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Photo by Adenike A. Harris

“Alright, this is it!” the woman shouts into the pulsing silence as Donny Hathaway resolves his rubato prelude on electric piano.

Before Donny plays the next note, folks begin clapping in time to a song that hasn’t technically even begun yet.

Donny is then, like, ushered into his song The Ghetto by clapping SO. ON. BEAT. that the ecstatic audience morphs from paying customers into a magic carpet of rhythm for Donny’s velvet voice and exhilarating piano solo.

I can just think of this musical moment on Donny Hathaway Live, and I emanate a sense of joy! In fact, on a recent walk, while listening to this recorded moment, I smiled so fiercely that a dude walking toward me blossomed as he smiled when we got close enough to make eye contact and exchange a head-bobbing nod.

Such moments remind me to keep radiating on my journey, because at some point in every day I can shout, or feel, ‘alright, this is it!” as a prompt to work harder to resolve personal drama, as a prompt to work with more savvy to help constructively shape society’s atonality.

Alright, this is it! Remember to … be a better family member!

Alright, this is it! Remember to … do my part for social justice and ethical living!

Alright, this is it! Remember to … LIVE SO. ON. BEAT. that I provide a magic carpet of rhythm for some kind of new world symphony!

∞

Awight, awight! I’m busted again, savoring another one of my imprinting cultural classics. And I truly DO wish my life was as synchronized as the perfect set list, the perfectly meshed medley of my favorite songs.

What is life but a quest for synergies? Sacrosanct moments strung together into a rosary made from our own liberating memories?

But go ahead choose what awes you into consciousness.

What keeps me awed?

That I persistently choose to live with the sensitivity and poise of an anonymous woman whose voice was recorded in the early 1970s, a witness listening so intently to Donny Hathaway’s music that she could hear the on-coming locomotion of the Love Train.

She shouted all aboard — so seamlessly in time, within the silence between notes — that she became a timeless catalyst.

∞

Where were you when you just KNEW that history was being made? When you just KNEW that unconditional love was unveiling itself in your presence?

In whose presence were you when a needed revelation knocked you to your knees?

Who made you cry with testimony sounding like a hymn to your mother?

When did you feel healing write a song for you?

What makes you shout, ‘alright, this is it?’

And you know the answer to another of Donny’s elemental questions: Where is the love?

And you raised a glass in synch and celebration with Madam Shirley Horn’s gentle toast: Here’s to Life?

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’: “…I’m on, like, a Drive About to the Giant Sequoia National Monument in Kern County, about 200 miles north of LA…. Was in between jobs. Bank account was on life support. My nerves were frayed. Worry was my lover. I needed nature. Read in the AAA mag about Sequoia Monument’s majestic ability to rejuvenate. No cell phone service. A drive into peace of mind…. Now I was on the final stretch toward the park. Mountain road. Mountain vistas. No other vehicles. CD playing Shirley Horn’s “A Time for Love.” I’m driving up this hill as the song begins to resolve in an amazing Johnny Mandel arrangement. Strings shimmer in crescendo, joined by Shirley Horn’s piano and Wynton Marsalis’ trumpet, just as I reach the crest of the hill. Oh my God! The view expands and the horizon is filled with rolling, cloud-covered hills. The music fades. I burst out laughing. I burst out crying. Turn off the player and continue my drive in grateful silence. Circumstances back home hadn’t changed. But I have. I’m a witness to a commanding serenity. I’m uplifted by a commanding serenity. I’m humbled by a commanding serenity. Go head on, brother, it promised. Maybe not triumph, just yet. But go head on and see what the end’s going to be….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“…Our blood lines and soulforce are the same and we have a common fate – what happens to one happens to all….” – Herb Boyd and Robert L. Allen, Introduction to Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America – An Anthology

Answering my adult son’s call meant flying into two Florida hurricanes, both elemental, one emotional, the other swirling wind and rain.

My first-born was confronting and handling a critical family challenge. He needed his Pops to join him within the eye of his storm. Hurricane Dorian was the unexpected backdrop of my visit. A perfect storm was demanding that he cultivate the calm of Smokey Robinson, and that I demonstrate the dedication of an R&B Classic.

Oh yes, I’ve loved this boy through all seasons.

From home birth, when I was 22 years old, my beard scraggly, my fro huge and fragrant, on through my divorce from his Moms, with all its transcontinental reverb, since I moved from east to west coast in an effort to make a new life with a new love.

Now my son has teenaged daughters, and I’ve entered the early years of my elderhood. I remain a Poet in love with all the man he is, has been, and stands poised to become. He’s a Navy vet. A tech executive with a major health organization. A gun enthusiast, who proudly shows me 20 safety certificates on the wall of his home office.

He’s a grown man with a restless intellect, curious imagination, and wounded spirit. And he called me to be with him for a concentrated month-long stay in his home.

∞

Fathering for all seasons is never ‘comfortable.’ But braving and choosing the discomfort of healing is the ultimate in grown-folks’ work! Ain’t no wreaking happiness if a Black man of happiness is scared to dive into the elemental work of being daddy to a grieving child.

One morning, about a week into my visit, homeboy asked me to spot for him as he lifted weights. I said yeah but I didn’t know how to actually spot a weight lifter. He had me straddle his lower torso and face him, just in case I had to grab the bar in an emergency. He lifted the barbells off the rack. Just hearing him grunt triggered my rescue instinct. I grabbed one end of the barbell, threw him off balance, and the weights on one side of the bar crashed to the floor, almost landing on my bare-feet.

I told you I was clueless!

After our initial shock, and him shouting, ‘Pops what the …?’ I learned a safety protocol: when he lifts solo, he does not lock the weights. That way, if the weight overwhelms him, he can angle the bar to allow the circular weights to slide off the bar.

Heavy lifting is no joke!

Fortunately, we escaped injury. I laughingly dashed to put on my sneakers. And we added another story to our menu of flashbacks we could tell his daughters on the drive home from school.

∞

Emotional weight lifting, you better bet it, demands you don’t get crushed. Our heavy lifting has also included deep, often painful, conversations surveying the past, capped by lingering hugs goodnight. We have debated the merits of providing national health care. We’ve listened, problem-solved, gone grocery shopping, visited the arcade with my granddaughters, attended a rousing concert by Charlie Wilson, of Gap Band fame, and even had two impromptu activities that included his mother, my ex-wife, who lives nearby: In one, I joined a planning session that harmonized some of her bill-paying options they were reviewing. In another, we played robust and competitive rounds of Sorry!, the board game that I used to play with my own mother!

Such soulful participation, courageous participation, has guided my flow since I flew into the storms. Focused participation. Taboo-free participation. And I’ve said to my beloved homeboy that I’ll weather any and all discomfort in the quest to contribute to his recalibration.

He’s even owned up that if he could wave a magic wand (and I’ve even been reading the box set of Harry Potter novels while here!) I would move from California to Florida. Indeed one his critiques of me is that my long years in LA have contributed to his emotional distance and his silences, his patterns of silences over the years, and doubt that he could call on me as an OG (Original Genius), when he needed to talk about personal issues in his life, his marriage, or about being a father.

Yet in certain crises, like this current one, he still blows up my phone, bends my ear, or puts out the Daddy Bat Signal – and I’m on the scene ready to rumble with him for righteous outcomes.

And my fundamental message and response over the years?

If you can call me when the shit hits the fan, then we’ve long ago established a formative trust. If you can call me in crisis, then you can call me in celebration, or as you sense life veering off course, so that we can brainstorm together about ways to KEEP SHIT FROM HITTING FAN!

Also, as a student of The Blues, I have long told him that SHIT WILL HIT THE FAN, so it behooves us as adults, as dynamic grown folks on life’s epic journey, to cultivate the capacity to respond with grace in service of living our best lives, including the pursuit and capture of our happiness.

∞

We must relentlessly be in the world for each other, our kids, regardless of their ages. We must learn how we can spot each other, so we’re strengthening our muscles of love. We must also forge and feed the fire of healing and honesty and resiliency.

My son continues to face fallout from his circumstances. Riding this storm with him will continue to be one of my elemental family fulfillments. My hope is that the resilience I’m witnessing, and the testimony I’m hearing, will soon have him bouncing back until he’s fully back in stride.   

PS—Wreaking Happiness celebrates its official one-year anniversary with this meditation in honor of my first child, born September 30, 1977. He gave birth to a life-long season of sacrifice, joy, pain, and instruction for me! I remain humbled by the miracle of our lives together.

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’: “…When I think like an administrator (and not a grandfather), I hear philanthropic, governmental, and other societal voices of expertise, who all publicly and absolutely value the importance of […] so-called ‘soft’ tools for 21^st Century young folks…. How do we teach young men these tools? That’s the crux, for me…. How do we impress upon them that being real over a successful lifetime requires ‘soft’ skills…? So- called ‘soft’ skills are the raw materials you will need to establish a personal power and integrity that allow you to fully participate in healthy human collaborations. Wielding your so-called ‘soft’ skills will reveal that you value yourself and deserve healthy human collaborations. Will position you (with loved ones, on jobs, via whatever platforms) to write common codes, create open sources, and generate a vibration of all good that keeps your head to the sky, even if you’re only howling in pain at the full moon. Talking to my grandson, listening to my grandson, I am full with the understanding that there’s nothing soft about full participation in the heroic exchanges and teachable moments in which we find ourselves working with young men. Whether those exchanges take place in living rooms, in classrooms, in workshops, at rec centers, sideline at the playground, at the extended family’s holiday meal, there’s nothing soft about the work necessary to teach a brother how to trust intentions, know wisely, concentrate deeply, love simplicity, develop fortitude, build stamina, and accept excitement and curiosity as catalysts for new angles, supple thinking, leaps of associations, and vocabularies of possibilities. It’s not possible to be a child of the future without the vitality that imaginative Inner Resources bestow on us…. But don’t wait until you’re in crisis, I’m trying to tell him…. [T]his is heavy lifting, son. This is heavy lifting. Sometimes, my man, getting happy means you got to get ugly like a singer possessed by the music….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“… art that matters to us – which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living… – that work is received by us as a gift is received.” Lewis Hyde, from The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property [Introduction, xii]

To stay sane and inspired, to energize my community-building, to remember and believe, I give myself regular R&B Transfusions!

To cultivate my ecstatic insights, my ability to see beyond even the ugliest social moment, I keep myself on a time-released drip of classic anthems of love and hope and encouragement and unity and service and dedication to themes, principles, and causes bigger than my own short-term hungers, vexations, and political overload.

Rolling up my sleeve, I’m jolted to attention by, say, the democratic question asked by the group War in Get Down:

“Tell me people/what would you do/if the running of the world/was all left up to you?”

Well, I’d always leave room for joining forces in ethical cross-cultural collaborations. Brave the work of building coalitions. Align myself with those in the crosshairs of unjust power.

I’d duet with Al Green in my quest for Love & Happiness.

I’d shoulder-to-shoulder with The Isleys to help grow a Harvest for the World.

I’d holler giddy-up love riding the rhythm of Smile Happy.

But hold up, before you accuse me of pimping nostalgia, check out these next two quotes to get at the sacred social DNA of what I’m grappling to say.  

“… the way the voice is used, the way instruments are held and played, the way instruments sound when played, the way an audience responds in a contemporary concert, the way in which a performer has dialogue with audience, all can be traced to the African American worship tradition created within the Black church…. Its expressions are drawn from a culture whose music operates as a phenomenon far beyond entertainment categories….” – Bernice Johnson Reagon, We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (The Wade in the Water Series) [pages 3-4]

“…The danced rituals of rebellious colonized peoples would probably not, after all, have seemed so strange to a medieval European carnival rebel or, for that matter, to one of the sixteenth-century German Anabaptists who danced triumphantly through the streets of Munster until more orthodox Protestants subdued them.” Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy [page 175]

∞

So no, I’m not saying that we’ll be saved by actual songs, but I am absolutely claiming that we can benefit from the necessary renewal, the definite uplift, unleashed by the impulse driving the creation of songs that have become ‘gifts’ sung across generations.

Yes sometimes songs crafted to storm the charts and make money. But yes yes yes songs crafted by musical genius to help us wade in the waters of beautiful struggle; yes yes yes to the danceable reverb such songs have provided for thousands of citizens who risk lives and treasure for democratic ideals.

Wade with me in memory infused with a robust through-line of creative and strategic  grappling with inhumanity, or illuminated by a vital through-line of community-making.

A periodic R&B Transfusion opens me to my most honest emotions. Shows me power eyes inflamed w/doubt can witness. Dresses morning sky in crimson when I pray. Spreads moss under my feet when I dance after sunset’s call. Grants me 3 wishes, and promises one million more when blood washes up on shore!

How to stay on the front lines of this life without the infusion of ecstatic insights welling from the well-wrought phrases and passionate singing of an R&B Classic? The deep pocket of the virtuoso band? The fabulous dedication to perfect harmonies behind a lead singer praising love in falsetto testimony? 

My R&B Transfusions help me risk the inspirational, work the inspirational, without being naive.

Keep me alert for contemporary examples of community. A Black Joy Parade?

Keep me open to human possibilities.  To Live In Love?

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’: “… A happy Black man, given our American journey, is the last laugh of American history. Given our American journey, he’s the very embodiment of the most pristine ideals of free thought and free speech, if he claims his inner ‘conceptual space….’ Originality makes me happy. Stylishness makes me happy. Boldness makes me happy. Distinctiveness makes me happy. Virtuosity makes me happy. Honesty makes me happy. Ceremonies make me happy. Laughter makes me happy. Peaceful conversation, testimony that sounds like music, trash talking suspenseful as classic literature, storytelling so mesmerizing it evokes and invokes ritual, dancing across a traffic-clogged avenue, gesturing and pontificating during a game of bid whist, theatrically sending off a loved one after a well-lived life, standing when sitting’s easier, insisting, believing, refusing, shouting, surviving, realizing that I can draw on an amazing cultural capacity to keep my head to the sky … all that energizes me, sets the devotional standards for me, keeps me plugged into the resilience that snakes up and down our historical spines … rooted in my whole human self, my whole emotional self, from grief to genuine rage, from awe to unexpected ingenuity….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“What we’re doing is reclaiming the power of the sacred in a society that has basically tried to distort our thinking and make us all think we’re commodities.” – Thomas A. Gordon, psychologist

I’ve been swooning to insights like this since 1989, when I first met and began studying with Dr. Thomas A. Gordon, who is now my trusted friend, mentor, extended family member, associate producer of The Johnson Chronicles, and living embodiment of brotherhood.

I wanted to emboss my 10th post on Wreaking Happiness by quoting this fabulous man, whose biography, accomplished as it is, barely captures how dynamically this human being really moves through life. But you deserve a quick FYI:

Thomas A. Gordon, a licensed psychologist and principal of TAGA Consulting, graduated cum laude from Harvard University, earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, held a post-doc in mass media and conflict resolution study at the University of Pennsylvania/Annenberg School of Communications, and has been for 35+ years a professor, health and mental health systems manager, psychotherapist, leadership coach, and organizational advisor. Plus he’s a husband, father, ‘avid, lifelong learner,’ and, well, you get me.

On June 1, 2019, I talked by phone with Dr. Gordon, a conversation so rich, I’ve decided to sip from it in this post, and share more wisdom in future posts.

Mainly, I asked him to riff about joy and happiness and Black men and how important is it to craft and build happiness, to live it and claim it as a framework. He latched onto the story I shared about my Moms yelling, ‘You live here don’t you?!’ after I complained, when she told me to pick up trash I had not thrown on the ground in front of our apartment.

Sip on Dr. Gordon’s insights, as drawn from the edited interview transcript:

Gordon: Everything we do is done within, and advances, an ethical framework, a set of ethical propositions. …We’re … reclaiming the power of the sacred in a society that has basically tried to distort our thinking, and make us all think we’re commodities. And that there’s nothing that’s worth valuing. Certainly not ourselves or each other. And there’s a moral responsibility that [your mother claimed.] … There’s a moral element to it…. You can’t hold happiness apart from a moral standard and a commitment, which really comes out of a critical consciousness that you belong to that ecology and it belongs to you. And your responsibility is to keep advancing and restoring it, because it’s not ever static, and it’s always going to be challenged. And, you know, we have decisions to make.

So I am saying any topic we bring up will only be an abstraction — if you start with Trust or Love or Wealth or Prosperity or Happiness … until we start defining what it means to us in particular contexts, in particular moments of space and time, and your mother, your mother — actually, without using all of that language — she used wisdom …. Think about what she said on every scale: [from] one to two people to three to 3,000 to 3 million: You live here, right, don’t you? You can feel it because it’s operative at every scale. So … it’s a principle you can trust. You know, it’s not something that’s parochial and just made up and arbitrary, like, ‘I’m going to beat your ass! I’m in a bad mood.’ You know, mood-centric. It wasn’t mood-centric. It was a wisdom that she didn’t buy at Wal-Mart.

And you asserted, well, wait a minute — there’s a place for your argument, which is, ‘Well, who brought the world to this place right now? That my play is being interrupted!’

PJH: And Moms wasn’t having none of it, though.

Gordon: It’s actually cause she’s saying, ‘Well I can’t tease out the evidence and facts … [or] the Karma of somebody else’s choices … to create that litter. [But] you, my son, belong here. You are a citizen. You standing on holy ground. This is holy ground, right? Because we live here. We live here.’ We don’t need a Burning Bush. And, you know, the rituals of remembrance of some other denomination’s view. She’s saying, ‘I’m going to bring it on from my experience and I’m gonna level with you.’ And boy does she do it. But how wise and loving. And I like it. It wasn’t mood-centric. It was like, yeah, you know, you can’t catch me next Thursday. I will say the same thing. That’s right. That’s right. Shit on the ground. I asked you to pick [it] up.

We got to give praise to those people, man, because look how they were able to hold their focus and create moments of inspiration and transmit, uh, uh, uh, mental diets that we could live on for decades. And in the midst of so much injustice and indignities, where you just want to smack somebody everyday, because of the indignities. You have to … connect morality with happiness….

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’: “(DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY of Bobbee Zeno): … I declare and hold this truth to be self-evident: As an African American man, I find absolutely nothing trifling about finding and maintaining happiness. I find my happiness absolutely nothing to trifle with. My happiness flows from an inspiring and deep hopefulness, no matter what or who is trying to jack me up, or jack-up my life. My happiness rests on a relentless accumulation of practical skills and emotional habits, especially speaking my mind with precision, especially speaking my mind with precision about the challenges and difficulties and pain and UNHAPPINESS in my life. I insist on grappling with the raw material of the damn thing, until I find a vocabulary for the drama or trauma I’m facing, their causes, their solutions, and until I excavate from the experiences vital lessons and gifts and magic and courage and vision and comfort and celebration. I am cold-blooded about my happiness. I will not let man, woman, child, peer pressure, politics, history, gossip, anonymity, poverty, or ground rules dictate or dilute my happiness. I work my muscle of happiness when I’m sad or when I’m alone. I insist on infusing affirmation into all situations confronting me. My Pops taught that you got to take the bitter with the sweet. I can’t feel nothing, if I don’t feel the Everything is Everything that comes from sincerely, seriously, trying to leave a humane legacy to those I love….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

* Three Men [Pyramid of Dignity & Joy] — Two men with canes seated in foreground with another man standing behind them. Loewentheil Collection of African-American Photographs. Cornell University Digital Library. Tintype (Photographic Print). Late-19th Century. Link: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:1508544

* Helen Cate, Research Librarian; Funded in part by The Pollination Project; #SeedTheChange; design by Julie Ray Creative.

Today, like Langston Hughes, I “Dance! Whirl! Whirl!” in a digital celebration I call See You: Faces of the Black Man of Happiness Social Media Campaign featuring historical photographs of Black men and boys ‘emanating a sense of joy.’

Today, Juneteenth 2019, starting with an image I call Three Men [Pyramid of Dignity & Joy], I’m posting the first of eight ‘Legacy’ photos on Instagram: @seeyou247; Twitter: @PeterJHarris1; and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackManOfHappinessProject/

Each week, I’ll post a new photo, ‘framed’ beautifully by Julie Ray Creative, the designer who also created the vibrant look for this blog, the website for the Black Man of Happiness Project, and the promo site for my play The Johnson Chronicles.

During the See You campaign, each photo will be captioned with info provided by the collection holding the original image. I hope that each photo will inspire folks to claim and emanate their own happiness; meditate on how to contribute to other folks’ joy; embrace happiness as a counter spell against personal and social down-pressures; and LIKE, SHARE, and COMMENT in the spirit of contributing to a living, breathing Oral History of Happiness.

See You: Faces of the Black Man of Happiness Social Media Campaign is a life-affirming oasis that traces the DNA of joy for Black men and boys during a social climate that too often places those men and boys in the crosshairs of danger and death. The See You campaign celebrates the humanity of Black men and boys from a refreshing new angle that I hope boldly contributes to a re-charged emotional ecology and social atmosphere that are infused with beautiful art reflecting ongoing, dignified, and intimate resistance of Black males to their dehumanization.

The See You campaign is partially funded by The Pollination Project, based in Berkeley, CA, which views the campaign “as part of a larger movement to inspire compassion and change in every corner of our planet.” The campaign features a portion of the 50-plus ‘Legacy’ photographs currently identified by lead Research Librarian Helen Cate, who coined the brilliant phrase ‘emanating a sense of joy.’

In these magnificent images, I see men and boys – now ancestors – as part of our community, our cultural family. Yet I also see them flaunting their individuality! They remind us to find our own unique reasons for living, for pursuing happiness, and for cultivating/celebrating our current and future mental, spiritual and community health. It’s thrilling to actually unearth these images of joyful and dignified brothers. They are powerful touchstones from the past to help us all breathe again!

These See You images are part of a growing collection of visceral reminders that, at our best, brothers always always always kept hold of their inner life and their inner light. No doubt, we’ve waded through hundreds of images of pain, and tragedy, and difficulty, and death, and ugliness. Yet, by not turning away we have been drawn inexorably to the magnificence ‘emanating’ from history.

This search, this campaign, culminates more than 20 years of my own sporadic – and frankly ineffective – investigations in search of images. In October 2017, after years of living in LA, I found myself at the Altadena Central Library, a library patron seeking assistance in locating historical photos of joyful Black men.

I first requested help from Melissa Aldama, Adult Services Reference Clerk II. Excited by my query, Melissa assigned Helen Cate to conduct research on my behalf. Helen began her research by sitting with me, and absorbing the specs I outlined: please search for any ‘Legacy’ photos in which Black men could be ‘read’ as exhibiting joy, or happiness, or contentment, or dignity. I didn’t want photos of entertainers or athletes. I wanted images of Everyday People.

After our meeting, Ms. Cate initiated her research by writing to librarians at, among other collections, the Library of Congress, universities, and public libraries. Almost casually, she wrote that she was searching for assistance identifying photos of Black men “emanating a sense of joy.” Honestly, I was blown away by this elegant turn of phrase! It distilled what was actually motivating me! It distilled what was ineffably calling out to me!

Now, that phrase governs and guides my on-going research. I love watching folks’ eyes light up when I tell them the See You Project is searching for photos of Black men “emanating a sense of joy.” I get a chill just writing the phrase.

Join us today and in subsequent weeks as we continue this unprecedented and concentrated and evolving exploration, as we pay homage to our elder brothers emanating a sense of joy, emanating their inner light.

I’m confident that they will help us all to see more clearly now – each other and the incredible strength and dignity and humanity necessary to become and remain a Black Man of Happiness.

Sankofa is an African word from the Akan … in Ghana.  The literal translation of the word and the symbol is “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.” —Carter G. Woodson Center, Berea College

Meditating on the death of a break-through mentor of mine. When I was 23, Dr. Irving S. Hamer, Jr. (January 6, 1946 – May 4, 2019) hired me to teach Language Arts to 14-21-year-old high school students at the Park Heights Street Academy, in Northwest Baltimore. I taught at the Academy from 1978 to 1980, when I left to attend the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, at UC Berkeley.

Irv’s influence started with his jazzy first interview of me, before there was even a building for the Academy. We sat in his apartment study in a high-rise across from Druid Hill Park. After he hired me for my first teaching job, I was imprinted by his quiet, but declarative demeanor, and by his erudite style – complete with a sleek brown Jaguar coupe. Then once in flow with the Academy’s rigorous faculty – which was ‘multicultural’ before the term was drained of its power – I was swept up by his demanding standards.

Our staff meetings were like graduate seminars on urban education. He led us in rich conversations designed to raise the entire staff’s IQ, to focus on actual teaching and learning, and to place our educational work within an international context. And when we were all EXASPERATED by one or more knuckleheads, he’d listen to our whining and wishes for expulsion. Then he’d smile and dismiss our complaints. ‘We’re in business to educate just that student! This is why we’re paid the big bucks! Let’s figure it out!’

No student was expendable. We earned our chops succeeding with so-called ‘difficult’ students. Chagrined, we’d take that deep breath – faculty from India, Ghana, Guyana, and African America – and dive back into each class wielding every intellectual and emotional tool we could muster on behalf of our students. I felt Irv was particularly challenging me. I was only 5 years out of high school myself. I myself had been a bright student whose underperformance exasperated teachers. If I were ready to expel a kid, instead of marshaling the energy, ideas and creative pedagogy to inspire a student, how the hell could I call myself a teacher! The Headmaster’s belief in me, his expectations of me, and his faith in the potential of so-called at-risk students fueled me then and it fuels me now.

For sure, Dr. Irving S. Hamer Jr. was a complex man. After the Street Academy, he’d go on to dynamic and controversial and innovative high-performance positions in New York, Memphis and Miami. For me, he was a formative member of a cohort of men who – after my father, uncles and big brothers – taught me to trust myself by trusting me with substantial responsibility. They hired me to teach, to write newspaper columns, to edit publications. I trace a direct line from their confidence in me to my confidence in myself.

Irv and I never worked together again, but over the years we’d swap a note or talk by phone. I’d send him clips of my writing. He’d turn me on to an editor at a NY publishing house. Introduce me to jazz and orchestral music. In perhaps the most satisfying flip for me: Irv let me publish a tender personal essay he wrote about raising his son, in Genetic Dancers, a magazine ‘for and about The Artistry Within African/American Fathers’ that I published during the 1980s.

In the spirit of Sankofa, and in honor of The Headmaster, I’ll conclude by excerpting below “The Headmaster & the Sports Editor,” an essay included in The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right.’

Here’s to mining our past to fetch lessons for now and tomorrow. Sail on Brother Irving! Fly with the wind!

FROM THE HEADMASTER & THE SPORTS EDITOR:

On my first morning with The Headmaster, it was sundown in the room. The lights in his study were nightclub subtle. In the background, moody John Coltrane saxophone curled from hidden speakers…. Dr. Irving S. Hamer, Jr. was simply the suavest brother I’d ever met in a professional setting … as self contained as Miles Davis, in full effect as the Prince of Darkness… He’s sitting behind his desk with his legs crossed, as if he were Miles on break, nursing a drink and waiting for me work up my nerve to ask if I could sit-in once his band reassembled on stage. Predictably, Dr. Hamer speaks in this subsonic tone of voice that makes me lean forward to hear, and makes me speak softly my own damn self. This was the coolest and scariest job interview I’d ever had and it hadn’t even started yet!

He even asks me if I wanted some mineral water and I said, uh, sure.

I damn near choked on my first taste of Perrier carbonation.

Finally, Dr. Hamer asks me whether I could teach Black teenagers how to write.

“How would you go about teaching them? Why do you want to teach at the Academy? What’s your teaching philosophy? Do you think that Black teenaged drop outs have what it takes to be taught in an academically rigorous environment?”

Whoa!

The Prince of Darkness is not bullshitting!

At that moment, I swear I felt myself maturing, like in time-stop photography. I sat up more erectly in my chair. Right then and there I knew I wanted to work with this man.

Teaching was the most demanding, exasperating, triumphant work I’ve ever done as a professional. Orchestrating a classroom with 15-20 students staring at me made me a man.

… By selecting me to become a Street Academy teacher, he allowed me to contribute to the heroic history of African American education, a legacy that included grammar and cross-cultural lessons among captives on slave ships, brush arbor reading sessions, mutual aid societies, one-room rural schools, nascent public schools during Reconstruction after the Civil War, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. By hiring me, Irv also became another member of that beautiful community of Black men who have since childhood demonstrated their faith in my actual talents and my potential. [T]hey knew how to conduct my idealism, my genius, into the direction of freedom.

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’ : “… Go head on, brother…. Maybe not triumph, just yet. But go head on and see what the end’s going to be …. In our journey to brotherhood, we’ve become thoroughly human and abundantly on display ….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop