Life Pieces to Masterpieces

From the front of the meeting room at the Anacostia Museum of African American Culture, Mary Brown explained the shoes this way: When a male is shot, the killer strips the victim’s feet and tosses his shoes around the electricity wires hanging overhead. Those who walk through the neighborhood understand the symbolism. A friend, brother, son, uncle, or no one of any consequence to anyone at all, has died. The shoes are a constant reminder of the death. There are some wires that resemble to closets of a family of boys, shoes of all shapes and sizes dangling and decaying.

Within a few moments of her short talk, two lines of boys step solemnly into the room of expectant supporters. They are the highlight of the evening, the reason we have gathered. They held bold colored canvases with halved shoes mounted prominently in the center. Approximately twenty-five in number, they chanted solemnly “a mile in my shoes” and begged the obvious question: Could you, old man, young woman, mother, uncle, neighbor, stranger… walk in my shoes? Through my neighborhood? Could you be me?

The boys, some whom are actually young men, are members of the DC-based arts organization Life Pieces to Masterpieces that provides structured classes and apprenticeships in the visual arts. They, with their families and teachers, gathered last Thursday evening to show appreciation for the many people who supported their organization over its ten-plus year history.

The boys are from the blocks of DC who have seen too much of the usual, as they convey in the poetry they read while presenting their art: violence, poverty, and institutional neglect. Yet, in the spirit of Gordon Parks, their life inspires beautiful art.

As I’m listening and looking, I think of how we often hear about young DC dudes. Do I need to articulate the venues? They—and my use of the personal pronoun emphasizes my point—are the subjects of discussion rather than the guides of the conversation. What’s life like when the public dictates the parameters of your life’s meaning? Obviously everyone endures stereotypes—politicians, nerds, gangstas—but as the guys asked, would you trade your struggle for theirs?

In the silence we’ve created, what are we missing? What are the truths behind the reductive, pejorative assumptions: Poet E. Ethelbert Miller reminds us in "In the Shadows There Are Men":

“We were never absent
or invisible
we were always here

Our lives interrupted
By what others
Wanted to see

Sometimes what
We want is the
Taste of the kiss
And the touch of
A hand

Even our women
Stare at us
Disgusted with how
We live

Never knowing
How we struggle
To love”

Gordon Parks in Spring

Gordon Parks died this week at the highly regarded age of 93. Ninety-three, or any number a few steps beyond ninety seems like a good, rich age at which to call it a day, and I don’t feel sadness for his passing. Lives of such richness should not be mourned.

His death gives me the occasion to reflect on the importance our first official meeting. I didn’t know him through Life magazine. I was not yet born, and then too young to read words during his tenure as Life’s first black photographer. Thinking back into those hazy days of scattered childhood memories, I think I can pull an image of his book, The Learning Tree sitting on my grandma’s coffee table. Any book Grandma was reading, or thought interesting, registered as boring to my young mind. At some point I learned he was a photographer—maybe came across his name in a textbook, or a text on African American culture—and was interested in seeing his work.

Some ten years later we “met” at the venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art through the retrospective “Half Past Autumn.” It was an intentional, but reluctant meeting, akin to attending a party hosted by someone you don’t like with the singular possibility of falling in love with someone who will be in attendance. Fond of almost all of DC’s museums, the stodgy, snobby Corcoran was an exception. Founder William Wilson Corcoran and I differed on the definition of “fine art.” His “fine” exemplified my “boring.”

Yet interests intersected with the elegantly powerful Gordon Parks, whose brown, wrinkled skin I found familiar and his eyes penetrating.

The title was intriguing—“Half Past Autumn.” What did it mean? Besides being an author, what was he about? Upon seeing the work, I instantly knew. The black and white photos of Washington, DC, of Brazil, of Chicago, made the gritty beautiful. He later said in an interview that he came to love all of his subjects so that they weren’t objects on the other end of his lens, but people cared for and wanted to represent with dignity. I looked around DC and its broken glass, leave-less trees and lonely eyes in a different frame. Of mind.

I’ve always loved cities, always loved the broad boulevard that is Pennsylvania Avenue, the secret life of Half Street, the effortless Connecticut Avenue. Gordon Parks showed me how to see them. Harlem, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore. The poverty, restlessness, angst, loyalty, pride... All of those realities were respected in a world that valued privilege and gloss.

I saw Parks also photographed famous Americans of black culture: Mohammed Ali, Langston Hughes, Loraine Hansberry. I vaguely remember seeing the other photos of famous black Americans, people I’d seen before, but this time the photos were taken by a black photographer of note. That meant something to me. Not that Mr. Hughes looked any different, more debonair, simply more…

At the time, not many of my friends were so familiar with Parks. Sophomores in college, we were just taking “Intro to African American Studies”, and Parks was later in the semester. I didn’t have the excited “Yo! Have you heard” conversation like we did about Lauryn Hill’s new album, “Miseducation” or the LL Cool J/Canibus battle. Privately, I tucked Gordon Parks and my moments with his work as pivotal.

Parks speaks with Phil Ponce of PBS about his life and work.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/gordon_1-6.html

Wil Haygood’s warm tribute to Gordon Parks
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802486.html?sub=AR


Curatorial statement on Parks’s work from exhibit, "Half Past Autumn"
http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m673.htm

The Eulogy of "Get Used to It"

All eulogies to Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, and others who reside in their heaven cautioned let not their legacies die with their physical passing. A recent conversation with a friend gives me the slightest reason to wonder if such a misfortune has actually come to pass.

I lamented to her how unfortunate the situation was, and she responded, “You… might as well get used to it. I hear gunshots all the time. [Wait] ‘til the weather heats up. [Brothas] get crazy!!”

Her quick, snappy dismissal led me to wonder for a brief moment in time if I was not a dewy-eyed idealist visiting from Pleasantville.

“You…might as well get used to it.”

Stunned by her matter-of-fact acceptance, and lack of empathy for my distress I responded, “To get used to gun shots is to accept that shootings are an acceptable element of life. Since I wasn’t raised in Sarajevo or South Central, I’ll never get used to it.” The response is distant, not slightly condescending.

The statement is the truth. I won’t ever get used to hearing gunshots, and not simply because it wasn’t a part of the cacophony of my childhood life. Children who are growing among violence more extreme, more often, and more penetrating than a shooting at a gas station, know that’s not the way life should be. They should not feel fear as frequently as the take breath. They may become less sensitive than I am because of the occurrence, but the essential knowing that it’s wrong, and that there is an alternative remains.

FLY, Facilitating Leadership in Youth, exemplifies this belief. Many of the children in this youth-development organization in Barry Farms supports their academic and leadership potential been immersed in as much violence as wealthy children in Cleveland Park are saturated with privilege and opportunity. Yet, they are leaders in their school’s, neighborhoods and city-wide resistance campaigns. “Getting used to it” is not an option.

Acceptance is not even a possible frame of mind given black American’s history of resistance, America’s history of resistance, women’s resistance…Get used to involuntary servitude? To second class citizenship? To public humiliation, to substandard education? Accept unequal wages and inhumane work conditions?

Perhaps my response, not slightly condescending, was appropriately dismissive.

It may still have been inappropriately defeatist.

Before there was a powerful voter registration movement in the Civil Rights South, there were slammed doors and “You’re wasting your time.” And still, workers persisted, returned to the back door, the side door, work, or church, until gradually grew a force.

Before there was Malcolm X, there was bitter Malcolm Little, deaf to any voice but those that echoed powerlessness and self-defeat. His evolution to an empowered, articulate, and world-respected leader, partially initiated by conversations and teachings of a fellow Muslim inmate, is legendary.

It’s very tempting, though, as I enjoy the comfort of a middle-class life, to accept her opinion as her own, assume she’ll pick another battle to fight, and move on to highlights from Chappelle’s “Block Party.” The world will continue either way.

But it’s not responsible, and with privilege there is responsibility to contribute to progress. We’re often reminded, through gunshots out the window, church fires in the South, debilitating achievement gaps in school, we’re not there yet.

Without my friend’s support, commitment, and resounding voice, there is one less person actively resisting. Without a critical mass, resistance is indeed futile.

Crucial to a resistance campaign, as Parks’s (Rosa and Gordon), Scott’s, and Friedan’s have taught me, is not just fighting the conditions of imprisonment, but the apathy that those conditions inspire in powerful people.

When Our Brothers Start Shooting

Gunshots sound at 9:50 pm at Pennsylvania and Branch Avenue gas station. Shots that I know aren’t cars backfiring, or ice tumbling out of the automated ice-maker. I am relieved that I was not at the gas station filling up my tank, or Cameron running out for cigarettes. Even as more well to do families move into the neighborhood and elevate the quality of life with trimmed hedges, polite family barbeques, and neighborhood watch, people who are quick to the hip still interrupt the Oscars with Poppoppopop-Pop! Pop! Flashing lights illuminate the station even brighter than the red, white, and blue Exxon signs.

Now I’ve been thinking about a line I heard in a play, Kymone Freeman’s “Prison Poetry” that premiered at the Lincoln Theatre last weekend. Allow a little background before I jump into the point of this reference. Freeman situates three black men in a prison cell for one night, and challenges them to explore their deeply held beliefs about incarceration, personal and community responsibility, and racial identity. The men engaged in this argument are: emergine Tobias Washington, III; exonerated Death Row inmate and former political activist Shujaa; and Poet, of no particular employment affiliation.

If an audiences’ oral and physical response to scene and dialogue is any indication of a play’s quality, then Prison Poetry is a fine wine. Shouts of “Tell it!” “That’s what I’m talking about!” underscored nearly every exchange between Tobias and Shujaa, who wastes no time jibing at Tobias’s name (in reference to Alex Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kente who was whipped into submitting to “Toby”) and continued at nearly every aspect of his identity. In a fashion befitting a third-generation lawyer, Tobias returns the jabs. Though each man swings with equal intensity, Shujaa comes off as righteous, experienced, “real”, and Tobias as sheltered, ignorant, and bourgie. The crowd clearly believed Shujaa spoke the truth.

Poet, educated like Tobias but “from the street” like Shujaa, mediates the arguments as much as possible with poetic soliloquies, or physical interventions. Ultimately, he argues, black unity will resolve black American’s problems. Not until black people support each other politically, socially, and economically will the most detrimental ills be resolved.

Aaaah…identity politics. “I am black therefore I believe in big government, elimination of the prison system, a social welfare system, and an authentic black experience.”

Leon Harris has just announced breaking news on News 7. A Secret Service officer was shot in an attempted carjacking at the Exxon station on Pennsylvania and Branch Avenues. The ambulances and officers have cleared the scene, and suspects are in pursuit. I need to go out, but I’m reluctant to leave. Momentarily, my sense of safety has been shattered and I don’t want to open the front door to that reality just yet.

Would Shujaa scoff at the fact that I’m a little shaken up? Is it a testament to my bourgie, privileged background? Should I be ashamed that hearing gunshots disturbs me?

Chocolate City privileges black people with the possibility of lifestyles from lower to upper class, lifestyles that directly affect our political sensibilities. Yet, these differences can impede a general “unified” movement. This shooting tonight illustrates this point. I’m sure residents of some parts of Southeast would brush off the shooting as background noise, my reaction as naïve, and theirs “real.” Just as Shujaa registered Tobia’s poor knowledge of drug policy laws as evidence of being less black, less aware than he was. Their dialogue made it clear Shujaa, with his experience in grassroots activism, in being imprisoned, in defending his dignity, was the authority on the black experience as Tobias needed to be schooled.

How do we create a unified political block when one black experience is valued over another? Fortunately, black Americans have advanced from an economic and political monolith. Unfortunately, we spite those who have worked their way into privilege. Unity…what will it take to achieve it? Around what issues should black people be unified? Who has the right, the authority to say?