CHAPTER 1 --james, mos def, MY BROTHA & me

I.

James, my brother is fourteen now, about the age when you and I began interacting on life with the best and worst of our thoughts. When I go home I see in his eyes, the challenge of becoming human in this new century. I was fortunate to have you as a comrade then and read in your works, especially The Fire Next Time, an excerpt to the story my inner actions were writing. Your Fire lit me and shined a path on how to fight whatever fever or chill will exist in my time.

There were differences between you and me, James, as there are between the two of us and my brother. Somehow, your differences and mine were united by the debilitating elements which sustained the forty years from your Avenue to mine. In seeking our better version, one that held on to dignity, pride and promise in the face of a world which, when left to its own devices, will do everything but uplift the better parts of our black boy selves, we learned more of life than my brother ever will. We knew a mighty power churned within because its movement brought us through pressure, pain, torment and tortuous days when death seemed the most inexpensive, most expressive and freest solution to our malady. Along the way to acceptance and love, you and I found a strength to overcome the misfortune life continued, and continues to blight on its black sons. It was as if the drama of interacting day and night under the backdrop of America's black and white racial projection became a corny, predictable, yet safe Saturday matinee serial which we sat through. We learned to operate, maneuver through, walk around, forget about, confront racism.

You and I (you more than I, and my brother less than me, because his reality has shifted from harsh black and white, to some nebulous touch of gray he may not be able to see through, much less survive) found great satisfaction in overcoming every obstacle a confused and racist society lays out for its damned. With each encounter, you saw as I did, that dealing with racism was a metaphor for achieving a better humanity. And the more I learned about my black history and about myself, the easier it was to make sense of the smoke and mirrors America calls reality. Little has changed in the American theater. The haze of racist ideology is still as damnable and unnecessary as the unconscious people who fear themselves enough to cover their eyes and oppress our lives. Damn them all, you showed me, for my life was more important than their conceptions of it. Some were lesser men who did not merit our pity. Some --for you also saw the conscious white folks out there-- deserved our time and honesty. But most were folks, damned and oppressed like us, yet to come to grips with who they were as human beings.

For you and me, being human began with a foundation in the politics of religious morality. If we played our cards right, the pearly gates, angels and White House of heaven waited in the afterlife. This earthly page was the chronicle of deeds to be kept in that good book opened upon Revelation's trumpeted morning. But something happened to our conviction for a God both of us felt only in fear and mostly when we did bad. (And according to your world, black boys did everything bad.) Like you said, people “ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell.” Something happened to you when you found your gimmick for coping with Harlem, USA and became a minister in your father’s church. There you bore witness to the systemic indoctrinating, false piety, illusion and corruption with no salvation for the folks who needed it most --the black folks you and I both knew we had to make sense of and reason for. Something happened to me when I found out what Christianity had done to the black man in the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Australia --wherever the damned lay claim to the oppressive backside of history's misfortune. Something happened which made me question, not the legitimacy of religious virtue --for, as you know, I still feared the fire and brimstone promise of my final days. I questioned the ritual practice of vice in the caveat of organized religion. I sought a better way of teaching humanity's building blocks without turning them into the black boy's stumbling blocks.

I recall an American Studies class in high school where we read documents written by the first settlers at Jamestown. I cut at least once each week, stopped listening to the teacher and cried in silence. It was painful to listen to white people's rationality about slavery. No one saw the tears, but I wept when I understood the logic in the decisions of gentrified, civil English aristocrats. It all made so much sense when my teacher read the journals and manifestos. The first settlers seldom worked the land in England, so why work it in America? When more land became available, they ordered more horses, more oxen, more human chattel to toil beneath a blazing sun. The damn thing was so rational. I understood the logic because scholastic science and math had imbibed in me a process where justifiable action was all but incontestable. They called it the scientific process. That is, if an action could be proven or reasoned through with the use of some organized set of skills and tools, it was, for all intents and purposes, OK --even if justification was only on paper and not in the heart and soul of any human being. I cried when, for one split second, I reasoned that slavery was inevitable and furthermore, it made sense at that time in America’s studies. In that split second, I cursed myself for having a brain, for having thoughts, for skillfully mastering, through years of self denial and self hate, the process of divorcing my black boy gut feelings from the caveat of scholastic thought.

As stated, my early thoughts and yours were dominated by Christian virtue. We were taught morals that would save us --from what, we feared but never fully understood. Growing up, I was told never to look at the sky for too long because I would see the face of God and die immediately. My heaven would come in its own time. I wanted to get there right away, but didn’t want to die to do so. Heaven was important in St. Vincent --my Caribbean island homeland-- as it was in Harlem, in the beginning. Vincentians possessed nothing if not the conviction that our poor lot in life would be made richer by having God in our homes, our hearts and always in the back of our minds. As a boy, I made it clear that I wanted to become a pastor in the Anglican Church. Everyone I talked to accepted this as an attainable goal for it seemed the best way to assure a spot in heaven. My family was well off by our town's standards --we had a refrigerator and more family in America who sent us things-- so the possibility of studying to pastor hood was not altogether ludicrous. Even island society's outcasts, the rastafarians, accepted the sanctity of religious grounding. My father --a devout rastafarian-- knew more about the Bible than any church man or layman I met. Even though he and my mother split when I was five, he kept close enough to give me a black, leather bound, King James Bible for my sixth birthday --so we could be closer in spirit and with Jah. My father lived my himself but he was never alone. He grew whatever food he needed and seldom went without. In the simplicity of his self-sufficient, subsistent lifestyle he showed me some people didn't need an institution to learn and live a spiritual life.

I wonder about my brother's youthful spirit, James, not on any religious level, but on the human level you and I both know it dwells on, begs to be looked at, studied, engaged with, outwitted, defied and ultimately mastered. You came from the blacker days of my American history, when religious hypocrisy, political chicanery, social indemnity, moral atrocity were your everyday reality --right out there on the Avenue; all up in your face. I can imagine your Avenue, with the pimp, whore and racketeer, "who really believed what the white man said about him." I can imagine the psychic tension you must have felt walking those streets, clutching your Bible, knowing what the white man said about you, searching for something holier than the pimps, whores and racketeers, the life you all led and the games it must have played on the dreams of your childhood. And even most of those dreams were blocked, shattered or discarded before you realized they existed. The unconscious in the white world aborted your American dreams, your human aspirations and sought to continually blacken the spirit within you. Such were your days. America is ready, willing and able to discard my brother in a similar fashion. You and I know this.

My days in America began in the same blackened fashion. In St. Vincent, the only white people I saw were occasional tourists passing through our town in jeeps. White was a crayon color, chalk, a shirt worn on Sunday morning. The sand on my beach was black, my Prime Minister, mayor, teacher, pastor, my butcher, baker and candlestick maker were all black. Blackness --as a self identity, a definition, a limit, a vantage point, a hole, a prison, a paradox, a curse, a means-to-an-end, a cloak, a cover, a shield, a shed skin, a release from, an awakening unto, a profound journey through, a spiritual fulfillment of one's self prophesy, my greatest human virtue; black as such, was something I did not think about until I came to this --another-- country in 1985, at the age of nine.

Island children with enough security sleep sound and dream of The States --as everyone would say, with an inflected reverence reserved only for God and teachers. America's riches afforded a line to salvation St. Vincent would never provide. And those with a connection to that line were teachers on the island. With stories of material excess and opportunities island life limits altogether, the fortunate sons and daughters of St. Vincent --those who had money, influence, government jobs, attended the Anglican Church I did-- opened island eyes to human capital. If you had relatives, friends or enemies in The States, you were an angel in my childhood circle because you could give away old stuff or food to the starving, hungry, naked children in town. I had a grandmother, uncle and aunt in New Jersey who sent clothes, books, money or toys at Christmas, sent me access to a human economy most were too poor to afford. I was an angel, a giver, a teacher. I felt godlike. Vincentians are a poor people who work hard. But there is just so much 117 square miles of land can give back --even soil as fertile as ours. To my friends and me, The States grew God’s blessed seeds, was ripe with all the stuff a hungry, naked, sick child thinks will make them better. The States was paradise --the Promised Land. But when I got to New Jersey in 1985, I quickly realized paradise was not as advertised back home.

America had duped my innocence into believing materialism was commonplace, yet things were so scarce in my aunt's house. The rooms were small, there was no space to play, to grow, no toys, no cable TV, no VCR, bike, skateboard, remote control car. Besides that, there was no freedom. In St. Vincent, I could at least roam all over town, unencumbered by consequence, living and being myself. In Jersey, there was constant buzz about kidnappers, child molesters, rapists, murderers, killers, villainous foes with nothing better to do than hurt me. There was no talk like that in St. Vincent.

Hanging around my white schoolmates and soccer buddies provided ample opportunity to be in the America I saw on TV and in the movies --The States I always heard about. On weekends, I slept in their big rooms, played with their new toys, chose the foods I wanted to eat, rode in their expensive cars. White folks defined and lived the America my innocence had come to accept as the real America. Why didn't my black family live in that grace? Why couldn’t we afford that state? Hadn’t we lived comfortably in St. Vincent? On the island, my family’s name carried influence in town discourse and politics. Everybody knew and loved us. What was wrong with us in America? What was wrong with me? I didn't want to know, so I placed greater value on my white friends, reserving the best of my energies for them and their white world. I owed them that much for treating me to the dream of America. I disliked black people. They had nothing to give me. Initially, I gave them even less in return. My first six months in New Jersey were America’s common immigrant lessons in misunderstand compounded by a self-hate I could neither define nor deal with until much later.

I admit to having a hard time feeling the historical truth you wrote about, James. The omnipresent nature of white hate, is something, thanks to those like you, I will never experience. I cannot imagine a teacher, preacher or parent, not only telling me I can't do or be something, but going to incredible lengths to curb my human progress --with the purpose of protecting me, no less. Today, we are made to believe those days are gone. Well, you and I both know there are kidnappers, molesters, rapists, killers, villainous enemies of the state out there to keep me in their historical line. The black boy was once their chattel and should be kept in his chains. But they rarely talk nowadays or make themselves known --in that real, affective, undeniable, in-your-face way you knew the enemy.

I cried the first time I heard your Uptown Harlem being read. I didn't like the way the white, suburban boy was emoting your black, inner-city words. I was fifteen and green, just experiencing the realities a black boy encounters. Your reality and mine possessed more soul than the blandness the boy was laboring through. Decaying streets sounded like nothing to him. There was no resonance, no light going on in his head as it had for me. Hopelessness was an utterance and not the abomination you and I both know it is --especially to the young, asking God, day after day, “Why me, your most loyal servant?” Soon enough, I began discerning the meaning in your words. When I left for school, bent on arming my fledgling, human spirit with this generation's gimmick --education and the promise of a politically defined equality-- I saw boys my own age, and older still, drinking forties at the corner store. When I returned home, there they were, at their same stoop, in their same stupor, throwing dice, buckwilin or frestylin’; their aspirations as empty and devoid of sustenance as their malt liquor bottles, their gait defiled of purpose, hiding behind walls of false, male bravado and designer labels labeling nothing but their inability to label themselves; their tracks as circular and self-defeating as their days, no doubt were. The truth of your reality resonated in me with power and understanding. I could do nothing but cry. I rarely cried in life, going to incredible lengths to severe serious connections with people who seemed oblivious to what harm they could cause with their unconscious in/actions. But somehow, decades apart, you and I were linked. And I cried as you must have.

Then, I began feeling the meaning in your words. Most books I read, I did so with little connectivity. I read because I recognized the value and purpose, but found little love in the process. At fifteen, I was old enough to cognitively ready to understand what made me love those white people in Jersey so much and hate my own people with greater force. They had the materials that defined my vision of America. I was angry when I realized the few people who experienced that America. There were nights when I cried myself to sleep thinking about life’s inhumanity, my lacking connections to family and friends and an inability to figure out what to do about my cheap, empty black boy life. I could not relate my existence to most people because I had yet to make sense of it. Moreover, I feared what my anger would do while I emoted. Would I kill anyone who stepped in my way, anyone with a connection to my oppressor’s imposed ignorance? I certainly wanted to kill --myself especially-- but I knew enough to fear what America’s judicial system would do to me, what it is designed to do to every black boy: provide a comfortable, structured, institutionalized home. I wanted more than America’s home. I needed a place to live and be myself --whatever that means, whenever its meaning suits me.

There was still one thing that did not fit, one thing could not relate to from your writings.

“The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized I believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and have every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or had strayed too far from the house.”

I cannot imagine my whole Avenue conspiring to hold me back because I have never experienced that force. In the language of your father, I would have been destroying myself for believing in and setting out to prove my human capital at twelve, thirteen or fourteen. Now, my brother is the same age and facing the same choice. He and I were both discovered to be above-average students around the fifth grade. Basically, we are both very good at standardized tests, observing and finding patterns in texts, equations and human thought. Like you, he is not just an above average student, he has the potential to be one of the relatively few, conscious human beings. No one has had cause to hold him back, James, said, “No” to his dreams, nor had cause to make him feel less than worthy in any way. He's never --like most black boys, thankfully-- heard the word nigger uttered with contempt from some unconscious soul whose family knows no better than to teach trash to their progeny. You've heard the word. I've been pierce by it.


in 4th grade after scoring one for the spirit of '76
i was tripped by him and fell in the mud
he blotted the sun that day and from my stained seat i heard
NIGGER!
i was 4'8" he was no bigger
Nigger? me? simply 'cause i borrowed the ball during
the give and take of the game we had both agreed to play
Nigger? me? for trying harder, running faster, playing smarter than him
that was all for Nigger
what assured loser he was
as the final whistle blew that Sunday the Spirit of '76 won
I
walked off the pitch, proud, on high
my yellow jersey muddy and black
his uniform was still clean
no mud, no black
just pure white walking off the pitch
me, a winner
he, sure looking like a NIGGER!

Nigger meant enough for me to defend what little black consciousness I possessed in fourth grade. I was in America for only a year but I knew how deep that word was to be felt. Seeing nigger story lines on TV or something, I knew hearing the word meant action. I suffused my anger that day and have dealt with it on many occasions since. When my high school soccer team won a game and we were changing our clothes on the sidelines, a teammate asked: “Anybody see my necklace?” to which another teammate, without hesitancy --and with a giggle to a joke only he knew-- answered, “C'mon Oronde. We know you have it.” “How do you know?” I asked, wanting to add a motherfucker or asshole to cap his ignorance. Anybody who knew me recognized I did not steal, did not cheat and went out of my way not to cause harm or damage to anyone or their property. The rest of the team was cool. The motley crew that we were --with players from Nigeria, Trinidad, Greece, Poland, Russia, Guatemala, Spain, Ecuador, Brazil-- enjoyed each other’s company and our different outlooks on life.

Though I felt insulted, I said nothing and got no apology from my accuser when the necklace was found on the ground not too far from where his backpack and clothes lay. Even the kid who lost his necklace looked to me with apology in his eyes. He was pissed off at his unconscious, white friend. I could read an unspoken contempt for ignorance on the features of his face.

Another day, this time in the school hallway, my accuser approached as I was talking to a Korean girl. He grabbed my hands, turned my body to the wall and said, “Assume the position” --as if all black boys practice the turn-n-spread two step at home, hoping against hope, to be asked out by the law one evening. Again he giggled. No one else around us giggled. No one ever got his joke. To the rest of us --white, yellow, brown, red-- he was quickly dismissed as uncool, a geek out of touch. I never assumed racism as his motivation, not because of a black boy's self-hate, self-denial, some self-punishment or certainly not because I think racism is gone. I wasn’t even trying to be nice. My accuser was not a white racist; he was an unconscious, inconsiderate ass who knew no better. Anyone around him accepted this asinine idiosyncrasy. Like you and me, my accuser had rarely stepped outside his self and seen the world through another's eyes. Looking through another's eyes --even while we look at ourselves-- is the unforgiving reality of many a black boy.

Should I have confronted my accuser that day and fanned the fire within me? Most definitely. But should and would never occupied the same space in the metaphysics of my adolescence. Did and did not were more my companions. That day, I did not do what I wanted. I did what I needed to do, what my life's processed logic had conditioned my spirit to do whenever a possible conflict arose: I avoided it, promising to fight the fire next time. Avoidance of life was an everyday reality I once accepted with ease. Who needed the conflict of friends, family, love and all their circumstance. I had enough to deal with in my black boy mind.

I know better now, but when I was twelve, thirteen or fourteen, I thought all the fights in my apartment were my fault and hurled all my frustrations inward. I would hear my mother yell to my brother’s father, “Don’t bring my kids into this. I’m glad they don’t respect you.” In early adolescence, I rarely talked to anyone: no family, friend or teacher, not even God. Then, I hated the god within and could not understand why he pierced my days with tribulation and fighting. Didn't I deserve better? It's a wonder I never spilled blood without. Somehow, I found it easiest to bleed within. Not physically, though. And it was more clotting than bleeding.

Like your parents and your Avenue, my ailing spirit blocked off what I could do, what I wanted, what I thought, creating a space between it and my life’s wants and needs. Before I wanted a T-shirt, I didn’t need the T-shirt because there was always the possibility that my family’s poverty would prevent me from buying it. Before I wanted a piece of the homemade bread my mother baked every Saturday afternoon (bread I ate every Sunday morning with eggs and milk) I didn't want the bread anymore because, even though she never said “No,” I needed to maintain an emotional distance from her. I rarely looked my mother in the eye then, not wanting to feel my emotional withdrawal and cold attitude reflected in the water always glazing her eyes. I didn’t want to smile or show any happiness around her, lest she think she had something to do with it. I wanted her to wonder about me, question what unconscious acts she may have been doing to cause my emotional atrophy. I wanted her to suffer as I believed I was suffering. Were my actions right? No. But they were what I needed to do then. By not even thinking about certain attainable realities or relationships and doing nothing to progress, I forestalled a pain I was sick of constantly having to deal with. I refused to get hurt anymore, to ball up into the shell I often did, to hate myself for being a sissy and not facing the fear I knew was holding me back. Why bother? But like you said James, “It took rather more time for me to realize that I had also immobilized myself, and had escaped from nothing whatever.”

What have we escaped from since The Fire Next Time or the American reality your parents went to great lengths to protect you from even thinking about? What has every black boy had to employ to survive under the silent thunder of your fury's legacy? You said it best,

“Every Negro boy --in my situation during those years, at least-- who reaches this point realizes at once, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a 'thing', a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way.”

At the beginning of this new century, what starts the black boy on his way? What reality has transpired "behind the words acceptance and integration?" Are we better for having heard and been swayed by those tired promises? What am I to expect for my brother? What is the world to expect from him? What is he to expect from himself? What new gimmicks have black boys had to employ to make it on the Avenue?