Summary: Writing My American Life: Uprisings to Civil War

Two-thirds of the way through writing this memoir I’m calling Writing My American Life, I realized that there was a through line to my life story that mirrored that of America’s contemporary history.

That’s why I subtitled the memoir, ‘From The Uprisings to Civil War.

 I grew up close enough to the Uprisings that took place in Newark New Jersey in the late 1960s to see and smell smoke rising from burning building where I had shopped with my family. Other cities where the mainstream media reported pejoratively that there were  race riots taking place.  Without explaining how a race would riot, or why. These places  included Detroit, Watts, Chicago, Atlanta, Birmingham Los Angelus Chicago and New York.

The smoke was real; everything else not so much. I’m talking about what I was watching and reading in the mainstream media. At this time there were few, if any places that I knew of being only a teenager, where you could get alternative takes on the news. I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t true, but I didn’t understand why or what was...

Witnessing the Uprisings and feeling more confused than being satisfied by what I was seeing and hearing ab is what pushed me to become a writer.

I wrote my first novel, called Area, when I was in my early twenties. It was about three young persons, Black, white, male and female, growing up in and around Newark at the time of the Uprisings.   I wasn’t writing a story to make a sociological or political treatise; instead, I wanted to look at how the same events were experienced and perceived differently by people in the same place and time. And report on the emotional response to watching the city around you burn down while National Guard troops patrolled the area in armored vehicles and looked down at us as though we were the ones  didn’t belong here. The Italian kids threw rocks at them.

At about the same time I started writing my memoir, I came to the Ivy House Studio for an event. The event was cancelled and when Julie, who manages the studio, told me that Ivy House was a community based art studio showcasing the work local creatives, I told her that I enjoyed telling stories in places like this.

During the last couple of years I’d been reading and performing stories I’d about what it was like for me spending eighteen months in the NYC homeless shelter system. I called them, ‘Shelter Ditties.’. I’d been reading and performing these stories at the Public Theater and Town Hall. They included stories with titles like Covid in Brooklyn? No Shit!, and one of my favorites, that I wrote while in a homeless shelter in   the Bronx. How Caucasian Became my Preferred Pronoun.’

Julie then invited me to tell a story.

 The story I told that day is called It Requires Some Discipline. It takes place in a Brooklyn hotel turned shelter on Memorial Day weekend, 2020.

My roommate was a twenty-seven-year-old Hispanic man. When I asked him where he was from he told me, ‘Born and bred in Brooklyn!’

‘Alright.’

He came to the shelter  directly from Riker. He just did seven years for gang assault.

‘Did you?’

‘No, man, me and my friends was just horsing around when a gang of cops took us in A detective told us they’d drop the charges if we dimed some older kids they wanted bad.’

Him and his friends chose  wisely not to snitch but then  spent almost his entire 20s locked up in a cage. What struck me mosed to t was the matter-of-fact way he told me about this, like it was just part of growing up in New York City for young men like him.

 He then became animated when he asked me if I’d heard about George Floyd. I shrugged my shoulders. I was about as tuned into what was going on in mainstream American culture as it cared  about what was  going on with me in here

He showed a photo on his phone of an adult Black man lying on the ground with someone’s knee pressed against his neck. Even though I was not closely following the news I knew that lately there were incidents like this taking place regularly across the country.

The cop whose knee was on the man’s neck was white and he looked into the camera gloating defiantly.

I said, ‘I’m sorry, Bro. That’s fucked up.’

The hotel shelter was located on the southern part of Atlantic Avenue and later that day one of the largest Black Lives Matters demonstration popped up on the street below our window. My roomy started whistling and cheering like we were watching a Saturday afternoon  college football game. When I walked over to the window what I saw impressed me.

It was a large number  of people who appeared jubilant and triumphant, angry and defiant. Plus. I noticed that there was significant number of young Caucasian men and women marching alongside them.

It took more than an hour for all the demonstrators  to pass by. My roomy didn’t go out to join the march because he feared it might be a parole violation and he still had a couple of years left on his full sentence.

A few hours later he started getting live feeds on Instagram from some of his friends who joined the march. They were now approaching  the Barclay Center with its high end shopping boutiques.

I could hear him tell his friends, ‘No don’t hit that place its owned by locals, but get me one of those, and that.’

Later, when it was close to lights out for the day. , I let  him know that I grew up during the Uprisings in Newark in the late 60s and that even though the uprisings were set off by the   police beating of a nineteen year old cab driver and Newark resident, all you saw on the news were pictures and videos of stores burning and Black people going in and out of the stores looting them. I remembered seeing those  videos repeating over and over on TV day in and day out for weeks.

I told him that if you want to lead a movement it requires some discipline.

He was no more receptive to my advice than I would have been when I was his age. But a week later I found a pair of new official NBA shorts on my bed.

When asked, I tell people that I believe  we are now on the verge of another  Civil War in America because we didn’t address the reasons for the first Civil War or understand why Black Americans rose up in rebellion during The Uprisings

I don’t think you can understand the first Civil War without knowing about Slavery. Both of my parents were first generation Americans, so there was no one from my family who was around then to pass down the knowledge. Like most Americans I studied history in high school and college. So I knew the dates and places of the Civil War, but not why it took place. History books and movie made it seem like slavery was a benign even quaint part of southern plantation life.

It wasn’t until I was an an adult, when I read Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved that I began to understand what slavery really was.  the novel is based on a true story about a Black woman who, when she finds out that her only child, her daughter.  is about to be interned into slavery, she kills the child. .

All of us who have experienced mother-love knows how strong that bond is and probably can’t comprehend how any mother in her right mind could kill her daughter   Yet it happened. Why?

There’s a reason Toni Morrison is one of only a dozen American writers who earned a Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison provides s harrowingly detailed  narrative just what it was like to he a slave. It was the  systematic brutalization of a race of people to  dehumanize them so that they’d allow themselves and their children to be bought and sold as property to be done with as the owners pleased.

.    When the woman is arrested and charged with murder her  defense attorney eloquently argues for an acquittal of the murder charge on the grounds that  under the circumstances – forced dehumanizing  enslavement – the homicide was justified.  You will find yourself going against every human instinct there is to protect children, like I did. and agree that given the choice killing the child  was the more humane option. That’s how bad slavery was.

I also don’t think you can understand how or why The Uprisings took place if you are not familiar with the ghettoes that existed in all of the cities that went up in flames during the 1960s. I have family in Newark. Newark at the time was tribal. . You had your Italian sections of the city, Irish and Jewish ones. In order to get to any one neighborhood, you had to pass through one of more of the others.

The Black section of the city was like none of the others. If you saw it for the first time you would probably think it had been ravaged by war and this is what was left standing, barely. Buildings were abandoned or in disrepair, empty lots were strewn with trash and the people you saw looked beyond weary from the everyday grind of trying to survive while being intentionally impoverished. These ghettoes were completely cut off from the resources – jobs, infrastructure funding, etcetera - that made the rest of America one of the wealthiest countries in the world. When you passed through the ghetto you could feel how  the atmosphere was  charged with despair, desperation, anger and rage.

I was the youngest in my family, so I sat in the front seat of our car between my parents so my older brother and sister could play in the back.

Whenever we passed through the ghetto, I would feel anxious, stop breathing, and bury my head in my mother’s coat until we passed through. I would not have the words to express what I was feeling at that time until years later when I heard people chanting ‘I Can’t Breathe!’’ If I felt that way just by passing through the neighborhood, I could only imagine how the people living there felt.

So I was not surprised when The Uprisings flared up. If anything, I wondered why it took so long to happen

Not that long ago,  many of us were feeling that America was finally moving past its history and practice of white supremacy and racism. There was the two -term presidency of Barak Obama and then the surprising solidarity among  so many Americans showing opposition to police brutality against Black Americans.

But here we are again, finding ourselves facing another racist backlash. led by a demagogue opportunist. Thus, we find ourselves once again on the precipice of another Civil War.  

So where do we go from here? What are we gonna do?

The shit’s going to hit the fan in November no matter what happens in the election. I feel we need to start preparing ourselves for that now by fortifying our communities so we have safe places to go to and network. And continue doing what we’ve been doing here at Ivy House. Listening, embracing, supporting and celebrating one another’s differences and similarities.

Let’s keep on going doing this until they say we can’t do it no more. Then do it some more.

My family may not have been here for the American Civil War. But I’m here because they knew how to survive and overcome autocrats and dictators. We can do this!

Peace.