High Price (6 page)

The idea behind the “accomplishment of natural growth” strategy clarifies a great deal for me about how my family saw its children and what my mother thought her role should be. While MH was obviously troubled and stressed by the overwhelming task before her, she saw her job as mainly keeping us safe, fed, clothed, housed, and out of trouble. Beyond that, she would teach the discipline of hard work and forcefully, often intrusively impose morals and manners. Life was hard and she didn’t think it would make it any easier for us children if she coddled us.

Above all, she wanted us to be scrupulously clean, polite, and well behaved. That would make us respectable—we’d be even better than the ill-mannered white children we often saw when she worked as a house cleaner—no matter how much or how little we had.

But as a child, I was infuriated by this emphasis on manners, appearances, and respect for adults. I didn’t understand why adults were supposed to be automatically accorded respect, while children could be arbitrarily dismissed and belittled. It didn’t seem fair that a child couldn’t speak up and be heard if something was wrong, while any pronouncement or action of an adult, no matter how cruel or foolish, had to be accepted unquestioningly. I didn’t understand the way the desire for respectability and some semblance of power and control amid poverty shaped the behavior of adults.

Moreover, the emphasis on obedience until you’d reached adulthood didn’t always enhance parenting skills. At least for some members of my family, becoming an adult just seemed to mean a shift from having to take often-irrational orders to being able to give them. While my own kids challenge me far more than I did my parents, I value that because I know damn well that adults aren’t always right. Of course, I also want them to question and interrogate the world, not to take things on faith without thinking.

And so, while there are many ways in which my parents were certainly neglectful, there are others in which our upbringing provided significant advantages. For one, I learned to be independent and to take care of myself very early in life. Second, I learned to take responsibility—both for myself and for my younger brother, whom I often essentially parented. Finally, my close ties to my cousins and siblings were another important result, though this was another influence that would have both positive and negative effects on my ability to enter the mainstream.

Nonetheless, in my earliest childhood, there was no pleasure I could see in many of the mainstream words—and no power or clout associated with doing well in school. The drive for status was part of what put me at great risk in my neighborhood, while simultaneously playing an even larger role in helping me to escape it.

M
y mom liked to listen to Al Green on Sunday mornings, his rapturous voice with its sacred yet really erotically charged falsetto high notes filling the house, the record spinning at 33 rpm on our giant console. With bright gospel harmonies and swirling organ lines, mellow songs of love and heartbreak like “Love and Happiness” and “Let’s Stay Together” flooded the house: “ . . . we oughta stay together. Loving you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad . . .” It was our music, the kind that didn’t get played on FM radio, so it was especially esteemed and comforting.

One Sunday when I was seven, however, Mom picked up an extension phone and heard my father talking to a woman who, it soon became clear, was his lover. Most of their fights had to do with real or imagined infidelity. It was a volatile, unstable relationship. And so, driven by rage, MH went coldly and deliberately into the kitchen. She turned on the stove and began boiling a pot full of maple syrup and water. Revenge would be served hot.

Soon my father got off the phone. He was lying in bed, wearing only underwear. Without saying a word, my mother walked into the bedroom and threw the sticky mixture at him, hoping the boiling syrup would cling to his skin. Her anger had taken over. Fortunately, most of the sweet-smelling but dangerous goo missed him. My father did get somewhat burned on one leg, but the vast majority of the sticky mess wound up on the walls or the floor. But now he was enraged.

Terrified, my mom ran out of the house—my dad chasing her, still wearing only his Fruit of the Loom underpants. Typically when my parents fought there was a predictable escalation from raised voices to violence. This time there was no preface. I just kept clear.

MH in New York shortly after she and Carl separated in 1972.

And fortunately for my mother, my father did not manage to catch her. It had been raining heavily, one of those intense subtropical downpours, slicking everything outside. Hot in pursuit, my father slipped on the concrete or wet grass, giving her precious seconds to make her getaway. To this day, my sisters believe he would have killed her if he’d caught her. But she had, for once, planned ahead. MH had called her cousin Bob and asked him to pick her up. He was outside waiting in his car. She jumped in. They sped away before my father could catch her. Recovering himself, my father made my sisters clean the syrup off the walls and floor. But that incident did definitively end my parents’ marriage.

Everyone went in separate directions at first. My siblings and I were split up living with various grandmothers and aunts. MH went to New York. My father stayed in our house, and after I’d spent just one night with Grandmama, he brought me there to live with him.

I was so glad to be going home. He didn’t take any of my sisters or my little brother, just me, his namesake, who was born on his own birthday. That felt right. I was his first son. I was the oldest boy. I was going to have to be the man of the house soon enough. And I wasn’t scared of him; I never felt like the violence between him and my mother had anything to do with me.

Carl never hit me: when he disciplined me, it was with a stern lecture or by grounding. My mother and aunts were the ones who got physical with us children. Also, at the time, I saw both of my parents participating equally in their fights. Like any other boy, I admired my father and worshipped him with that blind, childish love that admits no flaws or contradictions. Where I grew up, though, unpredictable events often led to major life changes.

CHAPTER 3

Big Mama

If you’re going to play the game properly, you’d better know every rule.

—
BARBARA JORDAN

I
was about midway through second grade when I started living with Big Mama, whose home was not far from where I’d lived before my parents divorced. I’d lived with my father for a few weeks after my parents separated. Even though I tried my best to be unobtrusive and well behaved because I so wanted to stay with him, he soon found he was unable to care for a young child adequately. My mother also wanted him to sell the house so that she could have her half of the equity. I’d have to live with his mother.

Although we called her Big Mama, she was actually quite short, around five foot two, but broad and big-boned. A proud Bahamian woman who had come to the United States as a young adult, Big Mama wore long, colorful dresses and oversize cat-eye glasses. Though she always kept her hair back in a neat bun, I never saw her straighten it or use any kind of relaxer or color. Her hair was black, only lightly streaked with gray. I loved Big Mama and she stood up for me, stressing first and foremost self-sufficiency and schooling. A black man without an education don’t stand a chance, she would always say.

The debate between the philosophies typically associated with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois was represented in my own family in the differences between my paternal and maternal grandmothers. Big Mama was with Du Bois: education was primarily what would advance the race, and staying in school and doing well there was what mattered most. She was grounded in that idea during her childhood in the Bahamas, where education could clearly lift at least some black people into the elite.

In contrast, Grandmama and my own mother thought that getting a trade was more important. Coming from a farming family in South Carolina, they put more emphasis on hard work as a path to success, like Washington did. My maternal grandmother, mother, and aunts on that side of the family all thought that being economically independent first and foremost was more important than book learning—and that was what they saw elevating black people economically, to the extent that was possible in the segregated South. They emphasized hard, manual labor with an immediate payoff, rather than intellectual work, which might never pay off in that punishing and unpredictable environment.

Of course, context was an important consideration for both Du Bois and Washington: both recognized that neither strategy could be pursued exclusively and that in some settings there were limits on what could be achieved through education or business success alone. My grandmothers reflected this complexity as well.

Although Big Mama put more stress on education, she did not see it successfully lift her family in America during my childhood and she recognized its limits in places where racism radically constricted opportunities. Grandmama, of course, had seen that all her life, which is why she thought striving for maximum economic independence was more productive than wasting too much time on school performance.

I would ultimately side with Du Bois on the primacy of education for myself. However, it would be a long time before that became evident, before I even knew that this was a complicated fault line in black history that had intellectual heroes on both sides. And I think much of the credit for my success today belongs to Big Mama and the important role she played in raising me.

Big Mama took a special interest in me and in my second-oldest sister, Brenda. She took me in when my parents split—but Brenda had lived with her since she was a toddler. At that time, my mom couldn’t handle raising so many young children so close together in age. Beverly was born just ten months after Brenda, leaving MH with a two-and-a-half-year-old, a ten-month-old, and a newborn. What began as a temporary arrangement after Beverly’s birth in April 1962 wound up becoming permanent for Brenda.

I should note here that these kinds of informal child custody transfers were common among my extended family and friends when I was growing up. Many of my cousins and friends lived not with their mothers, but with their grandmothers or aunts. Although the practice of aunts or grandmothers raising their relatives’ children has been attributed to the effects of crack cocaine on mothers, again, the rise of these arrangements preceded the marketing of that drug and is much more complicated.

In my family, I’d say that mistrust in or misuse of contraception played a much greater role. My mother, for example, wouldn’t take the Pill, because she said she didn’t know what was in it. She felt it might sterilize her permanently or could be part of some conspiracy to destroy the black family. We’d all heard about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and how black men had been left to suffer a curable disease just to allow white scientists to see how it progressively destroyed their bodies and brains.

If we didn’t know the exact details—or, indeed, had many of them wrong—there was nonetheless a horrific and genuine basis for our fear. This was always in the background of our interactions with medicine and science. Although we hadn’t heard about Henrietta Lacks, a black cancer patient whose cells were used by white doctors without her permission to create a multimillion-dollar biotechnology industry, that story was playing itself out as I grew up. Lacks’s cells allowed many important advances—but none of them helped the family whose genes they exploited, who remained poor and unable to afford basic necessities like health insurance. This story was only recently brought to light by Rebecca Skloot in her book,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
.

Although there were legitimate reasons for my mother to be suspicious of the white medical establishment, her suspicion in this case may have made life more difficult for her. Since she naturally continued to be sexually active with her husband, she had a child nearly once a year between 1961 and 1969. It was not just my mother alone but also her mother, sisters, and children who had to live with the consequences.

In Brenda’s case, this probably worked to her advantage. Perhaps because Big Mama basically saw Brenda as a motherless child, she coddled her. She always tried to make the granddaughter whom she raised feel special and wanted. Consequently, Big Mama supported Brenda’s interest in athletics at school, as well as her academic achievement. Brenda was on the drill team and in the marching band; she loved to strut her stuff. Surrounded by white do-gooders who expected her to go to college—and prodded by Big Mama as well—Brenda soon imagined and reached for the same future for herself.

Indeed, Brenda became the most academically serious of my sisters. She would later be the only one of the girls to graduate from college, with an associate’s degree in general education from Miami-Dade Junior College. She was the only one of my sisters who didn’t have a child in her teens or out of wedlock. She went on to a long and successful career in reservations at Delta Air Lines. To me, Brenda echoed Big Mama’s pronouncements about the importance of finishing my education and amplified them. My other sisters and my brothers didn’t get this kind of encouragement from adults. Brenda and I also learned lots of practical things from Big Mama, like how to cook and how to take the bus to get around town.