Episode 1 Life and Times Part 1

This episode is a personal journey through an early childhood that helped shape a life of tragedy and triumphs

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SPEAKER_01 0:26

This podcast is meant to be about the journeys from life-changing setbacks to restoration. This journey takes on many forms and encompasses many different stories and topics, including addiction, prison, abuse, loss, illness, and other setbacks. The primary message is not so much the setbacks, but the personal, mental, spiritual, societal, physical, and other forms of recovery needed to emerge from these challenges with renewed hope and as better versions of ourselves. We will explore personal journeys and celebrate those who have waded through their own personal struggles and have come out on the other side, having not only survived, but against all odds are better because of the journey. This is meant to be a message of hope with the overriding theme that it is not the falls that define us, but rather the getting up. Thus the title Miles Behind, Miles Ahead. I have chosen to use this first season to talk about my own personal journey. This is because I cannot ask others to make public their own personal experiences if I myself am not willing to do the same. The first three episodes are entitled Life and Times. I was born in a small town in North Carolina, right around the time that the civil rights movement was beginning to heat up. My parents were 16 years old. Because of the pregnancy, my mother was forced to quit school during her tenth grade year. My father continued high school and later became captain of the football team and student body president. He went on to a prestigious historically black college. Of course, during that time it had to be an historically black college because of segregation. I never got a complete accounting, but for some reason he quit college and came home to work in the furniture factory. He only worked there for a short while. In the meantime, my mother's older sister and other family members from her side of the family had already moved to Buffalo, New York to escape the South. I heard my father say that he was not going to be able to continue to work in that racist ass furniture factory. His exact words were, I would have had to kill one of them crackers. The fact that my mother's family had already paved the way provided my parents a pathway to the north. So, around 1962, my mother and father became part of what has been referred to as the Great Northern Migration. By then, I had two brothers and a sister. My parents took three of their four children and moved to Buffalo. I got to stay down south with my maternal grandparents. The first four years of my life were spent living with them in a loving and nurturing environment. Soon thereafter, somewhere between the ages of four and five, I found myself in Buffalo, New York, living with my parents. From what I can glean from the stories, my maternal grandparents, who were only two generations removed from slavery, made a living as sharecroppers. My mom informed me that she did not have to pick cotton with everyone else because she had an allergic reaction to it that included itching so badly that it led to scratching off a layer of skin. She used to smile when she told us that my grandparents would not force her to pick cotton because of that. At some point they moved to a small town in the Greensboro and Weston-Salem area of North Carolina to get out of the fields. I remember my grandfather having to be at work at 5 a.m. to fire the boiler at a furniture factory, while my grandmother worked at a dry cleaning business. That side of my family was loving and kind. They always made me feel loved, safe, and special. My grandmother was a gentle spirit. She did, however, tell us that if someone messed with us, we better fight like Beatrice Watkins. I don't know who that is or was, but she must have been an ass whipping somebody. My grandmother went to church every Sunday. When we visited for the summer, we had to go to Sunday school and church. She would give each of us a quarter to put in the collection plate every Sunday. Unfortunately for the church building fund or the Sunday school fund or whatever church fund, there was a store that we passed on the way to church. So the church only got 10 cents of that quarter. The other 15 cents went to cookies and candy. Do you know how much you could get for 15 cents back then? You can try the shameless if you want for spending God's money, but the church did get 10 cents on most Sundays, which is 40% of that quarter. Tithing only asks for 10%. Thank you very much. My father's side was a different story. His paternal side was a line of bootleggers who sold corn liquor. They were violent by any standard. The way it was framed in some of the stories and from my actual experiences, they would shoot or cut you, and I quote, before God got the news. My great-grandfather always kept a shotgun right next to him. He once shot his own daughter who was mentally ill for peeing in his sink. His sister, my great aunt, not only bootlegged liquor, she ran a card game. The story goes that one of her male patrons slapped her in a dispute during one of those card games, after which she went to his house, hid in a tree until he came home, and then shot him. My grandfather on that side of the family was sitting in his chair with a blanket on his lap. Underneath that blanket was a pistol. I have no doubt that he would use it if he thought he needed to. My mother told me that he once tied my father to a tree and beat him bloody, much like we see in the depictions from the days of American chattel slavery. My grandfather also broke my father's collarbone. As for my father, as a child, I have seen and been a victim of his violent behavior. I once saw him repeatedly cut a man with a straight razor. I couldn't have been more than ten years old. I have seen my mother stabbed in the head with a butcher's knife. I have seen her nose broken. I have seen her on multiple occasions with black eyes. She also suffered a miscarriage as a result of a beating my father gave her. As I was writing this, I realized that there is something that I never discussed with my therapist. When I was in school, second or third grade, our schools were so close that we walked home for lunch. One day, several of us were walking home from school for lunch when one of my friends was showing off and tried to jump on the ladder on the side of a slow-moving garbage truck to hitch a ride. It was winter and he slipped on some ice and his head fell right under the back tire of that garbage truck. He was killed. I saw that. I saw his body inhaling and exhaling in an exaggerated manner until he died. Back then, there was no school provided therapy or anything. In fact, I don't even know that my parents even considered therapy as an option in 1966. We just kept right on living. When I was seven years old, I chased one of the girls in my second grade class with a worm. She was pretty, I was seven, so I thought chasing her with a worm was a great way to win her heart. It was not. Later, her father came over and told my dad, at seven years old, I got my first beating with an extension cord. When I was eight years old, he kicked me in my stomach while he was beating me and knocked the wind out of me. Life was rough in that household. Whenever my father came home, we would all look at him and try to determine by his facial expression whether it was okay to relax or would we have to walk on eggshells. Most of the time, when he had that certain look, my mother or me was going to get beaten. During elementary school, if I made a B on my report card, that was a whipping. However, grades were not a problem. I attribute that to my mother and my grandparents, who had apparently done enough mental stimulation when I was a preschooler in North Carolina to connect some of those neural pathways. Also, I had great teachers whom I cherished. I loved going to school, so I was a straight A student through most of elementary school. However, when I was nine years old in the fourth grade, midway through the school year, one of those beloved teachers had to leave for some reason. I have no idea why. Her replacement was a lady from Alabama. That was in 1967. All of a sudden, this white lady from Alabama was going to be my teacher for the second half of my fourth grade year. I don't think a little black boy being the smartest student in the classroom and not having a subservient demeanor went over well with her. I went from being a straight A student and arguably one of the smartest fourth graders in the school to making C's on one of my report cards. I still remember the smirk on her face when she gave me that report card. I suspect it was racism. I also vividly remember that when I saw that report card, I was terrified. I knew the extension core was coming out. I panicked. Instead of going home, I ran away. I wandered aimlessly through the streets of Buffalo, New York for what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only about seven hours. I left school that day and went as far away from home as I could with no idea of where to go or what to do. There was no plan. I was just terrified of my father. The thought of getting whipped with that extension cord, which he called a drop cord, by him, trumped my fear of anything that could happen to me in the streets. So I wandered aimlessly in the cold through the streets of Buffalo. Late that night, a nice white lady saw me and asked if I was lost. I did not know what else to do, so I said yes. She took me up to her apartment, gave me a jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, then called the police. When I got home, and after the police had gone, my father asked me why I ran away from home. I told him that it was because I had gotten a bad report card. He nodded, then slapped or punched me unconscious. When I woke up, he took me upstairs, made me strip naked, took some cords, and tied me face down, spread Eagle on the bed, then took an extension cord and beat me and beat me and beat me until my back, legs, and ass were raw. The only way he stopped was that my mother went to a neighbor and begged him to come stop my father. After the beating, he spread newspaper on the floor, made me stand on it, and poured alcohol on me. Again, I was nine years old. I stayed out of school for two weeks. When I went back to school, he forbade me from participating in gym class or swimming at school because he did not want anyone to see the cuts inflicted by that extension cord. Later, when I was able to engage in those classes again, I still had visible physical scars that did not go away for years. Although never this bad again, this was one of many extension cord beatings I had to endure over the next few years. I think I was in my late 40s when my last physical scar from those extension cords faded. The emotional scars will never fade. In a later episode, we will explore this type of childhood abuse as it relates to my personal journey and its immediate and long-term effects. Here's a short excerpt from that episode. This is part of a conversation with my therapist of nearly 10 years, Elise Pei, whom I affectionately call the little white lady.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Now we're not we're not living as young people over that lifespan to survive. I mean to live to meet our needs. We're now living to survive. So what do I need to make sense of to ensure that my impact is lessened? And when we do that on repeat and repeat and repeat, now we have those long-term effects of I live in survival mode. I live in my limbic system all the time.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

I want to talk a little bit about school in Buffalo and what that was like. I went to an elementary school where some of the kids had just gotten off the ships from Europe. I remember specifically Italian and Polish kids. There were also Puerto Ricans and black children, as well as white children whose families had been in Buffalo for generations. Even my teachers had Polish and Italian names. Even though we had some diversity, the classrooms throughout my schooling in Buffalo were predominantly white. All of my teachers were white. I went to school in Buffalo from kindergarten through ninth grade. During all those years, I never saw a black teacher. I did, however, have some wonderful teachers, except of course for that one fourth grade teacher. I remember every one of their names all the way through the eighth grade. I always felt that my teachers were true to their mission of helping every child reach their full potential. I did so well, in fact, that I was chosen to attend what was then referred to as an experimental special progress school, where they sent the smartest rising fifth graders from each elementary school in Buffalo to an accelerated learning class. We lived on the west side of Buffalo, right on Lake Erie. The special progress school I was transferred to was on the east side. So now, instead of walking a block and a half to school, I had to take the city bus. At 10 years old, my friend JD, who lived in the same neighborhood but was chosen from another elementary school, and I walked to the bus stop through the fall, winter, and spring Buffalo weather and rode the same bus to go to school that adults rode to get to work every day. Those were sometimes very cold and windy mornings and afternoons getting to and from school every day. From the fourth through seventh grades, we took advanced classes, including French, learning to play instruments, learning about Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, spending time at museums and often going to see special performances by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and learning about the different orchestral sections. For some reason, Rimsky's chorus golf's Flight of the Bumblebee stands out in my mind. I remember the orchestra conductor asking us to close our eyes and picture a bumblebee in flight as the violins played. We were the only black kids in our class. That first special progress school only went as high as the sixth grade. So in the seventh grade, we were assigned to another special progress school and this time had to take two buses to get to school. So for years I had to use public transportation to get to school. After the seventh grade, JD and I decided to try to convince our parents that we wanted to go back to our neighborhood schools. Believe it or not, it worked. One of the things that convinced our parents to let us bus all over the city of Buffalo was that we would have each other and not have to take that trip alone every day. So we came up with a plan. We each told our parents that the others' parents were taking them out of school. Of course, they did not want us out there catching the bus by ourselves every day. So in my eighth grade year, John went back to school three and I back to good old school one. Again, great teachers. When we had our eighth grade graduation, I won numerous academic awards. However, I did not have the highest overall average in our eighth grade class. I was third. Of course, my mother and father were at the assembly. I did not know that my father was proud of me until after the assembly he surprised me and gave me some money. I, to this day, believe that he was proud that his friends got to see how smart I was, as my name got called out repeatedly. I could be wrong, but he never gave me any money for all those other good report cards when nobody was looking. Going to my eighth grade year, my parents sent me and my two brothers to North Carolina to spend the summer with my maternal grandparents. By then, my baby sister was born. She was the only one of the five of us who was born in Buffalo. The girl stayed in Buffalo that summer. My two brothers and I flew on Eastern Airlines to North Carolina. They provided a service where people were assigned to get children to their destinations. So during the flight from Buffalo to setting down in Greensboro, including a layover in Philadelphia, we had someone associated with the airline looking out for our safety. I distinctly remember getting off the plane and getting hit by the humidity. North Carolina had a different kind of hot than Buffalo. When we got to my grandparents' house, we were met by my first cousins who also lived in Buffalo and were spending the summer. They had gotten there before us. The neighborhood that my grandparents lived in was the first time in my life that I remember being in a neighborhood where there were no white people. The only time I saw white people was when the insurance man came by, when we went up town, or the man who drove the smoke truck came through. The smoke truck was the truck that shot out chemicals in the form of smoke to kill insects. Our dumbasses used to run behind the truck to get in the smoke. There was no EPA then. Who knows what the hell was in that smoke? That year I got to meet a lot of my relatives on both sides of the family. It was a wonderful summer. On my grandparents' street were families with some of the prettiest girls in town. And I mean pretty. All of them were on the same street. They were all very nice and friendly. It was also the summer that I lost my virginity to a girl that was a little older than me. I did not know she liked me. Apparently she did. She informed me that we were going to do it. If it was just her and no one was around, I probably would have said no. Hell, I was scared to death. I had no experience in that area, and I had no idea of what to do. She apparently did. But because she had informed my cousins that we were going to do the deed, I could not back down and still be that cool cousin from Buffalo, New York. Her friend, who lived next door to my grandparents, had the house to herself because all of the adults were gone to work, including my grandparents. So she took me in there and initiated me. After that summer, we went back to living in that abusive household. After the eighth grade, I went to a high school where you had to be accepted to attend. It was a technical high school. It was also All boys. You had to apply and get accepted. There was no essay or any other criteria. It was all based on grades. JD and I were not the only kids from our neighborhood to get in. It was a technical high school. You could choose from having a concentration in various technical fields. JD chose chemistry, I chose electricity. He ended up being a college professor at around 22 years old. He was studious. I was not. That first year I had algebra first period. I skipped school quite a bit and was able to maintain good enough grades. However, I stopped turning in my algebra homework. I don't know why, I just stopped. So I had to forge my report cards to keep from getting beaten to death. My father thought I was doing just fine in school. I gave myself straight A's with an occasional B. After the school year was over, and between my ninth and tenth grade years at school, my mother left my father. I came home on the last day of school and she had packed everything she could, including my siblings, and was sneaking away from my father. She was going home to North Carolina to try to save her children. In retrospect, probably her own life as well, who knows? I had gotten a summer job, so she asked me to stay and work that job while her and my siblings came to North Carolina so that I could buy my school clothes. When my father came home from work, I was the only one there. Someone once asked me if I ever blamed my mother for staying with him through all of that. My answer to that is a resounding no. I remember her protecting me from getting a whipping on more than one occasion by telling my father a lie about what I had done. Or once, when my father was drinking, she knew he was going to beat someone. We could literally look at him and know whether to walk on eggshells when he walked into the house. She made me go to bed and took the beating herself instead. I am pretty sure my mother suffered from Badger Wife syndrome. Anyway, that summer my father treated me better than he had treated me my whole life. I think he wanted me to stay with him. There was no way in hell that was going to happen. But I wasn't complaining about not getting beaten half to death. Besides, he did not know that I had flunked algebra. Now I was going to North Carolina and he would never find out. I spent that summer with little to no supervision. The issue was that my father worked out of town on construction sites and would be gone for a week or two at a time. I was 13 years old and had minimal supervision. Fortunately, my mother's sister and her children, who were the same first cousins, lived very close by. My aunt and her four sons literally and figuratively became my safe place. However, Auntie worked second shift. That meant that after leaving my summer job each day, we had no supervision until Auntie came home from work at around midnight. What did we do? We and our friends in the neighborhood had a ball. Oh yeah, we did normal things like navigating how to talk to girls, playing basketball, playing a game called relievio, and going swimming. However, we were unsupervised, so we also shot dice, played cards for money, and drank alcohol. We did a lot of that at my aunt's house. She would cook our dinner every day before going to work. As soon as she was good and gone, the mischief began. Our crew was between the ages of 13 and 15. One of our friends had hair on his face and looked 18. He was the one we enlisted to go get our liquor. Back then, the store owner just used his own judgment. If you looked 18, you got the stuff. We would buy slow gin and mix it with that tang mix, which was like Kool-Aid, except it only came in orange and it was in a jar. Yes, sir, slow gin and tang was our party drink. We thought we were the creators of the greatest mixed drink known to man. At about 9 30, 10 o'clock, we cleaned the hell out of that house and removed all evidence of any shenanigans. When Attie got home, we were all in bed like good boys should have been. That was also the time that there were several gangs in Buffalo. There were the Matadors, the Butler 49ers, the Mad Dogs, the Manhattan Lovers, the Pythons, and the Fruit Belt Gang. The Superiors and the Fantastic Souls were the gangs in my neighborhood. They would draft you when you turned 13 years old. However, as I said earlier, my father was pretty damn violent. He and some of his friends informed the gangs that my cousins and I were off limits. So we never even got approached. Speaking of alcohol, about a week before the summer was over, my father was out of town working. So some of my friends and I invited some girls over to my house. We wanted to try to entertain, but we did not have any money. Well, my father had some corn liquor that he had gotten from North Carolina. I had the bright idea that we would drink half the liquor out of the jug, then fill it back with water. It was clear and the water was clear, so I figured I could get away with it. What I did not account for was the smell. When my father came home for the weekend, he walked in the door and immediately got this puzzled look on his face. He took a couple of sniffs as if he smelled something, then immediately went to his corn liquor. He looked at it, it was full, then he shook it up. He looked at me and asked who the hell had been drinking his corn liquor. That was the last whipping my father ever gave me. It was a comparatively light one. I think he wanted me to stay with him. Let me reiterate, shit. When he asked me if I wanted to stay with him or go to North Carolina, the answer was easy for me. But because of the fear he had instilled in me, I was hesitant to tell him that I wanted to go stay with my mama and my siblings. But I did tell him that next week my Uncle Willie drove me to North Carolina. I was recently reminded of how fortunate I was to live on the side of town that I did. We were right on Lake Erie. In the summer we could walk on the break wall right out into the middle of the lake and fish. We had two parks close by. One had a toboggan slide, so we could ride our sleighs down at a pretty good rate of speed in the winter. We had the Peace Bridge Exhibition Center five minutes away, where there were numerous events, including professional wrestling. We got paid to help set up the ring, and we got to meet the wrestlers. Ernie the Big Cat Lad, the Iron Cheek, and Bobo Brazil, amongst others. We were ten minutes from Canada. Niagara Falls was just 30 minutes away. We walked to the Central YMCA on Saturdays. On the way, we would sometimes walk into the Buffalo Bill's office and chat with OJ Simpson. We were members of the Junior Civil Air Patrol, which was like junior ROTC for the Air Force. Our school had a swimming pool where we were all required to take swimming. So we all learned how to swim. Breaststroke, backstroke, side stroke, freestyle, which was called a crawl stroke, and treading water. In the summertime, the public pool was only a 15-minute walk. There was this bakery that was right next to the school. If you had a dime, they would sell you the freshest hot donuts right before school. We even had these clothesline bins where we played hockey in the winter. At night we would pour water and in the morning we had a hockey rink. We had community. We developed lifelong friendships. As I am in my late 60s, many of my childhood friends from Buffalo have passed away. They do, however, live on in my memory. Thanks for your time. I hope you will check in again for episode two of Miles Behind, Miles Ahead. Take care.