My Boy

I come from a broken family.  Usually when people use the phrase "broken family" they are referring to a family where the parents are divorced.  My parents separated when I was 15 however, when I say that I come from a broken family I mean that I come from broken people.

It's always hard for me, incredibly hard, to write about the failings of my parents. Like I talked about in this post, now that I am a mother myself I have to constantly reconcile the mother I dreamed I'd be with the mother I really am.  It's humbling. Parenting is humbling.

My parents' problems always seemed obvious to me.  There were three kids in my family and none of us was planned.  My parents kind of raised us that way - unplanned, shooting from the hip.  They abused substances, forgot about us, and got lost in their own problems.  I've spent countless hours on the couches of psychologists trying to work through the quagmire of who I am because of the pain that my parents gifted me with.  At least, that's what I used to believe.  The simple truth is that I blamed them for what I didn't like about myself.

One of the ideas I've explored a lot here in this blog space, is the idea that the members of my family wear a "mark" because we're from Greenwood.  There is a heritage of slavery that haunts us.  Greenwood was slave country, and we are her descendants.

Years ago, before that idea had occurred to me, I thought I had all the answers.  In my arrogance, I believed that I could construct the perfect family in the same way that I could mix together and bake the perfect cake.  I met a man who didn't drink, had a stable job, and seemed to be the perfect puzzle piece to build my ideal family on.  He was the cornerstone, and we were both the builders.  We had two sons.  I read to them, I home schooled them, took them to the park, and was convinced that my love would be all that they'd need to be perfectly, adorably happy.  I was wrong.

I always thought that I was sad as a girl because I had absent, selfish parents. Then, I met my son.  He is sad.  He cries a lot and talks often about how much he hates himself.  He is seven years-old.  I play with him, read books to him, take him to all types of doctors, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I resent it all.  He reminds me so much of myself at that age.  I was 11 the first time I contemplated committing suicide.  I always thought that particular detail was a reflection of the terrible, oh, so awful home life I came from.

In the life I have today, I easily spend 20 hours a week trying to save my son.  I take him to specialists, read books on kids that are "different", and talk to other moms. Every day it feels like the two of us are on a course marked for certain destruction. It's a game.  People are hiding where I cannot see them.  They watch us and laugh at us as we try to get off, because there is no "off."  There is only a mother trying desperately to find the right pill, the right program, the right diagnosis, the right anything.

Sometimes, he smiles at me.  He truly is the most beautiful boy in the world (although he may be tied with his brother).  He has caramel-colored skin that he hates because it's not white.  He is tall and most people think he's three years older than he actually is.  I know that one day when he's a man he will love being tall. For now, though, it's like a cross to bear.  People look at him and wonder why he can't do more.  Why is he crying?  Why is he screaming?

As I deal with him, trying to nurture and love without getting tapped out, his father lingers in the background, already talking about military school.   I picked him because I thought he'd be the perfect father.  But, I also thought that I would be the perfect mother.

Some days, I am painfully aware of the fact that I'm the only one who "gets" my son. Others hear rage, I hear a panic attack coming on.  I perceive the tears behind the behavior. Sometimes, I wish I could permanently tie him to me to help him navigate every situation or at a minimum, I want to construct a world in which he would experience no pain, a world in which everyone would "get" him.

Along with all of this, I have to wonder two things: 1) Is he like this because I am like my parents? Or 2) were my parents normal and all of my crap was my own fault because I was messed up biochemically or something?

Either answer kind of sucks.  If answer 1 is the truth, then does that make me a terrible mother?  If 2 is true, then I've spent all of these years blaming innocents for my own loneliness.

I've made some of the most critical choices in my life because I wanted to build the perfect family.  I don't have the perfect family.  I have a broken family and I don't know what to do about it.  

Branded

When I was a girl, I dreamed of being a writer.  In middle school, I started reading Sweet Valley High books and other teen romance novels.  In my early teens, I read E.L. Doctorow, Pat Conroy, John Irving, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  In my late teens, I painfully made my way through Shakespeare and Faulkner, all the while imagining that one day I'd be sitting at a desk writing deep, complicated tales that would both reveal and inform the American way of life.

I didn't write those tales.  Actually, I didn't finish those tales  Every laptop and every computer I've ever owned contains dusty hard drives imprinted with half-written stories that are trapped in an eternal, peaceful sleep.  When it comes to fiction, I'm just not a finisher.  During those blurry days when I started and restarted my computerized masterpieces, I was using napkins, scratch paper, and the backs of grocery lists to jot down my feelings. Unbeknownst to me, where I was failing at fiction, I was succeeding at non-fiction.  

Around this time I discovered the story of Booker Wright, and I made a choice that would change my life.  I decided to record, here on this blog, the steps I took to uncover his story and my efforts to grasp his soul.  Some of my earlier posts are lame.  I'll be the first to say that.  You can see me struggling to find my way.  At first, I thought that no one would ever read my blog, so I wrote hurtful things about my family, revealing with reckless detail, all of their earthly failures.  

In the summer of 2011, I made a documentary about my grandfather, called Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story.  After our first shoot, the filmmakers went back to their work spaces and started trying to pull together a movie.  I went into a corner and started blogging about everything.  Every feeling, every emotion, every moment of bliss and pain, I recorded here.   

My computers tend to die sudden deaths, and I can't keep up with printed copies. I've lost every story I wrote as a young girl.  That's why I posted here.  I was afraid that if I collected my random thoughts anyplace else that, one day, they'd be gone, accidentally thrown away or trapped in a computer that'd been murdered by the latest virus.  So, I blogged.  Blogging helped me to process, and it simply made me feel better. 

At the time, the only "visitors" to my blog were poor souls from the Ukraine who'd typed in the wrong URL. Then, one day the producer called and said, "Everybody in NY loves you."  He meant everyone at his agency who was working on the film.  I said, "Why?"  He said, "They've read your blog."

I felt like someone had just said, "Hey, yesterday, when you were showering, the window was open and everybody on 46th St. and 11th Avenue was watching."  It was weird.  I went back and read some of my earlier posts, the ones where I talked about which members of my family couldn't hold down jobs and which ones would go on shopping sprees and then not have enough money to pay their bills.  I did some quick deleting.  

Since then, I've tried really, really, really hard to keep writing with the same mission I had at first.  I write to escape, to work out my feelings, to make sense of what stalks my soul, and to record, so that in 30 years I can go back and accurately remember.  

But something has been lost.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm changing my clothes with eyes on me.  I wear my best undergarments, turn my body in a way to highlight my toned parts, but hide the flabby ones.  I have about 60 blog drafts here that I chose not to post because I didn't want to throw anyone under the bus or make anyone angry.  In some ways, I'm a brand now.  When I start to write I catch myself wondering if the writing will enhance or hurt my brand.  I wonder if it will make the people who've invested in me happy or angry.  Will it help the movie?  Will it hurt my book?

My soul lives here.  I stamp myself onto this blog space.  Just now, I started to type, "I stamp myself onto this blog space, because..."  but nothing came after "because."  I don't know why I leave myself here, I just do.  

There are things about this project that I need to work out.  I've seen my counselor about them, talked to girlfriends about them, and even started several pen to paper writings about them.  But for some reason, at least for now, I only seem to be able to get to "the end" of my conflicted emotional ropes when I am here, sitting in a coffee shop, shutting out the conversations around me, and staring at this empty white space, the one that invites me to pour it all out - the goopey, confusing stuff that sloshes around inside me.  

I've learned a lot about myself through this process, most of it hasn't been too beautiful.  I'm working on a book about this journey and I've had to dive deep into my past.  Some shameful truths have come to the surface and I want to run from them.  Lately, I've been spending a lot of time in my bed staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, and trying to shut out who I am.  It's not working, so I'm switching gears.

I'm really hopeful that if I can write through some of this, that I can get to the other side of the murkiness and once again feel the sun shining on my face.  Some people will think I'm using this platform to harm.  What I've learned about those people is that nothing I say makes any difference, they'll assume the worst about me, anyway.  Blogs are free, go get your own.  

I'm starting a "hard truths" series.  Hopefully, I can use this space to face myself.

Behind the Talk

I've gone back and forth about whether or not to delete some of the uglier comments that were left on my post about Lusco's Restaurant.  The simple truth is that talking about race is anything but simple.  It's complicated, messy, humiliating, dangerous, and sometimes it doesn't seem worth it.  But it is.  If we can keep our wits about us, we can move forward, one conversation at a time.

I'm no expert, but I sincerely think that one of the critical aspects of successfully talking about race is actually the stuff behind the talk.  This is one of the things I learned from my grandfather.  Booker was well regarded in both the black and white communities.  Blacks saw him as a successful business owner who ran a restaurant that celebrities frequented when they were in the Delta, he owned several rental houses, and had what appeared to be friendship with influential whites.  Dentists, doctors, and lawyers shared laughs with him.  On the white side of Greenwood he was the most dearly loved waiter in the town's most popular restaurant for the upper class.

He had it made, and he threw it all away in a moment to do what we all need to do when we talk about race.  He showed us his humanity.

He did not say mean things.  He did not make fun of anyone.  Instead, he shed his image of success, layer by layer removing his guise of strength and joviality, and told the nation that he lay awake in bed each night worrying about the future.  He told us that the way he was sometimes treated at work made him want to cry.

Our country is in a mess.  It seems almost impossible to talk about race without lowering ourselves to schoolyard communication techniques.  I think sometimes we forget that we're talking to actual people and we begin to feel as though we're talking to the issue itself, as if it has taken on the flesh of the one we're arguing with.

There are some basic truths that we may want to hold on to when we engage in these complicated conversations.  We all have the capacity to love, to hurt, and to ache.  We all love our children and would do whatever we think needs to be done to protect them.  (Yes, I know there are some crazies out there who do not love their children, but we're not talking about them).  We want to protect our homes from the unknown.  We want safety and a hope for a bright future.

Let's start there.  Let's start with what makes us the same, because what makes us different is often times found in the slight nuances of how we respond to these same intrinsic yearnings and desires.  At the core of who I am, beneath my shade of skin, underneath my life choices, there is a warm core that is probably similar to the core of a racist.

One of the most difficult things I've had to do in the last 18 months is sit down with people who knew my grandfather but failed to see his humanity.  I was tempted to do the same to them.  I wanted to humiliate them, cut them down, and expose their lack of understanding.  But that is not the response of the rational and it denies the beautiful gift that my grandfather gave to me and to all of us.

Instead of inciting more hate, I push forward, determined to find a common ground of shared human experiences with everyone, even those who might cringe if they saw my son in an alley with a hoodie atop his head.  I make a conscious choice to be a peacemaker, because it's what Booker Wright would do.

Masters and Man

Check out this video on Dateline.  It's a clip that didn't appear in Dateline's Finding Booker's Place broadcast.  In it, Raymond De Felitta talks about about the place where we stayed while making Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story and, what it was like to visit the South.

The Tallahatchie Flats, where we stayed during filming, is an interesting place.  It's a collection of reclaimed sharecropper shacks that sits on the Tallahatchie River, the same river where Emmitt Till's body was discarded after he'd been beaten and tortured all night long for making a sound in the direction of a white woman.

The Flats have been restored enough to make them livable.  They have working toilets, the spaces between the floorboards have been sealed, and each flat has at least one room with a window air conditioning unit.  It's strange to me that people think its quaint to live in sharecropper shacks.  It reminds me of people who tour Alcatraz and want to be temporarily locked up.

Raymond makes a point in this video that I really want the world to know: sharecropping continued well into the 1970s.  Many blacks continued to live at or below the poverty level while they worked their fingers to the bone in hot fields only to be told at the end of the year that they hadn't earned enough money to get paid. Many young black boys, my father included, were expected to miss school when the harvest came in.

I have to say though, the Flats truly are in God's country.  They overlook breathtakingly beautiful fields that stretch on and on.  Nights at the Flats are blanketed by an eerie silence.  I have to wonder how many slaves were whipped in those fields, and how many mothers had their young sons dragged from their arms because someone decided it was time for their sons to be sold.

Many times in the last five years I've thought about tracing my roots back as far as I can.  I envision myself uncovering the stories of my ancestors who lived as slaves. I went back two generations and found Booker Wright.  His presence in my family line has been an amazing gift, but it hasn't come without a cost.  His story pains me, and I wonder how I will bear the weight of all the other stories which will most likely grow more and more painful as I look back deeper and deeper in time.  Maybe I'll save this job for my sons.  Maybe I'll be brave enough to do it tomorrow, or next year, or in the next decade.