This is What Apartheid Looks Like in America

Words failed me because America failed in race relations again.  I spent a sleepless night after Prosecutor McColloch spent half an hour defending the grand jury process even though his use of it was far outside standard procedure. He spent most of the time bashing witness credibility and Michael Brown’s character while defending Darren Wilson, the man he was supposed to be considering charges against. With nine whites and three blacks on the jury, there was no other outcome possible. I knew this even as I held a glimmer of hope.

Then I watched the streets of Ferguson swirl into chaos, fire, anguish, rage, and hopelessness.

AP photo of Ferguson protests

This is what Apartheid looks like in America. This is the systemic implementation of racist and biased policies, laws, and actions in our courtrooms, in our neighborhoods, in stand your ground laws that seem expressly written for the protection of white Americans, and in the ethnic and racial makeup of a militarized police presence.

CNN reported, “Wilson called the area where Brown was shot a "hostile environment."

Wilson testified, "There's a lot of gangs that reside or associate with that area. There's a lot of violence in that area, there's a lot of gun activity, drug activity, it is just not a very well-liked community. That community doesn't like the police."

Why is the community suspicious of police? Because the police and the city used the community as a source of income, issuing tickets and fining people based on petty charges. The police presence was not a positive presence but a force of containment and oppression.

I believe it is a high crime area. There is a lot of poverty with few paths out. That causes an environment where some believe crime is an acceptable way of life. But not all citizens who live there believe that and live good, honest lives. They should be afforded the same police protections that the rest of America, white America, enjoys. They are there by circumstance, not necessarily by choice. Why do the police, officials, and the media impugn the whole community and not just the criminals? How can a police officer adequately protect and serve a community he doesn’t like?

He can’t.

Justice is bankrupt, and racism prevails.

While we argue causes and fling hatred and suspicion back and forth, more black men and boys die.

Including Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old carrying a toy gun. Look at his face. He is a child. Why did the man who called 911 call him a man and why didn’t the police acknowledge that he was just a kid and treat him as one? Racial bias blinds them.

Tamir Rice

Ronald left the house twenty minutes before the verdict was read. We had already watched four hours of coverage, and he said he didn’t want to see the verdict. He did not want to relive the George Zimmerman verdict. We had watched that verdict together. I cried; he got angry, then silent.

I knew I had to watch the grand jury announcement even as I understood he could not. I kissed him good-bye and told him to be careful. He already knew the verdict, and my silence when he got home, and again this morning, told him he was correct.

I understand hopelessness. I see it in the faces of the protestors, in the tears shed by Michael Brown’s family, in the comments on my Facebook page, and in the way Ronald grows more introspective daily. I suffer the same hopelessness.

If we don’t fight for change, the violence will grow and more black boys and men will die, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. The death of black men and boys is epidemic in this country.

I also understand that the election of a mixed race president did not usher us into a post-racial world. Instead it brought to light the very real inequality and injustice under which our society operates. Denial won’t change that fact.

The things that will change systemic racism are the following:

·      Video cameras on every police officer

·      Police departments that reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the communities they serve

·      Viable citizen review boards

·      Better and more comprehensive diversity training for officers

·      Better and more comprehensive training for officers on how to provide a positive community presence that promotes a safe environment rather than an adversarial force that works against citizens

·      Equality in the criminal justice system including the charges brought against offenders, sentencing, and the length of prison terms

We also need to have that conversation about race in America.  

Let me be brutally honest: If you believe race does not affect your life, then you are one of the privileged in this country. If you don’t care about or support the growing use of unnecessary force against citizens of color, you are racist and one of the privileged. If you don’t care about black boys and men being killed at the hands of police officers and vigilantes hiding behind stand your ground laws, you are a racist and one of the privileged. If you believe that every black community is full of lazy and lawless people, you are a racist and one of the privileged.

This is a tragedy for all Americans, not just black Americans.

We need to dig down into the history of our country and the institutional and systemic factors that cause bias and oppression. We need to acknowledge how this country was taken from Native Americans and how it was built on the backs of slaves. We need to acknowledge that  we continue to create an underclass through sub-poverty wages, sub-standard schools, and the high cost of college tuition.

Then we need to educate the public about these truths and make the changes necessary through the enactment of laws that protect equality and through Federal government oversight. We already know that states fail to achieve equality and justice for their citizens. Ferguson has proven that yet again with the appointment of a biased prosecutor, an almost all-white police force in a city that is 70% black, a jury that was predominately white, and in the militarized response to protests.

If we don’t make those changes, black men and boys will continue to die in record numbers.

This is what Apartheid looks like in America.

Michael Brown will not be forgotten

Black Lie, White Hope

The GOP continues its quest for the Great White Hope. What about Herman Cain, you remind me. He was a straw dog. Charismatic? How about that wealthy Mormon, Mitt? Self-righteous Christian? Here’s Perry. How about the man that suggested a cure for obesity? No-more-food-stamps Santorum. Militant conservative? How about Michele “abolish minimum wage” Bachmann? Short-term memory? Here’s Newt “I took the marriage pledge” Gingrich. Best GOP candidate since GW. He cavalierly suggested that poor children ought to work as janitors in their schools.

In many ways it doesn’t matter who the GOP selects as their candidate. They want to ensure the wealthy keep their wealth and grow wealthier. They want to ensure President Obama doesn’t get re-elected. Some call him the worst president in the history of our country.

President Obama saved us from an economic depression. He defeated Osama Bin Laden. He ended the ten-year war in Iraq. He has worked diligently to preserve the middle class. What makes him the worst president in the history of our country? It’s the color of his skin. No one wants to articulate it quite that way. The moral compass of the collective society would balk at such blatant honesty. Most people would rather deny their racist assessment and pin their dislike on anything else that might appear rational. But their arguments aren’t rational. They are lies: lies that protect the liar from having to face his own prejudices; lies that smartly cover up what no one wants to say aloud; lies that make it seem as if we live in a post-racial society; lies that make everyone who harbors racist feelings feel smug and righteous.

I can’t just point fingers at the GOP or Christian conservatives who believe God is on their side and are bonded by hate and moral superiority. The 99%, a predominately white organization, is also bashing our president. I wouldn’t mind, except that their demands are unrealistic. The president can’t force change. If one has not personally experienced the tremendous backlash against everything the President is trying to push through, one cannot imagine the difficulty he is up against. To the 99% who are warming the benches while others are out on the playing field, consider a future in politics if you want to initiate change and learn to work within a system that is not only immovable but also difficult to negotiate. Then you’ll have earned your right to complain.

In the meantime I won’t encourage you to look at a third party solution. You’ll just waste precious votes needed to ensure that the GOP doesn’t get elected to the highest office in the land and take us all down by blurring the lines between church and state, destroying the middle class, and bolstering the power and wealth of the 1%.

We will live in a world where religious zealots create the law of the land based on the Old Testament. Apparently they missed the Good News. In this new world homosexuals are criminals; fetuses have more rights than children; women are submissive; poor people die for lack of basic necessities; whites are armed and dangerous to anyone that threatens their way of life; minorities are assigned non-American status; and slavery is re-instituted. The vision is extreme, yes, but possible given the extreme rhetoric of Tea Partiers and Christian conservatives.

Have you noticed that President Obama’s enemies have not found even one skeleton in his closet? They tried with the birther conspiracy. They tried to tie him to unsavory characters and Illinois political corruption. They tried to deny his Christianity, as if not being Christian would disqualify him from office. They have accused him of the character flaw of humanitarianism, if one can call that a flaw. I don’t. The only truth that no one wants to speak is that his African heritage is a flaw in the eyes of many.

We need President Obama for four more years. We need to fight the good fight right beside him.

(Excerpt from essay Keep Hope Alive: Post-Racialism in America)

Everyone in the bleachers kept craning their necks around to see behind us. We all knew Senator Obama would enter the square from the rear of the bleachers. The number of men in black suits with earphones made it obvious.

Suddenly the men in suits gathered together, and my sight rested on Senator Obama in the middle of them: tall, handsome, a spring in his step despite the grueling schedule he kept. He wore a pressed, bright-white shirt, the sleeves casually rolled up, and a blue, white and silver tie. As he stepped up to the podium amidst the cheers, he appeared confident, smart, and presidential.

“Yes we can! Yes we can!” the crowd chanted. I wanted to believe them.

“Our destiny is not written for us, it is written by us,” Obama told the crowd. We cheered louder.

“We can rewrite our destiny,” I thought. “We can change our destiny in my lifetime.”

“Yes we can! Yes we can!”

Obama stopped in the middle of his speech and asked for people to attend to a woman who was weak from the heat and press of the crowd. Volunteers ripped into plastic flats filled with bottled water and started passing them back through the crowd. From our perch on the bleachers, the thousands of water bottles being handed high above heads from black hand to white hand to brown hand, looked like bubbles floating over the crowd.

Ronald assisted citizens and saved their lives and property for twenty-five years as a firefighter, but sometimes they did not want his help. One man said he would not let Ronald resuscitate his dying wife. Another citizen, his house on fire, said he did not want black people in his house. Disregarding Ronald’s lieutenant stripes and his command over the scene, another citizen called him a nigger. Could hatred be that strong? Yes it can.

Obama finished his speech, and he walked around the circle of people closest to the podium, shaking their hands, speaking to them. I watched him, and I watched them, some of them wiping tears away after he had moved on to the next person. I knew he would exit beside the bleachers just as he had entered. Some people were already standing and headed off the other side of the bleachers, maybe trying to beat the dispersing crowd. I went in the opposite direction and crouched at the edge of the bleachers three or four people back. I could see Obama nearing us. I stuck my hand through the crowd of legs, and he grabbed it and firmly shook it. His hand was dry and warm.

I stood from the crouched position I had taken to reach him and turned around. I was crying.

“You did it,” Cara said. “You shook his hand.”

“Yes, I did.”

What Would Jesus Do?

I read in the paper yesterday that the CEO of Duke Energy made $8.8 million this past year. Duke Energy is applying to increase utility bills in a state that has ten percent unemployment, with many people cycling off the unemployment rolls when they’ve exhausted extensions and have become the chronically unemployed. The Duke Energy’s CEO’s salary is miniscule in comparison to the salary and perks of some of the CEOs at the major financial institutions and fortune 500 companies where the going rate is in the tens of millions.

Alabama is trying to legislate immigrant laws similar to Arizona, a throwback to the slavery days where free people of color navigated through the country carrying their freedom papers. Now anyone who looks like an illegal alien, that will mean anyone with Hispanic heritage, has to produce proof of legal immigration.

Conservatives are pushing to raise college tuition costs and slice financial aid, effectively creating an elite environment where only the wealthy can afford college. Public schools budgets are being slashed and the voucher and privatized schools supporters are pushing their way to the forefront again.

Obama’s health care reform bill has been stagnated by the details, taken to court and deemed unconstitutional, and in the meantime, people are cut off from preventative health care. They can’t afford to be healthy or take care of health issues before they become catastrophic.

All these movements are creating an ever-growing underclass in America, and the conservatives and religious right support these movements, even as our collective quality of life deteriorates, our salaries stagnate and our houses lose value. The 99% are trying to organize and protest, but is it too little, too late?

I’d like to ask the religious conservatives, those people who are more interested in legislating morality than in the equality of our humanity, what would Jesus do? Would he step on the downtrodden because they are not worthy? Would he increase pain and suffering when there is already enough in this life? Would he deny the lowliest human being comfort and compassion? Would he judge certain people more worthy than others? Would he give a hand up to heterosexuals but not homosexuals, or Christians but not Jews or Muslims, or people with white skin and not brown skin, or those who are wealthy not poor? Tell me the answers, because I need to know how Jesus would act in the world you are creating: one in which children go hungry because they have chosen to be poor or they are homeless because they aren’t worthy of shelter; where the poor would stay poor because they aren’t worthy of education and improvement of their circumstances; where people who are different from a very narrow definition of who is worthy would suffer their fallacies; where people are told that if they work hard they will be part of the one percent, but it’s a lie. Would Jesus lie?

I think not a single child should go hungry, without shelter, without the education to reach his potential. Every American should be free of worry about access to proper healthcare. Every American should have a job that pays a living wage, a wage where a family can afford a safe place to live, food, clothing, an education and transportation. And if a person is unable to work due to physical, emotional or mental challenges, he will be provided a living benefit so that he does not live in poverty. Why would Jesus deny anyone that? He wouldn’t.

Stop lying. Stop using Jesus’ name to spread your brand of hatred and your vision of a world of haves and have-nots. And guess what? In my vision of the world, you are just as worthy as the homosexual couple who wants to marry, the atheist who believes there is no after life, the Muslim who prays to Allah several times daily, the young woman who wants to go to college and become a lawyer, the child who aspires to be an artist, the terminally ill patient who wants to spend her last days pain-free and with the people she loves, or the man who was born a woman and wants to make his outside match his inside. You will receive the same compassion they do, no matter your ethnic heritage, the color of your skin or your gender. You will be worthy of all that humans are worthy of, and you will not be judged.

(Excerpt from Chapter 2, Bloody Mick, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Ma was always ready to tell a good story when I was growing up, about her childhood or her days before and just after marrying Dad. Her words slipped easily into bawdiness and sailor’s curses, her humor biting, tart. 

Her stories were often served as dessert with hot tea – coffee for the men – after a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs or her favorite boiled dinner of ham and cabbage –mashed, fried in butter, and served over toast the following day for breakfast.

“Bloody this and bloody that” they always seemed to go, her cigarette slicing the air for emphasis and her face emotionless except for her gray eyes, crinkled ever so slightly with wry cunning. Ma’s stories made me laugh, and they still play like scenes from an old movie in my head. Perhaps I saw in Ronald a bit of Ma’s storytelling prowess.

Dad, on the other hand, was quiet until his temper exploded, never revealing much, but he worked with his hands: scraping old paint; patching holes; applying new paint with brushes and a roller, fashioning a hat out of newspaper; tinkering under the hood of his car; fixing leaky faucets; mowing the lawn and planting marigolds and petunias; dropping two or three dollars into the collection plate during Mass each Sunday, even when the mortgage was due and we would eat hotdogs, hash and Spam for the week; holding the newspaper up in front of him in both hands to read, or folded in quarters to do the crossword; helping his best friend Harold to renovate the old house Harold inherited out in Middleburg. “Mashooze,” Dad used to say, his hands clasped behind his back when he walked.

“What about your shoes?” I asked him almost every time.

“Mashooze escalappa,” he answered, rocking back on his heels. I never knew if it was an Italian phrase he recalled from childhood or something he made up because he liked the sound of it. I liked the sound of it, too, and the constancy.

Dad, born Francesco Liuzzi, was the second of seven children for Maria Mancini and Rocco Liuzzi.  Rocco arrived at Ellis Island in 1906 and returned to Montemurro, Potenza, Italy in 1909 to bring back Maria and settle in Albany.

Ma said Dad never had a childhood, and I believed her, even when Dad and his siblings argued about how things were when they were little, voices getting louder to drown out the others; even after Aunt Josephine had an old black and white photograph duplicated for everyone – a photo taken before she was born: Grandpa in a dark suit standing behind my seated grandmother in a full length printed skirt, a blouse with a watch pendant pinned over her left breast. He looks defeated; she looks like the Queen of Hearts from the Disney Alice in Wonderland cartoon, her bottom lip drawn in as she bites down on the right side of it. They both stare stoically at the camera; the children – four boys (Rocco also not born yet), hair plastered in olive oil to tame it into a side part, and one girl with a large, white bow in her hair, who would die of pneumonia soon after the photo was taken – all stand solemnly, dark eyes brooding at the camera.

As a child Dad sold newspapers on the downtown corner of Clinton Avenue and Broadway. Each week he turned his earnings over to his mother, but not before he stashed a nickel in his sock to spend at the theater. On a cold day in 1919 while out hawking papers with just a sweater on and no hat or gloves, Dad, seven years old, heard someone behind him.

“Hey, boy, aren’t you cold?”

He turned to see a tall, slender, colored man, early twenties, with a wool scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Yeah, I’m cold.”

“Well, follow me, boy.” The man led him to the kitchen entrance of the Grand Hotel on Broadway. He worked as a short order cook there. He pointed to a chair in the corner and left him. Dad looked around and wondered if he should leave, then the man returned with a cup of hot cocoa.

“Drink this and warm your bones.”

Dad, his eyes intense and dark, his hair shiny from the olive oil, looked up at the man with the kind smile, took the cup from him, and sipped the warm, sweet liquid. Dad and Harold would become friends after that day, the relationship lasting fifty-two years.

Dad attended St. Anthony’s Catholic School. The Italian-Americans called it “St. Ant’nees.” He dropped out after eighth grade. “My mother wouldn’t let me wear long pants, so I dropped out of school and got a job,” he often told us. As soon as he got a license, he secured a union job driving a truck for Hamilton News.

World War II came along after Dad had worked quite a few years. Dad became an older draftee. He legally changed his name from Francesco to Francis after he got drafted. He was stationed at the American base outside Sydney in Ryde, New South Wales, Australia. A Staff Sergeant, Tech 5, he “drove truck.” Dressed in army khakis in Australia, Dad was short of stature, but he had a full head of thick dark brown, almost black, hair, alluring deep brown eyes, and olive toned skin. He spotted my buxom Irish mother standing outside after a church meeting one evening.

“Hey,” Dad said as he swaggered over to her, “I thought they pulled in the sidewalks for little girls like you at this time of night.”

Ma ran away from him, but when she glanced over her shoulder, she always said with a wink, she noticed how short he was and let him catch her.

Ma found his exotic look exciting but was even more excited by his last name – Liuzzi. Just a few months before, an American soldier, Edward Leonski, had been arrested for murdering three “sheilas” –Aussie women – in Melbourne. My mother loved the stir she created by dating an American with a similar name. I felt that same stir when Ronald and I started dating.

Dad picked up Ma, a stacked size twelve (Marilyn Monroe’s size, she told me more than once), in his truck and let her ride around with him while he was on his rounds. If any MP jeeps were spotted, he pushed Ma down into the well of the seat. She was giddy with the secrecy and scandal of it all.

Ma also believed that an American could save her from a life of poverty. Her father fought in World War I at Gallipoli with the other Aussies, many of whom were slain as they ran toward the enemy. In a photo taken by a war correspondent, my 6’4” grandfather Clary Elliott carries a wounded comrade over his left shoulder. He stands colossal on barren rock, a crooked grin on his face, and though the photograph is black and white, I can sense his angry red hair peeking from under the slouch hat crushed down at an angle on his head. This rough-hewn giant returned home to his wife and children. A few years later he died from mustard gas exposure-induced pneumonia when Ma was four, leaving her mother Peg-o to raise five children on her own.

Ma, the fourth of five children like me, was born with crooked feet and had to wear button top shoes for the first seven years of her life. Her hair was too dark to be blond and too light to be brunet, and her eyes were a dreary gray like autumn rain. Next to her sister Joan who had jet-black hair and azure blue eyes, Ma felt plain and dull. She made up for it by taking on dares from the local blokes like the time she bit the three-inch long, fat, white grub in half. She dropped out of school when she was fourteen so she could work in a cut glass factory to help out her mother who made money doing other people’s laundry and taking in boarders. Ma spent many of her work hours being chased around the factory by her lecherous boss.

“Bloody Mick,” she called him, telling him to “Keep your diddle in your trousers.”

She accepted Dad’s marriage proposal just before he shipped back to the states.

Then Dad returned to Australia in 1946 to marry Ma and find work there. The thought of growing up in Australia instead of America makes me wonder how our lives would have differed. But Dad had trouble finding good paying work in Australia, so when the union sent him a letter from the States telling him they had a position waiting for him at Hamilton News, he brought Ma home to Albany, NY. He was thirty-four and she was twenty-four. They stayed at Dad’s parents’ house and Ma studied and converted to Catholicism so they could exchange new vows in the Catholic Church while Dad searched for a home. Peggy was born before he found one.

Dad’s parents called Ma a foreigner, demanded her marriage license every time she entered the house, and only spoke Italian in her presence, not that they ever learned to speak much English. My grandmother said an Italian curse at Ma every time she spoke to her. She offered Ma one thousand dollars to annul the marriage. Ma refused and asked a new friend, Millie, who became my older siblings’ godmother, what the Italian curse meant. The translation was I hope you burst.

Ma never felt comfortable with the Liuzzis who were not very affectionate with one another but who silently demanded loyalty and shunned outsiders. Grandpa had been scammed as a young father. A gypsy woman told him to bury three thousand dollars wrapped in a rag in a designated spot. She promised the money would grow into a fortune. When my grandmother found out what Grandpa had done, she sent him back to dig up the money, but it was already gone, and so was any trust in strangers.

Ma stood at the edge of the parlor one day as my grandmother spoke rapidly and angrily at Dad. Ma never knew what the argument was about; Dad refused to talk about it later, but suddenly my grandmother pounced like a cat on a rodent and slapped Dad across the face. Ma boiled with anger as she watched Dad drop his eyes to the floor.

The next time my 4’10”grandmother looked up at my 5’7” mother, narrowed her eyes, and growled the curse at her, Ma stared down into her eyes and said in her Aussie accent, “And I hope you burst, too, all over your goddamned new carpet.” 

My grandmother passed away in 1952 at the age of sixty-nine after tripping on that carpet and falling to the floor dead. Her death certificate stated cause of death as brain aneurysm.

Ma remarried in the Catholic Church, but she did not step foot in it again except for each of our baptisms and, later, Dad’s funeral. Dad took care of getting us to church.

 “Christians on Sunday; heathens the rest of the week,” Ma said of her in-laws and my father, “My grandfather is spinning in his grave because I married a goddamn Catholic.”

This Life We Live In

My mind has been racing these past few weeks. I’m not sure why I feel that way, except that change is on the horizon, so that always sets off both anticipation and fear. At fifty-four I’d rather have some quiet moments for reflection, but we can’t always choose. We can only accept what the universe has placed in front of us and find a way to make the best of it. I guess that’s why people in my life nicknamed me the “Woman Who Makes Things Happen.” I like living up to my reputation. So that means I have writing to do, and ideas to share, and lots of things to accomplish.

I’ve also been pondering the growing divisiveness in our country, and feeling sad about it.  Dreamers are protesting down here in North Carolina. They are illegal immigrants who arrived in our country as children. They’ve grown up here and they want to have the rights of citizenry so that they can go to school and work. Lots of people hate them and want to send them back to a country they don’t even remember. Their parents came here looking to make better lives. They were enticed to come, often by corporate farmers looking for cheap labor. They work jobs that most Americans would not even consider, no matter how dire things get.

But some people don’t want to talk about the need that was created and that they’ve filled. They don’t have empathy for the children who are coming of age and only want to be a part of the country they’ve grown up in. I can’t understand it. What are they worried about? What do they feel will be taken away from them if we let these children – these lost children – have a piece of the American pie?

But the pie is getting smaller and richer. Sweetness has been added in the form of executive perks, tax inequalities and unethical business practices, while the rest of America is fighting over the crumbs.

Do people really believe that some illegal immigrants, people of color who just want a level playing field, the poverty stricken who need a handout, and gay couples who dare to want a long lasting monogamous relationship with the same rights as heterosexual couples are really ruining our country?

It’s a diversion. Then we won’t think about how our salaries have stagnated because of the Bush years or how our homes have lost value and our pensions have been taken away while our 401k plans have tanked. Or maybe we’ll forget about the friends who have been unemployed for two or three years, are well into middle age, and are at risk of losing everything including their health. Or we’ll forget our grown children who went to school and work hard but have no access to health care. Or we’ll forget that the poor haven’t chosen to be poor, and that there few avenues out of poverty and they are rutted and uneven and crowded. And every one of us except for the very wealthy could easily be there. It’s a strong diversion that makes some people wish that people with no health care would die rather than ensuring they have access to medicines and cures. It’s a diversion that makes people hold tight to what little they have and wish ill upon others.

It’s such a strong, pervasive diversion that a growing number of people use Christianity as an excuse for discriminating, judging and hating others.  They don’t want the government to interfere in their lives, but they want it to prescribe a certain, narrow moral code for others. Some of our politicians are claiming God is on their side. Where did that come from? What happened to the good news?

I hope I never get there, where what I have is more important than another person’s life or where I feel that my life is more important than another’s or that I am worth more than another or that my morality is more right than another’s.  I remember writing once that I grew up poor and being poor didn’t hurt; it’s what other people said about it that hurt. We are all human, flawed, and imperfect. I have to be careful the diversions don’t divert me.

(Excerpt from Chapter 4, The Ghetto Will Follow You, Shades of Tolerance)

Ronald remembers his cousin Jackie imparted a fatalistic worldview to him around this time. He said, “Ronnie, no matter where you go in life, no matter what you do, the ghetto will follow you. Just when you think you’re a success, look around you – all the same people will be there.”

So when the Hagans moved to the eastside – Whitey-Whitey Land the three brothers called it – just a few months later, he knew better than to think his circumstances had changed for the better. They had only gotten more complicated.

“Don’t be following after those white boys, thinking you can act like them,” Syl Sr. told Ronald when they first moved into the gray and white house on Euclid Avenue. “You can’t do what they do. You’ll just get yourself in trouble.”

Then he said, “And, Ronnie, stay away from those white girls. They’ll only get you in trouble, too.”

I imagine Ronnie stared at the girls intently, studying the aesthetic quality of shape and line – the way he looked at something he wanted to draw. The girls on the eastside were, he tells me, different than the girls on the west side.

The white girls on the west side paraded as caricatures of women: hair sprayed stiff in teased page boys, thick black eyeliner, ruby lips bought at the five and dime, tight tees and short skirts, sometimes hand hemmed for better effect; they smacked gum when they talked and smelled of cigarettes, eyes squinted against the smoke. Oftentimes their introduction to sex happened at the hands of an older boy or man, sometimes a relative or friend of the family.

The black girls on the west side wore their hair greased and hot ironed straight. They were circumspect when it came to sex. Getting caught would probably result in a beating. But sometimes it was worth the new shirt, new shoes, a necklace or perfume.

Babies were born out of these exchanges and raised by their grandmothers, who already worked two or three jobs to feed the children in the apartment. Sometimes the girls thought they were gaining freedom and independence when they went down to Social Services to collect welfare and get an apartment of their own, yet, Ronald says, it only sealed the fate of another generation of teen girls who grew up too soon.

The eastside girls, almost all of them white and many of them Jewish, smelled of shampoo, crème conditioner and perfume. Their makeup enhanced rather than painted. They wore the latest styles, go-go boots and mini skirts, their hair long but also ironed straight. They relished their girlishness, wanting to draw it out for as long as possible. Sex to the eastside girls was a game, Ronald says. It was something they played at until they got serious about becoming an adult. Babies were hardly a concern – birth control pills were as common as platform shoes.

“I like you,” one petite blonde co-ed confided to Ronnie shortly after the school year started at his new middle school Levy Junior High. She leaned against the Hagans’ front porch post, her hand on her hip. She shook her head and artfully moved her waist-length hair behind her shoulder.

“What’s that mean?” Ronnie asked.

“I mean, let’s go out,” she said, her mouth sly and conspiratorial.

“You want to go steady?” Ronnie said, knowing he would have to hide it from his dad.

“No,” she said, laughing, “My dad would kill me. I just want to fool around with you.”

Girls called the house asking for Ronnie, and Sam would listen on the extension. He would tell them they might better go out with him instead of Ronnie because Ronnie was not allowed to go anywhere. That was true, Ronald tells me. Syl Sr. thought he was more immature than the other two boys and curtailed all social activities while the other boys went to school dances at the high school back in the old neighborhood and dated the black girls they met there.

Later when Syl Sr. got home from work Sam would say, “Dad, Ronnie’s been calling this white girl, and he won’t stop. She doesn’t even like him.”

“Ronnie, what did I tell you, boy? You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

Another girl invited him over to her house. Debbie had dark brown hair falling below her shoulders and a sweet smile with bright eyes. Her mom, who knew Ronnie because she worked in the school library, looked like an older version, and she talked to him cordially as she served iced tea and cookies and listened attentively to everything he said. Ronnie liked the girl and her mother, and was more encouraged when her dad, dressed in a gray sharkskin suit, got home from work and shook his hand when he was introduced. Soon it was time to go home.

Ronnie said thank you and stepped outside to pick his bike up off the front lawn. The dad followed him out of the house.

“If I don’t invite you, don’t come here,” he said. He pulled his tie loose, turned on his leather dress shoes and strode back into his house. Ronald says he stood frozen by his bike, trying to process what he had just heard, wondering if he had heard right, and knowing he had.

Excerpt from Chapter 4 The Ghetto Will Follow You, Shades of Tolerance

Ronald, or Ronnie as his family called him, had pinch-able cheeks sitting up high under the biggest, saddest, dark brown eyes. Bertha would later claim he was her brightest skinned child, and chided him when he played golf as an adult and let the sun beat on his skin until it was so dark Cara and Mackenzie called him “blurple,” a combination of black and purple. He also had “good hair,” deep brown, soft, and delicately waved. He was small for his age and looked younger than his years.

From the time he was very little, he explained to me, he saw halos of color around every person: greens, blues, purples, oranges, yellows and reds.  He did not realize until he was much older that not everyone saw what he saw. He never considered it supernatural as I did when he first told me: a day in Bird Library at Syracuse University when I lost the necklace he had given me on my nineteenth birthday. I was standing outside the restroom in the library basement, blowing my nose and wiping my tears, when he came around the corner and hugged me.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked incredulously, “I was supposed to be in class.”

“I saw your aura – all purples and reds,” he said.

“You see auras?”

“It’s just the way I see,” he said, “I can see what people really look like. That’s why I want to draw them.”

I imagine him in childhood as often wearing a solemn expression – a combination of worry and anxiety. It must have made him look as if he bore the weight of his worries on his shoulders.

Yet he harbored a spark of mischief, a morsel of strength and knowing, and a sprinkle of infectious humor. His Grandma Nellie said, “That boy ain’t nothing but a desperado.”

I tell him, “You were mischievous – always getting into things.”

“Yup,” he says, grinning.

His problems, he told me, were curiosity and creativity. The solution, at least from his dad’s perspective, was to keep him still, to keep his creative energy and curiosity bottled up so they would not spill out as they often did.

The housing projects, lines of brick two-story apartments with tiny patches of lawn and concrete patios, covered one city block after another. The tenants were a mixture of race and ethnicity. Some of them had been displaced after the interstate went through the center of the city. The urban renewal initiative razed houses that were owned by a tight-knit community of blacks in the 15^th ward, and the interstate cut the city in half from north to south, leaving a distinct division between the neighborhoods dotting the west side of the city and those dotting the east side.  Other tenants were newly migrated families from the South, like the Hagans, or immigrants from other countries. A few of the Onondaga left the reservation in Nedrow and moved to the city, ending up in the projects as well. The men looked for work at General Electric, Carrier Corporation, Chrysler or Niagara Mohawk, the utility where Sylvester Sr. became the first black sub-station foreman in the 1970s. Some families, like the Hagans, were only there until they could afford better housing; others would live there for generations.

The projects were full of adventure and peril, if a young boy could get past his watchful parents’ eyes. Ronnie had an innate ability for wandering alone and watching all the people and activities happening around him.

The projects, he says, taught him early on that the line between childhood and adulthood was often blurred. I wonder why I never figured that out as a child, hyper-vigilant and responsible, but still thinking I was just a child.

Ronald says he saw children performing adult duties in the projects while being largely unsupervised – running to the store for bread and milk, parenting younger siblings, using sex as bargaining chips for drugs or a trip to the NY State Fair. Men sometimes remained trapped in juvenile foolhardiness – hanging out on the street corner, drinking booze from bottles hidden in paper sacks, snorting cocaine or smoking weed, shooting craps and running numbers, dogging women and girls alike for sex.

Some of the kids Ronald knew from the projects would spend their adult lives in the same place they spent their childhoods or they were in jail or dead. The machismo the boys wore like armor as children, they wore like battle scars as adults: gaunt faces, missing teeth, and wild, yellow eyes with bodies ravaged by alcohol, drugs and the hard life. Girls, their sexuality a gift of hope for a better life, matured into weary women with pendulous breasts and sagging stomachs, tired, cynical eyes, whining children pulling at dress hems, and purses filled with food stamps.

Ronald learned in the projects that adults were sometimes untrustworthy – they could hurt you or steal from you. Sometimes they acted like children or just crazy. Sometimes they tried to sell a kid drugs or they’d beat a kid up because they were chasing after the same thirteen-year-old girl. Sometimes people spilled out of their apartments, screaming at one another, kicking and punching and pumping hands in the air to make a point. Or they had weapons, knives or guns that they grabbed in the heat of the moment.

Ronnie saw this while he wandered through the neighborhood, often times after his brothers told him to go home because they didn’t want him around while they were playing with their friends.

He says he felt distant as if he were watching a movie, part of the audience but not part of the action. But sometimes he got pulled into the action, and then, he tells me, he would be right in the center of it.

“Poverty forces things out in the open because there’s nothing to hide behind,” he says. I understand how this belief, offered to me as fact, stated without reservation, has become a lens through which he views people and himself.