Читать книгу Secondary Break - Marvin Williams - Страница 7

Chapter 1

New York, 1964. I was born Marvin Gaye Williams, one of the eight children to my parents. It’s been said that the sixties was the best time in Black-American history, and in a lot of ways, it’s not difficult to see why that’s not too much of a stretch, especially when you have today to compare it with. Think about it. The sixties gave black folks leadership. The kind of leadership we still talk about today. Hell, the kind of leadership that resulted in national holidays and a new way to see our own value as a black person in America. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and the Black Panthers. These are the legends that I remember growing up with and the names that filled the house, the streets, and the shape of our lives and struggles.

In a lot of ways, my first home set the pattern for many of my earliest struggles and achievements, to say nothing of the underlying sense of how life was back then. I grew up on Legion Street in Brooklyn, right down the road from our school, P.S. 156. We lived in a Brownstone. Our brownstone was three stories high, and every family knew one another. There were apartments on each floor within our brownstone community. There were eight of us living in our brownstone apartment in the back on the first floor: Mom; my brothers Harvey, Jeffrey, and Bradford; the baby; me; and my sister, Theresa. My dad worked in Long Island, doing his cooking show for a nice Jewish man, but would come home on the weekends.

The other families in our brownstone community included the Muslim family on the first floor. I went to school with their kids. on Sundays, I would sometimes go with them into the Harlem mosque where we would all sit together in one big room, all on the floor, no chairs or nothing, listening together to the message from a single jukebox. The single jukebox sat at the front of the mosque on an empty table. The jukebox, positioned like a pastor in other churches, was the only voice in the room. The message of Elijah Muhammed was delivered by notable persons like Malcolm X.

I remember running down to the Muslim family’s home when I needed to get away from my own family’s craziness. I was young but inquisitive (black folks would call me “Nosey”), and I loved interacting with people. I remember loving to learn in school and also from people whose lives appeared different than mine. That’s what struck me about the Muslim family. Their family was different than mine, and they always let me come over and stay awhile. I remember I got my first ear piercing from a Muslim woman when I was just eight years old.

Another neighbor was a karate teacher I called Mr. Kelly, and I remember being impressed as all hell with his abilities. It was so cool to know that he studied under and trained with Chuck Norris. My father once asked him to train my brother and me in karate. We would visit our new karate teacher and learn some techniques. I just remember it being fun to play with all of his equipment, or toys as I saw them.

Living on Legion Street was a time where everyone was allowed to be in everyone else’s business because it helped everyone stay safe. If a kid was in the middle of the street, acting a fool, any neighborhood parent could come out and pull them by the ear, pop them with a switch they just grabbed off of the closest tree, and then take the kid to their parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle to report they were being bad. Every kid on the block knew if a neighbor witnessed them being bad out on the street and brought them to their family, the punishment they had coming from their family would be twice the pain. They would get their ass beat once because they did something bad and the second time because they embarrassed the family. Kids knew they were better off being good, or at least acting that way. The communities embraced each other, protected each other, watched out for each other because typically, everyone was in the same or similar situation. Families with working or trying-to-work parents just trying to survive. For better or worse, some of the best lessons of my life went hand in hand with the hardness.

The community was real back then. Every Sunday, like clockwork, the whole family would come out to gather on the stoop, like a family reunion. This family reunion took place not just with our family but with most of the families in our communities. For me, it was my mom and dad; brothers; sister; cousins Madeline and Marie; aunts Pearl, Mary, and Thelma; and also my uncles Rudy, sometimes Kirby Lee who lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It always felt like we had enough food to feed the whole block. All of the food that makes a black family gather again and again: macaroni and cheese, ham, greens, baked beans, cornbread, and more all cooked to perfection with every cake and pie imaginable available as well.

One of my favorite memories about the place, and one that really defined how the classic Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods worked, was what I like to remember as the great pigeon wars. See, every building (or most of them) had open rooftops, and most rooftops had a pigeon coop. Flying pigeon became our thing, something to make our dad proud. It worked like this. My father would go and buy us, say, half a dozen homing pigeons, and we’d keep them in the coop for a while to get them used to us and their color. The key here was color. Our coop would be painted a bright blue. A building two streets away might have one bright red inside and out. The birds would then associate their color to their home flock. Then this is where it got fun because you would keep an eye out for when your neighbor let his birds out to fly. We would jump up and let out our flock when theirs got close and let the birds mix, then whistle for them to come home. If your birds were smarter than theirs, then they’d pull the whole mixed flock back to your coop, and suddenly, you’ve got all the birds, or you lost them all to smarter birds and a sharper whistle.

Where the current New York Nets arena sits used to be a market where they sold live pigeons. My dad bought about ten pigeons. We had them for a couple months, training them to recognize our blue coop. There was a Puerto Rican guy with a corner store. His nephew would compete with his pigeons. During one competition, we lost all the pigeons to this guy, and my dad threatened us, saying it would be the last time he would buy us pigeons. It could have been our desperation or sheer luck, but the next time we competed with him, we took all sixty of his pigeons. My dad had to build us a larger coop. The Puerto Rican uncle approached my dad, asking for his birds back. My dad told the guy; “You know the rules. If we lost, you wouldn’t give our birds back!”

I was surrounded by family. I had my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, my aunt Thelma lived in the next brownstone building, and my aunt Pearl lived with her husband, Rudy, not too far away from us. I went to school with my cousins Madeline and Marie, and My aunt Mary was always around to show us what Jesus had to say about whatever we were doing good or bad. Despite all the challenges in our lives, we had love. My parents were both major players in my life, but it took me a lifetime to be able to look back, as a grown man, at the lessons and dynamics that were fully in play. Black families have a long-standing tradition, be it good or bad, of not really opening up with each other. Rarely do you find adults in black families, sharing their past experience with relationships, abuse, mental disorders, family secrets, or anything. This means that as a kid, you see the end results of all decisions and issues but don’t know their cause. My brothers, sisters, and I were then left in a bad spot a lot of the time, thinking all the troubles our parents were going through were somehow our fault.

My parents were together for forty-one years. They had all of us kids moved back and forth from North Carolina to New York and remained unmarried. Although it is painful to say, my parents were also alcoholics. I believe my parents loved each other and were somehow, in a crazy yet cool way, made for each other. The circumstances that resulted in them being unmarried, raising a family for forty-one years stems from some generational, cultural, and economic shit that was just what it was—the truth in the black community! The stuff that came from the hundreds of years of slavery in the South. Thousands of families ripped apart where fathers and mothers have children, then the mother or the father is ripped away from one plantation to other plantations where new families get started. Thousands of years where men and women had to be hard toward love and family. A hardness that numbed both men and women into believing that it’s okay for men to have multiple families. A hardness that numbed my mother, or perhaps my father’s wife, into accepting that my father had nineteen children and maintained two separate families.

My father was a strong man who struggled all his life, both with what life threw at him and also with his own decisions. My dad finished the sixth grade and never put much stock in books or any kind of education. But he was one of the smartest men I have ever known. He had a PhD in street smarts. If there was an angle, he could find it and make it work. If any man could be called a jack-of-all-trades, it was my daddy. He was a mechanic, a tank driver in the Army, a chef, a handyman, a baker, and just about everything else at some point in his life. Then of course, there was the television cooking show on Long Island, where my brothers and sister got to watch and be proud of our dad. Cooking was one thing that, I remember, he really loved, he took incredible pride in everything he did because he did it damn well.

My dad grew up in Chinquapin (Chinkapin), North Carolina. He grew up with a tough father, which in turn made him tough. When my dad was young, he grew up in a poor family. He used to talk about how hungry he was growing up. He and his five siblings would go to school and church in the same building. They were all in a one classroom church, like the one on Little House on the Prairie, just not like that because he was black. He talked about going to school and church where he would have to tighten his belt so much to stop the grumbling in his stomach. My father grew up in a time in the South where sharecropping, or just a step above sharecropping, was how his family cared for the kids. The slave mentality was alive and real as many of the men of the family had been slaves as children. The family worked for the white man and hope was a scarce thing.

I remember a story my father told me that summed up how hard my grandfather was on my father. It was about him and his brother, Kirby Lee. My grandfather, who I don’t remember meeting, would get drunk at night and fall asleep. My dad and uncle wanted to learn how to drive, so they would sneak out of the house when my grandfather fell asleep. They would steal the car, and with my father behind the wheel, my uncle would push the pickup truck down the dirt road so that they could practice driving. On one of their driving lessons, they drove the truck into a water well. Keep in mind, they only drove in the dark, and the only lights were those on the headlights of the pickup truck. When my grandfather found out and reached my father and uncle, no words were spoken, only screams and yelps from how badly Granddad beat both of them. I believe that between the beatings and the lack of physical affection, since neither my grandfather nor father believed in hugging or being touchy-feely, my father became tough as nails.

My father’s family was very interesting. My aunt Katie was the youngest worked for Macy’s in New York for over twenty years. I remember going to all the Macy’s Christmas and Thanksgiving parades with her. She was a very beautiful woman whom I spent a lot of my young life with. Her husband, Rudy, was also an amazing (but very strange) man. He was a plumber by trade and taught me a lot of valuable lessons growing up. He taught me the value of love and hard work, and my weekends with him were always exciting. There were times we would be working in dark and smelly basements, fixing people’s pipes. Aunt Pearl and Uncle Rudy had a great love for dogs. The bad part about living with them was that I had to clean out the room where all the dogs were kept. Nearly every day after school, Aunt Pearl would come get me from Legion Street, and I would spend the week (or weekend) with them. I would be responsible for taking up the used filthy newspapers and putting down a fresh layer for the dogs. In return, she would pay me some pocket money, though I remember Uncle Rudy believed that if I ate his food and slept in his house, taking care of the dogs was my fair payment in return for spending the night and feeding me.

My dad also had another sister, Aunt Mary, who lived in the city. We all lived close to each other. Aunt Mary was very religious, so when she would come around to visit, all of the family would stop their drinking and gambling because if you didn’t, she would give you an earful of God’s word. My dad also had an older brother, Kirby Lee, who lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He would hardly come around, but when he did, all of us kids knew that something in the family had gone wrong and that he was there to straighten it out. Uncle Kirby Lee wasn’t a loud man. In fact, as a kid, I barely heard him speak. He wasn’t a loud boastful man. He was the guy that when he came to talk, you knew something was wrong. I loved him because he was so unlike my dad—a forward thinker. He would always come by during the summer to try to get my dad to take us somewhere fun (like Las Vegas or Disneyland), but my dad would never do it. My dad believed in hard work and buying us the things he thought we needed and the things he wanted us to learn from, like the pigeons, or the musical instruments. My mom, on the other hand, was very adventurous. She believed in trying anything and felt like we (as kids) should get to see the world.

My mother’s family was from the Deep South, and we would go to North Carolina some summers to see our granddad and grandma. The Deep South in the summer, unlike New York, was extra hot, had lots of dirt roads, and outhouses. Outhouses, meaning that if you had to go to the bathroom, you could not go in the house. You had to go outside of your house to go to the bathroom. Deep South North Carolina also had tobacco fields. My mother’s family did not own the tobacco fields, but when we visited our grandparents, they would immediately dispatch us to the fields to start cropping. Tobacco was big business in the area with major companies like R. J. Reynolds and Marlboro cigarettes. We went from being city kids to Deep South farmers with a single car ride.

The stench of segregation, racism, and hatred was everywhere in the South. I despised the attitudes and the tension created every time we were around white people. Even as a kid, I understood the sheer hatred of white people anytime a black person was present. It wasn’t because it was something that white people said, it was because their hatred came through in everything they said to black people and every action they made around us. During that time, white folks felt like black folks were not equal to them and that our only place was in the tobacco fields. We spent a lot of time, going back and forth to the South. I remember as a kid, reading Jet magazine while riding in the car on our way down South.

Jet magazine was the premier weekly magazine, highlighting stories about black people from all walks of life. This magazine showcased the good, the bad, and the ugly of the plight of the black person. I remember seeing a picture of a young black soldier, hanging from a tree in Georgia. The US military soldier had come home for two weeks to visit his family. He was then taken by some members of the Klu Klux Klan, a white racist hate group, and hung from a tree. This photo had such a major impact on my life that the image still sticks with me to this day. Racism was a part of our culture in New York as well but not as open and cruel as it was in the South. In New York, we all seemed to manage to get along with our neighbors regardless of the other person’s race because New York was one big melting pot.

My grandparents were extremely poor, and just like using the outhouse to go to the bathroom, we also had to bathe in a metal tub outside in the yard at night because they had no indoor plumbing. There was a bright spot in going to North Carolina during the summertime. When us kids weren’t out cropping tobacco leaves, I loved going to the countryside. On the countryside, there were wide open fields of land that I could play on. My family would stay with our grandparents for about a month during the summertime, soak up the sun, build lots of muscles from cropping tobacco all day, and conquer any possible fears we may have had from having to venture out to the outhouse after dark. At the end of the month, we would all climb in the car and travel back to the natural city life of New York. I remember this routine, summer in and summer out, until I was ten years old.