They're making it official

Lamarr and Tahija (their pseudonyms in the book) are getting married in March!

To commemorate, here's a passage from Walk with Us where Tahija describes meeting him:

That year in sixth grade I had a real chip on my shoulder. I had questions for everyone and everything. I remember asking a guy with a Kufi on in the hallway at school a bunch of questions [about Islam] and he answered them, I don’t know why. I guess it was God’s way of stepping in and just letting me know he was seeing everything and I wasn’t alone, but I didn’t realize it was a sign until the next year. I was walking up the back hallway and I see my cousin fighting some boys and I thought they were serious and I got into it with one of the guys named Lamarr. A few days later the guy Lamarr asked me if I would be his girlfriend. At first me and my cousin made a pact that I would go with him and she would go with his friend but we never told them that was why we said yes. We got together on October 28th and I remember that because it was exactly two weeks before my birthday which is November 8th. After awhile my cousin and her boyfriend broke up so without thinking I broke up with Lamarr. I thought it wouldn’t matter because I thought we could still be friends but I actually had feelings for him. I thought they would go away but they didn’t. A few months later I asked him whatever happened to that guy with the Kufi, and he said, “Are you serious?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “That was me.” Now you see we were meant to be.

One day Lamarr seen me drinking. He grabbed my drink and threw it away. That same day he seen me smoking and he threw my whole pack of cigarettes in the middle of Broad Street. I was so mad. I bought another pack and I hid them thinking that he wouldn’t find them, but he caught me taking it out and threw that pack away and after that I could have easily got another pack, but I didn’t, I quit.

An amazing couple and an amazing story. Hear Lamarr at the end of this radio interview I did with radio personality Bill Jakes.

like mother like son: news, grades & baseball update

Had a good long phone conversation with Tahija yesterday. She read off the boys' report cards. Pretty good. Mahdyy's doing the best - 9 A's or B's with the B in math up from a C. They're getting grades no for art and music. Tahija says it's just worksheets they do in their same classroom, from the same teacher, but it's something. Damear's acting up bigtime. Won't listen. "You're not my mom," his favorite someback.

A problem with authority, mom says. I wonder where he got that, I say back. she laughs. But he's got it worse than I did, she says -- sassier and sooner. True. A teacher, in passing, asked her had she thought of this school for troubled kids. Tahija said the name like everyone knew about it and it was a bad place.

I remember the Caribbean woman who talked to me after a reading at Manhattan's 15th Street meeting. Get him out of that school, she said.

But his parents don't want to split them up, and . . .

Get him out now. Or you'll lose him. Is he mine to lose, to "save"? Can I live there again, walk with him as I walked with his mother, whose age he is fast approaching? Can the book ever do much more than pay for more books so the tour can keep on awhile longer? It's hard to imagine it earning enough to pay for even one private school tuition, but after next year I doubt any better school would take him. He'll have such a bad behavior record.

Good news though about Tahija's own education. The BA classes at U of Phoenix were rumoured to be harder, more intense, than the AA, but she's doing ok so far - into the 2nd class, ethics. For the AA, classes ran ten weeks but now they run five. I'm very impressed with that U of Phoenix.

When baseball is over they can come up. That's mid-July. Oh, and there's problems with baseball, with the head coach and the ump. But at least they're playing, except Damear might have gotten kicked off the team the one night Tahija wasn't there to keep him in line. More on that soon.

talking with Bill Jaker

I've done five or six radio interviews so far but this one, for WSKG's "Off the Page," was the first one I did in the flesh. Got to see a membeership drive happening and even read the station phone number a few times. I donated 2 copies of the book "for the next caller" from Penna, and 3 people called right away. So went out to the car for a 3rd book.

It was an hour interview, with Bill Jaker (from Queens like me). He had read the book closely. He requested the short passage I read - the "Well I hope she's done" hypothetical letter to a racist stranger who ruined our day. I hope his listeners can take it! I notice some sales at Amazon right away.

They have posted the whole interview with a very cogent intro by, I assume, Mr. Jaker. He had asked for J or T to call in and talk some too. Jamarr said yes. Very nice. Except he mumbled the name of his music group, Philly Starz. He's got to get that promo thing going on! overcome that fear of success. Seriously - he and his brothers are good, tight. Once they get a website I'll link there. And if you need an R & B group for an event in the Philly, NY, NJ area, think about them. I can give you their manager's number. They've done a lot of gigs and are very professional.

The interview is available here. Thank you dear friends who listened. Nice to come home to your calls and emails.

in the triangle of poverty, a bratty voice

Sue Clark and I are sitting in a coffee shop in Indiana, PA, on the edge of IUP. It's raining. Crosby-Stills-Nash & Young are playing and Sue's reading about James Naylor...

Cleveland, Toldeo, Detroit. We've been to the first two of those. It's a triangle of poverty, Joyce Litten, chair of the Social work dept. at Lourdes College told us. More children living in poverty than anyplace in the U.S.

Cleveland's population has gone in the last ten years from 1 million to 500,000. We could feel it in the roads: bumpier than the narrow gravel road I live on. Smaller tax base, the clerk of Cleveland Meeting explained, but same roads to maintain. Or not maintain.

I brought a book of sci-fi short stories with me. Cleveland felt a little like a post-something place. But with the world class orchestra and museums, and the memory of having been great, central, industrial, rich, a first American home for millions of immigrants who love her still.

And I read from the book, Chapter 6, about Lamarr's violent childhood. Not an easy chapter to hear but that's what prayer led me to. Driving west from Syracuse, where I picked up Sue, I had been feeling I wouldn't read from the book at all, would just tell the story, discuss the issues.... Talking to Sue helped me question that notion. Then when I went into worship that night in our room on the 3rd floor of the old former-mansion meeting house I heard a voice. Not God's. My own voice, as if overheard - a bratty child's voice saying "I don't want to read from the book anymore, I don't want to..."

So I laughed at myself and read from the book. One white man, the adoptive father of two black sons aged 5 and 10, listened with great intensity and immediately shared a story of his own. If he ok's with it I may paraphrase that here. Maybe we came just for him, his sons. Maybe just to see and feel Cleveland. Maybe just to rehearse faithfulness for some larger production.

I'm feeling grateful and open and, thanks to wonderfully gracious hosts, not too tired. More later. Sorry I'm not traveling with a camera, but may get some pics from others.

crossing the river one hop at a time

I'm leaving for a western PA and Ohio mini-tour at the end of the week, accompanied by F/friend Sue Clark. She's coming down from Troy, NY. Without her the book would never have been published . . . that story maybe in a future post.

First stop is Cleveland Friends Meeting, then on to Lourdes College at the western end of the state, just south of Detroit and Ann Arbor (which I hope to get up to to visit my old college friend Walburga). Sounds like Lourdes has done a lot of preparation for my Monday evening lecture there. They're is a Franciscan school, justice a core value. Will they be open to the idea of reparations? I'll see how I'm led. Already thinking I may read the family court chapter. Suggestions?

After Lourdes it's back east to visit Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), this set up by a Anne, a Quaker woman I haven't met yet. She writes that she wants to bring the book's perspective to her neck of the woods. A neck with some, you know, red on it, she says.

Well alright. She's worked hard to make it happen and I can't wait to meet her.

These good people are like boulders in a river, each a part of the makeshift bridge I cross on. But where, what, is the other side? I don't know. I hop to the foothold, and then look ahead. (I wrote hope instead of hop there.)

I read about a possibly racially motivated shooting near campus in IUP's student paper The Penn. The column was titled "This should be end of line for racism at IUP, everywhere." I wanted to meet the person who wrote that. And it turns out the author, David Bivens, want to meet me too. So we will, meet I mean - two writers concerned about race. Maybe I'm a boulder in his bridge across the river. Who knows?

a Diamond

Kaki came back from two weeks away, most of them in Philly, with a veritable Easter basket full of treats: photos of the boys at baseball practice, and with the photos her descriptions and stories.

If you read the book you know how desperately we wanted them to have more time outdoors, playing and learning and extending their boundaries. I guess we just needed to be patient.

I wrote this already but I'll write it again - God Bless their coach Kevin, and all the people who coach children's sports. Twenty kids went out for the team. Only about half that could make it. His criteria? No missed practices.

The boys didn't miss a practice, and neither did their mom. Because you know Tahija's not about to let stay down at the field, after dark, for hours. And last night, Kaki said, some guy was there with his pit bull terrier running loose and Tahija and her friend called the cops on him because not only was the dog running loose, and with all those kids around, he looked starved.

Nothing gets to Tahija like a mistreated dog.

Kaki sat on the bleachers with the cold parents. I was glad to hear that about 2/3 of the kids are white. Glad because it's been looking like white flight has re-segregated the neighborhood pretty quick - in about ten years. But I guess it's not the whole neighborhood, yet. I know Tahija and Lamarr are doing their part - making friends, being good neighbors, building bridges, like they know how to do. And now the boys, playing on an integrated team.

But those other kids, of whatever race, are BIG, sompared to the triplets. Least it's not football.

Damear was playing second, Kaki said, really doing the squat and sway and chatter and smack your mitt thing. Mahddy, Mr. former failure-to-thrive, appears to be going out for catcher. If I was the coach I'd pick him for that too. He's tough and smart, and he's got a good arm. Those millions of push-ups paying off.

Little Lamarr is not exactly athletically inclined. But we knew that. His self-esteem remains pretty high though; he's doing the best in school and he's been favored since birth by many of them women in the family (see Chapter 14 if you have the book). He's throwing lefty and having fun. He's got a really big mitt.

Kaki had wanted to give them baseball mitts last Kawanzaa. I remember the two of us standing in the toy store debating it. I said they'd never get to use them. I might have said never-ever. I might have felt hopeless.

Thank you Kevin. Thank you Tahija and Lamarr. Thank you, you remnant of the working-class Italian and Irish community that built the field and the tall bright lights. Thank you working-class African-American and Latina/a people moving in, sharing your sports and ways, sitting with the white folks on the park bleachers so that your kids can feel it, be supported and protected by it: Community.

Thank you Kaki for being there that night and rushing home with your bright basket of descriptions. You are a bridge builder too.

We'll get some baseball pics of them up soon.

something pushing up through the loam

It's not easy thinking up original titles. . . . Anyway, off tomorrow to another academic gig at Temple U. A callback, I guess, from a professor who attended a Frbruary program and invited us to a larger thing. But not that large, and no stipend. I guess stipends are a thing of the past. But I always sell some books, sometimes sell out, and I'll get to see the boys the next day. Kaki's already down there and heading for her mom's in Virginia after, me right back up here to the new book, a novel, "Real Moon." But another, about race, seems to be pushing up too. It was around while I wrote Walk with Us - how I experienced race growing up, a souls of white folk type book, or maybe more like Ralph Ellison's milestone novel, his only novel, Invisible Man.

Experimental in form, about race but not didactic, intense and reflective at the same time. It shook me when I read it in my early twenties - the pure power of the prose, and the weightiness of the symbolism. The book forged its own form, because realism wasn't real enough and naturalism not big enough to contain its insights.

No wonder I feel a little blocked when I think about undertaking a work that even dares to try to approach what he accomplished . . . but I feel a form incubating in me that could hold what I have to say...

Notice Tahija's pseudonym in the book is Ellison. And another fact - Time Magazine ranked Invisible Man in its top 100 best English language novels since 1923. So, if you haven't read it yet you have something to anticipate! I'd loan you my copy but it's very marked up. Here's the terse prologue - clear, intense, private and historical at the same time, somehow.

And here is the first chapter, the longer, much-anthologized, gripping "Battle Royal." Works as a short story.

fun with de-centering whiteness

For example - talking to Amy's sons Gabe and Sam over dinner the other night, and Gabe, who's studying Norse culture, is telling about how when Viking sailors built a settlement in North America they turned the native Americans there against them by giving gifts of milk, yogurt and cheese.

Seems the indigenous people got sick, supposed they'd been poisoned. Not a good intro to neighbors. Of course, neither group knew about lactose intolerance. But what I didn't realize until Gabe explained it is that the ability to digest cow's milk is a genetic mutation. Handy if you have cows around but otherwise, as in the Americas for example, not a survival aid.

I'd always thought of it in reverse. I mean, I thought most everyone had this ability to digest cow's milk. The human norm. And then there were a few subgroups who for some reason did not have that ability. They had a condition, a flaw . . .

But it's lactose tolerance that's the aberration, the mutation. I am in the subgroup. In the U.S. though, European descendants are the dominant majority (I almost wrote "happen to be in..." but no "happen" about it). So their way can seem like THE way. The center.

Thanks Gabe! Not just for the interesting history piece but for telling it in a way that de-centered whiteness. And Sam, younger, is studying a period he calls "The Conquering of the Americas."

Can you guess they're home schooled? And they can cook like the dickens, too. With or without dairy products.

Here's a map, not a great one, but gives some idea of the cultural distribution.

graduation and baseball and a good neighbor named Kevin

Tahija leaves a message while I'm down in the basement loading the woodstove. "I want to tell ya'll about my graduation date so ya'll cam come because..." and there's another ya'll or two in there.

To say, ya'll are family.

I'd asked awhile back about graduation. Was she going to go? That's for the Associates degree she's been working toward the last two years or so. In the past, she hasn't liked public events like that. I remember they had a dinner when she finished the CNA program I talked about in the book (last chapter), but it was a pretty dismal affair.

But she's going this time. June 13th. I could tell she was walking when she called, walking fast, the way she does, to the market or someplace. To the future.

And Kaki, who's down there doing AVP workshops, stopped by and got to watch 2/3 of the triplets riding their new bikes (Mahddy was on punishment). Well! I can't tell you how happy that makes us. Yes I can - it makes us happy enough to erase, in retrospect, days and weeks of toddlers with no room to toddle, little boys with no place to run.

And--gift upon gift--their report cards were good enough, dad said, that they could join league baseball this summer. God bless the man who's organizing the league. Kevin. He's a white guy who used to live around the corner from T and J but is still close enough, I guess, to stay involved. He came by the house when Kaki was there with info about the league. They can walk to the ball field. I hope they have practice every night and many games. I hope they love baseball and that loving it opens them to more new activities. I hope there's more people like Kevin to organize safe fun. Because believe me, there's people enough organizing the unsafe sort.

Well, that's the news from Philly. If you want to send a graduation card email me and I'll give you the address. elizag@epix.net

friends don't let friends pretend privilege is a good day

These names are changed.

My white friend Ellen’s in grad school, Penn State. I helped her on a paper a few months back, a rough with a loose firehose of a thesis. She took my critique a bit hard, seemed undermined in her confidence, her sense that she could do the work to get this degree she wants.

So, 2nd paper I was gentler. I didn’t need to be really. She’d worked on it more and the thesis shone laser-like, the style more authentic sounding, more her. “But I don’t think you want ‘celebrant’ here," I said – "for someone who celebrates another’s success? I think 'celebrant' is a priest celebrating, or conducting, mass.”

Her face went from calmly confident to fearfully uncertain. Someone, I thought, several someones early in this person’s life made "correct" language the measure not just of success but of self worth.

Enter Jackie (I’ll call her), another student, black, a study friend of my friend. First paper, the professor, in conference with Jackie, says of some grammatical problem (I paraphrase) – that’s a mistake African Americans tend to make. The professor is a white woman.

Ellen reported this to me. I was shocked and wondered what it meant to Jackie to be stereotyped that way right at the start of her graduate career. Jackie, by the way, does common English just fine, Ellen reports. Sounds like she's from the midwest. But her first paper, Ellen thought, was pretty all-over-the-place.

But it’s not the professor I want to talk about here, it’s Ellen. Her insecurities, and how they drive her racism. Just like mine drive my racism.

She goes to class with the laser-thesis rough of the 2nd paper, 'celebrant' perhaps changed to 'celebrator,' perhaps not. During peer review, she reads Jackie’s rough, and comments, playing the role with Jackie that I played with her. Except I’ve worked years as a part-time English prof who’s critiqued maybe 4,000 college papers. She, Ellen, is Jackie’s peer, struggling like her with the writing demands of this tough course. (Peer review is meant to give student writers a real audience, not an editor, grader or arbiter of "correct" English. But it's hard to get some students to just react, not evaluate. Particularly hard, I've found, for white students working with students of color. The male to female match-up can also be a problem.)

Here’s the report I get on how class went (paraphrased): I read Jackie’s draft and showed her a lot of what she needed to do. We had a really good interaction.

I translate that this way: Instructing Jackie, I feel better about that really embarrassing mistake with 'celebrant,' and my writing in general, and more confident in my ability to excel in this competitive program.

And does Jackie feel more confident? I don’t know. I do know that after class Ellen approached the professor and asked if the two of them — Ellen and the professor — might collaborate on the revision and co-publish the final in an academic journal. The professor said yes. Ellen was thrilled.

But puzzled. The professor hadn’t read the draft yet.

The privilege of being assumed competent. What level of confidence do we have to reach before we are willing to let that privilege go? Can we reach that level and ground ourselves in healthy self-esteem with that privilege still intact and unexamined? And here’s the biggest question, one this writing has helped me arrive at – Is that privilege the very cause of our low self-esteem?

We suspect we didn’t earn it. We’re not challenged and toughened as we grow up. If Jackie survives this class and program intact, she’ll know she sure earned it, and some. Despite professor and classmates, not to mention what all is in the reading.

I celebrate those who step off the smooth road of privilege and take an honest look around. It’s not simple – what to do next. But we’re not celebrants at a Mass, following a set ritual. We’re free beings. We “go by going where we have to go,” as Roethe writes. Justice compels us to go off the road of easy yes's.

making a point (or tryin)

They come, but I don't always know from where. My answers, I mean. That very shiny green shirt though I know for sure came from The Metropolitan Opera thrift shop in Manhattan. My East Side host, and an early supporter of the book, Ilene Wagner, snatched it off the rack just as it arrived. Thank you, Ilene.

CC Inc's director Paul Marcus' gift is this photo. I like "What Changes" above my head there, like text in a cartoon bubble. I change, we change, we all change our communities. Let's get going. If you're near Boston, at least you've got Community Change, Inc.. Horace Seldon founded it after Martin Luther King Jr. was assasinated. A sprout that's grown into a great tree. I felt privileged, in the good sense of the word, to be sitting in its shade sharing my story.

at Community Change, Inc. in Boston

The reading at Community Change, Inc. was unique in that much of the small audience was drawn from the tiny sliver of the U.S. population - white ant-racists. We discussed more than I read, with Community Change, Inc. director Paul Marcus sharing insights about how this personal story fit into the larger anti-racist context. Amazing to find such a good match for the book, especially since I knew little of the theory and history when I was writing it.

So where is the director? Well, he took this photo, but the ones I took I deleted by mistake before I could make it to a computer. Borrowed camera (my only excuse). Visit their site. A LOT going on (the site's being revamped though so come again later).

My niece took off from classes at Simmons College to attend the reading. It was a thrill. She's on the left, rear (really small, sorry Jen). And we did the tour of the Black Heritage Trail led that day by none other than Community Change Inc. founder Horace Seldon. More about that soon.

looking out on a lake of faces

...was going to write "sea" but there weren't that many faces. The room was full though and some of those faces bore the light of recognition. Yes yes yes, they nodded, that's just what it's like, I can see it, yes. A writer wants nothing more, at least this writer does.

Some stayed after to look at photos of the family today.

Worcester State Hospital

Here's the reader and the reading planner, with her aunt and uncle (Esther and David)! I couldn't have imagined, those years alone in he Endless Mountains writing the book, all the people I'd meet through it. This is Esther's niece Jackie, director of social work at Worcester State Hospital. Esther gave her the book and after she read it she wanted to schedule a reading.

I'm so glad she did. She and her husband Stan hosted me the night before, with family coming from all over to see their aunt/grandmom/sister Esther. The dinner was phenomenal--grilled salmon was the highlight, cabbage for St. Pats Day, veggies, this goat cheese dressing for the huge salad, apple crisp after...oh and the reading next day went pretty well too.

Was the reading mandatory for the staff? Well, sort of: held at a regularly scheduled meeting time. But I think I entertained them some. Saw laughs and smiles, nodding heads. Quite a few stayed after to talk. And quite a few books took wing.

The black hat is a gift, says WSH / Social Work Month 2009. It'll serve to remind me that social workers may sometimes seem the villian, as they did to Tahija, but that they can be as bright and caring as they women and men I met at WSH.

the tazmanian devil & me

Lamarr and I started blog of movie reviews: freestyle, playful, but serious too. Because he loves movies and knows them well.

Our angle is a sort of Siskel-Ebert thing - two very different people volleying opinions: old(ish-young, white-black, Quaker-Muslim, pacifist-fighter. TAZ is Lamarr's nickname, for the Tazmanian devil cartoon character, and EKG is my initials, so we call it Flipside: TAZ & EKG movie reviews. We've only done two movies so far, but I'm glad for the peep into his world. I'm an old sci-fi fan and that's been something we share. So this is good.

Stop by and say hello at Flipside. His use of language is more skillful than you might think at first if you're used to common English. It's quite hip, or, as they say now, dope.

A big sweet 80

Tahija just got the results of her final - 80%. With that, she earns her Associate degree and moves on to the Bachelor's program. She's majorly psyched (you can translate that as joyful). I asked her what her overall grade was but she says she didn't look. Soon as she got her test score she just called. Then she went out the front door, still talking to me, to see what was happening on the sidewalk.

What was happening was her friend's baby was chewing on a wet soggy biscuit he had been chewing on the last time she looked out. She laughed lightly, and I heard others laughing . . . the joy of her success already rippling outward.

She mentioned the friend's name, Lamarr, and for a disoriented moment I thought she meant her little Lamarr, as if we were ten or so years down the road and some percentage of the triplets were fathers, and one of them was visiting her, his baby, her grandbaby (my great godbaby or is that greatgod baby?), sitting on the stoop gumming a soggy biscuit, her, near forty (!), telling me about it on the phone, me past sixty straining as always to hear her and the sounds around her and the implications of her tone and her every choice of word.

Or maybe we'll be living close again (but not too close). Maybe by then she'll have a Ph why the heck not D!

Pi's pretty cool

Tahija takes her math final today. This is the third time she's taken math. It's the one course that remains between her and her first ever academic degree - the Associates. I've been on the phone with her all week, dredging up my very limited math skills. But what she needed more than my skill was my encouragement. To walk through the harder problems with her, complain with her, as we used to do about social workers, nurses, teachers -- any officials she felt were in her way. The complaining is a kind of venting, and me complaining with her is a way of being an ally. Then comes celebration, when she gets a tough problem. And in between all this is the boys coming and going, Jamarr, Jamarr's friends. I'm amazed she can get any studying done. She worked yesterday from 6 am till evening. She wants to pass this class. She says she'll give up if she fails, and I believe she will.

I think she'll pass the final. I helped yesterday with basic geometry, looking things up on line (to review and in some cases learn). The good old Pythagorean theorem still works, and I still don't know how to find the square root of a number, besides guestimating and then multipying till I come to it (as I remembered doing on tests, knowing there was an easier way). And Pi is quite elegant. Good to know there really are a few constants in the world. In the universe.

Tahija complains that she'll never need any of this stuff "so why do I got to learn it?" Of course she will need it, has already, and the process is also a product. She can't deny the satisfaction she felt in working out a difficult problem, the confidence it engendered. And I don't know about her, but it reassures me, seems a shadow of the Divine, that the ratio of every and any circle's circumference to its radius is 3.14... No matter what, no matter where.

We need constants in this life, especially ones we can measure.

the gated college

Remembering powerpoint problems last year at Albany University, I planned to arrive early at Temple U. To get everything set up. Kaki had decided to come and so we were both early, an hour early, and the dean of the social work school wasn’t ready for us, nor was the room where I was to present.

The program was to start at four. The room empted out at four. I hurried in, whipped out the flashdrive John Sharpless gave me after hearing about the almost-stolen laptop with the unbacked up new book on it. And poof: the first slide of the powerpoint writ large on the screen.

Educators are using WALK WITH US to

 Present a fascinating Case Study
 Examine Survival skill, Strengths, & Resiliency
 Encourage Cultural Sensitivity, and Advocacy
 Develop Bias awareness and Mutuality
 Inspire long-term strategies and Creative problem solving
 Enjoy riveting, evocative, hopeful, funny, edifying, poetic prose

That was devised by Kaki, who also set up the Temple event. She started working on it about six months ago. But it was worth it: although the group was small, we’re invited back for a larger event in April.

The professor who invited us feels Temple is too clinical. Students don’t come from or know much about the people and communities they hope to serve. I could tell that from their questions. And how amazed they were that we had done something very common (as the professor pointed out) around the world and in the innercity – everywhere in fact but in middeclass white America: shared our home with neighbors in need.

Temple sits in the innercity but walls itself off from it. Social work students are attracted not by the location, this professor told us, but by the clinical program. Clinical as in hang up a shingle and wait for people to come to you. Don't go down to the streets.

Kaki was busy, before and after, telling undergrads about those streets. Those who had already walked them were most interested in talking: a single father who fought the system in order to keep his children; a young woman from Israel who spent two years tutoring in North Philly schools before starting college. Experience before education.

They had to hurry off to classes — our story and a few of its images (like this one) now part of their education. And, maybe, a critique of it.

reFlections prompted by an aquarium membership fee

Some people say they’re playing us – Tahija and Lamarr. They see white guilt and black need as a common, potent compound that, when mixed with cute little boys synergizes into resources: A place to live when Tahija was fourteen, pregnant and homeless. Legal guardianship when that’s what she needed to keep the boys. Miscellaneous stuff. A three-bedroom freestanding house. A zoo membership (family deluxe) and now an Aquarium membership.

My biggest fear when I consider that this might be true is not that we have been played (manipulated, conned), but that we may have reinforced a co-dependent pattern in the parents and greatly abetted its being passed on to the children.

A young social worker named Danny who came to two readings characterized Philly as a racially co-dependent city. I think he’s right. The problem with an interchange of this sort – I’m poor because I’m black, you should give me x (a dollar, a break, a free pass) because your people have hurt mine – is that it neither empowers the poor nor releases the guilty. In fact, in so far as getting resources is contingent upon need/lack/disability it actively disempowers.

It’s like the way poor parents get a small check for learning disabled children, but nothing for the gifted and talented. What does that encourage?

I’ve sometimes felt Lamarr is deeply committed to this strategy. When he was a kid with a mother caught up in the crack epidemic of the eighties, he used his younger, cuter twin brothers to get help from whitefolks. And now he uses the triplets. Twice now white neighbors have given him vans, and last time I was there little Lamarr said a neighbor had promised them bikes.

I think he’d prefer to be independent. Maybe at some level he scorns the helpers. I think his cynicism toward those he plays makes real relationship difficult. It is not a relationship of equals; in fact the relationship is predicated upon inequality. It would not have come about had the two parties been equal.

Tahija has sometimes gone along with Lamarr, as she has with him about nearly everything, because she loves and needs him. (Violent horror movies, for example, are now something she says she enjoys.) But her connection with us is rooted in love, I feel. She has more integrity and a stronger drive for independence. It was her idea, I think, for them to take us out for dinner for Kwanzaa. “You always pay, now we can pay,” she said. When we lived together I lived on the childcare money, needed it. We have that foundation of a kind of equality.

When I haven’t seen or talked to her for awhile, the stereotypes and suspicions start to push up like weeds. But time with them weeds the garden of our relationship. Part of the harvest can be this day at the Aquarium.

It may be that this time Tahija and Lamarr will offer to pay for the membership. If we want to pay, as a birthday gift to the triplets, are we being played?

Or are we being grandmotherly?

Sweet Honey in the Whitehouse

My friend Esther of Esther and Freddy fame sent me this story - Sweet Honey in the Rock at the Whitehouse performing for a group of middle schoolers Michelle Obama had invited over for a Black History Month program. You know what she said has got to motivate them. And hearing Sweet Honey...! That changed my life and I didn't hear them until I was like twenty. If you haven't heard them yet here's a few pickings from U-Tube:

The classic "We Who Believe in Freedom" (quoted in the book)

A performance in Sydney, Australia here

And the more musically intricate "Peace"

And here's their official site, with tour dates and so on.