That Summer in New Hampshire

That Summer in New Hampshire

Water Song Part II

                      When my ship comes in is a phrase we all know, or a certain generation knows, and it's about the thing hoped for but not quite seen.  The poet's success is some ship out in the bay for many of us, and maybe it's when we realize it's better for the ship to stay out on the water that we come to understand the real prize of this thing called being a poet.

I left Baltimore and drove up to Indian Pond, New Hampshire, without a clue as to how long it would take.  I had been on the road for eight hours and realized it would be a few more before I got to the turn I was supposed to take to get to Catrina's house.  There was supposedly a mailbox there at the road just past the junction where New Hampshire met Vermont, but it was dark.  There were no lights on the road, just the road itself and the way it revealed it's curves and dips to my Datsun 510.  

Recently, I had to explain to my students just what a Datsun was.  "It was what Nissan was before it became Nissan," I told them.  "Oh really," they said, "Professor Weaver, you are old."

But there I was in the dark with my five speed hatchback.  I had most of what I owned in and on it, including my Schwinn High Sierra bicycle.  My buddy Duck, a man I worked with in the warehouse for years had explained to me that a bike was the emblem of freedom, that and staying out of debt.  Before I left the warehouse he gave me the precepts of a black man's wisdom.  "Keep your bike, Mike.  Pay your bills, and guard your affections.  You know how easy you are to fall in love."

That last precept took a few years to sink in, and when I finally saw that mailbox I took the turn onto the dirt road leading up a steep hill.  There were no lights anywhere, but I could make out the grove of trees Catrina had drawn on the map she mailed to me with a letter explaining my station as her artist helper for the summer.  I went just past the grove and took a right turn, and it wase the right turn.  When I eased onto her grass just outside the kitchen door near her well, she threw open the door and stood there as vampish as she could for all of her maturity.  She was eighty-three years old, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist who had known the entire Calder family of American sculptors as well as Madam Soon Qing Ling, one of the last female aristocrats of Old China.

"You look like a man without a home," she said, standing there smiling.  Her hair was neat.  She looked as if she had been prepping for my arrival all day.  I was glad to turn off my engine and leave the car.  She had some snack prepared for me in the kitchen, which was the heart of the house when it was built before the American revolution.  The furniture was all Shaker.  When daybreak came the next day, I saw the militia certificate on the wall for the man who built the house.  It certified that he fought the British.  

There was a big field of wild blueberries in front of the house, and now and then a deer would poke across, taking its time to feel each blade of grass on its hooves.  There was indeed a pond nearby where the locals and vacationers came to swim and sunbathe.  When my son came to visit me, we went slipping out into the water like two bears, the only black people on the beach.  I took him mountain climbing on the smaller mountains nearby.  We made it halfway up one of them.  Beneath us we could see the plastic tubes connecting the trees and sending maple syrup down to the store by the road.  

It was an idyllic summer, one that gave me a place to rest after being in Europe for two months and before going into Brown that fall.  It was my year of fellowships.  I had won my NEA earlier that year, and when Brown accepted me they gave me a full university fellowship.  I was riding high.  I had copies of my book Water Song in a box in my room upstairs where I listened to French radio from Montreal.

Catrina invited Jay and Lois Wright to come visit and I said I would cook and make tea.  True to my Baltimorean form I made fried chicken wings and served a generic tea from the store.  Catrina looked on in amusement.  I did my best, and I was absolutely stunned by Jay's presence.  Charles Rowell had described him as the most learned of all American poets of any race, and I do believe he was right.  He made such an impression on me that I have always striven to "know" as well as to "write."  Jay and Lois were kind enough not to speak disparagingly about my fried chicken wings.

Catrina picked her times to give me instruction and comeuppance.  I was at the kitchen table putting together a scrap book of photos and favorite things from my trip to Europe as she stood by in one of her humorless moods.  After a few seconds she could not contain herself.  

"When you have been to Europe as many times as I have you won't need a scrapbook!  I went to Europe on a steamer after I finished my degree at Radcliffe.  There were no transatlantic flights.  As for tea, had you read your Victorian fiction you would know the proper time for tea."

Well, that did not help my general lack of interest in Victorian fiction.  I made myself read Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice, but Trollope was no match for Melville.  I chewed whole chunks of Moby Dick and loved teaching Billy Budd years later at Rutgers, but in this summer in the mountains of New Hampshire Catrina had near bout killed my desire to read fiction by the later 19th c. British scribblers.  They can all thank her.  Her spirit persists, despite the fact that it has flown.  She and her sister Betty lived past 100 years of age and carried whole histories with them.  Their father was the first accounting professor at Harvard, a man who thought DuBois was a rabble rouser.

The summer was about class distinctions and the mountains of things I had to learn as well as about the White Mountains that people the area like resolute saints.  I can see my son sitting with me now near the top of that smaller mountain, looking down and around at creation.  Time was suspended for us.  Troubles and doubts were at bay.  I had managed to tear off a chunk of freedom from life in a place where the night sky seemed nearly white with stars and I could see the infrequent traffic lights of cars peeking around the highways of distant mountains at night while animals I could not see made music I did not know in trees waiting for me to name them.  I call them memories.  I call them the gateways to the next phase of life, the sentinels that watched me as I slept those nights in New Hampshire.

As for falling in love, I was in love with a woman whom I would later marry, Ms Aissatou, but that summer I fell headlong into a loving friendship with Catrina, a woman fifty years my senior who loved sipping her brandy while watching Tom Brokaw and picking at me as I cut the lawn or trimmed the lilacs in front of the door.  I think of Catrina and the lilacs in this line from Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as what is love if it is not sometimes careless and inexplicable? 

"You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart, )

Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me."

It was what Charles Rowell thought I needed, that summer with Catrina, who knew so much about me the minute she saw me.  About that much, he was certainly right, right about the right turn from the mailbox onto that steep hill leading up to parts of me that I had yet to "know" and to "write."

Water Song

             It was heartbreaking.  I had hoped to win the Walt Whitman Award in 1983, but my manuscript, something entitled "City Folk," had only been selected as one of forty finalists out of a field of twelve hundred manuscripts.  I have only rarely submitted manuscripts to contests and have not done even that in many years, but at this point in my life I can say that was not a bad showing.  I was still in factory, working as a janitor in the warehouse at Baltimore's Procter & Gamble plant, and I wanted to escape.  I had a plan, but the best laid plans are only plans.  The imponderable civic of human activity and the intelligence that governs it have other plans.  

         In 1975 I wrote the first version of what became "City Folk," and that became "Water Song" in 1985, a sojourn of ten years between first draft of a manuscript and a published book.  In 1975, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" was a box office favorite, and ten years later it was "The Last Dragon," and arguably postmodern look at identity and hybridity around the theme of the interface between African American and Asian cultures.  If the warehouse was my own cuckoo's nest, I "sure nough" wanted to fly, and I was more the "Leroy" character, utterly naive but hopeful, than the power wielding "Sho Nuff" Shogun in "The Last Dragon."  Those were ten years of trying to know myself and the world through my writing while stacking boxes, loading trucks, cleaning bathrooms, and scrubbing floors.  

         "City Folk" was written on a portable electric typewriter I bought while living in a garden apartment in East Baltimore.  In 1980 my wife and I moved to a house near the old stadium in Baltimore where the Colts and Orioles played.  I could hear the crowds cheering, and I could feel the stomach ache of a lull when things weren't going so well.  It was a two story house where I used the third bedroom as my study.   A few months after my rejection/congratulations letter from the Academy of American Poets, I received a phone call from Charles H. Rowell, editor of Callaloo magazine and the Callaloo series of books of poetry by such notables as Jay Wright.

         It was 1984, a Sunday morning in spring, my reflection time.  The phone rang, and Charles announced himself.  Before long he asked if I had a manuscript.  My breathing stopped.  My heart skipped a few beats.  This was a moment I had been waiting for, a chance to publish.  I was so excited, and I immediately said that I had two manuscripts, as I tended then, as I do now, to write in at least two streams when I am actively writing.   I had other irons in the works.  I had enrolled in a non-resident university program in New York to finish my bachelor's degree.  I had been applying for a NEA fellowship in poetry.  I was preparing to apply to the writing program at Brown.  But this seemed golden.  I was so excited.  Then another shoe dropped.

         "How tall are you?" Charles asked.

         I was caught and suddenly fearful where I had been so excited, but I gave my height.  It seemed so awkward, and Charles replied, "Oh, and so sensitive."

         Charles is an exceptionally intelligent man, well read and, quietly enough, perhaps one of the more 

knowledgable persons in the field of African American literature.  He is also well versed in the dynamics of how people move in the literary world.  At the time I knew nothing of such things, but my exit from the factory seemed more plausible now.  I did not want to jeopardize this opportunity.

         Fall approached and Charles began writing to me, letters I have since misplaced.  He wanted me to come and spend a weekend with him in Charlottesville, so we could take rides in the mountains and talk about my poetry.  Call it a misunderstanding, but I was only comfortable with a visit where I could get a hotel room nearby.  Things fell apart and we did not communicate much until earlier the following year, after much had happened for me.

         I had applied for the NEA again, and this time I won.  It was January, 1985, and I was able to leave Procter & Gamble.  I left friends behind, and I carried with me what I still have, a penchant for habits such as stopping by the 7 Eleven for a coffee in the evenings, or taking long walks away from my office at Simmons to remember some of what it was to spend a whole day on my feet.  I left, and some of my black coworkers gave me a dinner at a posh restaurant on Falls Road.  I left and moved out into the world half expecting people to know who I was, which was so naive.  I had no sense of the competitiveness in American poetry, the way people guard their territories.  My own sense of propriety would take years to cultivate.  But there I was, out of factory life.  I had applied to Brown before I left and that acceptance would come in April with a full university fellowship.

         Water Song was in limbo.  My personal life was in flux.  I had left my second wife and was dating the lady who would become my third wife.  I was a celeb in Baltimore, an ignorable fact in New York, but in B'more I was everywhere, and I did the best I could with handling the success.  There are quite a few poet workers in America, but among black poets I was rare, and I was more rarer for having made my exit from blue collar life with an NEA.  It was a singular accomplishment, more so than I understood at the time.  Water Song would follow later in the year, but there were hurdles.  Charles and I had another misunderstanding.

         I called him from my fiancee's apartment and announced, somewhere in the conversation, that I was remarrying.  Charles was less than happy to hear this news.  In fact, he was furious.   He thought that I was not taking my talent seriously.  Charles assessed my gift as a poet to be distinctive.  His wish for me was that I live a more monastic life, monastic except that I should make my romantic liaisons with men.  He thought women would take my essential energy away from me.

         "I don't know if I will be able to do your book!  I might do a small book, but I don't know when that will happen."  The call ended abruptly.  We communicated infrequently by mail after that, and it was agreed that I would ask David Driskell for a cover image.   Professor Driskell is one of the giants among African American painters, and I was thrilled.  My fiancee and I went to his studio in College Park, Maryland, and Driskell told me to choose whatever I liked.  I chose a beautiful painting of his depicting a minister with wings around him, and I choose woodcuts of nude figures for the two sections of the book.  Water Song treats the southern roots of my family and black culture in the first section, and in the second section there are poems about the industrial north.  It is thoroughly working class.

         Other people tried to give me advice about how to navigate this new space in my life, and when I chose to take some of my NEA money for my first trip to Europe, some thought it unwise because I should have been attending to my book.  But I wanted a touch of class, insecure as I was about having been a laborer for so long, insecure and afraid of people's judgments.  I had done all I could do for my book, I thought, and I trusted Charles to look after the proofreading.

         In late June I returned to the States after wandering in Europe, and the box containing the first copies of Water Song arrived, and it was full of surprises.  The cover was not the one I chose, and the woodcuts were not inside because Charles said there would be no naked people in his books.  Finally, there were typos and lines had been arbitrarily broken in a few poems.  I felt like I had been throughly whooped, allowed a measure of success with my first book but only after being picked up like a puppy, prodded and smacked around the ears.  In any event, there I was, with first book in hand.

         Call it a shared southern sense of communication, or call it the persistence of my own false humility, but Charles took it upon himself to recommend that I go spend the summer with Mrs. Catrina White in Indian Pond, New Hampshire, because Jay Wright lived nearby and I could get a chance to get to know him.  Charles explained that he thought Wright and I have something in common, a metaphysical centering, among other things.  Mrs. White, an elderly woman, was in the habit of keeping an artist as a summer helper, and I became that artist helper, and I started to get to know Jay Wright.  That summer changed the course of my writing and my life.

         When I work with young poets nowadays, I do so only if asked.  Once I decide to work with them, I try to be as judicious as possible.  They are a vulnerable lot, the necessary keepers of our cultural consciousness, vulnerable as they may or may not be.   When I sit in places where decisions are made, I remember all of what I have seen, the politics and betrayals as well as the unabashed displays of compassion, and I try to do the right thing.

         I go forward trying to remember what things cost, as in James Baldwin's trope "The Price of the Ticket."

Meet Me at the Old Chuckwagon

Milton Avenue

I was raised on westerns, and my first sight of real horses was when the "Arabbers" came through the alleys selling topsoil and fresh produce. They sang out street vendor songs and walked beside horses that were either ponies or slightly larger. Often they would be pintos or piebalds. Once in awhile I saw a palomino, but chestnut came to be my favorite color in horses, so when I watched the westerns I learned to distinguish the colors somewhat. With a black and white television in the early sixties, it was not so easy to see anything other than the limited chiaroscuro of our 19 inch RCA.

My uncle Ronnie was a self-made film expert, and he helped bolster my early accumulation of westerns watched, if I can take the time to name a category. My father's favorite was "Shane," and I have it on DVD in my collection. Every now and then I pull it from the shelf to try to figure why my father called it his favorite. I have my own reasons for liking the film. There is a simple beauty to it, something unpretentious compared to some others.

When I think of westerns and cowboys, I think of how black urban notions of masculinity in Baltimore might have been affected by what men and boys saw in these movies. I think first of the way we walked down the street. Learning to negotiate the urban landscape was a matter of knowing how to walk with confidence. Men who were up to no good had a predatory way of moving, and it was important for nerdier young men such as myself to know them and know how to respond, if necessary.

When I was working in Procter & Gamble's warehouse, we all walked like characters out of westerns, men and women alike. At least that's the way I remember the folks I worked with. We didn't carry guns in the warehouse, of course, but many of the men I worked with had revolvers, semi-automatics, and shotguns in their trucks and cars. However, inside the warehouse we had only buck knives, and we wore them on our belts, as if to be ready for an assault from a coworker.

We were white and black, and there was one truckdriver who came in regularly and described himself as a "hillbilly" with no fondness for white people. He was probably one of the toughest of all of us, but we all swore machismo and proved it on the parking lot by calling each other out to settle scores with fistfights. We walked to the lot like the characters in the films, steadying from one foot to other while keeping an eye on the target, another man, another human being with whom we had a beef.

The "cow" of cowboys came to me on my first horseback ride. I was riding a mare named Tilly that belonged to another uncle of mine. We were on a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and unbeknownst to me my trusty steed was a Quarter horse. She was bred for "cutting" or separating individual cows from the herd. We headed down the field toward a barrel at a slow gallop, and when we got to the barrel I eased against her neck with the right rein to signal her for a left turn, and she "cut" so fast I nearly fell out of the saddle.

I continued to ride now and then over the years, getting beyond just watching the first horse handlers I saw, the "Arabbers" of Baltimore. But it's been years since I've been in the saddle, so long that I miss it now. It would probably be wise not to let nostalgia relieve me of a healthy awareness of bones that are forty plus years older than the ones that made it around that barrel with Tilly.

When things went wrong in East Baltimore between men, it was usually a matter of taking risks with one another for the sake of pride or out of some serious dysfunction, some craziness.

The Chuck Wagon was a restaurant that opened a side panel onto the sidewalk for sales in a way that mimicked the chuck wagons in TV and film westerns. One night in the summer of 1969 a friend and neighbor by the name of Oscar was shot to death in the street directly in front of the place. He was taunting another young black man who was not known as a trouble maker, and neither was my neighbor for that matter. He had been drinking. It was the improper alignment of the forces affecting the development of black men in the sixties, a decade when major American cities were war zones between blacks and whites. When Oscar reached into the other young man's car, he was met with a revolver and received a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen.

It was the summer men landed on the moon. It was the summer of a race riot in York, Pennsylvania. It was the summer I went to the race track for the first time with another uncle and learned the basics of gambling, the merits of "win, place, or show." In the streets black men often lost without placing or showing.

When the Arabbers came through the alleys in the heat of summer, my mother would sometimes take cold water to them. They were always grateful and responded with a series of genuine "Yes mam's and thank you's." The horses stood there obediently, decorated as they usually were with some kind of headdress and then the bells in the harness that let you know they were coming. As a child I wanted to be able to sit on the wagon and pretend it was a stage coach and we were rumbling along somewhere in Arizona and New Mexico. Or I imagined I could take one of spotted ponies and avenge Native Americans.

I often rooted for the underdog without full recognition that I was one of them. After all, I had access to horses beyond the street vendors in the alleys and beyond the dangers of the streets because I had survived the turning of a barrel, and so falling down seemed like something I could avoid--if not all the time maybe in matters of life and death.

So I walk a little like a cowboy at times, or at least the way I think a cowboy walks, especially when I am climbing into my version of a truck, a SUV that is dwarfed alongside a Chevy Suburban the way a pony is dwarfed by a Clydesdale.

Black Urban Cowboys

MARYLAND PENITENTIARY

"Central Booking"

East Baltimore

February 11, 2011

Central Booking is what the Maryland Penitentiary has come to be known, and it is the oldest prison in the western hemisphere still in daily operation. You can reach it by driving west on Madison Street from Johns Hopkins hospital, which sits in the middle of an old black neighborhood and up the street, so to speak, from Dunbar High School, named for Paul Laurence Dunbar, the great African American poet who wrote the line "I know why the caged bird sings..." which inspired the title of Maya Angelou's incredible autobiography.

Jail, as we call Central Booking or any of the other "correctional" institutions in Baltimore, is full of black men, and in my sixtieth birthday year I am given to looking back over my life from this point to the black men I have known. I am not alone among black men from poor and working class urban backgrounds who can say they are survivors. In Baltimore beginning in the seventies the homicide rate began to rise to 200 or 300 a year, black men killed mostly by black men.

However, I am given now to looking back at my childhood and adolescence, the period from 1951 to 1971, a time that coincides with the national violence that marked integration, the end of the old world of segregation and the beginning of new patterns. The aftermath is what the journalist Eugene Robinson calls the "disintegration" of black America in his new book by the same title.

But when I look back at my own life in Baltimore I see that there was, in that traumatic shift, a troubling undoing of black models for masculinity. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1940's and continued into the 60's, black men in Baltimore worked and lived in the context of a world of working class jobs and a black community with institutions built out of the immense contradictions and dangers forged in the reality of racial oppression in the world's largest democracy. Assertion of black humanity by black men and women has always been a matter of questioning de jure legislation, and the sustenance of black culture has often been a matter of ignoring or going beyond laws designed to confine and contain black life through various strategies of dehumanization. Black entrepreneurs who could not secure loans from racist bankers had gentleman gangsters as a recourse.

In the 1960's the context of all this changed. Integration created a space where black men struggled to know how to be. It was a space of anxiety, fear, and tremendous courage exerted in the face of a complex of dangers. It was the time of a war in Southeast Asia that was unlike any other war, a war with racial dimensions that were new. Men moved from combat to be returned to urban environments in a matter of days with no treatment. The journalist Wallace Terry interviewed several of these men in his book "Bloods."

As teenagers in the sixties we had to forge our way as young men against the dangers that existed in our own neighborhoods as well as the racial dangers of white hostility that surrounded us. We lived in communities under siege in ways that make current tensions in other parts of the world entirely understandable. Growing up with helicopters circling over your house and the military occupying your neighborhood amounts to a "state of siege."

Violence took on newer and more menacing aspects. Neighborhood confrontations that were settled with the loss of a fistfight were now more often settled by gunplay and knife fights. The guns that were turned on police and soldiers during the riots fed into the battles black men had with each other.

At the same time this was happening the rug was pulled from under the black community with the loss of working class jobs. The jobs that allowed our parents to send their boys and girls to college gave way to service jobs like McDonald's in the seventies and eighties. At the same time drugs flooded Baltimore as international drug lords saw America's cities as an open market with both clients and workers. The stage was set for disaster.

Parallel to Madison Street running east and west there is Monument Street. When I was a child my parents bought furniture for our home and clothes for us on layaway plans. It was also the border between black and white. My parents dressed up to go to Union Savings Bank or Levenson and Klein furniture store. Milton Avenue runs north and south and the part of it in my neighborhood had a five and dime as well as a movie house when we moved there in 1957, both of which were burned when Dr. King was killed. I watched the flames from my grandmother's bedroom window and heard gunshots echoing through the smoke. In the evenings there were soldiers patrolling the neighborhood.

I was sixteen years old with my brand new driver's license. In the summer I hung out with friends and relatives in the neighborhood. We taught ourselves courage while trying to understand the world of sex, sexuality, drinking and drugs, and we fought the white boys around us. Many of those friends and relatives are dead. A few are in prison. The little boys who were eight or ten years behind us grew up to call each other "G" for gangster, and when they were little they thought we were gangsters.

But we were kids ourselves. Riding around in our parents' cars and cars we were able to buy because we lived with our parents, we were in a world we understood but the walls of which were crumbling so that those behind us would have to struggle to know how to be men in what arose from the rubble of the past. This past was built partly with the courage of men who praised Jack Johnson and listened to Joe Louis on the radio, breathing when they breathed, punching when they punched, all in an air they could name as their own, and it was built with the courage of the women who knew the substance of that air.

Note:

In this 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun another part of the penitentiary is discussed, a unit in the old Maryland Penitentiary is called "Metropolitan Transition Center":

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.rodricks.11may11,0,1951340.column

photo by Bill Larson

taken at Austin Peay University

Clarksville, Tennessee 2010

To the Heart of Things

When I listen to people with terminal illnesses talk about the time they have left, it often takes me awhile to remember that I have had to deal with that, too. Maybe it's because I am fifteen years away from the diagnosis. I was forty-three years old, too young to expire according to many, not the least of whom was myself. However, people have died soon after they were born. People die at all ages, but I was busy doing stuff, as they say, when the diagnosis came and along with it the only solution, according to the doctors. They wanted to give me a new heart. I refused to be put on the waiting list. I wanted to try exercise, change of lifestyle, the geographic cure, and most of all, a return to my Taiji and all the related aspects of what we call Chinese medicine.

But all that seems like chit chat. I think now of the place where I lived, an apartment on Philly's West Side, near University of Pennsylvania. It was a short walk from my house to the offices of African American studies. There are the trees that lined Locust Street, my street, where the Victorian house I lived in was kept in meticulous order by the landlord and landlady, a precious black couple who had known each other since elementary school down South. I want to say South Carolina, and that's what I will say. Their last name was Butler, and they were a holdover from the time of strong enduring marriages. We were out in the yard together one day when the subject of religion came up.

Mr. Butler said, "My wife is religious. I am spiritual."

She looked at him and gave him that "look" that black women give which lets the world know it's time to hush.

When I came down with congestive heart failure, any little sensation that came into my chest was cause for concern if it was a "new" sensation. My doctors had told me to be aware and to come into the hospital if need be. One night I had a "new" sensation, and Mr. Butler came up and sat with me. There I was, a grown ass man, as they say, needed the comfort of a father figure. The state of my heart put me in the position of having to think about death. I had been given five years of being barely able to walk with all the medications I was taking. So when I felt that feeling in my chest I heeded Mr. Butler's words. A few days earlier he had spoken to me like a father.

"Now Mr. Weaver, don't you sit up there and suffer. You call downstairs and let us know when you're not feeling right. You hear?"

I heard, and so there he was. The sensation in my chest did not go away, so he drove me to the hospital, which was the Hospital University of Pennsylvania or HUP, as Philadelphians call it. It turned out to be nothing, and so later in the morning Mr. Butler came to retrieve me from the hospital, and we rode back to that three story house with one glad passenger sitting up there alongside Mr. Butler.

My buddy Roger Allen Jones was my helpmate and nurse. He was a poet who had spent a few years selling used books on the sidewalks of the university. Students knew him, and the first time I remember having a conversation with him was when he was walking down the street to where I sat on the steps in front of the house. I had elected to live alone after several years of marriage, alone again, and my heart had not yet failed. But it was lumbering in my chest. I had put too much pressure on the pump, high blood pressure, medications for depression that were not good for the heart, a huge transition from working class life to academia, and always the search for love, that deadly addiction. Roger always wore too big shoes, and that day he had on a seasonal outfit, his jeans and an old blazer.

"Michael S. Weaver, " he called out in his lion voice. He was a tiny man who talked in a megaphone voice. He got closer and said, "I read your first book, Water Song. I like your poetry. Have you written your deathbed poems?"

Roger was nothing if not the purest devotee to poetry that I have ever known. He loved the word more than I did and could supply me with research info for class prep at times. Roger taught me about friendship, and he taught me about living. He even critiqued my love poems.

"Those ain't love poems, Boss. You just writing about love. I have yet to see you write a poem about the desire and the craving." Then he went back into his meditative space, gnawing his lips and looking at the sky.

What is it to be alive? Well, you breathe and you think and you feel, but the feeling is something I have come to place on a much higher plane than thinking. Thinking has always come easier to me, but feeling has taken me a lifetime. What has taken longer is to honor those feelings, to be brave enough to act on the basis of my feelings. You don't have to always say what you feel because that is often not appropriate. But you have to have an honest connection to your emotional reality when you speak and act, when you move in life. Most of my life I have not been able to do that, and I hope the people who have noticed this and been annoyed have forgiven me. I can blame it on my childhood, as all of us can, but what good is that at this point? It's good in the therapist's office for your own head straightening, but I believe compassion has to come from understanding we all have some hardness in life.

In the past couple of years I have been going to a barber by the name of Benny. His shop is close to my Cave. I was telling Benny the other day that I am writing a memoir about my hard life, and he said he had one, too. For a moment I felt annoyed, but I made myself listen. He went on to tell me about having to live on salt water as a child in Haiti, and it made me a little ashamed of myself but glad that I took the time to listen. It reminds me that if I finish this memoir I want it to be of help to people.

Walt was my barber here from the time I landed in the Boston area until 2007, a long time. Life got busy, or so I thought, and the subway ride to Magic Shears, the shop where he worked, seemed so long. I went down to Dorchester, where Magic Shears sits, to get my hair put in proper order. I had not been in awhile so I called the other day to see if I could catch him before he left for the day. Clyde owns the shop, and he answered as he always does. I asked for Walt.

"Mike, are you sitting down." That's all he had to say. I was glad I was sitting in my truck, looking out at the morning sky. Walt was gone. Clyde and I talked our way to being able to laugh about something Walt said. Clyde owned the shop, but Walt always said he kept the customers coming. Walt and Clyde were my working class touchstone. They were the men I grew up with and worked with for many years. They were the norm for a huge chunk of this six foot three working class piece of walking flesh I call me. We always had a ritual at holiday time, Walt with his glass of Christmas cheer.

So we breathe, and we stop breathing. Roger is gone, too. He passed away in his apartment just two years after I came home from the cardiac unit. When I came home the doctors had advised me against walking and driving. I broke both rules.

Roger and I went to Cape May, just over the bridge from Philly in Jersey. I drove a rental car, and when we got there Roger sat on the beach watching the gulls and what we thought were dolphins in the distance. It is a beach full of little stones. Roger was born and raised in Philly but had never been to Cape May. He sat there rocking back and forth. I asked him how he liked it.

"It sure beats television. That's all I can say."

I should be writing a letter in Chinese to my teacher in Taiwan, and I should be grading my students' papers. I guess I can get to those things now that I have let whoever reads this know how I feel about having time to live.

This was once the corner store across from

Fort Worthington Elementary School

East Baltimore

circa 1957

I loved arithmetic so much that when the teacher announced it in the 4th grade I hollered out "Yippee!" Call me the king of nerds. My classmates helped me understand that it was inappropriate expression in the context of their ideas of classroom decorum. Mrs. Miller was our teacher, and she thought it was rather cute of me to express my enthusiasm for math class. She was a stern woman, and I only remember her as being tall and beautiful, a dark brown-skinned woman with a stately demeanor. She was a little mean, too. Many a knuckle got cracked with that wooden ruler she kept ready on her desk.

Mrs. Miller was taken away unexpectedly, murdered by a man. I don't remember if it was her husband or boyfriend. I've always thought it was her boyfriend. Maybe so.

With the exception of Mrs. Tang, a longterm substitute, all of our teachers were black. I remember Mrs. Tang because her name was like the breakfast drink the astronauts took with them into outer space, the outer space beyond the concentric circles on the wall chart showing how far the Cuban missiles could reach. But that was after Mrs. Tang. The missiles came in the 6th grade. Mrs. Lewis was our teacher. She was a woman who seemed to be the embodiment of jazz. She had a way of easing around the class that reminds me now of the sound of vibraphones from Milt Jackson.

Mrs. Lewis told us to write something about our lives one day. I came in with twelve pages in longhand. What else but longhand? We didn't get a typewriter until I got to junior high school. I write "we," but I don't remember allowing my little sisters to play with it. All they could do was play. They were only nine and five respectively. No way they were going to mess up my typewriter.

Although she was impressed, when I brought my twelve pages to class, Mrs. Lewis said, "Michael, I didn't tell you to write all of this."

I had a lot to say.

There was a Mr. Lewis, too. He was a corpulent man who dressed as nicely as the ladies did, a semi-formal presentation. We were playing in the schoolyard one day, duck duck goose, I believe, and I remember Mr. Lewis's bald head shining in the sun. It was amazing, a clean, smooth black mirror under the sun. The sun, of course, was in outer space, the safety zone above the reach of the Cuban missiles.

Mrs. Lewis and Mr. Lewis were not related.

The principal was a white man with what must have been some severe kind of arthritis. His fingers curled a bit. He was a kind man with a name something like Mr. Galeprin. I don't remember the spelling.

My parents went to the office one day to discuss me with Mr. Galeprin. I was terrified. I couldn't imagine what a perfect nerd like me could have done wrong. They came home and gave me the news. I was going to skip the eighth grade. There was no vote taken. It was a parental edict, and so I tried to imagine skipping non-stop for two years. What kind of sneakers would I wear? That was the sillier part of me. I knew I would be working like a nuclear power plant for the rest of my life, and I would always be with older kids.

It was a predominantly white school, and so I left the black world of elementary school life and took the bus to the larger space that, unlike outer space, did not seem nearly as safe as the concentric circles emanating from the black center of my black world.

We were children. We did what children should do. We obeyed.

When We Tap “The Wire”

A RESPONSE TO "OBAMA IN THE AGE OF THE WIRE"

THE HARVARD PROJECT

by Afaa Michael Weaver

The Wire/Urban Decay and American Television edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall is the first published collection of critical essays on the HBO program “The Wire.” The book includes an essay of mine entitled “Baltimore Before the Wire.” What follows here is my response to the project at Harvard University.

In The Wire Collington Square Park is used to portray Marlo, an ambitious young drug dealer, in meetings with his guards and assassins. They stand on a knoll where Johns Hopkins hospital stands in the background. I know the park as the one adjacent to the school where my son and two youngest siblings attended the Head Start program in the seventies. As a poet who did his literary apprenticeship as a Baltimore factory worker, my life has taken me across the spectrum of the city covered in this television series that has garnered the attention of Harvard educators and community leaders and activists in Boston’s black community. It has also gathered its share of controversy. I think Reverend Rivers and his colleagues at Harvard have rightfully claimed the program as a teaching tool, and I understand the concerns of Ishmael Reed, whom I know and whose work I have always appreciated, just as he has explained in conversation that he appreciates mine.

However, Reed is no fan of The Wire and has said it is full of cliches. My concerns go to both sides of this controversy.

As to the matter of cliches, I would go so far as to say the characters in The Wire are perhaps the catalytic summation and potential antidote to the cliches Reed cites. Simon’s characters are rooted in the active space in the consciousness of lived experience. Granted, European tourists cruising the city looking for action is not something I find comforting. As a native son of Baltimore, I believe the folks at Harvard could have strengthened their offering to the students there and to the black community had they sought more input from folks who actually grew up in Baltimore. There are a few of us in the Boston area.

My family home is on Federal Street in East Baltimore, a few blocks away from the rim shop that is used in The Wire as a meeting place for drug dealers. Four blocks from my parents’ home is the intersection of Federal Street and Milton Avenue, the northern end of a stretch that is a major artery in what we call “street life.” In the late fifties my parents obtained a mortgage during the period of block busting when rental agents across the country were making fortunes by using scare tactics to move white owners out and resell to blacks at inflated prices. Milton Avenue had a five and dime and a movie theater that were destroyed in the riots following Dr. King’s assassination. As heroin and then crack flooded our neighborhood immediately after the sixties, Milton Avenue fell apart and down to what it is now, a no man’s land in the world of illegal drugs and poverty.

I know and have known people whose lives and personalities fit aspects of the characters in The Wire, and each time I watch the program I see them anew, in dimensions that speak honestly to their intelligence and own sense of integrity, as poorly constructed and misshapen as they might be in real life when human failings meet systemic social dysfunction and deliberate plans for destroying a community.

In applying The Wire to Boston I would expect these educators and activists to know Boston is not Baltimore. The black community here is not the more “like member” kind of community in Baltimore, where black folks from the same areas in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia and elsewhere in the South moved in groups to the same neighborhoods in Baltimore. Boston is one of the America’s internationally black cities where you do not have to go too far back in the family to know someone who speaks or spoke Jamaican patois or Haitian creole. Boston is a city with a black diversity that is something of a marvel but a mystery to many whites and an untapped discussion for many black folks. However, it is another marker of significant difference in applying The Wire to Boston, a very northern city.

Still The Wire should be applied. It should be applied to our collective consciousness as a well-told tale of what has happened to one of America’s great cities, a tale where the historic trends and development, the tragic flow of its hustle, invites us all to be more human.

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