Four!

This isn't a blog on Huey Lewis & The News' awful album from '86 or a revisit to the critique of it, as offered by Christian Bale's character from the 1999 movie American Psycho. My son Noah turns four today. Four! It's unbelievable that we've made it this far.

But I wonder how he'll see me once he's old enough to understand Boy At The Window. Assuming that I'll find a publisher and everything goes well, that is. How will Noah see his dad when he's nine or thirteen or seventeen? Will he see a pathetic wimp of a person? Will he want to emulate me? Will he spend his time brooding over the pressure he may feel to measure up or to live down what he inherits from me?

Truth is, I don't have a clue as to how Noah will see me by the time he's old enough to understand the life that I lived twenty or twenty-five years ago. Heck, by the time Noah's nine, much of what Boy At The Window's about would be more than thirty years in the past. U2's The Joshua Tree and Michael Jackson's Thriller would be twenty-five and thirty years old by the time Noah can understand why his father would want him to understand the meaning of redemption or how to overcome heartbreak. Even the music I listen to now--from Anthony Hamilton to Nickelback--would be at least a decade old by the time he's ready to load up his own (wireless) MP3 player.

I hope that me and my wife give Noah the gift of balance, of not just having a dream and pursuing it but also the ability to take time to smell the flowers, to enjoy the process. To feel joy and not have the sense that his world will come crashing down if enjoys himself too much. To pursue his education to the best of his ability but also to know that his best is good enough, for us and for this world. To be a well-rounded person who cares about others but isn't gullible enough to be pressured by his peers into saying or doing something he should. To see others as they are and to imagine them as they could be without overindulging his reality or his dreams.

I want so much for Noah to have experiences and to enjoy his growing-up years in ways that I couldn't or couldn't imagine. I just hope he doesn't think less of me because of the person I used to be, the enigmatic loner whose world was crashing around me. It may be too much too soon for me to be thinking about. Especially since Noah's life has been pretty good so far. And after all, Noah's only four.

A Dream That Had to Die

I'm approaching another Boy At The Window related milestone this week, a not-so-fun twenty years since experiencing an obsession-driven heartbreak. This involved another crush, another young woman out of my league, one which left me scarred for a little more than a year.

She was one of those mid- to late-80s cool Black girls, attractive and popular, yet one of the nicest people I'd known during my middle school and high school days. The things I remember about her most are kind of silly and sensuous. I remember her long legs, her long dark hair, her always wearing skirts in public. I remember her lips and bright white smile most of all. She was all of 5'7", and seemed to be always there to pick up my spirits. I guess that was why I ended up wanting to date her by the middle of my junior year.

But images of the mind, no matter how powerful and complex, can only begin to capture the reality of the person who could be the object of your affection. So it was with shy and pitiful me our senior year and the summer before college. I tried but I could never figure out a way to ask her out, to tell her that I liked her, to tell her that I was terrified of my own emotions about her and about her learning about my family. After a few weeks of stifled attempts at conversation, I accidentally ended up overhearing a bitter conversation about me between my crush and her sister outside of a mall in White Plains. I wasn't a man, I certainly wasn't a Black man, so she kept saying to her sister.

I was devastated. I didn't have the greatest opinion of myself to begin with. I went into my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh more protective of my heart than I'd ever been. Still, with the help of a female friend that I'd made during the summer, I decided to confront my obsession, leading to a letter that brought me more despair and heartache. She had all but destroyed my image of her as someone who could save me from the horrors of my world, someone who I could pour all of my confidence and aspirations into.

I finished that semester with a C+ average, homesick and not sure about people or my future. I completely distrusted anything any woman had to say about me that semester. Most of all, I distrusted myself. How could I allow this "triflin' ass" -- as one of my friends described her -- affect my grades, my life like she had? I took all of that anger and focused it on my classes, and pulled my over GPA back up to a B in the process.

You could say that I learned my lesson. But that would be a lie. I had to go through a summer of unemployment and a week of homelessness my sophomore year at Pitt before I learned one of life's most important lessons. Trust is a decision that we all have to make, even if it does mean heartbreak, because trust -- especially in yourself -- allows you to see people as they are and as you would hope they could be. Trust means taking risks with your heart, means being honest with yourself about why you may be terrified to date or for someone to know about your dark past. Trust means that people, even people you may know fairly well, may betray you in some way, but trusting anyway, because it's the only way to live a great life.

I also learned that much of what I thought I saw in my second crush reminded me a lot of my mother. Especially around definitions of manhood and being a Black male. We were supposed to be bold, even arrogant. We were expected to make the first move, in dating or otherwise. We were supposed to break away from our families but be there for them at the same time, to succeed in the world but never forget where we came from. I realized that my mother and my obsession were both wrong, that they didn't know me, and had no right to lay their expectations on me. I figured out, for the first time in my life, that having a mind as powerful as mine brought with it the responsibility to tame it, especially when it came to figuring out men and women. I needed to trust my instincts, that a bright smile and wonderful lips didn't equal a sense of seriousness or integrity or actual kindness. I could still dream of a kiss. I just needed to make sure that the rest of the person in that dream was worth kissing.

Still, I have to thank her, my second infatuation. I wouldn't have known what not to look for in women or in friends without this experience. I learned as much about what attracted me to my first crush as I did about what kept me from going after my second one. The women I've dated and the woman I married all benefitted from my period of mindful obsession. My college education, formal and informal, became that much sweeter once I let go and allowed myself the opportunities that only trust in myself could bring.

My Motivations

Given my recent blogs, why in the world would I write a book about the worst years of my life? Years in which my wonderful moments were sprinkled in between segments of loneliness, hostility and betrayal? Am I a fool or just an arrogant SOB who has nothing better to do than blather on about his rather ordinary life?

The answers to why write and publish Boy At The Window now are simple, so much so that they surprise me. I'm motivated by the reality that my adult life has been much more pleasant than my life was twenty or twenty-five years ago. Not only my education. My social life, my family life, my Christian life, my career choices have almost all been good experiences, successful endeavors, wonderful choices. But even with all of that, I've remained unhappy when I otherwise should be, continue to see myself as an underdog, and in want for more in my life. This despite all of the blessings that have befallen me since leaving Mount Vernon for college. I want to know what in my past has made it difficult for me to celebrate a milestone like finishing a degree, enjoy the work I do, to not worry about money even when all the bills are paid.

Boy At The Window has helped me figure out much of what is ailing me. I tend to see myself as an underdog, so I put myself in positions where I'm fighting against a system, whether it be academia, the nonprofit sector and my supervisors, or the materialism of modern-day Christianity. Even though I'm optimistic about my own ability to succeed in life, I tend to expect the other shoe to drop, as it did a week and a half after I was awarded a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in April 1995. That's when my mother and four younger siblings were rendered homeless by a fire at 616 East Lincoln in Mount Vernon. They began a nearly three-year-long odyssey of homelessness and semi-homelessness before moving back to 616. I'm almost always on the lookout for something that could threaten my future or that of my son and wife. Nuclear annihilation. Global warming. A high debt to income ratio. :-)

I know, I know. I should've gotten over all of the misadventures I experienced growing up by now. And for the most part I have. Yet that doesn't mean that there aren't scars, that there aren't things going on within me that I'm otherwise unconscious of. So many of us who do "make it" out of poverty and abuse "by the grace of God" refuse to look back to see how much of our lives continue to be determined by the forces that shaped our upbringing. In order to be truly free, which for me means to be free to be happy in every way possible, it means confronting the past in a way that allows it to stay in the past.

It also means realizing that there are other people like me out there, maybe a ten ot twelve or sixteen-year-old who doesn't think much of himself (or herself) or his community or parents. Someone flying right under the radar at school but a person who has talents and abilities that they can't quite imagine unleashing in a way to transform their life. Someone who believes that there's more to life than what they've experienced but doesn't exactly know how to get there. Someone willing to make sacrifices, to take risks to make their life worth living, if only someone or something were there to help them. I hope that Boy At The Window can reach them and teach them a way to trust without being gullible, to hope without worrying about loss, to be happy even when it might seem that there isn't a reason to be so.

A Word on the Positive Side

Some of you may think that Boy At The Window is mostly a dark, depressing tale of struggle and strive with bits and pieces of silver lining mixed in. That's not true, but the context for what pushed me into the journey that I've taken over the years arose out of moments like the one that I described on Friday. On the positive tip, the one silver lining, the one theme from 1982 that helped me get through an otherwise soul-destroying year was my seventh-grade crush.

Not that the girl whom was the object of my infatuation ever noticed. We fought twice, and for most of the year, we exchanged barbs and insults, most of them of the ridiculously stupid variety. But after watching her ballerina performance in class one day, I was smitten with attraction. It was the first time in my life that I had a crush on anyone my own age, much less a classmate. I found myself daydreaming about kissing her in class, my heart skipping a beat before pounding in my chest. My stomach would tie itself into knots upon seeing her arrive at school with her entourage at hand.

I don't know when my crush on her turned into a metaphor for redemption. Somewhere around the time of my witnessing my ex-stepfather's abuse of my mother, my classmate became more than just an attractive, fierce, and abundantly gifted individual. She became the type of person I aspired to be. Someone confident, fearless, able to take on the world. Someone who could defy gravity and my otherwise emotionally enigmatic self and pull out of me passions and possibilities that I never knew existed. That's what she became to me at twelve. I've hoped ever since to meet people throughout my life that reminded me of my one-crush, at least the way I saw her back then.

By the time I began to get my head kicked in, I had transferred some of my feelings and thoughts about my crush to my mother. That gave me the strength that I needed to get through the summer. I know that this transference set me up for attraction to two kinds of people (women especially) in my life -- those who are passionate, purposeful, and represent "damsels in distress," and those who are popular and could be passionate and purposeful.

After a quarter-century, I've come to appreciate the different (and different) kinds of folks whom have been a part of my life because of my basic need for inspiration, for passion, to be saved, most of all from my past. I stopped pining away for my favorite ballerina years ago. But there is still a twelve-year-old in me who wouldn't mind going back in time to steal a kiss, to grab her hand and thank her for being there (even if she didn't know she was "there"), for waking me out of my childhood slumber.

Another Day of Days

It's been twenty-five years since I've experienced some of the worst physical abuse that I could ever imagine short of rape. It was July 6th, a Tuesday in 1982, when my now ex-stepfather began the afternoon by literally whipping me in my bedroom for not tracking down and beating up my mugger from two weeks before. I was all of twelve and a half, barely five-foot-four, and still in shock from seeing him knock my mother unconscious at the end of Memorial Day that year. I got mugged at the end of June because I carelessly walked around with ten dollars in my hand at the nearby public park and swimming pool, the largest one in Mount Vernon.

So there I was two weeks later, stripped naked and being beaten with my arms and legs spread against a dirty eggshell white wall because I failed to find a man who went by "Pookie," about five-ten and at least five years older than me. When I yelled that my stepfather wasn't my father, the already ugly situation became criminal. I took several punches to the head, jaw, ribs and stomach, was picked up by my arms and thrown into the wall in my room. The man who had claimed to be changed by becoming a Hebrew-Israelite then said, "Go to police! I dare you... I'll kill you!" If not for my mother coming home from work by mid-afternoon, I probably would've been in an emergency room, maybe even murdered. As it was, I would spend the next five weeks under constant abuse from the man who wanted me to call him "Dad."

I discovered about a year later that my stepfather and "Pookie" actually knew each other, that he had paid "Pookie" to go to the park to mug me, to make me "into a man," as he'd liked to say all the time.

I can't believe that it's been twenty-five years. Especially since I wasn't sure I'd make it to the end of 1982 when all of this abuse stuff started. It's the ultimate irony, though. If it weren't for that summer of abuse at home and my experiences in the gifted track at school -- not to mention a crush I had on one of my classmates -- I wouldn't be in the position to write these words. I found myself so down at times that I thought about killing myself. But the anger and rage that came from that abuse, the desire for revenge and my unrequited infatuation on a girl that I had built up as a savior of sorts all kept me going in July and August of '82.

It's difficult to be thankful for so much pain that was the beginning of my journey for survival and success, but in many ways I am thankful. Every moment I breathe, live, work, write, teach, learn, succeed, love, forgive and care for others is a moment of revenge, a moment that I've taken away from those horrible days and times. Obviously I haven't forgotten what happened to me (I still bare a few scars on my right leg and back, not to mention in my trust of those who've claimed authority over me over the years). But that's what my memoir is all about, the ability to forgive, to understand what's been lost, to find one's self and truth even in the midst of violence and chaos. So I mourn a little for the person that I was at twelve today, but just a little, because I also know that I have a life that my twelve-year-old self could only dream of. I hope that he can smile about that today.

I'm Teaching Again

Tomorrow marks the beginning of another teaching gig for me, this one at Howard University in their Department of Afro-American Studies. I'm teaching a summer session course in research methods for Black Studies for undergraduate majors. This will be the sixth university in which I have taught since 1992, but this will be my first time teaching at an historically Black college and my first time teaching this course.

I wrapped the course around the theme of African American identity and the various ways to approach this broad and fundamentally important topic to anyone of African descent living in the US (White South Africans included - :-) ). I hope that my student can appreciate the levels of complexity and subtlety involved in identity construction and perception that we all live with as individuals and as members of a particular group or society, especially in this society.

I'm of two minds as I approach my class for the first time tomorrow. One, I recognize that I have spent the past quarter-century or so attempting to make sense of who I am and where I fit or don't fit in this world. I know that because of my voice and education that many Blacks assume that I'm "acting White" from the moment I open my mouth to say "Hi" or "Yo". I've had numerous experiences with Whites who assume because I'm 6'3" and still in decent shape that they can start a conversation with "Yo, what's up man" and launch into a basketball discussion before I've learned their name. Those from other ethnicities might make their own assumptions, but my experience has been that they tend to keep them to themselves. So I plan to approach the topic with some patience and with kid gloves on, at least initially. My biggest issue is the fact that I'm not an academic true-believer, in that I don't believe that scholarly research is the best or only way to address questions in Black Studies, including the topic of African American identity.

Mind number two is the one that reminds me that I've been doing research around my own identity and on the issue of racial, ethnic, and societal identity for almost half my life, since I was the age of the students I'm about to teach. I can question the validity of research now more than ever because of my experiences and because of the knowledge that good scholarship often isn't enough to touch the minds and hearts of others, much less their will to act on the knowledge that they've received.

Research certainly has it place. It was integral to Boy At The Window. The local newspaper records (Mount Vernon Daily Argus dating back to 1976), a copy of my high school yearbook, some Board of Education docs I managed to obtain long before I started this book, New York State Department of Education school district report cards and my interviews benefitted my writing of Boy At The Window a great deal. But ultimately all research and the methods you use to collect it is a journey, to find the truth, a truth and/or your truth. It's not an end in itself. Sometimes I think folks in the academic world forget that. I hope that my students, at least, get that if nothing else.