was, “They got enough of my life. I made up my mind they wouldn’t get any more of it by my thinking about the joint or talking about it. I never opened my eyes one day thinking I was still inside. The first morning I was out, I woke up knowing I was free.”
What seemed like aeons later, from my thirty-eighth-floor office at UniWorld, I would watch families from a Herald Square welfare hotel as they boarded an ironic yellow school bus to visit the missing men of their families on Rikers Island.
It was awhile before I shared the story of my grandfather and my childhood trips to prison with any of my New York friends. Although I knew it must, I felt as if my experience had almost nothing in common with the children leaving those hellish hotels and getting on those ignominious buses. I thought of my granddad not as a common criminal, but as a hothead who had been falsely imprisoned for a horrible offense he did not commit. Perhaps, like my grandfather, I felt that prison had taken enough of my life. The shameful reality of criminal life just didn’t square up with my freed grandfather, my image of myself, or the kind of child I had been when I made those long-ago family visitations.
When I was that child, I couldn’t wait for school to teach me how to read. I felt frustrated that there was a code all around me that I couldn’t crack. One day, riding down a rural highway in a car, I saw a roadside billboard with a big black panther on it. My inability to read the words on it made me so frustrated I cried. When my mother read books to me, I longed for the words to be as understandable as the pictures. I stared at the pages, willing the words to become comprehensible. Our babysitter’s grown son, a lean, ramrod-straight soldier whom we called Uncle, was a smart guy who loved to test our young brains. He was always posing riddles and showing us cool stuff—like how magnets would stick to metal but repel each other. One day, he challenged my brother and me—the first one to tell him the word affixed to the corner of the window fan would get a nickel. My brother Spurgeon, who in my five-year-old eyes knew everything, may have been distracted by thoughts of the ice cream he would buy with his nickel. I, on the other hand, slid right back into my usual focus: trying to make sense of this arrangement of the ABCs I had known forever. This time, inexplicably, something clicked.
“Is it Country Aire?” I asked.
Our uncle, astonished, replied that it was. “Did somebody already tell you that?” he asked.
“No, I just know it.”
I was just as surprised as he. It was an incredible experience. I had willed myself to comprehend something. I had taught myself to read. I don’t remember reading anything else until I went to school, but the feeling that I could, through sheer will, break through a barrier and get into a world I had been locked out of was born that day.
* * *
While my mother worked, we were left with Elsie Cooper, a stout, Arkansas-born matron whom we called Mama Cooper, and who was more like a grandmother than a paid caretaker. When my mother dropped us off at her house early on cold winter mornings, she let us go back to sleep snuggled next to her in bed, only to wake up to the aroma of thick slab bacon frying in the kitchen. She would serve it up with scrambled eggs and biscuits dripping with butter. After breakfast, I would sit between her knees as she combed and braided my unruly hair and chatted with her friends about the latest diet, deaths in the community, and the disaster of someone having missed the daily numbers jackpot by one digit, or having had all the digits but failed to “box” them and ensure a win. As she prepared dinners of fresh vegetables from her garden, fried chicken, or pork chops, and beat bowls of cornbread batter, we watched her favorite soap operas, The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow. Occasionally, she would call one of her friends and exclaim, “Did you see what that low-down woman just did?” Or, “That dirty dog! God’s gonna get him for that!”
In the early afternoon Spurgeon would come in from school with his usual treasure trove of knowledge garnered in first grade. Mama Cooper, though barely educated herself, believed in learning and loved smart children. She would talk with Spurgeon and me about whatever he had learned that day.
Later in the afternoon, her husband, Mr. Henry, her younger son Arthur, and her pretty green-eyed daughter Alla Mary would come in from their jobs at the Pontiac Motors plant. After they dropped their lunch boxes in the kitchen, they sat around the dining table waiting for dinner to be ready and reading the Pontiac Press that they had divided among themselves. All three would bring up items in the paper, and we were always included in the discussion.
“Whatcha think about them Russians and that Sputnik satellite, junior? You gonna go to outer space when you grow up?”
“Val, the Queen of England is coming to the United States. You reckon she’s gonna make it all the way to Pontiac?”
I doubt that any kid in today’s formal preschool gets more individual attention. The Coopers instilled in us a respect for learning and knowledge that neither of us has ever lost. Their questions, devoid of obstacles and limits, also made me an incorrigible dreamer who could easily imagine myself meeting the Queen of England, perhaps with my brother the astronaut by my side.
One of my creative heroes, Gordon Parks, had a theory that he didn’t tend to see barriers because in his childhood on the Great Plains, the vista was clear to the horizon. The Coopers exuded an unspoken optimism about the future because life had delivered them from the cotton fields of Arkansas to the promised land of the factory job, homeownership, and a new car in the driveway. After dinner, bellies full, my brother and I would watch TV until my mother picked us up. I favored Pinky Lee, a Pee Wee Herman–type comedian, but Mama Cooper usually insisted we watch The Auntie Dee Show because every once in a while we would see a “colored” faced like our own. I loved being with the Coopers and remain close to the family to this day. Still, partly because of their encouragement to envision myself as part of a world I could sense but not yet see, I longed to explore what lay beyond the comforting bosom of Mama Cooper’s care. I couldn’t wait to go to school.
Some children cling to their parents and feel abandoned when they are left in a strange place called school. I barely remember my mother being around on the day I arrived, raring to go, at the entrance to the kindergarten of Bethune Elementary School. Bethune was a midcentury-modern building our booming city had just erected, presumably to handle the influx of black baby boomers from Lakeside Homes. I remember learning how to sit still for story time, how to play rhythm instruments like tambourine and woodblock. We walked, marched, and ran around the classroom to music. To this day, I can hum the tune from the skipping portion of that exercise. I remember that we were shown a movie called A Desk for Billie, about a little girl who moved around a lot (with her family of migrant workers?). That was the first time I realized that white people could also have money problems and live in less-than-desirable neighborhoods. I loved school, with the exception of recess, which was a waste of time and a boon to classroom bullies. My first-grade teacher was a lovely black lady whom I knew from Sunday school and church. I’m not sure whether she had already noticed me from my brief performances on Easter Sunday, when we children recited short poems about Jesus and the Resurrection, but she immediately paid attention to me as a student and was the first of many teachers to nurture my academic progress. At Christmastime, I was stunned and pleased to receive a subscription to Children’s Digest as a gift from her. I read every issue cover to cover, partly because those magazines were a reminder that my reading ability made me special to someone important.
The following school year, the same teacher was instrumental in having me skip second grade. I had no idea why I was being taken to the principal’s office, but when asked to read for her, I was only too happy to show off in front of adults. My new third-grade teacher was an elegant, artsy woman who read us the poverty-to-glory saga of our school’s namesake and opened our minds to the possibility of Negro greatness. Mary McLeod Bethune, daughter of freed slaves, founded Bethune-Cookman College by selling sweet potato pies—a fact I later used in an ad about black colleges—and became an advisor to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
My teacher was a tall, unconventional beauty. She wore stacks of bangle bracelets on her long arms; her thin waist was often cinched with a wide leather belt that divided the swirling fullness of her skirts from the form-fitting turtleneck sweaters and simple shirts she favored.