Thinking Today

It's the last day before the new year----and I'm thinking. I'm thinking because there is so much to be thankful for and much more to hope for in this world.

Places of Memory: A Memoir

This is my first post. I'm a writer---well, professionally I'm a Dean at a small liberal arts college in the northeast but have been at work penning a memoir about growing up black in a small city in upstate New York. I'm new at blogging but thought it might be useful to keep my writing on track.



Here's an excerpt from the prologue:

I closed the door behind me, leaving the comfort of my home for a journey that the entire world would witness. It was a five-minute walk to Beulah Baptist Church and half way down the block I turned to catch a final glimpse of the soft lights on my front porch. The night was quiet, the darkness lit by several bright stars and a full moon. I pictured the streets of Washington D.C. covered with black men. Would the day be anything like the 1963 March on Washington which I’d read and heard so much about? What was it going to feel like to be among a million black men converging on the nation’s capitol?
Dried leaves crumbled under my feet. I wondered how history would record the day and its message to the world. It would be an once-in-a-lifetime experience, comparable to what it must have been like on that hot August day when Dr. Martin Luther King echoed the words I Have A Dream. I looked forward to the euphoria I hoped to feel, and yet I felt uneasy about leaving my wife and daughters behind. I was torn—divided over the thought of leaving them alone, but the idea of black men coming together was a powerful idea. I had to be there.
When I arrived at the church parking lot, several dozen men waited near the chartered bus, their faces glowing like school children preparing for a field trip. I made my way through the crowd, and noticed a reporter for the local newspaper combing the parking lot and interviewing anyone he could. Larry had covered my high school basketball games almost twenty years earlier. His eyes met mine as he walked toward me. I prepared for his questions about the march, rehearsing what I’d say. His question was as what I expected.
“The March —what does it mean to you, Ed?“
I was anxious to answer him and wanted to leave little room for my words to be twisted. I wasn‘t sure what Larry would write, but hoped that the irony of the moment in history would become clear. So many of us had been crippled by the negative images splashed across newspapers and on the six o’clock news. Around the world, we were demonized and painted with one negative brush. We’d become enemies to ourselves, heading down paths of self-destruction. We were killing and hurting one another—unaware of how our lives, our families, and our communities were crumbling right before our eyes. I wanted Larry to see that what was about to happen in Washington was a good thing, not something that should alarm America. I wanted him to understand how the media had scrutinized our lives—and now that there was a march for unity, they were still searching for the negative. Larry’s eyes darted across the parking lot as if he’d suddenly realized he was the only white face in a sea of blackness. I wondered if the nation was ready for this journey to Washington.
When he finished writing, Larry thanked me and wished for a good trip, stuffing his notepad in his back pocket. I watched him exit the parking lot, hoping that he’d heard me.
When the bus driver cranked the engine, I climbed onto the bus and sat next to Earl, a quiet, soft-spoken, copper-skinned man in his early fifties. We’d spent many hours talking about our lives while volunteering with an African-American men’s organization that mentored black boys. The long bus ride would allow us to finish the many conversations we had started but never finished. Earl was well-read, a recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, and had a steady job with the railroad. . In many ways, he’d been like a big brother, and I knew that our conversations would easily fill the five-hour ride Washington.
The ride would be more than a journey to march. While the darkened, stuffy bus rolled through the night, my mind went back to the neighborhoods where I’d grown up. I traveled back to the abandoned park where I spent endless summer days, behind the aging red-brick three-story building where I first attended school in New York. The memories came in fragments that I’d long ago tucked away, deep and far away in my subconsious. Family stories I’d heard over the years in my mother’s living room at Friday night gatherings came to the surface as did life lessons she had instilled in my siblings and me. My oldest brother had died of cancer a year earlier and his struggles reminded me of what I’d come to know about my family’s journey to New York in the midst of the civil rights movement. There had been critical incidents in my life—memorable teachers, becoming an athlete, becoming a father at seventeen, going to college—that made me think more about what I had become.
As the bus moved through the chilly autumn darkness, I was slowly ushered through memories that had been buried by nearly three decades of not wanting look back. But I went back as far as I could, chasing memories of growing up and trying to connect them to my life as I knew it. I was thirty-six, married, and had two daughters. I lived only several blocks from where I’d lived as a child. Life had not taken me far away from home. I had a respectable job as a dean at Vassar College and was President of the city school board. The city that had nurtured me was still home and full of memories that I had to unlock. The journey to the March started that process.
This book attempts to unfold some of those memories, stretching back to the Sunday in 1965 when my uncle drove us through a snowstorm from North Carolina to a small upstate New York town. It is a story of journeys through childhood memories, early lessons about race and class, and ultimately across the uncertain landscape of black masculinity in America. It is my version of certain events, my selective memory—yet I hope there is a collective story within my voice. When my mother learned that I was writing this book, she was quiet for a long time and spoke guardedly when I probed for details about our family. Later. I understood that she was only worried that I might not get it right. And so this is the journey of one black man trying to get it right.

A Poem for Lawrence

Black As….Love

Black as the night
Black as the bottomless pit
Black as the ship that stole us away
Black as in Black Love
Black As
Black As
Not Black as in Black Ass
Or Black ass So and So
Not Black as in that Black Nigga Ass
But Black as in Black Love
Black as in Harriet and Sojourner
Black as in Nat
Turning darkness into light
Black as Garvey
Black as Malcolm
Black as King and Fannie Lou
Moving toward love and black power
Black as in Black Solidarity


November 2004
Inspired by listening to a young black man's "spoken word" performance at a college Black Solidarity Dinner. In one stanza he spoke bluntly about a woman he knew and what sexual things she did--to him. I judged him before he could get back to his seat, convicting him on the spot for speaking from a place devoid of blackness. I never told him what I thought. Instead I wrote my own poem for him.

Three Days Before 2005

It's only three days---and then its a new year. It will bring those things that we have wished for, those things that can make peace and make our weapons into plowshares. Pray for peace.