The Movement of this Era is Highway with Lanes for Everybody

 I thought about selling crack one summer for recreation. After watching neighborhood friends breakout fresh Jordan’s week after week the pressure was too much to bear. I needed to get “fresh” or die trying, literally. This scenario happens often, a black kid like me with two parents present, decides to piss it all away. Baltimore is like a vacuum that’s doesn’t discriminate against how wholesome your upbringing is. Just raising your kids here is like rolling loaded dice. My soon to be crack boss was Melvin. He weighed about 130 lbs soaking wet and sported purple black skin. His head reminded of poorly animated alien movies. He’d wear Nike air forces whiter than new dentures. My interview with him went well, and the day before I was going to pitch my first rock we had an impromptu meeting, I guess to discuss best methods of avoiding 5-10 years of hard time for a rock or two. He moved closer than comfortable to me and said, “Yo this goin be your strip right here, knockers (unmarked police) can’t run up on you right here cuz it’s one way in and one way out, feel me?” And I felt him, oh yeah I felt him, at I least I thought I did. After a handshake filled with ambition, I walked off feeling like scarface or nino brown. “Yo remember tomorrow you gotta get up early son, fiends be ready to get out the gate.” he said with conviction. Drug addicts, and specifically functional ones, rise before dawn. They smoke in the morning possibly break in houses, find junk metal, do your taxes, or better yet, litigate your custody case. The doctor’s who are junkies never make the news.

4:00AM the next day seemed like it came in seconds. I woke up to a phone call from Dante Jones, my soon to be head football coach at Edmondson high school, and before I could tell him that I was now a good kid gone kingpin, he screamed through the phone “two-a-days start a 6:00AM, be late and I’m going run you on the hill until you throw-up”. Needless to say I couldn’t make a time commitment to both, so my drug dealing career never got started… The purpose of this jaunt into my past isn’t to highlight the potential screw-ups or gullibility I had as a child. I would hope that you glean from it, the important lesson of intervention. Also understand this type of work comes in all shapes and sizes. Even till this day I never forget the small instances where I received guidance at life’s crucial turns from different people.

But, my coach knew that he had to kidnap kids from the streets of Baltimore, no matter if they came from a Cosby Family, or The Wire.  Biggie Smalls had a rhyme that went “Either you’re selling crack rock, or you got a wicked jumpshot.” Biggie wasn’t lying at all, but everybody can’t slam a basketball. So people with multiple skill sets are more needed than ever.  And Black America now, and like always needs skilled interventionist. In fact, we could use semi-skilled soldiers in this war. Unfortunately there are tons of people, organizations, and laymen acting as a panacea for every ill in Black Society. Even some of those who don’t claim to have all the answers, are busying themselves with finger pointing. Political agendas are being shoved down the throats of the masses, street outreach organizations are furious because their getting overshadowed by public personalities, and black college students are doing their very best not to be perceived as the black bourgeoisie.

The worse thing that could happen right now is that everyone starts to battle for the microphone. It’s kind of insane that this is what’s happening in my city and all over America. Funny, I used to wonder how it felt to be in Ferguson with the lights turned on, media ready to shoot, and leaders battling for influence. Then Ferguson came to Baltimore last week. Amazingly enough, it has shown how unified we can become, but it’s also exposed the internal wars we wage for the hearts and minds of the masses. For the people who benefit from Black America’s continued erosion it’s not the rage on TV that they fear. They worry about the one day we put differences aside and form one moral army.

This all reminds me of the plantation, where we were separated by everything from sex to toe-nail length. Whether our ancestors knew it or not, the elephant in the cotton field was freedom. And I seriously doubt we had the time to clash “publicly” over how we were going to get it. So the house slaves maybe had a job to poison master’s food, the bedwarmers put pride aside and spent the night with the pedophile overseers, and the field-hands slashed the necks of all the hounds, in the still of the darkness. I imagine that they plotted in cabins whispering so their scheme wouldn’t be heard through hollow walls. They more than likely used coded ebonics to coordinate logistics. Lastly, they acted not with their own salvation in mind, but with thought that they couldn’t possibly see another child be slaved, sold, lynched or molested. When morning came a decent revolt was ripe for execution.

1,000 Solutions arise after the Baltimore Uprising: One is Read

James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are  unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” We all have that Uncle that reverts back to slavery at a every turn. A conversation about polo shirts could mean a dissertation about Mississippi Cotton plantations. He’ll go on to say how most corporations would never be where they are had it not been for 12-16 hour a day slave labor. Add some 250 years of that free labor into the mix and you have a ton of uncles poised to verbally tear America to shreds. Any argument could ultimately take a rugged ride up the mountain of white blame. And by all means I believe that whites play a significant role in the continuation of the disparities that exist in this country. We can leave that debate for Cornel West and his counterparts. I believe it’s more important that we “read" into the situation here in Baltimore and especially America, before we make progress. 

“Did you read the Narrative of Frederick Douglass this year?” I interrogated my nephew Fahim 2 weeks ago. “Like did ya’ll at least watch a documentary yo?” I said pressing further. He replied, “Naw we really ain’t learn about him so far, I mean Ummi (grandma) talks about him, that’s it.” Our interaction had taken a turn for the worse and I became enraged. It would have been too difficult to explain the gruesome steps day by day and year by year that Douglass took to become marginally literate, and eventually one of the best writers ever in America. Sadly, he and my niece were the only two present to express my frustration. “It blows my mind that you could be in a high school called Frederick Douglass, and his autobiography not act as the living bible for the entire school” I lashed out again. I turned to my niece in confusion, “Bilquis, what are you reading now?”. She snapped, “Black Boy by Richard Wright”. “See that? They reading Richard Wright, this is crazy” I shouted. Bilquis goes to City College High School in East Baltimore, a rather prestigious institution. Fahim goes to Frederick Douglass in West Baltimore, a school working to improve its reputation. Douglass’s most recent fame has been it’s supplying of rock catapulting students to start the Baltimore uprising. And like many other people, parents, places and schools, I can’t see that it’s absolutely sold on reading.

Out of the chaos of Baltimore’s riots many social issues have taken a turn under the microscope. Maybe it’s just me, but the statistics on literacy in Baltimore would leave one to believe that this is a third world country. I believe culturally and structurally we’ve dropped the ball of literacy and the love of reading. According to the Baltimore Library project, “In 2012 34.5% of 3rd graders read below grade level, a figure that is double the State average. What makes these figures even more alarming is the fact that it’s been shown that one in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do not graduate from high school on time.” We can begin to deduce other symptoms that come about from this level of illiteracy. But there is a cultural component that needs to be discussed as well. Black kids don’t associate being “cool” with reading. So even people who can read, don’t, because we as Black Americans have been stigmatized as soft, or a nerd for finding out what’s in a book. My father used to say in his early demonizing of Facebook, “you need to get off Facebook and put your face in a book!”

Social Media with all it’s ills makes it quite easy to keep an eye out for new things friends are doing. Sometimes these can be friends you haven’t seen in 10 years. I was having a comment conversation one day about how kids in the hood won’t think reading is cool until “a guy is posted on the block with a book cracked open”. Low and behold the next day, another friend from my old neighborhood posted a picture of a black guy reading Soledad Brother, The Prison Letters of George Jackson, leaning on a wall with his pants slightly sagging. Of course the picture made my mind race. “Could I be a psychic or some type of savant?” I kept thinking to myself. But those type of self-allegations weren’t necessary.

Another search through my Instagram led me to a white dude’s page with a video of a black man protesting in front of the West Baltimore police station with Michelle Alexander’s Book “The New Jim Crow”. The white guys caption under read, “this must be the bible of the movement”. Let’s add that there are tons more bibles to pick up and read! However Alexander has provided an exceptional new doctrine. I’ve been pointing out what many have been pointing out for years in the ghetto. That is, once the love of reading fills the hearts of the people in slum areas like Baltimore, you’ll at least see people begin to question their circumstances and hopefully start answering them on their own. But for now we’ve locked ourselves in the darkness in America. So out of all the programs and promises our recent crisis brings, I hope literacy is at the top of the shelf. I’m not saying that books are the only sun that will illuminate that darkness, but every book a child reads is a lantern on a path to understanding, then escaping, or bettering these ghettoes.  

Baltimore's Uprising: Standing at the Front Line

Here in Baltimore, we call older members of our community with commonly known endearing nicknames: OG, Oldhead, Big Homie, Unc, Big Ahk. “Go head big brotha, you got it” is what I said this morning to a black guy about three times my age. I was on my way to a meeting in Washington D.C. called by my bosses, probably to scold me for taking the past few days off. Yesterday, especially, I chose to stay in Baltimore to help ensure the safety of my beloved multi-ethnic city, instead of being present for an audit at work. “Naw lil brotha, you can go ahead and get on first, my leg is killing me” he retorted immediately. I pushed through a smile, despite the trauma inside from the past few days I was experiencing, and said “Elders always first” with conviction.

The train doors closed, and I slumped in my seat, sort of the same way dope fiends sprawl out across benches in Baltimore that read “The Greatest city in America.” My head raised and so did my curiosity. “What up with your leg big bruh?” I asked. He erupted, “man the Baltimore Police beat the (expletive) out of me three years ago! Stomped my knee out of place!” I slumped further in the seat, my back was almost level on the seat cushion. I sat there stupefied. Here I had been on the streets of Baltimore ushering kids into their houses, marching for peace, and reverberating the need for blacks to protect each other for the past four days, thinking I was making some real progress, and a random Unc on the train was a victim of the same violence three years before, the same violence that ended Freddie Gray’s life!

In a whisper, I pleaded “you’re lying to me, please tell me you’re lying to me.” He rambled, “Brother! I got a 2.5 million dollar case on them jokers man. They beat me up three years ago for filming another guy getting his rib cage shattered by a few cops.” Before I fell completely off my seat, I snapped my body up, and leaned in within nine inches of his salt and pepper beard. “Three years ago? Police beat on you three years ago and you’re just settling the case?” This conversation was loaded with black rage, frustration and enchantment now. The six million dollars the police department of Baltimore has paid in fines for brutality is about to tack on 2.5 million dollars more.

“But what did you do?” I blurted, but thinking inside my head that it was obvious: darker pigment equals bruises and bullets. I remember reading how Eric Bradner for CNN wrote that “blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.”

He carried on: “I ain’t do a (expletive) thang! I’m a proud owner of a family plumbing company and have been teaching plumbing and HVAC for over 40 years to young guys just like you. I just happened to see the folks wailing on this dude and I started filming.”

Cops haven’t particularly enjoyed being filmed, but as of late it’s been really volatile. Three years ago I would’ve missed the memo too. “They told me to put my phone down and I said no. That’s when they stomped me out on the pavement like roadkill,” he mumbled.

I told him how I’ve been in the thick of it the past few days in Baltimore.

Then, the train sounded off the “Stadium Armory” notice, and his face sunk as he said he had to go. Walter, he told me as his name as he was getting up, added, “Take my card we’ll talk again for sure,” and left the train.

I know that in Baltimore, Big Homies like Walter love when younger ones are “involved.” But just what was I doing out there? If Walter and I would have stayed together for a few more stops, I would have shared with him more of what I witnessed just in the past four days alone, literally on the front lines of the city of many generations in my family, the only place I know as home, Baltimore. I would have shared the overwhelming feelings I have of PTGD (Post Traumatic Ghetto Syndrome).  And maybe ask his wisdom on how to make sense of it all.