We suffer, in this society, the conceit that each generation has a unique and essential message to the world. We suffer, in this society, the conceit that each race has a unique and essential message to the world. I am sufficiently informed to the contrary for both of those conceits by studying history. I resist the idea that people will inevitably be products of their environments and I have the fortunate skill of not having a problem crossing social boundaries. So you can ‘OK Boomer’ me if you please, but I think there are some enduring truths that even people considered too young or from the wrong side of the tracks can discover on their own. I provide myself as an example, moreover I have the desire to prompt young people from the wrong side of the tracks.
Young Love
This morning I have been brought to tears by the memory of Betty Washington to whom I was cruel in middle school. She was, in fact, the first girl I ever slow danced with. The song was by the Main Ingredient. Everybody Plays The Fool. Betty was dark-skinned and modest. Nobody paid her any mind. Some said she was ugly. She was not. The day after the party, the class was abuzz about the fact of our slow dance. So I quoted the lyrics in dismissal of any affections people thought I had for her.
How can you help it when the music starts to play
And your ability to reason is swept away?
Like so many songs of that era, I only knew parts of the lyrics correctly. Reading the rest of them this morning brought hot shameful sobs. I’m sorry Betty Washington, wherever you are. I’m so very sorry. I did like you.
Oh, Heaven on Earth is all you see
You're out of touch with reality
And now you cry, but when you do
Next time around someone cries for you.
The girl of my dreams was Danielle Andrews, but I was a trepidatious fool. I couldn’t say a word to her. When I was out of school from chicken pox, she asked the class to pray for me. It was the sweetest thing any girl had ever done, that my foolish little heart could remember. The queen of school was Renee Raymond. She had it all. Brains, looks, nerve, style. She played the snake in the Garden of Eden play. I never even saw it, as it took place the year before I transferred in to Holy Name of Jesus School. It was legendary. Rumor had it that her boyfriend was the child star George Spell who looked like a combination of Michael Jackson and Foster Sylvers. I had but two words I ever spoke to her, as she suddenly turned to me, perhaps challenging me to keep up her repartee.
RR: Hey good lookin’
MB: Hiya
RR: What ya got cookin’
MB: Pie-ya
That was it. With a swish of her pony tail and rolled up skirt, she was out the door. I stood frozen. Or was I a puddle of mud? Those two were unapproachable. Untouchable. Homeroom angels. They had a force field around them. The problem was, as were many of my problems, based on the fact that I was a ‘brainiac’ and everyone in all of my classes, from 7th through 12th grade, was one year older than I. So I grew up passive-aggressive in my own private Idaho. But there were the approachable girls I liked and yet was far too clumsy to deal with.
Alaine Takai was shy and quiet and smart and clean and crisp. I was able to muster the courage to take her on one of the carnival rides. Somewhere in my garage is a picture of us my father took, her with her long straight hair, me in my black and white houndstooth polyester t-shirt and beanie, with my fro sticking out the front. There was Conrad Meredith’s older sister whose name I cannot even recall. Darlene? She had a pretty smile and wore bangs like Marlo Thomas. Hair was all we could know, because uniforms. Blue plaid dresses. White blouses. Us boys with salt & pepper corduroys and white short sleeves. All of us wore itchy wool dark blue cardigan sweaters. Losing mine cost me a spot on the volleyball team.
Bridgette Jones was fair skinned with a broad open face and the biggest afro flecked with bronze tones in the summer. She filled out her sweater well, I seem to recall. She was simply a happy person, never seeming troubled by the the dark subplots of Catholic school. I ran into her eight years after graduation, but I had a girlfriend. I couldn’t possibly keep up with two female friends for whom my affections were clear. I saw her on Facebook three years ago.
The one girl who transcended middle school, whose presence remained current through high school was Celeste Brown. If Renee was the queen, Celeste was the virgin mother. Her family was dynastic in that way that certain families are in small parochial schools. Her older brother was the OJ Simpson of our championship high school football team. Celeste had this air of destiny around her - everybody expected great things. Was she valedictorian at St. Mary’s High School? I would be surprised if she wasn’t.
About six years ago I won the first blind auction in my life at a fundraiser for Holy Name. Ironically, or perhaps not, it was a basket of swag for my highschool. I heard an extraordinarily competent case for the continued funding of parochial schools. They have answers for which most of America still has questions, but the schools hang on by thin financial threads. It is a tragedy of our world-weary and well trod dimensions. Not enough people who have enough, give enough. We seem to have inverted too much common sense in a society where people feel they have to hack their way through rather than have any comfort that practical knowledge and a bit of moral discipline will suffice. Perhaps I haven’t mocked enough counter-cultural hippies and their descendants.
The Main Ingredient
The songs that I discovered in middle school in those years when I was still wary of cursing out loud resonate for me today as I write memories in the Dad Book my oldest daughter gave me for Christmas. A standout for many years that I could sing with full-throated gusto was Rolling Down a Mountainside.
Winners and losers
Fight when you know you're right
You'll get some bruises but
Some fool might see the light
So when you talk confused, yeah
Keep your pride
Smile and you'll make them listen
While you teach, then we'll be alright
Birds will stay in flight (Birds will stay in flight)
Day will follow night (Day will follow night)
So keep the truth in sight
But no, no, no
'Cause we're not stones rolling down a mountainside
We all count and we've got strength and we got pride
'Cause God is on our side
You might remember America once had a movie star by the name of Cuba Gooding Jr. Yes, the man who had the temerity to make wholesome films for families like Snow Dogs and Daddy Day Care. The lead singer of the Main Ingredient was his father. There’s something to that simple hopeful wisdom that resides in hearts not afraid of being pure.
I was in the 7th grade when it became time to grow up quickly. We learned that the President was involved in dirty business. Was it the first time such dirty business was discovered? Perhaps not, but it was the first time we watched a President resign. It was more than two decades later when I finally found something a number of admirable qualities in Richard M. Nixon, but that moment sent us into an era of dark pessimism that only Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker could beat back. So in middle school I began reading adult fiction and non-fiction.
Thus began my appreciation for the burdens of America, and I tell you it took some doing to avoid white liberal sentimentality back in those 70s. There seemed to be no question whatsoever in the minds of my teachers that my way to understanding America beyond my neighborhood was found in the mind and fiction of John Steinbeck. After Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, I’d had enough dour pessimism. I had no idea what sat behind the thinking that convinced blacks and whites to think like blacks and whites, but I had the good sense and good family to realize that wasn’t America’s destiny. I read Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender, and that was the last of it. When offered The Cross & The Switchblade, I declined. The same snotty no was my response to Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe, Two Years Before the Mast and Anne of Green Gables. Somehow, I managed to find Frank Conroy’s Stop Time, and I was pleased. It sounded real and contemporary.
Despite the insistence of our teachers that we love and respect them, it all seemed forced. I recognized the difference between that compelled relationship and that which I had in elementary school which was nothing more or less than mutual admiration. Nothing expressed this difference better than the difference between Judy Milliken and Eileen Sweet, my public school sixth and Catholic school seventh grade teachers, respectively. Everybody loved Miss Milliken. Miss Sweet required us to learn and sing “To Sir With Love” to her. Sweet was also one of those creatures known to the times as a Jesus Freak. So instead of learning songs like “I’ve Got Sixpence” or “The Caisson Song”, which kids love to sing, we got Godspell. If Sweet had permission and the talent for leadership, then she would have converted our entire 7th grade experience to learning and putting on a production of Godspell. The only consolation we got was the one time Renee Raymond danced the bump and grind of Turn Back, Oh Man.
Can you believe these clowns? Unbelievable. This was the direction of contemporary morality via the Jesus Freaks, which of course we were bound to respect at our parochial school. The hippies were preparing us to be the Hair Generation. Fortunately, I was a Cold War kid. I was a science kid. I was young, gifted and black. I didn’t have time for these bozos.
I read Peter Benchley’s Jaws. It was adult. But that entire era of disaster films, paranoia made for television by producer Irwin Allen held nothing to the most real of the real. That was the reality of nuclear fission, which was the subject of my 8th grade project. I studiously drew every particle of the nucleus of U-235 and colored them appropriately. I read Hiroshima, Red Alert and Fail Safe. Nothing quite had the impact of the latter - written by Eugene Burdick. This was the sort of writer I could learn from. The impact was deep. When I wrote this fictional speech ‘After The Bomb’, in the wake of the Beirut warehouse explosion, I put myself in the place of the US President. Stoic as hell.
Reading as much science fiction as possible, I projected myself into a nuclear powered future, hoping against all hope that we wouldn’t end up like the Planet of the Apes. Like so many Americans, I was shocked into tears when Charlton Heston cried on the beach, leaving Nova behind on the horse, uncomprehending. I was as optimistic as the producers of the Cold War adventures of Jonny Quest, but as ready for strange scenarios as the author Robert Heinlein. It was his Starman Jones that captivated my imagination. I expected one day to be an astrogator, as I was always good with maps. And so it was with this disposition that I entered my teens, with admiration for men like Fermi, Bohr, McCandless, Grissom and Collins. Well, yeah also Prudhomme, Knievel, Breedlove, Garlits and the authors at Mad Magazine.
These were the final years that I considered my family to be in the rogue wing of Black Nationalism. Something about the Bicentennial and a new spirit of colorblind cooperation bound me to a kind of patriotism. But what I had to learn first was how to reconcile my parents’ newly rediscovered Christianity to the sort I was getting disciplined under at Holy Name.
While I heard the echoes of gripes against the Vulgate Mass established by this thing called Vatican II that everybody else seemed to be upset about, I had to navigate between the version of the Lord’s Prayer that I knew that used ‘debts and debtors’ vs the new one that used ‘trespasses and those who trespass against us’. And why did we stop to let the priest intervene when we asked to be delivered from evil? And who is this Virgin Mary anyhow?
There was some vision of fresh young hope in a Catholic parish that allowed the Jesus Freaks to teach, (well Sweet lasted one year), and so we were allowed to sing songs from The Carpenters and The Beatles in church. By far our favorite song was “It’s a Brand New Day”
So put away cares
Let freedom be yours
Joy is everywhere
But that wasn’t the spirit I was learning so much as the serious and structured piety of the Catholic Mass. Unlike the machinations of the Foursquare ministers who endeavored in every utterance to evoke and prolong spontaneous exaltations from the flock, the Catholics had a program. You either get with it or the devil take you. There is a bold, arrogant presumption of the Catholics’ self-proclaimed lock on morality that requires no such call and response. You work your way through the algorithms of the Sacraments, and confess, confess, confess. A command economy of spirituality but more intriguingly of mysteries, ahh that was the Catholic difference. Nothing quite represented that so much as the Stations of the Cross.
At the Avalon Zion Foursquare Church of my mother’s reborn and ex-Catholic faith, all waited for the ecstasy of someone in the congregation to light the joint on fire and the sermon would drone on until such a fuse was lit; a dry Sunday would wring out everyone in the building until 2 in the afternoon until tongues were spoken and deep scriptural meaning revealed. At Holy Name there was an 8:00AM service and a 10:00AM service. Get in, get Eucharist, get out. But not for the Stations of the Cross. There, in the entirety of the annual calendar, was the longest and most solemn Mass of all. Fourteen stained-glass windows in the clerestory. Fourteen sad verses in the most reverent minor keys any pipe organ might play. Slow. Staid. Tearful. The long march to the death of God. It’s not about us. It’s never about us. We don’t even get to speak to God - we have to go through priests and saints. We have to go through the discipline of the Sacraments. The sacred beauty of pain and suffering.
The Catholic world was a secret until the 7th and 8th grades. I knew about Goodwill and the Salvation Army. They had St. Martin de Porres. I knew about the BPOE where my grandfather was a fellow. They had the Knights of Columbus. I didn’t belong. I never quite belonged anywhere, but I had seen a full alternate hemisphere. I knew their confidences and their fears, and after six years of education under Jesuits and the Sisters of Loretto, I became half Catholic.
My middle school was a strange and mysterious place that forced me to take responsibility for myself. It was there I met light-skinned black kids from New Orleans who had French surnames like my mother. It was there I learned how to silk-screen. How to fold and read a newspaper. How to freeze at the sound of a school bell, and move quickly and quietly to replace my sneakers with the hard shoes of the uniform. I learned that when it came to blaxploitation films, my parents were more strict than Catholics. It was there I learned how to receive swats and not laugh when others were getting theirs. I learned that the universe was not as simple as I thought coming in, and that Mr. Philpot didn’t really understand algebra and that a steel drum was not easy to play. I learned about PAL baseball and that there was something about this new movie called The Godfather that made grownups freak out. I learned about conspiracies of parents and teachers to extend their influence above and beyond the borders of school. I learned to love hotdogs with onions that gave me bad breath. I learned what it was like to not have the love and admiration given to other kids for reasons and rules I never heard of. I learned what it was like for a football coach to show up for practice drunk with hickeys all over his neck, without having any idea what a hickey was all about, but knowing it was about something having to do with sex.
I survived it all, and I figured that a kid like me might spend a year or two in purgatory, but that’s all. In the scope of eternity, that’s not so bad.
Shout outs to Patrick, Danny, Alfred, Vincent, Gary, Steve, Wayne, Lawrence, Larry, Landis and Dana and the left-handed kid who got to play first base. Also to Connie, Veronica, Carmen, Yvonne, Cherry and Rene. The only person I ever hated was Patrick L. with your stupid afro parted down the middle.
This was resonating. Reading your recall of those years enabled me to recall that time better.
A while back I wrote…
“I was with the same set of classmates since grade 7. When I enrolled as a brand new seven grader at E.O. Smith Junior high school I was assigned to section E. When I showed up for class there were 26 other girls and boys. We were called the accelerated class. There were 12 other sections for grade 7, A - M. Due to our higher test scores my classmates in section E were grouped together. I scored a 13 grade reading level and an 8th grade math level on the basic skills test I took when I was in the sixth grade. Mrs. Johnson, my sixth grade teacher glared at me angrily about why I didn’t get better scores than what I did. I felt crestfallen about her assessment until I compared my scores with my classmates. Nobody scored higher than I did. Yet, Mrs. Johnson upbraided me for my paltry performance. Go figure! Later, much later, I learned to understand Mrs. Johnson’s response as Tough Love.
We remained Section E from grade 7 through grade 12 and attended all our classes together except for the electives. We had the same homeroom teacher, starting with Mrs. Lillian Bastine as our junior high school homeroom teacher and Mrs. Gloria Woods as our senior high school homeroom teacher. Everyone knew we were the smart kids. We knew we were the smart kids but we never lorded it over the others. We innately understood the value of the privilege in our status. Harold Moore Jr., or as we knew him, Harold Vann, later to be known as Khalid Abdul Muhammad was one of my classmates.
Nobody ever sat us down and explained the reason for our section E status. As we began to get to know each other, we compared notes and quickly reasoned why we were grouped together.
Names of section E classmates:Jacqueline Hill, Adrienne Bennett, Theodore Jones, Charles Carruthers, Kenneth Jones, Rosalind Curry, Diane Boone, Gwendolyn Johnson, Kenneth Carter, Lionel Pointer, Anthony Cebrun, Jacqueline Smith, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, Harold Vann…
It felt good to be in section E. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It simply was where I was and where I was supposed to be. The specialness of it did not hit me until much, much later when I begin to look back and assess my development. “You never know where you are until much later.“
Being in section E shaped me and influenced me more than I understood at that time. Who understands anything at the time, anyway? Besides the shot of esteem it imparted me: being recognized for being smart and being relegated with other smart students, the greatest benefit to me was shaping how I viewed the opposite sex.
The girls were the smartest students in the class. Jacqueline Hill, who became a doctor, was the smartest. Jackie graduated valedictorian six years later. Carolyn Boone was the next smartest. Rosalind Curry, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, they all stood head and shoulders above us smart guys. Their being smart was unquestioned. It was simply how it was. We, the guys, were attracted to them but their intelligence totally negated, at least for me, my ability to view them at sex objects. And ultimately, women in general. The paradigm was set for me there and then. Imbued with a value of academic intelligence and knowing that the girls I grew up with were as intelligent as or more intelligent than me, shaped my non-sex object view of women. As a Cisgender male, I am strongly attracted to women of the opposite sex but I was loathe to ever assert myself sexually with the opposite sex without their genuine consent. My sexual attraction to women was always in deference to their choices. Always. I get very uncomfortable when men treat women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, many do. I learned all this from being in Section E.”
Enjoyed this quite a bit.