mild ruminations

Now, I am fairly certain that is nothing that a body should get riled about, it is merely an observation I am making.

Man Unit and I procured assistance from a moving company roughly three years ago to pack up our belongings and load them into a rental truck for our move South.  We lived in an very urban/inner city neighborhood in Michigan.  The two men who came to pack us up were black.  We used the same company to unload us in our new home that is just barely outside of Tha Beeg Citeh.  Again, two black men were sent to assist.

I decided to use the same company to pack up my mother’s house earlier this week to make things easier for the charity that was coming to pick up said belongings the following day.   I have most likely mentioned before that the house in which I mostly grew up is located in the middle of a predominantly white, middle class suburb.  The two men sent to assist were white, as were the men who came from the charity.  Additionally, the two men from the junk service I hired to finish the clean out were also white.

Why is it that more often than not, these folks looked surprised to find either of us at the door?

*ruminates on this*

I’m not ‘hood.

I was having a conversation with another classical musician friend of mine a few days ago and was telling him the story of how in August I had finally succumbed to the fact that I wasn’t going to find a job any time soon and hauled my ass to the closest department of labor office.  I live in an area that practically straddles the line between my city and the large metro city, so while I actually live in a  different county, the closest department of labor office is in the southern part of Tha Beeg Citeh.  So while I was running another errand in that part of town, I decided to stop in and finally handle my business.

Now, the southern part of TBC is infamously known as “the ghetto”, since you know, that’s where all the gangbangers, thugs and welfare moms live.  *eyeroll*  But I refused to be intimidated…until I got there.  The office is located in the bottom part of one of those square U-shaped strip malls and once I found it, I had to park almost at the street end as it was that crowded.  I took note as I was driving around looking for a spot of the merchants in the shopping center…they all had steel bars over any part of their windows facing out.  *dry swallow*  I kept going.  I parked and began the trek through the parking lot.  I could see other brown people waiting in cars-I assumed they were there waiting for whomever was at the DOL office.  Music was thumping from the cars in the heat, windows down, doors hanging open.  Women and babies hanging out, waiting.  As I got closer, I saw that the line inside the office was at least 6 or 7 rows deep, winding around every available open space in the office and out the door and down the sidewalk. I couldn’t do it and bolted and ran. A couple of weeks later, I made the trek to the office that’s actually in my county and had a fairly speedy and painless interaction.

So my friend (who is also a brown person) says to me: “what is it about us (meaning brown people like him and me) that we’re just as scared-if not more-than white people when we find ourselves in the ghetto?”  I said “it’s because we don’t live there and we know good and damned well that it’s not about skin color when you go there, it’s about where you’re from.  And we’re not from there.  We’re not scared of black people, we’re scared because once they realize that we’re not ‘from around the way’, we’re in even more trouble than a white person would be.”  I thankfully learned this lesson fairly early on (although I really would have preferred to learn it differently and earlier to have been spared the awkwardness.  Also, I know this story is a retread, but it’s pertinent, so bear with me.).  When I was in about the 6th or 7th grade, my mother thought it would be a great idea for me to invite some black girls I had told her I was friends with over for a sleepover (it might have been my birthday, I can’t recall).  So I did.  *sighs*  Like me, the two of them were outgoing and talkative girls,  and mom picked us all up from school that day instead of us riding the bus with their overnight bags.  The closer we got to my house, a four bedroom ranch in a predominantly white neighborhood, the larger their eyes got and the quieter they became.  By the time they got indoors, the most they could manage was “yes/no ma’am/sir” to my parents and they flatly refused to say little else to me.  I vaguely remember one of my parent’s dropping them off…in one of the projects that were well known for violence and gang banging.  Upon my return to school the following Monday, I found that I was suddenly persona non grata with them and shortly after that, my winter coat that my dad had gotten me for half price plus his employee discount as a part-time employee at Sears mysteriously disappeared from my locked locker.  In other words, I was obviously so rich that I could easily afford a replacement.

They had never seen anything like my parents’ house up close and in real life; only on television.  My family wasn’t rich by any economic standards; we actually fell somewhere around the lower to middle middle class range.  My dad worked full time as a warehouse manager/driver for a local electronics supply company in addition to the PT gig with Sears; my mother drove a van picking up/dropping off senior citizens who volunteered with the United Way.  The down payment for the house came courtesy of the U.S. Army when my father retired.  But to a couple of girls who grew up in the projects…I know what it looked like to them and I couldn’t blame them.  I hid the fact that my coat had gone missing as long as I could, slipping out of the house in the mornings to get to the bus stop down the street without them seeing me right before I got out the door.  I already knew at 12 years old what kind of grief I’d catch if I sounded the alarm at school.  I almost got away with it, except my dad left for work late one morning and saw me at the bus stop in my old ill-fitting coat.  I said that I was afraid to tell them it was gone because I’d probably left my locker open so it was my fault and I didn’t get another jacket that season.

I am now in the process of cleaning out that house and donating everything I can to charity. I will close on its sale for half of its value this week.  I don’t know what happened to those girls-they went to a different high school because of district lines-but I guess they’d still say that I was rich.

Going where the old songs take me

This entry courtesy iTunes surfing.

It’s old school night in the house.  I am apparently now old enough for the music I devoured during my formative years to be deemed “old school”.

Vinyl.  When a 12 inch remix was merely an extra minute or two added on.  Shalamar’s 12-inch of “A Night to Remember” clocks in at 5:02 of delightful joy.  Jody Watley, Howard Hewett and that other guy whose name we never knew.  It’s one of the many tunes that takes me back to Soul Night at the local roller rink.  Yeah, I did the skate roll bounce with a vengeance.  I used to go on Saturday afternoons with kids from children’s choir practice.  That’s when they’d turn on the lights and do the Hokey Pokey and the Limbo.  I don’t know how I discovered the heat of Wednesday nights…wait a minute.  Yes, I do.  I graduated to the youth choir and…well, you can imagine the rest.  Some of my most interesting outfits were born during that time.  In retrospect, I was way more ambitious with my fashion and hairstyle choices then I realized.  I’m not saying it was good (remember the asymmetrical ‘dos made popular by Salt-n-Pepa?), I’m just saying I was ambitious.

Oh.  Oh.  Terence Trent D’Arby’s first album.  “Let’s Go Forward”, first.  1987.  I was dating the boy who would eventually propose, then crash and burn.  I was alllll about it.   D’Arby’s voice had this stunning combination of throbbing, vibrating need.  As a fervent hormonal teen, that’s all I heard.  That’s all I felt. “Sign Your Name”.  So sweet, so nearly silent.  Shh.  Just listen.  It’s what I felt.

1986 saw the Loose Ends album Zagora.  The only song that causes twinges is “I Can’t Wait”.  by the time I turned on to this one, it’d been out for a few years.  So the longing of a long-distance relationship (different universities) blossomed around this song.  A quiet storm mix tape staple.

My tape and vinyl collection at the time reminds me of how much I stood apart after deciding to attend a small private nearly all pale people school in the middle of freaking nowhere coal mining Virginia.   I had a better-than marginal console system with big floor speakers that my dad had gotten for me half off from Sears where he worked part-time (employee discount, too!) that traveled with me.  When I was alone, I’d crank it.  I think it was Guy and Heavy D and The Boyz that got me into trouble the first time.  “Groove Me”.  “My Fantasy”.  “Teddy’s Jam” (1 & 2).   “D-O-G Me Out”.  “You Ain’t Heard Nuttin’ Yet”.  “More Bounce”.   Those coal mining kids had NO idea what to make of me, whatsoever.  Read an article today in the NYT about how interracial roommates can reduce the prejudice in one another.  While I identify very strongly with the ideas the article puts forth, I must say that I wasn’t very helpful in those early semesters/years.  I had no idea how bereft I’d feel.  It wasn’t that the other students were white, no.  It was the fact that a very large percentage of them had never even laid eyes on a real live black person in their entire lives.  To them, I was either a Cosby kid or a welfare mother because they didn’t see anything else on TV.

In order to promote class unity or some snot like that, each class year was required to take the same class together at the same time.  Four days a week we’d be in little groups taught by all of the faculty no matter what their specialty, one day we’d meet up as a class for special lectures.  Freshman year was basically western civ and by the time we worked our way up to the civil rights movement in the second semester, I was feeling pretty comfortable with things for the most part.  Until the professor, who also happened to be head of the music department began pointing himself at me.  I guess he felt more comfortable doing so since he knew me well-he assumed-out of class (tiny, tiny, tiny music department.  I was one of maybe a handful of voice students).  But the “Terioso, what do you think about /insert black folk related topic du jour here/?”  all of a sudden, I was the Voice of All Black People.  I was teen controlled by my baser urges, that was pretty much it.  So one morning after getting too little rest, I finally, sleepily snapped.  He or someone else in the class made the mistake of phrasing the question in the worst way.  “How do black/your people fell about…?”  “I don’t know”, I answered. “I can only tell you how I feel about it and right now, I don’t feel like it.”  At that point, I didn’t care about lifting it up for my race and eradicating stereotypes.  I just wanted to stop feeling like a butterfly pinned to a cork board.

I transferred after a group of drunkards thought it would be a good idea to “string that nigger bitch up” towards the end of my third semester there.  That’s a story of which I do not particulary feel like illustrating the details tonight.

elevator shenanigans

I have observed an odd thing over the past few months.  I work in a high-rise, 60 floors total.  So there’s a lot of elevator riding entailed to reach my floor.  On at least two occasions, possibly three, there have been instances when a group of people are in the car and the group is racially mixed.  On the occasions when the folks who aren’t black exit, conversation begins between the black folk.  For example, I’m standing there, minding my own as peeps are wont to do in elevators, and once the pink people are gone, someone says “good morning” from the corner.  I’m the only person in the car, so I look up, kind of startled.

What causes this to happen, does one think?

The holidays are upon us

So the holiday season is upon us and with it, ruminations of seasons past.

When I was performing a great deal while still in college, I spent a lot of time on the party circuit during the holidays. It’s interesting being a performer at high falutin’ house parties. You’re not quite a guest, but you’re not quite the help either. One experience that stands out in my mind was an event an the insanely large home of the dean of the school of humanities. It was my first real contact with folks who were professional servants and it unnerved me greatly. You don’t want to believe that there would still be such a wide gulf between the classes in modern times and modern cities and I was in for quite a rude shock. I was all gussied up in my formal wear and was taking a break between sets in the solarium when I ran into an older black man in a classic butler’s tux. One that would not distinguish him as anything other than “the help”. He was very sweet to me, at first assuming that I was a guest and being all solicitous, then when he realized that I was the entertainment, his manner changed a little. His posture relaxed a little, his speech became more colloquial and conspiratorial as we talked about the folks attending the party. It was in the middle of this that an elderly white woman dripping with what were probably heirloom jewels swept in on a cloud of very expensive perfume and interrupted without apology-as if there was no one else in the room besides me and I obviously wasn’t doing anything-mock begging me to sing again. “What will it take to get you to sing something from Cats??” she pleaded, her hand bird-like on my arm, barely touching. I looked at her, then looked at my new acquaintance who had immediately snapped back into service mode, winked imperceptibly at him and said, “If you, yourself, bring me a drink and keep them coming and I’ll sing whatever you want.”

She blinked, then looked toward my new friend who had assumed the “I am here but not listening, lo, I am invisible” look on his face and was fading away to gather empty glasses. I smiled glowingly. She laughed nervously at first, then agreed and we swept back into the main room to the piano. Where she somehow miraculously produced my fresh cocktail. The rest of the evening as long as she was still able, I’d catch her eye from across the room and wave my empty glass and off she’d go…as long as I kept the tunes coming. I think she found it fun.

“Memory” never tasted so sweet, especially when I’d see the butler’s shoulders twitching with mirth.
midnight…not a sound from the pavement…

Thoughts inspired by “Stomp The Yard”

Stomp The Yard was in the Netflix queue and finally showed up last week. I enjoyed it immensely. Of course, it took me back in some ways.

I had the opportunity to attend an HBCU, but the option was introduced to me far too early for me to make a rational decision. My father’s first military station as a married man was in Anniston, Alabama. There, they were introduced to James “Pappy” Dunn, an early local mover and shaker when it came to civil rights. They stayed in touch over the years, and one summer we all trundled down to visit after my father had retired from the military. I couldn’t have been any more than 13 or 14 at the time. Pappy was proud to show us his city, which had become an entity much different than my parents had experienced in the very early 60’s. I remember that when he and his wife would take us out to dinner, Pappy was given the star turn, he had to force money on the servers and cashiers because they would almost always simply refuse his attempts to pay. Both white and black folk would wave him off saying, “Now, Pappy, you know better. Your money’s no good here, you’ve done too much for us already. And the manager will have my head on a platter if he finds out I made you pay!” So he’d just tip exorbitantly and stuff collection jars that were put out to raise money for whatever the latest need was, be it band uniforms, muscular dystrophy or what have you.

Anniston on the whole did not impress my teenage self. All I saw was miles and miles of red clay hills that simply cried out to me with the blood of the beaten. I didn’t know it until decades later that I actually am sensitive to the auras of past hurts, but that’s a story for another time. All I knew was that the place was just…loud and painful to me. But then Pappy took us down the road to Talledega College. Summer session was in full swing and I remember the place being alive with color and life. He and probably the president or someone else high up on the academic food chain gave us the tour and did their best to encourage me to do the family proud by attending TC when I was ready. In all honesty, I probably easily would have attained a full ride just from the connections alone. They even introduced me to the music professor who put me through my vocal paces on the spot and pronounced me worthy.

But I wasn’t interested. In a way, my parents had killed any desire I might have had to go to an HBCU because they tried to do right by their children in the way we were brought up. First on military bases, then buying a house in a lily-white neighborhood. I had never had the experience of existing solely among black people. Never. And it certainly didn’t occur to me at that age that it might be a good thing to do so. It scared the bejeesus out of me, truth be told. I couldn’t relate. Nothing made sense and I was afraid that I’d be rejected out of hand once they knew that I wasn’t…well…really black. Not black like them, anyway. Of course it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be the only one, but when you’re that age and had been through it alone as I had, you never thought there was anyone else like you. In their own way, my folks had tried to encourage me to take part, as it were.

For my 13th birthday, my mother encouraged me to invite friends over for a sleepover party. Two girls from church and two from school came over. In retrospect, I know now that it was a disaster in the making. None of the four had ever been to my parents’ house before and while it wasn’t such a shock for the church girls, it was definitely a mind and eye-boggling experience for my acquaintances from school. We lived in a middle-middle class neighborhood of mostly ranch homes built in the late sixties-early seventies with all the ensuing trappings. Both my parents worked; my dad, two jobs. We weren’t wealthy by any means, but we were comfortable. On the other hand, my two schoolmates were from the projects. Literally. Which didn’t make any difference to me then, in part because I didn’t really understand what that meant. Their whole demeanor changed upon sight of the house. The sassy, mouthy laughing girls I knew turned solemn and polite, refusing just about everything they were offered. Word spread immediately upon their return to school that I was “stuck-up” and “rich and spoiled”. Shortly thereafter, my new winter coat that my dad had bought for me on sale and with his employee discount at Sears was stolen from my secured locker. I hid that fact from my parents for weeks before they noticed because I just didn’t want anymore trouble. Once my mother mused, “Why don’t you have those nice girls over again?” I just stared at her for a moment then muttered something non-committal and changed the subject.

Ironically, I ended up on the complete opposite end of the spectrum when I went to college. I spent three semesters in the hills of Virginia before I couldn’t take being the only female freshman and then sophomore of color anymore and transferred back to the city.

It still took some time for me to figure out who I actually was. Some days I still don’t know.

20 Questions (sort of)

I’ve been away from the U.S. South long enough to have forgotten the kinds of questions that brown folk will ask other brown folk that they would never dream of asking any other ethnicity. I was reminded of this fraternal ease last week at work when during a business transaction was asked the following questions:

Q: How you get your hair so curly?

A: …Ummm, it’s natural.

Q: Oh, oh! Alright! What you got in your family? You mixed?

A: I’m not entirely sure…possibly Native American.

Q: One last thing: you definitely from the West Coast, right? ‘Cause you don’t talk like you from here.

A: Nope. South Carolina.

-bamboozled stare-

A: Army brat.

-ah ha! look-

As before, I still don’t quite know how to feel about these kinds of questions. I know that I’d never even think to ask anyone I didn’t already know stuff like this. Ever. What is it among “us” that seems to not only make it kosher, but even to invite it?

In other news, I had a lovely weekend with a bunch of my favorite pink people. And not once did a moment of ethnic/racial awkwardness arise. Even when I covered the table on Saturday with very traditional Southern cuisine. I think the best moment was when T. walked into the kitchen and exclaimed

WHEN is this going to be ready??? You’ve been in here lovin’ on this food for hours and I can’t wait much longer!

Which is exactly what I had been doing. Loving on it. The mess o’ fried chicken. The smashed potatoes with just-fried bacon, sour cream and cheese. The stop-your-heart macaroni and cheese made with with three kinds of cheese, eggs and heavy cream. The green beans with pork fat. I’ve never seen so little leftovers from such a feast. Made my heart glad.

On Being a Social Butterfly (or not)

[warning: disjointed ramble ahead]

A few days ago, I received an evite to an event at a local club whose name I did not recognize. I lurk as part of a related group that was invited by a group with similar interests.  Admission was free, and it looked like fun as it was themed as an “old skool R&B night” with tunes from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.  I was musing about who I could nab to take with me as I attempted to find out more about the club itself.  Then I came across it and it all fell together.

The group I lurk on is an ethnically diverse group of women.  The group sponsoring the event is almost exclusively made up of black women. The club itself is known for its patronage by brown folk, so that considerably narrowed my selection of folk that I could consider, mainly because I abhor participating in uncomfortable moments based on race that could be avoided.  I’ve had enough of those on my own, thanks.

So I called my one brown girl friend who lives in the same area that I do and asked her if she was down to do something entirely out of the ordinary for us.  Usually when we meet up, we find some delightful restaurant and spend hours enjoying the cuisine and each other’s company.  This would be a whole ‘nother pot o’ greens.  She’s down for it before I reveal what it is and then surmised lightheartedly:

It must be a black woman thing.  That’s why you called me.

That made me grin because what could I say?  She was 100% correct in her assessment.  Then she asked:

Are we black enough?

To which I replied:

Well the two of us should equal at least one black person, so that should get us in the door, you think?

She then went on to point out that her invitations to “black events” from another friend of hers who seems to be more traditionally ethnic, if you will, had all but ceased and we mused on that for a bit.  Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that her friend was unmarried and didn’t have kids, but who can tell these days when people can be so cryptic in an age of almost constant connectivity and instant communication?

The point is that I agonize over these kinds of events.  I have an ex that steadfastly believed (and told me quite often in a derisive fashion) that me and my friends were “snoots”.  Well, we were all performing artists; we had to run around in formal wear a lot and hobnob with donors and other moneyed folk and that can rub off on you after awhile.  So if that made us snoots, then so be it.  But sometimes I wonder just how much of a snoot I became and how much snoot did I retain?  There have been occasions where I’ve attended functions of all stripes that all I want to do is peel off my skin and exit, stage right.    And others where I feel I’m home and want to stay forever.  There’s really no telling what will make it so, I just know that I always hold my breath mentally when I walk into a new social situation and pray that it will be a good fit, because Miss Terioso likes to have a Good Time, no matter what the flavor.

It’s just that as I grow older, I want those times to have more color, somehow.