photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

memories of death

 

my first unforgettable death scene was a man’s body all cut up. some man i didn’t know. i had gone to meet my father at his job. a laboratory technician, he worked on the third floor (or was it the fourth floor) at the veteran’s hospital. sometimes he would show us how he mixed chemicals with body fluids, mainly blood or urine. it was kind of fun but not really exciting once you had been there a couple of times. this particular time, i remember i was in seventh grade, and he told me he wasn’t ready to go. often i would go to the main library, which was only a few blocks from the hospital, and afterwards meet my father when he got off from work. on a few occasions i would get there earlier than his getting off time of 4:30pm and would sit around reading until he was ready. but this particular time it was after 4:30. he said he had some extra work he had to do. as most children do, i said, ok.

 

he told me, come on. follow me. and we got on the elevator and headed to the basement. i walked behind him trying my best to keep up. my father was a fast walker. i’ll never forget his story about walking to new orleans from donaldsonville, louisiana. we twisted and turned through the basement. down this corridor, through that door, into another hallway, through another set of doors. i really wasn’t paying much attention. didn’t read any signs or anything. i didn’t have to. i was following my father.  and then we went through the last door.

 

and there it was. a corpse. i balked about ten feet away. the naked body was laid out on a big table that had a ridge around it and pans on carts next to it. the chest was cut completely open with the left and right rib cage folded back. a pan with internal organs was next to the torso. and worse yet, the top of the head was gone. i mean completely sawed off. the brains was in another pan.

 

i don’t remember it stinking or nothing. my daddy said, you can watch me or you can sit over there. over there was only like five or so feet away. i sat way over there. pulled a book out and buried my head in the book while my daddy started messing with that body. it would have been ok except they were making a lot of strange noises. my daddy was sewing the body back together with a big old needle and thread as thick as twine. when he started putting that man’s head back together and sewing the scalp back over the skull, it made this sucking kind of sound.

 

i had, of course, been to funerals before and seen bodies laid out at church, but this was my first really memorable experience with death. at that moment, i was de-romanticized about any thing i thought about dead bodies. i realized that for my daddy, death just brought another job he had to do. in fact it was a good job because it paid him overtime.

 

so this is what happens to you when you die. this is what an autopsy is all about.

 

between that time and my next memorable death experience i graduated from high school. in fact it was february of 1965, the year after i graduated. and, no, kennedy’s assassination was not a memorable death experience for me. by the end of high school i had been active in the civil rights movement: sitting in at woolworth’s and schwegmann’s lunch counters, picketing on canal street, knocking on doors and doing voter registration work in the black community. kennedy had never been a hero of mine. so here i was up in northfield, minnesota, a small town whose claim to fame was that’s where jesse james did his last bank robbery. the local folk had laid a trap for mr. james and they almost caught him. the james gang was badly hurt in the resulting shoot out and disbanded after that attempt. anyway, i was at carleton college. i hated it there and would leave in less than two months, but i also learned a lot there.

 

i was working at the college radio station doing a jazz show. my show came on on sunday nights from 8pm to 10pm, if i remember correctly. part of my job at the station was to get there by 7:30pm and literally rip the news off the teletype. it used to come in automatically and there was this big roll of paper that fed into a box. all the news, weather, sports and whatever. and you had to gather up that long roll of paper and cut it up, or rip it, to separate the items you wanted from the ones you didn’t.

 

there were only 13 black students at carleton, and 8 of us were freshman, so you know how lonely we were. that particular night, linda, a girl from little rock, was visiting my show. as i remember we were the only two black students from the deep south. and when i started ripping the news, i got the first and all subsequent reports: malcolm x had been shot. dead. linda was crying and my eyes were kind of blurry too.

 

at first it was just a line or two, and then later more and more info streamed over on the loudly clattering machine. i’m ripping the news of malcolm’s death for some college kid to read. i don’t know how much, if any of that news item was read that night on carleton’s radio show, but i was strangely very, very affected by malcolm’s death. i say strangely, because i was not a muslim. i was not a follower of malcolm in the sense of being part of any organization, but i was, like many, many people my age, an ardent admirer.

 

why? what was it about malcolm? over the years i have had time to think about it and rather than focus on him, i realize now the focus was on myself and parallels that i scarcely recognized back then, if i saw any of them at all. for one, we both rejected the civil rights movement.

 

i remember sitting on the steps of mt.zion methodist church before our weekly n-double a-c-p youth council meeting. we had been the main force picketing and leading the boycott on canal street. after close to a year of demonstrating, the merchants decided they wanted to negotiate. we said, sure. they said, stop picketing and we can talk. we said, let’s make an agreement and we will stop. the merchants balked. in response to the impasse the adult branch of the naacp, then led by the future first black mayor of new orleans, ernest “dutch” morial, instructed the youth council to stop picketing so negotiations could proceed.

 

we were adamant. we’d stop when the merchants met our demands. not before. the national office sent down wally moon, one of the main officials to instruct us, stop picketing or we will put you out of the naacp. they didn’t have to tell me twice. i decided to leave.

 

for close to two years, the youth council had been my life, consuming all my free time and a lot of my thoughts even when i was in school. i was a few years younger than the leading members, who were mainly college students but they were my gang, whom i hung out with, admired, wanted to be like.

 

i sat there on those church steps and finally decided: i couldn’t do it. anyone who has ever, for whatever reasons, abandoned a love can appreciate the pain of this voluntary separation. that was my first divorce.

 

malcolm had divorced himself from the muslims. also, malcolm was advocating internationalism and self-determination. i agreed with both. plus, malcolm had been a preacher--well, officially he had been a muslim minister, but anyone familiar with his oratory knew that malcolm was not just a master minister, he was a full blooded, get down preacher who spoke so eloquently both birds and angels hushed their singing while he was delivering the word. amen.

 

i had been groomed to hold forth in the pulpit, i knew a thing or two about public speaking, and i knew that malcolm was about the best we had, martin luther king notwithstanding. king had dreams but malcolm had the fire.

 

to paraphrase malcolm’s eloquent post mortem, the march on washington had been a picnic. the white man told those negroes when they could march, where they could march, how long they could march and when to leave town, and you know what, they came when the white man said you can come and they said what the white man wanted said and they left when the white man said go! malcolm. malcolm. el hajj malik shabazz, malcolm x.

 

knowing about the organizers’ attempt to censor the march on washington speech of john lewis, the chairman of the student nonviolent organizing committee, whom walter reuther (of the afl-cio) and others considered too militant was proof to me that malcolm had been right. the sell-out house negroes and their white liberal supporters were emasculating our leadership. i was a young man; speaking truth to power was a sine qua non of my definition of manhood, and in that regard no nationally recognized black leader was more man than malcolm.

 

plus as an insider, i knew all the stories, tales and gossip about our black leaders--king as a philanderer; this one on the take; the other one married to a white woman; on and on. but  when it came to malcolm there was nothing, and malcolm was so hard on middle class negro leadership, i knew that if anyone had anything on malcolm we all would have been made aware. malcolm was a model of leadership in a category unto himself. and now he was gone.

 

days afterwards, i tried to find out as much as i could. and when i saw one of the death scenes: malcolm carted out on a gurney, his head back and to the side, his mouth sort of open, i thought about that body my father had sewn up and wondered would malcolm be cut up like that. my subsequent thoughts were about the men who shot malcolm, how they could do it. death comes in many forms, but for us in the movement, the hardest to confront is the seeming endless cases of black-on-black killings. 

 

death makes you think. at first you just recoil in shock, but sooner or later, the philosophical aspects confront and confound. malcolm’s murder in particular initiated many hours of trying to figure out what, if anything, i could do to address, and ultimately stop, black on black murder. i was too young to know how old that particular problem was. fratricide has never been a racial issue, has never been anything but a human issue, and mainly a human male issue.

 

nevertheless, when your leader and hero dies at the hands of our own, you never forget. i don’t recall what music i played the night malcolm died. despite any nostalgia for my youth and the glory days of seemingly boundless energy and optimism (which two qualities are, after all, the hallmarks of youth regardless of the specifics of any particular time period), despite the fog of memory and the hunger for the good old days (isn’t it oxymoronic that we call the days of our youth “the good old days”?), despite any and all of that, all i remember about that sunday night is malcolm was assassinated. our movement was in crisis. i was in crisis. those were difficult days.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

WE STAND BY OUR STUDENTS:

Students at the Center (SAC)

 

start with what you know

to learn what you don’t know

start with where you’re at

to get to where you want to go

 

 

Our Students at the Center (SAC) class stood around in small clumps outside the school building. The temperature an uncomfortable lower-50s, an annoying light rain falling, the weather was not welcoming. Tiesha stood unsmiling under a blue umbrella, I told her to hold that pose with her face booted-up; scurried over to my black leather briefcase to get the digital camera, I wanted to take her picture. “You really going to take my picture?”

 

After taking four or five shots, I moved under the sparse cover of a tree, but it offered scant protection. The rain still fell on us. Tiesha smiled as she inspected the small screen on the back of SAC’s digital camera.

 

Jim pulled out the heavy African-American literature book from his backpack and proceeded to continue the last discussion we had before the fire alarm went off. What did Alice Walker mean about fruit awakening taste buds in the poem about her sister Molly?

 

Greta, the coordinator of the Smaller Learning Communities educational program, called on my cell and wanted to know where we were? She was on the St. Claude and Alvar street corner by the front of the school, we were on the Pauline and N. Rampart street corner at the rear of the school. Shortly she joined us and jokingly admired Jim’s tenacity as chilly raindrops wet the book’s pages. “Yall, really going to try and hold class amidst all this?”

 

“Yeah, why not?” Jim casually replied, pushing back his long, dark hair that helps earn him the semi-sarcastic nickname of “Jesus.” Three out of the eight or so students in class that day gamely struggled to answer the questions.

 

We were outside because someone had set fire to the second floor bathroom. And eventually we were all called into the gym and dismissed for the day. This was, Ms. Holiday, the new principal’s second day in charge; a not-unusual, even if atypical, day at Frederick Douglass high school.

 

Everyday working in the public school system I battle the demons of despair; most times I eat that bear, but sometimes brother bear takes a deep bite out of my rear, and on such days, nursing my wounds, I retreat home to repair, often in the process questioning myself: why in the hell do I return to this day after day?

 

I love the youth, especially the students at Douglass and I know that I as an older Black male make a major difference, especially as I do not represent authorities types, but rather, in many, many ways, am but an older version of them, or at least a version of who they can become once they achieve critical self-consciousness and commit themselves to life long learning.

 

Any of us who work in a major American metro-area, inner-city public school intimately knows Mr./Ms. Despair bear, knows the challenge of maintaining in the face of a system whose normal state is either chaos unreined or else the even more sinister, terrifying silence of lock down. But here is where we go everyday, somehow nourishing the dream of teaching youth.

 

Some people have developed theories about teaching inner-city youth, and most of those theories are predicated on preparing these youth to participate in the mainstream, while never questioning the sanity of joining in a system that has systematically oppressed and exploited the very youth we are teaching. If preparing them to be productive citizens is the bottom line of what we do, then we might as well be teaching courses in suicide.

 

I do not apologize for my stance: I advocate education for liberation, not education for mainstream socialization.

 

I am interested in coaching youth to engage reality in two ways: 1. Know themselves and 2. Decide for themselves what they wish to become. Those two simple objectives are the foundation for my praxis—the pedagogical theories I develop and/or adopt/adapt, and the day-to-day practice I use to engage the reality of public education.

 

Like many professional artists, I became involved because I was asked to participate in a specific program and not because I was seeking a way to work in the public school system, or even seeking a way to work with youth in the teacher/student dynamic. For most artists, teaching is simply a way to make the money we need to survive and enable us to do what we consider our real work, which is developing our art. In my case, although I have a long history of working with youth, it took over two years before I would consciously commit to teaching as a professional priority of my life work.

 

Contrary to what many non-teachers think, teaching in public schools is not easy money. Reaching our youth is hard, emotionally taxing, and intellectually challenging work, especially if the goal is education for liberation.

 

I teach at McDonogh #35 (a citywide school) and at Frederick Douglass (a district school). Citywide schools require students to meet specific academic requirements. District schools are based on residence in a specific geographic location. In New Orleans we have a three-layered school system: parochial (primarily catholic), private, and public. The public sector is where the overwhelming majority of Black students are herded, although a significant number are in the parochial system. The New Orleans public school system is the largest in the state with a $500-million budget that exceeds the budgets of every town and city in Louisiana.

 

Education is ground zero in the systemic exploitation of Black people in New Orleans—ground zero because public schools are the direct feeder for the necessary, albeit unskilled, labor needed for the tourist-oriented economy. For those not fortunate enough to work in a hotel, the public schools prepare them for the penitentiary. I will not recite the alarming statistics, it is enough to note that in New Orleans they are building more hotels everyday—where will the bellhops and maids come from? If you are reading this journal, I assume you are already aware of the statistical fact that more Black males are in prison than college.

 

Teachers who would educate Black youth but either shy away from making or else are incapable of making a political-economic critique of the school system, such teachers are themselves impediments, if not down-right opponents of education for liberation. If we are not prepared to at least intellectually confront the implicit racism of using test scores to fail students whom school systems have systematically miseducated, if we are unwilling to recognize the utter under-preparedness of system administrators and the lameness of their solutions, if we are afraid to address the difficulties of middle-aged Whites trying to educate Black working class youth, in other words, if we are unwilling to face what is really happening in public education, all of our “innovative” programs will fail because they are not addressing the real problems.

 

We are at war for the future of our students. In New Orleans, tourism is the number one (two and three) industry. Our schools are the way they are because the economy continues to need drawers of water and hewers of wood, continues to require a labor force to clean, cook and serve. And though they can not articulate it in political language, our students know. The ones at the citywide schools, encased in a near zombie-like state of obedience, work to escape the neo-slavery of tourism via college and a “good job” somewhere else in America, those at the district schools rebel or else go through the day in an alienated state of non-engagement with the curricula, which they generally (and too often not incorrectly) perceive as a waste of time. This is the context within which Students at the Center works as a creative writing elective.

 

Everyone who visits our classes, or looks at “Our Voice” (a student run newspaper we publish), or reads the chapbooks and poetry collections we publish, or views one of our numerous videos, everyone marvels at the work and wants to know how we do it. I smile. Although we employ specific techniques, there is no secret ingredient. It’s the fruit of protracted struggle, the fruit of the hard work of encouraging the students to take their lives and their future seriously.

 

Three of our basic principles: 1. No class larger than 15 students. 2. Sit in a circle. 3. Require each student to participate in discussions. We also encourage students to engage in peer teaching with their fellow students who are not in a SAC class or with middle or elementary level students, including those in after school programs. We strongly urge students to get involved with social change organizations and agencies, a number of whom are active partners with SAC.

 

In addition to reading our work aloud and taking turns reading a wide variety of materials, we teach active listening skills by talking about how to ask questions and by our example of asking questions. Silence is death; no student is allowed to not participate. While we do not accept rote responses, at the same time we do not reject any honest response as “wrong” or “inappropriate.” we are not working on what Paulo Freire calls the “banking” concept wherein we as teachers have fed our students the right answer and are prodding them to give us back that specific “right” answer. Instead the SAC methodology is to begin at the beginning. We begin with the experiences and real thoughts and reactions of our students. We begin by affirming the importance of their existence, their personalities, howsoever and whatsoever they may be.

 

One particular tool in this affirmation process is the story circle—a technique developed by John O’Neal and others in the Free Southern Theatre. We sit in a circle and take turns telling a story about a selected topic.

 

To be successful, we must actively listen to our students. This process is one of building community. It is not reductively a one-way process of simplisticly asking our students to spill their guts to us while we silently sit in judgment. Indeed, in SAC we all participate as equals; we teachers tell our stories when our turn comes. We all tell stories and we all listen to each other.

 

Whether a person intends to or not, if they honestly participate, they end up doing two things. One, we all learn more about each other, and we thereby become closer to each other. Two, we learn to articulate ideas and emotions that previously had never been publicly expressed. For many students this is their first experience in an educational setting of being embraced for who they actually are rather than for how close they are able to come to some external standard that is set before them as a kind of holy grail.

 

We then encourage our students to write. Again, we do not require any one-to-one write-the-story-you-told process. Rather we ask them to write about a variety of topics, and even encourage them to write on a topic of their own choosing if it is a topic they strongly want to express. When we combine the story circle technique with the prompts and inspiration that comes from the reading assignments, invariably students produce a richer body of literature than if they were simply asked to respond to abstract writing assignments. Here is an example from Maria Hernandez, a sophomore at Frederick Douglass who presents a brilliant social-critique of the affects of violence that is also an unsparing and startling self-critique.

 

Just Like Him

They say when you’re around someone for a long time, you start looking and acting like that person. The problem is that I didn’t want to be like him in any way, but what can I say?  I have his eyes, his hair, and recently I’ve acquired his personality.  Lately I go crazy and snap.  I bitch slap my little brother and on more than one occasion I’ve drawn blood from my little sister’s lips.  I didn’t want to be like him, but I did it anyway.  And something inside me is telling me that I let him win.

 

When you review student writing at this level, the work forces you to confront yourself. You can not stand before this student and just go through a rote exercise. What do you do?

 

We publish the work and encourage her to do more. Maria’s piece is included in a collection of Douglass writings called From the Heart. Just as our students learn from us, we as teachers, learn from our students. The experience of liberatory education is necessarily a reciprocal relationship. We learn to know our students as fellow human beings with whom we share our lives and experiences, rather than solely see students as blank slates upon whom we teachers are trying to inscribe particular lessons.

 

When we say start with where we are at, we are saying a mouth full. Our students have many, many problems. An upcoming publication is called “men we love / men we hate”—recently during a discussion of an excerpt on Black manhood from bell hooks’ new book, a quick, informal poll demonstrated that only one person of the 12 or so students lived in a two parent family with a male as the head of the family.  We were discussing patriarchy, which is a bit tricky when there are no patriarchs present in their day-to-day lives; and that was at the city-wide school whose reputation is petite-bourgeois (we pronounce it boo-gie), many of them are literally the  children of first-generation professionals and lower-level managers.

 

Although functional enough to do their class work and to pass standardized tests, even these students, the so-called best and brightest, suffer social stress and trauma at sometimes unimaginable levels. Sexual molestation, dysfunctional families, suicide, drug (especially alcohol and tobacco) abuse, STD’s, and warped senses of self-esteem are endemic, indeed near pandemic across economic strata. Without falling into the trap of either pitying or being repulsed by their problems, our task is to encourage the students to articulate the realities of their day-to-day existence. Unless and until they can honest recognize and confront their own realities they will never be able to truly transform themselves and their communities.

 

In this McDonogh #35 class three seniors were working on projects. Angie Solomon was working on a two character drama about a young woman trying to talk to her best friend about new feelings she is having that might be homo-erotic but which may not be, she just needs to… to talk about it and her friend is not wanting to listen. The brief piece illustrates the importance of being able to talk about life with a supportive friend. Asia Brumfield’s piece is about her uncle, a high school student, one year younger than Asia, who was murdered at a near by school in a brazen hit in the school gym during the middle of the day. Rather than a simple cry of sorrow, Asia is intent on exploring the nexus of relationships in her family which include her who was imprisoned at the time and a grandfather who had survived a barroom shooting. Marnika Farria is exploring the subject of rape spurred by her own attempts to deal with her mother being raped when Marnika was 11 years old. As Marnika does her research and family investigation she finds out that her grandmother is also a rape survivor although Marnika previously had no knowledge of that history of rape in her own family.

 

These are not woe-is-me, feel-sorry-for-us-poor-downtrodden-negroes investigations, rather these are honest explorations of complex social situations. For Angie, Asia and Marnika, these investigations are a brave and ultimately inspirational example of self-transformation through confronting  social issues at the personal level. Neither Jim nor I try to weigh these projects with overt political views. Our tack is to ask questions, we encourage them to dig deep within themselves and be as truthful as possible.

 

Because we are not a core curriculum class and because we are a “creative writing” class we have more latitude with subject matter and lesson planning than do most of the regular classes. Although one might suppose this means that we are less rigorous in an academic sense, all of the students will tell you that, except for a handful of their other teachers, our SAC class requires them to work much harder than do their regular classes.

 

Even though they have to read more, write more, think more, they come back, some students taking our class two or three times during their high school matriculation. Last semester at Douglass we encountered the phenomenon of male students cutting their assigned classes to sit in on our writing class. One of them eventually persuaded his counselor to switch his class, another student, Bruce Lightell, got a note from his mother saying that it was ok to skip one class so he could be part of our SAC class.

 

Later in the semester when Bruce was selected as one of two students to represent Douglass at a statewide conference on “agenda for children” where our SAC duo recited poetry, one of the counselors wanted to know how in the world could that happen since Bruce was failing every other class. Bruce has severe problems with text. His spelling is on an elementary level and his grammar is almost non-existent, but he has a sharp mind and easily grasps concepts such as metaphorical consistency, which he calls “m-c”. When it is time to publish Bruce’s work, we patiently sit with him and correct each misspelled word. We question him about grammar. We do what editors have traditionally done for many, many highly rated writers whose manuscripts would be unpublishable without significant editorial help. One of my favorite images of Bruce is his head buried deep in a dictionary trying to find out the correct spelling of a word he wants to use. His academic shortcomings notwithstanding, Bruce has the fire and determination to improve himself and his family supports SAC partially because they know the value of our work—one of Bruce’s older cousins had previously been an editor of Our Voice newspaper.

 

We are not a one-shot project or a new approach trying to prove itself. We have made a long term commitment to public education, long enough that we now have former SAC students who are college graduates returning to work with SAC. Also, a significant component of SAC work is now in the hands of SAC alumni who are currently college students, two of the more active of grads turned SAC staff are graduates of Frederick Douglass—our staff is not just drawn from the academically better prepared students at McDonogh #35.

 

Indeed, at Frederick Douglass the situation is paradoxically both easier and more hopeless—easier because the students are more forthcoming, more hopeless because these students generally have only a modicum of reading, writing and mathematical skills.

 

Steve Grant, a handsome, football player belies the stereotype of the jock who gets all the girls. In a moment of disarming honesty, Steve penned a short response to an Ishmael Reed poem. When he finished reciting his poem there was a moment of stunned silence—we never thought of Steve that way.

 

If I had a nickel …

 If I had a nickel for every time I had been rejected I would be poor because I’ve

Never really had the heart to approach a girl.

 

In one of his writings, Steve gave us the title “From The Heart.” in a similar vein I remember Darrow Reaux coming to class one day after being absent for two days. I asked him where he had been, why had he missed class. He dropped his arrest papers on the desk where I was sitting. I scanned the papers, gave them back to him, and simply said welcome back. Turns out he was arrested because he was standing on the block outside his home when the police came through doing a sweep because of a fight that had happened nearby. I don’t remember for sure, but it was probably after curfew. The next day, Darrow wrote a short piece which highlighted his arrest but from a totally unexpected perspective.

 

I Told My Mother I Love Her

This girl in my writing class name is Anastasia and it seems like we’re the same but we really don’t know whose the blame. We both stay with aunt and uncle thinking that they were our real parents. My real mother name is Irita and my real father name is Darrow, but I don’t called neither one of them mom and dad. I continue on calling my auntie Rose, mamma, and my uncle Junnie, papi.

The funny thing was I got arrested the other day and I haven’t seen Irita for about three months and I ran into her in jail. I really didn’t know how to feel when I saw her I didn’t even bother asking what she was doing here but she asked me, and I told her what I was in for. The police brought me in the back for booking she came to the window and told me bye. In jail it is really crazy. Some old man was getting beat while the guards was feeding us cold luncheon meat. I went to court and the judge release me on ROR.

I went home to my mother Rose and told her I was in jail. They let me go without paying bail. My mother said she didn’t know where I was because I left my cell phone. I left the radio on. The lights on and my writing everywhere. She told me don’t go outside at night so I wouldn’t have to fight with the police anymore. I told my mother I love her and good night.

 

The students at Douglass have no problem sharing their problems, whereas the better educated students at McDonogh #35 are also the more reticent and the least in touch with their true feelings. Often they have repressed their thoughts and feelings for so long that their ability to express what is happening inside has atrophied. They have the words, in the intellectual sense, but lack the psychological ability to express themselves.

 

The Douglass students are the inverse. They are not hampered by self-censorship, but rather limited in their language skills. By the measure of the leap tests (our state-mandated standardize tests), Douglass is the second worse high school in the state. On a scale that ranges up to approximately 150, I believe we scored 11 and were surpassed in a negative direction only by our uptown sibling, Booker T. Washington, who scored in the single digits, “9” out of the possible 150. Their educational limitations not withstanding, our Douglass students produce creative writing that helps them cope with and begin to overcome the crippling effects of miseducation.

 

There is a misconception that under-educated students are not ready to grasp philosophy, political-economy, subtleties of high art, etc., however, just because the school system has failed to educate them, does not mean that our students are stupid and/or uneducable. That they score poorly does not mean they can not think and do not have analytical skills. Indeed, their environment forces them to develop very sharp discrimination skills.

 

They are able to easily spot insincerity and incompetence. They know with the accuracy of a finely tuned Geiger counter, which teachers are simply collecting a paycheck or impersonally teaching from a textbook without being concerned about the student as a human being. Students learn early how to dodge the bullies and con artists who daily confront and try to hustle them both in and outside the classroom. They develop all sorts of evasive techniques to avoid physical harm and/or incarceration by police, guards and other authority figures whose sole responsibility is to maintain law and order, a law and order that demands mindless obedience and compliance with arbitrary rules and regulations. In many, many ways our students are far more realistic about their educational situation than are we who would teach them but who do not take the time to understand them or their world except as either an abstraction or with a pejorative view of their environment.

 

A sure sign that many of us do not understand our students is our refusal to understand that even if students can’t spell, they can reason; even if students can’t pronounce multi-syllabic words, they can express themselves. How well a person does on a standardized test is no indication of that person’s character or desire to learn. A test may measure what one knows, but can not accurately predict whether a person wants to or is capable of learning.

 

Thus, we read and discuss Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” or excerpts from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, along side of Toni Morrison and excerpts from the writing of Frederick Douglass; we read Sandra Cisneros and Birago Diop as well as Alice Walker and Langston Hughes. We not only read these authors, we discuss the relationship of the text to their lives and follow-up with assignments that, for example, ask them to write about their own “cave” experiences. Here is high school sophomore Rodneka Shelbia’s cave essay written when she was 14 years old:

 

When I was 13 years old, I stumbled into a place with very little air and very little space.  I was uncomfortable.  I stumbled in this place not knowing what I was getting into, not knowing a way out.  This place was a dark, confusing, messed up place.  Being in this place was terrifying and painful, full of decisions.  This place was a cave, a cave of many emotions.

This cave was a relationship between me, a boy named Tim, and a boy named Rodney.  Tim was my boyfriend.  Tim and I had a good relationship.  We were known as the star couple.  We had known each other for about three years, but we were together for about five months.  Tim had what I look for in a boyfriend.  He attracted me because he was himself.  He did not try to be anyone else, and he accepted me for me.  He was my 9-10, but we broke up.  We broke up over a few words that were passed around and the pressure of Rodney.

  Rodney was someone I would call a best friend.  Tim, on the other hand, thought Rodney was not just a best friend.  He saw Rodney as someone trying to get with someone else’s girlfriend.  After Tim and I stopped talking, Rodney and I started talking.  Rodney was the type of nigga that would do anything to get what he wanted.  He was good at his game, cause he got me.  We were together for about two weeks, but after those two weeks he lost me.  I had to leave him alone.  I felt like I was cheating on him, cause I still had love for Tim, which meant Rodney wouldn’t get all I had to offer, maybe not even half. 

Now I was hurting, stuck in the middle of a four-wall cave, just confused.  On each of the walls there was an engraving that somewhat frightened me.  The first wall was engraved, “Rodney,” next “love,” then “Tim,” and last “Decisions.”  On the ceiling and base of the cave there were little riddles and clues telling me where the answer lay.  There was one in bold print that stood out like none other.  It stated, “The answer lies where you stand.”  I sat thinking, “What does this mean?”  What could I do to help myself, to strengthen myself, to free myself?  I soon noticed two rocks next to me.  Those rocks were nothing more than my feelings. 

The first rock was soft and chalk-like.  With this rock in my hands I looked around and repeated three of the clues to myself. 1) The answer lies where you stand.  2) Freedom is the key.  3) “X” out that that won’t help. 1) The answer lies where you stand.  2) Freedom is the key.  3) “X” out. 

I thought, “Freedom, freedom is the key.  It can open the cave.  The rock lies where I stand.  The rock can “x” out the words on the cave.  I can write freedom on the cave.  It just might open.”  I was hoping and praying as I got up to try my plan.  I got up to the wall, but the rock was so soft it crumbled up as I wrote.  I found that the rock didn’t engrave nor write, because the rock was soft and contained no strength, no power, only mixed emotions.  It didn’t help me at all. 

I sat hopelessly thinking.  “What am I going to do now?”  I looked at the second rock and thought to myself, “Ain’t no way in hell I’mma get that rock.”  So I just sat making excuses.  “It’s too far; I can’t walk.  It’s too heavy; I’m too weak.  It’s in a pile of man-eating creatures; they’ll eat me alive.  That junk is gonna hurt.  It’ll probably make me look ugly.”  Then I thought to myself, “It’s the only way out.”  So I walked over there to get the rock, but in the process I suffered.  I bled and lost a lot, but I got the rock.

This rock gave me confidence.  Every step I took with this rock felt like the hardest step in the world.  When I got to the wall, I started to write freedom on it.  That was very hard, because my hands were bloody, and the rock was heavy.   I had to push the stone in the wall to make the engravings, but the good part about it was that as I engraved I grew stronger.  I became more powerful, and my emotions came in line.

When I finished, the cave vanished.  I became free.  Rodney was gone.  Tim was gone.  Love was gone.  And I was free, oh so free.

 

Although teaching writing is both a more complex and a far broader question than can be addressed in this short essay, one quick example, will illustrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of finding a working solution that addresses all the needs. Three of the students in our small class at McDonogh #35 are transfers from Douglass. This is an example of the typical third world brain drain that is a common feature of under- and un-developed countries. While we struggle to meet the needs of all our students, including those who are intellectually gifted, a larger fact is undeniable: when the best students are relocated from the neighborhood schools to a citywide school, invariably the level of instruction goes down in the neighborhood school. The absence of “gifted” students in the classroom ensures that those who are left behind stay left behind.

 

We discuss these concepts with all of our students. Rodneka was considering leaving Douglass, and though there is no doubt that she would benefit from a better educational environment, there is also no doubt that were she to leave, Douglass would face a big loss. Our task as SAC teachers who recognize this dilemma is to provide ongoing educational stimulus and opportunities for all the Rodnekas we encounter even as we recognize that schools such as Douglass do not provide a quality learning environment or instruction.

 

That is one small example of the complexities we face. I want to make sure no one romanticizes SAC and the struggle we wage. Students such as Rodneka deserves far more than we are able to give them, even though we, they, and their families recognize that SAC has given them far more than they would have normally received in their matriculation through the jungles of public education.

 

I am an experienced writer, sort of a writer-in-residence, but only “sort of.” although i have published books, have had my writings used as part of the SAT tests, and am an award-winning journalist in both print and broadcast, most of the students do not know me as a published writer. They simply know me as their teacher, the one who helps them write and shows them how to make movies. Additionally, I have years and years of work as a community organizer at local, national and international levels. I do not have to rely on teaching in this program to make a living, nor am I using this program as a stepping stone to get to another level in my writing career. Ultimately, education for liberation demands a commitment far beyond career development.

 

Moreover, I am not an “artiste.” I am against an emphasis on the arts where the focus is on teaching technique and individualism. Our students need to focus first on their own realities rather than be seduced by the intellectual brilliance or the career bling-bling of some artist. In other words, it is not about me as the artist—the focus must remain on the students. Moreover, we have to model social commitment not by sloganizing or by using clever rhymes to fight oppression, but rather we must do the hard work of helping others without requiring students to look up to us on our teacherly pedestals of wisdom, truth, and beauty. We must be serious about keeping students at the center of our work.

 

In our SAC classes we encourage our students to critique the SAC education process, including how we teach them. We ask them for opinions about what we should study, which programs we should do and which we should pass up. Sometimes it is as simple as requesting they select a topic to write about for the week or select the theme for a story circle, other times we lay out particular situations we are dealing with and ask for their input in the decision making process that ultimately Jim and I make. The students quickly realize that they can help shape their education. They can help determine what they will learn. This engenders a sense of ownership and identification with the learning process that will never happen if one simply uses predetermined lesson plans and state mandated educational objectives.

 

We realize that not every class can operate the way SAC does, however we are certain that public education can be significantly improved by specifically focusing on the needs of the students, which, for us, means including the views of students. We believe another world is possible. We believe students are a resource and not just an object of education. We encourage the students to become agents of their own education, and we struggle with other teachers and administrators to make these changes. Unavoidably this is sometimes a contentious and even bitter struggle. There are teachers and administrators who actively fight against what we are doing, but, as the British are wont to say, at the end of the day the work our students generate stands out and speaks for itself.

 

Still the attacks come. Some people say: SAC is successful because we work with only a handful of students. SAC is elitist because we pick only the best students.

 

At Douglass, there are racial antagonisms aimed at Jim Randels, a white teacher in a school that has only one or two white students and none in any of the SAC classes. In the second semester of the 2003/2004 school year an antagonistic counselor assigned us two special education students, plus one student who was a serious discipline problem, plus three students who needed upper level English to graduate and who also had to pass the leap test but whom had failed the English portions previously, all of this in addition to those who were assigned to us “just because,” even though we are supposed to be an elective course, and even though the counselor did not include some students who requested our class. Meanwhile we have a handful of students who want to learn how to write—two of whom are intent on becoming writers.

 

So we circle the chairs and soldier on. And though we have our problems, despite stumbles and setbacks, despite backbiting and resentments (the inevitable result of struggles to create change), despite having to deal with a wide range of student attitudes and capabilities, despite all of that, our students produce and their work is both our defense and our offense. Their work is answer to the question of can public education be improved. We proudly stand by the work that our students do.

 

Marcus Garvey said, what man has done, man can do. Terence said, there is nothing human that is foreign to me. SAC says: start with what we know, in order to learn what we don’t know. Start with where we’re at, to get to where we want to go.

 

 

INTERVIEW: JAMES BALDWIN

Looking Towards the Eighties

 

 

by kalamu ya salaam

 

 

__________________________

 

 

 

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - November 30, 1987)  

________________________________________________

 

INVENTORY / ON BEING 52 (parts 1, 2 & 3)

Music by David Linx, Pierre Van Dormael

James Baldwin – narration

David Linx – vocals, drums, percussion

Pierre Van Dormael – guitar

Michel Hatzigeorgiou – bass

Deborah Brown - vocals

Viktor Lazlo - vocals

Steve Coleman – alto saxophone

Slide Hampton – trombone

Jimmy Owens – trumpet, fluegelhorn

Pierre Vaiana – tenor saxophone

Diederik Wissels - piano

________________________________________________ 

 

 

JAMES BALDWIN:

The Preacher Poet

 

I would like to use the time that’s left to change the world,

to teach children or to convey to the people who have children that

everything that lives is holy.

—James Baldwin

 

-1-

 

James Baldwin voiced us—articulated black experiences with a searing intensity that frightened some and enraptured others of us. Even if you could not read, once you heard Baldwin you were convinced of the power of words. His ability to move air was such that the vibrating oxygen Baldwin set in motion spoke to us as surely as if the words had issued from our own mouths.

 

Baldwin’s sermons (and that’s what his words were, instructions for living) entered us, vital as breathing.

 

Baldwin’s breath proclaimed what it meant to be flesh, and black. He told us of the here and now, told of barbarians who feared life in others and feared those who truly lived to love rather than to conqueror.

 

Baldwin spoke of racist hatred for black people, telling us that their hatred was but a mask for the intense hatred they felt for themselves and the sordid, twisted mess they had made of their own lives.

 

The gritty texture of Baldwin’s voice testified to the realities of black life, the ups, the downs, the terrors, as well as the hard-won tenderness found in our usually brief but nonetheless frequent stolen moments of exquisite and redemptive love. He was no romantic, but oh how he loved. He loved us all and gave his all in the love of us.

 

Indeed his very behavior posed the quintessential question: if not for the opportunity to love, what are we living for? Certainly not labor and toil, nor riches and fame, which we can never take with us when we inevitably exit the world; If we do not love our selves and our children, what will our living matter in the future? And if we do not understand that everyone’s child is our child, then how whole can we be as a human being?

 

When I was younger, when I thought I had a taste for anger, a yearning for retribution, I was always mystified and sometimes even miffed by Baldwin’s insistence on love. Now I am older, directed by the wisdom of age: sooner or later, most of us grow tired of fighting but we never tire of love.

 

What was bracing about Baldwin was his insistence that we be humans regardless of how inhuman our tormentors might act, and as Baldwin so eloquently reminded us, their behavior was an act, most likely a ruse to mask their fear of us, or worse yet a lie to camouflage their fear that they were not what they tried to make us believe they were; they were not gods, conquerors, lords and such. No. They were merely what we all are, human beings trying to survive and prosper.

 

It is easy to think of Baldwin as an Old Testament prophet, raining down fire and brimstone. He was, after all, a professional evangelist as a teen. It is easy to think of Baldwin as a Shakespeare in and of Harlem since his command of language is now legendary. But it is wrong to reference Baldwin solely from outside of black culture. Think of this black voice as a life-force, as the sound of us, as the sound of living, as a drum. A drum, an insistent beating drum whose rhythm was synchronous with our own heartbeats.

 

The fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard. Only once your heart was moved by the way this man moved words could you fully understand the power he brought to us who were told time and time again, in a million ways, day, night and seemingly always that we were totally powerless, or at least powerless to prevent first our enslavement and now our ongoing oppression and exploitation.

 

The power Baldwin brought to us was a clear-eyed recognition of world realities, we, just as everyone else, were the range of behaviors and emotions, memories and dreams that it means to be human, and as such our task was to be the best human we could be, which best necessarily meant the embracing of other humans. You are a human and you must embrace other humans is a powerful message to give to those who have been taught otherwise.

 

And this fire to be wholly human that Baldwin breathed into our lives was no mere mental exercise. Baldwin went far, far beyond thinking because he spoke with a passion for life, a passion to get the most out of life even as he admitted that as we struggled on inevitably we would err, we would make mistakes, we would fail from time to time, even backslide, and knowingly do wrong, after all we are humans and that’s part of what humans do, but Baldwin would remind us as long as we are alive we have the opportunity, indeed we have the obligation to correct our mistakes and to strive to be better than we have been.

 

Baldwin was telling us: grow up. Of course, you’ve been done wrong and you’ve done wrong. We all have. We all have been done wrong. We all have done wrong. Grow up, face life. All the wrong in the world does not mean that you and I can’t do what’s right.

 

And ultimately, while James Baldwin the writer is important, James Baldwin the human voice is equally important, especially now that the technology exists so that we can all hear him, we can all experience the ways in which he manipulated human sounds of communication. In other words, the fullest appreciation of James Baldwin the writer is not totally understood until James Baldwin the voice is heard.

 

Baldwin was full of passion and the very fire light of life. To reduce him simply to books is to miss the music that this man made of words.

 

Thus, if you think you know James Baldwin, if you think you love our literature and you have never heard him deliver the word, and you do not have his spoken word CD, then you don’t really know the breadth and depth of James Baldwin.

 

-2-

 

Between September 19, 1986 and September 18, 1987, James Baldwin spent a year working on a spoken word CD with producers/composers/musicians David Linx and Pierre Van Dormael. Recorded in Brussels, Brooklyn and New York City, A Lover’s Question (Label Beu, Harmonia Mundi) is a masterpiece of merging words with music: a precursor to what is now a popular artform.

 

The producers succeed in more than providing a sonic backdrop for the words; they actually composed orchestrations that both complemented and mirrored the intent and expression inherent in Baldwin’s delivery of his complex poems. The success is then on three levels: the poems are phat, the music is tight, and the musicians respond with an exhilarating verve that let’s you know they too were giving their all, giving their love and not simply going through the changes to get paid.

 

Aside from a brief musical introduction and an elegiac solo rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” on which Baldwin talk-sings the famous gospel composition, there are only three poems on this CD. One poem, “The Art of Love,” features operatic vocalist Deborah Brown and is done as an art song, an interlude between two poetic suites.

 

The two-part “A Lover’s Question” continues in the vein of the Fire Next Time. Baldwin questions the citizens of his birth nation as to their desire to hate: “Why / have you allowed / yourself / to become so grimly / wicked?” and “No man can have a / harlot / for a lover / nor stay in bed forever / with a lie. / He must rise up / and face the morning / sky / and himself, in the / mirror / of his lover’s eye.” As Baldwin knew, true love is always honest even though honesty is seldom an easy fact to live with in a land where lies and commerce replace truth and reciprocity.

 

The concluding number is the three part opus “Inventory / On Being 52” and it is the introspective Baldwin fingering his own wounds (some of them self-inflicted). He does not flinch as he cross-examines his own life and realizes the terrible costs of his mistakes, the terrible beauty of embracing both the terrors and joys of being human. Baldwin manages in a stream of consciousness style to encourage us to live the good life, suggesting that the good life is a different life from the life/lie that too many of us live. Baldwin encourages us not simply to march to the beat of a different drummer, Baldwin tenderly implores us to be different drummers.

 

Tap out the real rhythms of life with our every footstep in the dark, our every embrace of what we and others are and can become. Reject the ultimately tiresome and ephemeral wisdom of materialism / accept the rejuvenating life-cycle rhythm of the earth. Thus Baldwin says “Perhaps the stars will / help, / or the water, / a stone may have / something to tell me, / and I owe a favor to a / couple of old trees.”

 

“Inventory / On being 52” is a deep song, but then, as he says, “My father’s son / does not easily / surrender. / My mother’s son / pressed on.” Every young poet needs this old man’s CD in their collection, this compass of compassion, this example of the passionate heights the spoken word can attain. If you as a poet do not know A Lover’s Question then you do not know the full history of your own human heartbeat.

 

-3-

 

James Baldwin. His life, his teachings, his commitment, his words embody one of the great paradoxes of the contradictions of life—and regardless of misplace beliefs in idealism, in an eternal anything, in a person being solely and only one thing or another, regardless of our worship of the false idol of ideas and dualism—experience teaches us, all life, every life is contradictory. In fact, to be alive is a contradiction, is a fight against death, literal death, symbolic death, the death of compassion, the death of our own humanity in terms of how we relate to others and the world we live in.

 

Life is a contradiction, and as such, isn’t it wonderful for us to realize that one of the most insistent prophets, preachers and poets of love was a queer, black man standing against the homophobia, standing against the misogyny (and surely hating women also means hating the earth), standing against the racism, and all the other -isms endemic to the place and time within which Baldwin was born.

 

James Baldwin. Clearly modeling for all of us what it meant to be a man, and more importantly what it meant to be human and live in a time of institutional war and inhumanity.

 

I love James Baldwin.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

[The first version of this essay, essentially most of part 1, was originally published in Mosaic Literary Magazine, Spring 1999. The second version of this essay, part 1 & part 2, was originally published as part of the booklet accompanying the 1999 reissue of A Lover’s Question.]

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

when a man loves a woman

 

i don’t know why i was immobile, just standing, caught between moving forward and backing away from some horror that was not my nightmare. i mean, why wasn’t i doing something, why couldn’t i think of anything to do besides be a voyeur, an onlooker, saying inside my head: this is none of my business, yet, steady gawking at the timeless tableau?

 

i didn’t see him wind up, but i saw the fist smash. they were half a block away. she cringed, or crumpled, or slumped, or something, against the brick wall of the white-painted old warehouse. too far away, i could not hear anything. but from the way she staggered, the hit must have been hard. no love tap. no heated argument slap. but a fist. to the head, or maybe the heart, the middle of her chest, between her breasts. i don’t know. from where i was, i could not really tell.

 

a moment before, i had been at my desk. and someone, i forget who, someone had rushed in and said a man was beating a woman, outside. i remember there were at least three of us, standing at the corner, just beside the front door entrance to the black collegian and edwards printing company. it was butch and me, and i forget who the third person was, probably bill, but i’m not sure. and by the time we got there, what may have started as an argument on the street, and probably included some cursing and even perhaps a shove, or maybe he grabbed her and she tried to jerk away, or could be she swung her purse at him trying to back him back, or something. i don’t know.

 

i don’t remember exactly how old i was, but since i left the magazine in 1983, i had to be in my early to mid-thirties, old enough to know better. i had not yet been to nicaragua, but by then had been to cuba the first time, and haiti, and jamaica, and tanzania, and china, and japan, and korea. i had been a lot of places. seen a lot of things. stood with progressive forces, even ventured into a few situations where to be caught was possibly to be imprisoned, if not straight up killed. some would say i had been fearless. some might say bold. going gladly where most folk feared to tread.

 

so why was i not moving forward this time. why was i just standing and looking. i told myself i did nothing because it all happened so fast. like liston going down in the first behind an ali punch most people didn’t even see, the fight was over before i could re-act. but i saw her body take the blow. and i did nothing.

 

immediately afterwards he looked like he said something to her. and they walked away. together. away from us. down the street. and the three of us went back inside. well. the old street adage: don’t get in the middle of lovers fighting cause you could end up getting jumped by the both of them. or, the other old saw: he might have a gun, she might have a razor (which was reinforced by the fact that most of the men in our office were gun owners, and lorraine, our first secretary, carried a straight razor). and the projects where those kind of people congregated was one block down the street in the direction the couple was headed. but i knew better, and besides, i have faced down police and soldiers—a pistol or a knife was nothing, comparatively speaking. no, the truth was, i wasn’t afraid for my own safety, the truth is, or was: i had been socially shaped not to respond to violence against women, and i was simply doing what i was trained to do: nothing!

 

trained by movies and television that are not only forever showing a woman being slapped, or smacked, battered or bruised, but the media has made violence into an acceptable form of entertainment, something we watch and enjoy, watch and laugh, watch and take pleasure in someone else’s pain.

 

seasoned by the callous lassez-faire of street life that essentially said: i don’t tell you what to do with yours, you don’t tell me what to do with mine.

 

encouraged by the army, especially in terms of all the shady dealings that went down with the women we sexually and economically abused with impunity—a lot of people don’t know that the word hooker came from the name given to the prostitutes employed by general hooker during the civil war; oh, yes, i’m aware general hooker didn’t directly pay the prostitutes or even officially condone the sexual laisions, but that’s the american way. the leaders always have maximum deniability even as the status quo works its nefarious show.

 

conditioned by a culture that said a fight between lovers was nobody’s business but theirs.

 

assaulted by the literature—i never forgot native son bigger bashing bessie with a brick.

 

not to mention pornography, the all-time top grosser among americans, even in the state of utah which is supposed to be so righteous. the violent sexual exploitation of women and children, our number one form of entertainment.

 

violence against women was reinforced by damn near everything i could think of. and the reinforcement was incremental, no one thing guiding it all, but the preponderance, the cumulative effect, like one rain drop does not a storm make, but a multitude steady falling will flood us out, wash us away, cast us adrift, like i was, hesitant, unsure on that sidewalk. where was mr. bold black man that day?

 

even though violence was never practiced in the home where i grew up, and even though it was unthinkable that i would personally hit a woman, nevertheless, in ways, until that day, i was not totally clear about, i  now realize that yes, i passively condoned such violence, and if not condoned it at least tacitly accepted men beating woman as the way it was with some people, a sort of twisted status quo. and, perhaps my passivity was birthed by an even more sinister moral equivocation: it’s ok to be my brother’s keeper, but that doesn’t include stopping my brother from giving my sister a beating—oh, sure, in the family, somebody you know, your mother, sister, daughter, lover, auntee, oh sure then jump in and break that shit up, but some sister on the street we never seen before, i don’t know, you never know what the deal be and ain’t no sense in getting caught up in some edge of night drama.

 

protecting an unknown sister—no matter what i said in the abstract, when my face was pushed up in it in the real world, her back against the wall, some huge dude all up in her grill—i hesitated.

 

there had to be some reason, some reasonable explanation for why i simply stood there. it took me a while to realize the main reason was that i live in a patriarchal society, a society within which violence against women is not only deeply embedded, but also a society within which violence in general, and violence against women in particular, is so broadly accepted that it becomes invisible even though it is ubiquitous. how can something so obvious be so ignored?

 

the weight of acculturation does not easily budge and can keep us from moving forward even as we believe that it is backwards to stand still.

 

afterwards, not minutes, but in the days that followed, i said i would never be silent again. that moment of stillness turned me around. i would never be uninvolved again. and truth be told, i haven’t, but on the other hand, i have never been tested like that again. never been within shouting distance of a man beating on a woman.

 

yes, i have stopped young people who got into inevitable fights and tussles with each other. it really, really saddens me that so much play-fighting is accepted as a form of affection among many of our young people. their seemingly harmless mock violence is ameliorated by genuine affection or, more likely, rather than by affection, by pubescent desire; whatever, the result remains the same: in more cases than not, what began as a seemingly harmless activity actually ends up being a predictable  preparation for them accepting violence as part of the package deal of personal relationships, thus violence is fatally intertwined with what too often passes for true love.

 

i can not imagine any of my daughters or sons either accepting or perpetrating abusive violence.

 

i have marched. i have campaigned. i have written essays, plays, poems, made movies. but ever since that day, i have never been caught standing around simply looking when a man beat on a woman. nor will i ever again revert to letting aggressive violence go down without at the very least shouting out against such abuse, without doing something to stop the violence, and if not bring that violence to a “squelching halt” (to quote my father), at least intervening or in some other effective way opposing and lessening the negative effects of such violence.

 

cause when you get right down to it, a true love of one has to also be, to one degree or another, a love for all—and if we can not love others, especially those whom we see as the “other,” whether that be a gender other, an ethnic other, a racial other, a sexual-orientation other, whatever other, if we can not love an other and yet claim to love a particular individual then we are cutting off part of our own selves—the part of our selves that is also a part of the other. we are restricting our lives, constraining our souls, diminishing our spirit, and this is especially true when we are dealing with the questions of violence against women.

 

when a man loves a woman, truly loves a woman, he will not silently condone nor, through his own inaction, allow any man to do any woman wrong. because, while there are those fortunate enough never to be victimized by violence, in general there are no exemptions: each woman in a society shares some of the essence of every woman in that society. when a man truly loves a woman, he must love all women or not really love any woman at all.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

Govern Yrself Accordingly 

 

i have dismissed 

the minister 

of emotional defenses, 

distributed 

confetti to all 

the guards and given 

faithful and ever vigilant 

caution 

several days off 

 

the city 

of me is well ready 

to joyously receive and 

rainbow celebrate 

your unanticipated but 

nonetheless profoundly appreciated 

arrival into the intimacy 

of our space 

 

know that you are warmly 

welcomed for howsoever long 

you should choose to stay 

here, you need no keys 

no door is locked to you 

every window is open 

 

feel free 

 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

I MET MYSELF

 

 

I met myself coming around the corner one day, and I almost didn’t recognize me.

 

We so seldom see ourselves as we actually are. Even in a mirror we often see what we hope to be or what we fear we are, exaggerating both flaws and beauty. But when we see ourselves in the faces of others, then we really see.

 

Would you know yourself if you saw yourself the way others see you?

 

Of course, when we are young—or at least when I was first moving beyond my teen years—it never occurred to me that the past had anything deep to do with me personally. My father was from the country. I was from the city. I didn’t really see how his life was shaping my life. One African proverb says you can’t truly judge the man until the man has reared a child. So when can you truly judge the child?

 

Somehow, in the way most of us in America have been acculturated, I thought of myself as distinct from my parents. I did not consciously know their ideas about life except by inference in terms of what they encouraged and/or discouraged in me, and therefore I was blissfully unaware that much of my own ideas were shaped and influenced, if not outright determined, by the ideas my parents held.

 

When my mother was battling Hodgkin’s disease, she would have her three sons take turns driving her across the city to the hospital that was located in the next parish to the west of New Orleans. During these long drives for chemotherapy treatment she would talk to each of us, not about anything in particular, but many years later I realized she was consciously spending her last days conversing with her sons.

 

I’ll never forget how well she knew us, how after hurricane Betsy hit my mother had written a long letter to her youngest sister, my aunt Narvalee who was by then living out in California, a single mother with one child, my first cousin Frieda. My mother was a college graduate and a third grade school teacher. I knew she could write, but she opened her letter saying if she could write like Paul in the bible or like me, Lil Val. Wow, my mother admires me as a writer.

 

That was in 1965 three years before I joined the Free Southern Theatre and became a professional writer. By 1973 she was dead. If she saw me now, would she still admire me; would I remind her of the young man she loved; or would I be so strangely changed that she would know who I was but not know the me who came to be over the intervening years between now and when she last saw me back in the early seventies? I wish I could see me the way she would see me if she looked at me today, she who knew me before I knew me.

 

Have you ever had a long talk with someone who knew you well but had not seen you in over ten years? Say, you’re having a quick drink with Gilbert after seeing him at Walgreen’s; he was purchasing a prescription for diabetes medication and you were getting a refill of blood pressure medicine. Gilbert was your best friend from elementary school with whom you used to share lunch. You and Gilbert had even planned and literally started to run away together just for the romanticized adventure of two adolescents exploring the world away from the dictates of parents.

 

Or maybe you are hugging Eric and laughing with your arm still around his shoulder and he is playfully punching you in the chest the way y’all used to do while playing sandlot football games on the crisp autumns of weekends decades ago, and Eric would laugh at something you said and retort, “boy, you still talking all that shit.”

 

Or maybe it was Woodrow you encountered.  He was coming out of Picadilly’s, and you were going in planning to meet your wife for dinner. Woodrow was someone you used to laugh with pulling pranks in high school and now, even though he walks with a cane and has only half a head of hair, Woodrow gains your admiration as he tells you about the business venture he’s started. His enthusiasm is contagious as he describes all the wonderful skills and information he’s learning. His eyes are animated as he leans into you, one hand familiarly resting on your right shoulder as he describes the joys of getting into a whole new area and keeping up with thirty-year-old guys who are not even half his age.

 

Or you see Sandra in some office hallway, she who could outrun a cheetah back in eighth grade. She is still slim and vivacious. She greets you not only with a girlish giggle and bubbly “hello” but waves a well-manicured hand at you while balancing a cup of steaming coffee in her other hand; she’s married and has a beautiful diamond ring that literally shoots off a flashing rainbow of refracted lights as she waves good-bye. Seeing her brisk walk and the swing of her lithe hips makes you self-conscious about all the weight you’ve gained.

 

I temporarily quieten some of my concerns about who really knows me by insisting people who have not seen me in years can not really know me. The two questions—who knows me and do I know me the way other people know me—take turns as the focus of my mind.  Then I wonder how much of me today is the old me that friends knew decades ago.

 

The old folks say it’s easy to change your mind but hard to change your ways. Is the way I am today more or less the way I was way back when, and if so where did that constant part of me come from? Was I born the way I am, or are all of us shaped by our interactions with and responses to our nurturing environment?  Over a life time do we remain essentially the same or is it possible to fundamentally transform ourselves?

 

The things we think about can surprise us. Where did that come from, we ask ourselves while looking around to see if anybody saw us thinking these crazy ideas.

 

I remember riding a subway in Manhattan. I hallucinated for a minute and thought I saw my mother and father at a train stop, standing close to each other. My old man handsome, with a dimpled smile and a seriousness dripping from his eyes, his dark head held high; my short mother looking up, her eyes shining. He had one hand lightly on her waist, and she was leaning into him, two hands caressing his chest. I had never seen my mother touching my father like that, never thought of them as head-over-heels infatuated with each other. But there they were.

 

Suddenly I started wondering about what momma and daddy were thinking and feeling, how it was to be young and black in the late forties. How did fighting in two wars affect him: once in the pacific and later in Korea?  Before she died, my mother’s younger sister told me why we used to alternate going by the Robinson’s on Mardi Gras one year and the Robinson’s coming by us the next. Frank Robinson and my father were best friends, and daddy asked Mr. Robinson to look out for mama while daddy was in the war. I wonder now how it was to be a pregnant woman with two small children and her man returning to war after surviving World War II.

 

I can’t believe how dumb I was to ignore them. How could I be so uninterested in the roots of myself. Even though in my early manhood years I served in Korea on a missile base located on a remote mountaintop, I never really discussed Korea with my father. Like most youth, I was too self absorbed to want to learn anything about my origins or any of me that wasn’t actually embodied in my physical person.

 

When I was still in elementary school I gave a Frederick Douglass speech and won a prize in a church contest, and later in junior high school, playing Crispus Attucks, I jumped out of a closet—well, actually from behind a curtain—hoisting a sword fashioned from a coat hangar, proclaiming “I’m a proud black man who is willing to fight and die for my freedom.”

 

I liked that kind of black history but ignored my father’s fight to be hired as a laboratory technician at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He wrote letters all the way to Washington. DC, kept arguing his rights and finally a directive came down to hire him. They did, but they wouldn’t promote him even though he was the best lab tech they had, so good that he was the one training the college interns, some of whom were hired after his training and even promoted because they had a degree while he languished in lower grade positions because he had no sheepskin. I never heard him complain about mistreatment—was I deaf or did he just silently suffer, nobly carrying on despite slights heaped on him?

 

Now that I’m old as history, now that my teenage years are on page five hundred-and-something in the American history book, the textbook someone had thrown on the floor, in the corner of our classroom; now that what I went through does not seem relevant to what teenagers today are going through; now I want to know my father’s history, I want to embrace my mother’s hardships.

 

There they were again and again, at each train stop. That must have been me my mother was carrying in two arms, gently bouncing up and down. I had on a funny, green knit hat swallowing my big head. I am the elder of their three sons.  Should I get off and at least walk close to them, hear what they are saying to each other?  Look, my mother is talking to me.  What was she saying? Before I can muster the courage to stand up and go eavesdrop on my parents, the train pulls off. I am strangely more anxious about how I bungled the chance to get to know my parents when they were standing at the last stop than I am curious about what I will see at the next stop.

 

But the next stop is my stop. I get up and wait at the door as the train jerks to a stop. The door abruptly opens.  People pour in and out of the train simultaneously. As I push through the throng, I look up and down the platform. They are not there. My parents are gone, or more likely, never were here. I feel alone, making my way in the world.

 

I promise I will never forget my parents as young lovers. I was so fortunate that they were my fate—Inola and Big Val. My mother, a school teacher who never forced me to do homework and who did not even try to dissuade me from taking an F in high school one trimester because I didn’t want to do an assignment a teacher forced on me. My father forcing us to grow food in the city and pick up all the trash on our block to keep it clean but who never once tried to discourage us from picking up the gun in the sixties—that was my brother on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a shotgun during the take over at Cornell University. Big Val and Inola always encouraged us to fight, and they never made us conform to anything.

 

It is obvious to me now, but I have not always recognized this truth: I can not fully know myself if I don’t intimately know my past, intimately know the forces that shaped and influenced me, the people who gave birth to me, and especially the culture and era within which I lived. My head was spinning as my mental fingers tapped the codes of past experiences into the calculator of my consciousness. I was literally engrossed in my own world.

 

So there I was coming around the corner thinking all these thoughts, totally unaware that I was about to really peep who I was; suddenly I see someone I grew up with. That person looks old as they hug me, greet me, and playfully say, heyyyy man, long time no see. They enfold me in a long, warm embrace, holding the me they remember. I am struggling to remember their name.

 

In that moment I see both their obvious joy and also see how much they have changed, how they have aged. I wonder what they are doing, what is their life like, what part of the city they live in, what kind of work they do, all the personal profile sort of information. That’s when I had this weird desire; I wanted to be able to fully embrace myself and know myself the way this old friend thinks they know me, and I was really curious to know myself from the perspective that my parents knew me.

 

I wanted to know all of me, and that’s the moment when I had a news flash: now that your life is almost over, who are you really?

 

Am I only who I think I am or am I really the complex summation of all that I have also been in relation to others and in response to the world within which I have lived.

 

As I walked to my car I had a funny thought: my mind is not me. My mind may in fact be the biggest impediment to me getting to know me. Maybe my mind is the least reliable map of who I have been, a distorting lens when it comes to recognizing the self.

 

All personal intentions aside, all individual desires sublimated, all intellectual self-reflections and second guesses ignored, is it possible for any of us to truly know ourselves without the help and input of others who know us? Is it possible to move beyond letting our minds judge who we are? Would it be too overwhelming to consider letting the world we live in judge who we are? Can we shed the shackles of our own mind and be both free and fortunate to see ourselves the way others see us? And if that portrait was actually presented to us, would we recognize ourselves? 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

PAIN

 

My body is scarred. 

 

A thirty-eight bullet blotch on my left knee. A twenty-five-cent, quarter-sized, raised, keloid on the back of my left shoulder from falling out of a tree when I was a pre-teen and a piece of cut branch pierced deep into my flesh. An eight-inch-long appendectomy line diagonally crosses my lower abdomen. Plus, there are other scarifications I’ve picked up along the sixty-three-year life-way I’ve traveled. 

 

And, of course, a series of stories accompanies each mark. I could narrate my autobiography just by relating the tales of how each wound came to be.

 

For example, there is a cut on my left hand. I was fighting with my brother when we were both young. If I remember correctly we were in junior high school. The two of us were tussling over one knife. He grabbed the handle, I ended up with the blade. You can guess what happened. You know the skin between your thumb and your pointing finger, that elastic part? That’s where I was sliced. I remember I could see the flesh inside my hand. Although it hurt, I was really fascinated by examining the inner workings. 

 

That altercation happened over fifty-some years ago. Although the physical scar is still there, the slicing did not produce any psychological scars. I am not afraid of knives or fights. I don’t hate my brother, nor did I hold a grudge against him. 

 

Although my body reveals the violence I have encountered, my deepest scars are not visible. Indeed, one of those invisible markings runs the length of my mental and will never disappear. I will never forget how seriously I stabbed myself, severing my budding self-esteem.

 

I was standing in the Manhattan street holding down a parking spot. A car came up. The horn blew. I ignored the sound. The driver blew again. I remained steadfast. The driver lowered his window and shouted for me to move. I didn’t respond nor did I move. 

 

This was in the seventies, four or five of us were headed to The Beacon Theatre to experience a double-bill of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi group and Pharaoh Sanders. As we drove around looking for parking spots, the brother who was driving spotted one on the other side of the street. He told me to get out and go stand in the spot until he could turn the corner and double back. I did as I was requested but I didn’t feel good about doing so. 

 

I had tried to assuage my guilt by rationalizing: maybe that was the way they did things up in New York. I hoped no one would come along before my friend got back. The night was warm. New York City. Anything could happen. How would I handle it if the police came along? Suppose someone jumped out and wanted to fight—not that I was afraid—but as I stood guard the myriad of possible scenarios playing on the screen of my consciousness was interrupted when that young black man drove up.

 

After I ignored him, he pulled up next to where I was standing and talked to me through his window. It wasn’t a long speech, nor was he cursing at me or even shouting. He was calm and accurate with his words, “Alright, brother, but you know you wrong.”

 

Those words scalped deeply. He was right. I was wrong; so wrong that I could barely enjoy the music because I continually questioned myself: why had I done something I knew was wrong?

 

That happened close to forty years ago but it indelibly mottled my memory, resulting in a sort of psychic scar. Ever since, whenever I’m asked to do something I know is wrong I don’t just go along with the situation just because it’s a good friend making a seemingly innocuous request, nor do I swallow my moral sense and do a jig because the outcome would be of some immediate benefit to me. 

 

With me, the outcome really doesn’t matter as much as does the process. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Especially, why am I committing an action I know is wrong?

 

Sure, we enjoy pleasure. We like getting things, consuming things. Let me be specific: we men like sex, crave power, being in charge, in control, but I constantly ask myself: at what price? Can I—my sense of being a man, an honorable human being—can I afford to be the boss if the cost of attaining power is knowingly doing wrong?

 

Physical pain rarely deters me but the psychic pain of doing wrong terrifies me. That is the pain I learn from; not just on a Manhattan street blocking a parking space but every day of my life, I do my best to avoid the pain of doing wrong. 

 

So, although I have a high tolerance for pain, I have a low threshold when it comes to my personal behavior. Regardless of what anyone else may think of what I do or don’t do, what I think of myself is my compass. What’s ok for them, may be anathema for me. 

 

The scars on my body, hey, that’s life. Life is a knife. Or a gun. An accident, a fall. Hot grease burning the skin in a cooking accident. The unanticipated pain of a hand slammed in a car door. The tooth chipped by a baseball unintentionally thrown in your face. The residue of  childhood chickenpox or an allergy to a food you didn’t know would cause severe rashes. Life, in all its complexities. Life, the myriad of petite disasters that challenge our personal morality and leave behind indelible indications of each encounter.

 

While we cannot avoid the inevitable markings of life, we don’t need to tattoo our souls with self-inflicted graffiti. My body may be scarred, but I try to keep my soul unblemished. 

 

Regardless of the scars you may or may not see when you look at me, what you don’t and can’t see: my internal moral wall—that is where is posted the most important lessons of my life. Inside of me is all that I have learned. And I guess you can say that I’ve studied myself deeply and tried my best to take note of and respond to both the pleasures and pains of my life.

 

That New Yorker taught me a key lesson when he told me, brother, you know you wrong. Even after over 350,000 hours of living, that wound remains tender. 

 

Knowingly doing wrong is one pain I just can’t stand.

 

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

NICENESS

(for the girl in the next block)

 

There was a time when beauty was so beautiful. Those moments before the rose wilts, the flame turns to an ember, when you smiled because you could see that I was happy to see you and that made you happy. We were going somewhere. Winston and his girl were in the front seat driving, you and I were in the back, hanging on to each other like a delicious cookie in the hands of a two year old. Both of us were newly past the age of majority, able to go anywhere, do whatever, and at that moment the “whatever” was your hand lightly on my knee, and, to my great delight, palm pressed lightly on the inside of my left thigh, that same hand that was now making haste very slowly up the arc my legs, which I opened slightly to make room for your fingers.

The night was no longer young. We had been dancing and drinking, and neither one of us was ready to let the other go, and rather than romantically kiss me you leaned back, your right cheek resting on my chest just below my goateed chin, then you sighed contentedly and simply said: it’s a nice night.

I knew what you meant. I hadn’t kissed you yet but it was nice—I don’t often use that square word to describe the sublime but within the confines of the car that warm night, the windows down, the darkness of our breathing synchronizing like birds and bees, “nice” was a just right way to describe what we felt for each other. We was nice. I hadn’t much even touched your breast or anything, but there was a knowing in our closeness, and more than closeness there was a palpable intimacy hovering over us even though we were not alone in this car speeding through the night. Everything was niceness. 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

BLACK STACEY:

saul williams, my generational son,

the punk-hop poet/musician

 

new orleans, 22 nov. 2004. when he got in my car, i told him i was proud of him, “very proud, really.”

 

 

it hardly seemed over a decade ago when we sat on the carpeted floor together in a barely furnished apartment in atlanta. he was at morehouse. my daughter kiini was at spelman. and their small group of friends, the red clay collective, was groping forward toward a glorious future, or more accurately groping toward a gloriously-hoped-for future. they were poets and writers, photographers and dancers, some were into the hard sciences, not saul williams, he was a philosophy major.

 

they published a journal and i contributed writing and advice. after graduation when a hard core of them, kiini included, moved to new york, saul would go to graduate school at nyu in acting. kiini traveled for a year and then did a masters in publishing at pace university.

 

i would visit them in new york, not often but whenever i visited it was good to get together with them. their energy was energizing to me; always left me with more to contemplate, inspired to do more. at one program they asked me to read poetry in a feature spot—kiini cried that night, so happy, so proud.

 

in later years, as saul’s star rose, he and i would sometimes share platforms and panels—once in boston i stood with him as old heads attacked what they perceived as the irrelevance of these black youth for whom blackness was neither a badge of honor nor courage; indeed, from the youth perspective, their blackness was, in fact, not a badge of any kind.

 

 

many of us, the black power generation of parents, never dreamed of children who were not focused on the color, culture and consciousness of their/our blackness.

 

now, in 2004, our future has arrived but the reality of our social landscape is no dream zone; bitterness sours our intergenerational relationships. it’s complex. it’s blatant. it’s infuriating. it’s tough being black in the 21^st century if you were born before the sixties. and it’s even tougher relating to today’s young people, particularly those born in the eighties or later.

 

we old heads figured that if richard pryor could publicly give up the word nigger, well nobody had an excuse to keep slinging that epithet. but little did we know that eddie murphy, crouch-grabbing, cursing and generally acting like a, well, like a niggah, was only the beginning. murphy was cool compared to martin, and def comedy jam, and gangsta rap, and shit, what the fuck is going on? these young negroes really are crazy!

 

i once asked a group of young people what they thought was the biggest problem with “today’s youth.” one perceptive young man fired back without a moment of hesitation: “today’s adults.”

 

 

and i knew precisely what he meant. there is not only a disconnect, there is also deep disappointment. young and old look at each other and are thoroughly uncomfortable with what the other has become. are these our children/are these my parents? what happened to them?

 

except for the older men still trying to hit on the younger women, most of my peers are uncomfortable around young people. whereas, i tend to be uncomfortable around many of my nostalgia-loving, over-50 peers, a significant number of whom are former rebels now turned responsible citizens.

 

as saul and i sat in café nicaud, he drinking a latte and eating a portabella mushroom and avocado sandwich with a fruit salad cup on the side, me chugging down nantucket lemonade, our conversation unfolded at a leisurely pace.

 

i asked him what he was up to.

 

he was in town for a gig at the house of blues with his band.

 

same band as amethyst (which was a rock group he led for his first album)?

 

no. this was stripped down, a quartet. he was now into “punk-hop,” kind of a mixture of punk and hip hop. violin, turntables & bass, i believe he said drums, and i know saul said he was doing guitar.

 

i didn’t know he played guitar.

 

he didn’t really play. he kind of just played what he wanted to play.

 

ok, i thought, i’m sure that’s an interesting aggregation.

 

we talked on about his daughter saturn, his son (i forget his name). i had met saturn in new york, but never met his son. they have different mothers. saul is a twice-time, proud father/single parent—he had been the primary care-giver for his daughter for two years while marcia returned to college for a masters.

 

i asked saul about acting. he said he really wanted to continue acting, if he could get good parts. he was signed on for a handful of films he looked forward to but none of them had yet been “greenlighted.” actors actually spend more time waiting for other people to get their act together than they do actually acting.

 

saul’s music career was not so interesting to me because i’m not into the type of music he’s making. saul views it as a role he’s developing for himself, a role that gives him a platform, partially because, as saul explained, actors don’t have a public platform. even when they get a hit movie, as he had with slam, they don’t get to interact with their audiences and say whatever they want to tell folk.

 

i was more interested in his writing career. saul told me about his next book, which he is committed to delivering to his publisher (mtv, yeah, mtv is publishing books) in late may 2005. i won’t give away the subject matter, except to say it is a mix of fiction and autobiography (parts of the book are literal transcriptions from saul’s journaling). as saul described the structure of his book, a point snapped into focus.

 

then saul got a cell call from frosty, his tour manager, he had to get back to check out early because they were going to get on the road right after the show rather than leave in the morning as originally planned. but before we left, saul urged me to finish making the point about the differences going down.

 

 

our relationship to race was radically different. he with his dark skin and nappy-headed fro—you know, not neatly trimmed like a superfly, more like the raggedness of a runaway whose head knows neither comb nor scissors. i, with my dark skin (although a shade or two lighter than saul), and my grey beard and uncut-but-not-uncombed afro, we could easily have passed for father and son, except we were talking amicably, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company.

 

i explained that in the seventies there was a major clash between the black power folk and the integrationists. we believed in nationtime and worked hard at creating alternatives: political organizations, schools, musical groups that didn’t include whites, hell, some of our venues didn’t even allow whites in the audience. and also at the same time we were doing that, there was a major push to counter our every move with mainstream supported, integrationist organizations. thus, at the height of the black arts theatre movement, rockerfeller and/or ford funded, in a major way, the “negro” ensemble company. how much clearer could they make it that there was a battle going on for the hearts and minds of black folk? moreover, the mainstream did not intend to concede one iota, indeed, they intended to win. and win they did.

 

i pointed out to saul that i recently read that the venerable dance theatre of harlem was defunct, kaput, finished, stick-a-fork-in-them; they started up in harlem teaching ballet at a time when blacks in modern dance were doing eleo pomare or else following chuck davis into institutionalizing african dance among african americans. and it was but a short pirouette from n.e.c. and d.t.h. to the modern day golddust twins, colin & condi. as i pointed out to saul, the twins had been groomed to do the jobs they were doing and they were good at it.

 

we have a whole generation of black folk who are deep into americanism, which reductively means into western values: fundamental christianity, winner-take-all democracy and global capitalism. but that was a choice and that was their right to choose to do so, even as i felt it my responsibility to chart a separate course. a course which includes a complex relationship to whites in general.

 

i recalled attending the sixth pan african conference in tanzania and meeting liberation leaders and seeing their european spouses. we had thought the struggle was for black freedom. both saul and i laughed as he said, yeah, it meant to be free to marry europeans.

 

part of me understood. during the civil rights era, the union of interracial couples was a very specific, and often very brave, political statement, a statement that could not be easily dismissed (even though many of us were often casually contemptuous of such relationships). and, as i told saul, today i co-direct a writing program in the orleans public schools. my fellow co-director and founder of the program is jim randels, a twenty-year-veteran public school teacher and union organizer. we work at black high schools. some of the kids call jim “jesus” because of his appearance: beard, long hair and white skin: the irony, of course, is that jim does not really look like jesus looked, only like the picture that europe has enshrined of how racists wanted jesus to look. many of the older teachers hate jim, for them he represents white supremacy still asserting itself in what they perceived is the guise of benevolence. yet, their politics is the flip story.

 

on the one hand, white-skinned jim is opposed to the status quo. on the other hand dark-skinned colleagues want to force our students to conform to the american way. i know where i stand on that issue, but i also know that race camouflages the major class, cultural and identify contradictions. this is a hard issue to deal with because of the emotional buttons that integration continues to push, less so with the youth, more so with the adults.

 

 

saul grunts and relates experiences in brazil where folk were asking him what did it feel like to be fire-hosed, and he had to explain that it was his parents’ generation who were fire-hosed, not him. but the brazilians with their history-lives tradition, found it hard to understand saul saying he and his parents were fundamentally different.

 

likewise, we, the parents of the saul williams-es of the world, wanted our children to be free of the burden of racism, but at the same time we tacitly expected them to wave the flag of racial solidarity—an action our children rightly perceive as equally burdensome. but there was more.

 

i got around to one of the harder aspects of our relationships while driving saul back to the hotel, which once had been a major department store and was now remolded as a luxury french quarter location. tourism is how new orleans’ makes its money. saul had wondered aloud about the young kids tap dancing on the sidewalk, hustling chump change, their bare torsos shinning, their air jordan sneakers with bottle caps embedded in the soles as surrogate taps. what could one say: don’t dance for your supper? in one way or another, don’t we all dance to the system’s piper in order to receive money?

 

“i believe we males are divided by the absent father syndrome.” saul quietly listened. it’s the dominant social reality of black family life. we older men are not there. and i wasn’t saying it as some lofty abstraction—i am in my second marriage. although i have a good relationship with my offspring, there was a time when i was not there.

 

far too many of our young men wouldn’t recognize their fathers if they were confronted at gunpoint. this male alienation, youth from elder, also too often unavoidably leads to a psychosis of self-hatred as young men father children but are estranged from the mothers of those children, except that the manifestation of the self-hatred is actualized in a visceral hatred by the single-father young black man for the absent-father older black man.

 

as we pulled up to the hotel, saul tentatively asked if i had time to attend his show, he would put my name at the door, although he knew i was really busy and probably didn’t have… i told him i would try to make it. we both knew a 10:30pm, punk-hop show wasn’t my particular cup of herbal peppermint tea.

 

i had forgotten that saul was coming to town, so i was pleasantly surprised when he had called me before noon the morning of the show. it was a touching act of filial respect. he didn’t have to reach out. i immediately suggested we go out for coffee, tea, or whatever. he agreed. now he was inviting me to go out. would i agree?

 

finding agreement is the question confronting our respective generations: can we agree to support each other, agree to participate in each other’s lives, even as we recognize that although we are both black, we are actually born of two different worlds, actually see each other and our respective futures in two different and sometimes contentious ways?

 

* * *

 

embracing black stacey

 

new orleans, 22 nov. 2004. when he came off the stage, even though i was standing near the steps, he didn’t see me. they had done a high energy set for over an hour, i knew the spaced-out look that was in his eyes.

 

 

at such moments you don’t really be seeing what is physically before you. you are seeing everything you remember from those past moments of using the power of performance to hurl yourself into the way-out-a-sphere, you are still immersed in that floating feeling, remembering your imagination boosted by the adrenalin of art creation. as he turned to head to the green room, i caught up to him quickly and shouted out a greeting. he turned. recognized. and embraced me like a lover, full body press. we were lovers and my presence made clear, in a way that no words or nothing else could: i care. i love. you. brother. son. man.

 

i’m glad you came.

 

i’m glad i came.

 

and we smiled at each other saying nothing for a couple of seconds. just smiling.

 

i was glad i got a chance to see the set. the punk element was really strong, as was the spoken word. saul is really figuring a way to mix it up. there were a number of moments i really, really liked although approximately 25% of the time the music, the beats, were so loud the words were indecipherable. but when you could hear, saul gave you an earful.

 

one headbanger had the hook: where my niggaz at? and the answer was incarcerated, in the military (“some benefits and a gun”). then there was a song called african student movement, during which saul cajoled us: instead of fighting for them, why not fight for health care, education… you get the point. but it was not all protest and hard beats, there was a tender moment—which is oxymoronic to talk about tenderness and punk-hop in the same breath, but tender is what it was.

 

 

saul started off making a point of what he saw as a difference between emcees and poets, the image of being hard and the reality of being human. he spoke out against “motherfuckers” whom he defined as anyone/everyone that denigrated and disrespected the feminine. saul challenged us to have the heart to acknowledge our human hearts. beautiful.

 

i watched the audience of approximately 120 people on a monday night in the ‘parish,” which is the new orleans house of blues’ small upstairs venue. the three-fifths filled room was approximately 75% white and 99.9 percent young. yours truly was the .1 percent that was old. at one point when saul was talking between numbers, someone asked for more beats and less talk. saul talked on. another time someone was on a cell phone, no, they were taking a picture...

 

another interesting note is that there was a hard core of saul-heads down front. on more than a few occasions, as saul recited a number they knew, the followers would loudly declaim the hook lines in unison with saul. it was undeniable: saul had found a way to penetrate into the consciousness of a core of folk in new orleans without the aid of radio and television, which was in fact one of saul’s objectives. earlier when he told me that going commercial was a way to reach folk, i nodded but retained reservations—how many times had i heard musicians say when i get famous i’m going to really come out with some stuff. my experience and analysis suggests that if you ain’t doing it when you’re unknown, you would not be likely to do it when you had fame and fortune at stake. but saul is not weighted down with my perspective.

 

for me, punk-hop is far, far removed from anything commercial, but saul has a recording deal, has a video about to be aired on mtv, has a book publishing deal, is making movies. so, the reality is: he’s commercial. and the reality also is he’s saying something and reaching people. more power to him. still, this is not my kind of scene, not the kind of venue i desire nor the type of music i enjoy.

 

but, even so, i realize, not only should i tolerate it, i should also embrace it and learn from what saul is doing. why? simply because when i was him, i too was striking out in startling new directions, directions that my parents would not have explored. he was black like i had been, i was then and am now no blacker than he.

 

for my money (i had a complimentary admission, but if i had paid to get in, for my money…) the best number was black stacey, an autobiographical number about growing up the son of haitian parents, his father a minister, and he dark-skinned and skinny. he talked about some of his more self-depreciating moments, and then hollered out the chorus: blaccckkkk stacey (which is his middle name).

 

 

he left nothing on the stage. was holding back nothing. gave it his all. the veins on the side of his neck buldging. his eyes bugging. throwing himself spastically into some of the more hyper-energetic numbers.

 

once again i was proud of what he was doing, even though it was clear he couldn’t play guitar (thankfully he only stabbed out chords on one number, wisely relying mostly on his mouth chops rather than his non-existant guitar chops—yet, wait a minute, this is punk, and it doesn’t matter that you are still learning some of the basics of your craft.

 

even though we had been standing at the foot of the stage steps less than five seconds, a bunch of stuff ran through my head in the brief interval. the crowd was hollering wildly, they wanted more.

 

saul leaned into me. “you know that piano poem?”

 

he was talking about my cecil taylor homage, “let me ‘splain it to ya.” i had to tell him no, i didn’t know it by heart. he asked me, you sure you don’t know it. i knew where this was going. he wanted to call me up to do a number with him for the encore. i declined. i told him, no, i didn’t remember it.

 

earlier while he was performing, there had been a couple of mili-moments when i thought about what i would do if i was on the stage, but no, this was saul’s night, this was his time, not mine. i didn’t need to be out there, especially since performing in this kind of venue was not something i wanted to do.

 

saul jumped back on the stage with his band. acknowledged me on mic and then they did two numbers. since i was now standing backstage, behind the bank of speakers, it was even more difficult to hear the words, but i watched the drummer. he was pounding full force, but while knocking out the hard rock rhythm, he was also mouthing the lyrics, clearly enjoying playing as much as the raucous crowd enjoyed receiving the music. it was a moment of oneness.

 

afterwards, saul asked, you want to come back, i said, no. i was headed home to get some sleep. i didn’t need to hang out with the band and the other young people who would invariably be there surrounding saul, one of the major voices of their generation. this was their time to step forward, and, in that specific context, my time to offer background support.

 

i didn’t need to hang out. it was sufficient that i had come and seen him perform, and had been there to embrace him when he came off the stage.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

I Want To Talk About You

(for my sister Czerny)

 

this poem was supposed to be

for/abt you but as i was thinking

i felt another need

& know in order to truth talk

abt you i had to truth talk

abt how our hours

on this earth spot

some call a civilized nation

has been bitter centuries long

long, long after the chains fell

our unhealed scars are serious sores

still too tender to touch

 

abt how few

of us really comprehend the enormity

of our history of captivity

not only the horror of what was done to us

but what the residue of that historic undoing

continues to do to us today

 

our genitals were

put on public display

 

if you were white

you could see cleotis' thing

silent in a sealed see-through coffin

howard kept the sinister cylinder at his shop

behind the unpainted cypress wood counter

out of plain sight but was always proud

to hoist the mason jar

with the shiriveled, pickled penis

into the surprise of sunlit delight

and the carefree hoots of the gathered

good old boys, although we never knew

who actually did the cutting

we all knew where the evidence was kept

 

they say in france they got

the vagina of our sister entombed

(for medical research of course)

venus, the "hottentot venus"

they sarcastically called her,

and when she was alive they paraded her

naked on a pay per view basis

and people paid to see how big her butt

was, and later after she died, how big

her vagina was, and the worse

part was that crowds of humans

actually went and oohed and ahhed

and paid money to see something

the creator gave to all of us

 

could my name be cleotis

could your name be venus

& why should anyone want

to trophy our genitals?

 

i turn over naked

in my nude sleep sometimes,

hold myself hard with my hand

and imagine the pain

and wonder how does a man

live without himself?

 

what i really want to talk abt

is how we lived despite

the mutilations

i am so impressed by the beauty

of a people who can survive

the public display of our privates,

who could rise the next morning

face the pain and still believe

in living a good life

 

you are one of those old ones

the women who tear-washed

and bare-handedly buried the broken bodies

cauterized wounds and stitched together

some kind of tough, tough love

that mended men

and raised the manchild even after

the man was gone

 

this poem is

for you and all the race

women like you who continue

to feed us reason to live

when suicide seems unavoidably sensible

 

me and all my manhood

bears daily witness

i would be nothing were it not

for the redemptive love

of certain of my sisters, my mothers

my aunts, grandmothers and 

women friends securely umbilicaling

sustenance into my soul

 

all the remaining years of my life

i will never cease

wanting to talk abt you

needing to talk abt you

to talk abt you

talk abt you

 

—kalamu ya salaam