Tag Archives: unemployment

Charlatans United

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in 1, 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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The Rev. Al Sharpton, et al., at a press conference providing an update regarding the Tawana Brawley rape case, Queens, NY, 1988. (http://www.wbur.org/; AP)

If I have to pick a point in my life where I began to realize how hypocritical humans could be, my second summer after high school would be such a time. The long, hot summer of ’88, of nearly 50 consecutive days of highs in the Triple-H (hot, hazy, and humid) 90s in New York and its immediate suburbs. It was my first summer after starting college at the University of Pittsburgh, and if it weren’t for sheer determination, it would have been my only year at Pitt.

News wise, there were two local events that dominated my summer of unemployment in Mount Vernon and The City. One was the Tawana Brawley story. Between the end of November of the previous year and the end of June, the Rev. Al Sharpton and his entourage used the bully pulpit of the fourth estate to generate outrage and consternation regarding the alleged rape of one Tawana Brawley. A month or so before her sixteenth birthday, good samaritans found Brawley outside an apartment building in which her family had once lived, lying in a garbage bag, covered in dog feces and with racial slurs written on her body. Brawley had been missing for four days.

There wasn’t much agreement on anything else beyond these facts. Brawley claimed that three White men had repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted her, including a local police officer, then later denied being raped, but remained adamant about other forms of sexual assault. At one point, a cop who had recently killed himself was a suspect in the alleged Brawley rape. At another point, Sharpton and company accused the Dutchess County Assistant DA Steven Pagones of being one of Brawley’s three rapist (he later sued Brawley and Sharpton for defamation). Sharpton claimed throughout to believe Brawley, but others in his group later disclosed that the blowhard had his own doubts about Brawley’s story a few weeks after agreeing to represent her in the public eye.

Wappingers Falls is in Dutchess County, just two counties north of Westchester County and Mount Vernon, a hour-and-thirty-minute drive from Manhattan (give or take). After Eleanor Bumpurs and Michael Stewart, I rarely believed authority figures regarding their crime reportage. But by June, I also realized that not everything is a conspiracy, and that even racists can occasionally be on the right side of the law. I learned, above all else, that Sharpton was a charlatan. He used Brawley’s true life story of familial abuse and misogynoir and fear of more abuse to raise his profile on the New York and national stage. Especially in this case, as Brawley’s mother and stepfather took a dim view on Brawley’s time out with boys, a view shared by Whites all too willing to see Black girls and women as over-sexualized playthings.

If Brawley wasn’t raped or sexual assaulted, she was certainly abused physically and psychologically. It was bad enough that her name was out there and known (a violation of her rights as a potential rape survivor), especially since Brawley was still a minor. It was bad enough that there was a significant racial gap, where six out of every seven Whites polled believed she was lying (versus only half of African Americans polled). That Sharpton put Brawley’s name in the public arena for months with additional and unsubstantiated accusations? He took advantage of her for months, adding another layer of abuse to this teenager’s life. It’s practically unforgivable. And no, Sharpton’s work to get Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012 the attention it and he deserved and his self-serving eulogy at Michael Brown’s funeral in 2014 do not make up for his original media sins.

The other charlatan I had to deal with that summer was my idiot stepfather and another one of his get-rich-quick schemes. He had spent nearly all of 1988 unemployed and lying around at 616, between losing his car salesman job and burning out the engine of his green 1976 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. It made my summer at 616 almost unbearable. I hadn’t spent this much time around the asshole since my summer of abuse.

In July and August, Maurice had the wonderful idea of starting his own limo service. One of our neighbors on the second floor had moved from driving a limo to starting his own service over the previous eight years. Maurice wanted in.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

Afterward, Maurice went to his once well-off friend, who had survived a three-year period of very local and very public court battles and prison time over alleged incidents of child abuse and molestation at her daycare in Mount Vernon. The woman and her husband were financially ruined in the process, even though neither of them were directly involved in the incidents that occurred at the daycare. Somehow Maurice managed to get $1,000 out of his friend for his limo idea, likely some of the last money she lent anyone before her death in 1989. It’s more likely that “Hebrew-Israelite” Maurice bought lobster tails and moo shu pork at a Chinese restaurant with the money than attempted in any way to use it as collateral to get the downstairs neighbor to give him a shot at driving a limo.

By this time 30 years ago, I had already had my fill of hucksters between Sharpton and Maurice. Their misogyny, their need to use others, their harebrained ideas for fortune and fame. Maybe that’s why I never bought my stepfather’s act when he was dating my mom as a seven-year-old. Maybe that’s why I never, ever, found 45 appealing from the first time I read about him in the New York Daily News in 1984.

End of the Dorm Room State

30 Saturday Apr 2016

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

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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.

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.

On this day and date twenty-eight years ago was the Saturday end to my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. Like today here in the DMV, it was a cool and cloudy day, a day in which I was tired from the year, but hopeful now that I had survived many of my inner doubts and outward troubles to make it to another fall of courses.

But there was a lot of unfinished business at Pitt. And, no, after my first Dean’s List, it wasn’t my grades. Six weeks earlier that year was March 15. That was the deadline for me to put down a $350 deposit to guarantee a dorm room for next year. Otherwise, I’d have to participate in a lottery for one. And the deadline for that was April 30th.

As of that morning, I had more than enough money to cover my deposit, as I’d gotten paid for my eighty or so hours of computer lab work with Pitt from the month of March. That money was way too late now. I knew that I’d have to go back to New York, to Mount Vernon, to find work for the summer, to have the money I needed to find a place to live for the fall when I’d come back to Pitt.

25 Welsford Street, Pittsburgh (where I lived my sophomore and junior years at Pitt), August 2015. (Google Maps).

25 Welsford Street, Pittsburgh (where I lived my sophomore and junior years at Pitt), August 2015. (Google Maps).

It wasn’t like I didn’t ask my parents. Mom didn’t have the money, between my idiot stepfather, my four younger siblings and my older brother Darren. Eight-hundred and fifty dollars of AFDC, food stamps, and WIC per month can only be stretched so far in a place as expensive as the New York metropolitan area. And my father Jimme, well, I let him know a month before the dorm reservation deadline that I needed the money. He said at least twice that he had wired me the funds via Western Union. I checked both times with the check cashing place in North Oakland, only to walk out empty-handed.

The timing just didn’t work out. That’s what I told myself, at least. I’d find a better place to live than Lothrop Hall. Between carousing Pitt basketball players, underaged boozers, the more than occasional tokers, and the terrible cafeteria food, I was probably better off living off-campus anyway.

You can convince yourself of a lot of things in the hours before a US Air flight to La Guardia when you’re staring at 120 days of living at 616 and being in Mount Vernon. Both places where I’d barely fit in before thirty-three weeks of college and relative independence. I was about to reclaim my emotionless role as the eldest son, all but running a house that was never mine to run in the first place. The fact of my questionable residential status as a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh could wait.

Like with so many things going on in my life that leap year, I was terribly wrong. I found myself unemployed for the summer, homeless in Pittsburgh for five days, and broke and malnourished for most of the Fall ’88 semester. From April 30th to the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I’d live with financial crisis, without a place to lay my head, and with tuna fish sandwiches and pork neck bones and rice as food for many of those days.

I did make friends my freshman year, and I did have friends my sophomore year, some of whom probably would’ve taken me in had they known about my troubles. But that’s the thing about abuse and poverty and race in a country that purports to be great and yet contradicts itself. You seldom tell anyone about anything bad in your life, out of embarrassment or out of pride, because you don’t want to be the living embodiment of a stereotype. Still, when I hinted about my lack of eats in October and November, my friends and even my classmates did help.

Fast-forward to ’92, the spring my father refused to believe that I knocked off my MA in Pitt’s history program in two semesters. He had told my brother Darren and his drinking buddies for years that he had paid my way through college. I also found out about that bit of Jimme braggadocio that spring.

Bumble Bee Tuna in oil (not water for me - still has been almost 28 years since eating), April 30, 2016. (http://www.upcitemdb.com).

Bumble Bee Tuna in oil (not water for me – still has been almost 28 years since eating), April 30, 2016. (http://www.upcitemdb.com).

When I went over to his place in late June to show him my MA degree, he even tried to tell me how he paid for my BA for four years. “What are you talking about?,” I said.

“My bachelor’s cost $32,000, and my other expenses over four years were another $20,000. In four years, you sent me $480 total,” I yelled, even though my drunk father was only a couple of feet away.

“Naw, naw, naw, I paid, I paid,” my father kept saying, with very little of the confidence than he had displayed before.

The total of my father’s payments for me and college was actually $880, including $480 he Western Union-ed to me my first three semesters. I’d forgotten the $400 I managed to get from him in August ’88 so that I could find a place to live my sophomore year in Pittsburgh. It is true, without that money, and without me surviving my first days in Pittsburgh minus a dorm room, I wouldn’t have finished college. But as a father myself, I’m not sure I’d ever claim credit for that, drunk or sober.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and My Own Prison

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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East Library branch of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, before (the version I worked in) and after renovation, October 4, 2006 and September 25, 2011. (http://popcitymedia.com and http://eastliberty.org).

East Library branch of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, before (the version I worked in) and after renovation, October 4, 2006 and September 25, 2011. (http://popcitymedia.com and http://eastliberty.org).

On February 17th seventeen years ago, we opened one of the first community-based computer labs in the US at the East Liberty branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. What was once known as the Microsoft Library Fund (which later became the Gates Library Foundation, and then became part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) had provided the initial $110,000 to place this computer lab in one of the East Library branches resource rooms. I guess it could’ve been a proud moment for me. If I hadn’t earned my PhD the year before, only to face unemployment for three months during the summer of ’97 and underemployment in the five months since taking the Carnegie Library job. But this was a humiliating moment, not one of pride or, at least, taking comfort in a job done well. It was a learning moment at a time when I thought I already knew what I need to move forward with my career and life.

The dissertation process, my battles with Joe Trotter, the truth about my relationship with my Mom, had all taken a heavy toll on my heart and mind by the time Memorial Day ’97 rolled around. So much so that I lived between moments of humility (which is different from humiliation) and moments of rage in the sixteen months between May ’97 and the fall of ’98. I was living on fumes from my last Carnegie Mellon paycheck when I began working for Carnegie Library the day after Labor Day that year. I’d been conditioned, though, to think that everything happens for a reason. So I assumed that God was attempting to teach me a lesson, that I needed to give more out of the needs I had in my life in order for the things I thought I deserved to come my way.

John Wooden saying on being humble, February 16, 2015. (https://pbs.twimg.com).

John Wooden saying on being humble, February 16, 2015. (https://pbs.twimg.com).

There was a bit of a flaw in my logic around God’s lessons. For one, the idea that I wasn’t finding work in academia because I hadn’t been a giver was ridiculous. Between volunteering for soup kitchens, tutoring high school students, tithing at church, and so many other things, it was dumb to think that not enough humility was the reason I didn’t get the job at Teachers College or had trouble finding adjunct work in the fall of ’97. Or rather, it was dumb not to think that bigger issues — like my dissertation committee abandoning me when I needed them the most — played a greater role in my not finding full-time work in my chosen profession than any inability to serve others.

The Carnegie Library job provided a part-time stop-gap for my income while I attempted to figure out how to move forward without my advisor and my committee and move on with the knowledge that my relationship with my Mom would never be the same. I figured that the job gave me the opportunity to help others and to do good, and that it was a good first foray into the nonprofit world, especially with money from the world of Microsoft.

Boy, I couldn’t have been more wrong! I had a co-worker who was jealous of my degree and attempted to undermine the work of putting together the lab and the class materials for teaching patrons how to use the computers at every turn. I figured out that the bosses at the central branch in Oakland had essentially pocketed some of the funding for the lab to cover the costs of new computers for their own personal use, and had underfunded both my position and my co-worker’s position as part of the grant.

Album cover for Creed's My Own Prison (includes title track), released August 26, 1997. (Jasper the Friendly Punk via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws to illustrate title and theme of this blog post.

Album cover for Creed’s My Own Prison (includes title track), released August 26, 1997. (Jasper the Friendly Punk via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws to illustrate title and theme of this blog post.

But I didn’t learn all of this until June. By February ’98, I began to realize that, more than anything else, I needed to free myself from my own prison of an idea, that I’d done anything wrong or sinful to end up running a computer lab project at twenty-eight when I had done much of this same work at nineteen years old. I had to begin to find prominent people in my field(s) to support me in finding work, even if none of them were on my dissertation committee. I still needed to apply for academic jobs, even if my status meant than some would reject me because of my issues with my advisor. I even needed to explore the idea of jobs outside academia, in the nonprofit and foundation worlds, where my degrees and my ideas about education policy and equity might still matter.

It definitely helped when Duquesne hired me in April to teach graduate-level education foundations courses in History of American Education and Multicultural Education. It helped even more, though, when I decided in August to quit the Carnegie Library job. Between the Microsoft folks and the sycophants at Carnegie Library who were willing to do almost anything for a few extra dollars — anything other than serve their neighborhoods, that is — I’d had enough of duplicitous people. Who knew that my first job with sycophants and Gates money would come back to haunt me in the seventeen years since!

The Week The Lights Went Out In America

08 Tuesday Oct 2013

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Gas station displayed a sign that explained the flag policy during the first OPEC oil embargo and crisis (Oregon), May 1974. March 26, 2013. (NARA via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Gas station displayed a sign that explained the flag policy during the first OPEC oil embargo and crisis (Oregon), May 1974. March 26, 2013. (NARA via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It wasn’t the middle of September of ’08, either. It was the beginning of October ’73, forty Yom Kippur holy days ago. There had been signs for any American who had cared to look at the cracks in the US dominance of the world economy ceiling. Rising unemployment, higher inflation, new monetary control measure, competition from a mostly rebuilt West Germany and Japan. The twenty-eight year-long run America had as the undisputed and undefeated leader of the capitalist world was on its way to a close, and ninety-nine percent of all Americans didn’t know or didn’t care enough to know.

No, the Yom Kippur War between Syria, Egypt and Israel didn’t cause the US to become more dependent on the rest of the world. But our support of Israel against countries from which we imported oil did lead to OPEC’s decision to deny us oil. Up to that point, our government had pretty much done whatever it wanted geopolitically, on behalf of containing Communism and American corporations. It was this week forty years ago, though, that truly began to teach ordinary Americans that there would be consequences for our foreign policy actions without regard for folks who lived at the blunt end of them.

Egyptian forces cross on one of the bridges laid across the Suez Canal, October 7, 1973. (CIA/Soerfm via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Egyptian forces cross on one of the bridges laid across the Suez Canal, October 7, 1973. (CIA/Soerfm via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I was just a couple of months away from turning four, but I do have vague memories of the week and month from four decades ago. Within a block of where my Mom worked, Mount Vernon Hospital, was a gas station, one that by the end of October had lines wrapped around the block as motorists in their six-miles-to-the-gallon guzzlers desperately waited for some petrol. It was loud and chaotic, from the little bit that I do remember. Fast forward to about a year later, when my Mom took me and my other brother Darren to the old Met grocery store on South Fulton in Mount Vernon. There, she complained about the $2.69 she had to spend on a five-pound bag of Domino’s Sugar ($14.53 in 2013 dollars). I remember her sighing about the high prices and the fact that her paycheck wouldn’t be able to keep up.

It would be years later still before I realized that the last of America’s easiest days as an economic and geopolitical superpower were during my years as a toddler. I did feel secure back then, not knowing about my father’s alcoholism, my mother’s insecurities about being a Black Southern girl living in and around New York City. I had yet to witness the violence embedded in my family, or in my neighborhoods, for that matter. I knew nothing of drug addiction or authentic Blackness, of racism and systemic job discrimination. I had yet to learn that the economic and educational opportunities that had been available to millions of Americans — almost regardless of race and gender — were about to become that much harder to attain and retain as I grew older.

Now, forty years later, as memories of the Reagan and Clinton years have faded, I think of America’s heady days, ones that now seem of lore. I realize that America could have even better days ahead. If we were to acknowledge human involvement in climate change and invest heavily in a green economy. If quality, well-funded universal pre-K to higher education became our reality, without creating one system for elites and another for everyone else. If we as a people finally said it was time to repair $3 trillion worth of infrastructural damage to our bridges and roads, to our sewer and water systems, and to our electrical grid. If we somehow decided to end our expensive wars on drugs and on Black men, on anyone whom we think (but do not know) may do our nation’s interests (if not our people) harm.

Collage of workers placing an F-Series bed onto frame at Louisville Assembly Plant (Kentucky), 1973. (http://media.ford.com)and a woman carrying a sign past a McDonald's on East 125th Street during a protest by fast food workers and supporters, New York, NY, April 4, 2013. (Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images via http//:financialpost.com).

Collage of workers placing an F-Series bed onto frame at Louisville Assembly Plant (Kentucky), 1973. (http://media.ford.com); a woman carrying a sign past a McDonald’s on East 125th Street during a protest by fast food workers and supporters, New York, NY, April 4, 2013. (Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images via http://financialpost.com).

But I know that we won’t have those better days, at least not yet. Not with narcissistic politicians either lining their pockets with money or lining their minds with sugarplum hopes for the Rapture and Armageddon. Not with a media more interested in the political horserace and petty optics than in giving us the full story. And not with an American public more interested in Miley Cyrus than in funding for more psychologists in public schools.

It’s truly depressing to know how far our nation hasn’t come in four decades, virtually my entire lifetime. At least I know, though. For so many born after me — not to mention lacking self-reflection — they may never know what should’ve been.

Get Rich, Or Whine Trying

08 Monday Jul 2013

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

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50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin' album cover art (2003), June 27, 2007. (Hundredalexander via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of picture's low resolution.

50 Cent, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ album cover art (2003), June 27, 2007. (Hundredalexander via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of picture’s low resolution.

When people grow up impoverished, there’s a strong impulse to come up with all kinds of scenarios for becoming rich. Some of these ideas require hard work, some require the fulfillment of dreams through tapping into one’s individual potential. Many ideas, though, remain half-baked shortcuts, ones that never reach fruition. Ideas like winning the lottery or Powerball, becoming a professional athlete or a singer or a rap artist. Others involve get-rich-quick schemes, ones that often take advantage of desperate wish of those in poverty to no longer be poor.

I’ve had plenty of experience observing examples of this last point. Especially in growing up at 616. My late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington was susceptible to all kinds of ideas for making money, particularly schemes that required others to invest. I guess I can understand. As the fledgling writer and author I am, I can certainly see the appeal of finding shortcuts to, say, selling 100,000 copies of Boy @ The Window in a month. If only I could somehow get Oprah to endorse my book on her website and on the air!

Bernie Madoff (mugshot), the ultimate get-rich-quick scam artist, March 16, 2009. (US Department of Justice via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Bernie Madoff (mugshot), the ultimate get-rich-quick scam artist, March 16, 2009. (US Department of Justice via Wikipedia). In public domain.

But I digress, as my scheme at least has a least a puncher’s chance at working (I have written a book, after all). My then stepfather, having held the jobs of Air Force MP, hospital orderly and taxicab driver, spent most of the ’80s trying to find ways to make easy money without putting forth any effort at all. In ’82, his grand scheme was Sun-Lion Corporation, which later turned into Sun-Lion Communications, the latter his attempt to do the equivalent of Bob Johnson’s Black Entertainment Television. My idiot ex-stepfather intended both the overall corporation and the communications arm to have what we would now call an Afrocentric slant. His vision was to be an emphasis on Hebrew-Israelite or similar foods, clothing, and other products and services meant for Black folks in the New York City area.

Maurice did everything he could to get my Mom involved in these schemes. My Mom went so far as to buy a corporation’s license for $2,500 in March ’82 for Sun-Lion. In the meantime, they argued and fought, and my ex-stepfather beat my mother up once in part over her lukewarm support for his grandiose schemes. At one point, they argued because Maurice wanted to raise $100 million in capital to put Sun-Lion Communications together! God, that man was an idiot!

After getting back on his feet after three years and three months of unemployment as a part-time security guard of an empty Vicks building in August ’82, Maurice came up with more schemes. He went to trucking school for four months between October ’86 and February ’87 outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, but never spent a day as a truck driver. Then Maurice was a car salesman for a few months in ’87, actually making commissions while selling Cadillacs. But of course he couldn’t hold on to a job he was tailor-made for, a gift-of-gab con man!

Finally, in the spring and summer of ’88, Maurice tried to talk his way into the limo business by attempting to get a fellow 616 resident to give him access to a limo or capital. They laughed. My Mom laughed. I laughed. Maurice cried and whined about how no one ever supported his get-rich-quick efforts, not realizing that most of his so-called effort came in the form of getting others to give him something he either already.

"Whine...it's just not fair!" cartoon, October 1998. (http://allpolitics.com).

“Whine…it’s just not fair!” cartoon, October 1998. (http://allpolitics.com).

When Maurice finally left 616 in June ’89, I thought all those days of ludicrous schemes and bullshit ideas for making lots of money were over. But when you’re poor, you’re vulnerable, and others looking to take advantage sense that vulnerability. In the two periods of my adult life in which I’ve been unemployed or significantly underemployed, people have approached me about selling Amway products. My younger siblings have proven themselves to be susceptible to alleged golden opportunities that were much closer to rust than gold.

This is not a screed in which I’m crapping on pursuing dreams or long shots. What I’m saying, though, is that dreams and long shots need to be tethered to serious plans, hard work, maximized gifts and talents, prayer and even some good luck. Yes, reaching out for help will help, but not in a spirit of draining others in order to help yourself first and only. That’s what my deceased ex-stepfather never learned.

The Life of Mary Louise

28 Sunday Oct 2012

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

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My Mom, Thanksgiving 2006, Mount Vernon, NY. (Donald Earl Collins).

Today, my mother turns sixty-five years old. My mom has now officially hit elderly status, which reads and sounds so weird, considering that she’s only twenty-two years and two months older than me. That Mom’s here at all at sixty-five is really a not-so-minor miracle, considering how hard her life’s been from day one in ’47.

This was what I wrote about my mother’s first thirty-five and a half years of her life, courtesy of Boy @ The Window:

Bradley, Arkansas main road (Route 29) with me and my Uncle Charles in the shadows, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

Mom came from a long line of folk whose lives were hard and impossible ones, where they  couldn’t take handouts even if they wanted to. She was born to Samuel and Beulah Gill in October ’47, their first of twelve children and her father’s second overall child of thirteen. The Gills of Bradley, Arkansas were tenant farmers who lived in the Red River valley in the southwest corner of the state and five miles north of the Arkansas-Louisiana border. The town was a one-flashing- yellow-light-four-corner one. Just over five hundred people lived there, with farms, shotgun houses, and ranch-style homes neatly segregated between a few affluent Whites, lots of po’ White trash and the abundantly poor Black side of town. The conditions she grew up in included corrugated tin roofs and outhouses to boot.

Being born into this family in the late-’40s meant that Mom’s life would be a difficult and emotionally tortured one. She started doing household chores when she was five, helping with her siblings when she was six, and graduated to hoeing and picking cotton by the time she was eight. There wasn’t the time, energy, and experience in the household for Mom to receive any affection or nurturing.

My maternal grandfather Sam Gill, Sr. (82 at the time, 93 now), Bradley, AR, June 2, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins).

With all that and her mother’s constant neglect and occasional abuse — she was once beat with the back of a hair brush for not getting ready for church on time — it’s amazing that Mom wanted to get married or have kids. Yet I knew that what little nurturing and affection Mom received came from her great-grandmother, her aunt, and high school basketball. All served that role as Mom grew into an attractive six-foot woman. Her great-grandmother, half-Choctaw and half-Irish and originally from Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), taught Mom to see herself as beautiful despite her dark complexion. Her Texarkana, Texas aunt taught Mom her basic adult survival skills. And high school basketball took her as a senior to the segregated state quarterfinals in ’65, an amazing feat to say the least.

Still, it was a hard life, one that Mom had vowed she’d never live again. That’s why she moved to New York in the first place. I’d heard these stories for years, and like her, I believed that our lives would get better through sheer hard work. Welfare was never to be something we would live with.

After nearly seventeen years in the New York area, never had all but finally arrived. She had spent my whole life up to that point telling us not to take “handouts,” that she’d “never be on welfare.”

By her thirty-fifth birthday at the end of October ’82, my mother no longer had full-time work at Mount Vernon Hospital, with her hours cut and four mouths to feed. That weekend, all we had left to eat in our two-refrigerator kitchen was a box of Duncan Hines’ Devil’s Food cake mix, Pillsbury All-Purpose Flour, and some sugar. That Saturday and Sunday, we truly ate like Torah-era Jews. Mom made us pancakes out of the flour, without baking powder, eggs or milk, and cooked down some sugar in water to make us a crude
glucose syrup.

Between an abusive Maurice for a husband, the loss of an already insufficient income after not joining her union in a strike, and two toddler-age kids (and another one on the way), the period between May ’82 and April ’83 was probably one of the lowest points in her life.

As I’ve realized over the years, though, Mom’s life was always hard. It was simply a matter of degrees, not of distinction or difference. The mistake of marrying Maurice, becoming a scab (see my post “The Quest For Work, Past and Present” from August ’12) and leaving my older brother Darren at The Clearview School for fourteen years has had an impact on all of our lives to this day. Just as much as fourteen years on welfare, the three-year-long loss of our home at 616 in the ’90s (see post “The Fire This Time” from April ’08 for more) and my late sister Sarai’s twenty-seven year-long struggle with sickle-cell anemia. “Wow” is only the beginning of a description of calamity that has been my mother’s life, about as long as the first hundred digits after 3.14.

What’s made the difference? My mother’s belief in God or Jesus? Her general sense of resilience? Her uncanny ability to deny reality and frequent lack of self-reflection? But I’d say that Mom has learned to expect little from this world and, unfortunately, even less for herself. She often expected the worst, and then being surprised at how not-so-bad “the worst”  was, could continue to soldier on.

My Mom and my Uncle Sam Gill, Jr., Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

So I wish my mother a happy sixty-fifth birthday. One in which she can just spend the day at her church in New Rochelle, and then just rest and be. Only one of my siblings lives at 616 these days, and apparently spends more time out and about than he does at home. So, I hope my mother can relax, knowing that she has endured all the evil that this world could throw at her, and despite her view of life, has come out on the other side, badly damaged, but still here.

The Quest For Work, Past and Present

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

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

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Down and out on New York pier, 1935, June 2009. (Lewis W. Hine via FDR Presidential Library). In public domain.

Election ’12 should be about how to generate more jobs and how to grow the economy. Sadly, it hasn’t been about these issues, and given the toxic political and cultural climate, it will not be about jobs or the economy when this cycle ends on November 6.

I’ve seen this horror movie of economic downturns and mini-depressions in American society and in my own life now three times in the past thirty-five years. Each time, I’ve been better prepared, more informed, more able to ride out the storm. And each time, I’ve seen the ugly side of what we call the United States of America, a place that has and will continue to punish the unemployed and underemployed for problems beyond their control. Especially if they were and are women, young, over forty, of color, and among the poor.

In the period between ’79 and ’83, when the effective inflation rate for that four-year period was more than thirty-five percent, when we experienced a double-dip recession, when interest rates reached 22.5 percent. My mother’s meager income of $12,000 in ’79 didn’t keep up, even as it reached $15,000 in ’82. We were late with our rent at 616 by an average of three weeks each month and didn’t have food in the apartment the last ten days of any month, going back to October ’81. Things were so bad that my mother, a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s dietary department, brought food home from the hospital kitchen for us to eat for dinner several times each month.

“Negro Women,” Earle, Arkansas, July 1936, August 21, 2012. (Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress/http://libinfo.uark.edu). In public domain.

The good news was, Mount Vernon Hospital’s employees went on strike for higher wages and increased job security in mid-July ’82. The bad news was, although Mom was a sixteen-year veteran, nearly fifteen of those as a dietary department supervisor, Mom never joined the union. She didn’t want to pay “them bloodsuckers” dues, and said that she “couldn’t afford them” anyway.

I can only imagine how much spit and venom Mom faced on her way to work every day for three weeks. Considering our money situation, which I knew because I checked the mail and looked at our bills every day, picketing and getting union benefits might have been better than working. It wasn’t as if there was food in the house to eat anyway. As much as I enjoyed Mount Vernon Hospital’s Boston Cream Pie, I thought that picketing for a better wage was the way to go.

Soon after I started eighth grade, the other shoe dropped. Mom, so insistent on not joining Mount Vernon Hospital’s union, was the odd woman out. The hospital’s concession of five percent increases per year over three years left them looking to cut costs. The only personnel left vulnerable were non-union service workers and their supervisors. My Mom had been cut to half-time by her boss Mrs. Hunce. Mom was screwed, but it was a screwing partly of her own making. It was the beginning of a two-decade-long period of welfare, underemployment, unemployment welfare-to-work, with an associate’s degree along the way. So much for hard work leading to prosperity!

I’ve gone through my own periods of unemployment and underemployment over the years. The most severe one for me was between June and September ’97, right after I finished my PhD. It was the first time in four years I hadn’t had work or a fellowship to rely on, and it was brutal. I did interviews with Teachers College and Slippery Rock University for tenure-track positions in education foundations, only to finish second for one job, and to see the folks at Slippery Rock cancel the other search. In the latter case, I think that they felt uncomfortable hiring someone of my age — twenty-seven — and my, um, ilk (read race here).

What made it worse was the fact that I couldn’t simply apply for any old job. I did actually try, too. McDonald’s, UPS, FedEx, Barnes & Noble, among others. I couldn’t even get Food Stamps in July, because my income threshold for March, April and May ’97 — $1,200 per month — was too high. And because I technically was a student for tax purposes my last two semesters at Carnegie Mellon — even though I was adjunct professor teaching history courses — I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits either.

Shuttered Homestead steel mill, 1989, August 21, 2012. (Jet Lowe/Historical American Engineering Record). In public domain.

I had to omit the fact that I had a PhD to get a part-time job at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which began after Labor Day ’97. I ended up teaching as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University’s College of Education the following year. Still, my income level did not return to where it was my last year of graduate school until June ’99, when I’d accepted a position with Presidential Classroom in the DC area.

I am nowhere near those times of being considered or treated as a statistic, marginalized in media and in politics as being lazy, shiftless, not smart or hard-working enough. But as a person who teaches near full-time and has more than occasional consulting work, I know how precarious and temporary work can be.

Ironic, then, that the people making decisions that have put people like me and my Mom in terrible financial straits have never missed a meal or not paid a bill because they were choosing between heat and not making phone calls. That most Americans regardless of party affiliation shun the poor, unemployed and underemployed is a shame and a pitiful example of how we really don’t pull together during tough times.

These attitudes are why rugged individualism and hard work aren’t enough to get and hold a job. An education, a real social safety net, even regulation of the job market, would help level the playing field for millions. Or, maybe some of us should learn Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic or Portuguese and move to where the jobs really are.