They told me "He hate you Niggah! Can't you see."Carrying a rusted old hammer with a splintered pommel, wrapped in melting, sticky, black, electrical tape and a bucket of bent and twisted nails, I walked up the street toward the stack of boards and bent baby coach wheels, imagining I'd be like one of the kids on Bill Cosby's "Dead Man's Hill" from the album "Wonderfulness". (*tangent)- I don't know how many times I stole it from my dad or how many times he'd take the record off the spindle, put it back in the slip cover, dust jacket and on the alphabeticlly ordered shelf, that I never realized, until I helped him pack what would fit from the thirty years of "things" he'd horded into his small, brick, northwestern Detroit "house", [that was never home, but a social statement of having "made it"] into a huge moving van with the help of two young, white, Moron, elders. (*digression)- Before that day, I called them "Bicycle Vampires". After that day, I would never refuse to offer one of them a glass of water or a piece of fresh fruit. (*End digression-return to tangent) He'd carefully marked several boxes, "Rock's favorite music" and packed them with records, "carts" and boxed reels of aging magnetic tapes [recording sessions of me, my brothers, sister and friends of the family playing DJ and station announcer, air personalities in his rigged up home studio composed of pieces from the radio station at University of Michigan, WCHB, WJZZ and WTVS Channel 56.] The rest of the house was my responsibility alone to fit in the truck. There were well over two hundred albums in that collection and he had notes about what songs, on what albums and a list of details that resembled what I'd note when I worked as a restaurant kitchen manager. Things like weather, who was present, my mood, the time of day or night and what order I played tracks. Those boxes would ride with his wife and a surprisingly few very precious things, (a charcoal drawing by John Lockhart [before he added Oni to his name], some pictures of family and the Old West Side, where he grew up and I lived the first seven years of my life, the Bible that he'd recently inherited from my Grandmother, with all the family birth records and some other "junk and trinkets", he call the cache of things that traveled, in the air conditioned conversion van, while he drove the big yellow truck, "Home" to the family farm in Ivanhoe. The same place I've dreamed of retiring to, since I was about twelve, when the processes of tending the patch of tobacco that stands next to the family cemetery, where I hope to be buried when I die, but not too soon, okay. I'd already realized that we'd taken totally different paths, in hopes of reaching the same goal. (*End tangent). I was going to make a Go-Kart and Mister Batt, the mean old white man down the block, who seemed to be the only person who saw what I was trying to do with my wheels and broken brick and pieces of metal that I'd scraped up from the dirt around the perimeter of about ten houses north to the Smith's and four houses south, to the Nelson's, of our gray asbestos sided house that was my range of travel without Mom's permission. Mister Batt stopped at the turn to the pathway and stood, grunted and said in a funny voice that I'd later learn Batt was his first name and his funny talk, a Cork County accent, he helped build Briggs Stadium and planned to spend his last days in the house he build for his wife, who died some years before. "You there, you need some tools and some help there, I ain't askin'. Now go ask your mom if it's alright for me to give you a hand making your push cart! You'll just get your hands all bloody and no push cart, with that alley apple. And you isn't one that's likely to quit. I watches you." So, I did my "Yes Sir", and went to tug at Mom, who said, "Sure, whatever", because she was enjoying one of her very few days off from the plant. I mean very few in thirty one years of slaving on the motor line or pretty much inside of a Hilde Borer Machine, tapping cylinder heads. (*tangent)- Let me tell you about realizing that you're a punk and your mom is a tougher man than you'll ever be. i work a summer job on the motor line in the same plant. The damned place was so big, we never saw each other and she never knew I'd ever been there. Now, when I was a teen and she'd just started working the Hil-borer, I'd spend an hour every night picking shards of metal shavings from her hands and feet. Then she'd shower, get drunk and fall asleep for a few hours before starting the whole insane process all over again, beginning with making sure I got my brothers up for school. Anyway I knew that if I'd gone to my dad, who worked eleven years skill trades or one of my two step dads who also worked in the same damned plant, I told you it was a big place, [I didn't tell you how incestuous factory culture could be or that my mom is five feet tall and weighs all of a hundred pounds, soaking wet, in her steel shanked and toed boots.] to tell them, that after eighty six days, I got laid off, something like three days before admission into the union and whatever, I'd have been able to keep my job. Which at the time was paying "Good Money". But for an entire summer, I cried like a bitch in heat every night and a whipped child every morning. So when the man handed me my pink slip, I jumped for joy and bought a plane ticket to San Fransisco, where lay some of the best fucking pavement for skate boarding in North America. I was seventeen, a misfitted artsy, fartsy, nerdy always fighting to defend my right to just be, without somebody that looked kind of like me, hurling open insults or making the type of threatening gesture that often lead to one of us enjoying short stay in a hospital and a cop or magistrate saying "You again!" (*End tangent) So I followed mister Batt to the end of the block and on to his front porch, where a few minutes later he comes out with the small red chitterlings bucket full of bent rusted nails and tattered old hammer and says, laughing, "These be quite heavy, If you like you can take a couple of pocket fulls". I accepted the weight of the whole bucket and thanked him, preparing to strain what little muscles I had lugging the thing seven or eight houses home. But he doesn't let the bucket go, instead he guides them and me to sit on a step of the porch and begins explaining the reason for giving me a bucket of bent nails, what I should do with them, the fact that he wants his bucket of bent nails back when I was done and that he wanted to be the first person to push me down the street on my new push cart.Now like I said it was only a few houses from his house to ours, but by the time I'd gotten back I was pretty much exhausted and in tears with humiliation of feeling too weak to handle the load I carried and from insults the kids spit at me and my new friend Mr. Batt. But, as I strained to raise my head up and choke back my nine or ten year old tear, I saw my step father standing at the first stair to the house, proud, akimbo, in her sweat salt bleached gray uniform shirt, unmoving and totally confident until I reached the walk way. Then he reached out and picked up the bucket, saying, "Damn Boy this is heavy! You been working on this thing all day?" as he walked me up the stairs and sat down to help (instruct) me straighten nails and drive them into the boards that I'd arranged into a huge "I" shape for my go-kart. Mom made us come in for dinner before I could finish, and he help me carry the thing into the basement, warning me that something this nice could get stolen if left on the porch. After dinner he helped me finish it, going over my little sketches, adding all kinds of reinforcements, little things to make it easier to handle and swapping out two of the baby coach wheels for solid rimmed wagon wheels. I told him that I agreed to let Mr Batt be the first to push me down the street. He told me that it was dark and time for me to go to bed and I'd have to test drive it in the morning. That night I went to sleep chanting the race sound track from "Dead Man's Hill".I woke up, got dressed and ready to take my new go-kart to Mr. Batt's for a spin, my mother was crying into my step dad's shoulder. "Rock, somebody broke into Mr. Batt's house and beat him up really badly. He's in the hospital." He whispered over my mom's back. Like the spoiled American brat that I've always been, I ran outside and down to his house, where people were boarding up the windows. I skipped stairs up to his porch to be greeted with. "Where do you think you're going little nigrah!" With tears in my eyes and as much venom in my voice as I could muster I shouted at him, "I'm not a nigger. I'm a nigger row! Mr. Batt helped me make my new go-kart. You old punk!" My step dad was close behind me and ready to defend me from the black man who'd stopped nailing plywood to the window frame and was about to throttle me for standing for my self. "Don't talk down to my kid. Mister Batt is his friend and he's concerned about the old man." "Sheeeet Niggah, he's gone a hear it in the streets anyway and I don't know why you tripping about that old racist ass honky anyway Shit. Serves his old ass right for staying down here in the ghetto anyway." My step dad walked me home and allowed me to take a picture of my finished go-kart with his Polaroid that he used for his side job shooting portraits at cabarets and night clubs. Then he took me to the hospital to visit him.Now what you have to understand is racism is sort of an abstract concept to me at this time in my life. Right about now everybody's a good person or a bad person. I have fresh memories, I mean like a few weeks old fresh memories, of campus life at University of Michigan, where I'd never felt so free. And I was haunted by vivid memories of Dexter, Grand River, Clairmont, Lothrup and Joy road, the streets near my grandmothers' homes and where we shopped, burning in the distance. Straight north up the street that we lived on, the street that the soldiers and tanks rolled up and to make it doubly scary it was on television. Next door at the Coleman's house the television was 'real' color. Not like the color thing that Dad had stuck to the screen. The same hands that expressed unmeasurable love for me, also left long enduring wounds on my person and my psyche. By the time I was ten I'd been twice molested by different friends of the family. I'd threatened a grown man with a locked, cocked, loaded and safety off hand gun. I'd seen my mother beaten comatose. I'd been dragged out of the small Louisiana town that my mother's grandmother lived in, because I'd greeted a little white girl and my family was afraid I was going to become the next Emmet Till, experienced tobacco poisoning on my father's family farm in North Carolina. Been to the mint in Washington DC and gotten publicly beaten by my Dad, for openly entering a debate with a university instructor about the racial implications of Beauty and the Beast and invited back to the same lecture hall to continue the exchange. Met John Sinclair and experienced my first super massive contact high, at the Hash Bash. Gotten drunk in a tittie bar in South West Detroit, because Dad said, "My number one son ain't gonna be no fuckin' faggot. I've actually seen a child born, in the same bed that she and her mother were conceived in. I'd been flown to California twice without a parent or any direct adult guardianship on board. Seen the lights of the Ambassador Bridge turned on for the first time and cats singing Doo Wop on West Grand Blvd outside Motown's first studios. Bend snow blinded. Stood on Michigan Avenue, when the Tigers won the World Series, Shook Dick Gregory's hand, been touched by Mohammed Ali and Mother Waddles. Been inside the Grand Canyon and stood in the footprints of superstars on Hollywood's walk of fame. Witnessed my grandmother stand in for Mahalia Jackson and seen teenage boy's bodies that had been beaten to death and left in trash cans behind Hanks Store. Reportedly as the results of S.T.R.E.S.S.'s (The Big Fo') effort to clean up the streets of Detroit. I'd seen someone that I was told was Miles Davis, in a junkie nod outside the Blue Bird and heard Nina Simone sing in the Safari. I'd seen the MC5 at the Grandee, we went rollerskating there and it was in the same strip as the barber college where I'd go to get my hair cuts and learned about the infinity effect of mirrors. I'd ridden on the elevators with the white gloved attendants at Hudson's Downtown and eaten lunch on the terrace at Hudson's Northland. Been in limousines and on carousels and even was told that Edge Water Park was the second Black Amusement Park in Detroit, I'd been to concerts at Cobo Hall and the Olympia and plays at the Fisher, I knew Black people that had garages attached to their houses that were bigger than the house I lived in with my mom and two brothers, I had African and English relatives visit a grandmother who'd been made a nobleman in the Bahamas by the Queen of England and cousins that lived in Alaska and to top it off, if I was sneaky I could get free food from the Black Panthers down the street or at school. Imagine that! And I know adults in Detroit today who've never been more than five miles from the place that they were born.I didn't take my go-kart out of the house until Mr. Batt came home. He couldn't push me. It was everything for the nurse to bring him out to his porch for some sun. A few weeks before he died, he said their are no black people or white people and no really good people or really bad people. Just people. He told me about his father who'd been lynched by hateful white men, because his father chose to party with Black people. Back then I didn't understand what lynching was and by the time I did understand, I knew that black folks did things like that to black folks.I found it hard to believe that white people did that kind of thing to other white people. Now I know that people do these kinds of things to everything and unlike many, I kind of understand why. I've spent most of my 45 years trying to figure out how. I don't mean how people commit individual acts, I mean how these things grow to such scale.You know, I've always wondered why White men have always gifted me with tools and information, Asians, Eastern and Southern Europeans with poetry and food and Black people with music, money and things to enjoy. I can't remember what I did with any of the money that anyone's ever given me, but I think I still have our first television and first computer, An Apple II, my first set of trading cards, which includes, Lynn Swan and OJ Simpson rookie year cards, I have my first compound bow and BB gun and most of the first drafting set I was allowed to use and my first air compressor. I have a pretty nice record collection too. Some of my favorites have been stolen by my son (that makes me happy). Who no longer reaches into my mouth for food, but will from time to time, take food off of my plate. Now that he's a father, he'll get his and he gets to carve the turkey. I take it as a sign from God that the hospital that I was born in has been replaced with a Home Depot and you can still buy a quality hammer for less than ten dollars. I don't know what happened to the hammer, but the bucket of nails is still in my mom's basement, under the stairs in a storage room. I think I'm going to help my son build a tree house for his daughter with them. I'd like to help him build a house to call home.
Now when we take a look at the present state of humanity, one may be forced to think how stupid our youth appears to be.
Well Tricky said, "If you follow a stupid kid home, I bet someone stupid answers the door".
With that said. Really intelligent men tend not to make as many babies.
That goes for really intelligent women too, but it has a slightly different numerical skew and impact. When you look at the numbers of women who have multiple children by a number of different fathers, you may be able to note something impressively important, many of those women share children with the same set of fathers and these fathers have similar characteristics. One that is most notable is their lack of intelligence.
It's similar to the porn industry, where, before the advent of the DV camcorder, less than one percent of the men working in the industry were having sex with over ninety percent of the women in the business.
Without these dumb boys making babies like hampsters, we'd have very few disposable people to send off to war, work dangerous, toxic, thankless, low paying jobs, lock-up to do America's dirty work, like cleaning highway shores. Soon we'd have very little exploitable population, because the super bright amongst us believe and say things like, "I don't want to be responsible for making another one like me". "I can't find a suitable partner". & "I ain't up for commitment right now".
Which in turn gives us countless generations of canon fodder to deal with and reinforce the belief for the intellectual exception, that making new human beings is not worth the grunt
Vlade Divac made me wonder if having missiles launched through one's "hood" could make one a better basketball player?
Boukowski made me realize that I wasn't the only 'niger-ized' person to ever share a thought like that.
The future? The future is much like the past. The surviving nerds gather and take revenge upon the "cool" people of the world by creating and marketing one more thing that evolves from a luxury and status symbol into something the "cool" people of the world just can't live without.
The coolest thing that could happen is one of us becomes the next Huge Hefner and sends the rest of us out to have summits with the likes of TI, Martha Stewart, Gail King, Jean Grae (Tsidi Ibrahim), the Next Dali Lama, some eye candy model that just happens to be a stellar cartographer and the guys from Tesla motors.
"The same hands that expressed unmeasurable love for me, also left long enduring wounds on my person and my psyche. By the time I was ten I'd been twice molested by different friends of the family. I'd threatened a grown man with a locked, cocked, loaded and safety off hand gun. I'd seen my mother beaten comatose. I'd been dragged out of the small Louisiana town that my mother's grandmother lived in, because I'd greeted a little white girl and my family was afraid I was going to become the next Emmet Till"
---says it all, and raises even more questions. Who are we? Where are we in this Inca/Arowak/Gitcheegoomee/Mayan/Nasca haunted hemisphere? What do we see each other as? What will our future be?
Bro' Man, you damn HUMANIST, you! You keep writing shit that gives me chills and flashbacks. Is the experience of 40-something Black male Detroiters really so similar? My own experiences parallel yours, including the old white man in the neighborhood (well, he was Filipino, not white, but that was 'other' enough in them days!) and the beatings in public because the family was terrified my mouth would get me lynched by white folks, and right down to the molestation.
Molestation--more common that Black men want to say, and more common that everybody who sees us as beast/robot/hardleg/mules, want to imagine? After all, Black boys in America are objects for consumption and fetish (Wayne Williams, whether he was guilty or innocent, certainly underscored that in the Atlanta child murder uproar--Baldwin no less, shouted it from the rooftops: 'protect your little Black boys!')
Pride and awe to you, Brother, for stepping out of the pack to say it matter-of-factly, the way truth ought to be said, the way you always do say the truth. You've a gift.
https://theblacklist.net/
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Category: Fashion, Style, Shopping
Now when we take a look at the present state of humanity, one may be forced to think how stupid our youth appears to be.
Well Tricky said, "If you follow a stupid kid home, I bet someone stupid answers the door".
With that said. Really intelligent men tend not to make as many babies.
That goes for really intelligent women too, but it has a slightly different numerical skew and impact. When you look at the numbers of women who have multiple children by a number of different fathers, you may be able to note something impressively important, many of those women share children with the same set of fathers and these fathers have similar characteristics. One that is most notable is their lack of intelligence.
It's similar to the porn industry, where, before the advent of the DV camcorder, less than one percent of the men working in the industry were having sex with over ninety percent of the women in the business.
Without these dumb boys making babies like hampsters, we'd have very few disposable people to send off to war, work dangerous, toxic, thankless, low paying jobs, lock-up to do America's dirty work, like cleaning highway shores. Soon we'd have very little exploitable population, because the super bright amongst us believe and say things like, "I don't want to be responsible for making another one like me". "I can't find a suitable partner". & "I ain't up for commitment right now".
Which in turn gives us countless generations of canon fodder to deal with and reinforce the belief for the intellectual exception, that making new human beings is not worth the grunt
Posted by Periwinkle Bubbles
Boukowski made me realize that I wasn't the only 'niger-ized' person to ever share a thought like that.
The future? The future is much like the past. The surviving nerds gather and take revenge upon the "cool" people of the world by creating and marketing one more thing that evolves from a luxury and status symbol into something the "cool" people of the world just can't live without.
The coolest thing that could happen is one of us becomes the next Huge Hefner and sends the rest of us out to have summits with the likes of TI, Martha Stewart, Gail King, Jean Grae (Tsidi Ibrahim), the Next Dali Lama, some eye candy model that just happens to be a stellar cartographer and the guys from Tesla motors.
In fact, That one passage;
"The same hands that expressed unmeasurable love for me, also left long enduring wounds on my person and my psyche. By the time I was ten I'd been twice molested by different friends of the family. I'd threatened a grown man with a locked, cocked, loaded and safety off hand gun. I'd seen my mother beaten comatose. I'd been dragged out of the small Louisiana town that my mother's grandmother lived in, because I'd greeted a little white girl and my family was afraid I was going to become the next Emmet Till"
---says it all, and raises even more questions. Who are we? Where are we in this Inca/Arowak/Gitcheegoomee/Mayan/Nasca haunted hemisphere? What do we see each other as? What will our future be?
Will we have one.
Ray
Bro' Man, you damn HUMANIST, you! You keep writing shit that gives me chills and flashbacks. Is the experience of 40-something Black male Detroiters really so similar? My own experiences parallel yours, including the old white man in the neighborhood (well, he was Filipino, not white, but that was 'other' enough in them days!) and the beatings in public because the family was terrified my mouth would get me lynched by white folks, and right down to the molestation.
Molestation--more common that Black men want to say, and more common that everybody who sees us as beast/robot/hardleg/mules, want to imagine? After all, Black boys in America are objects for consumption and fetish (Wayne Williams, whether he was guilty or innocent, certainly underscored that in the Atlanta child murder uproar--Baldwin no less, shouted it from the rooftops: 'protect your little Black boys!')
Pride and awe to you, Brother, for stepping out of the pack to say it matter-of-factly, the way truth ought to be said, the way you always do say the truth. You've a gift.
-Ray