PART TWO
My grandma Katie, while renting her
one-room living space, would choreograph our ride on the buses from Ferguson to one of those
glorious old downtown movie houses that showed Big Effervescent Movie Musicals.
I was only 8-years old when we went to see South
Pacific, splashed across the big screen in all its fabulousness; foreshadowing my
future: a film that depicted unrequited love, a drag number and a moral lesson.
You've
got to be taught
To
hate and fear,
You've
got to be taught
From
year to year,
It's
got to be drummed
In
your dear little ear
You've
got to be carefully taught.
You've
got to be taught to be afraid
Of
people whose eyes are oddly made,
And
people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You've
got to be carefully taught.
You've
got to be taught before it's too late,
Before
you are six or seven or eight,
To
hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've
got to be carefully taught!
I wonder how my sissy boy self
responded to those lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. Could I have understood the ache
of “Some Enchanted Evening”? Predictably, I screeched when the butch men
created campy femaleness, transforming coconuts into titties.
Even though our household echoed with the delivery of
pejoratives, taking flight and landing like lethal insects, I knew—even at
“seven or eight”—that the “n” word was particularly virulent. Both of my
parents used the noxious word—almost always fastened to a specific reference
that described a person’s behavior. This is, please believe me, no defense.
However, my father’s work often placed him in an
authoritative role with black men who were trained to be subservient, but I
never had the impression, not once, that my father had any degree of malice in
his heart toward these men (not “boys”) of color. In his case, actions spoke
more genuinely than his “casual” use of the “n-word” (remember, this was the
Fifties). Yet the sound of the word made me uncomfortable; the powerful
venomousness coursed through my body, making me slightly nauseous but not
knowing exactly why.
Even at six years old, I distinctly remember
something stirring in my being when we gathered around the television set (a
temporary gag order must have been placed on the incessant name-calling) to
watch Elvis Presley’s ballyhooed performance on the Ed Sullivan
Show. Although the television cameras were determined
to censor Presley’s pulsating lower body, my lower body was awakening to the
clarion call of sexual desire.
Zo, my traveling bud (etc), and I decided to
visit Memphis on our way to see my brother, incarcerated at a Missouri federal
penitentiary in Charleston, Missouri; about 150 miles between the two
locations. Visiting Graceland is only one of
the multitudinous treats that my bro will undoubtedly never experience, even if
he does get paroled before he turns 75.
"It is a commercialized piece of real estate
that posits itself as monumental as Mount Rushmore
but isn’t even worthy of comparisons to Grant’s Tomb."
So Zo and I bring Graceland
into the confines of the prison visiting room, letting Joe know that he is missing
nothing on this overblown day-trip. It is a commercialized piece of real estate
that posits itself as monumental as Mount Rushmore
but isn’t even worthy of comparisons to Grant’s Tomb.
Knowing my brother’s quirkiness regarding race (in
spite of his apparent shift of perception during the past decade), we avoid too
much storytelling regarding the pinnacle of our visit to Memphis :
the Lorraine Motel—brilliantly attached, emotionally and architecturally, to the
National Civil Rights
Museum
After
parking the rental car, Zo and I nonchalantly turn a corner and our bodies involuntarily
freeze. Approximately twenty yards in front of us is the balcony where King was
shot.
I try to
recreate the horrific moment. He has just stepped onto the balcony to deliver a
speech to support the striking sanitation workers, when a single bullet enters
the right side of his face, approximately an inch to the right, and a half inch
below, his mouth. His jaw is fractured as the bullet exits the lower part of
his face and reenters the body in the neck area, severing vital arteries and
fracturing the spine in several places, causing severe damage to the spinal
column.
He tumbles
to the ground in a pool of blood. Andrew Young rushes to King’s imperiled body
in order to check his pulse.
The bullet
came from the direction of a rooming house across the street where a man is
seen escaping on foot, leaving clues to his identity. A fugitive from the Missouri State
Never
regaining consciousness, King is pronounced dead at
The previous
night, he delivered a sermon containing these immortal words: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it
really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop…and He’s
allowed me to go up to the mountain,” King said. “And I’ve looked over, and
I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to
know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
I was finishing high
school when King died, focusing on my potential career as an actor. In the typical white American unconsciousness of the Kearns ’ family, Reverend King did not get star billing. Do I
remember where I was when I heard of his death? I don’t. I don’t remember being
taught much about King, a pivotal player in our political/cultural arena, not
even a mention in the “Current Events” aspect of our Social Studies class.
"Even though she was far more interested in The Lion King
than Martin Luther King, I persisted..."
Honoring Martin Luther
King Day, I began reading King’s historic speech to Katherine, my black adopted
daughter, when she was nine or ten years old. Even though she was far more
interested in The Lion King than
Martin Luther King, I persisted—even insisting we go to the Martin Luther King
Day parade. Surveying the crowd where her daddy was one of the few whites in a
sea of many-hued black folk, she said—with so much emotion it was emotionless—“Now
you know what it feels like.”
She was not the only
one who could deliver a good punchline. Maintaining the mantle of Kearns ’ storytelling, we have “colored” (so to speak)
this folklore for audience reaction (so laugh if you want to):
“Is that your baby?”
some dingbat woman asked me, standing in line at the grocery store. “No, I’m
babysitting for Diana Ross,” I deadpanned. “Where’s Mommy?” was a common query,
marked by extreme thoughtlessness in spite of the questioner’s theatrically furrowed
brow. “I’m her Mommy,” I deadpanned with a bit of an edge. Finally, one
busybody who had seen too many television pilots, asked, “Are you her nanny?” I
was finally at a loss for words.
“I’m black,” she proclaimed with a tone of discovery—half kidding, the other half
plaintively serious—over long distance lines from Bournemouth, England, where
she was in her first year of college in 2013; her first year in a truly diverse
setting during a critical time for most twenty year olds when identity and ideology
begin to take shape.
Ironically, her personal
discovery has accompanied an America
It is imperative for
me is to be vigilant to the emotional cues that come with the numbness that
pervades my black child. Because even though Katherine is about to turn
twenty-two, she is my black child. Even though she can orchestrate (and pay)
for a trip—by herself—that traversed a section of the Midwest ,
she is my black child.
When she insisted on
being dropped off curbside at the airport, Zo and I complied. And as Katherine slung
a backpack over her shoulder, with a sense of her father’s bravado, she gave us
those de rigueur airport hugs and
kisses, then disappeared into the crowd.
My black child
disappeared into the crowd. My anxiety was no different than when I dropped her
off for her first day of kindergarten. Rules at the progressive school she
attended were not to be disregarded; we had been instructed to deposit our kids,
providing a simple hug but be careful not to fuel the potential of our children’s
dependence.
My black little girl went
to kindergarten (with predominantly white “peers”). I drove away crying, knowing that the “goodbyes” would begin mounting and
I would be, like it or not, letting go (a phrase I’d like to bury). I don’t
know how many goodbyes separated the first day of kindergarten and the
wrenching experience of leaving her in England
Katherine had returned
to America in time for Mike Brown’s death, significantly occurring in a part of
the country she had actually visited; a place untarnished became a scene of
horror that she, along with the rest of the world, saw immortalized over and
over on every news outlet that existed: Ferguson became iconic during the
amount of time that Brown’s body was frying on the street in the blistering
August sun.
Brown’s death is what
began the discourse, and continues to energize our father-daughter relationship,
virtually on a daily basis; his murder, the country’s mood and my daughter’s
stimulating response has resulted in my conscious commitment to travel this
vibrant black cultural road, encompassing its bumpy past and its precarious
future, alongside her. Katherine is my guide, my teacher, and what she endures,
and what all black people endure, informs my morality.
If I cannot find my
way into the interior life that she battles? If I cannot empathize with her
unique place in the world she inhabits, I will have failed her—as a father, as
a human being.
Race has begun to dominate
my palette as I—with worn-down energy playing opposite accelerated
passion—dedicate my artistic construct and my public position, to the black
lives that matter. And my daughter holds my hand and whispers truths in my ear.
Brown’s body was frying on the street in the blistering August sun."
During decades spent
in service to the GLBT lives that matter and the AIDS deaths that matter,
racial consciousness was largely treated like a distant cousin when it likely
should have been looked at as a sibling. I have begun to adjust my allegiances,
as I complete my sixth decade on this exhilarating social justice train, in art
and in life.
And while I may not be
able to move mountains, I will determinedly look over towering purple mountaintops
as my daughter points—with reticence but also with hope—toward the Promised
Land.
We, as a people, will
get to the Promised Land.
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