a ten-inch growth spurt in a span of twenty months, I became enamored with sports. And the sport I became most interested in early on was football. The strike-shortened ’82 NFL season combined with the formation of the USFL and the coming-out party for soon-to-be draft pick Herschel Walker to get my attention. The vicious hits, the acrobatic catches, the powerful throws were things that I’d seen before. I saw them through the lens of an underdog now, a downtrodden member of an abandoned family who wanted to see folks who’d overcome impossible circumstances achieve great things.

The first person who represented that for me in sports was Joe Montana, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. The only ending to a football game I’d ever watched was the end of the NFC Championship Game the year before, with the play known as “The Catch.” I didn’t even know who Joe Montana was, even after watching Dwight Clark go up and catch a ball that was only meant for him.

He was the kind of person I wanted and needed to be in order to overcome what I thought was an impossible deficit. As far as I was concerned, I had to score about a hundred touchdowns to go from welfare to college, let alone anything after college. Yet it didn’t stop me from dreaming about rolling out right to the sidelines on fourth down, sucking in Dallas’ defense, and throwing a ball toward the right-side of end zone, toward the back line, just high enough for Clark to catch and Emerson Walls not to.

It was a dream that required some theme music, and luckily for me it was ’83. Michael Jackson’s Thriller had come out at the start of eighth grade, The Police were big, Toto and Rick Springfield were at their peak, and New Edition had put out there first hit, a Jackson 5 remake. All of it gave me something more modern to move forward with, to get silly about, to “march down field” to when I needed to gear up to get an important A. I’d accidentally found a way to escape my life without ever leaving Mount Vernon.

The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair, 1st Edition, March 31, 2011. (GrahamHardy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Demontravel’s and Carraccio’s classes were the first two places in which I applied this approach to my life and studies. In Carraccio’s case, it was the reading and essay assignment for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) a muckraking tale of first-generation, Eastern European, Chicago meatpackers who worked and lived in grueling conditions and where some of them gave their lives — and livers — to Swift and other companies. I’d caught a cold, had a fever, was going to the store for Mom, and had just heard Toto’s “Africa” playing at C-Town in nearby Pelham.

The song served as my background music, giving me the energy and drive I needed to finish the book. I read The Jungle in one night, three hundred pages of it in four hours. I think Carraccio gave me a 95 on my essay. She pulled me aside to say, “You know, if you wanted, you could be a really good writer.” It might’ve been the only thing she said that I thought was right on the mark all year.

Yeah, you could say that I was seriously music deprived, didn’t understand the cultural symbolism or archetypes in the song or video, or simply had and have bad tastes. Y’all may be right, too. But for me, Toto’s “Africa” struck the right note, lifted my imagination, and found the goofball within.

Peanuts Land

01 Sunday Apr 2012

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

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Ass-Whuppin', Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, Grounding, Imagination, Inspiration, Intellectual Development, Lucy Van Pelt, Peanuts, Peanuts Gang, Reading, Running Away, Snoopy, World Book Encyclopedia, World War II

Snoopy and Charlie Brown taking a nap, circa 1964, March 10, 2012. (http://wallpaperpimp.com via United Features Syndicate). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution, subject matter and is no longer in production.

I loved Charles Schulz’ Peanuts comic strip and his Charlie Brown and Snoopy books growing up. From the time I turned seven all the way through sixth grade, they helped expand my mind and world beyond 616 East Lincoln Avenue, apartment number A32 and Mount Vernon, New York. So much so that when I had read all of the books available to me through Mount Vernon Public Library, I took the idea of Charlie Brown

Lucy and Charlie Brown, from a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, November 20, 1973. (http://billluton.com via United Features Syndicate). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution and subject matter.

to heart. I saw myself as the Black version of the lonely misfit of a kid, who could almost grab the brass ring but couldn’t quite hold on to it, who had some friends, but not close ones.

World Book Encyclopedia literally changed my life between December ’78 and April ’79. And with that change came my ability to use Charles Schulz’ Peanuts as the image in my mind’s eye for understanding it all. It was after running away from home to get away from my new stepfather, the now-and-forever abuser and idiot Maurice Washington, whom had married my mother in October ’78. Because my stepfather had pissed me off with another one of his rules, and because I knew that my guardians had already started to argue about money, I ran away from home. I packed two days’ worth of clothing and walked out with the plan that I would get to New Rochelle, find a boat, stowaway and eventually get to Europe or France. There, I could be free.

The Pelham Manor Police found me three-and-a-half hours later, having lured me into the squad car with the promise of hot dogs and orange soda. My mother gave me the belt-ass-whuppin’ of my life at the time, as it seemed to last forever, with her screaming, “You do this again, you won’t be around to cry about it!” I was on lockdown in me and my older brother Darren’s bedroom for six weeks afterward.

It was during those six weeks of no TV and no going outside that I decided to punish my mother and stepfather by ignoring them with books. I cracked open the “A” volume of the ’78 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia and began reading. And reading. And reading. “I’ll show them!,” I thought. Pretty soon I didn’t miss TV. I didn’t have lots of friends, so going out to play became less and less of a hardship. So I kept reading.

By the time I decided to go outside again, it was April ’79, well past my six-week grounding. But going

McDonald's Big Mac styrofoam container, 1975, February 27, 2011. (bolio88 via Flickriver.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws, as picture is for illustrative purposes only, and said container is no longer manufactured by McDonald.

outside to play for the first time in four months felt more alien to me that what I had been doing after reading sections of World Book Encyclopedia. I’d taken what I’d learned about city government, taxes, urban planning, population density, and created what I called “Peanuts Town” in our bedroom. Charlie Brown was the mayor, and Lucy Van Pelt was his wife. Snoopy, of course, was the deputy mayor and in charge of law enforcement. Once my father Jimme came back into our lives, I’d buy Matchbox cars to drive around the city, and created a restaurant and entertainment row of the city that included a McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King fries containers as restaurants.

By the end of fifth grade in June ’80, my encyclopedic world view had expanded to include national and international issues, including history and World War II. And not just through World Book Encyclopedia, as I cruised through Ebony’s four-volume Pictorial History of Black America collection that spring also. I made “Peanuts Town” the capital of “Peanuts Land,” and Charlie Brown was the president. By this time, Charlie and Lucy had kids, just like I had a younger baby brother in Maurice.

Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace on his doghouse Sopwith Camel, circa 1964 (scanned from Thermos lunchbox), January 23, 2008. (Maravin via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution, with image no longer in production.

I made up maps of this country, including its natural resources and its naval bases. I’d make ships out of aluminum foil, stamped into shapes using the old, heavy wooden frame windows we had in our bedroom. I had made at least fifty battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers, preparing for the Soviet threat. All without the prospect of nuclear war.

As I kept reading and using my imagination, my SRA tests for fourth and fifth grade confirmed that all of this deep thinking was paying off. I had raised my reading score from 3.9 (just barely at the fourth grade level) to a 7.4 (the equivalent of an above average seventh grader) by the end of fourth grade, and to an 11.0 by the end of fifth. A story of irony, imagination and naivete, the story of my young life, a boy at the window. One of success, of living, of wisdom and love and understand, of self-discovery, of all the things that makes one human.

The Curious Case of Mrs. O’Daniel

30 Thursday Jun 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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1979-80 School Year, African American History, African American Teachers, Black History, Black Teachers, Board of Education, Cooperative Learning, Corporal Punishment, Fifth Grade, Language Arts, Mrs. O'Daniel, Nurturing Teachers, Reading, Student Engagement, Wiliam H. Holmes Elementary, Writing

I meant to do a post on this last month, but got caught up in other work and other posts. This one’s about the unique experience me and about thirty of my William H. Holmes Elementary School classmates had between ’77 and ’81, and my unique experience in particular. That experience, at least for me (and to a slightly lesser extent, for my classmates), was in having a number of caring, highly qualified Black teachers before we went off to the vicious worlds of A.B. Davis Middle School, Nichols Middle School, and Mount Vernon High School.

Starting in first grade in ’75, I had Ms. Griffin at Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker Elementary), Mrs. Shannon — my first teacher crush — in third grade at Holmes, and Mrs. Bryant, a great teacher, in sixth grade. But the toughest and yet very caring of all the Black teachers I had in K-6 in Mount Vernon was Mrs. O’Daniel, my fifth grade teacher. She was the teacher that made me realize how troubled the world around me really was.

I and we learned early on how not to cross Mrs. O’Daniel. Once early in the school year, when our class was wound up and acting out, Mrs. O’Daniel threatened to “introduce [us] to the Board of Education. Do y’all know what that is?” After raising my hand, I said, “Yeah, it’s the building next door to us.” “No, not that Board of Education,” Mrs. O’Daniel said with a slight smile, “this one.” This Board of Education was three yard sticks taped together, and she tapped the palm of her left hand with it to emphasize what it was for — our behinds.

She used it on me one time, because I happened to take something that wasn’t mine from her nook in the classroom, what, I don’t remember. Five taps with the Board of Education across my hand was quite enough for me in the ’79-’80 schools.

Mrs. O’Daniel, though, did much more than provide discipline for our classroom. She spent a lot of our time that year on history, American history, African American history, reading and writing. I read parts of W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk in her class that year and wrote a small and wholly inadequate book report on it. I learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time in May ’80. I learned so much about MLK and Malcolm X that year, more than I’d learn all through middle school and high school.

I also discovered how far behind some of my classmates were. We had two twelve-year-olds and a thirteen-year old in our class, and all of them read well below the fifth grade level. Mrs. O’Daniel assigned me and two other classmates the task of working with the older classmates to help them build up their reading and writing skills. That spring, I spent a month working with the oldest member of our class, going over words that I once struggled with in second and third grade. I felt bad for him, but even more puzzled about how a teenager could be stuck in fifth grade reading only on the second grade level.

There was a mystery to Mrs. O’Daniel as far as I was concerned. I still can’t remember if she’d grown up in North Carolina or Alabama, or if she had any kids or grand kids, or if her husband was still alive. When she announced in the early spring of ’80 that she had just turned sixty, we were stunned, thinking of how old sixty was compared to ten, eleven or even thirteen. She seemed a bit strange, but certainly not old beyond our knowledge that she was born in 1920. Mrs. O’Daniel was as tall as teacher as I ever had, but hardly frail or old outside of her salt and less salt hair.

She died in ’83, sometime during my first weeks in Mount Vernon High School. Some of my former Holmes classmates, who were now in Humanities in ninth grade, broke down and cried when they heard the news. I must admit, I was stunned. I’d never known anyone who had contact with me and died before. All I knew was that an older person who cared about me, about all of my classmates, had passed away.

It made me sad, but it didn’t sink in until much, much later how fortunate I was to have had Mrs. O’Daniel and Mrs. Bryant, Mrs. Shannon and Ms. Griffin as my teachers early on. I had no idea that the only teacher of color that I’d have until I reached the University of Pittsburgh would be Ms. Simmons, a first-year, seventh-grade math teacher I stood toe to toe with by Xmas ’81. I think that my understanding of African American history and culture would’ve been much more limited prior to my Pitt years if it weren’t for Mrs. O’Daniel. And for that, and so much more, I thank her.

World Book Encyclopedia’s Insidious Effect

15 Tuesday Mar 2011

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Ass-Whuppin', Imagination, Intellect, Learning, Mrs. Shannon, Parent-Teacher Conference, Peter Cottontail, Reading, Reading Level, Reading Scores, Runaway, Running Away, Teacher Crush, Third Grade, World Book Encyclopedia

World Book Encyclopedia, 1978 Edition, March 15, 2011. Source: http://cgi.ebay.com

I’ve talked about how World Book Encyclopedia literally changed my life from a reading standpoint between December ’78 and April ’79. It was after running away from home to get away from my new stepfather, the now-and-forever abuser and idiot Maurice Washington. I talked about how after my mother gave me an ass-whuppin’ that seemed to last forever, I was forbidden from having any playtime for six weeks. I punished myself, my mother and my idiot stepfather by picking up the A volume of World Book Encyclopedia and began to read it. “I’ll show them!,” I thought.

I made a point of reading and reading. By the time I decided to go outside again, it was April ’79, well past my six-week grounding. And my SRA test for fourth grade confirmed that I had raised my reading score from 3.9 (just barely at the fourth grade level) to a 7.4 (the equivalent of an above average seventh grader). So much for punishing my mother and myself!

Many of my former classmates, and certainly a number of my closest friends, have heard parts and various versions of this story over the years. But I’ve hardly ever told the story of how I had access to the ’78 edition of all thirty or so volumes of World Book Encyclopedia in the first place. That started because of a teacher crush, the second one I had in my first four years of K-12. This one involved my third grade teacher at William H. Holmes Elementary, Mrs. Shannon. She was fun, funny, beautiful, and dressed like a young Sue Simmons from WNBC-TV New York did when she started working for Channel 4 earlier in

Sue Simmons, circa 1978, March 15, 2011. Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of low resolution of picture and relevance to subject matter of blog.

’77-’78.

Like most crushes I’ve had over the years, this one snuck up on my eight-year-old self and hit me in the head like a 90-mph fastball from Randy Johnson. And like the crushes I’d have when I reached Humanities in middle school and high school, I acted weird throughout February and March ’78. I became shier than I already was. I found myself daydreaming during reading time, not following instructions for assignments, just generally out of sorts.

Then there was the Easter play, the Peter Cottontail play. I wanted to play the lead role of Peter the Bunny, but all Mrs. Shannon wanted me to be was a stupid flower. I was mad, acted out, and she punished me by taking me out of the play all together. Following that, I refused to talk to her in class the next day. “You don’t have to speak,” Mrs. Shannon said as she sent me to sit in the corner until I was ready to talk again. I stayed in that corner the rest of the afternoon.

The following week, this week thirty-three years ago, Mrs. Shannon called for a parent-teacher conference with my mother and soon-to-be idiot stepfather. My mother, who had only been to two meetings at my schools since kindergarten, now found herself finding out that I was a bad student. Well, not exactly. Mrs. Shannon told them, “He has the ability. He has the potential. He just doesn’t want to concentrate.” Then she suggested that my mother could find a way for me to focus through World Book Encyclopedia. “It’ll draw out his imagination,” Mrs. Shannon said.

That’s all I thought and talked about on my way home with my mother. I brought it up so much that my mother said, “Alright already!” after two days of me constantly asking about it. We met a World Book sales person, and my mother wrote a check for $310, which was a lot of money for her. Within a week, four or five boxes reached 616, by far the largest order of books I’d see until grad school.

I didn’t start reading them immediately, and my mother complained about “spending all that damn money” on these books. But after December 2, ’78, my Saturday of running away from home, the investment began to pay off, and with it, the ability to think and imagine while being as weird as I wanted and needed to be, and others believed me to be as well. It’s a bittersweet memory, how I became a brainiac, how a teacher crush put me on a path of intellect and writing, of constant remembering and of painful transformations. How insidious knowledge — and the search for it — can be.