Before the Commissioners

The following is a transcript of the Kenyatta’s appearance before the New York State parole board on February 25, 1999: STATE OF NEW YORK EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT DIVISION OF PAROLE ———————————————————————————- In the Matter of IBN KENYATTA INST. # 74-A-3701 NYSID ————- ———————————————————————————- TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS at a hearing held in the above-entitled matter by the … Continue reading Before the Commissioners

The following is a transcript of the Kenyatta’s appearance before the New York State parole board on February 25, 1999:

STATE OF NEW YORK
EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT
DIVISION OF PAROLE

———————————————————————————-

In the Matter
of
IBN KENYATTA
INST. # 74-A-3701
NYSID ————-

———————————————————————————-

TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS at a hearing held in the above-entitled matter by the State of New York Executive Department, Division of Parole, on the 25th day of February, 1999, Fishkill Correctional Facility General, Fishkill, New York.

BEFORE:
COMMISSIONER VANESSA A. CLARKE
COMMISIONER MARIETTA S. GAILOR

PRESENT:

ALEXANDER YANUKLIS, S.P.O.
EDAPPARA MATHEWS, F.P.O. I
ROBERT MROCZEK, F.P.O. I

LINDA W. WHITMORE
COURT STENOGRAPHER

Q: You are Ibn Kenyatta?

A: Yes.

Q: Mr. Kenyatta, I am Commissioner Gailor. With me today is Commissioner Clarke.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Good morning to you.

THE INMATE: How are you doing?

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right.

Q: You are reappearing before the Parole Board serving a 15-year-to-life term for attempted murder, A-1, and a seven-year definite term for criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree; is that correct?

A: Yes. That’s right.

Q: You were found guilty of these offenses after trial.

A: Yes. I was found guilty.

Q: Did you appeal these decisions?

A: I appealed, and I also am not guilty of these charges.

Q: What is the status of your appeal?

A: Well, I am still working on it.

Q: So, you have a pending appeal, right, open?

A: Well, yes.

Q: The reason that I say that is because we make a record of our interview here with you today, and that record could be subpoenaed by any court. Now, we wouldn’t want you to say anything on the record that could jeopardize your appeal. Do you understand?

A: Yes.

Q: Now, you initially saw the Parole Board–

A: I never saw a Parole Board. This is 10 years. I decided to come because I wanted to. I thought that you should get a chance–

Q: You refused in 1996.

A: From ’88 to ’98.

Q: Okay.

A: I decided to come today because I felt that after a decade I should see who I am–who was administering over me. And I have a message that I would like to put on the record.

Q: Okay.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay, Well, you know, you waited 10 years, more than that. This is your opportunity to say what you would like to say.

A: It is a written statement that I would like to read.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: How long is it?

THE INMATE: Three pages.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We don’t want you reading anything into the record. If you want us to review that document and make copies of it, we will review it.

A: Well, it is a statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: This is the Parole Board, you are here now, so tell us what you wanted to tell us.

THE INMATE: I have it here, I would like to–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You can refer to it. Just let us know. Talk. This is a conversation.

THE INMATE: Conversation?

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We are having a conversation, talking back and forth.

THE INMATE: Basically, it is just dealing with–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: We are talking to you and you are talking to us.

THE INMATE: It is, basically, dealing with why I have been refusing parole to appear–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay.

THE INMATE: –all of this time. I think that after 10 years, I should have permission to at least acknowledge why I have not been here.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay. You are here. Tell us whatever you want to tell us.

THE INMATE: Well, it is a statement. February of 1999 Parole Board. Dear Parole Commissioners, a free man in chains, a free man confined by the bars and the cages of the New York State prison system. For 10 long years I have turned my back on your parole system, refused to get down on my knees and beg for what is already mine, that those among you who say I am crazy, that such a position requires the attention of the State’s most clever psychiatrists.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right, Mr. Kenyatta, that’s it.

THE INMATE: You don’t want me to finish the statement?

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are not going to be allowed to read this, your personal journal, into the record. No, you can’t do it. Tell us whatever you would like to tell us. If you think that you shouldn’t be, as you say, on your knees before the Parole Board, I don’t know where you would come up with such a thing, but if that’s your opinion, then that’s your opinion. You don’t have to–

THE INMATE: It is not just my opinion, you don’t understand the terror that the Board has on the men and women that have to come before you. I mean, they, these are guys, women, are very bad in the street. When they come to this, they are out there trembling. For what? I mean, it is unfair the way that the Governor has set it up that there is six, seven, 85%, most of the guys know when they come in, they know that they are not going to go home.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Well, that’s also the opinion of maybe yourself, maybe others.

THE INMATE: Well, since I’m not allowed to read my statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Just tell us what you want to tell us. I mean–

THE INMATE: I prefer–it took me a good while to construct this.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Give us your written statement, let’s have the statement.

THE INMATE: Thank you.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Okay. I said that before if you wanted us to read it we will certainly read it.

THE INMATE: As a matter of fact, I don’t think that–if I can’t put it on the record, then I don’t think that I should have anything else to say. I am not looking for parole. I didn’t come here for parole.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Now, you realize that you have to be interviewed before a decision could be made to release you.

THE INMATE: I am not interested in that. I am interested in conditional release. I am interested in the charges of that I was convicted of–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You realize that you are serving a life sentence, sir?

THE INMATE: I understand that.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You said, conditional release.

THE INMATE: Unconditional release.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are saying “unconditional release?”

THE INMATE: Unconditional release.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Because there is no conditional release in your case.

THE INMATE: No. No. Got no CR.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Do you want this back?

THE INMATE: No. I want you all to keep it.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: All right.

THE INMATE: So, I think that that’s about it.

Q: That’s all you want to say to us?

A: I wanted to put the statement on the record, but since I’m not allowed to read it, I will just go back to my cell and wait for another two years.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: The inmate has submitted a document, statement to the February of 1999 Parole Board, basically, a personal–

THE INMATE: I think it is important.

COMMISSIONER GAILOR: It is a summary of his feelings toward–

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: The system.

COMMISSIONER GAILOR: Yes.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You are, basically, railing against the system and you feel that being incarcerated constitutes slavery–

THE INMATE: I think it is an important document, personally.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: You can have a seat, Mr. Kenyatta.

F.P.O. I. MATHEWS: Sit down.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Unless you would like to leave.

THE INMATE: I am free to go.

F.P.O. I. MATHEWS: They didn’t give you the order–

THE INMATE: If I can’t read it into the record, then I am going to leave. I appreciate, you know, the time that you all gave me.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Thank you.

Q: Thank you.

(Whereupon the inmate was excused from the hearing room at this time.)
(Off-the-record discussion between Commissioners at this time.)

DECISION:

Denied, 24 months, 11/2000.
Parole is denied due to the serious nature and circumstances of the instant offenses, attempted murder, criminal possession of a weapon, third, wherein records indicate that you shot a transit officer four times, resulting in his incurring serious physical injuries. A complete review of your record and your statement to the Board, dated 2/99, has been reviewed and considered. This Panel believes that you are an unacceptable candidate for release to parole supervision.

The guidelines are unspecified.

(Commissioner Clarke concurs.)

 

Neontest

Testing the waters of wide open apertures and neon lights in New York City.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

 

Parole Refusal

Parole boards across the nation routinely refuse parole to prisoners, but prisoners rarely refuse parole when it’s offered. There are cases on record, however: In Colorado in 1996 and 1997, more than 2,500 prisoners refused to attend parole hearings to protest what they considered harsh parole guidelines. Often prisoners choose to serve their maximum sentence … Continue reading Parole Refusal

Parole boards across the nation routinely refuse parole to prisoners, but prisoners rarely refuse parole when it’s offered. There are cases on record, however: In Colorado in 1996 and 1997, more than 2,500 prisoners refused to attend parole hearings to protest what they considered harsh parole guidelines. Often prisoners choose to serve their maximum sentence rather than be subject to parole supervision. (With a five-to-ten-year sentence, for example, they would prefer to serve the full ten years rather than accept parole and be out on the streets after five.) These examples amount primarily to silent protests behind the scenes, and on many occasions involve individuals who maintain their innocence.

Go back to Freedom, Deferred.

 

Kenyatta’s Artwork

I have always been interested in ibn Kenyatta’s artwork and poetry. They help me grasp, in small measure, his perspective and experience of living in a black skin. In his view, race was merely a matter of which of us was sprinkled with the most pigment at birth. Throughout his prison years Kenyatta has used … Continue reading Kenyatta’s Artwork

I have always been interested in ibn Kenyatta’s artwork and poetry. They help me grasp, in small measure, his perspective and experience of living in a black skin. In his view, race was merely a matter of which of us was sprinkled with the most pigment at birth.

Throughout his prison years Kenyatta has used his art, writing, and other creative pursuits as a distinctive form of commentary, one filtered through the prison experience. Both his drawings and poetry address the human condition, oppression, and the power of the individual in social change. Curators of his works use “social justice themes” when describing his art.

For example, “The Judicial Lynchin of Eve” is a 24 x 28 charcoal drawing of a silhouetted young African American girl, Eve Postell. In 1978, at age fourteen, she was sentenced to 114 years in prison for murder. The image includes prison bars, shackles, and an earring forming the letters 114.

A drawing of the late Billie Holiday has the lyrics to her song “God Bless the Child” sketched over her beautiful, ravaged face. A 1979 drawing of Safiya, “Black Graffiti,” includes dozens of “terms of endearments” surrounding her face.

Go back to Freedom, Deferred.

 

Letter from ibn Kenyatta to Marguerite Kearns

"… it was a special day. i had gone to the library on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn where i often went durin the week to study. it wasn't far from our apartment. on this particular day back on 29 January 1974, the whole day seemed strange."

September 30, 1993

8:25 p.m. Wednesday

dearest M.—

… it was a special day. i had gone to the library on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn where i often went durin the week to study. it wasn’t far from our apartment. on this particular day back on 29 January 1974, the whole day seemed strange. i discovered this book by John H. Williams, The King God Didn’t Save. it was on the assassination of Dr. King. in it Williams described how when the bullet hit Dr. King it tore into his chin and goin down penetratin into his chest and explodin. it was as if i could actually see the bullet as it travelled down inside of his body as i read. when i left the library at about 3:30 P.M. or so the sun was bright, so bright with its accompanyin sharp dark shadows. the brightness was almost blindin to my eyes. people of the street who i didn’t even know were speakin to me as i made my way to the apartment.

when i reached the apartment there were two guys there with B. one i knew from my days in D.C. with the organization. the other guy i would later learn was merely some cat he’d met on the street and got the guy to take him to my apartment. the guy i knew from D.C. was rollin up reefer on the livin room floor. the other cat cut out as soon as i got there. i took ah joint and got high myse’f. the guy from D.C., Marlowe, asked me to go back to his hotel with him where he was stayin off 42nd Street. he told me that he didn’t know his way back to the hotel. it was his first time to n.y. city. i just wanted to go to the dojo and workout. but i left with him anyhow. ‘gainst my own better judgment.

as he and i walked up Sterling Place toward Utica Avenue , there was this lil boy i used to always play with each day, sittin in the middle of the sidewalk. he looked at me so strange. he stared at me. his eyes were big, full, and focused, as tho he was seein ah ghost or somethin. his stare made me feel strange, uncomfortable … scared. he knew me, but he looked at me as tho i was ah total stranger to him. as i got close to him i stepped over his body, touchin his head with my hand as i passed. he continued to look up into my eyes without sayin ah word. i smiled ah weak smile at him. i wanted to stop right there and run. just run. run back to the apartment out of fear. somethin was wrong. i had kissed B. at the door, tellin her that i would return in ah lil while.

i haven’t been back since that day, Marguerite.

i went to his hotel with the bro from the street and he took out ah hit of mescaline (acid). i was already high from the reefer earlier at my apartment. now after droppin the mescaline i began trippin. i lost faith in Man that nite. he & i boarded the subway together headin uptown to Harlem to see another brother who was also in D.C. with us. this guy abandoned me on the train – i was trippin. i woke up some time much later, somewhere in the Bronx.

by the time i hit 149th Street & 3rd Avenue, where the shootout took place in the subway, i had stopped trippin, i was just tryin to git back home to Brooklyn. i just wanted to git back to my bed and sleep. i had carfare & ah train token when i approached the subway turnstile. i also noticed the transit cop on the platform with his back to me talkin to someone. i walked thru the turnstile without payin. i heard this loud, seemin’ly death defying screech from my back: “He didn’t pay his fare!” the transit cop turned around as i was passin thru the turnstile. i was thru. but i left the damn thang cocked in ah way that chu could see that it was still in the open position. i rushed off to the edge of the platform, waitin for the come down.

the black woman in the token booth told the high sheriff that i had beaten the fare. after ah few disagreements between us as to the status of my bein there on the platform – the transit cop attacked me on the head with his night stick. he is “white.” i am Black. it is approximately 2:30 a.m. on 30 January 1974. i was knocked unconscious. i only came to after repeated blows to the head from his nightstick & billy club (… leather strap with the metal at the end).

i took one of his guns and shot at him, hittin him in the legs, as he ran away. i couldn’t really see him b’cause of the amount of my own blood in my eyes. he hid behind ah solar can on the platform and fired two shots at me from his second handgun he carried in ah leg holster. i fell on the platform, blood shootin outta my skull. i came to with two cops kickin on my body to see if i was alive or dead. there was ah small grayish-red mound of blood, the shape of an anthill, on the platform in front of my eyes as i lay there contemplatin the rest of my life. actually i was thankin that it was my brain i saw before my eyes and i thought about how i wanted to die.

the two cops picked, jerked me up and as they were takin me out towards the steps, we were met with about eight other “new york finest” runnin down the steps to git me. i was thrown into ah corner of the station and they, all ten of them, tried to stomp my brains out. i fought them lyin on my back, lahk Bruce Lee, to ah stand still. i landed on my back with handcuffs on and i was kickin at them so fast and strong that they couldn’t git close enuf to me to hurt me. i was lyin there lookin at my feet moving and they jumpin back and tryin to git near me … it was lahk it was all happenin in ah dream. “take me to fuckin jail!” i said to them. they stopped. grabbed hold of me and drug me up the steps. when we got to the top, my head emergin from the subway, i saw all of these bright headlights to the po-lice cars.

i thought to myse’f: who are they after? my feet hit the last step from the top. and the rest, as they say, Marguerite, is history …

Go back to Freedom, Deferred.

The Forgotten Warrior. During his thirteen-month tour in Korea, from 1968 to 1969, Bob Keeler worked in military intelligence ("a major oxymoron"). It was mostly a desk job, but here, he's refereeing a field exercise. At the time, he really thought he looked cool.

War in a Time of Ignorance

Best of In The Fray 2002. Remembrances of another war to make the world safe for democracy.

Bob Keeler standing in front of an Army jeep
The Forgotten Warrior. During his thirteen-month tour in Korea, from 1968 to 1969, Bob Keeler worked in military intelligence (“a major oxymoron”). It was mostly a desk job, but here, he’s refereeing a field exercise. At the time, he really thought he looked cool.

My letter from Lyndon Johnson came with a subway token.

The correspondence started formally: “From the President of the United States, greeting.” Just one greeting, not even two. Times were tough.

The token was taped to the top of a separate page, a sheet of directions from my local draft board in the New York City borough of Queens. Those instructions helpfully advised me what trains to take from Queens to the Armed Forces Induction Station at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.

Decades later, I still have that page of instructions. The token is still at the top, under yellowed tape.

For many years, this piece of paper has sat in my files, primarily because I hate to throw away anything that might later “come in handy.” During most of that time, buried deep in a file drawer, it had no particular significance to me. I was 21 years old when it arrived in the mail, and I had never given any serious thought at all to issues of war and peace. I had no sense of its human cost over the centuries, no concept of the rivers of blood that it spilled, no understanding of what my Christian faith had to say on the issue, no insight into the essential nonviolence of the Gospel. I lived in a thick fog of unknowing.

Now, with the nation launched into a new war, I am glad that I still have the paper and the token. They “come in handy” to remind me of the thinking that I failed to do then, and they goad me to examine this war far more critically, in light of my uncritical acceptance of what the nation was doing in Southeast Asia.

In important ways, of course, the situation now is starkly different from the one in 1965. The most crucial difference is the emotional temperature. In 1965, before the coverage of the war expanded, Vietnam felt terribly distant. But the current conflict began with more than 3,000 people dying in one day on American soil, in a horribly visible way. So most Americans feel a close emotional connection to what is happening in Afghanistan. The 24-hour-a-day presence of CNN and Fox News serve to keep those emotions high.

But high emotion does not protect against deep ignorance. This conflict, which began in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, then moved to Afghanistan, seems likely to spread to Iraq and beyond. Its roots and its consequences are immensely complicated, and we should all be examining it intelligently, rather than simply accepting slogans. Yet, with so much at stake, millions of Americans are almost as clueless about foreign affairs as I was in the Vietnam years. For them, as for me, there can be no excuse.

As the country sinks deeper into this new war, I am actually grateful for my earlier inattention to foreign policy, because it gives me some insight into the persistent ignorance that characterizes the popular response to the events of September 11. I offer this story—my own story—as a cautionary tale, an admonition that it is time to pay attention now or regret it bitterly later. And if it should come to pass that Congress reinstates the draft, I hope my experiences will serve as a how-not-to guide for today’s draft-age men and women.

I Fail to Dodge the Draft

To get back to that token: as glad as I am that I still have it, I have to ask myself why I saved it, instead of spending it on my subway ride to induction. The reason was probably nothing more mysterious than the nasty strain of obsessive-compulsive behavior that has plagued me from childhood, compelling me always to organize, to save, to file.

It was that obsessiveness that had allowed me to be drafted in the first place. Through my first year at Fordham University, I had received no grade lower than an A—not because any great career goal was driving me, but simply because imperfection always seemed like such a hideous option. In my sophomore year, crazed by the possibility that I might have to settle for a B+ in one course, I made a brilliant decision: Rather than blemish my perfect grades, I would drop out.

It was a breathtakingly neurotic choice, one that would alter the course of my life. After leaving school, I took a job as a copy boy and later a desk assistant at the New York Herald Tribune. It was my first chance to witness the craft of journalism at a high professional level. Every day, I worked in the presence of such great writers as Jimmy Breslin, Red Smith, Tom Wolfe, Richard Reeves, Dick Schaap, and Walter Kerr.

Though I loved that job, it had a serious drawback. Unlike the academic world that I had left behind, it offered me no protection from the draft. Worse, at a time when young men of my age were spending much of their time thinking of ways not to get drafted, I was not really thinking about the draft at all.

It was 1965, and the U.S. government was frantically shipping more troops to Vietnam. The newspapers were full of these stories, and I worked every day at one of the greatest newspapers in America. The wires hummed with news of Vietnam, and the Tribune’s staff was on the case. On at least one occasion, my job put me in direct contact with the war.

The legendary Jimmy Breslin had cabled a column from Vietnam. It arrived in one long, unbroken string of words, and my job was to break it into paragraphs. Characteristically, I was far more worried about the horrible possibility of paragraphing the story in a way that would displease the great Breslin than I was about the events that he was reporting.

At about that time, a mail carrier delivered the letter from Lyndon. I don’t recall the precise circumstances, but I have a vague memory of being surprised. Nearly four decades later, I am still astonished at the murky process inside my head that was masquerading as thought. The president’s frugal salutation and the tiny token should have put me on high alert, like the first notes of scary music in a horror movie. I should have concluded by then, as so many others had, that the war was a totally immoral enterprise, a conflict that our nation had no business entering. If I had been thinking at all, the arrival of that letter should have driven me into a frenzy of belated planning to avoid the draft.

Instead, I meekly rode the subway to 39 Whitehall Street. This ugly, fortress-like building near the southern tip of Manhattan eventually became a concrete symbol for the whole war. It stood just blocks away from the site where excavation would begin, a few months later, for the World Trade Center.

Soon after I arrived, I went through the famously humiliating physical exam, brilliantly satirized by folk singer Arlo Guthrie in his song “Alice’s Restaurant.” As the mass inspection of body parts unfolded, the command I remember best was: “Bend down, grab the cheeks of your ass, and spread ’em.”

The result of my physical would have elated many young Americans. The military classified me 1-Y. That meant I was temporarily unable to serve because of some physical defect. Instead of leaping for joy, I was offended. Why would my country reject me?

It might have been my acne, or the collarbone I had fractured a decade earlier in elementary school. Or maybe it was just a mistake by the doctors. Whatever it was, I didn’t have long to wonder: The government soon decided that my bodily imperfection was not really a threat to national security, and I was good enough for military service after all. (As I later learned, “good enough for military service” is not exactly high praise.) They ordered me to report for induction on November 15, 1965. I raised my right hand, took one step forward, and solemnly promised to defend the nation.

To this day, I look back at the high seriousness of that moment and marvel at the cosmic emptiness of my head. I was not thinking antiwar thoughts. Nor was I swelling with patriotic fervor, eager to kill Communists for America. I was just there, inert and not alert.

The Army, as I quickly learned, did not encourage its young troops to think. Whenever a recruit dared to say, “I thought,” some sergeant would bark: “If you were authorized to think, the government would have issued you a brain.”

Nonetheless, in that first week of military service, I was still trying to think. I even had a “plan” for my Army career. At the Herald Tribune, one of my colleagues had attended a military journalism school and then served the nation in his chosen craft. That sounded good to me. So I memorized his MOS—my first army acronym. It stood for Military Occupational Specialty, the little code that described your job. His MOS was 71Q20, information specialist.

Smugly, I cradled this magic code in my mind as I carried my DA Form 20 through a processing line at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first stop in my military career. The DA Form 20 is an enlisted soldier’s personal military record, printed on stiff yellow paper. Mine was mostly blank as I approached the low-level clerk who was about to assign me to my first job in the Army. This was my plan: I would tell him I wanted to be a 71Q20. In his astonishment that I even knew what an MOS was, he would meekly write down the code, and I’d be on my way to training as an army journalist.

As the clerk looked up at me briefly, I spoke confidently. “I’d like to be a 71Q20, information specialist.”

He casually penciled in 11A10. Armor crewman.

It was then that I had my first great epiphany concerning military absurdity. My destiny was not to write, but to drive tanks. Hell, I was a city boy. I didn’t even know how to drive a car.

I Learn to Be a Killer

Before I knew it, I was climbing onto a rickety Saturn Airlines propeller plane, with all my goods in one olive drab duffel bag. The plane landed hours later in Fort Hood, Texas, the home of the 2nd Armored Division. There, in a tank company recently converted to a basic training unit to help turn out the long lines of men needed to prosecute the war in Vietnam, I learned to be a soldier.

It never occurred to me to question the central premises of our training. The sergeant would demand loudly, “What is the spirit of the bayonet?” We would reply in unison: “To kill!” Instead of seeing in that ritual the cruel reality at the core of all armies, I worried about polishing my boots and shining my brass.

At my first permanent assignment, as a personnel clerk in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I spent my time and energy learning to type officer efficiency reports perfectly, with no typos and no erasures. I could have seen the presence of the United States Army Special Forces, a particularly savage and remorseless collection of professional killers, as an occasion for reflection on the brutality of warfare. Instead, I just loved the jaunty way they wore their green berets. In fact, I bought one and sent it home as a present to Judy, the woman I had met at a going-away party right before I left for the Army. Now, after being married to Judy for thirty-two years, I cringe at the memory that my first gift to her was a symbol of war.

It was at Bragg that my brother Richie and I crossed paths for the only time during our military service. He was on his way to Vietnam. By then, I had grown tired of being a clerk and soured on life in a barracks with dozens of other men, many of whom played country and Western music loudly on their radios. So I had decided to apply for Officer Candidate School, even though that would extend my military obligation from a draftee’s two years to something more than three. Richie and I said our goodbyes, and he reminded me that, even after I had my lieutenant’s gold bars, he would never salute me.

At the Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, my one obsession was learning how to get an artillery round to its target. One day, I led the fire direction center, the part of an artillery unit that calculates map coordinates, wind, temperature, and other variables to produce an accurate trajectory. We launched a barrage of timed-fuse rounds into the air, exploding them right over a heap of scrap cars on the practice range. Not bothering to ponder what it might have been like to be a person standing below that lethal rain of shrapnel, I rejoiced at the abstract perfection of our mathematical achievement.

On Sundays, I found solace from the demanding routine of my training by attending Mass. Not once did I even think about the utter incompatibility between the nonviolent Gospel of Jesus and my studies. After church, I’d go back to mastering the murderous math of war. Once again, my obsessive focus on grades was obscuring the obvious. Instead of thinking seriously about the morality of what American artillery was doing to Vietnamese bodies, I contented myself with conquering trigonometry and finishing first in my class.

That little distinction had one value: It gave my preference of assignments some weight. So I ended up as an information officer at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. There, I returned to the craft of journalism, as a supervisor of the post’s newspaper. I also wrote a patriotic speech or two for the post commander. What I did not do was give much thought to the ultimate meaning of the National Security Agency, the super-secret spy organization that eavesdropped electronically on the whole world from its headquarters at Fort Meade.

After less than a full year at Meade, I received a letter from the Pentagon. When I opened it, I found a set of orders reassigning me to the 4th United States Army Missile Command, APO San Francisco 96208. APO meant Army Post Office. I knew that the APO in San Francisco served troops throughout Asia. Was I being sent to Vietnam? The orders did not tell me the exact location of my assignment. With a growing sense of dread, I walked to the post office at Fort Meade, went up to the window, and meekly asked the clerk where APO SF 96208 might be.

He matter-of-factly informed me: “Korea.”

I was relieved, of course, but also curious about the factors that had spared me a trip to the rice paddies. I called the Pentagon and spoke to the officer who had made the assignment. His reasoning was sound: For a year after graduating from artillery officer candidate school, I had not even come close to an artillery piece. If he had sent me to Vietnam as an artillery officer, I would have been instant dead meat.

He had a point. Of course, I might have ended up in the comparative safety of a fire direction center. But I might also have become a forward observer. The role of the artillery forward observer is to travel with the frontline infantry troops and guide artillery barrages down on the heads of the nearby enemy—without dropping them by mistake on American troops. I shudder to think of the damage I might have done, to both sides, had the U.S. Army sent me to Vietnam in that capacity. By then, I had also learned that the life expectancy of forward observers was rather brief. It was odd, but typical of my mindset, that this reality had not occurred to me when I chose to leave my clerk’s job at Fort Bragg to become an artillery officer.

There, too, I lucked out. My artillery battalion at Fort Bragg later went to Vietnam as a unit.

I Live to Regret the War

In Korea, the Army put me in a contradictory, even schizophrenic, assignment. My primary duty was military intelligence (another great oxymoron, like “army journalism”). Working in the S2, the intelligence section of command headquarters, I found myself the custodian of hundreds of secret and top secret documents. As an additional duty, I supervised the production of the command’s modest little newspaper and handled public relations. In other words, my job was simultaneously to keep secrets and to deliver the news.

By then, Judy and I were engaged, and we corresponded almost every day, exchanging letters and taped conversations, because phone calls home from Korea were too expensive. Our relationship had unfolded almost entirely by mail, but even at that great distance, we had a deep disagreement. More immersed in the real world than I was, she had already sensed that the war in Vietnam was deeply wrong. But I had swallowed the propaganda of a film that the Army showed often during my training, called Why Vietnam? I should have listened to her, but I stubbornly refused and moped angrily. Still, I missed her and counted the days until we could develop our relationship in person, instead of on paper and on tape.

To maintain my sanity during the thirteen months of my tour, I taught English at the radio station in Chunchon, bought a good camera, and learned to develop my own film in a crafts shop at Camp Page. On a military exercise, I took endless photos of the Honest John tactical missiles, rejoicing when one photo skillfully captured the exact moment when it roared off the launcher toward a distant target. It did not even occur to me to wonder what one of those thunderous missiles might do to a group of human beings at the other end.

Nor did I give much thought to the targeting documents that we maintained in our files. I worried about what would happen to me if failed to protect the security of the documents, but I didn’t worry about the lives that they might someday enable my unit to snuff out, many miles away from the launchers. Nor did I have moral qualms about being part of a unit that could put tactical nuclear weapons on the tips of its rockets.

But in its own manner, the Army did teach me something in Korea about the way the United States makes enemies, on a retail level. The Army understood from experience that the average seventeen-year-old American male can cause an astonishing amount of mischief when he leaves an American post and sets foot in “the economy” of the host nation. As a “Cold War officer,” my job was to brief these teenagers about the hard-working people and the ancient culture of Korea before they were allowed off post for the first time, and to warn them about previous occasions when young Americans in foreign lands had created nasty incidents in other nations.

By the end of my thirteen months at Camp Page, I had grown disillusioned with the Army. Even so, my disillusionment was pale and feeble, a reaction to the everyday stupidities of “the Army way,” rather than an intelligent, principled response to the deeper questions of the U.S. presence in Korea. In a mild protest against the imperative to get soldiers to “re-up,” or sign on for more years in the Army, I counseled friends on the benefits of leaving. Eventually, I even earned a minor reputation as “the command un-up officer.”

Far from seeing this attitude as a threat, my commanding officer was amused. He considered me a good officer.

During my year in Korea—all of 1968 and the first month of 1969—I missed an immense amount of turmoil in the United States: the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, the turbulent Democratic national convention in Chicago. Somehow, I persuaded myself that Richard Nixon’s experience as a vice president would make him a better president than Hubert Humphrey, and I voted for Nixon by absentee ballot.

If I had remained on a college campus for those years between 1965 and 1968, I now like to think, the salutary virus of dissent might have infected me, jolting me from my lethargy and moving me to protest an immoral war. But it didn’t happen. I got home from Korea, threw my expensive dress blue uniform in the garbage, and got on with my life. I resumed my interrupted career in journalism, and Judy and I got married a few months after my discharge.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, I paid little attention to what was going on overseas. I woke up about the Vietnam War in time to vote for George McGovern, the antiwar candidate, in 1972. But I devoted no real study to what had led to the war, nor to the broad sweep of American foreign policy that had made it almost inevitable. Instead, I kept my nose buried in my work (I was now a reporter at Newsday) and in my family. That, of course, is no excuse. There is no reason why I could not have raised my two daughters and my consciousness at the same time.

Then in 1983, my brother Richie died, at age thirty-six. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was to identify his body, horribly decomposed after he had lain, dead, for a day or more in his overheated apartment, where a friend eventually found him. He had been suffering from severe headaches for months, and he had odd symptoms, such as a total intolerance for alcohol. But the doctors couldn’t give us a definitive cause of death.

In the months after, as a way of coping with Richie’s death, I decided to write a magazine piece about it for Newsday’s Sunday magazine. In doing the reporting for that piece, I contacted some of the men who had served in his combat engineer battalion in Vietnam and discovered that some had displayed the same symptoms that had plagued Richie. We had no positive proof of it, but we suspected—and still suspect—that his combat exposure to the herbicide Agent Orange contributed to his death.

Even before I did the reporting that led me to that conclusion, I had a visceral sense that the government was responsible for his death. It overtook me as I walked into a funeral parlor in Queens for his wake. His coffin was closed, and on top of it sat an American flag, folded crisply into a triangle. Without even thinking about it, I removed the flag and threw it on the floor of a closet.

From that day to this, I do not take off my hat for the flag, pledge allegiance to it, or find comfort in its colors.

Bob Keeler leads peace activists in prayer
Reformed Soldier. Almost every year on Good Friday, on the streets where he once looked askance at peace activists and soldiers with insufficiently shined boots, Bob Keeler now participates in the Good Friday peace walk along Manhattan’s 42nd Street. In this photo from the 2000 peace walk, he and other members of Pax Christi Long Island lead people in prayer from the back of a flatbed truck.

Two Lessons Learned

The death of my brother Richie in 1983, which we attributed to his earlier exposure to the contaminated herbicide Agent Orange in Vietnam, should have awakened me completely from my ignorance about our nation’s foreign policy. Sadly, it did not.

For the remainder of the 1980s, I should have been studying the way our nation was supporting the murder and the disappearances of the poor in Latin America, and cozying up to regimes that popularized slogans such as Be a patriot. Kill a priest.” But I kept my nose buried in work and family and paid little attention to what was happening in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The cosmic alarm clock that finally aroused me from my decades-long slumber was Operation Desert Storm. At the time the first President George Bush began to utter his bumbling and inarticulate justifications for what became known as the Gulf War, I was working on a long-term project for Newsday about the State University of New York. In the all-hands-on-deck situation of Desert Storm, my editors asked me to help with the war coverage, by writing about the peace movement.

The irony was acute. When I was a soldier myself, home on leave and walking the streets of Manhattan on a date with Judy, I would sneer at soldiers I passed on the street who had not sufficiently spit-shined their boots. Worse, Judy reminds me that I didn’t hesitate to make snide remarks about war protesters.

Now, I found myself flying to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, with radical attorney Ron Kuby, counsel to a group of Marine Corps reservists who were seeking conscientious objector status. They had joined the Marine Corps for a variety of reasons, including the extra money that they could earn as reservists while pursuing other goals in civilian life. Some of them thought it could make them real men. That, after all, is why so many teenagers join the Marine Corps. Our society lionizes this proudly homicidal institution as the paradigm of elite competence and muscular patriotism. The term “ex-Marine” has become a stock description in journalism, a brief phrase that is intended to communicate toughness and virtue, no matter how far back in his past a person served in the Marines.

A quarter-century after my own near miss with the Marines at the induction station in Manhattan, I was interviewing these young men at Camp Lejeune, who had joined the Marine Corps and then had begun to read, think and have second thoughts about its primary enterprise: killing. Not surprisingly, other Marines viewed their position as suspect, even cowardly. But these objectors impressed me as serious people with legitimate concerns.

In those early weeks of 1991, before the short and brutal war that destroyed much of Iraq in a matter of days, I spoke with a wide variety of peace groups. For a story about Bush’s assertion that this conflict fit the criteria for a just war, I interviewed the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the great Jesuit peacemaker. “I think the whole debate is useless, and that it’s a distraction from the main issue and an abandonment of Christ’s teaching,” Berrigan said. “It’s really quite simple: Love your enemies and do good to those who do evil to you, and do not kill.”

One of the people I interviewed was Sister Mary Lou Kownacki, the national coordinator of Pax Christi USA, the American section of the international Catholic peace movement. Shamefully, I had by then spent nearly fifty years as a Catholic, without ever managing to learn about Pax Christi. “We do not feel that peaceful negotiations were given all the effort that they deserve,” Sister Mary Lou said. “We do not feel that the good achieved by this war will outweigh the possible evils.”

At that moment, despite the insistent beating of the war drums, Sister Mary Lou sounded totally sensible and well-informed. From the vantage point of today, she looks positively prophetic. That war, essentially fought to preserve cheap oil for American consumers and to rescue the despotic regimes in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia who supply much of that oil, has brought about endless evil. As many as a million Iraqis, many of them children, are dead as a result of the war and the embargo that followed. About 260,000 American veterans of the war have filed medical claims, many of them suffering from the poorly understood Gulf War Syndrome. And the sanctions against Iraq—along with the continued presence of thousands of American troops in Saudi Arabia—have stirred up hatred of the United States in Muslim countries.

Something happened to me in my conversation with Sister Mary Lou and my talks with other salt-of-the-earth Christians who were objecting to the war. The scales fell from my eyes, and I began to see how much my lifelong ignorance had concealed from my view. So I found a local Pax Christi group and joined, sitting at the feet of a marvelous peacemaker named Joop van der Grinten.

During World War II, Joop had fought the Nazis in Holland, but he later overcame his hatred for them. During the Vietnam War, he became a draft counselor. Joop has served the peace movement in every conceivable way, including his conscious decision to live below the poverty level, to avoid having to pay taxes to a government that uses the money for bombs. With his snow-white hair and his endless stream of stories, told in a thick Dutch accent, Joop is a memorable character.

As I struggled toward a deeper understanding of my faith and its ideas about peace and war, Joop was my first mentor. Soon, I was asked to join the council of Pax Christi Long Island, the regional presence of Pax Christi USA. Beyond what I learned in our discussions at the monthly council meetings and at the gatherings with Joop’s group, I began to study on my own. As a young man, I had studied for one reason: to get good marks. Now, motivated by deep regret over my ignorance, I studied to learn and understand, to take a truly Christian posture toward war.

I Learn to Ask Questions

Of all the things I learned over the next several years through my involvement with the peace movement, two lessons stick out in my mind: the sad history of Christianity’s fall from nonviolence, and the ugly story of American foreign policy in the last half of the twentieth century.

Though I was a “cradle Catholic,” I had never really understood how central the principle of nonviolence was in the teachings of Jesus. He lived at a time when the Jewish people were seething about the occupation by the Romans, and many were seeking violent ways to expel them. Jesus rejected that option. He preached about peace, about loving the enemy, about creative nonviolent responses to oppression.

The earliest Christians took that nonviolence seriously and declined to serve in the Roman legions. One Christian leader in Rome, Hippolytus, taught that that no one who has embraced professional killing could become a Christian, and no Christian should volunteer for military service. If drafted, he argued, Christians should refuse to kill.

That attitude lasted for nearly 300 years. Then, in the year 312, a Roman leader named Flavius Valerius Constantinus, preparing for the pivotal battle at the Milvian Bridge, thought he saw a vision of a cross in the sky. In the vision, he saw the words “In hoc signo vinces,” meaning “Under this sign, you will win.” Unfortunately, he did win, and soon became the emperor Constantine the Great. The year after that battle, he made Christianity the state religion. From that day to this, Christians have clung to the poisonous embrace of the state. Instead of rejecting military service entirely, Christians now join enthusiastically, providing not only the soldiers to kill in the name of the state, but also the chaplains to bless the bloodshed.

Here’s a hideous example: Just before Thanksgiving 2001, President George W. Bush appeared at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, before troops of the 101st Airborne Division, whipping them into a frenzied anticipation of battles yet to come. A Christian chaplain closed with a prayer for the commander in chief, and the troops answered the prayer with a resounding: “Air assault! Amen!” That blasphemous blending of prayer and battle lust now makes me ill. In years gone by, I wouldn’t even have noticed.

The other pivotal lesson for me was my stunning and much-belated discovery that an idea internalized by all Americans is false: We are the good nation, the only indispensable country, the one that helps people all around the world, the one that stands always for freedom and democracy.

To disabuse myself of that simplistic and dangerous view, I only needed to read one 1948 document, written by George F. Kennan, then director of the policy planning staff in the State Department. Though a few have construed Kennan’s meaning benignly, his actual words accurately describe an American attitude that has not really changed since those early Cold War days:

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only about 6.3 percent of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Ever since Kennan wrote this description of American policy, the government of the United States has constantly trumpeted those “idealistic slogans” in public, citing “freedom” and “democracy” and the “threat of communism” to justify a variety of military actions. But the real reason is essentially the maintenance of the “position of disparity” that Kennan described.

That basic approach to the world guides our profligate military spending. It inspires a hair-trigger willingness to use American power in bloody interventions, such as Grenada and Panama. It constantly puts America on the side of the rich and corrupt and against the poor, in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

For fifty years, American administrations, Democratic and Republican, have done whatever was necessary to keep strong regimes in power in Latin America’s developing nations. That’s in keeping with another Kennan dictum. Just a few years after writing the earlier document, he told a group of U.S. diplomatic officials in Latin America that “we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government. It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.”

Bob Keeler on stage in front of a microphone
Fighting for Peace. Bob Keeler speaks at the 1993 Good Friday peace walk in Manhattan, an annual event sponsored by Pax Christi Metro New York. At each “station of the cross,” a local Pax Christi group proclaims the Scripture reading and adds its own statement on peace and justice issues.

I Fail to Be a Good Patriot

Of course, our definition of “communist” has been amazingly broad. It includes any government that seems concerned with economic reform. It also includes bishops. The late Dom Helder Camara, a widely known and respected bishop in Brazil, liked to say: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

My father was a staunch anti-communist. Calling someone a communist was about the worst insult he could utter. As a result, one of his great heroes was Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the now-disgraced communist-hunter. When I was a teenager, some sense of McCarthy’s dangerousness managed to penetrate through the murk of my thinking, and I argued with my father about the senator.

What I have come to see now, but didn’t understood during my Army days, is that anti-communism was nearly as destructive a force in the twentieth century as communism was. In the name of beating back the red menace, the government of the United States put its money and military might behind some hideously repressive governments. Supported by our taxpayer dollars, these regimes made enemies of priests and nuns who were simply trying to obey the command of Jesus to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and give shelter to the homeless. Instead of seeing these priests and nuns as faithful to the Gospel, these regimes saw them as dangerous subversives. That attitude gave rise to the slogan I mentioned earlier: “Be a patriot. Kill a priest.”

In El Salvador, during the bloody 1980s, the poor endured the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of three nuns and a lay missionary, and the slaughter of six Jesuits, along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Many of the perpetrators were trained in Georgia, at the United States Army School of the Americas. After tens of thousands of demonstrators protested the school over the years, the government attempted to deflect criticism by changing the name of the school to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Different name, same shame.

In these days of concern about terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism, we need to remember that the United States has helped to develop state-sponsored terrorism in Latin America by training its armies. Since most of those states don’t have exterior enemies, the bulk of what their armies do is called FID (foreign interior defense) in Pentagon-speak. That means defending against their own people—torturing them and disappearing them. Our tax dollars at work.

Not surprisingly, once people have been victimized by repressive regimes supported by the United States, those people tend to view this nation as hypocritical. They think America has a nasty double-standard: preaching democracy, but supporting dictatorship, so long as the dictator does what America wants.

In the aftermath of September 11, one of the central questions has been, “Why do they hate us?” The most popular answer is that they hate us because we are good, because we are free, because we have a high standard of living. If that were the case, any intelligent person has to ask: Why aren’t they bombing Canada or Italy or Norway? All those nations have democratic governments, a good measure of freedom, and a high standard of living.

The difference is that they do not have a military that projects itself around the world, and they do not have a global reputation for supporting repressive regimes. Some people doubtless hate the United States because of its culture and its wealth, but many hate this nation because of specific acts of foreign policy. For more on this theme, I strongly recommend a book by Chalmers Johnson, called Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

Now that I have finally awakened and seen our nation’s many pathologies, I have come to detest the we’re-number-one, love-it-or-leave-it brand of patriotism that is so visible right now. My favorite definition of patriotism is the one that the Rev. Jesse Jackson offered years ago: loyalty to the highest ideals of the nation, not to the person who happens to occupy the White House at the moment.

Asking sharp questions about the nation’s foreign policy does not make anyone unpatriotic. Exercising the freedom to criticize does not endanger the nation, but strengthens the great and fragile muscle of freedom itself. True patriotism surely includes a willingness to criticize the government to make sure it remains worthy of the nation’s highest ideals.

I Live to Regret Another War

My late awakening to these realities has brought a healthy share of irony into my life. In another century, thirty-six years ago, I thoughtlessly rode the subway to Whitehall Street and became an unquestioning servant of the nation’s foreign policy. Now, I am seen as unpatriotic, a card-carrying member of the blame-America-first crowd, even a Communist. (If my father were alive, I think he’d smile about that.)

All I really want is for America to start spending more of its wealth on eliminating the global gap between rich and poor. Kennan wrote about preserving America’s position of disparity. I want to narrow it. That gap is one of the most dangerous forces in the world. While the World Trade Center attackers appear not to have been poor themselves, it is this grinding poverty that provides terrorists with a fertile breeding ground for hate, and hate is far more essential to terrorism than weapons.

America could make this a much safer world by cutting our $300 billion defense budget (which vastly exceeds the expenditures of any potential adversary) and by spending a lot of that money on eliminating world hunger. Some organizations have estimated that the prudent investment of about $60 billion a year could nearly eradicate hunger on the planet. For the Pentagon, $60 billion is chump change.

The greatest obstacle to that fundamental change is ignorance. For example, Americans vastly overestimate our country’s generosity to other nations. In a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the average poll respondent estimated that America spends 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid. Actually, it’s well below 1 percent. Using Gross Domestic Product as a benchmark, the United States is the stingiest developed nation. In contrast, it is far and away the largest seller in the global arms trade. And the money that other nations spend on buying American arms is money they can’t spend on lifting their people from poverty.

The ignorance of the American people on foreign policy is the subject of an excellent book, Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy, by Eric Alterman. One of his central points is this: Polls show that Americans would back goals very different from those adopted by the foreign-policy establishment. Among other things, the public would like a foreign policy “that eschewed far-flung adventures to concentrate on strengthening the American economy and society,” Alterman writes. In other words, the American people believe in a far less interventionist stance than the American government does. But the average citizen does not know much about how to alter the course of foreign policy, and most foreign-policy professionals feel that the general public is too ignorant to be part of the debate.

So it all comes back to my starting point: ignorance. Now that I have recognized, regretted, and tried to remedy my own ignorance, I am struggling with another shortcoming: impatience. As someone who remained so ignorant for so long, I should be more tolerant of that attitude now. But I’m not. It just makes me very angry.

To brighten that gloomy prospect, I should admit that I have seen a few encouraging signs in the past two or three years. Perhaps the most heartening is the sharp increase in the number of young people involved in at least one aspect of the peace movement: the campaign to close the School of the Americas.

Every year in November, thousands of demonstrators gather outside the gates of Fort Benning to protest the school’s existence. At first the crowds were small, but every year, they have grown, under the leadership of the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, the Maryknoll priest and Vietnam veteran who leads the movement. And every year, the percentage of young people in those crowds has also increased. I wrote about that hopeful development for the magazine U.S. Catholic last August.

In my own family, I have the example of my daughter Rachel, who led Pax Christi Metro New York for three years, exhibiting a profound understanding of world issues. At her age, I was still cloaked in ignorance.

Still, I’m naturally pessimistic, and I know from my lived experience how persistent ignorance can be. But these times are so perilous that we can no longer afford the option of failing to study what our nation is doing in our name. We can’t settle for slogans, for mindless flag-waving, for barroom rooting for swift victory, without thoughtful analysis of what happened to make September 11 possible and how we must change our policies to minimize the possibility of future terrorism.

One hint for action: I think we should support a plan by Senators Joe Lieberman (D., Connecticut) and John McCain (R., Arizona) for a nonpartisan, independent commission to examine the September 11 events. With an independent commission, we have a far better chance of getting truthful answers than if we leave it to the administration or to the Congress.

The commission’s work may also help focus the public’s attention on foreign policy issues and dispel some of the ignorance. I certainly hope so. Something has to get us beyond the slogans and the flags. If we can’t take that step, if the nation as a whole takes as long as I did to emerge from the fog of unknowing, we’re in very big trouble.

This article was originally published in two parts, on December 17, 2001, and January 7, 2002.

 

Parris Island? No Thanks

In my own defense, I've always known that being a Marine was no ticket to glory.

In my own defense, I’ve always known that being a Marine was no ticket to glory. The day I was drafted, a sergeant announced that they needed about eight or nine Marines. That was a stunning revelation to me. I had always assumed that, in order to enter the Marine Corps, people had to be gung-ho enough to volunteer and subject themselves to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. Even in my ignorance, I understood that it was one of the most hideous, dehumanizing experiences on the planet. It had never occurred to me that a person could be drafted into the Marines. But this was the Vietnam War. If they didn’t get their nine Marines from volunteers among the dozens of draftees in the room that day, they’d draft a few of us into the corps against our will. The next few moments were terrifying, but my name did not get called.

Go back to War in a Time of Ignorance.

 

The high line

Remnants of New York's once mighty elevated railway system.

Click here to enter the visual essay.

 

Best of In The Fray 2001

The votes are in, and here are the winners.

Your journal has a courageous, vibrant life of its own and for this I commend you. The living soul of your journal has inspired and consoled many hearts and minds, perhaps more than you realize. —Michigan reader (name withheld at request)

Our sincere thanks to those readers who participated in the vote for the Best of In The Fray 2001. We did a thorough, county-by-county count of your ballots, and even though some articles won by a single vote or fraction of a vote, we are glad to report that we found no dimpled chads, no butterfly ballots, and none of Florida’s finest stopping African Americans near the polling stations.

Before I hand over the results, let me say a quick word. In The Fray recently was approved for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. Donations are now tax-deductible, to the extent permitted by U.S. federal law. Those who gave us donations earlier this year, please know that you can now write your contribution off on your taxes. Those who haven’t given yet, please consider doing so during this holiday season. We depend on the support of readers like yourself to keep publishing. Your donations will allow us to continue providing you with provocative, intelligent content on issues of identity. For more information about donating, click here.

‘Nuff said. Below we proudly present the Best of In The Fray 2001.

Victor Tan Chen
Editor, In The Fray
Boston

 

NEWS

First Place

The Most Segregated Hour in America
A look at three churches that worship the multicultural way.
Written and photographed by Nicole Leistikow
November 5, 2001

Second Place

Watchdog under the Watchtower
The story of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, and freedom of press at a time of internment.
Written by Kelly Yamanouchi
April 9, 2001

Third Place

Survival of the Fittest
Living under body fascism in Los Angeles’ gay ghetto.
Written by Don Chareunsy
May 14, 2001

Fourth Place

Caricaturing Lieberman
How the media missed the story on religion in the 2000 election.
Written by Ben Helphand
Illustrated by Vasus Das
April 9, 2001

Honorable Mention

Finding Solace in Cyberspace
Stricken with the loneliest of illnesses, people with rare forms of cancer have built their own online communities.
Written by Charles Savage
Illustrated by Melissa Scram
June 4, 2001

PHOTO ESSAYS

First Place

Reaction
A photographer and poet decipher a transformed city.
Photographed by Dustin Ross
Written by Shobita Mampilly
November 23, 2001

Second Place

Survivors of Sexual Assault
Portraits of sexual assault victims.
Photographed by Nobuko Oyabu
September 17, 2001

Third Place

Jhota
Photo illustration.
By Rosa Lee
July 3, 2001

Fourth Place

Them Gators (a.k.a. Southern Negroes)
Hip-hop in the dirty South.
Photographed by Jason Lewis
Assembled by Dustin Ross
June 4, 2001

CULTURE

First Place

Eight Letters between Old Lovers
Poetry serial.
Written by Daniel Wolff
Illustrated by Vasus Das
April 9, 2001

Second Place (tie)

Postcards
A poem.
Written by Jia-Rui Chong
Illustrated by Melissa Scram
August 6, 2001

Undressed for Success?
This Lil’ Kim went to the market, and sold her body.
Written by Mekeisha Madden
April 9, 2001

Fourth Place

When Wu-Tang Met Kung Pao
On the big screen and off, African and Asian Americans trade stereotypes, but no kisses.
Written by Sharon Pian Chan
May 14, 2001

COMMENTARY

First Place

Of Beetles and Angels
Childhood memories of African war and American struggle.
Written by Mawi Asgedom
April 9, 2001

Second Place

It Takes a Village
A visit to China reveals what was gained, and lost, in one family’s journey to America.
Written and photographed by Harry Mok
May 14, 2001

Third Place (tie)

The Occidental Asian
Politically apathetic, socially intolerant, and culturally clueless–let’s hear it for the Asian American Yuppie.
Written by Debbie Kuan
June 19, 2001

Songs in the Key of Life
Who do you call when the screaming starts?
Written by Molly Hennessy-Fiske
August 20, 2001

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A mural two blocks south of New Song suggests black/white partnerships within the community, July 2001.

The Most Segregated Hour in America

Best of In The Fray 2001. A look at three churches that worship the multicultural way.

People laughing in front of church
Left to right, Kenny, Rachel, Quinlin, Bonnie, Nicole, and Tim gather outside Faith Christian Fellowship after a Sunday service in July.

In 1968, four days before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a sermon in which he called eleven o’clock on Sunday morning “the most segregated hour in America.”

Over thirty years later, even the most integration-minded churches still struggle to cross the cultural divides that keep Christians worshipping apart.

Last summer, I spent time among three mixed-race congregations in Baltimore, hoping to understand the challenges that today’s multicultural churches face. Baltimore, it seemed to me, was a good place to look. According to 2000 census estimates, Baltimore is 64 percent black and 31 percent white, with growing populations of Latinos and immigrants—a diverse metropolis, whose friendly atmosphere makes it the most Southern of Northern cities.

I soon found out, however, that the multicultural church movement has more than a few obstacles to overcome here. Many residents today describe Baltimore as a black and white city, not just for its demographics, but also for its history of racial conflict, which still plays out today in segregated neighborhoods, segregated schools, and segregated churches. Mutual suspicions run deep. Riots rocked Baltimore after King’s assassination, accelerating white flight. Renewal programs supported by the city government have rejuvenated areas such as the now-touristy downtown harbor and nearby Fells Point, but have generally failed to improve life in many black neighborhoods.

Three decades after the civil rights movement broke the color line at workplaces and lunch counters, the designation “multicultural” still raises eyebrows in Baltimore’s Christian community. The three congregations I got to know were fighting against this attitude, and were finding, despite all their good intentions, that building a racially diverse church is still no easy matter.

Not a ‘White’ Church

On a summer Sunday morning in Pen-Lucy, a struggling neighborhood on the northeast side of town, two thirty-something women walk down the sidewalk, arms encircling each other’s waists. One is black, the other white. They enter the church’s foyer through a stone archway built long ago, by a wealthier congregation. A tacked-on sign in upbeat, modern type announces the building’s current occupancy by “Faith Christian Fellowship.” The two friends stand in line to fill out nametags before searching for seats in the nearly full sanctuary. The music kicks in, and the multicolored “worship team” leads a gospel rendition of “Like A River Glorious.” The crowd of about 250 begins to respond, as variously as their many shades. Some clap and shake their hips, while others sit calmly nodding their head in time to the drums.

Pastor Stan Long says services weren’t always so inspiring. Visiting Faith in the early 1990s, he found the church “still struggling to get it together.” But he was greeted with change when he visited again, in 1999: “There were a lot more people, a lot more mixed people, the music was clearly more alive.” Long was so impressed that he quit his job as head pastor of a predominantly African American congregation across town to become co-pastor at Faith, which is explicitly multicultural, with an emphasis on racial reconciliation. It was good timing, as the church needed a black leader.

He and Craig Garriott, his white co-pastor, ask to meet with me as a pair. Long, whose curly hair is just beginning to whiten, is genial, quick to talk and laugh at the frustrations of running a multicultural ministry. Garriot’s thinning hair is blond, and he draws out his words, sometimes pausing to peer through his glasses. Both are in their late forties; both have five children. They’ve known each other for twenty years: Long was working for InterVarsity, a national Christian organization that focuses on college students, when he met Garriott, whose college group was doing a summer urban project at Faith. That was 1981; Faith was founded just a year before. But their current partnership is barely two years old. It is part of Faith’s attempt to attract more blacks to what some from the African American community call “a white church.”

Garriott calls the staff of Faith “intentionally diverse.” Indeed, he uses the word “intentional” like a mantra. It explains Faith’s struggles to address racial disparities by carefully monitoring the church’s leadership, worship styles, and even small group demographics. Before they got “intentional,” the church found that the covenant groups were self-segregating along race and class lines. So the church broke up the groups and started over, emphasizing the goals of reconciliation and diversity. Garriott insists there was “no quota system, [no] engineering system.” Now, the groups can no longer be characterized as white intellectual, African American, or blue collar. They’ve achieved a mix of people that’s echoed in the larger congregation—about 30 percent black, 30 percent Asian, and 40 percent white.

Garriott is surprised when Long says that black churches in the neighborhood don’t appreciate Faith’s multiculturalism. “You think they see us as a white church?” he asks.

“There’s no category for multicultural churches,” Long says. Even if a church has both black and white leadership, he explains, the tendency is for the black community to see the white person as the real leader. When sharing the platform with whites, he says, African American leaders are suspect—ingratiating Uncle Toms.

This barrier of historically unequal black/white relationships is why Long is excited to see the middle-class black families who’ve started coming to Faith. “You can’t have a church that’s truly a diverse community where there’s real dignity if the middle-class community is white and the blacks are poor.”

When they bought the current building in 1983, Faith’s founders felt its location on the border of two very different neighborhoods in North Baltimore would provide valuable racial diversity. Long’s concept of “true” diversity has become a concern only more recently. Because the church draws from both prosperous Guilford, near Johns Hopkins University, and distressed Pen-Lucy, examples of economic parity between the races are hard to come by.

In part because of its strong contingent of people from “outside,” the church is still struggling to attract members from the Pen-Lucy community. Faith’s Christian elementary school and sports programs are major avenues of recruitment for neighborhood kids and their parents. Faith also recently created a non-profit organization to focus on community development projects.

One of the biggest draws, however, is the music. Though the mix includes classical and contemporary, gospel is clearly the most crucial in attracting and retaining black families. The biggest problem facing an upcoming move to two services was scheduling so that the drummer could play at both.

Patty Prasada-Rao, a member of Faith since 1994, worries that the church is still not doing enough to locate itself as a community church: “It can be discouraging if … you see mostly white faces or Asian faces because it draws a lot of Hopkins students.” Because of these “outsiders,” she describes it as a regional church focused on community development rather than a community church.

A former Hopkins student herself, Prasada-Rao is now director of resource development at the Sandtown Habitat for Humanity, an organization struggling to define itself as community-based. The Habitat where she works was started by another multicultural church in Baltimore, a much smaller one called New Song.

Multicultural mural
A mural two blocks south of New Song suggests black/white partnerships within the community, July 2001.

Singing a New Song

Pastor Thurman Williams likes to joke about meeting people and explaining he’s from New Song, a church of about fifty members in West Baltimore. New Psalmist! they exclaim, and pile high praise on the gifted brother.

There are many reasons to mistake him for a preacher from one of the oldest and most prestigious black churches in the city. Though only in his early thirties, he has the charismatic presence of a seasoned minister. And though he grew up in middle-class, suburban D.C., he exchanges greetings easily as we walk the streets of Sandtown. He calls, “Hey ladies,” or “Hey bro’, how’re you?” as he passes people cooling off on their stoops.

He’s made this neighborhood—one of the poorest in the city—his home for almost two years. He lives in the row house where the church was founded in 1988. (New Song has since moved to a larger building three blocks away.) It’s there that I meet his wife Evie, toting infant son Joshua. Williams’s family itself is a multicultural church success story. He met Evie, a member of New Song, before becoming pastor there in 2000. Although she is white, her presence in the mostly black neighborhood is accepted, and Joshua is passed from lap to lap at church. In a neighborhood where Williams says most churches are “comprised of folks who drive in and drive back out—people that grew up here and left,” his commitment is a cornerstone of New Song’s plan. “We wanted to be a church for people right here,” he explains.

Across the street is the neighborhood pool, thronged with kids battling the summer heat. Pointing up the street, five houses down, Williams shows where, just yesterday, men shot at a church member’s home. The kids at the pool dove to the ground in fear. But the streets are busy again today, the pool is full. Business is as usual at the nearby Habitat office, Health Center, and Learning Center, all established by New Song with numerous grants.

These neighborhood resources are all part of New Song’s three R’s: Relocation, Reconciliation, Redistribution. The first principle can be especially challenging. When New Song’s white founders, Allan Tibbels, wife Susan, and friend Mark Gornik, moved to Sandtown fifteen years ago, people were not welcoming, believing them to be narcs, or maybe just crazy. Now, after earning the trust of the community and bringing millions of dollars in resources and services, their own kids have the neighborhood lingo down.

Sylvia Simmons is a black church member who moved her two daughters from East Baltimore to Sandtown; she became a Habitat homeowner there in 1992. Now in her mid-thirties, she’s seen a man shot and killed, escaped gunfire next to her house, and had a co-worker injured by crossfire while making a phone call—all since the move. Yet she remains committed to the neighborhood, arguing, “When will the rebuilding start, how can it start, if we all run away?”

Simmons’s loyalty stems from her close ties to New Song. Her current job as a medical assistant, as well as her home, were gleaned from close ties to the church. “I saw the good that was being done and I was a recipient of that,” she says. Yet when her small Pentecostal fellowship decided in 1992 to combine services with New Song, a Presbyterian Church of America, it was difficult at first. “We were used to the shouting and the jumping and being very active in the service and this was totally different, very reserved,” she says.

The process of both congregations adapting to each other was gradual and difficult. “I cried through it and I prayed about it and was puzzled about it and I looked at my pastor initially like, ‘Why did you do this? And why are we here?'” she says. One of Simmons’s greatest and most difficult realizations, she says, was that “God has other sheep.” Her denomination was not the only one that was Christian. She refers to Acts 2, describing the day of Pentecost, on which tongues of fire appeared and a crowd of men speaking different languages miraculously understood each other. This scene is the model of many churches attempting to claim a multicultural status, and is often cited as Biblical proof of God’s approval.

“The racial thing is what will continue to eat at you ’til you leave here, if you’re allowed to,” Simmons acknowledges. New Song’s leadership still struggles with mistrust. Placing more power in the hands of community members and addressing longstanding inequalities are constant issues. “We want to feel as blacks in this community that we have the freedom still to know what’s best for us and have that respected,” she explains.

At Habitat, Prasada-Rao sometimes groans under the burden of black/white misunderstanding. Indian American and dark-skinned, Prasada-Rao often finds herself in the position of mediator, a bridge between black and white in Baltimore.

There’s not a day that goes by at work that’s free from racial issues. Disagreements may not get trumpeted in church on Sundays. But during the week, at the various centers started by New Song, hurt feelings and resentment announce themselves. At times Patty wishes reconciliation didn’t take so long. “I wish I could say to the white folks I know, ‘Because you come from this perspective you have no idea what it’s like,'” she says. “I wish I could say to the black folks I know, ‘Not everyone has it out for you … not every comment that is made is a racial slur.'”

Getting beyond Color-Blindness

But patience is crucial in the multicultural church business. So is a large measure of forgiveness. Michael Coles has learned both lessons, the hard way.

Coles, in his late forties, is the first African American pastor at Seventh Baptist, a browning church on the corner of St. Paul and North Avenue. Seventh Baptist is not his first multicultural flock. After graduating from seminary, Coles and his best friend at the time, who is white, started a multicultural church in Columbia, Maryland. When his co-pastor was disqualified for misconduct, Coles found that some members of the congregation were not ready to accept him as the sole leader of the church. Though they were willing to hug him on Sundays, Coles says, “I had people come up to me and say, ‘I just can’t sit under a black preacher.'”

It took Coles time to get over his bitterness, especially toward white Christians. But since 1996, he has taken pride in leading Seventh Baptist, a church that didn’t allow black people to sit on its outside steps in the 1930s and 1940s. Warm and voluble, he offers an easygoing pat on the back and sometimes a grandfatherly “Be good” as he says goodbye to congregants. At the same time, he responds to questions with take-it-or-leave-it candor. Some white members of the congregation have found his coming unpalatable. He is not surprised.

Coles chuckles at the rhetorical questions put by those advocating color-blindness, mimicking their air of innocence with a smooth drawl: “Why can’t we all just get along together? Why can’t we just be Church?” He responds, “I believe one of the most racist statements that anyone can say is that God does not see color, because if God does not see color, then he made an awful mistake.” His laughter booms—”an awful mistake.” For Coles, seeing and acknowledging differences is a first step toward tolerance.

Coles’s anti-color-blind approach is to discuss divisive subjects in the open and to challenge perceptions. He replaced the old Sunday School curriculum with texts targeted at urban and African American congregations. He brought up the O.J. Simpson trial in a sermon, before an audience that is usually about 60 percent black and 40 percent white.

Betty Strand, seventy-nine, has been going to Seventh Baptist since 1940, when it was almost entirely white. Since then, whites have fled Baltimore, and the area around the church has grown darker. Strand, who is white, approved of hiring of a black pastor to attract more people from the surrounding neighborhood.

She knows some people who left because of Coles’s race and because of the church’s changing worship style, with its new emphasis on gospel. Of those who remain, she says, “We think an awful lot of Pastor Mike. He’s a down-to-earth Bible preaching minister, who doesn’t mince words.”

Coles will need all his evangelistic skills to face the challenges of staying multicultural on North Avenue, a street many associate with abandoned homes, drug deals, and even homicides. He will have to hold on to a nucleus of white families, even as he convinces neighbors that Seventh Baptist has divorced its racist past, and that the local rumor, “Mike is pastoring a white church,” is simply not true.

He accepts the challenge with a certain enjoyment, and sees his unique position as an advantage. When white folk, interested in helping, ask, “What can I do?” he sees other black pastors responding, “We don’t need you.” Coles is happy to end the impasse and accept resources from outside his church and city. In return, he offers suburban congregations the opportunity to overcome their negative perceptions. He describes a recent visit by a white Baptist congregation: “We had a group come up, their expectation was that someone was going to get hurt, someone was going to possibly die, their things were going to get stolen … at the end of the week, they were so blessed to realize there are good people here. They went back home with a 180-degree [different] idea of what the city was all about.”

In Baltimore, integrating the most segregated hour in America remains a sought-after dream. “It’s just not very clean or smooth, it’s very messy,” says New Song’s Thurman Williams. “There’s always something coming up that let’s you know there’s issues that haven’t been dealt with.” Patty Prasada-Rao agrees. “It’s hard, it feels impossible, but I believe that it’s important, it’s what God wants. If you can’t do it in the church, it’s going to be hopeless to do it anywhere else,” she says.

I visit New Song’s service on a hot July Sunday. Two blocks from a basketball court where men are warming up for a game, I find a small congregation of about thirty-five people. A third are white, a third are kids of both colors talking intently or teasing each other. A doctor from the Health Center, her daughter, and her husband are the lone Asian family. Sylvia Simmons has promised me an un-Presbyterian style of worship: “Lots of upbeat music, clapping and stomping.” The low hubbub quiets for a moment of silence. On the front wall, behind the electronic keyboard that serves as an organ, there is a sentence spelled out in puffy, sparkling letters: “Nothing is too hard for God.”

 

Eight Letters between Old Lovers

Best of In The Fray 2001. Poetry serial.

Eight Letters between Old LoversFirst Letter

Dear John:

Today is Tuesday, a day of the week, and I’ve gone

to work, to lunch, to work, to shop,

back home to eat and, now, to bed—where I don’t quite drop

off to sleep but, instead, write you (dear John)

because you’re the one who might understand I haven’t gone

anywhere.

The high school looks like a factory.

The factory looks like an art museum.

The art museum has that plate glass

they use in all the skyscrapers:

tinted, one way.

So, instead of seeing what’s inside,

you only get what the surface reflects.

As if we were all light and play and sex,

John. As if we were all skin.

It makes me think I need to begin

again, somewhere.

Although I know that isn’t right.

I had this dream the other night.

About CONTEMPORARY INTERIORS,

the bed-and-sofa

place where I work? This customer walks in and asks

what we have, and, without even thinking, I drop

my skirt, unbutton my blouse, take off a

layer at a time until, at last,

I stand there, naked. And then he says, “What else you got?”

But that’s a dream, not

really why I’m writing.

I guess I feel badly,

John, about what happened between us. The fighting,

and the lying to each other, and the hurt. You used to say

that once two people have been lovers,

they can’t be friends,

but … I’ve got a new guy—Jimmy,

a sweet man—and last night, in his arms, I called your name,

instead.

There. That’s said.

What I mean is: you could be him.

All these people, all this experience,

and it ends up the same.

A city made to make us forget.

As if we were created, not equal,

but identical. Interchangeable.

My question to you, as an architect

(Or, as an old lover. Or, as

a new friend.) is what are we trying so hard to hide?

I’ve gone from home to work to Sorry. Jimmy just rolled over.

I think I’d better stop.

FRANKIE

 

Second Letter

Dear Frankie:

I’m at work, so this will be brief.

I think it’s a privileged, selfish, comforting belief

to say everything’s identical.

I don’t know what city you live in,

but turn a corner in mine, and everything’s different.

Sure, there’s the perfect plate-glass face.

But step behind, and you find fallen ceilings, walls like paste,

the world without a front. Whatever you meant

by saying you’ve never been

anywhere, you should go.

It isn’t interchangeable.

It isn’t a dream. It isn’t either “light” or “sex.”

There are actual beams you can touch.

My work is to try to figure out where it connects,

and why it breaks, and how history

gets turned into dust.

As to the intimate details of your lust-

life, spare me. I’d actually

rather you didn’t write. Maybe that shows I still care too much,

but, whether you’re selling sofas or being an architect,

it seems to me there’s a real need to forget.

So, I won’t go on.

Sincerely,

JOHN

 

Third Letter

Dear John:

All I have to say is, Jesus,

we sure do get serious

—and fast!

I’ve been re-reading your last

on a bench in the park,

and I guess we aren’t going to be friends,

huh? Well, how about one

last note, then, before it ends.

Yesterday, around dark,

I broke my regular route back and forth from work

to go where you sent me. I followed your letter

like a map.

Back streets. The smell of cats

and piss and people. A sweater

ripped and rotting on a banister post.

Streets scribbled with ghost

anger. “FUCK YOU” “EAT SHIT”

You’re right. It didn’t feel like anywhere

I’d been before. At first, I just wanted to tear

it down, to start over. And then I noticed it

already had been. Whole blocks laid to waste.

And without a clue what to put in their place,

right, John? Without a clue.

I guess I should thank you.

For sending me. I don’t mean to be critical,

but you should try it sometime in a woman’s body.

Stand in front of the storefront glass

and have a guy come up in cracked reflection

and whisper how he wants you to be

his “finger food,” his “piece of ass.”

Maybe it’s not all identical,

but it sure feels like one architecture:

this just the dark side of the same question.

From where I sit today, I can see ducks begging for feed,

red tulips in the sun. I think people need

more of this, John: more birds, more bloom.

Otherwise, we assume

everything’s man-made:

the city as self-fulfilling prophecy, played

out in concrete the way it was laid out on paper.

I won’t write again. But I did want you to know

that I never meant any hurt.

Are you well, John?

Happy?

Seeing anyone?

I hope so.

FRANKIE

 

Fourth Letter

      It’s late, Frankie.

And I’m drunk. And the theory

of this and that goes wet

with wanting. Do your legs still rise in two swept

spires and join?

If you really want to talk about this

—about us—then let’s talk about the times we came together: met

and fused and disappeared. How, at the very center,

we’d pass through and forget

who was female, who male, where the kiss

left off and the lips began. One long, sweet spin

and no sign of a designer.

“Someone who gets paid in the coin

of the realm to make his mistakes

in public.”

That’s the definition of an architect.

Did I ever tell you about Frank Lloyd Wright?

How he built this hotel in Tokyo that gave

in the wind: actually swayed? He called it a “natural building,”

and people made fun, but when the earthquake

came and the city collapsed (the rest was designed to resist, unyielding),

his accepted. His was saved.

It wasn’t just ink on paper; it was touch.

I’ve already told you, Frankie, that I care too much.

But am I seeing anybody?

Absolutely. Every night.

I see people who’ll never have what they need

because some fuck with a t-square cut their neighborhood

in half. I see rooms whose dimensions are decided by greed.

I see all that we should

change and can’t (or think we can’t) and, so, goes on and on.

Here’s my dark question this drunk night:

Will you write? Will you forget what I said and write?

Will you, Frankie, forgive me?

JOHN

 

Fifth Letter

Dear John:

I’m having a little trouble in

a lot of ways knowing where to begin.

There were three of them and one

of me, and it was like they were furious about something,

something I’d done. And you know what I’ve done, John?

Nothing.

The room they took me to was the kind

you wrote about: ceiling

gone, walls down. So, when the first one got on top,

I could see right through to sky.

Blue sky. Like nothing would ever stop.

Here’s how people react:

· First, they ask if I hurt.

· Then, they ask why

I was there, as if what I’d done

wrong was to walk in the city where I live.

· Then, at the end, they say, “Well, life goes on.”

Don’t you love it?

I want to say, “Prove it.”

I want to say, “How much do you have to forget, in order to forgive?”

I’m okay, John. I have this one scratch

the whole sideways length of my back.

But when I catch myself in the glass,

it’s like Braille—and the world gone blind.

It’s this feeling

that my body is signaling people: my ass,

my tits. As if the shape of my lips begged for a kiss.

As if all the peep shows and jerk books

were based on this,

on me. Never mind how we think about each other and all that worn-

out talk. It’s the basic form—the way we fit—that needs to be torn

down. When? And how? And by whom, John?

I’m not writing to ask for help.

It’s just that I am not—and will not be—myself.

 

Sixth Letter

Dear Frankie:

Just a quick note to say

I’m glad we actually spoke, if only briefly.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is a way

for old lovers to be friends.

I’ve been doing a lot of walking, lately.

Down by the docks where the ships used to be,

in the allies behind the stores.

Places only truckers and whores

ever see. What doesn’t count, what isn’t pretty.

And I end up on my knees

before it! In the dead-rot and disease,

I seize on this or that scrap of sensation

because … because I need a reason,

Frankie.

Because I need to believe it began

somewhere in order to believe it can end.

Just like a man,

huh? I need to lay the blame.

I don’t mean to say that “Life goes on.”

Over the porn

shops, in the places no

one cares about, lovers beat each other; dead kids are born.

But in the morning, when I stumble into work,

I look at my co-workers (who look like me),

and I think, “Those people are the experts. These people don’t know.

If we lived in a true democracy ….”

I’m ashamed

to go on. Especially to you, especially after this.

I know it sounds bad,

but I wish

I had

your hurt.

JOHN

 

Seventh Letter

Dear John:

I think you’re brave

to stay, to fight. But I don’t want to save

anyone, even myself,

ever again.

I’ve decided to go to the country. Alone.

I know it’s not Jimmy’s fault and so on,

and I certainly don’t blame you or him,

but there’s something not good

about my eyes in the mirror. Things don’t shut off, if you understand, like they should.

I guess I could go on living here.

But deep down, I know it can’t help.

Once you find fear,

fear stays. In the concrete, in the cracked

glass. I’ve always believed in signs,

and now mine’s

this sideways scar across my back.

You want to know where it began?

Me, too. You don’t have to be a man

to want that. What I’ve been doing is re-reading Genesis

—not because it makes any sense out of this,

but …. “Ye shall not eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.”

Or what? Do you remember? Or ye shall be wise.

Yesterday, around 11 a.m.,

I went downtown to the mall.

I don’t need to describe it to you because

these really are all

alike:

in-door fountains, all-year ferns. There was

a lady in a bright red suit handing out plastic spikes

of deodorant. For free.

No dirt, no drugs, no distraction.

And it scared me, John. The whole fucking nation

does. So, I’m gone.

FRANKIE

 

Eighth Letter

Dearest Frankie:

Weren’t you the one who said we can’t begin

again?

If you leave, the lies lives on, unchallenged.

I work with them;

I know.

They bet on the fact that we’re all too damaged

to fight.

And if you run to the country

(which is what?) and it cures

(which it can’t), then

where would you be?

And what’s the bible for, Frankie? How can that help?

Late last night, I found myself

walking home through the park,

and, in the shadows

by the lake (which is as close as the city comes to dark),

I saw a couple making love.

It wasn’t Eden, but it wasn’t rape. It was a man

and a woman. And if there’s a god above,

doesn’t he see this as an act of almost pure bravery,

of prayer?

People making shelter out of thin air.

What we made, Frankie, was the same.

And if that’s over—if that’s gone up in some blinding light—

well, I need to stay here. In the city.

In the hollow of what used to be.

Because … because what else do we have to build on?

And because, if I stay, at least I remain

yours

JOHN

 

Originally published as a serial between April 9, 2001, and July 16, 2001.

This 1982 photo, taken at a refugee camp in Sudan, shows Tsege Asgedom with her children, Tewolde, Selamawi (Mawi), and Mehret.

Of Beetles and Angels

Best of In The Fray 2001. Childhood memories of African war and American struggle.

Tsege Asgedom with her children, Tewolde, Selamawi (Mawi), and Mehret
This 1982 photo, taken at a refugee camp in Sudan, shows Tsege Asgedom with her children, Tewolde, Selamawi (Mawi), and Mehret.

The desert, I remember. The shrieking hyenas, I remember. But beyond that, I cannot separate what I remember from what I have heard in stories.

I may or may not remember seeing my mother look at our house in Adi Wahla, Ethiopia, just before we left. Gazing at it as though it were a person whom she loved and cherished. Trance-walking to the house’s white exterior, laying her hands on it for a few moments, feeling its heartbeat—feeling her own heartbeat—then kissing it, knowing that she might never see it again.

I remember playing soccer with rocks, and a strange man telling me and my brother Tewolde that we had to go on a trip, and Tewolde refusing to go. The man took out a piece of gum, and Tewolde happily traded his homeland.

I remember our journey and the woman we met. Despite her fatigue, she walked and walked and walked, trying to limp her way to safety across miles of stones and rocks. She continued to limp, wanting to stop, but knowing that if she did, she wouldn’t move again.

She pressed on and on, and soon her limp became a crawl. And then I saw a sight that I would never forget—the soles of her naked feet melting away, and then disappearing into the desert, leaving only her bloody, red flesh, mixed with brownish sand and dirt.

But still, she kept on limping. For what choice does a refugee have?

We had no choice, either. We—my mother, my five-year-old brother, my baby sister, and I—kept walking, hoping that we would make it to Sudan and find my father. He had fled our war-ravaged home a year earlier, driven away by the advancing Ethiopian army.

Even stories fail me as I try to recall the rest of our journey. I know only that the wilderness took its toll, that our young bodies gave way, and that we entered a more barren and deadly internal wilderness.

We crossed the Sudanese border and arrived at a city called Awad. A sign should have been posted at the city limits: Awad, home of the exiled. Home of the hopeless. Home of the diseased. A simple sign that would warn and welcome us all.

Welcome, all you refugees. All you psychologically tormented. All you physically malnourished. All you uprooted. Rest your burdens here, for you can rest them nowhere else. Rest your hopes here, for no other place will accept them.

But do not hope too much. For too much hope can lead to insanity.

Beware. We can ill treat your ailments. We have few pills here and little life. We have no guarantees that medicine, not flour, fills the pills. But you have no choice, and neither do we. For we give only that which we have.

Beware our fishermen. Where’s the water, you ask? There is no water. They fish strangers, vagabonds, foreigners, refugees. They look for you even now; if they find you, they will drag you with their iron nets to a wilderness hell.

Please do not blame us. What would you do if chaos approached you on the tortured feet of a million refugees? Could you handle so many?

‘Remember Us’

I don’t remember avoiding the iron nets or finding my father. But I do remember seeking safety in a Sudanese refugee camp. My family spent three years there.

But the camp had its own problems. Disease took its toll, famine always threatened, and warfare plagued Sudan.

Although the fighting never reached our camp, the Sudanese armies were always looking for new soldiers. And they didn’t hesitate to draft refugees.

My parents wondered: What kind of future do we have here? What kind of future do our kids have?

They started hearing more and more about a distant land, a paradise where everyone had a future.

And then, one day, they decided that they’d had enough. War at home. War in Sudan. They wanted peace, and they were ready to go. The village elders watched them prepare and offered a few words of wisdom.

Heading to America, are you? They say that everyone there drives big cars and lives in big houses. Money flows through streets of glimmering gold. And everyone lives long, easy lives.

You will undoubtedly be happy there. Go well, live long, and please, do not forget us.

But as you gather your belongings, please permit us a few words of caution. We may be the poorest and least educated of folks, Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees living in Nowhere, Sudan, but even we have heard things that may interest you.

America seems sweet on top, like fresh honey straight from the comb. But what’s sweet on the surface is often rotten underneath. So beware.

Beware your skins. Blacks are treated like adgi in America, like packhorses. Beware, too, of thieves. Yes, thieves who steal much more than money—thieves who can loot minds, cultures, and even bodies.

Most of all, please remember your country and remember us. Remember your people.

A New Life

We spent our first two weeks in America in a two-room, two-bed motel room in Chicago, my parents on one bed, and on the other, all of us children. Then we moved for seven weeks to a motel in suburban Wheaton.

Knowing that we could get lost in the maze of streets and homes, we rarely left the motel, unless we were accompanied by World Relief, the organization that had brought my family.

One day, though, my father decided that we should brave the new country on our own. TEWOLDE AND SELAMAWI, GET YOUR SHOES ON, he announced. WE NEED TO LET THE OUTSIDE AIR BEAT ON US.

Sporting fully-picked afros and sun-broiled, Sudanese skin, clad in mismatched second hand clothes and low-budget Sudanese shoes, we trekked along the shoulder of Route 38. Needless to say, we drew plenty of looks.

We walked until our new shoes tore into the soles of our feet. Night approached, and thousands of headlights, more lights than we had ever seen in our lives, streamed past our eyes.

We watched in wonder, unable to believe that one road could hold so many cars. My father’s voice assumed an uncharacteristic hush.

THEY WERE RIGHT, he told us in amazement. I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY KNEW, BUT THEY WERE RIGHT. NO SMALL CARS HERE. EVERYONE DRIVES BIG CARS. AND NIGHT HAS NO POWER OVER THEM.

If he could have read his future, my father might have feared the headlights. He might have seen the destructive power behind them, power that would one day take his life. But he could hardly read his new country’s language, much less his future, so he remained amazed all the way home.

The other times we left our motel were with our World Relief friends. They came almost daily and took us around Chicago—to parks, to skyscrapers, to the grocery store, showing us what life would be like in America.

Even with their constant support, though, we still felt the deepest homesickness. We yearned for a piece of injera bread or a bowl of sebhi stew. For a neighbor who spoke our language. For our people.

That’s when they appeared. Out of nowhere, two angels at our door. It was two of our people: habesha women. And they came bearing gifts: injera bread and sebhi stew.

My mother burst into tears upon seeing them. “How did you find us?” she asked.

“We heard from someone that there was a habesha family that had just arrived, and that they were pent up in a motel and knew no one. We remember our first days in America, so we came.”

They showed my mother how to make injera and sebhi using American utensils, and they left us with enough food for a few days.

Seventeen years later, they still hold a special place in our hearts.

On some days, neither our sponsors nor our angels came. We still feared our new country, so we would stay inside and entertain ourselves by telling stories. Other times, we kids would play catch with little pebbles.

It never took long before a stone went somewhere it shouldn’t have, like my father’s ear.

GO AHEAD, YOU SONS OF WOMAN! BREAK SOMETHING AND GET US THROWN INTO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT.

SIRAHKHA KEREKHA IYE—I WILL SHOW YOU YOUR WORK.

As we searched for safer things, we discovered the great mouthpiece of America, the television.

My siblings and I had seen a fuzzy black-and-white television once in the big Sudanese city of Gedariff. We had heard about it from our friends, and we squirmed through the crowd of Sudanese natives and habesha refugees to reach the rich man’s small, dirt-floor room. Once there, we bunched in among 30 spellbound viewers and watched tiny dots struggle to form the outlines of boxers on the screen.

Now, as we turned on the television in our motel room, we noticed immediately that American dots were much stronger than the ones in Sudan. They did not struggle to form the images on the screen. In fact, sometimes you couldn’t see the dots at all, only perfect color images.

Although we saw what the images did, we could not understand what they said. The only one who could was my father, who was considered an educated man among our people and could half-speak an Ethiopian/British dialect of English.

He was appalled by what the television told him.

GOD SHOW MERCY ON US! DID YOU HEAR THAT? THE BOYFRIEND KILLED HIS GIRLFRIEND AND HER PARENTS, TOO. HE STABBED THEM MORE THAN FIFTY TIMES. WHAT KIND OF COUNTRY HAVE WE COME TO?

My mother turned her face toward the heavens and lifted her quivering hands, as if to draw in God’s angels around her. We kept watching as the television displayed more footage of the girlfriend and her family.

THEY WARNED US OF THIS WICKEDNESS CALLED BOYFRIEND AND GIRLFRIEND BACK IN ADI. DOING WHAT YOU WANT, LIVING OUTSIDE THE RULE, AND THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE A STRANGE SICKNESS OR THEY KILL YOUR FAMILY.

We changed the channel. The dots formed a white child, getting ready to go to school. His mother hunched over and scanned his face for dirt, wiping white filaments from under his eyebrows and dirt from off his face. The lesson was not lost on my mother.

Do you see this? Tewolde, Selamawi, Mehret. Take note. If you do not wash your face and comb your hair, if you have even one speck on your face, they will chase you away from the school.

Waiting

We would have come to the States one year earlier, in 1982. We had already passed the infamous immigration tests, sold our six goats, and begun to say goodbye to our fellow villagers. But in the final days, right before we were to leave our village forever, my half-sister Mulu came from another region of Sudan, surprising us.

Although we were scheduled to depart in a matter of days, my father and mother refused to leave without her. They begged the immigration officials. YOU HAVE CHILDREN, DON’T YOU? WOULD YOU GO TO AMERICA AND LEAVE YOUR DAUGHTER ALONE IN THIS REFUGEE CAMP?

“Look,” they told us, “World Relief agreed to work with a family of five, not a family of six. They agreed to bring you now, not later, and it’s impossible for her to come with you now. She has no paperwork.”

World Relief was a U.S.-based Christian organization that sought refugees from all over the world and helped them to resettle in the United States.

Millions of my people had become refugees during the 30-year bloodbath between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Most had fled to Sudan. Seeing their plight, World Relief had mediated an agreement between the United States and Sudan to resettle some of the refugees.

As part of the resettling process, World Relief would have to identify American sponsors who would find the refugees housing, furniture, jobs, medical treatment, and schools—everything that they would need to get on their feet.

But before a family could qualify for resettlement, it had to pass the infamous tests. No one knew which answers were right and which were wrong.

“Why do you want to go to America? What will you do when you get there? Do you want to come back to your country some day? Do you plan to work in America?”

Many clever interviewees had failed despite giving the same answers as those who had passed. Others had passed after giving the same answers as those who had failed.

My father made one thing clear as we headed into our interview: He would speak for all of us. DON’T ANY OF YOU SAY A WORD OR I WILL MAKE YOU LOST. LET ME DO ALL THE TALKING.

Apparently, he told the officials what they wanted to hear, and they told us what we wanted to hear: “You are going to America! To a city called Chicago.”

The officials insisted that we had to leave Mulu behind because she had not applied with the rest of us. But my parents refused to leave her. Returning day after day, sometimes three times a day, my father wore down the officials until they finally caved in. She could come if we waited one year.

We waited, the year passed, and six of us started on our way: my father, Haileab, in his late forties; my mother, Tsege, in her mid-twenties; my half-sister, Mulu, in her late teens; my older brother, Tewolde, nine; my younger sister, Mehret, five; and I, Selamawi, almost seven years old.

‘The Deepest Pain’

After World Relief met us at the airport, they paid for us to stay in a motel in Chicago. Meanwhile, they searched for a church that would sponsor us.

They could not find a sponsor in the city of Chicago, so after two weeks they moved us to another motel in the suburbs, on Route 38. A World Relief caseworker named Beth Raney had agreed to find us a sponsoring church in the area.

The first time we saw Beth, we wondered how such a small woman could exude so much energy.

The first time Beth saw us, she saw trouble. My father lay shivering under a blanket, his head aflame in fever, and Beth, a nurse, realized instantly that he had malaria.

We did not have access to medical care, so she went to a physician friend to obtain the medication that my father needed.

She also met with the pastors of area churches and asked if their congregation would sponsor a refugee family of six.

While she searched for a sponsor, she visited several times a week, talking with my father in his broken English, trying to communicate with my mother through words, but succeeding more through hugs and smiles.

“I still remember looking at Haileab’s and Tsege’s eyes and seeing the deepest pain,” Beth recalls. “The pain of people who have been torn away from their loved ones, from their culture, from their place in society, from everything that has ever given their life coherence and dignity. I tried to help them, talking often with Haileab, trying to get him to talk about his life in his homeland.

“I tried to talk with Tsege, but it was hard because she knew so little English and because she would always retreat to the other room with the children when I came. Her culture had taught her that only men could speak with important visitors. She did not realize that I considered her to be just as important as Haileab and myself.”

Beth found a sponsoring church, the Bethel Presbyterian Church. Like the rest of Wheaton, the church was almost all white, and from our standpoint, all haftamat, or crazy-rich. Bethel went to work immediately on finding us an affordable home—no small task in Wheaton.

We lived in the second motel for seven weeks. Then, one day, our sponsors at Bethel told us we had a home.

We had no idea what to expect. We had spent the previous three years living in a one-room adobe, and even then, we were grateful that we had the one room.

So when we saw our two-story house with its huge yard, we could not believe our eyes. ARE THEY RIGHT? IS IT FOR REAL? THIS WHOLE STRETCH OF HOUSE AND YARD OURS? IT’S TOO MUCH.

We could not afford the rent, even when my father had his job, so we rented out the entire upstairs. And then, a few months into our new home, our lives changed forever.

My parents went to the hospital. Our sponsors took us kids to their home. Two days later, my mother returned with a most precious gift. Conceived in Sudan but born in the States, he was a child of both the old and new worlds.

HIS NAME SHALL BE HNTSA-EYESUS, BUT HE WILL ALSO BE KNOWN AS TEMESGEN, OR “THANK YOU.” FOR WE ARE THANKFUL TO HAVE MADE IT HERE SAFELY, AND THANKFUL FOR OUR NEW LIFE IN THIS LAND.

‘You Are Poor and Black’

From our very first days in America, my mother and father hammered into our minds the importance of excelling in school.

RIGHT NOW, WE ARE AMONG THE POOREST IN THE LAND. NEITHER YOUR MOTHER NOR I WILL FIND GOOD WORK BECAUSE WE LACK SCHOOLING. WE WILL HAVE TO WORK BACK-BREAKING JOBS, WE WILL NEVER FULLY UNDERSTAND OUR RIGHTS, AND OTHERS WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE OF US.

BUT IF YOU, OUR CHILDREN, WORK HARD AT SCHOOL AND FINISH THE UNIVERSITY, MAYBE SOMEDAY YOU CAN HELP YOURSELVES AND HELP YOUR FAMILY, TOO.

My parents may not have known much about this country, but they knew that the university cost more money than they had.

They had a solution, though. They told us that if we were among the best students in the land, we could earn scholarships and attend the university for free—in spite of our race and background.

YOU ARE POOR AND BLACK AND WE CANNOT BUY YOU THE RESOURCES THAT OTHER PARENTS CAN. BUT IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH DESIRE TO OUTWORK ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS AND YOU NEVER GIVE UP, YOU WILL WIN THE RACE ONE DAY.

What’s both beautiful and scary about young children is that they will believe most anything that their parents tell them. If our parents had told us that black refugees growing up on welfare in an affluent white community couldn’t excel, we probably would have believed them.

But they told us that we could do anything if we worked hard and treated others with respect. And we believed them.

Lessons

Sometimes, though, faith was not enough. No one taught us that lesson quite like our classmates at Longfellow Elementary School.

They had never seen anything like us, with our thick, perfectly combed afros, our perfectly mismatched clothing, and our spanking-new XJ-900s, bought from Payless Shoe Source for under $7 a pair.

My brother Tewolde and I patrolled the same playground for the hour-long lunch recess. Kindergarten met for just a half-day, so my sister Mehret went home before recess.

Most of our classmates treated us nicely, others ignored us, and the rest—well, we could only wish that they would ignore us. We may not have understood their words, but we always understood the meaning behind their laughter.

“African Boodie Scratcher! Scratch that Boodie!”

“Black Donkey! You’re so ugly!”

“Why don’t you go back to Africa where you came from?”

We were just two, and they were often many. But they had grown up in a wealthy American suburb, and we had grown up in a Sudanese refugee camp. We were accustomed to fighting almost daily, using sticks, stones, wood chips, and whatever else we could get our hands on.

So it was usually no contest, especially when the two of us double-teamed them, as we had done so many times in Sudan.

Sometimes, though, our classmates found us alone. One time, a brown-haired, overweight third grader named Sam cornered me along the north fence of the playground.

All about the school, kids played soccer, kickball, and foursquare. We had but one supervisor to monitor the hundreds.

I don’t remember what I had done to infuriate Sam; maybe it was something that Tewolde had done, and I was going to pay for it. Whatever the answer, Sam wanted to teach me a lesson.

He bellowed at me, getting louder with every word, until his face blossomed red. He bumped me against the fence and gripped the railing with his thick, chunky hands, sandwiching me in between.

I pushed against him desperately and tried to wiggle out, but he kept squeezing harder and harder, until the metal fence began to tear into my back, leaving me unable to breathe.

I searched for the supervisor but could not spot her. Nor could I see my brother. Fearing that Sam meant to squeeze all the life out of me, I started to cry for help. He squeezed even harder.

I think one of my brother’s friends must have told him that Sam was suffocating me, because through the tears, I saw Tewolde exploding toward us. He came charging from the other side of the playground with all the fury of an angry bull.

Tewolde was half of Sam’s size but he showed no hesitation. Without slowing, Tewolde leaped up, cocked his hand back and smashed it against the side of Sam’s thick head.

Sam slumped to the asphalt and started to cry. But my brother had only started. He clenched his teeth and pounced on Sam’s outstretched body, battering his face with punch after punch until Sam started to bleed.

I saw the supervisor coming toward our side of the playground, so I grabbed Tewolde and pulled him off. Come on! Nahanigh, Tewolde! We have to go! Come on, before the supervisor sees us!

African Brothers

Many battles later, my brother graduated to the fourth- and fifth-grade playground and left me to fend for myself. My younger sister Mehret was still on my playground, but she was small, too small to fight.

Mehret was so small that one day the strong wind picked her up and slammed her into the fence. My father berated the school administrators for not doing more to help her. But what could they do? She was small, and the wind was strong.

With time, I started to make friends through the soccer games at recess. Although my parents could not afford to put me on a team, Sudan had taught me well, with its days spent playing kiesoh igre, or “ball of foot.”

My brother met a good-natured white kid named Brian Willmer who lived right up the street from us. Brian became my brother’s best friend and a great friend to everyone in our family. He came over to our house often, always telling us that we should send pictures of Hntsa to baby modeling agencies because Hntsa was so cute.

We made other friends, too, and started to fit in better. But the old enemies did not disappear. They had new ammunition, too. Every day, the TV news would broadcast explicit footage of famine-stricken Ethiopians.

“Hey, Salami! You look so skinny. Let me know if you need more food. You want another sandwich? How about some extra milk? I don’t want you to starve.”

It was even worse for my sister Mulu, who had to brave high school by herself. Her classmates drew skeletons on her locker and even serenaded her with the popular famine fundraising song, “We Are the World.” She fought back until Wheaton North suspended her.

Tewolde and I even had confrontations with the only other Africans at our school: big, puffy-cheeked Frank and small, silent Mbago, a pair of brothers from Nigeria.

Both were in second grade with me, even though Frank was three years older than the rest of our class. How could that be?

None of us knew for sure, but we knew that he wasn’t too bright. He used to pay other second graders to do simple math problems for him—five minus three, eight minus four, six plus seven—all for 2 cents a problem.

Even though we were from different countries, we still should have been brothers, defending and helping each other. But like our brothers in Africa, we were making war when we should have been making peace.

I tried to avoid them by playing on the opposite side of the playground.

But Mbago always provoked me. I think that he disliked me because I was poor and looked it, and he was ashamed to be African with me. When Frank was there, I had no choice but to let Mbago call me any names that he wanted. But whenever I found Mbago alone, and Mbago said anything mean to me, I always pounced on him and made him cry.

Invariably, he would return with Frank. They would corner me far away from the supervisor, when I least expected it, and beat on me until I had escaped or they had had enough.

They lived just down the street from us, less than one block away, so one day my bro and I hid in some bushes and waited for them with long, lean sticks in our hands. We would show them, Sudanese-style.

We sprang on them. Slash. Scream. Slash. They ran desperately.

But we were faster and cut them off. And Tewolde let out his anger. Don’t you ever touch my little brother again or you’ll get it even worse!

We strutted back home, victorious, even laughing as we recounted the incident.

But then we thought of whom they might tell, and our laughter stopped in a hurry. We retreated into our house, afraid of what we had done.

When we heard the frenzied knocking on our door, we knew that our time was up.

Their parents stood outside, guarding bruised and teary-eyed children. My parents yelled out in anger for us to appear. DID YOU DO THIS? DON’T YOU DARE LIE OR I WILL MAKE YOU LOST RIGHT THIS MOMENT!

Lifting us by our ears, my parents screamed at us and threatened us until the Nigerian parents had been appeased. Then the parents began talking about Africa, immigration, and all of the things they had in common.

“Would you like some injera? How about something to drink? That’s all you are going to eat? How about some tea? Please. Visit us anytime you want. Of course not! Do not call first. You know that our people do not believe in appointments; come over whenever you want!”

It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

‘Do Not Ever Fight Back’

As Tewolde and I got older, the violence at school continued. So we kept defending ourselves—until the school administrators had no choice:

“This notice is to inform you that your children are fighting almost every day. Especially Tewolde. If they continue to fight with their classmates, we will have to consider expelling them from Longfellow Elementary School.” Signed, Ms. Cobb, the principal.

My father sat, saying nothing, as he was known to do in moments of great crisis. Then he proclaimed his iron verdict.

YIIIIIEEEEEE. ALL THIS COMING FROM ADI FOR THE SAKE OF SCHOOL AND EDUCATION, ALL FOR NOTHING.

LISTEN TO ME, MY CHILDREN. I AM YOUR FATHER, RIGHT? THEN LISTEN. I KNOW THAT IN SUDAN, YOU HAD TO FIGHT OR THEY WOULD KEEP BEATING YOU DAY AFTER DAY. WE ARE NOT IN SUDAN ANYMORE.

HERE IN AMERICA, THEY TAKE A SIMPLE THING LIKE A BRUISE AND KICK YOU OUT OF SCHOOL AND EVEN THROW YOU INTO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT. SO FROM NOW ON, LET THEM HIT YOU. COME HOME BEATEN AND BRUISED. DO NOT EVER FIGHT BACK.

My brother and I were dumbfounded. At best, we had expected screaming; at worst, the leather belt. But we had never imagined a betrayal of this magnitude. Our father, better than anyone, knew the importance of standing up for yourself.

We begged. We pleaded. We reasoned. What if they knock our teeth out? What if they make us bleed? What if they break our bones? If we let one kid beat us up, they’re all going to beat us up.

DO YOU THINK THAT I WISH HARM ON MY CHILDREN? WE HAVE NO CHOICE. WE ARE POOR.

IF YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL DRIVE YOU TO YOUR NEW SCHOOL? IF YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL GIVE YOU A SCHOLARSHIP? DO YOU THINK THAT THEY GIVE SCHOLARSHIPS TO STUDENTS WHO GET EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL?

REMEMBER THAT THIS COUNTRY RUNS ON COMPUTERS. ONCE YOU COMMIT THE SMALLEST CRIME, YOUR NAME WILL BE STAINED FOREVER.

SO I’M TELLING YOU: IF THEY COME AFTER YOU, RUN. IF I EVER HEAR THAT YOU HAVE BEEN IN A FIGHT, FEAR FOR YOUR BEINGS. I WILL MAKE YOU LOST.

We feared my father more than anything in the world, so as painful as it was to stop fighting, we stopped fighting.

We learned to take taunting and small beatings. There were a few isolated incidents, though, where we had no choice but to defend ourselves.

There was the time that I was in fourth grade and my brother had graduated to middle school. Our neighbors, the Panther family, gave my sister Mehret rides because they had one extra seat in their station wagon. That left me to make the one-mile walk home by myself.

One day, two of my classmates, a light-skinned black kid named Dennis and a skinny white kid named Marc, jumped me on the way home. They would have given me a black eye and maybe more, worse than anything that awaited me at home. So I tightened my face into an angry scowl.

Feigning toward Dennis, I kicked Marc, hard as I could, XJ-900 right in his groin. Marc hunched over and whimpered to the ground. Dennis tried to run, but I caught him. I made sure that there would be no next time.

Dennis and Marc were easy pickings, but a year later, my brother met a more serious challenge: Jake Evans. Tough, mean, unstable, Jake was the deadliest kid at Franklin Middle School.

He was the school’s head burnout, one of those heavy-metal white kids who did drugs and didn’t care about anything. He struck fear in the entire student body. And he hated my brother.

Jake started telling everyone in the school that my brother’s days were numbered. I rarely saw my brother tremble, but he trembled when he heard Jake’s threat. He was right to tremble. Jake had about eighty pounds and a foot on him.

But what terrified us wasn’t Jake’s size. It was his illegal-length switchblade. We knew Jake had it because we had seen him practice with it, setting up targets in the grass near Triangle Park, hitting dead center almost every time.

Even if my brother could have taken Jake, Jake had seven or eight burnout lackeys who followed him around. My bro couldn’t possibly survive all of them and their knives.

Eventually, the day came, as in one of those movies where the whole school knows that a student is going to get whooped.

My brother fidgeted all day long, trying to figure out an escape route. But there was no escape route. Too many people were watching him, talking about the fight. By the end of the day, everyone followed him home, including Jake.

Jake and his friends surrounded Tewolde about a block away from the school. My brother had a few friends around, but not nearly enough to save him. So he made a desperate prayer: Dear God, please save me. Dear God, please save me. Dear God, just don’t let them use their knives.

I guess that God must have heard my brother because He sent some friends down to help him. A van pulled up, carrying four tall black guys. They looked like high-school students, maybe older. They strutted toward us with dangerous confidence.

“What’s going on here? Does someone have a problem with our brother?”

No answer. Confronted with someone larger than himself, the school bully became the school coward.

“Why are you so quiet now, you little punk? Yeah, you. Don’t look around like I’m talking to somebody else. I’m talking to you. If you touch this kid today or any other day, you’re dead meat. You got that? Good. Now get the heck outta here.”

Jake and his friends slunk away, never to be heard from again. They understood violence and they understood threats.

Those four rescuers? They were the older brothers of Tewolde’s friend, Kawaun. Kawaun had told his brothers that all the white burnouts were getting together to gang up on his black friend, and his brothers had come down to help the black kid out.

The Five Chinese Brothers

At night, when we were still in elementary school, my brother told me the most hilarious stories. They usually starred these five Chinese brothers who had moved to the United States. Each brother had his head shaved in the front and long hair in the back, sometimes braided. All five brothers lived together.

Tewolde spun his stories from the top bunk and I heard them from the bottom. They always featured the same plot: the five Chinese brothers craved peace and usually tried to mind their own business. But some ill-willed Americans would always mistreat them.

Like all Chinese people, the Chinese brothers had mastered kung fu, karate, and every other martial art. My brother and I knew this about Chinese people because of a TV show called Samurai Sunday that came on right after church. All the Chinese people in that show could really fight.

Tewolde’s Chinese brothers would be doing something innocent, such as watering their garden, and then, out of nowhere, their neighbors would insult them or hurl a rock through their window. Having no choice, the Chinese brothers would use their kung fu to beat up the Americans.

Eventually, it got so bad that the brothers had to whoop the whole town—every last citizen, five citizens at a time. It was a lot of work, but the brothers had no choice.

Sometimes I wonder why my brother and I loved the Chinese brother stories. I used to think it was because they were funny.

Lately, though, I have come to believe that the brothers were more than stories. They were our kid way of dealing with our unfriendly world.

Even if we couldn’t beat up all of the cruel kids at school, the five Chinese brothers could. They could whoop the kids, they could whoop their parents, they could whoop the entire town.

This article was originally published in two parts, on April 9, 2001, and May 7, 2001. It is an excerpt of Asgedom’s memoir of the same name.

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