Odds and Ends

It's another week of writing and searching for an agent and a publisher for Boy At The Window. Many thanks for the comments and email over the past couple of weeks. I'm glad that folks are reading and are giving feedback on my ramblings. I do plan to continue to update and improve the website, including the blog section, so there may be a few glitches along the way. I apologize in advance, and hope that all of you can bear with me.

There's not much news to report on my search for an agent. I received three rejections last week, including one from an agent who apparently is too swamped to take on another client but thinks that my work is "impressive." I often don't know what to make of rejections, but I assume that the fact I received a response is impressive enough. For the month, I've received twelve total rejections, mostly of the "your work is good but..." variety. Sometimes I think that there must be an easier way to find agents besides going to writer's conferences and workshops or working the process as if it were a police investigation and a research project all wrapped together. I find myself thinking, "Maybe I should've gone to Harvard or Columbia, Oberlin or UMass, Morehouse or NYU, someplace where future literary agents and editors congregate before working at a publishing house or an agency." But then I realize that I can only do what I'm doing now, and to keep doing what I'm doing until I either break through or until everyone tells me that my writing skills are about as impressive as an aging frat boy farting on my living room couch with my family present.

I did add an unpublished essay, titled "Shouting 'Race' in a Crowded Theater," to the website today (under the "Other Writings" button). As I said in my cover letter to magazines for the piece at the end of last year, "I discuss an incident that occurred on my company’s volleyball team. It was subtle enough that if I hadn’t been paying attention, I would’ve missed it. Yet the more interesting aspect of this story wasn’t so much what happened during the game. It was after the game and after I politely raised the issue of bias that those subtle group dynamics became more obvious. Within this story is a message for us all around the nature of group (or societal) chemistry and how that can trump our more politically correct and conscious selves regardless of intent, as well as what to do about it."

The larger story here is that we need not shout “Race!”—nor be in a “crowded theater”—to send people running in panic. One needs only to say “race” loud enough for a few folks to hear to generate a cynical or fearful response. But that’s the irony of race in America these days. In group settings, particularly ones in which there is a clear and significant majority, the issue of race is taboo, even when group dynamics indicate an unconscious set of attitudes and actions that those in the minority can interpret as bias. Now I'm no psychologist or sociologist. But I do think that these dynamics leave all of us with more questions than answers about race and about ourselves, about whether we actually act as individual or if we really are sheep.

It's another theme in Boy At The Window, how group dynamics can heighten the insensitivities and cruelities of life in a program, school or community. I know, I know, I spend too much time thinking about things that make others' heads hurt. Oh well. Someone has to do the heavy lifting here, so it might as well be me.

It's Been Twenty Years...

Thursday, June 18, 1987. It was twenty years ago on this date that I graduated from Mount Vernon High School, twenty years ago today. After two decades and a manuscript that covers the years leading up to this date, you'd think that I'd have some witty and unconventionally intellectual perspectives on this day. Yet all I've been thinking about is if I or my former classmates will really try this time or over the next five years to have a class reunion.

Ten years ago, a few did just that, without really taking the time to plan it right. Out of our graduating class of 509 students, only 72 actually made it to the reunion in October '97. Most of those folks had stayed or moved back to Mount Vernon, New York. I only found out about the reunion through one of the few classmates with whom I still had contact and a friendship, whom herself only found out because her father was once a prominent man in the city. Neither of us had been invited, at least not directly. I decided not to go, coming off of three months of unemployment as a new Ph.D. and in need of money to present at a conference in Philly at the same time as this partial reunion. From everything I heard, though, it was an overpriced disappointment, kind of like my times in Mount Vernon High School. The cliques that became post-high school circles of friends mostly showed up. None of them included my circles of classmates, as many were long gone by '97.

But this isn't all there is to think about when it comes to the twentieth anniversary of the end of my formal schooling in my first hometown. Mostly the issue for me is waste and loss. When I started seventh grade in '81, there were nearly 1,700 other students (about 75 percent of them of Black, Afro-Caribbean and Latino descent) that could've been part of my Class of '87. By the time we reached ninth grade, that number was down to 1,075. The very first day of high school, our principal Richard Capozzola had all ninth graders report to auditorium to welcome us. "Four years from now, only half of you will graduate," he said with a jaded sense of sternness. I didn't think the man cared if any of us would ever graduate. Of course he was wrong. Less than half of us graduated four years later.

Even if you were to account for the affluent Whites and middle class Blacks who left Mount Vernon and the high school before graduation for private and parochial school or another school district, it would only account for a tiny fraction of the attrition. The building that I grew up in, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, is a more typical example of what I'm sure happened to so many of my former classmates. At least two people I knew who dropped out ended up becoming low-level drug dealers and would spend most of the past twenty years in and out of jail (mostly in). One neighbor and former classmate who dropped out became a prostitute, contracted HIV and died from AIDS a couple of years ago. So many others became drug addicts or wandered from job to job or became mothers before I finished college that it almost goes without mentioning.

Of those of us who went on to college and left Mount Vernon behind, my more immediate classmate circle, the bonds we formed during middle school and high school were about as strong as wet pieces of toilet paper. It's sad, really, when I think about it now. I can count on one hand the former classmates I have regular contact with, and half of those are as a result of writing Boy At The Window.

I do hope that we do have a 20th or 25th anniversary reunion. I just hope that enough time has past to heal the wounds of loss and waste that were so much a part of our lives back then--and for many of us, have survived to this day. To those of us how have succeeded and survived, I tip my cap to each of you and hope that life is treating you kindly, certainly more kindly than back then. Vaya con dios and, dare I say it, happy anniversary!

Five Minds for the Status Quo

I just finished reading Howard Gardner's latest book Five Minds for the Future, and found it both interesting and disappointing. Interesting in that the father of multiple intelligences came up with a holistic approach to living out our lives utilizing--and in some cases, going beyond--these intelligences with the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creative mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. Disappointing in that his examples and his book were both geared to White male executives, the minds of the past (and to a great extent, the present) as opposed to the future.

I guess I shouldn't really be surprised. I've been reading books on leadership and innovation for years, finding that almost all are attempting to preach to the converted, to folks who already are leaders and (presumably) innovative. But given my love for Gardner's multiple intelligences work, I decided to give Five Minds for the Future a shot. Only to find example after example of Western culture's exclusive claims on the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, and the creative mind as the embedded message throughout the first chapters. Marie Curie was mentioned a couple of times, along with medieval China. Only when we move into the chapters on the respectful and ethical mind did folks of color or other cultures show up, and those were the usual suspects like Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and The Dalai Lama. It's with a bit of irony and significant contradiction on Gardner's part that in his attempt to proclaim the need for tolerance and even the embracing of diversity he didn't practice what he preached.

I don't necessarily expect Gardner to spend more time discussing Imhotep or Mayan mathematics or the ancient Indus valley's number system than Aristotle or Leonardo or Isaac Newton. What I did expect, though, was a more well-rounded understanding that in his discussion of the contents of each of these "five minds" that Gardner would've included more diverse (by age [and Age], race, ethnicity and gender) examples to make the point that in the future the leaders who've integrated these five minds wouldn't consistently be White males.

What does any of this have to do with Boy At The Window or Fear of a "Black" America? Both books and much of my career as a writer and educator has been in response to a sense of exclusion. Not racial exclusion per se, but the idea that it was all right to ignore the existence or contributions of others to an organization or class. I went into an exclusionary gifted/talented track program when I went to middle school in '81. I felt excluded by many of my teachers when I was in high school. I saw how others felt when being excluded from a college or an activity. Although exclusion in life is often necessary ("not everyone can go to Harvard or Yale, right?"), it doesn't help when folks like Gardner are unnecessarily exclusive in their descriptions of concepts that are allegedly universal and inclusive. It's okay to applaud Gardner's book for its potential in explaining how to live successful and ethical lives as lifelong learners. But it's equally all right to criticize him for writing to an audience that is more focused on themselves and their present rather than those most apt to be the "five minds of the future."

Twenty Years in a Week

Boy @ The Window is an in-depth story about my preteen and teenage years growing up in Mount Vernon, New York. Most of those years were difficult, violent, and even heart-breaking at times. But those years weren't all bad, and at times I felt downright inspired even in the worst of times. This week twenty years ago represents some of the worst of my experiences and how they shaped me into the person I am today.


This past weekend, June 9 and 10, made it twenty years since my last two days at Mount Vernon High School. For better or worse, I spent my Saturday at the Washington Independent Writers Conference on George Washington University's campus. It was a boring and pompous affair led by literary agents who, as usual, talked down to us allegedly neophyte writers as if we didn't know in advance how much money we had wasted on the registration fee.


Yet it gave me time to think about another June 9, a Tuesday in '87. That evening, our high school held an Honors Convocation to hand out awards to deserving graduates, especially those of us heading immediately to a four-year college. There were almost 150 of us on stage in the high school auditorium, with a full house of nearly 800 parents, teachers, relatives and friends. But only two of us--the top two in our class of 509 students--really had any face time. For nearly two hours, our principal and administrators called out the same two names over and over again. All the while I watched my classmates squirm in their seats out of boredom or frustration. It was almost a surprise when I did head other names called for awards. I had no delusions that I would win lots of scholarships or awards, but I hoped to win at least one. Well, I did win two, one for perfect attendance (I missed thirteen days of school in four years), and the presidential academic fitness award (which everyone on stage received). Seething from the experience, I immediately dumped my two pieces of paper in a garbage can on my way out the building.



My WIW '07 experience felt pretty much the same, except that I came into the conference with low expectationsto begin with. Neither experience, though, tops what happened on my last day of high school. For those of you who've read Fear of a "Black" America, particularly the beginning of Chapter 4, the story that follows should sound familiar. After my eighth-period Health class, I walked down the second floor steps and the first floor halls of the high school to my locker one more time. While clearing out my locker, Estelle Abel walked by and asked to meet with me. I went over to her office, and for the next fifteen minutes, she proceeded to explain to me how much of a disappointment I was while a student at MVHS.


Abel claimed that I had underachieved throughout my four years as a student, that I should have been ranked in the top ten of my class, and that my performance in AP Physics was beyond abominable. All I could focus on was the amount of anger and emotion she possessed in her voice and eyes. You’d have thought that I’d been expelled from school or had raped her daughter.


There were two really odd things Abel said during her attack on my character. One was that I had let down the Black students of the school and "my community" by not finishing closer to the top of my class. She said, "You could’ve been a shining example of achievement to us," all but hinting that I should’ve been like the Black guy who finished second in our class and was on his way to Harvard. I guess I did let my Black classmates down. I only ranked second in GPA among Black males and eighth among all African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans in my class.

Abel’s other comments really surprised me."You don’t have any excuses! There is nothing going on at home that could justify your performance." When I disagreed, the Science department head’s face turned stern. She said that nothing occurring in my life would ever compare to the problems Blacks faced "back in the 1960s . . . I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King!" I clicked off my eardrums at that point. Short of showing her my war wounds and having her meet my family, what could I possibly do or say to that?


Thinking about all of that over the weekend and watching HBO's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee left me feeling sorry for myself for a couple of hours yesterday. I know that there's no comparison, but loss is loss, whether it's physical, cultural or psychological in nature. It would ridiculous for me to say that those last days of high school motivated my journey to become the author of Fear of a "Black" America or write my Boy At The Window manuscript. Those events, though, did make me realize that I needed to live my life on my own terms, regardless of whether folks in my life showered me with praise or tried to tear me a new one. Or, as it's been the case more often than not, have shown indifference to my struggles and triumphs. I also learned something else. People, even well-meaning people like myself, sometimes don't get it and allow their own crap to get in the way of their work to help others. I just hope that my crap isn't getting in the way of folks reading this today.

About Boy @ The Window

I hope that this posting provides some comfort to those of you who've wondered for months whether I ever planned to update my website. Starting this week, I plan to make a posting every week to Fear of a "Black" America.com under the banner "Notes from a Boy @ The Window," based on the title for my second manuscript. Speaking of which, Boy At The Window is now a full manuscript and has been revised several times since the beginning of 2007. Since the end of February--and especially since the end of April--I've been looking for a literary agent to represent and sell Boy At The Window to a commercial publisher. I decided that it made the most sense to take the manuscript the commercial route despite the horrors of going this route with Fear of a "Black" America. I want to make the book as physically accessible to readers as possible, and the commercial publishing world is still the best way to do this, even with all its difficulties and pretenses.

In the meantime, I want to continue to share my writing and my ideas with readers, including the major themes embedded in Boy At The Window. The best place to start is why now, why this time to write a memoir, with only one published book under my belt? In so many ways, I've been writing Boy At The Window since I was twelve years old, since the day I witnessed my mother being knocked unconscious by my ex-stepfather. There were so many lessons about perseverence, about creating my own sense of identity, of believing in making my dreams real even though every bit of evidence around me said that this was impossible. By about five years ago, I knew that it was time to take my teenaged journals, my memories, dreams and nightmares, and write about the events that and the people who shaped me into the person I'd become, success and good, bad and ugly. Plus, I knew that I needed to finish this project before the twentieth anniversary of graduating from Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, New York. It just felt like I had enough distance to write a book and interview former teachers and classmates, to visit family and relatives, to relive awful experiences without reverting to my twelve or seventeen year-old self. All of this is to say that my lack of communication via this website has been because Boy At The Window has been an all-consuming project for nearly a year and a half. But the writing end of things is pretty much "done" now, and I have much to share to whomever wants to read and respond. Thank you all for your patience.