My Mom’s Migration Story, 50 Years Later

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A Big Wheel and Recovered Memories, Part One

16 Saturday Jul 2016

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

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Bicentennial, Black Masculinity, Bullying, Darren, Left Alone, Memories, Molestation, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Nathan Hale Elementary, Self-Awareness, Self-Defense, Self-Revelation, Sexual Abuse

Big Wheel, pretty much as I remember it, April 2014. (http://sf.funcheap.com/bring-big-wheel-race/).

As most who read me know, I wrote a book about the worst of my growing up years three years ago, Boy @ The Window. I wrote about how I saw things between the ages of eleven and nineteen during the 1980s. I covered everything from a preteen’s fantasy life and Black masculinity to child abuse and domestic violence. I dug into my memories for haunting moments of poverty, for examples of ostracism, for stories about my family, my high-achieving yet soulless classmates, and for any oases of good moments, too.

Or so I though. (And no, it’s not just that I should’ve given the book to another professional to edit.) I focused so heavily on what turned me into the professional, writing, teaching, fairly erudite and extremely goofy me. Really, too heavily, as it turns out. I forgot that there had been a me prior to World Book Encyclopedia and Black America, Starling, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, the Hebrew-Israelites, and Humanities. That even younger me apparently had a story to tell. It was a story that I should’ve told, but I didn’t, I couldn’t remember. Maybe part of me really didn’t want to recall. No, I had to finish Boy @ The Window, publish it, and promote it for a year before I reacquainted myself with that splinter deep in my mind.

I found it, too, in a story that didn’t quite add up. The story that turned me into all of me, good, bad, and yes, obviously ugly began forty years ago this month. Well, it actually started with Christmas 1975. My Mom and my father Jimme had bought me a Big Wheel for Christmas and my sixth birthday, because my birthday comes two days after Christmas. I had begged them for this ride for months, at least as early as that July. I was so happy that as soon as I could, with my dark blue winter coat and all, I rode up and down South Sixth Avenue’s blue-slate sidewalks with it. I thought I was the coolest kid on my block!

The 400-block of South Sixth was one of two and three-story homes with 150-square-foot front yards with interlocked steel gates, and ample backyards. But there were few kids for me to play with, at least kids my age. This despite Nathan Hale Elementary holding up the southeastern end of the block. I rode around that stark early winter-looking block for days, with hardly a toddler to greet me.

At 425 South Sixth, we lived just two doors down from Nathan Hale and its playground area/parking lot. Here was me and Darren struggling to be in front when my mother took this photo.

Me and Darren struggling to be in front when my mother took this photo, Nathan Hale ES playground, February 1975.

Back then I had no trouble talking to anyone about anything, including how I felt. By the end of first grade, a girl in my class named Diana had taken a liking to me. She had skin the color of butterscotch, and bright hazel-green eyes to go with her puffy lips. Diana’s light brown hair was always a mess, but then again, I could pick out a piece of corn or a grain of white rice from my jet-black knotty roots more days than not.

We kissed several times, in class and on the short walk up South Sixth back to our homes. We even attempted to French kiss a few times, including once in class before being caught by our teacher Ms. Griffin. All I know was, there was a lot of spit and tongue involved. When I’d ride my Big Wheel after school, and see Diana on the rough and bumpy asphalt playground between my house and the school, I’d let her ride on it. And we’d continue with tongue practice sometimes, too.

When the school year came to an end in June, Diana and her family moved away. I waved her goodbye as they drove away from South Sixth, me riding my Big Wheel down the block behind them. I felt sad to lose such a good friend.

But I still had my Big Wheel. For weeks after the end of first grade, I rode it around the block and on the school playground. Sometimes my older brother Darren would be there, but most of the time I was by myself. With Diana gone, there were no kids my age around. It was the summer of 1976, and like most parents back then, mine were only interested in seeing me come home for lunch or dinner, not in me being inside all day.

425 South 6th Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Inside was a second-floor, two bedroom and one bath flat within the three-story tan and off-white house that was 425 South Sixth. We had a separate entrance, giving us the appearance of living in our own home without actually owning the place. It sometimes seemed spacious, except when my Mom and Jimme would fight, or when Darren would take my toys, or when my Mom went into the kitchen and made fried porgies and whiting or chitlins. On many a day during our short two and a half years at 425 South Sixth, I stared at the cars parked or rolling down the street. A dark-green ‘68 Chevy Camaro here, a grape-colored AMC Gremlin there. The Chevy Monte Carlo series from between ‘69 and ‘75 was my favorite back then. Maybe it was how high the curvy back-end of the car seemed raised an extra foot off the ground. That summer, though, my Mom and my father weren’t home often to engage me in the car model guessing game that I liked playing when I was bored.

What made this worse for me was that my Mom and my father Jimme were getting a divorce. Only I didn’t know it at the time. All I knew was that things seemed different. They weren’t fighting as much. My Mom had bought all new furniture for her bedroom and the living room. She even bought a Polaroid camera, to take pictures of herself while wearing a scarf with earth-tone artwork around her head, all without makeup on. Even though anyone over eighteen seemed old to me at six, my Mom seemed ageless, like she would be in her twenties forever, a shade of brown consistent with my own medium dark with copper undertones. I thought it was a good picture of her.

My father had never been home for more than a few days at a time, with his binge drinking and all. He was a night janitor at Salesian High School in New Rochelle, but hardly made it home during the day. My diminutive father worked this job years after losing his custodian job with the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Manhattan, but still acted as if he worked as a banker on Wall Street. My brother Darren and I would sometimes be with him at Salesian whenever he took an evening shift. My Mom’s shifts as one of the dietary supervisors at Mount Vernon Hospital varied, between 7 am and 3 pm during the day and 3 to 11 in the afternoons and evenings. So, some days she was home when I was on one of my Big Wheel adventures. Sometimes Jimme was home. Sometimes, I was with my babysitter Ida or one of my dad’s drinking buddies.

And, there were days I was alone. On a lonely Wednesday in July, just a week and a half after the bicentennial Independence Day, my Mom left for work. She was on a 3-11 pm shift that day. She told me, “Keep your butt upstairs while I’m gone.” Then she left. No one was home. Darren was at his Clear View School in summer day camp. God only knows where Jimme was.

I did that day what I always did when left alone. I got on my now nearly worn out Big Wheel wearing my blue and red-striped t-shirt and dark blue shorts, and rode it down to the school playground. It had rained earlier that afternoon, and the asphalt was still wet from the summer showers. I skidded along the playground, and noticed two things. One, the air still smelled of rain, even though there were breaks in the clouds. Two, a group of four older Black kids had taken over the swing area.

Something had told me to not go over by the swings, but my Big Wheel’s skidding and sliding brought me over there anyway. As soon as I ended up near the swings, the four older boys surrounded me. One of them grabbed me off of my Big Wheel, while another took my ride. I yelled, “Give it back! Give it back!” The lightest skinned one in the group, their leader it seemed, came up to me, unzipped his pants, and said, “You get it back after you suck my dick, muthafucka.”

I shook my head, but then one of them threatened to destroy my Big Wheel by banging it on one of the swing poles. Crying while being held by two of the twelve or thirteen year-olds, they pried open my mouth long enough for the light-skinned leader to stick the tip of his penis in my mouth. I felt the dry meat on my tongue long enough to want to throw up.

“The little muthafucka’s sucking my dick!,” the light-skinned one yelled while laughing.

They started laughing so hard, I was able to pull myself away from them and grab my Big Wheel. While I ran and rode, the four boys kept yelling, “You a faggot! You a faggot!” One also yelled, “You a dukey!”

I rode straight home and tried to forget what just happened. But I couldn’t. My Big Wheel now had a crack in it, between the back of the seat and the back axle. It wasn’t broken, but it was definitely damaged. My Mom noticed it a few days later. “That’s what you get for leaving the house,” she said after I told her about the Big Wheel and the older boys trying to break it. I didn’t tell her about the other part.

I’ve complained for years that my ability to remember has been both a blessing and a curse. But I didn’t deliberately hone this skill until after I turned nine. Between the age of four, when Nixon resigned, and my first time running away, three weeks before my ninth birthday in December 1978, I have lots of memories. Those memories are those of a young child drifting from day to day, as they should be. The result, though, was not being able to recall details like being molested at six. Until twenty months ago, I remembered it as a vague attempt. And not as the damaging, trauma-inducing incident that it really was (to be continued).

Malcolm X, “Make It Plain”

21 Saturday Feb 2015

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

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Afrocentricity, Alex Haley, Assassination, Audubon Ballroom, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Bill O"Reilly, Contradictions, Cornel West, Dichotomy, Disillusionment, Geraldo Rivera, Malcolm X, Malcolm X Assassination, Manning Marable, MLK, Murder, Nation of Islam, Nonviolence, Pitt, Respectability Politics, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rudy Giuliani, Self-Aggrandizement, Self-Defense, Self-Discovery, Self-Revelation, Tavis Smiley

Plain Conscious Chocolate, February 21, 2015. (http://www.ethical-treats.co.uk/).

I’d be a terrible historian to not comment on the fact that today marks fifty years since some Nation of Islam malcontents — with support from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI — murdered Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom (now the Shabazz Center) in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. I wasn’t around for the event, or any of the tumultuous events that defined “The ’60s.” All I know was I didn’t learn about Malcolm Little or Malcolm X until the summer between my undergraduate and graduate years at Pitt, the summer of ’91. Although the year before, I’d gone to a Malcolm X birthday celebration at the Homewood-Brushton branch of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. There, I saw poets performing their work, got to listen to some good jazz and rap, and saw the Afrocentric set out in full force.

Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was murdered (now the Shabazz Center, with the Columbia University Medical Center's Mary Woodard Lasker Biomedical Research Building in the background), Washington Heights, New York, June 4, 2014. (Beyond My Ken via Wikipedia). Release to the public domain via GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was murdered (now the Shabazz Center), Washington Heights, New York, June 4, 2014. (Beyond My Ken via Wikipedia). Release to the public domain via GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

You’d think after three years as a Hebrew-Israelite and years around children of Nation of Islam members as a kid that I would’ve heard all about Malcolm. Nope, hardly a peep about him growing up in Mount Vernon. Mostly, I got questions like, “Yo, you a “five percenter”?,” which for me translated into the chosen few living in the midst of the end times. Other than that, there was always the dichotomy trope of Martin versus Malcolm laid on us real thick through school and the newspapers. Dr. King was respectable, nonviolent, a true representative of the race. Malcolm was a street thug, a leading member of a heathen religion, a violent man who hated White people.

My Mom, who normally rejected mainstream White ways of thinking about Black folks, had bought this trope and tried to sell it to me and my older brother growing up. But as with so many things my Mom attempted to instill in me growing up, I wouldn’t make any decisions about Malcolm the person (as opposed to the icon) until I got around to reading, in this case about him and the Nation of Islam, as an adult.

The Five Percenter logo (apparently popular among the rapper set), January 8, 2013. (http://assets.vice.com)

The one thing I realized after reading the Afrocentric, mainstream and Alex Haley interpretations of Malcolm in the early ’90s is that just like with King, we could make Malcolm X represent whatever we wanted. He could be nonviolent and a militant at the same time, or a thug and an ambassador of peace at the same time. Yes, as the late Manning Marable’s book shows, Malcolm — like most of us — was a walking, breathing contradiction of convictions (literal and figurative) and beliefs. For the purposes of my post today, though, he was a social justice activist, acting on the part of those poor, Black and discarded, plain and simple.

Which is why I think anyone who thinks Malcolm X brought murder to his own pulpit in February 1965 is an idiot. The idea that teaching others self-defense in opposition to White mobs, lynching, and blatant police brutality deserved a violent death. Really, now? So, if that’s the case, then Dr. King should have died of natural causes about three or four years ago, since his was the path of nonviolence, right? Yet, you still hear the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo de Stupido slinging this shit (and similar crap playing on such respectability politics themes) as if it were McDonald’s hash browns on sale for half-price.

Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: Life of Reinvention (2011) cover (Marable died four days before his last book dropped), May 28, 2012. (Malik Shabazz via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under copyright laws (relevant subject matter, low resolution).

Speaking of that lot, I don’t wonder what Malcolm X would say about our racist, plutocratic democracy these days. Anyone whose read his words would know what he’d say. That what happened with Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Rashida McBride and so many others should be resisted “by any means necessary.” That we should unmask those powerful people lurking in the shadows but pulling the strings that keep the systems of oppression working 24/7 in our world. He would’ve supported Occupy Wall Street when and where few Black leaders had in 2010 and 2011, called Islamic State or IS (that’s what they are called outside the US, where we can’t get our acronyms straight) a “chickens coming home to roost” scenario, and put Tavis Smiley and Cornel West in the same self-aggrandizing bag as Giuliani and Rivera.

I get why it took Malcolm Little so long to transform himself into Malcolm X, and still, until after his thirty-ninth birthday, for him to find himself and his purpose in the world. It’s taken me nearly four and half decades to do the same. It’s hard to “make it plain,” especially to ourselves. It’s scary to be in a constant state of disillusionment, about family and friends, about your identity, about your religion and beliefs. But it also allows you to see yourself and everyone around you fresh for the first time, to know who people really are.

Killing Joe Trotter

10 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Advisor-Student Relationships, Burnout, Child Abuse, CMU, Dissertation, Dissertation Committee, Dreams, Emotional Baggage, Father Figures, Forgive and Forget, Forgiveness, Graduate School, Guerilla Warfare, Hatred, Imagination, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Mental Health, Murder, Paternalism, PhD, Psychological Baggage, PTSD, Self-Awareness, Self-Defense, Un-father Figures

Yeah, I did it. I killed the man who kinged himself mentor over me. I took some piano wire, tightened it around my hands while listening to him yammer on an on about “running interference” to protect “my interests.

As the pointy-headed, smoothly bald and mahogany man gazed at my thesis, myopically gazing into nowhere, I pounced. I quickly jumped out of my seat and took Trotter from behind. He clutched at the wire with his elderly left hand as I pulled and tugged, hoping to prolong the bloody agony for as long as I could. Trotter choked for air, then choked for real, as spit, bile, blood and tongue all became his substitute for oxygen. Then, with one bicep curl and pull, I garroted his throat, and watched as his already dead eyes turned lifeless. All as his burgundy blood poured down his white shirt and gray suit. It collected into a small pond, where his pants crotch and his mahogany office chair met. Trotter’s was a chair that was now fully endowed all right. Thanks to my righteous stand.

=======================

Tired, mentally drained, battery, March 2014. (http://blog.batterysharks.com/).

First, a disclaimer. I am in no way advocating killing Joe Trotter, or any other professor, whether they’re a great advisor or a terrible one (except perhaps in the case of literal self-defense). This was how I imagined what I could do to Trotter in the spring and summer of ’96, as our battles over my dissertation and my future turned from typical to ugly. By mid-July ’96, after his handwritten all-caps comments telling me to disregard my evidence on Black migration to DC during the Great Migration period (1915-30) — or really, the lack of evidence — I was mentally drained. I went back to our first big arguments over my future, the “you’re not ready” meetings from November ’95 and April ’96, and thought about what I could’ve done if I’d stayed in his office five minutes longer. That’s when I imagined killing my advisor for the first time.

By the time Trotter and my dissertation committee had approved my magnum opus, the week before Thanksgiving in ’96, I’d played that scenario in my head at least a dozen times. That’s when I knew I was burned out from the whole process. I may have become Dr. Collins, but I might as well have been my younger and abused self, the one who had to wade through five years of suffering at 616 and in Mount Vernon just to get to college.

Four months ago, I actually dreamed about killing Joe Trotter, exactly as described above, in his office, on a warm spring day like I imagined eighteen years ago. Keep in mind, I don’t think about Trotter much these days, other than when I write a blog post or am in a discussion of worst dissertation advisors ever. So when I woke up from this old-imagination-turned-dream, I had a Boy @ The Window moment and revelation. Did my struggles with Trotter open up old wounds, unearth my deliberately buried past? Did I see my fight with Trotter over my dissertation in the same light as my guerrilla warfare with my abusive and manipulative ex-stepfather?

I obviously brought baggage into my doctoral process that I’d hidden from everyone, including myself, and hadn’t fully resolved. The fact that Trotter was at times tyrannical, deceitful and paternalistic didn’t help matters. In some ways, then, Trotter must’ve morphed into Maurice Washington during the dissertation process, with me only half-realizing it once I was freshly minted.

Emotional and psychological baggage, January 2014. (http://www.projecteve.com/).

I actually went to Trotter’s office a few weeks after I graduated, to apologize for how our relationship devolved, and to grant him my forgiveness as well. Arrogant as my act was, I needed to make the gesture, to at least begin my healing process. I knew Trotter was beyond surprised, but he shook my hand anyway. I also knew, as I walked away from his Baker Hall office, that other than a letter of recommendation, Trotter no longer had anything to offer me. At least, anything that would help me resolve some deep, underlying issues.

It’s safe to say that of all the reasons that led to me writing Boy @ The Window, my problems with Trotter in ’95 and ’96 were near the top of the list. Still, I needed to kill the idea that Trotter was an indispensable part of my present and future, if I were to ever resolve the issues from my growing-up past.

Me The Little Runaway

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Runnin'" (1995), 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Abuse, Child Abuse, Father-Son Relationships, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Poverty, Running Away, Self-Defense, Self-Discovery, Self-Reflection, The Pharcyde

Literally on this day and date, and at this time twenty-eight years ago, I was at the beginning of a twenty-three hour adventure away from 616, my idiot stepfather (no longer, of course, and recently deceased) Maurice Washington and his abuse, a trek that took me all over Mount Vernon and into both my dreams and fears. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

“We got into it over the ‘Dad’ issue again. He told me to do something, and I only said, ‘Okay.’ I didn’t say ‘Okay, Dad,’ and my ‘Okay’ wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. This was the one thing about Maurice that I refused to accept – him as anything other than the leech and bully that he was. He certainly wasn’t my dad, and he gave up the right to be called “stepfather” three years before. Yet he insisted on me calling him “Dad!” I usually walked a fine line between open defiance and acquiescence with him, not referring to him by anything at all. He had no name, no title, no label. Maurice was nothing and meant nothing to me other than the reason I’d eventually have to leave 616. Our incidents had become less frequent only because he worked nights as a security guard and slept during the day. And I stayed home as little as I could when he was around.

“So on the last Sunday of August ’85, we had another round.

“I’m your father, and the Bible says to ‘honor thy father and mother’. . .”

“You’ll never be my father. My father lives at 149 South Tenth Avenue.”

“As long as you live under my roof, you’re gonna call me ‘Dad’.”

“No, I’m not,” I said shaking my head at the same time.

“I’m gonna show you how to respect me, nigga!,” he said as he balled his fists.

“Luckily I had fast feet. He tried to grab me and then hit me at the same time, not a good tactic when you’re significantly overweight and off balance. I slithered past him, got out of his grasp, and dashed down our long hallway to the front door. I ran down the stairs that led to the back dirt courtyard area of 616 and didn’t stop running into I ran into the woods nearby, Wilson Woods. It was a mostly cloudy late summer day, thank God, because I wasn’t in any shape to be bothered with anybody.

“I wound my way through Wilson Woods on its serpentine path toward the southeast side of Mount Vernon. I saw a few folks who recognized me as I walked from the woods toward East Third and South Columbus, but the walk was mostly a blur. I made my way to Jimme’s place on West Third and South Tenth, all the while thinking about the reality of my long-lost childhood and quickly evaporating time as a teenager. Jimme wasn’t home, and I didn’t feel like going on a hunt for him at one of his watering hole after a meandering three-mile walk. So I waited there for a while, maybe an hour or so.

“I made my way past downtown Mount Vernon, up Gramatan Avenue, taking on the hill on which Davis Middle School sits. From there I reached Fleetwood and walked past homes and cars that I thought me and my family deserved but would never own. I likely walked by the homes of some of my classmates without even knowing it. Tudors and townhomes, beamers and Volvos populated this neighborhood. I turned right on Birch Street and headed east, eventually meandering past Pennington-Grimes Elementary. I noted that this was the place where the remaining affluent and most assertive Humanities classmates went to as kids. It made me think for a moment about the reality that when put together, Mom, Maurice and Jimme had no clue about what it was like for me to be in a program like this, with students whose parents owned their own homes or were able to take a vacation overseas. These compadres were more sophisticated than I was, even after four years in the program. Just thinking about it made me clinch my teeth.”

I eventually made my way to Mount Vernon High School, where I spent the night sleeping on the floor in the classroom next to the Humanities coordinator’s office (Joyce Flanagan’s office at the time). I had a morning of meandering, ended up at St. Ursula Catholic Church for three hours of prayer and contemplation about my future. All before going home to my worried (for once) Mom, my dispassionate dipshit of a stepfather, and my uncivilized siblings.

There, around 3 pm that Monday, I just collapsed, in my sometimes bed and bedroom, not knowing I was literally two years away from being on my way to Pitt and Pittsburgh. But I knew for sure that I couldn’t keep running away, either.

The Last Mugging

06 Tuesday Dec 2011

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Acts of Kindness, Arthur Treatcher's Fish & Chips, Disillusionment, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Mugging, Self-Defense, Self-Discovery, Suicide, Waldbaum's, Welfare

East Prospect, Mount Vernon, New York, where Foodtown (once Waldbaum’s) and Rite Aid (formerly Genovese) are today – about 30m from where I was mugged in ’83. (http://maps.google.com).

Twenty-eight years ago yesterday was the last time I was mugged, the last time I had to fend off wannabe thugs. As important as the challenges I face in my life are now, the ones I faced just before my fourteenth birthday were a thousand times more intense, if for no other reason than I nearly took the path of suicide back then.

For whatever the reason, December ’83 was spent without food at 616, this time in the welfare and food stamps era. My mother hadn’t received her welfare check on time. She went to Maurice for money to buy groceries, a necessarily rare move. I’d rather had gone to A (see “The Legend of ‘Captain Zimbabwe‘” post from May ’09) for grocery money than to my stepfather. He came to me and gave me twenty dollars to go to the store.

“Donald, do not lose this money. I don’t want no excuses. I want all my change back. If you have to, catch the bus,” Maurice said to me. I had already missed the last 7 bus going into Mount Vernon, and I knew that by the time I’d finish shopping that I would miss the last 7 for the return.

After shopping for Great Northern beans and rice and some beef neck bones and spinach at the Waldbaum’s on East Prospect — which cost $6.50 by the way — I walked out with the intent of cutting down Park Avenue to East Lincoln and avoiding most of the potential for a mugging. But it seemed that Maurice’s God had other plans for me. I barely got to the poorly lit corner of Prospect and Park before I was ambushed by four guys, all around my age and size. Part of it was my fault, as the Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips that held that corner had closed the year before, a casualty of the recent recession. I saw other people around, but none came to my aid.

So here it was that I was jumped by a bunch of dumb kids with dumb parents trying to beat me up and take thirteen dollars from me. Apparently I must’ve learned something from my idiot stepfather, because I was able to kick, punch, and bite my way out of the mugging at first. I kicked one dumb ass in the balls, bit another’s arm, punched someone else in the jaw. I kept going until someone was able to hold me long enough to reach into my pocket and take the money. Then they took off, running across one of the bridges into the South Side.

Grocery bag torn to shreds, food on the ground, shirttail hanging out, I took off after them, now thinking only about what I’d face at home if I didn’t come in with Maurice’s money. They went east up First Street, turned right up South Fulton, and then left on East Third. With groceries in tow, I just couldn’t keep up.

It was after 9 by the time I got back from Waldbaum’s and my mugging. Mom was worried, actually worried, while Maurice was just pissed.

My mother was more concerned about what happened during the actual fight. I told her about what happened.

“You see someone you know?”

“I think one of them’s named C,” I said.

C and his older brother lived in the equally impoverished building next door, 630 East Lincoln. C’s older brother was in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade with me at Holmes. I hadn’t seen either of them much since elementary school, but I recognized him immediately as the one who said, “Give me the money, muthafucka!” Those were some ugly kids, inside and out.

In an unbelievable turn, my mother took me the next morning to the Mount Vernon Police Station, its juvenile division, to have me press charges, look at mug shots and ID my attackers. It didn’t take me long to ID C and his henchmen, all of whom had juvenile records. Before I left, they had hauled C into the station for booking. I was glad to see that my fists had done some damage to his face.

I went to school that day with my mother and ended up signing in around sixth period. One of my classmates saw me as I was leaving Vice Principal Carapella’s office, on my way to gym. We talked for several minutes about what had happened. He gave me a high-five. It was maybe the second or third time in three years that anyone cared to ask me about what was going on with me outside of school.

That whole twenty-four-hour period was overwhelming. I spent most of that evening at 616 asleep. I spent the rest of the month until my fourteenth birthday considering how to off myself. I spent part of my birthday standing thirteen feet over the Hutchinson River Parkway, on top of the stone facing looking down at the traffic while tears streamed down my cheeks.

All because I had lost hope, and my life was filled with contradiction. Luckily, I found a reason to live, and a reason to begin to see good in others, at least outside of 616.

Cracking Skulls

10 Monday Jan 2011

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

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Alcoholism, Binge Drinking, Bullying, Depression, Dorms, Dust Mop Handle, Harassment, Lothrop Hall, Pitt, Pranks, Security, Self-Defense, Stereotype Threat, Violence

Bighorn sheep in Silver Canyon near the town of Bishop, California, October 24, 2007. Rhalden (copyright holder of this work, has released it into the public domain).

Originally posted January 10, 2011:

I’ve written about this before, but not completely from the context of violence. Twenty-eight years ago today, I had a violent incident in my college dorm. It was never reported, thank goodness, since it really didn’t do damage to anyone per se. But it did involve striking two human beings out of anger, in response to a prank and violence on the part of two of my Lothrop Hall dorm mates at the University of Pittsburgh, “Mike” and “Aaron.”

I came back to Pitt after the holiday season in January ’88, determined not to make the same mistakes I’d made the semester before, since another 2.63 GPA performance would mean losing my academic scholarship. Whatever homesickness I felt for Mount Vernon and New York was crushed by the realities of home life at 616 and the sheer lack of friends in Mount Vernon in general. I knew I needed to channel the anger, bitterness, hurt and embarrassment I felt regarding my Crush #2 into my second semester at Pitt.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the third floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

Lothrop Hall (we lived on the fourth floor in 1987-88), University of Pittsburgh, June 8, 2008. (TheZachMorrisExperience via Wikipedia). Released to the public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

The answer as to how to begin involved my dorm mates on the third floor, half of whom were on Pitt’s basketball team, the other half the folks I usually hung around (geeks who would make most of my high school Humanities classmates look like socialites by comparison). The latter group had spent most of November and December binge drinking and occasionally taking me along for the ride. Aaron had begun to build a pyramid of Busch beer cans in their room, one nearly five feet tall by the time I returned from the holiday break. I needed to figure out how to co-exist with these dorm mates, as they had enabled my holiday blues and sheer lack of caring about my grades with their morbid, drinking ways.

The opportunity I needed happened a few days after I straightened out my Pitt bill. As usual, I left my door open and walked down the hall to the bathroom, took a leak, and went back to the room to call my mother. When I called, my mother kept saying “Hello . . . Hello . . . Who’s there?” She apparently couldn’t here me. After my third attempt, I checked my phone to see what was wrong. One of my idiot dorm mates had unscrewed the phone and taken the transmitter piece out, which was why my mother couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t even make a call to report what they did! I set out looking for Aaron and Mike in their room. When Mike saw me, he ran and immediately closed his door, almost breaking my hand and bruising my foot as I kept slamming my body into his door and put my foot between the door and the door jam.

The Breakfas Club Screen Shot, “Cracking Skulls” line, january 9, 2011. Donald Earl Collins.

I thought about telling our RA, who was too busy screwing his girlfriend to notice that he had no control over our floor. So I took matters in my own hands. The next day, the stupid asses were next door in a mutual dorm mate’s room, bouncing balls off my wall and laughing like there was something funny about it. My anger turned into a rage I hadn’t felt since my fight with one of my classmates six years before. I grabbed my dust mop and unscrewed the handle, walked next door, and proceeded to smash Aaron and Mike — both drunk — on top of their heads. “I don’t hear anyone laughing now!,” I yelled. “If I don’t get my phone piece back by this time tomorrow, there’s going to be a fight, and I don’t intend to lose! We can ALL get kicked out of school!”

I’d never seen three White guys so scared and quiet. I knew I had crossed a line, but so had they. To make sure they knew that I meant business, I smashed my dust mop handle against the wall as hard as I could and said, “That’s what’s gonna happen to your heads if I don’t get my phone piece back.” They sent Samir, another dorm mate — the only other person of color in our group — as an emissary with the transmitter by the end of the day.

I didn’t allow myself to feel bad about going psycho or, from their perspective, “Black” on my dorm mates. With only a couple of exceptions, I saw everyone on my floor as the enemy for a while. And for the next couple of weeks, whenever I left the room at night for the bathroom or for something else on my floor, I kept my door locked and took the dust mop handle with me. I wasn’t crazy. I was as sane as I’d been in a long, long time.

===================================================

Could I have been expelled from the University of Pittsburgh for that incident? Possibly, but not likely. Was I crazy? Hardly. Still, it wasn’t my best moment, if you define good moment by always taking the high road. I suppose I could’ve reported Mike and Aaron to security and gotten the transmitter back that way. But at eighteen, I had already begun to get used to the idea that I had to take life on directly. That included taking risks and not following rules and procedures. I had to learn how to stand up for myself and for what I knew, even if it meant being seen as the angry Black guy or as a troublemaker.

On this day/date twenty-eight years ago, it worked. If only because the dorm mates I confronted probably had no business being in college in the first place.