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Our poetry reading was supposed to start at 8pm. It was 7:45 and NOBODY had shown up. I sat with Kamau Daa’ood in the theater at LA’s venerable Beyond Baroque. 

Initially we were philosophical. 

Neither of us was promoting a book. We weren’t part of a group reading or a themed reading. It was just a night for two older heads, two poets with fine resumes, well-earned respect, and reputations as powerful readers. 

Yet nobody was showing up for our reading…. 

I’m normally, on GP, antsy before a reading, even though I have been publicly reading my poetry since the 1970s. And I know that most poetry readings always start, LOL, on Artist Time (typically at least 10 minutes — often up to 20 minutes — after announced start time.

But I was fraying. 

Pissed that folks weren’t showing up to give well-earned respect to Kamau, an indispensable Native Son of LA, who had in 1989 co-founded the World Stage with Billy Higgins. I mean, honestly, how could you not flock to hear Kamau read his poetry? With a stunning passion and soaring musicality, Kamau baptizes listeners in surging imagery shot-through with hope. 

Once while watching Kamau perform at Getty Center with his band, the Army of Healers, I just straight began to cry as he blended his voice into a mesmerizing collage with his locked-in fellow musicians: vocalist Dwight Trible; pianist Nate Morgan; bassist Trevor Ware; and percussionist Derf Reklaw!

That night at Beyond Baroque, as we watched the clock, I know I floated a few F-Bombs about how we were being disrespected, and that these Maryland Farmers be rolling out into the night for lesser poets, younger poets, better marketed poets, and other blah blah blah full of envy and poison. 

Kamau stayed calm (in fact I myself have NEVER seen Kamau as anything but calm, except when he’s telling sly jokes in his animated FM Baritone!). 

Then he seemed to slip into a mini trance. My rants quieted, and we segued into him musing on his days reading poetry with Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. 

The music was as far away from Easy Listening as you could get. The Arkestra was a community resource. The Arkestra was political. Sometimes the Arkestra played to small audiences. And sometimes Kamau wanted (and felt the Arkestra deserved!) larger audiences. Of course, he was younger then. And the call-and-response of an engaged audience can be intoxicating. 

But when small audiences gave way to an empty venue, Mr. Tapscott gave Kamau and Arkestra musicians a most memorable piece of advice, which stunned me and silenced my whining. 

Did Kamau and I even have a reading that night? 

Frankly, I can’t remember how many people showed up or if any showed up at all. 

I do know that I’ve never worried about audience size again. 

∞

This flashback still has me meditating on the mantra shared with Kamau by Mr. Tapscott, whom he called “Papa, The Lean Griot” in a poem that concludes with “i am Horace Tapscott / and i am not for sale.”

In the years since that evening, Mr. Tapscott’s mantra inspires in me a mindset that I’ve since found all at once humbling, inspiring, and instructive. 

It speaks to the quiet intimacies that infuse my creativity, vision, artistry, and service. It reminds how Me Myself and I — in the process of conception — are surrounded by an elemental and nurturing quiet.

Ironically, I LOVE writing while I play recorded music. Right now, in fact, I’m listening to the Arkestra’s pulsating Peyote Song No. III. 

Yet even within the eye of this, or whatever music plays, I’m truly only hearing the ebb and flow, the dynamic play, of elastic silences looping within my senses, expanding my faculties, electrifying my brain as I’m seized by a driving idea or lines of aha or what if!

In this pristine quilting, there’s no audience. So, technically, it really doesn’t matter if there’s no audience for the final piece of work. 

It was conceived in its own raging silence. Maybe it’s supposed to be ‘received’ by silence. 

If my ego can get out the way! Cause believe me it is absolutely intoxicating to be caught up in the call-and-response with the right audience! 

But the whole process, which revs up for each new creative thing or concept for community engagement, demands what Carlos Santana once called Love Devotion & Surrender, in a song, and in an entire recording with John McLaughlin. 

Sparked by that night at Beyond Baroque, I understand now that if I hope to craft art that I want, at the very least, to transcend my limitations, then I must relentlessly renew my willingness to lean into Love, Devotion, and Surrender.

Does that art then become any less powerful if I share it with an audience of one or 1,000 or 100,000? Does it become less powerful if it never finds / earns an audience at all? 

These days, especially while navigating the forced quarantine of the COVID pandemic, I often search for Sweet Honey in the Rock as I create and grapple with the work itself.

Going forward, should I get a chance to stand before another audience, I’ll always be emerging from the demanding rites of passage required to share something well-wrought, something meaningful, something beyond what an audience could possibly anticipate, no matter how many times they’ve heard me. 

I will always be able to give something real!

∞

So what did Mr. Tapscott say to Kamau back in the day? 

I mean Papa no doubt had been intoxicated by the call-and-response with an engaged audience. He was at one time a member of Lionel Hampton’s band, which could make an audience swoon and dance on such tunes as Flying Home. 

And as a composer in his own right, Mr. Tapscott no doubt found sensational overload as he danced with, and within, melody and arrangements. 

But he was not for sale, Kamau says, which means the Arkestra Griot risked comforts, finances, and accolades for service to his community, even if sometimes community members weren’t part of standing room only audiences at a given venue. 

So he knew another kind of value, another kind of Love, Devotion and Surrender, and he passed it on to Kamau, who passed it on to me one night, when I just knew Beyond Baroque’s theater would include an SRO crowd for our reading. 

Now, I pass it on to you. 

If ain’t nobody in the audience …

… Play to the universe …!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… I want to know how Black men, in their own words, define happiness, discuss happiness, describe happiness. For the sheer joy of it, and because I believe their testimony will unleash a wave of spiritual satisfaction that could be a healing ingredient for all our lives….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Listen Here – Countdown to History
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Harlem residents in front of shop listening to the radio, 1930s.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1930 – 1939. Link: http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/75ece515-a29e-388d-e040-e00a180601f1

“This was the work I truly loved. The meetings … with people who seemed to step out of the pages of black history. The singing, the eloquence, the determination and hope in their faces, the spirit. People who carried so much vulnerability in their eyes, who knew exactly what they were risking by being there, but being there anyway, steadfast.” Stokely Carmichael, from his memoir, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell. [Page 462]

∞

… In general, the goal of a Proof of Concept is to test whether or not an idea is viable. It does not focus on the marketability or production cost of a product or service, but it mainly tries to answer the question, “Is the idea achievable? …”

∞

From the beginning, in 1993, when I first asked myself, ‘What IS a happy Black man,’ and in 2010, when I started the Black Man of Happiness Project, I trusted that a dimensional exploration of Black male joy – in cultural work and community engagement programs – would contribute to an inspirational ecology and help generate healthy impacts and outcomes.

Although as a rule, I trust the ineffable as primary fuel for my work, I knew how important it would be to ‘prove’ the value of this life-affirming theme, given how the very concept of a happy Black man felt foreign, unexplored, and invisible in the larger public sphere.

In 2020, I discovered the 1965 photo of Stokely Carmichael sitting in communion with Mr. Jack Crawford of Lowndes County, Alabama. I knew I’d found the proof I needed to keep myself motivated, to keep myself crafting the language to describe my quest, and to keep repping my innervisions that happiness is an indispensable, yet underutilized, tool for personal and social development.

Photo by Douglas R. Gilbert © 1965

* Front Porch: Stokely Carmichael (l) with Jack Crawford during SNCC voter registration campaign in Lowndes County Alabama. Douglas R. Gilbert, photographer, LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [Reproduction number e.g., LC-L9-60-8812] Helen Cate, Research Librarian; Funded in part by The Pollination Project; #SeedTheChange; design by @Julie Ray Creative

Also when I read that quote in Mr. Carmichael’s memoir, I was uplifted into a knowing that my respect for each brother’s individuality was the right celebratory ‘grass roots’ orientation for this quest. 

And this month, I’m showcasing that individuality in a new, limited edition, ‘PROOF OF CONCEPT’ publication called See You: EMANATING A SENSE OF JOY. The publication is INTRODUCED by the Carmichael-Crawford photo, taken in 1965 by Douglas R. Gilbert for LOOK magazine. The publication is anchored by a gallery of historical photos of Black men and boys that I curated from a pool of more than 100 photos excavated by lead Research Librarian Helen Cate, who coined the brilliant tagline ‘emanating a sense of joy’ for the See You: Faces of the Black Man of Happiness Campaign. Ms. Cate unearthed photos from collections at the Library of Congress, U.S. Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and universities, among other sources.

The publication fulfills terms of my ‘Impact Grant’ from The Pollination Project, and also features exhilarating photos taken by ‘Living Masters,’ including cultural pioneers Chester Higgins and Roy Lewis. Other photographers – African American, Asian American, Chicano, and European American – contributed photos capturing Black male joy. These men and women live blocks away from me in LA and as far from me as London. They are seasoned and emerging. Their photos capture individuals and groups,  fathers with their children, dudes smiling, and dudes in meditation. They capture tender moments, exhilarating moments, and the publication concludes with a special section of photos of my own father.

∞

I’ve grounded the ‘PROOF OF CONCEPT’ publication on historical photos, even though pain has branded the primary contours of African American history. I plunge into that paradox guided by the ecstatic insight that these historic Legacy photos – Faces of the Black Man of Happiness – are prisms that splice the view of Black life beyond pain, suffering, and reaction to racism.

To illustrate the power of joy and happiness in human rights work, it was critical to start the publication with Douglas R. Gilbert’s dynamic 1965 photo. That photo was circulated on social media after former President Clinton glibly dissed Carmichael at John Lewis’ funeral. Original research for the ‘PROOF OF CONCEPT’ publication confirmed that the photo was held in the Library of Congress and identified Mr. Crawford. Our ‘genealogy’ research of Mr. Gilbert’s stunning photo reflects the rigorous passion behind the See You campaign and the glorious photos in the publication, including three Legacy photos taken in the 19^th Century.

The ultimate See You campaign strategy is to publish a ‘fine art’ book of Legacy, contemporary, and crowd-sourced photos, complemented by my poetry and essays, along with writing by other scholars and creative writers. BTW the See You campaign’s title was inspired by the refrain in my poem, “Praise Song for the Anonymous Brothers,” first published in the 1996 anthology, Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, edited by Rohan Preston and David Wideman.

∞

One final joyful FYI: the publication was printed by Black Classic Press (BCP), founded in 1978 by W. Paul Coates, perhaps best known these days as the father of Ta-Nehisi Coates. BCP’s publication list is foundational for so much restorative reading in Africana studies. I’ve known Paul Coates since my formative days in Baltimore, where my kids were born, and where their first school was founded by our late Sistren Kay Stancil.

This new collaboration with BCP and Paul Coates culminates years of courtesy, encouragement, and creative evolution. In 1993, BCP published my first book of poetry, Hand Me My Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby, narrative poems ‘told’ by my irascible alter ego, Junior Baby. Griot Clothes earned PEN Oakland’s Josephine Miles Award.

How sweet the circle! A press founded on the importance of Black Classics has printed a contemporary publication anchored by Legacy photos! Oh yes! What goes around comes around!

∞

NOTE: The 2021 Proof of Concept publication is NOT for sale, b/c we’re using it to definitively demonstrate how ‘achievable’ it is to publish a fine art book featuring photos of Black men and boys ‘Emanating a Sense of Joy.’ But you can help us achieve that goal! I’ll tell you how, if you contact me at seeyou977705@gmail.com.

And as always, you can make a tax deductible donation to support our work at: https://pentacle.formstack.com/forms/unique_donation_form [select Peter J. Harris from the dropdown menu beneath ‘Which Unique Artist Are You Supporting?’]

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… Black men are human beings. From Thomas Jefferson’s time till now, we do seem to forget that self-evident truth in our grandest ruminations…. I’m just a human being, as deserving of the unique, sometimes inscrutable, fruits of my own pursuit, as I am to the profound legacy of the historical forefathers….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

I once played basketball with skill, fearlessness and confidence. Stared down all comers. From my point guard position, while dribbling up court on offense, I shouted to teammates: basket or a foul!

Score or get fouled so we could get the ball right back to try and score again.

I smiled in emotional flashback when I walked into the empty gym at Loma Alta Park in Altadena. I picked up a ball resting against the bleachers and slow-dribbled over to the basket, where I read the sign, ‘No Hanging on the Rim.’

I wish! I could never even touch the rim — even when I played basketball with skill, fearlessness and improvisation.

But in the silence of that gym I shot a few mid-range jumpers. Practiced dribbling with my left hand. Flashed back to leading one marvelous 3-on-one fast break. Dribbling full-speed with my left, I went behind my back and in one fluid motion threw a perfect bounce pass with my right to my teammate running the lane. Two of the sweetest points off one of my sweetest passes! Oh but I LOVED to play the game!

My flashback was a 10-minute prayer.

∞

Which brings me to 2021. No clichéd resolutions. Just standing with the present as my Homeboy.

I’m opting in to a renewed commitment that happiness, creativity, and imagination are indispensable tools of personal and social development.

I’m opting in to a renewed embrace of candor, integrity, and curiosity.

I’m opting in to a renewed search for pleasure, love, and companionship.

I’m opting in to a renewed dedication to play with skill, play with enthusiasm, play with stamina.

I’m opting in to honing my tools as a Change Artist.

∞

Change Artist?

A human being in possession of distinctive resonance. Resolved to rigorous citizenship.  A Griot synched up with principles allowing for segue into conversations and collaborations with human beings of all kinds.

I ain’t being a man this year…. my chromosomes are unnecessary … my, like, you know, mumbling understood … everywhere cycles unfold smooth as shifting yoga postures*

As when I played ball with skill, fearlessness and full participation, drove to the hoop, got hacked, and scored anyway.

And one!

∞

*10 Minute Prayer

uppity in God’s chest
a place where nobody stands in line for love
everywhere
I can be on the fabulous end of a sister’s eloquence
reward is stamina to celebrate
& our choice of theme music
exhaled from guitars
cooking with friction of our flirtation

floating in God’s chest
a place solid as a 10-minute prayer
soothing as knowledge of water beneath land
everywhere
calming me at the news my daughter enjoyed her first sex
our reward is stamina to celebrate
& our choice of daring
laughed from chants filling days & nights without suspicion
I ain’t being a man right now
an embryo in God’s chest
my chromosomes are unnecessary

in a place where I am not a prisoner
my son is my mother
my daughter is my father
each moment a universe
wisdom burns on candles of sound

ember in bassinette
invisible shrine for an urban pilgrim
my, like, you know, mumbling understood
everywhere
cycles unfold smooth as shifting yoga postures

ember is stamina in my chest

a place where no child stands in line for love
& fabulous recipes of survival
are rewards at the receiving end of please   thank you   sho you right

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “…  I’ve paid my dues. I’ve earned my expertise. I’ve found my stride. I have chosen to walk a quieter road, and speak with the confidence of a man whose arc does not include brushes with criminality, nor paralyzing self-doubt, but instead rests on a foundation that includes life-long parenting of successful adult children, educating hundreds of young people, from elementary school students to Ph.Ds., and distilling from personal and cultural challenges happiness that is a living echo of the African American tradition of grace under pressure. I have chosen to examine happiness from within African American culture, relying on expertise and wisdom earned from embracing the ebb and flow of living as an urban Black male unshielded by academics or scientists, Shamans or salesmen. I have chosen to cast my counter spell in a vital, personal voice of ecstatic insight that does not promise easy answers, formulas, prescriptions, lectures, pre-packaged advice, or promises whispered in the voice of a meditation teacher or a scolding librarian. Whatever my volume, you do not have to worry if you hear my voice coming up behind you. Turn around. Your joy is safe with me!  ….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful, Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you—“ —Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

Cresting as we end the year of emergency in public health and national leadership. I dip one final time into my conversation with big brother Thomas A. Gordon, psychologist, long-time mentor and friend. Since the late 1980s, Thomas has been an inspiring energy source in my life [often via incredibly timely financial, emotional, and conceptual support]. He’s seen me through adversity. He has always been a teacher who stretches me to what he calls the ‘limits of my curiosity.’ No matter how I describe him, I’m barely capturing the humanity that surges from his rigorous generosity.

The following edited excerpts are quilted from the transcript of our long conversation (recorded in spring of 2019). May Dr. Gordon help you ID and tap into the inspiring energy source(s) in your life.

∞

PJH: When I read books about the brain, what excites me [is that] … when you smile, the brain rewards that smile with positive neurochemistry. How do you tell a young brother, for example, in the middle of some shit, how to activate his internal systems? By staying aware of the choice they have to sort of heal thyself, even as you may have to deal with a particular set of dramas or traumas. How do you help a mug navigate that?

TAG: Your brain is the physical entity that’s going to be sponsoring a lot of these choices. What your enemy wants is for you to use very little of your brain…. Your enemy wants you to use it to make choices that are low-level. Very restricted. Not a high return on investment. Your enemy doesn’t want you powerful….

The brain anticipates. … So when you smile, or you say, in the midst of adversity: ‘I know there’s a blessing coming, or there’s a lesson coming, or there’s prosperity on the other side of this corner,’ your brain is starting to anticipate what you just thought of, and that’s what that smile starts to doing. Everything starts mobilizing. So you start paying it forward, before it actually manifests. Then your brain starts being on your side.

… As a child, your brain is so open …. We’re the only life form that enters so ignorant of particular things, but so brilliant in terms of absorbing particulars and making a pattern, which is the true meaning of intelligence. Intelligence is not what you know; it’s the ability to make a pattern. To see a pattern….

We are going to have a lot of inputs. Now all of these inputs are not going to be telling you:

‘You are unique.’

‘Nobody’s like you on the planet.’

‘You came here to give gifts that nobody [else] can do at a virtuoso level.’

‘And we are so thrilled for you to be here.’

‘We’re going to rally to your support and your empowerment.’

NO! You’re going to get mixed messages.

That’s why [a] mentor is so key. Because [we need] one of the village messengers [to say], ‘I see you,’ before you see yourself. You got to have some people in the village that start telling people: ‘Your happiness is not dependent on the circumstances that you’re in right now.’

…. See the default is to say: ‘Oh if everything isn’t great around me, then I’m not happy…’ You will be influenced by your circumstances, but your happiness is a continual choice that is grounded in a moral connection to something bigger than yourself. And it is a principle that if you believe it, your brain then picks it up and says, ‘That’s what we’ll sponsor today!’ And if you don’t obey this principle, you will sit in your circumstances, covertly become a victim of your circumstances, and you will find buddies to talk about your victimized circumstances, which isn’t going to take you somewhere different…

Don’t say what you can’t do. Smile. Say what you can do. Your brain knows you’re in a war, and if you decide, ‘I see the victory,’ your brain then conspires … CONSPIRES … to support you… And [when] we are persons who are connected to other persons, both visible and invisible, there are forces that we don’t see that will conspire to support you. 

∞

… You know a lot of us are so angry at our circumstances that we move into victim complaint or we just attack each other. Or do things that are self-destructive. But if we could think about … imagination, intelligence and intention — my holy trinity. Imagine creating the crucible. It’s hot in here. … It’s fiery but it’s a new kind of comfort b/c now we’re on purpose. We’ve deepened our connection.

I see us as global citizens, members of the planet. Outcomes emerge out of the dance of people, persons and collectives — people dancing with process — and that means circumstances. … It’s not static. It’s very dynamic. Very very deep challenges. Some will take your life if you’re not careful….

We can have great outcomes, but we can’t do it unless we reclaim and authorize our minds to pursue it, define it, choose it, go after it. It’s not going to be bought at a store. … You’re going to have to define it… Everything we see as an outcome is really a covert, hidden process; it’s coming out of people, sacrifices.

See … It turns out if you get a human being to actually believe that they can define a desired future, and you now get that human being to believe that they belong to something bigger than themselves, and they start being in commerce with each other …, that’s the power of us dancing together. We’ve now created a process that will drive the performance outcome that we’re looking for, which is happiness, and all of the symbolic and material manifestations of that and sustainability of that and transformation of it…. Suppose we get people in that process?

∞

Thomas tells me this story about his father. He’s 10 years old, walking to a “South Carolina country school, six grades in one room, potbelly stove, taught by teacher with only a 6^th grade education 3 months out of year.”

On “one rainy day,” he sees lynched Black men in their military uniforms hanging from a tree. His father, according to Thomas, remembers sobbing, being soaking wet, and crying, saying, ‘What is the point? How can we possibly get out of this system?’

Yet he keeps putting “one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other one, to go to that school. Now you fast-forward it, my dad’s telling me that story, because he’s saying, ‘You have to have a positive vision! Doesn’t matter what your circumstances are. So your brain and everything else conspires to give you opportunities that you cannot foresee.”

[His father and mother go on to become professors at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina.]

“My mom taught education and psychology, and my dad taught history, comparative religion and philosophy, critical thinking, French, and he’s this sharecropper kid who ends up speaking five languages. I said to my mother, ‘Why did you marry my dad?’ She said he was the only guy to hit me with this line: ‘There’s a great big world out there. We’re going to escape this system. We’re going to be part of that world.’ She said, ‘That’s what I wanted.’

So fast-forward the movie, I’m 9 years old, and – I didn’t know this till my dad was dying – he borrowed the money to take me and my brother around the world.

[The trip included community members drawn from across class lines, and the itinerary included visits to Europe, the Middle East, before culminating in Egypt.]

My dad’s vision: ‘Wherever we go, I’m going to teach them the history of what really was happening in all these places throughout history, and we’re going to end up in Africa. And we’re going to walk in these pyramids and you’re going to see that the paint … they used to draw the pictures is over 15,000 years old…. Imagine people understanding enough chemistry — so don’t you tell me, when you go to chemistry class in a segregated school with the textbooks 10 years behind, don’t come with an excuse that you can’t learn chemistry….’

Dad did that trip 12 times. So I didn’t get to make a lot of excuses!

He used to tell me:

‘Thomas sweet are the uses of adversity. If you can stay your mind on greatness.’   

∞

PJH: I see happiness as an enzyme, catalyst, a quest …

TAG: I don’t ever think you need to write a how-to book. I think you really got it. People can learn the how-to’s once they get reignited, reinvigorated, reconnected to their being alive, and the opportunity of being a full human being — now that’s when, to me, they’ll figure out the 1,000 particulars of HOW!

We need people to come alive and to me that’s what you’re bringing and what I’m bringing, which is: You don’t let your enemy declare you’re spiritually dead. That enemy is not authorized to do that.

The Deep Wisdom is … when you think of yourself as connected to something, you say:

‘I am a point of light.’

‘I am a force.’

‘I will warm this room up!’

‘I’m not going to be complicit with your fear.’

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… My meditations say make this quest more profound by finding everything more joyful: the anticipation, the uncertainties, the awkwardness, the frustrations, the failures, the wonder in the telephone’s ring, the ping announcing an email…. I’m trying to capture the exhilaration I’m stalking, the ecstasy feeding the percussion of this season…. What is a happy Black man but an implosion of rearranged molecules? H2O on it… Harris to the second power. Two times like James Brown shouted at his band! A huge circle of oxygen, refreshing smell of water…dynamic doing of the do, so I decrease the time between peaks and increase the time between valleys ….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

I see it … this is how I described it in the stage directions for my play The Black Man of Happiness:

Inspiration House…

…high ceilings open floor plan, gorgeous wood floors;
…huge video screens integrated into design are time-shifting portals;
…powerful abstract African American art on the walls;
…garden through large windows;
…dining room area contains a scrumptious buffet with drinks;
…piano sits in a corner, steel pan and guitar set up near piano;
…thumb piano sits on shelves;
…kora sits on floor;
…birimbau sits on stand.

∞

I feel it … this is how I described in a poem called House:

Inspiration Crib…
welcome to my house built with talk
foundation squat on our grandparents’ chaingang demands
floors creak with closeted lovers’ North Star resolve
walls   rooms   doors   roof  align with my mother’s bedtime prayers
live a barefoot holiday with me
only celebration will measure time
each second an occasion to wilt he said/she said
with riveting telepathy of 2 humans face-to-face
gossiping with kiss from mouths
steady evolving beyond the need for speech

∞

Thinking through my best memories of family gatherings over the years, AND meditating on the ugliest architecture of American history, it comes down to this for me:

Be happy your ownself, you know! Be the antidote to the historical poison of slavery (from self-hate and self-destruction to society’s willful dehumanization and disappearing of chosen scapegoats). Explore life and history from refreshing angles. Often, I choose to live through the lens of happiness of the men whose joy has never been a national priority. Choose your angle and contribute to the tipping point of a national conversation. Given our American journey, happy Black human beings, on their ‘pursuit of happiness,’ can be both last laugh of American history and a basic ingredient for enriching American society.

∞

Thinking through my best moments of human cooperation over the years, AND meditating on the ugliest architecture of American history, a happy mindset is most opposed by a system of:

Following orders: groupthink enforced by government, religion or other constricting social structure infused with myth, buttressed by myths. Stratifying expertise only within a military configuration, top down, chain of command. Granting value to any soldier, any guard, any uniform…

What is leadership? What is power? When you wear a uniform, are your mirror neurons scorched by ideology, seasoning and training into atrophy? Those aren’t magic wands being pointed at unarmed men, women and children! What gives one accent power and consigns another to banishment? What’s in a last name? Peltier? Stone? Abu Jamal? Gallagher? Who defines the criminal? Is English a magic spell? Spanish a curse? They’re both imperial languages that rode in on the horses of cavalrymen! Following orders sanctified by royalty and money. Following odious orders sanctified by cosplaying priests waving their hands and sanctifying lines drawn on an insufficient map! What if you superimposed images from France, Germany, Poland over images of East LA, San Diego, Phoenix? ID Papers. Passes. Documents. Illegal. Aliens. Migration. Immigration. A species on foot. As cargo. As contraband. As ….

And who wants us to be unhappy? Who wants us sad? Who wants us scared? Who wants us doubting our worth? Questioning our righteousness as a member of society, as a member of the species?

∞

Creativity is my indispensable energy. Imagination is my key catalyst. Inspiration keeps me supple. Rigor keeps my thinking from calcifying into one-note mindsets, attitudes, relationships, habits, and hierarchies. Hard work is foundation for keeping my eyes on the prize in the face of personal and social obstacles, mistakes, and setbacks. I consider myself the vital and visionary first-among-equals in any collaboration.

Grounded and rejuvenated, I am always stitching what’s awesome into the quilt of ‘practical’ approaches necessary to ensure healthy futures. My happiness rests on ethical self-expression, relentless search for the elemental, and making myself ecstatically available for new patterns.

Within the first minute of each new day, I pledge to grow and court improvisation. I love folk, but I embrace healthy solitude, pandemic or not. I’m down for silence (Moms would say, ‘If you can’t say something nice…!’), but I am absolutely down for going ‘on record’ with bracing candor.

With my mind on renewal, I’ll be cultivating and blending a no-nonsense, razor-sharp sense of humor, deep concentration, active listening skills, an adventurous mastery of old school (writing, each one-teach one techniques) with new school (hand-held digital devices and social media) — and straight courage to eternally call out BS.

∞

enter my house made for talk
describe our place here-and-now
bury us in the moment of our witness
pin the corsage of my promises in your hair
curl inside motion with me & end your voyage
sift our fears until all we smell is ginger behind closed eyes
sink in the quicksand softening my palms
rise with skin radiant from the grit
lining our elation from nothing to everything

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… But the sight of two skinny brothers, in spontaneous duet with one another, armed with friendship and genuine peace between them, makes us the perfect prism for this call for Black men to play their chord of joyfulness as an equal and opposite response and counter-spell to the American Blues Song about Black pain …. Happy Black men … swapping stories and making memories and resuscitating histories. I’m anticipating The Black Man of Happiness …. Refreshing folks who seek inspiration to maintain their own personal equilibrium. He will help oxygenate their collaborations with individuals and organizations seeking to stop violence between and among Black men, to heal from the reverberations of violence directed at them, and to defuse corrosive stressfulness in the lives of too many Black men …?” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Once, Fred Scott and I lived as neighbors in houses that sat side by side on Fifth Street in Southeast, D.C. Ma and Daddy moved us to their first house in 1971 after years of living in an apartment in Parklands.

Like my father, Fred’s Pops (of course we called him Mister Scott) worked hard, laughed hard, and lived with that unsung dedication which always makes me think of advice that Daddy always gave me: do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do!

So in May 2020, Fred Scott, now a grown man, started a post on Facebook like this:

“I thought I would share this story this morning with my FB family and friends which caused me to break down and cry this morning.”

Read the rest and you’ll see he meant tears of joy, and you’ll see why I’m so deeply moved.

“My mom gave me my fathers wallet years ago and I never thought about going through it because there was nothing in it [–] so I thought[;] he had this picture of me tucked away. if you really know me[,] you know how private I am. I’m going to show this to my daughter who never had the chance to meet her beloved and wonderful grandfather who was the best father and caring man that you will ever meet. I know his spirit is always with me and all his kids. I will see you again and I miss you so much R.I.P. DADDY I LOVE YOU.“

Like a shocking reveal to an inspiring story, ‘… this picture of me tucked away …’ was a school photo of Fred as an elementary school student!

Everyday, Mr. Scott carried his little boy’s photo. Everyday, Mr. Scott reminded himself why he worked so hard. Erryday until he died!

∞

After international viewings of video showing Mr. Floyd suffocated, U.S. Representative from Boston Ayanna Pressley wrote on Twitter on May 26, 2020:

“Just for a moment, I am going to drown out the images of profiled, surveilled, policed, lynched, choked, brutalized & murdered black boys & men w/images of their joy. It won’t erase the ache, agony & fear, but joy is an act of resistance too. Add your #blackboyjoy #blackmanjoy.”

On May 27, @wodouble22 wrote Representative Pressley: “YOU literally have the power to introduce legislation to protect Black people and hold police accountable but you’re talking about posting some damn pictures. No wonder they can kill us with impunity….SMDH.”

Igniting a thread…debating value of the images…in a classic case of either/or thinking:

Two examples:

@DuaneAMoody wrote: “You can’t symbolically do away with the ugliness of this country by countering that ugliness with pictures and not POLICY!! Lord, you new folks are proving useless as well. I just don’t know what to do after we vote in supposed progressives who STILL draw on symbolism.”

@_AVBAD wrote: “Drown it out by drafting a bill or proposing some legislation that protects us! This is our political class, black people. Notice how useless they are, posting feel good content, during our slow genocide. #MinneapolisPoliceMurderdHim #MinneapolisPD”

∞

The thread of photos on May 27 was LOOOOONG!

The photos featured all generations, all complexions. There were photos from all over the U.S., and from Africa. Photos featured dudes wearing suits and swim trunks. Obvious activists and cats in more quiet settings. Grandparents posted. Fathers, Mothers, Aunties, Uncles posted. Brothers, Sisters, and Cousins posted. Photos showed men and boys playing ball, playing trumpets; with their daughters, with their sons, with their Homeboys, with their frat brothers.

The call for these images was appropriate. Y’all know I’ve been SHOUTING this call for years, most recently in my Faces of the Black Man of Happiness social media campaign See You … Emanating a Sense of Joy on Instagram @seeyou247.

That so many folks were inspired to post photos reflects vitality that too typically goes unheralded. Vitality that at its best actually keeps us inspired to organize, fight in legislative arenas, take to the street. Pressley obviously tapped an emotional vein to have inspired posts by such an invigorating cross-section of folks.

It’s a measure of how wounded we are that even a call to pause ‘just for a moment’ from being society’s bulls eye seems too long for some folks, as if genuine joy doesn’t deserve to be celebrated, as if Black men should be only mourned, only fought for, only used as a cause, only be the poster child of a slogan.

In this case, attacking a legislator such as Pressley, though well within the job description for a public official, seems sigh-inducing. From the beginning of her career in Congress, she’s consistently raised her voice for a humane vision in bills she’s (co)sponsored, including one that would end the principle of qualified immunity, in which police officers and other public officials are shielded from lawsuits in the course of doing their jobs.

Already Pressley has endured (and more than held her own) a national game of the dozens with Trump Devoid of Funk, who derisively and dismissively said that Representatives Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar made up “the Squad” whose members, all U.S. citizens, were asked in a tweet: “…why don’t they go back…’ to their ‘countries.’”

When racist-dehumanizing mythology is the foundation of social attack, then you better bet that the use of ‘some damn pictures’ (not to mention film and other media) MUST be a part of the quilt of conceptions and strategies and actions of resistance and renewal and restoration. 

“The endeavor to affirm the dignity of human life cannot be waged without pictures, without representational justice….” wrote Sarah Lewis in ‘Vision & Justice: Guest Editor’s Note’ for the special issue of Aperture magazine. “American citizenship has long been a project of vision and justice.”

Critically, In the face of lethal relentlessness, these photos belong to a long righteous tradition of creative disturbance on behalf of our humanity.

The photos do NOT represent powerless ‘symbolic’ celebrations in the face of overpowering enemies. They are NOT trying to convince our enemies of our humanity.

Just scan the eloquence of the captions — even at the pace of a Twitter feed. The posted photos prove that we, the people are the sacred audience for these breathtaking images!

In most viewers, smiling at these photos, laughing at these photos, smiling and laughing WITH these joyful human beings, absolutely ignites a gratifying implosion. Absolutely ignites that cascade of brain chemistry and visceral response, which restore or revive our inspiration and motivation to ACT with ethical determination and discernment as citizens. That expansive cascade represents “an inner, life-changing shift,” in Lewis’s words.

(And we damn sure know the visceral rush of that negative chemical cascade triggered by the viral videos of the murders of Mr. Floyd and too many others!)

How effing ahistorical is it to rant that these photos are not part of ‘The Struggle.’ As if we don’t have the right to grieve and mourn along with our right to rage and resist.

These photos are a reflection of what already exists.

Happiness as Geology. As Nature. As Human Hunger.

Happiness as Refreshing Protection. As Motivating Counterspell.

Happiness marked by individuality and distinction.

These photos are now part of the public record, and reflect what Lewis calls the “gravity of this connection between vision and justice.”

These photos illustrate our relentless, and parallel, Oral History of Happiness.

Like Fred Scott’s picture, these photos tell no lie!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “…  I understand and embrace the wonderful African American humanity with which we forged joy out of insanity. But it’s time to forge joy from joy, ignite happiness from happiness, to spiral inward to get to an indivisible irradiation, whose fragrance is exhaled as part of each breath we take. Want to be happy. Will be happy. Become ornery about happiness. What happiness can I cultivate when I don’t have to look over my shoulder? What endorphins will I release – in my body and into the body politic – by singing of myself, singing to myself…being myself…again…? What ecstasy? For ourselves and for others we love …?” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop