Today,  I decided to do the “grown-up” thing and become an official commuter, with consecration of the moment occurring as I purchased my very first monthly Metra Pass to carry me from the “A” zone of downtown Chicago to its neighborhoring zone “B” where I live in Hyde Park.   No more scrounging around for change in the mornings or evenings to run to a bus stop with nerves wrecked to know if the bus going was mine or the bus coming will ever be.  No more toes stepped upon by every CTA bus rider with a case for being disabled, defeated, tired or otherwise prioritized to step ahead of me as we boarded.  No more cattle calls of “Back door!!!” to a harried bus driver upfront who is not responsible for the mechanics of the vehicle he or she drives–or I suppose not the extra block I must walk in rain or snow when he does not hear me.  I was going to have a schedule displayed on my refrigerator of exact times for the prompt and reliable regional transit train just three blocks from door, with a coffee shop underneath if I should so choose, a civilized milieu of suburbanites around me, precision to calm my Type-A nerves and no more “cash back” after nonsense 7-11 or Walgreens just to get on the bus to get home.

Is it too much to ask these days to spend your money, contribute to the well-being of society, and feed the GNP with some expectation or reward of politeness, gratitude and concern from the individuals you give your money to?  Apparently it is.  My observations that the general dispositions of society have sunk so low that I feel like I am committing a crime when I spend money anywhere but steadfast and cheeryMcDonald’s, given the lack of customer service help or enthusiasm to any of my questions, reached a new low today as I made my prideful purchase.  For one thing, a White lady circumnavigated the cordons of the Metra station commuter line to sneak up to the next counter with 5 minutes left before my train pulled out of the station to take me home.  A brother called her on it, with a boisterous “Did you know?!?!” scenario for 5 of us in line to participate in, in which I must admit she pretended pretty well that she did not know where the line began. 

However, I was not pretending when I only purchased a monthly pass to move about with for a month and thought I would be legally riding the train in 5 minutes for it.  In my typical downhome smile, I could not stop a nice “Hi” before I stated my reasons for approaching a clerk at the Metra station.  I did not think I looked like a robber, but these days I feel the need to clarify.  My greeting was unreturned, so I rushed to the heart of the matter: “I would like to buy a monthly pass from Zone A to Zone B.”  How’s that for information?  The bland clerk behind what I hope was not bullet-proof glass told me it was $85.50.  I was astonished.  “What happened to $63?”  She did not speak.  She only pointed to a sign.  Apparently, rates went up on February 1st and I was always the last to know.  I swiped my debit card and ran to track 5. 

Understand, she did not tell me that my Zone B train would be on Track 5; I had heard this announcement over the PA system.  Nor did she tell me “Thank you for riding the Metra,” or “Enjoy your ride,” or the most critical piece of information that is pertinent to this blog post now: “Your montly pass was purchased today but it won’t be valid until March 1st, just so you know.”

Instead, I ran off in counterfeit peace and harmony that my transportation was no worry for the next month.  I settled into law and ethics professor Dorothy Roberts’ latest tome, Fatal Invention, and determined to relish at least her complex preface during a 15 minute train ride in near silence versus a jerky 45-minute carousel ride on the #6 bus.  It was enjoyable until the conductor snaked through the train in search of evidence of riders’ tickets.  Unsure of the protocol that is customary among ordinary riders who did not bother to flinch as they displayed tickets in neat plastic cases upon the ticket grips that Metra provides riders, I held out my ticket to a gentleman who started questioning me immediately.

“Do you have a ticket?”

What did he mean did I have a friggin ticket?!?!?  I was $85 poorer for one.  It was fresh, newly minted, untarnished byfingerprints and coffee stains.  I showed it to him for a closer view and waited for him to smile, thank me and move on.  I did not receive that kindness.  I received a lecture and wrecked nerves instead.

“Your ticket is not valid,” the conductor stated.  “That’s for March.”

“I just bought it today,” I countered.  I pointed to the date stamped on the back of the ticket in order to verify that I was okay to ride the Metra until March 21st.  He did not go away.  “It does not start until March,” he insisted, with nothing for me to say to that without employment of something I try not to do: assign blame.  “Well,” I said, “I thought this was like buying a subway ticket which is good from the date that you purchase it for whatever time you purchase it.  Your fellow Metra teammate who just sold this to me did not bother to point out that I would have to wait until March 1st to get my money’s worth for the $85 I just spent buying this monthly pass.”

“The ticket is $3.00 ma’am,” the conductor tersely informed me. 

“I used my debit card for this,” I told him.  In short, I did not have $3 for him.

“You do not have $3 for this ride today?” he grumbled.

Perhaps his belief that I was not hijacking a ride on the Metra was confirmed by the fact that I had a fresh new ticket in front of me that had obviously cost me more than $3 and that was displayed in earnest cooperation; thank God for ignorance at times.  Correct me if I am wrong, but in Western United States at this moment the date is February 21, 2012.  March 1, 2012 will not come for another 9 days.  If the translation of “monthly pass” for commuter trains means that passes are invalid until the very first day of the month and not on a cycle coinciding with the day one purchased it as most electronic transit fare systems are, should not a customer service clerk my ticket pays for alert me to that fact.

Should I have asked?  I had supplied to greeting.  I had given the smile.  I had clarified the price raise with my own eyes on a poster upon glass since apparently human explanation was too much effort.  I was supposed to also explain the terms of my ridership as well.  I was a rushing commuter trying to catch a train in less than 5 minutes, with obvious hurry at unfamiliarity of the station.  I should have had the service of this explanation.

By that point, the train and its riders had made it to the convenience I enjoy of not having to spread out too far from downtown Chicago where the ridiculousness reaches epic heights with each new block accounted.  I was already in my “Zone,” just one stop from where I would get off normally and with a post-workout walk to do if I was going to be put off the train from there.  I would have taken that.  The “fine” given to illegal riders was out of my question.  Thankfully, there was neither.  By happenstance, the busy conductor who was responsible for checking tickets as well as announcing stops as well as checking for running riders in between each 30-second stop also did the job of customer service as well: “This ticket is not good until March 1st, which is why it says March on it, so you can’t use it until then.”

I told him “Thank you.”  I looked around to see familiar skylines signaling Hyde Park and my possible stop.  He ran on to verify I was actually in the right place over the loudspeaker.  I unboarded.  2 blocks into my 3 block walk home, a familiar homeless man who has several posts throughout the neighborhood and who beams each time he recognizes me bummed a cigarette from me.

            One would be hard pressed to find any public demonstration or clue as to an inherently “mad” or “angry” person lurking on the surface or even deep inside of Michelle Obama.  In the elite class of  First Ladies in which she resides and with 50 predecessors before her, Mrs. Obama ranks among Abigail Adams, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy in terms of recognition, studiousness, diligent work and an identity of her own entirely separate from her world-leading husband.  In terms of public visibility and community exposure that the African-American Obamas have had to consider their primary job it seems, she ranks second to none.  While former first ladies hosted scant events in the big home during the week and rushed to country abodes in order to be ornaments of the home, Mrs. Obama has a packed scheduled of global dignitary events with hubby, media appearances, and even hauling lumber on Extreme Homemaker (in a delightful episode that covered a rehab for a home of female veterans).

The first and only time we have seen the First Lady angry is when she should have been: after having been called as such by a new book without having to do a thing to earn it but be among the most popular people in the world.  I will not dignify the book which made such accusations by giving it more free promotion than it has already earned with such a disrespectful publication during a time this country has other realities to address; there is no time for theatrics.  I will only provide a glossing of Black women who are never mad or angry–except when they needed to be.  And she changed the world with it.

Angry Black Women:

Harriette Tubman

Billie Holiday

Fannie Lou Hamer

Rosa Parks

Angela Davis

Rae Lewis Thornton

Sethe-Beloved

Claire Huxtable

Tyra Banks

Oprah Winfrey

Delores Cross

More to come on why…..

I would be remiss to unrecognize or ignore that I am using a blog format and system to announce this announcement…

There is enough strange and messy about being an artist who bares my soul and any impressions of others’ souls on my mind in a book; but to add my personal or regular shenanigans–from frolicking with my niece, to seeing a bad movie, to lunching with my dad–into the pot of words in the world to be found about me is stranger and messier by far.   More than the assassination of an infinite number of trees as a necessary evil my industry of publishing depends on, the wildfire success of Internet writing has proven to be the most pressing danger and threat to the craft of fiction and its essential engagement by a public.  While we do have a critical mass of the world’s population writing now (and reading), it is from an explosion of writing online which means that Internet celebrity and prominence are more attainable in this era than a damned good book.  I do not care when my favorite authors discover a new recipe or have a successful online date or climb Mount Everest.  I care when they make me weep or wince with their art.

In high school, I used to press the “Power” button on my mechanical typewriter after my family had gone to bed and go to town on whatever my imagination fancied.  Usually, I was driven by the latest time-tested book an English teacher had assigned.  Now, I approach my latest in a series of laptops I am known to burn up with so many options I usually wind up frozen—before drifting.  Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn?  Myspace? WordPress? Huffington Post? I used to have a blog roll of my favorite friends and writers.   I love them, so it was natural.  But I no longer do.  I was spending more time reading their micro-chapters than I was writing my own.

Ask anyone what makes the person who whines “I want to write” different from the person who declares “I am a writer.”  The answer will usually boil down to one trait: Discipline.  Before I learned that there was a global machine behind the impressive displays of mental acuity and wit organized into the brightly colored spines of books in my public library, at home and at school, I knew that those we knew as authors were ascribed undesirable characteristics which seemed foreign to my lively high school life and impending future.  Solitary. Cranky. Snobby. Addicted.  Withdrawn.  Nocturnal.  Depressed.  Stormy.

My own ephemeral forays into a cerebral and introverted category of person aside, I would have to become a published author to learn that the personality compartments of most writers were less likely to fit into such dark and stark ledgers.  As a matter of fact, such ledgers were not possible if one were to be the “entertainer” that most writers must be in order to promote, promote, promote—or die.  I have never seen or met a writer of long tomes or masterpiece attempts who could afford not to work terribly hard.

Instead, I saw the grueling pace of speaking engagements, teaching, reading and manuscript advising of poets who work among even less profit margins than fiction and non-fiction artists.  I saw magicians of le mot achieve noteworthy and acceptable split personalities, in their instantaneous switches from long days and nights of solitary toil with Microsoft Word as a lone companion into smiley tours in bookstores, book clubs, book groups and festivals with neverending companions.  The ball in our court is so heavy that elusive popularity is more anguishing than it was in high school.  24/7/365 Twitter or Facebook Apps in between calling Mom, Constant Contact, and online social media gurus-for-hire seem to be weird shortcuts to that end.  They are not hard work.

One of my fondest memories as an author is meeting a prolific New York novelist in her hotel room in Chicago when she visited for a reading.  In between our drinks and dashes to the Hard Rock Hotel conference center for special events that week, she stood up straight at her computer typing out her latest novel with one hand and ironing her best meet-and-greet slacks with another.  There were no assistants to crisp her pants like bacon as she savored finding the perfect word, no entourage to shield her email address from all who asked.  By then, I was on the way to never coming out as a “writer” again.  I needed to stay in. I did not see myself as suited to be an online attention whore, and I had always found boarding or riding planes alone to be a dismal activity.  I formed these conclusions as a phenomenon developed behind my back which remains to be tamed or explained:  people sitting at home or work on computers gaining audiences virally and beyond demoralizing reproach of editing or workshopping.  The possibilities may have expanded: I do not have to be a harried writer in a bookstore signing , or a VIP carrying my own flight bag.  Now…I can Blog!!!!!  But 5 years after these revelations came to me and the toddler stage of blogging has passed into piss-and-vinegar adulthood, I am still a writer in bookstore signings.  And, I can still find my books in the library or bookstores.  This is how it should be.

If any group of artists on the planet should not suffer dilution of celebrity, it is writers.  We exist in a profession where the time to produce a work is significantly longer than most—even muralists determined to cloak buildings that are blocks long, or musicians recording legendary albums which will be pressed out weeks after the last editing strokes.  We strive to reach audiences through a medium and method which plays a dastardly trick on its strivers, amateurs and dreamers.  Anyone can turn on a computer or put pencil to paper, so anyone can write books—right?  The illusion of ease with writing was already a formidable roadblock to authors and poets collecting the leisures and luxuries of our cohorts in the fields of entertainment.  Now, keyboards with WiFi are as well.

While other entertainers find their most positive tabloid coverage being unearthed pictures of their first tap dance performances at 6 or breakout starring roles in school plays at 12, writers find it taken for granted that we learned to recite the alphabet at 3, fashion penmanship at 6, master Mavis Beacon at 13, and finally produce books at 50.  The writer’s tell-tale backgrounds of lifelong geekiness or shewd insights into what most never notice or reveal is neglected.  And now that anyone with a computer can be the writer of their own blog, it is not even required.   It usually saddens me when people really believe—and they do—that becoming a writer is as simple as asking any one you can meet: “Can you write my story?”  While films about writers certainly centralize melancholia, unrequieted or fiery love, addictions, and passionate force behind finishing the novel that will win the Pulitzer, most writers are not that volatile or vain.  Yet, blogging and online social networking almost depend on the two. 

The hidden disciplinarians of fiction, non-fiction and poetic writing are spared the commitment to vanity that many entertainment industries often fatally require.  But in the name of vanity, I speak out for my genuine and sincere writers in this world who would be doing so no matter if Blogger had not given so many instant audience in paragraphs or if the shrunken wit of Twitter did not exist for any member of society who can write a sentence without knowing how to diagram one.  Writers would be writing journal, newspaper or magazine articles in our print publications that are steadily dwindling.  Writers would be writing copy for music product, or playbills, or obituaries.  Writers would be critics, striving to be noble at it.  Chances are that these statements do not apply to 80% of people “writing” online. Why, then, have book sales declined and even school book orders evaporated?  My guess is all are online.

I cringed when software developed and computers evolved for any rapper or musician with a computer and microphone to press out an album, really a zeroxed CD.  I do, however, smile and decline politely when one of these homemade records is offered to me as I hit the local fried fish joint.  Let’s face it.  If everyone who aspired to entertain or making a living off of talent circumnavigated the industries that both set and limit its access, we would have fewer doctors, attorneys, nurses, administrative assistants, cafeteria workers and people to pick up our trash in this world.  We all have our own unique callings, and the calling to rise as the crème de la crème of talent is one in which risk, uncertainty, and social sacrifice is paramount.  Few want to really ride it. Anyone can kill two birds with one stone in an office, fashioning their latest micropiece in their chosen subject area—whilst on the clock, or either paid vacation.  Not as many eschew the comfort of employment for MFA programs or English majors or independent presses and newspapers they must fuel, and those who do write in occupational comfort often commit to the discomfort of rising at the crack of dawn or eating into sleep at night in order to compose masterpieces. Brutal honesty is also a trait of writers.  Time theft prevents that.

But that remarkable conscientiousness of a sincere writer, who would rather miss out on sleep or Saturday night fever in order to write and still actually do the day job they are being paid for–until Stephen King’s editor calls–is testimony to the hover of diluted celebrity that most authors expect and obey.  As blog numbers rise and rise and kids learn Textlish before English, let’s hope more writers keep writing for what can be remembered beyond last week or month.  Otherwise, whatever will be tested or taught?

The very first time I saw Edwidge Danticat was on the Oprah Winfrey stage in 1998, as one of the earliest authors handpicked by Ms. Winfrey to have the distinction of a title for the Oprah’s Book Club.  The title was Danticat’s first novel: Breath, Eyes, Memory.  I paid undivided attention to the soft-spoken, gentle mannered, chocolate, dimpled and precisely-worded young author.  A Haitian best friend from Brooklyn had mentioned this woman to me–for Krik? Krak!  I recall I had not had the time to borrow it yet.  I must admit.  After I met her on Oprah Winfrey, I went out and bought her works the very next day.  Funny…I would certainly listen to a friend who always gave me the best books, but I would fast run out to spend my money when Oprah Winfrey said so?  What she has done for Black American female writers in America, in making her selections of our works with no pretention of “diversity,” but just a predilection for damned good books, is unprecedented.

During her tenure as more than a talk show queen,  Oprah Winfrey was lauded for her book club…but why?  Sure, she got millions of Americans reading.  Her golden stamp of approval guaranteed that major bookstore managers and publishing publicists would stay very busy, in these times where people are too hypnotized by Facebook to pick up a real book.  The writers she put at the forefront of American daytime audiences, like rock stars running the late night television circuit, were a collection of everyone from the unknowns that she launched into the pages of Poets & Writers to deceased heavyweights that only English teachers wagged fingers for us:

William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Andre Dubus, Billie Letts, Jane Hamilton, Pearl Buck, Gabriella Garcia Marquez, Wally Lamb, Barbara Kingsolver, Joyce Carol Oates, Leo Tolstoy, Ken Follett, Anna Quindlen, Sue Monk Kidd, Charles Dickens, Alice Sebold, and so on and so forth.  The list of Black American men and women she featured includes the little engine Ernest Gaines and the elegant behomoth Maya Angelou.  Most of her book selections were written by women.  In the earliest years of the club, the majority were titles by Blacks.  Winfrey practiced quiet diversity.

Beyond the hard books she placed into American circulation at rates higher than when they debuted, Winfrey’s cinematic contributions to American film have done more for Black women’s literaturethan anything besides her own book club.  She is second only to the Black academy’s tenacious study, collection, archiving and documenting of our books from the last 150 years of bravery in continual publication (despite continual negation of our voices).  More people heard and saw her heartfelt and dramatic “You told Harpo to beat me!” than actually read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple book (1985); the same goes for the droves of people, of all races, who flocked to Broadway for The Color Purple musical she spearheaded and funded to international acclaim.  Without her, it may have just had a novelty run for a few seasons.

Despite the fact that Beloved (1998) ascended Toni Morrison to unprecedented critical acclaim and meritorious notoriety, it took 15 years for one like Oprah Winfrey to guarantee it would reach audiences onscreen.  Her television roles (as lead actress and producer, respectively), in The Women of Brewster Place (1989) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005), gave the world a visual rendering of Gloria Naylor’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s decades-old work.  Previously, those books had only haunted the most astute Black women readers and college classes of stalwart professors who would not let such names remain unspoken. 

Winfrey’s dissenters, and there were many, accused her of pandering too much to “soccer mom” culture and slighting her own people by building schools in Africa–at the expense of Black women’s issues or concerns, or rescue of American projects with notoriously dismal rates of academic ambition, or higher concentrations of Black guests.

She could have done little more.  She could have created a Book Club centering upon names, faces and complexions such as hers–with a taskmaster’s attitude to America to “englighten” themselves on Black writers.  The affirmative action undertones would have knocked the works down a peg or two, made them more pathetic than majestic.  She could have made sure to include a token Black writer in a predictable pattern…one every month or year.  She did not.  Some years had several.  Some had none.  The arbitrary democracy of her selections forced the true categorization of Black women’s works to finally shine brightest and highest: These are not Black writers’ books…these are just the best books on the planet.  Here is a list of books that I would love to design a college academic course around, celebrating Ms. Winfrey:

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines

The Meanest Thing to Say, The Treaure Hunt, The Best Way to Play by Bill Cosby

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

Paradise by Toni Morrison

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage

River, Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Cane River by Lalita Tademy

Sula by Toni Morrison

The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier

Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan

Biography found at American PBS Masters: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/lena-horne/about-the-performer/487/

    At 16 years old, the NAACP of my small hometown determined that they would “protest” the school district that I was a local star, stand-out, participant and benefactor of.  The reason?  The high school pregnancy, suspension, drop-out and truancy rate was in direct relation to a nearly 50/50 Black/White student population with scarcely a Black teacher in the schools.  They claimed White students were either going to college or guaranteed good jobs in town through their parents or otherwise, while Black students were being steered to jail, technical schools, and at best, the military.  I would have had to leave school the year before college admissions were sealed, and with a near straight-A honors average, in order to protest as well.

At that time, as Class President and Miss Junior Kankakee of the integrated town, I saw their arguments as valid…sure.  Yet, I was sequestered in honors classes and surrounded by higher achieving friends of all races who were clearly self-determined.  I just did not know we had been born that way.  The methods of petitioning and partitioning our district into makeshift all-Black church schools, conducted by retired teachers, was antagonistic to all I had learned in Black History Month of our historical victory.  These were today’s crusaders, talking now.  It was such an oddity to me that we were at this backwards point in race relations that I penned a letter to the newspaper stating I did not agree with the boycott, we should not look to segregate schools, parents should get involved in steering children’s futures and we all needed to pray.  

I still agree with the last two, at this age of over twice 16.  

My letter galvanized the NAACP’s tepid threats into a movement.  It freed up Whites to start writing in their opinions for much more “hope” that we could “all get along.”  I was profiled in newspapers, and taken from my afterschool jobs, studies, church activities and extracurricular projects to be a local celebrity.  My desperation to cover acne accelerated.  Within weeks, a national television show in New York had heard tale of the news in our small town; suddenly, I was to be swept off to New York City in order to be the foil to low black achievement (and White blame) on national television.  It was my first plane trip.  I was excited, and ready.

However, the same concerned and active Blacks who had swept me up into scholarship pageants and Debutante Cotillions approached me gently regarding this new role I played.  They did not give personal attack, as some NAACP leaders in town chose to do, for an outcome I had not asked for.  I always listened and smiled through their pointed lectures.  I thought I was saying something peaceful and that our forefathers would have wanted.  These other protestors were more still, calm and serious.  A distillation of the speeches I frequently heard from them is this:

“You don’t understand.  You’re pretty, nice and helpful.  You were obviously already moving on a higher path, long before you got to school.  They are going to like you more, treat you differently and see you as something to take credit for.  You are not going to feel the same high discipline these others get, and you are going to have them trying to help you just so they can say they were apart of one of our successes.  You will see, when you get older, that all that stops the moment you are out of a place where you can be identified quickly and easily as one of our exceptional people.  Once you get out of school and into this world, your life is going to turn into having many more surprises, pressures and battles than you can ever imagine now.”

The surprises, pressures and battles actually started the moment I crossed over the threshold of just “winning Black student”…to well-known local television star, publicly articulate woman and example of model intelligence.  In the weeks before the show, television show producers called my parents and me incessantly.  I was amused at how they directed my mother to speak of me, since she had been doing so all my life: confirming how early I started talking, making it clear I worked hard and no one had to tell me to, emphasizing how well I wrote and that I wanted to go to college, and confirming to them that they had an authentically inauthentic Negro to depict.  We were small-town, working class people.  We had many strangers call to to congratulate us but even more acquaintances decide not to speak to us.

I spoke with the television show more briefly, since I was handling my life and new role.  I mostly wanted to know where Columbia University was, and to journey there since I was going to New York.  Our limo driver did make that detour, and I sat on the steps of the main building with plans to apply.  I did several times to different programs, and always got in.  Oddly, when I became a novelist at 27, I was unaccepted into their English PhD program.  I was promised a VHS tape of my television show.  The producers were like the rest who wanted to contribute to my obvious success story that started before them—and give me the tape to give to colleges. Their promises were enthusiastic and energetic.  But, we never heard from them after our show.

My parents and I journeyed to the set to receive the first of many surprises I would earn over the years: attempts to test our wills, give us new challenges to reckon with immediately, emotional shutters and shocks that add for us what others don’t have to deal with it, and expectations of a thrill in how we will handle this (rather than help).  I had thought all the show’s guests would be people I knew from my hometown, including a divided young male friend of mine whose mother was among the most avid of the protestors.  The producers told me that Former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke would be joining us during the taping.  

I was astute and intelligent enough to know who he was, what he stood for and what it meant for me.  I was stunned.  I felt the life drain out of my meticulously-curled hair, perfumed chest, polished toes and high spirits.  My father pulled me to the side to immediately scrutinize this.  In his words, “I am sorry, but as much as these people spoke to us, they had to know this man was coming on the show and did not tell us.  If you don’t want to go on, you don’t have to.”  

At that age and time, I did what I said I was going to do in life.  That courage and bravery, unto now, were qualities that those concerned hometown elders had told me to either tame early or get a grip on as bringing much pain later.    The pressures that would never stop began as well—to both remain the model citizen I was, but to also answer to suspicions of deviance that I never knew to suspect others had, until they pushed me to them.  The television producers told me to “Pep up, babe.”  They did not know me.  I was pepped.  Despite seeing that I could write a letter to rival experienced journalists, and was more focused on seeing Columbia than the hoods of New York, I suppose they expected a neck-rolling, head-jerking, loud and gyrating woman they saw on television.  The audience cross-examined me to points of having to raise my voice and my mother having to stand up to explain that we were not necessarily rich, just stable, the producers ran to me with glee:  “Good job!”  I had called off of work.  By this clarifying point, I was on the verge of tears, waiting to get off their stage to get back to Harlem.

The producers did not care that I was celebrated for my soft voice, virginity, reserve, quiet bubbliness and proper speech I took after my utility and secretarial-working relatives for.  Here, I was not “Black” enough.  The audience thought so as well.  They represented the ditching  similar Blacks face once they have achieved: complete and total estrangement from their own people, and near disdain, for being “different” enough to embody the enemy.  Our words of encouragement and advice to our own remains distrusted, spit back at us, not taken and just as rebelled against as suburban parents’ bored children rebel into rap, jungle fever and drugs.

Though I detest the word and use it only in simulating Black speech, since it truly originates with German extermination tactics and not Black people, I am as far from “ghetto” as it gets.  I do love the “You know you ghetto when…” jokes.”  I can admit to any of mine which apply.  But I could not jump double-dutch, or do the kick-foot dances that sororities and pep rallies required.  I walked with books on my head, wore heels to Sunday school, sat with my hands folded and polished my own toes in calm mental clearance—not fake nails.  The “ghetto” and loud person many Blacks are seen as is locked in its cave of defenses, inside of all people.  

All people, no matter what background or reputation, have the capacity to be high-pitched, explosive and physically animated when they are defending themselves or highly pressured by one or many other people.  There are plateaus of composure, which many Blacks have had to become nearly catatonic or diseased by high blood pressure to maintain.  The knowledge that these pressures to stay composed do exist do not result in more tender treatment; they result in “strong” and “proud” defining the Black species’ taxonomy.  Examinations of that strength and pride are conducted by situations or orchestrators which wish to see it displayed before them.  To show strength and pride, one must confront bristles of thought or action which would make most weak or self-loathing, but have stamina beyond them.  The inflictions of automatic rehearsals of strength and pride, for their mere display and no meanings, came to me.

On that show, I came to know that my stuttering and furrowed brow would not be considered signs of distress for others to immediately come to my aide for—as I saw being done to White heroines in the movies.  These would be certifications of a “ghetto” beast lurking inside that was a desired complication of the inauthentic Negro I most often represented.   I would be either left on my own to hear them, or punished even more than the events which caused any changes in me already had punished me.  Later in life, this would involve clear unfairness on my jobs, assaults by men, cocky and aggressive handling by police, and constant backlash or distrust among White friends who never outlasted whatever situation we were fated to sit within.  

While I would remain strong and proud through clearly weakening and self-loathing moments, these performances carried no currency—as school counselors and scholarship committees once gave reward.  Instead, waves of reactions would go to the one reprimand I made in writing or the one raised-voice demand I made in stress.  All I had stayed strong and proud through cancelled out.  I became fixated in those rare moments of “ghetto” or “threat.”  I would be given a new assignment or event to do more about my outbursts, than what I was finally bursting about.  And the “Others” (either my own or White) would be gleefully satiated.

On the show, the pressures to account for my “ghetto” life hindered the capabilities of the audiences to hear what I was saying: self-reliance, spiritual cores, hard work and finding people who uplifted one’s talents could surmount the racism our town was assigning to great teachers who helped many of all levels.  Yet, the presence of my two parents in the audience and my clearly pronounced speech made me an imposter in these hardcore New York Blacks’ world.  It followed in a year where I was more nervous and scared to wear my pageant crown on cars and floats in Black communities; I would answer for it the next day in school, hear I was not “pretty” and be accused of “acting White.”  In the rural cornfield towns and fairs, Whites would clap and cheer.  I did not understand why I was certainly something to see for many.  But, the same genes who had visited the zoos and carnivals to see mad or odd Blacks were present for me.  I almost had Hottentut Venus’s ass for their ticket; however, they came to marvel at a Mensa-level mind.

What I remember most about the show is coming back from it, still juggling studies and attention, being both congratulated and despised, and battling suspension for “verbal fighting.”  Of course, there was envy.  A group of girls determined they were going to tax my nerves with low blows and insults until I approached them.  I politely explained I did not enjoy or appreciate being called names.  I walked away as a teacher noticed their volatile outburst through the halls, calling me the unimaginable for this.  Within minutes, I was also called to the office to face a principal who had my suspension slip ready.  He had no evidence of anything I had done, other than being named in the event.  In my own defense, I did not gain exoneration; I provided his ammunition.  In admitting I had asked my victimizers why they taunted me, he looked redeemed and stated: “You started it.”  He then added: “We’re cracking down on Black girls fighting.”  

My entire demeanor in those 30 minutes flew out of his mind’s window.  I was being suspended as Class President and a woman who had just journeyed onto television to defend the school as not being discriminatory.  The Black principal honed in on my nearly frozen scramble to grab my purse before I had to walk, inconsolable and shocked, through the hallways.  I am not sure how “good” I was supposed to be, but he saw my tight grip on my purse and the eyes that finally flew to the top of my head.  I heard:  “See…attitude…that’s what we’re talking about.”

It was the first time I had ever displayed “attitude” in school beyond adolescent hormones that made me tired, and “attitude” had never gotten a White person suspended. “Peer Mediation” was among my many activities to keep me just as much a staff member of the school as a student.  The premise was to gather model students to arbitrate, notate and give support to physical, sexual, social and verbal disputes in the school—for offenders to get a “reduced sentence” for their participations.  For my offense of asking a mere question, I was not offered this option and reduction that I could have trained someone on how to conduct.  This day would provide the very first of many physically-taxing suppressions which reached an apex by the time I was in my early thirties and led on to this writing now: where punishment, blame, explanation, penalty, suffering or further obligations could be extracted beyond the purposes of reckoning anything actually done—but for the specious reasons that my person, and many’s, had to both live actual life and also respond to or assuage unpleasant imaginings of us in others’ fictions.

I had been in running to be the Valedictorian or Salutatorian of my high school class.  Suspended from work and exams, this was impossible.  The few White teachers who did not fit the mold of the NAACP’s accused quietly breached policy and told me I could make work up.  One White teacher had been on the television show wondering why she was being accused of discrimination, and she truly deserved to ask.  She ran to the office to state that she would have never brought girls in who were screaming in the hallways if she had known I would be suspended for it; she stressed that she had never even seen me talking to these girls, and that the only thing strange about me was that I hurried through her hallway without speaking as I normally did.  My honors English teacher confirmed I had been sitting in class on time and leading a project, to show I had no interest in staggering in hallways yelling obscenities.    

My father raced to school to demand explanation for me being used as a “martyr.” He got none.  Numbed, I coasted through Senior Year without the same torpedo for highest grades I was known for.  This was a first point when fissures started to invade my skull, for a future volcanic quake of the brain.  Though it did not know it then, my solid faith in the dream of uplift quaked, too.  I saw that none of my companion academically-talented peers rushed breathless into acing Honors Chemistry exams, after being subject to flees from dropouts who rumbled in the streets.

I have written 5 novels.  My eighties love affair with Tom Cruise launched my first, on typewriter: Letters to a Star.  A girl chases her object of affection unto embarrassment at high-class events.  In respect he was married, I limited my antics to posters and joining the fan club.

I wrote my next novel, The Junction, while I worked as a doctor’s secretary.  I had been  nearly a straight-A University of Chicago graduate.  I needed the help of Black administrators at my alma mater to get that temp-to-perm job.  My name revealed a Black with an unprecedented  background and mind; viewers did not even have to buy a ticket, but just wait to see me come in, hoaxed that I was truly interviewing for jobs that never hired me and depressed me to seek out.  My solace here was typing out The Junction, a multi-generational saga tempering of all I had learned about Black migration to the Midwest with my interest in magic.  Save for names I loved and cornfields the people stayed unemployed in, I disappeared all of myself into older characters.  

My published novels, Conception and Upstate, were condensations of concerns which climaxed especially after I came to the cities: the proliferation of Black men in jail, Blacks’ easy harassments and lines of single Black women ousted from marriage or help with fatherless children.   Negression, however, is the first time I have laddered my interior psychologies, young life and actual spiritual template onto a work of art, in fictionalized imperative and warrant.

Those tough elders whispered their own lullabies to me: to conserve energy for a lifetime of condemnation, despite all evidence to the contrary.  The Talented Tenth lived on.  Maybe we are a Talented Half by now.  There is rest in Black suburban enclaves, Black-owned firms and non-profits, Black colleges.  Black parents approach me when I speak at schools.  Their firefly children run in the world.  They are stopped if they are expressive or smart.  They have heard my speech about education, art and goals.  They have sat quietly, arms folded, eyes lowered, lips pursed.  They have congratulated me and smiled.  They ask:  “Should we tell them?”

 I found some interesting shots of Black women done by Eudora Welty, online at Corbis.com.   Why were they nice suprises to me?

A Migrant Mother

A Migrant Mother

In these times, I found some pictures of us looking certifiably glamourous, raw, and fly.  The puzzle of visual placement of African-American female images, from the countrified to the well-to-do to the sexual, have seemingly remained unsolved.  Must we be downtrodden, barge-toting and potato-sack wearing unfortunates in order to be appreciated, or must we be creamy displays of uber-sexual excess, to melt into most cerebral pots?  The consideration of our Migrant Mothers alongside our visually-accepted beauties has a gradient of approval, examination and interpretation that either cuts most of us out or celebrates far too wide. 

Looking at us in the ranges and predicaments of glory we are capable of, I at least proclaim Black women may have been the greatest things to come from the camera’s invention–whether to document the historical genocides and modern chaos of our nations (still), or to exhibit the flowering of ingenues from what was then and still sought for extermination.  And we are still here… Enjoy!