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“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

Walking the beach. Listening to Ashford and Simpson. I found a cure!

A stunning realization flooded my spirit as I danced like nobody was watching on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, as I dipped in time to the elegant duo’s dance-floor bass line and the calming echo of undulating waves.

This F-bomb dropping, poetry-loving, gray-haired grandfather walks a round-the-way illuminated path!

I’ve been on this path since walking the sidewalks of my youth in Southeast D.C.!

I was set on this path of right living by the marching orders of anonymous men and women of dignity, hard-working guardians confident in the facts of their urban lives built on rural gumption, governed by truths elemental as proverbs, consecrated by a foundational truth forged from their tribulations:

As long as you alive, keep your eyes on the prize, your shoulder to the wheel, do what you gotta do until you get what you want, sing, dance, gather, argue, own up, show up, show out, but remember one humbling and magisterial article of faith:

He May Not Come When YOU Want Him, But The Lord IS ALWAYS RIGHT ON TIME!

∞

I can smell Daddy’s roses. Planted in the small rectangle of earth beside the walkway to our crib on 5^th Street, where we moved when I was 16. It was my parent’s first house after years renting apartments.

Each petal carpeting our walk way honored … Vintage mothers who lived aloe vera lives. Timeless fathers who blazed trails smell like eucalyptus. Neighbors who lined their footsteps with salve. Baby sitters whose touch promised salvation. Teachers who squirted nourishment from their larynx.

From that strip of concrete, I stepped into my future with history as my homeboy, grounded by the wisdom and fragrance of flowers hand-tended without chemicals. I sought what’s sacred, hoped for what’s sacred.

And you know I listened for what’s sacred, bopping to an ever-widening mix tape from music sourced from around the world: Milton Nascimento; Pete Escovedo; Omar Sosa; Sufi whirling dervishes.  

My journey still beckons, so I can only hope my work will forge a rep that releases wisdom and fragrance from my cocoon of anonymity.

But wherever my round-the-way illuminated path takes me, whatsoever I run up on, I know it’s got to be funky!

And for sure it will represent a truth elemental as a proverb: I talk like I’m from somewhere (you know) … I talk like I’m from somewhere.

∞

Like I’m From Somewhere

I don’t mind you hearing
the echo of oceans when I speak
surf droning/offshore misting/grit itching
years of California
will do that to a voice

I don’t mind you wondering
if I got the South caked on my palate
Virginia swaying/Maryland grinning/Florida thickening
Atlantic Seaboard bloodlines
will dictate to a sensitive tongue like that

I don’t mind you debating professors
etched their philosophies on my wisdom teeth
Howard pledging/U.C. trembling/FAMU stepping
walking different yards
can make footnotes slant down
the ramp of my mouth like that

but I don’t want you confused
cocking your ear & asking me
“repeat that please”
cause I’m speaking like maybe I haven’t tasted
pork rinds & TruAde sodas or sugarjones apple cobbler
or spent time in the kitchen of a rural Baptist church
while my aunts & sister cousins turned
fresh produce & dead meat
into meals for fall revivals

I don’t want you taking me for some
sandpapered college graduate chose booklearning
over the cornbread-filled story telling
float into the shade trees covering the mouths
of men & women who never did migrate
up D.C. up Baltimore up Philly or
points higher on the compass

I want you to know I been somewhere
that I got some sense in my head
but somewhere I got sent with the blessings
of chicken fryers/truck drivers/automotive magicians/
grizzled rabbit farmers/factory-line men/lullaby-fingered
babysitters & other Christian relatives
always had my back
even when they didn’t know my particular zipcode
at a particular time or whether I was quoting somebody
after clearing my throat or telling my own Anacostia
story at family reunions held under laughing green leaves

I want you to know I been somewhere
but I want you to know
I aint never really left either

I talk like I’m from somewhere (you know)
I talk like I’m from somewhere


∞

BONUS EXCERPT from my book, Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My ‘Unalienable Right’: “…During my last visit with Pops, in the 93 Christmas/Kwanzaa season, he glowed because I was home, along with my teenaged son and daughter. When it came time for that December 25th meal, he was overjoyed…. As folk laughingly fixed plates from the buffet, daddy sat beside me on the sofa. I could smell that he’d been tasting the corn liquor his older brother supplied from our family’s rural Stomping Grounds in Powhatan, Virginia. I resisted my gut reaction to dis him for drinking, because it conjured arguments, inappropriate sexual innuendo, and a smell I associate with unhealthiness. Instead, with a deep breath centering me in the holiday sprit, I affectionately palmed the back of his head, put my arm around his shoulders, and waited for my turn at the table.

“Peter,” he said, his voice slurred more with emotion than the liquor, “I’m so happy that everybody could be here.”

Then he said to me under his breath, his voice this time slurred more with the liquor than emotion:

“Look at that ham! Just look at it! Hacked to pieces! Goddamn it! Can’t nobody never carve it right.”

I had forgotten this pet peeve of his; after all, I been a vegetarian since 79. But as long as I’d known him, he really did get pissed, his country-boy chef’s eye really was violated, the elegance of his holiday table really was ruined, if you chopped chunks, rather than cut slices, off a ham or turkey. Especially if he’d been tasting!

But this wasn’t the time nor place for his Gemini-ass to trip off into his growling, evil twin.

“It ain’t nothing but dead meat, no way,” I cracked, playfully punching his shoulder. “Go head over there and cut it up right, if it’s messing with you so much.”

“Naw, naw, it’s too late now. It’s already been fucked up. I’m leaving it alone.”

He gazed once more at the sacrificial ham. Checked out his loved ones enjoying themselves and settled back into the sofa with an expression of simmering contentment. In the end, the pull of our ritual was irresistible. He was satisfied with having spoken his peace — which was only right, according to the psychic Man of the House Manual by which he lived. But finally he was, I believe, glad to just groove on the sounds of enjoyment after a life of work and raising a family. Sitting pretty for a country boy with no formal education and nothing saditty about him. He would reach 69 the hard way — one anonymous day at a time. He was happy….” www.blackmanofhappiness.com/shop

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