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“… Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end. You must make your own map.” Joy Harjo  [A Map to the Next World]

“… won’t you celebrate with me … that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” Lucille Clifton  [won’t you celebrate with me]

“… And who will join this standing up … we are the ones we have been waiting for …” June Jordan  [poem for South African Women]

“… Who stole the hearts and minds of the humble hard-working folk until they too became moralistic and self-righteous: senators, bishops, presidents, missionaries, corporation presidents?” Simon Ortiz  [From Sand Creek]

“… Blessed/are those who listen/when no one is left to speak …” Linda Hogan  [Blessings]

“… sadness is a chemical one atom away from joy/heroism is a spiritual one history away from slavery …” Peter J. Harris  [Complete Already]

∞

During a pandemic, I remain dedicated to Wreaking Happiness, in the spirit of human ancestors on this land – especially Indigenous and my own cultural ancestors – who set a magnificent example, that can be studied empirically, of lifting every vision and voice into song and action despite encountering social ugliness of epic proportions.

I remain dedicated to singing in the chorus of human beings keeping their eyes on the prize of public health and wise governance. I remain dedicated to working for the world we want, and to the work covered in this succinct statement from Yes! Magazine: “We must be willing to get our hands dirty, to both try new things and trust age-old knowledge, and to be uncomfortable.”

I will continue to sing with the chorus of cultural workers, journalists, Inspectors General, loyal opposition, and Everyday People who see it as our ethical duty to illuminate and resist the anti-democratic, racist, self-serving, truth-deformed, and power-grabbing politics radiating from the White House and from demagogues and policy makers from Brazil, Hungary, India and other national houses of power around the world.

“The study of happiness never was a luxury to be postponed until more serene, peaceful times,” writes Sissela Bok in her bookExploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (2011). “… From earliest times, views of human happiness have been set forth against the background of suffering, poverty, disease, and the inevitability of death.”  [Page 5 and 6]

“Trying to envision “somewhere in advance of nowhere,” as poet Jayne Cortez puts it, is an extremely difficult task, yet it is a matter of great urgency,” writes Robin D.G. Kelley, in his book,Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down….”  [Page xii Preface]

“… And my mama – not one to traffic in metaphors, usually, being a very scientific woman – would add, ‘Yeah, speak your speak, ‘cause every silence you maintain is liable to become first, a lump in your throat, then a lump in your lymphatic system,’” writes Toni Cade Bambara, in ‘The Education of a Storyteller,’ from Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Fictions, Essays, And Conversations [page 255]

∞

As I take daily walks during the pandemic, I wave to many folks out with children and dogs. What a joy to exchange well wishes with men and women exercising their bodies and smartly claiming public space. Also, I see folks, fully masked, whose body language suggests they are terrified. They lower their heads. They practically scurry to cross the street, to stride away from my path, or to accelerate past me, as if Covid-19 could simply leap between us like a vile ninja! It takes all kinds, as Moms used to say!

Folks can get sick, be sick, without inevitable death and social dysfunction.

Society can choose democratic disbursement of our tax dollars, wage replacement grants to small business. Leaders can communicate with an overall rigor and candor on behalf of public service beyond the platitudes of Instagram notecards (although I especially co-sign this IG notecard: “If you think artists are useless try to spend your quarantine without music, books, poems, movies paintings and games.”)

Society, in the elemental sense of that word, doesn’t have to embrace fealty to Boeing or the hubris of other so-called too-big-to-fail brands, or real estate moguls, or Dark Money puppeteers. Society doesn’t have to privatize production of medical equipment, or tests, or the production of vaccines, or eliminate the oversight of disbursement of public dollars.

We have evidence of so many more humane visions. You no doubt are a witness through your own prisms, your own analyses or processes for change. You no doubt can pinpoint welcome examples of resistance, persistence, and humane existence.

Among mine: Center for the Study of Political Graphics, with its collection of political posters “advancing the power of art to educate and inspire people to action.”

The alternative or People’s Budget produced in the U.S. House of Representatives by the Progressive Caucus, representing a vision of what control of public resources could do if We the People were the focus of national expenditures.

The Poor People’s Campaign – A National Call for Moral Revival has proferred a humane agenda both during the pandemic and as a larger motivating vision.

Through whichever lens you view Life on this American Earth, it’s important to remember – as a starting point – that government is ours, and that our ideas, our insights, our priorities, are as important as those whose income allows them obscene access, criminal influence, and quid pro quo after quid pro quo.   

“Radical change for Ella Baker was about a persistent and protracted process of discourse, debate, consensus, reflection, and struggle,” writes Barbara Ransby in her book,Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: a Radical Democratic Vision.Ella Baker, like Bayard Rustin, is one of those human ancestors whose life-long, often anonymous, service instructs and inspires me. “If larger and larger numbers of communities were engaged in such a process, she reasoned, day in and day out, year after year, the revolution would be well under way. Ella Baker understood that laws, structures, and institutions had to change in order to correct injustice and oppression, but part of the process had to involve oppressed people, ordinary people, infusing new meaning into the concept of democracy and finding their own individual and collective power to determine their lives and shape the direction of history.” [Page 1]

∞

Even with obvious anti-democratic, racist, self-serving, truth-deformed, and power-grabbing politics radiating from the White House, I am grateful I can find in my life, on social media, in journalism, examples of inspired Mutual Aid, Mutual Encouragement, and nationwide evidence of a society inspired to see beyond pandemic. I’m grateful I can see folks all marshaling digital tools to mitigate isolation during Shelter in Place orders.

Thank you dancers, poets, musicians, political thinkers, health care professionals, urban gardeners, moral and spiritual practitioners. And thanks to my own relatives zooming our stories, history, laughter, and political commentary from D.C.-Maryland down I-95 to North Carolina and Florida and across I-10 to California, where my youngest daughter and I live and work.

In Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s bracing book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, she mentions a term called “Terminal Narratives” by anthropologist Michael V. Wilcox: “accounts of Indian histories which explain the absence, cultural death, or disappearance of Indigenous peoples.” [Page 42]

Dunbar-Ortiz critiques a school of thought asserting that the Indigenous-European Encounter would inevitably have debilitated and disappeared Native folk, because of their lack of immunity to what were, to them, ‘novel’ virus [e.g. smallpox, measles].

“Such an absolutist assertion renders any other fate for the Indigenous peoples improbable,” Dunbar-Ortiz states, because it fails to account for the impact of relentless structural forces [military, ideological, religious, political policies, among others]. [Page 39] Terminal Narratives “… emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so,” according to Dunbar-Ortiz, and refuses to “accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide.” [Pages 41-42].

For me, Wreaking Happiness means resisting any type of Terminal Narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic. And pointing out that the early impact of the disease on who survives, and who thrives, is being (and will be) affected in such a manner that even trillion dollar ‘investments’ of our tax dollars are more akin to schemes mostly benefiting the same folk and institutions currently profiting from contemporary inequitable social circumstances, such as prison overcrowding; lack of health care for all and an effective, compassionate service superstructure for all; less-than-livable wages and overpriced housing; courts stacked with pre-fab judges who fail Bar Association muster; targeted sweeps by ICE, Border Patrol, and local police; and the disappearing of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and homeless neighbors.  

“The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally,” writes Arundhati Roy in her essay, ‘The pandemic is a portal.’ “But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?”

∞

Robin D.G. Kelley entitles one chapter of Freedom Dreams: ‘Keeping It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous,’ tracing rich connections and influences of Black creativity and surrealism, which he describes as a “living, mutable, creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom.” [Page 158]

Cultivating the Marvelous is a liberating way to activate my brain’s biochemistry and supercharge my quest to weave hopeful stories, and seek lush motivation to live a life that will make proud my late mother and father and the other unpretentious aunties and uncles who imprinted me with Each One Teach One.

Cultivating the Marvelous is my antidote, neutralizer, and converter against cynicism, doubt, and anxiety, amidst the onslaught of mythological greed, selfishness, and supremacies of all kinds from power elites implementing social strategies drawn from the abysmal laboratories of feudalism, slavery, colonialism, Nazism, and their vile scapegoating justifications.

“When we become immersed in a story, the brain shifts from attending to our immediate surroundings to imagining the details of the narrative world,” states a summary of research on the website of the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. “Understanding this process and its underlying neurobiology may be a key to understanding how stories exert their influence.”

Though I don’t need brain scans to know that a well-rendered story enraptures, I welcome rigorous science on the impact of envisioning another world, and “the brain mechanisms that mediate narrative immersion.”

For now, in closing, I echo the question in New Edition’s hit song: Can you stand the rain?

I can, I believe, with Hope and History, and so I resolve in communion with uplifting words from two generations of the inspiring Harding family, heirs to Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin’s legacy. Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Dr. Vincent Harding, compassionate participants in the Black-led human rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960s, make me proud to be a human being.

First, scholar Rachel Elizabeth Harding on her mother Rosemarie Freeney Harding:

“Mama had an acute and gentle intelligence about navigating the world…,” writes Harding in the intro to a book she co-authored with her late Moms, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering. “…Her understanding of social justice activism situated struggle very comfortably alongside hospitality and mothering. This is a meaning of activism I have not seen widely discussed among scholars, but the women of the Southern Freedom Movement (and their families) know about it. More than anything, it is an activism based in “being family” – bringing people into the house, literally and figuratively. Making room and making welcome. Letting people know there is room for them in the vision, in the struggle, in the nation, in the family.”

And from Ms. Harding later on in Remnants:  “One of the most exciting things for me about being in the freedom movement was discovering other people who were compelled by the Spirit at the heart of our organizing work, and who were also interested in the mysticism that can be nurtured in social justice activism.  …There was an energy moving in those times. Something other than just sit-ins and voter registration and Freedom Schools. Something represented by these signal efforts but broader. As I traveled around the country in the sixties, it seemed to me that the nation – from the largest community to the smallest – was permeated with hope; that people can bring about transformation; that what we do matters. [Page 168]

And from our late Big Brother, Dr. Vincent Harding, from Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement:

“Somehow, in a time like our own, when the capacity for imagining appears to be endangered …, it seems especially crucial to introduce our students to the meaning of such a question as, “Is America Possible?” … Indeed, it is precisely in a period of great spiritual and social hunger like our own that we most need to open minds, hearts, and memories to those times when women and men actually dreamed of new possibilities for our nation, for our world, for their own lives. It is now that we may be able to convey the stunning idea that dreams, imagination, vision, and hope are actually powerful mechanisms in the creation of new realities. Especially when the dreams go beyond speeches and songs to become embodied, to take on flesh, in real, hard places.” [Page 178]  

… Like during a pandemic — when we need all citizens of witness and liberation to become alchemists of our most humane future …

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… I dream of The Black Man of Happiness…. He is vibration, receptor, animating force. He wants to be well, to paraphrase Toni Cade Bambara’s opening line in The Salt Eaters. He is drum major of The Turn. Healing Trajectory. Bedrock. He is quest for perfection, the rumble beneath our doubts, the resonance of anticipation, heroic sensibility, point guard. Just standing there, you can hear the tone of reconciliation and resurrection emanating from his spiritual combustion …” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Joyful Boys – Dance in My Light
African American children, False River, Louisiana. Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002, photographer. 1934 July. Lomax Collection (LOT 7414), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Photographic Print. Link: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsc.00324/?co=lomax

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

I turn 65 on April 26. WTF how did THAT happen! I offer you a stream of concentrated moments, and a praise poem, Always a Black Man, to celebrate a lifetime of instructive and illuminating brotherhood.

∞

Lip-synching classic Temptations and stepping in rhythm to Motown’s Funk Brothers at Bernard’s apartment during my adolescence in Southeast D.C.

Laughing at Blazing Saddles with Lawrence and Chris and Steve in the dark of a movie house; laughing even harder when I fell over a seat blocking our aisle as we filed out the theater!

Marveling as my brother Ron played a favorite Motown song for what seemed like 25 straight times – on turntable during the 1960s; on iPod in the 21^st Century!

Cringing as my brother Glenn cussed me out from the pitcher’s mound after my fourth straight error at shortstop during a college baseball game.

Clenching David’s handshake for the first time after a TV interview when he stood inches from my face insisting: “WE need to meet!”

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of He Ain’t Heavy by Donny Hathaway.

∞

Interviewing Richard Pryor at his home with Greg Tate for Vibe Magazine.

Missing my comeback cue later that night when Richard Pryor snapped, “nigger would you shut the fuck up” outside House of Blues waiting for his wife to escort him to see Etta James perform.

Scanning the audience in fear as Dick Gregory welcomed “the CIA agent assigned to follow me” before a speech at Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium!

Interviewing Dick Gregory after he’d just returned from Iran in a Delaware hotel with Rock Newman for the Wilmington News Journal.

Distilling my own uncensored voice from Pryor, Gregory, and the Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor — examined in Mel Watkins’ book On the Real Side.

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of Everything Must Change by Benard Ighner.

∞

Wiping tears as my father told stories in the car outside our old house on 5^th Street S.E. on the rainy December afternoon one month before he died.

Blushing as my father asked me if I pulled my lover’s hairs apart when I showed him a rash on my adolescent Johnson.

Smoldering as my father yelled defensively about his drinking: “Don’t I go to work everyday? Don’t I put food on the table?”

Thanking my father for allowing my wife and I to live temporarily in his basement apartment when we moved from Cali to DC!

Understanding my father saying I could not live temporarily in his basement apartment after my wife and I separated!

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of Dance With My Father by Luther Vandross.

∞

Always a Black Man

For Brian, Anthony, Curtis, David, Terrell, Roger G., Datcher, O’shea, Conney, Willie, Zef, Cleve, Jamil, Gilmore, Kenny, Charles, Ethelbert, Paul, Milton, Ketema, Greg, Jelani, Kahari   

there’s always a Black man in my life
a Homie found the power of spine
percolating
with ways to
shorten
my crisis
extend   my   climax
this man is there
even when it’s a drag for him
he steps through the shadows
becomes an incorruptible senator
the instant my troubling light
falls on his empathetic face
& right away
he’s gathering all the facts
gaveling
to start a public hearing
with hours as convenient as a 7-11

there’s always a Black man who grants my wishes
a Walkboy lined his pockets with psalms
ripening
with ways to
soothe
my doubt
prolong   my   high
that man is here
even when confusion weakens his meaning
he steps through the contradictions
becomes a medicating genie
soon as we make eye contact
& right away
he’s floating up under my confessions
X-raying through the bullshit
sifting for faults
measuring for serenity
while always
speaking his revelations
like Miles on All Blues

there’s always a Black man in my life
my man
laughing desert water in my ears

erupting
so unstatistical
living
for more than just the weekend

24-7…
we’re crammed between
every second of our lives
without a mirror’s yardstick
without a hint
that any generosity
will be reimbursed
& in the grinding
steady guarding against specified meltdowns

there are Black men in our lives
always
yes, Black men
in our lives
there’s always a Black man in our lives
always
in our lives alive alive alive   well

∞

Spending the night at Melvin’s house after my first divorce.

Eating fries at McDonald’s after Melvin picked me up from BWI to drive me to my mother’s funeral.

Standing with Melvin at his own father’s funeral.

Reuniting at Melvin’s house with Daki, Avon and Ralph for a gray-haired reunion of the  1970s cohort who used to meet weekly at Ralph’s crib in downtown Baltimore.

Shouting ‘remember-when’ stories at Melvin from his guest room as two grown-ass men fought to stay awake on a sleepover at his house in Baltimore.

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of Ooh Child by Dwight Trible.

∞

Learning from Thomas A. Gordon that Master Negotiators can ‘walk away!’

Swooning to Kofi Opoku’s idea that proverbs are the Haiku of a people’s wisdom.

Relaxing when Sterling A. Brown told me, “if I can’t read my poetry louder than a toddler’s babble,” then he shouldn’t be standing at the microphone.

Honoring Haki Madhubuti, Kofi Lomotey, Kweli Tutashinda, Kalamu ya Salaam, Professor Samuel F. Yette and Professor Lewis Fenderson for educating me in books and classrooms, on sidewalks and in cyberspace.

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of Chimes of Freedom by Youssou N’Dour.

∞

Laughing with Darrell until we ignited smiles in other passengers while riding the train to Brighton Beach on my first visit to London.

Risking public laughter with total strangers while riding LA’s Metro buses and trains.

Believing Michael’s assurances that ‘we have what we need’ no matter the circumstances.

Harmonizing along with big brother Ron while attending Smokey Robinson’s Hollywood Bowl concert.

Smiling at the wistful way big brother Glenn told us to “Go in Friendship” when he retired from his Emmy-winning TV show SportsTalk.

Listening in awe to this ineffable rendition of The Places You Find Love by Quincy Jones.

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… Listen … it’s no question, and I understood this even in my 20s, that great singing, great music, is an ineffable emotional aphrodisiac under any circumstances. I am definitely not saying I had to lip synch Rose Royce (“…I’m going down …”) in order for pop ballads to become 4-minute mantras of metamorphoses. But I have come to discern that this unbidden, flu-ridden, rite of passage was a genuine Round the Way Initiation. I had a 20-something revelation that I could face what scared me, what scarred me, what stymied me, but only if I invested in my own genius and established my own elemental endowment. I sensed I had discovered a sensual and regenerative operating system for the rest of my life, to deal with my drama, to activate my potential, to consolidate my triumphs. My insights have distilled over the years into my own mantras.

Accountability is the midwife of credibility. Refuse the siren song of blame. Withstand the sting of conviction. Measure your own value and distinction. Recognize that creativity is my ally in the worst seasons. Apply creativity in the worst seasons. Start at the age epiphany strikes. Trust that familiar tools, currencies, and modes often come embedded (encoded?) with motivation, abundance, and exhilaration. Don’t let the snap, crackle, pop of new grooves throw you off beat. Communication is the currency of collaboration. Never be afraid to wear your Griot Clothes.

Then repeat, peep game, adopt lessons, evaluate.
Repeat, peep game, adopt lessons, evaluate.
Repeat, peep game, adopt lessons, evaluate.
Until, like compound interest on a spiritual exercise regimen, life affirming patterns can become lifetime practical habits.…” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

“Peter you ain’t Black. You vegetarian….”

I still laugh at my former student’s hilarious comment!

She captured my textured individualities. With adolescent audacity, she reframed and re-envisioned me. She flooded me with joy.

No question she knew I was Black. During classes, she heard in my voice what poet Melvin E. Brown calls “plain scripture.” She witnessed the surging vernacular synergies flowing from my voice. She riffed on the demanding academic and intellectual standards I brought into her LA classroom from my upbringing in 1960s/1970s D.C.

Also, she saw me during lunch breaks scarfing avocado, Ritz crackers, and peanuts! She didn’t know that I’d changed my diet when I was not much older than she was, as a second-year student at Howard University.

I was converted at a speech by Dick Gregory, who pierced me with his humor. First, he welcomed the CIA agent he said was assigned to follow him. Later, he castigated Black folks’ diet and persuasively indicted factory farming. With the overnight righteousness of a convert, I swore off meat. My father, who used to serve me fried chicken hearts still sizzling from the frying pan, swore I had joined a cult!

Whose child am I?

Reality serrates. Enrages. Uglies. Deforms. Yet, open our eyes, click a button, move a molecule, ride the subway, and we can witness resistance, humanity, beauty, renewal.

Reminding me always that we can also manufacture another kind of consensus: We  won’t be afraid of the mysterious, our potential, our respiration.

My beloved Staples Singers promised to take me there, but they left it up to me to outline the geography of where.

And as a mature Mavis Staples sang, 99 and a half just won’t do, when we are working to transform our life-affirming vision into a society beyond chalk outlines.

∞

∞

I’m thinking about ceremony, ritual, rites of passage to help me bless the ashes on my unfolding, to help me distill experience, to help me embrace life’s multiplication, dance to life’s calculus, hop-skotch the tectonics roiling me to my core. All my adult life, I’ve been thinking outside of the box. Now it’s time to think outside of the hexagram….

∞

So check out my original plan after house sitting for two of my oldest friends. First, drive from the Bay Area to Sequoia National Park. Then stroll and recharge among the elders. But before I hit the interstate, while on a meandering drive, I happened upon Tilden Regional Park, just a short drive from El Cerrito, where I lived during the early 1980s. 

As I drove deeper into the park, I came upon a stand of – what what! – redwoods. Maybe not as old, nor as huge, as those in Sequoia National Park. But the beautiful detour had BECOME the trip.

And there I was. Walking among sensations and memories that told me, in a fragrant, visceral and spontaneous way, I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Life Life  … my youth, my maturity … echoing, merging ….

… Black Man of Happiness On the Road …

Searching for grooved pavement ahead. Undeterred when pavement gives way to gone ground found. Fused with the velocity of unexpected joy. The force of joy binding past, present, future.

I ain’t Black. I am elemental!

∞

Father and son ride the Metro Gold Line. Curly haired son looks up to his father, who is tattooed, whose brown skin is splotched with vitiligo.

Son says: You’re black.

Father laughs. I can’t believe you just told me that. What color are you?

Son leans up to his ear.

Orange, huh?

The boy smiles into my eyes. I grin back at them both. I step off the train.

People get ready there’s a train a coming!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “…I’m imagining a richer sphere for The Black Man of Happiness …. Before he demanded that I find language, he judged my constitution fit enough to play the Dozens with a Founding (Step) Father, to interrogate wind shear and whirlwind of my XY explorations on this American earth, and to peer into and beyond the constellation of conditionings and conventions governing African American manhood. He hummed in a fragrant whisper: “Treat yourself kindly!” He said speak up, be bold. He said dance, be startling. He said risk, be example. He said end the war within, be kaleidoscope. He said imagine, seek peace. Become the cat who can walk up behind a brother, who will know it is you, who will turn, look you in the eyes, laugh with you, offer his fist for dap. …” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

The Kiss, mixed media collage, detail, by Richard May III

It isn’t what you say, it’s how you say it!

With that admonition, Moms shamed us if she caught us slinging the Dozens indiscriminately, especially if we targeted family, especially when I inevitably took advantage of any time in the spotlight or on the mic.

As sharply as June Harris could snap herself, if her ethical framework was violated, mostly her Home Training taught us to try a little tenderness. Mostly she wanted us to cultivate the feeling-tones that saturate our voice when we talk to babies.

She didn’t want us to coochie coochie coo! She wanted us to speak honorably, speak kindly, as when we spoke genuinely to actual infants and toddlers. Such Baby Talk hypes a child, sparks and imprints her brain with the sound of safety and community, and puts to shame the awwwwwwww of social media and talk shows.

When lead singers of all types lend their magical voices to the task of persuasion and affirmation, when they say I wanna Ta Ta You Baby, they go beyond begging. They just get better with time!

When lovers mouth their beloved’s name with such quiet force it reaches ears across a crowded room, or they whisper baby come close until they both quake, we’ve slipped into the inspirational marrow of ‘how you say it!’ And the rhythm just changes!

∞

I was a well-loved and well-reared child. I’ve been fortunate that throughout my life I forged close bonds with my father and brothers. Also over the years, I’ve had powerful, enduring friendships with good men. As a 22-year-old college graduate, my first child was born, and I reveled in sharing loving babble with my son. He’s a father of three now. I’m in my mid 60s. Our lingering hugs can still refresh one another.

I can still clearly hear my late father’s playful voice. He might be referring to his vodka and OJ as his ‘medicine.’ Or asking me for koshies, fat wet kisses on the cheek. Or boasting during an operatic game of bid whist. One of Pops’ friends, my late Godfather Mr. Scotty, always shouted a jaunty ‘Petey Pete’ while giving me change to buy candy.

Playing basketball in high school and baseball in college, I definitely heard my share of less than tender talk during hard-fought games. But I can also honestly recall stunning conversations of friendship, trust, and brotherhood in locker rooms, on the sidelines, and on road trips.

∞

Oh I am fascinated with how humans speak our terms of endearment.

I often turn my gaze to history. I study, for example, Thomas Jefferson, avatar of America’s pursuit of happiness. After reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, I teared up wondering what 22-year-old James Hemings said when he welcomed his baby sister Sally Hemings to Paris in 1787. At 14, she accompanied the founding (step)father’s daughter Mary (aka Polly) to Paris, as a ‘domestic servant’ and ‘maid’ in Jefferson’s household.

James Hemings, the “bright mulatto,” was ‘owned’ by Jefferson. In 1784, TJ took Mr. Hemings to Paris for the “particular purpose” of being trained in the art of French cuisine. Mr. Hemings, a Virginian like my father, is revealed by Gordon-Reed as an intriguing enigma, known to posterity only through letters by Jefferson and his correspondents. James Hemings committed suicide in 1801.

I keenly miss the voice of James Hemings while in France. I long to hear him talking tenderly with his sister about their mother back home at Monticello. Musing together about filing a “freedom petition” seeking their legal freedom. How did brother and sister console each other when they agreed to return with Jefferson to enslavement in Virginia?  

“Hemings might have lived longer, had he and his sister taken the chance to work together to build a life in Paris,” Gordon-Reed writes. “Though racism was alive and well in France, there was a substantive difference between the treatment of mixed-race people there and their treatment in the United States. That did not change the condition of the entire race, but the extra social space might have made a difference to an individual as sensitive as James Hemings. By the end of his life, starting over in Paris was a moment that had passed. There would have been a great difference between putting down roots there in 1788 or 1789 with a sister who could have helped pay the rent and […] stepping alone into the uncertainty of postrevolutionary France.” [page 552]

Oh what is the sound of African American tenderness? How can we all shape our mouths to speak tenderness?

∞

On my next birthday in April, I will be, incredible to me, eight years older than Moms was when she died in 1984. She schools me still!

In my senior year of high school, Moms was my date to the year-end athlete’s banquet. I was the MC. While roasting my basketball coach, I was slinging the Dozens indiscriminately. Moms got pissed. On our way home, she shamed me. I defended myself with the comedian’s mantra: But folks were laughing.

You went overboard. You controlled the mic. You had all the power. You let it go to your head.

And for sure Moms understood a roast! A foster child born on January 25, 1927, in Queens, N.Y., she loved comedy and satire. Normally, she took a bit of pride in the verbal gymnastics of her Number 3 son. But I had crossed the line. I had folks laughing beyond the playfulness of the moment.

I sulked but ultimately I took her criticism as one of the gospels that guides my life.

Moms wanted me to claim my voice as a magical tool of tenderness, a shimmering reflection of genuine emotions, a prism splicing vulnerability, a marvelous amplifier of subsonic hungers, a sensitive oscillator that warned me off of toxic swagger.

I will continue carving out time to explore the reverb of Baby Talk in my own life, in the broader culture. Always, I’ll seek the individual qualities of the VoiceMusic of intimacy.

I dedicate all future meditations and research to June Harris, my January mother with the summer name, whose ethical voice so often reminded me: My love is your love.

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… [W]henever I’m in public, especially when I’m in public, I’m quick to call a Black man Sir — whether he’s panhandling that quarter on city streets, standing with me in the supermarket line, or balling with me on the basketball court. And the normal reaction is for them to be cool in return. In other words, the human response is to be cool. Defenses melt. Cats be smiling. Courtesy is the rule. Maybe it’s my unapologetic leap of faith to think — no feel — this is a foundation from which we can help Black men heal their psychic and social wounds. Maybe it’s my own brand of street corner philosophy to believe treating a man like a human being will mean, nine times out of ten, getting treated like one in return. Maybe there ain’t enough science in my argument for the real experts to take it seriously. Well, just who are the experts on the inner emotional labyrinth of Black men? Who’s able to spread on the table facts and figures, evidence and analysis, examples and anecdotes, songs and stories that say there is no room for an effective, national surge of common courtesy, mutual respect, healing laughter, intelligent challenge, intense listening, and downright kindness toward every Black man we come to meet? Who’s got the magic words, government study, foundation report, or bible printout that document some alternative formula we need to excite a man into reaching his potential?” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Riffing off of Nikki … in Ego Tripping: I/we love you inside and throughout all of forever; knowing that even your doubts, complexities, and errors are magnificently correct.
– Dr. Thomas A. Gordon, Psychologist, November 2019

At the dawn of 2020, I’m dipping back into the expansive conversation I had with Dr. Thomas A. Gordon, recorded June 1, 2019. In my post of July 30, 2019, I promised that I’d sip again from our conversation, which lasted for more than a scintillating hour.

In the edited excerpt below, we grapple with the very idea that it’s possible to choose happiness (wreak happiness?) within the crucibles brought to boiling by oppressive people and forces, histories and systems.

Is there really a choice for folks who have been consigned to social death? Are we consigned to being happy-go-lucky in order to survive?

Gordon doesn’t shy away from what’s ugly. He orients me, in fact, toward embracing my obligations in the face of what’s ugly. He invites me to be fueled by my core freedoms of conscience, of integrity, of will.

Is choosing happiness easy? HELL-to-the-NO!

But after my conversations with Thomas Gordon, and we’ve been conversation partners since the 1980s, I come away sensing that choosing happiness is the sum of my other elemental choices:

Choosing human connections. Choosing community and morality. Choosing dignity and integrity. Choosing fulfillment and loyalty. Choosing to trust that in danger I can find pivot points towards sanity and safety and sanctity.

∞

PJH: Do we have the choice to be joyful or happy? We have the capacity to be those things in the middle of trauma or oppression. Should we be doing it in your opinion?

GORDON: The quick answer is yes, yes. It is not only possible. It is required of a conscious-slash-moral being. … If you really are awake to who you are, you have a capacity to make choices to preserve, advance, expand, transform who you are to be better than you were yesterday, irrespective of the circumstances that you’re in.

… So Frantz Fanon, the Black psychiatrist, used to say, be very very careful each day, meaning be mindful each day, of your capacity to make choices, and do not make choices that renounce your freedom. If at sunrise they’re going to hang us, I still say … no one could predict how we’re going to walk to the gallows. NO! Because you still got choices. … We all might be saying Margaret Walker’s ‘For My People’ on the first five steps. Let there be a ‘bloody peace.’ … [B]efore we go to the gallows, we [might] take out 10 people.

You can’t ever strip human beings of all of their capacity to choose, unless you take away their mind. … Unless they’re literally strung out on acid or drama! … For most of us, we have more choices than we realize. Which is what our enemy wants: us to always be unconscious. They don’t want you to realize how much power you have….

PJH: I think there’s a serious difference between happiness and being happy-go-lucky. I see happiness as everything from an enzyme to a catalyst to a quest. I think happy-go-lucky is when you’re just performing to make the money or to get safe. And maybe there are moments when you have to be happy-go-lucky to escape or something…. How would you put happiness in a political context…?

GORDON: [American culture] starts shaping people to actually Identify with themselves as the only point of reference. So you end up having a very disorientated, distracting and defeatist, self-referential-type being that can say, ‘I’m happy-go-lucky.’ Meaning I can do, willy nilly, arbitrarily, at any moment, whatever I want to do, and not really connect it or reference it to —not only a moral framework, but even a practical framework, because ‘I don’t have to. I am authorized to be self-referential ONLY!’

Now what you want is healthy people who can be self referential and moral, not either/or. … People take happiness to mean: ‘I don’t have to think. I’m so swept up in euphoria. I’m swept up in manic, euphoric pleasure, that I can therefore be not sober or mindful.’ And that’s very localized to this society. So you’ll see [someone who] didn’t think about the consequences of what he was going to say. He just exploded … and didn’t care about the consequences. Didn’t think about the ripple effects. Didn’t think that what you do now is going to affect seven generations….

That’s not what you’re talking about. You’re not talking about being independent apart from a moral framework. You’re saying deeply embedded. …You don’t want people happy-go-lucky. You want people deeply happy … grounded. Otherwise … they [ignore] consequences on other human beings and the ecology that sustains them. That’s an illusion.

∞

Epilogue: In November, I wrote Dr. Gordon a personal and professional update, owning up that I felt shadowed by some nagging doubts. An excerpt of his encouraging email, dated November 7, 2019, synchronizes his message of connection.

“As for today’s doubts, let them be navigationally instructive. There’s something there to be named and spotlighted. Doubt prompts/forces/invites us to slow down and check the journey’s invisible knapsack for compass, practical support kit, and bi-lingual flashlights.

“Doubt, like many things meant to be taken in moderation, only seems problematic until we realize it’s sharpening our real-time readiness to move and rally some folks to go to places they wouldn’t ordinarily go. …Rumbling with doubt … [means] you’re on the move.

“Doubt slows us down, as we’re about to enter unknown curves or terrain — the better for us to move more swiftly ahead.”

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “…I am embracing, craving and exploring my complex humanity as an African American man. Critical celebration has guided me into nuanced self reflection and evolving curiosity about a simple, provocative question: What is a happy Black man? How does he navigate the labyrinth of life? How do I? I am a son, brother, father, grandfather. I am a lover, apprentice to wiser elders, straight man crafting brotherhood with my gay Homeboy. I am an orphan seeking affirmation after the deaths of my mother and father. I have confronted, survived, and transcended my youngest daughter’s rape by her Black step father.  A happy Black man?  I am done with surviving. I’m done with Black History Month packaging, the symbolic roll call of the heroes and the readings of their pronouncements. I’ve been ordained by anonymous, daily, often agonizing work, in search of timeless health and lasting jubilee. The Black man of happiness has blossomed. I’m hungry for the change of ball bearings! I’m ready to pour the love packed in honey. I am ….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

Photo by Darrell Fields

Earlier this year, I was removing the last of some 50 boxes from a storage unit.

Finally, after losing my house to foreclosure in 2014, I felt haunted by a question of renewal:

What will I live for?

For five years, other questions, reflecting anger, frustration, and despair, had been pissing me off:

What the hell are in these boxes? Why didn’t I just let them all go and move on?

But then I found treasures, emotional and administrative, that viscerally reminded me why I scrambled every month to keep paying Public Storage.

I found photos of my children. I found love letters. I excavated more than 10 years of PAID LA County tax bills. I fingered pages of correspondence to the Maryland child support agency and trembled holding documentation of my years-long financial contributions to my kids’ support after divorcing their Moms.

Flooded with emotion, I found even more reasons to keep my head to the sky.

I blew dust off the layout boards for my book of Kwanzaa tales, Wherever Dreams Live; I fingered the design flats for Genetic Dancers, the magazine “for and about the Artistry Within African/American Fathers.” I held in my hand evidence of consistent cultural work during the 1980s.

Next I found plastic containers holding tapes of me reading poetry at The Getty Center, and other venues around LA during the 1990s. Just reading the labels, I could hear the  echoes of poets blending voices, often in the Inspiration House PoetryChoir format, which demanded we improvisationally respond to each other and to virtuoso musicians playing with us. At our best, we transformed readings into ceremonies, into mini rites of passages!

Ultimately, I found cassettes and CDs recorded at KPFK-FM while I produced and hosted Inspiration House: VoiceMusic for Whole Living, the weekly poetry-music radio show that held down Mondays, 10-11 p.m., from 1999 to 2004. That show, in fact, set the framework for the PoetryChoir format.

Coughing through dust, reclaiming my life, and ignoring my aching back, I knew it was time for an LA Resurrection!

∞

It was easily 2 am. My oldest brother Glenn had come home from his ramblings. He entered the room we shared. Glenn is eight years older than me, and back in 1973 he was our family’s official hippie, living a life about as far from 9 to 5 as he could get. I was already asleep, but I could hear him firing up his turntable and amp. After he dropped the needle, the speakers blasted Buddy Miles’ LA Resurrection. To say that music woke me up is laughable! I actually wanted to strangle Glenn. I cannot recall if he lowered the volume, or even played the song to its resolve. But close to 50 years later that song still jumpstarts me!

∞

Frederick Douglass wrote in his Growlery. I wrote, lived, loved and lost in my Inspiration House, my actual cottage in one of LA’s urban canyons, where I picked tangerines from the tree growing in the sloped backyard; where I sheltered my daughter after we put her criminal ex-stepfather in jail for rape; where on any given equinox I gathered with musicians, poets, dancers, and community servants of all kind, from all cultures, speaking languages of all kinds, swapping their humanity, and scarfing home-cooked greens and potato salad prepared by VKali, my sister from another mother!

∞

But I can’t let Inspiration House simply conjure sentimentality about a specific home (or even poetry readings). It’s a concept, a personal mission and vision, that opens my spirit to (re)starting my future. It helps me remember I’m a ‘miracle wrapped up in human flesh’ worthy of rolling up my sleeves (my pants pulled up YEARS ago), and learning from my experience, intellectual stamina, task-oriented concentration, entrepreneurial leaps of faith, and creative productivity, while always walking the talk of that proverb my father used: Say what you mean, mean what you say, then do what you promise!

I lost the crib but I didn’t give up then, and I aint giving up now. Recently I wrote my son and daughter: “I am still angry that I lost my LA house to foreclosure after living in my crooked cottage for some 15 years. I am not paralyzed. I know my home was made of wood and stone, and that I will have another home in my future. Yet I still struggle … after all the time, ideas, money, taxes, sacrifices, friendships, love, pain, and pleasure that I’ve invested here, after arriving with you guys in 1991. I truly wanted to keep my home and then pass it on to y’all. So – deepest truths be told – I’m not a blank slate emotionally and financially.”

∞

These are year-end meditations from a mature African American man grappling with changes and challenges in life. I’m on the trail of natural beauty, riffing about happiness, joy, beauty, aging, and the importance of creativity and imagination in a well-lived life.

My quest is to live a default style of collaboration, so that across all platforms – former jobs, contracted work, and community collaborations, former wives, lovers, and extended family – folks don’t need truth serum to describe me (flaws and all!) as trustworthy, ethical, collegial, candid, responsible, accountable, competent, curious, reliable, and a valuable asset to whatever mission is at hand.

∞

Brain researcher V.S. Ramachandran was asked in a TV interview about a critical skill necessary to envision, then fully participate in the crafting of a satisfying life. Ramachandran’s ‘best answer’? “Creativity. Metaphor. Poetry” … and collaborating with “people who have a poetic mind, and people who are passionate about what they do, who think of life as a grand adventure….”

∞

On the Metro recently, I watched this African American woman twist a black balloon into the shape of a dachshund for a Latino boy, who gazed in awe as the sculpture came to life. Before giving the child his gift, the woman asked the mother and father for permission. When they nodded yes, the boy cradled his new pet. Faces shined. Simple, uplifting pleasure reverberated among the quartet of strangers.

And one smiling witness, who’s on the move again!

And it’s starting to feel good.

People get ready there’s a train a coming!

∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right,’ WINNER, 2015 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD: “… Last Will & Testament of Peter J. Harris (To Be Executed Over My Dead Body): When I reach the end, I want my ‘homegoing’ ceremony to be a house party! I mean it! Whoever officiates, however it is officiated, let’s turn up the music, let’s clap hands, let’s dance, let’s parade, let’s live! One person in attendance, or a thousand, let’s exhale in common humanity. Forgive me if I’ve clutched any grudges to my grave. Pass on any wisdom I ran up on along the way. Choose a song (breath, gesture, moan) over a speech. And keep any speeches timed as if folks got to head back to work…. So, here it go, yall, starting with my own Overture: I lived my life seeking stylish equilibrium between perspiration and celebration. Each day, I tried to be a valuable participant in any encounter or experience, from the smallest and most randomly anonymous, to the most intensely formal, scheduled and socially ritualized. Each day, I tried to express myself, ask questions, listen without prejudice, search for more humane ways of connecting and collaborating with folk, protection of the vulnerable, justice in the evolution of my society, and respect for individuality within community. If I worked it right, my absence will conjure a frangrance specific enough to make everyone from my closest intimates to professional colleagues, say, ‘This individual right here!’ before launching into a flashback that uniquely describes how our paths joined up in a memorable way, in a way that changed us both for the better. And left us refreshed and ready, always ready ….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop