Black folk could fly, p.9
Black Folk Could Fly, page 9
Moreover, I was surrounded by folk who had been on the planet for the entire century, and their view of the world began before any of these newfangled machines were even invented. There was my cousin Norman, who lived right across the dirt road from us, who was in his seventies when I was born. He knew an awful lot about the land and raised hogs and chickens and had an admirable orchard adjacent to his and his wife Miss Alice’s house. There was my great-great-aunt Erie, who was the youngest daughter of my great-great-grandfather. (Only years later did I discover how rare it is for a person to know a great-great aunt. Indeed, both my maternal great-grandmothers were living when I went to high school.) Aunt Erie had over ten children, most of whom were away, but all were colorful people, and they would descend on Chinquapin during the holidays and the town would feel like a festival. There was my aunt Lillian, who lived in a big two-story house down the road, and her multitude of daughters, and her sons, Herman and Irving, who had worked to send many of the girls to college, and Herman’s nine children with whom I went to school . . . and that’s just one limb on one branch of one side of the tree of the extended family in which I grew up, surrounded by stories and antics and foibles and gossip and artifacts and something like love, though the many feelings engendered by life in a small town are much more complex and tangled than most people who’ve never lived in one, belonged to one, could ever imagine.
There was church. Two churches in fact. First Baptist and St. Louis. Both Baptist, and to this day I cannot say why Chinquapin never had an AME church. My mama was zealous about my going to church, and I remember too many sermons to be in my right mind, and the pastors Hestor and Lassiter the younger, who succeeded Lassiter the senior. There were revivals in September and Vacation Bible School in June, when the blueberry season came, and Sunday school each and every Sunday—even on fifth Sunday when nobody had church services. Church remained an indelible mark on my growing up and, no matter how far or how fast I run, the lessons of Baptist Protestantism and Southern Calvinism will be etched on my brain—probably my soul—the way circuits are hardwired to a motherboard.
There was school, which I truly enjoyed. And all the Black women who taught me (I actually had more Black teachers than white teachers before I went to high school), women who had known me and my mother their entire lives; women who watched me and all the other Black boys and Black girls like sentient hawks, and who would report any crime or misdemeanor with the rapidity of lightning. Getting away with wrongdoing or occasional mischief was doomed to fail. I remember feeling completely watched, and always felt that was one of the many reasons I couldn’t wait to say goodbye to the hamlet. Not that I wanted to do anything particularly evil; I just didn’t want my business known to every Myrtle, Blanche, and Willie Earl.
I will not be romantic about Chinquapin. From as early as I can remember, I always wanted to get the hell out of there. After all, it was what it was: a very small backwoods North Carolina village. The schools were not desegregated until 1969; a great many roads were unpaved; medical care was twenty-five miles away and then not particularly competent; water was pumped from private wells, and many folk had no running water. As soon as I could read newspapers and magazines, I had a clue that the world was wide and far different from what I had seen day in and day out in Duplin County, and something like resentment grew in my breast. I resented people who were elsewhere. Though I would not know the phrase for decades to come, like Milan Kundera’s poor artists in the novel Life Is Elsewhere, I figured real life was going on somewhere else.
Of course that was a boy thinking, feeling. And though I think that this feeling, inchoate and arch, was the origin of my wanderlust, I now see those elements of Chinquapin that were so fundamental in making me a fairly good citizen, a fairly decent person, a fairly respectful human being, and, probably, a writer. Though, in truth, all those years, there was nothing I wanted to do more than become a scientist.
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In 1994, Paramount Communications launched a new television network called UPN, and one of their flagship shows was Star Trek: Voyager. Apparently the success of their cash cow franchise was so irresistible—after Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the string of movies—that they couldn’t resist the moneymaking urge.
The remarkable thing about this new series was not the fact that this super-duper new starship had been flung to the other side of the galaxy, and that it would take its crew more than their lifetimes to get home—no. What I found arresting was that the security officer was a Vulcan, one of those pointed-eared, green-blooded, utterly logical aliens from the planet Vulcan, whom Mr. Spock had made a part of American pop culture, and he was Black. Mr. Tuvok, played by the actor Tim Russ, was the logical, honor-rigid, emotionless embodiment of all of Gene Roddenberry’s peculiar psychosexual hang-ups about the id and cognition, which, as the young folk say, blew my mind. This series was clearly made to address all the cultural, ethical, ethnic bugaboos that had been haunting the franchise since the 1960s. The captain was a woman, the first officer was a Native American, the science officer was a Korean, and the chief engineer was a woman—half-Klingon.
Too much can be made of this minor historical development, I am well aware. But, for a while, what Paramount had unwittingly done—in a sheer and utter and bald attempt to pander to people like me—made me ponder many a thing.
A Black Vulcan. For me, in high school, besotted and beset by science fiction, and watching the original Star Trek religiously, and fantasizing about being on a starship, it was not imaginable—or at least I did not imagine—the convolution or the notion of “race” in conjunction with alien life, let alone on the planet Vulcan. Moreover, this purely monetary gesture on Paramount’s part was rife with a huge cultural irony which tickled me no end.
Vulcans, for those who don’t know, are a species who, centuries ago, decided that emotion was a bad idea, so they essentially eradicated it from their society. In emotion’s place, they elevated the philosophy of logic, to which they subjected everything. This premise, the notion of a “humanoid” without the petty, messy, irrational baggage of feelings, was what made Mr. Spock so compelling for so many folk. He became a built-in device for examining emotions in a new way—in a way that only science fiction, really, can successfully achieve. Moreover, Vulcans are bound by rigid codes of honor; filial piety is paramount, as are duty, dedication to science, and they only mate once or twice in their life, and that act is seen as something of an embarrassment and is shrouded in solemn ritual.
The irony comes when you consider the image of the Black man in popular media, indeed, long before popular media existed: emotion-less? logical? honor-bound? sexless? One could take this cultural juxtaposition as a joke. But, in 1994, when this new media phenomenon was presented, blatant and subtle in its various permutations, and admittedly minor in the scheme of things, it nonetheless made me wonder. Was our society finally, so close to the turn of the century, coming round the bend? Were we ready to begin to reimagine our deepest prejudices, and come closer to that Martin Luther King and Rodney King vision? Were we starting to climb to the mountaintop and get along?
Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas means.
—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaca”
In 1994, Chinquapin had finally been thrust—more like yanked—into the heady whorl of the postmodern era. The ambulance was state of the art. The town had city water. There was cable television and a supermarket and two convenience stores, at which one could rent videos of movies that had, in some cases, been released in the last six months. Less than twenty miles down the road was Ellis Airport, with a landing sleeve and a rotating luggage belt. Interstate 40 had been completed only a few years before, which effectively created a line all the way from Barstow, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina, and, for the good folk of Duplin County, cut an hour off the drive to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area, which in that year had been assessed by Money magazine as the most livable place in the country. My grandfather now used a microwave and cultivated a taste for Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, while my mother watched Montel and Oprah and was receiving medical care that, in 1963, would have been essentially the stuff of science fiction.
To be sure, these things seem minor to most folk in the country, but the way they changed the complexion and the quality and the quantity of life bewitched me. For in my mind, Chinquapin was still backwoods and out of step, yet, thanks to satellite dishes and faxes and email, was not so far away from the rest of America, and not so quaint and Tobacco Road.
Nevertheless, for me, Chinquapin was very much a land of specters, so many of the people I had known as a boy now dead and gone. I could not help but hear their ghosts about the rooms and fields and barns, now empty and relic-like. And, as sentimental and shamefully nostalgic as it may sound, groups of folk no longer sat about on porches and just talked; now they watched HBO and Cinemax. Most farms had been bought out by larger farms; church congregations seemed sparse. The old folks who remained seemed older, more frail, halting, almost ethereal, some from Alzheimer’s, some from neglect and being forgotten. My running buddies were practically all gone, like me.
All of which is not to say that any of these changes are in and of themselves bad, and I am the last person on the planet Earth who will lament the passage of an era. Chinquapin did, and probably still does, abound with a multitude of hateful truths, dirty laundry, murders, substance abuse, strife of every manner, small-mindedness, racism, boredom, and downright inertia.
During my year back home, I could make the drive in less than two hours, go from Chapel Hill’s squeaky clean, high-tech, PhD-laden opulence, to Chinquapin’s postmodern present, where hog farms were running riot, and the chopped barbecue was good, and I could get chitlins and run from snakes and attend the Daughters of Zion’s annual event at the church, and go home and watch BET, and check my email after calling a friend in Japan.
I was not so much bothered as disquieted by the changes that were occurring in Chinquapin, for in a way, those changes were at the foundation of the changes that were taking place in America. Chances were that the young folk in the elementary schools and the high schools of Duplin County were not having the same sorts of experiences that I had had in school. In fact, their experiences were probably very close to those of young folk growing up in Alaska or Maine or Wyoming or Arizona. Yes, there was a local flavor, a local color, but the information they were receiving, there in no-longer-quite-so-remote Chinquapin, was not very different from the information being received by kids, Black kids, in Seattle and Madison and Salt Lake City and New York.
More to the point, those things that I had taken so for granted about being Black, which had come from my mama and my grandfather and Uncle Roma and Aunt Lillian and Aunt Mildred in third grade, and Reverend Raynor and Miss Ruth, were now being dictated by Martin and Moesha and Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre and Russell Simmons and Vibe magazine and, yes, Paramount. Chinquapin was becoming more like the rest of America. It was being absorbed by the vast cultural soup of consumeristic we-think.
The problem, as I saw it, had to do with the idea that Blackness was not so easily beamed through a satellite or through an optic fiber. After all this travel and bother, I had, in many ways, arrived back in Chinquapin with the same question: What is Blackness?
I have argued that Internet experiences help us to develop models of psychological well-being that are in a meaningful sense postmodern: They admit multiplicity and flexibility. They acknowledge the constructed nature of reality, self, and other. The Internet is not alone in encouraging such models. There are many places within our culture that do so. What they have in common is that they all suggest the value of approaching one’s “story” in several ways and with fluid access to one’s different aspects. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible, and ever in process. The metaphors travel freely among computer science, psychology, children’s games, cultural studies, artificial intelligence, literary criticism, advertising, molecular biology, self-help, and artificial life. They reach deep into the popular culture. The ability of the Internet to change popular understandings of identity is heightened by the presence of these metaphors.
—Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
I had a revelation one day in the library in Phillips Hall, the math and science building, back when I was a junior: sentences are very much like equations.
Why did I want to become a scientist?
People in Chinquapin considered it, me, a little weird or just plain strange, my pursuit of science. But then again, in Chinquapin, in general, I was considered a fairly strange child.
I always believed the desire stemmed from my fundamentally intense sense of magic and the supernatural. From a very early age I had been fascinated by tales of ghosts and vampires and werewolves. Witches, sorcerers, wizards, warlocks, to my preteenage mind, were the ultimate. Perhaps it was the ability to affect matter, to change the world. (Psychologists might say that such a strong interest in what can only be called magic actually comes from a deep-seated dissatisfaction with regard to the way things are, a desire to actually change a world one feels powerless to change. That may also be so.)
Nonetheless, somewhere about third grade or so, the more I learned about the world, and was able to distinguish fact from fiction, I settled on the notion that the real, modern-day sorcerers were those men in white lab coats who sent people into outer space, and designed lasers, and made experiments into the nature of atoms and electrons. They could affect the physical world, change it. I don’t know if I made the connection, though I probably did, that “witch” means a wise woman, or a person of knowledge, and “science” means knowledge. In both cases, knowledge meant power. For a poor colored boy living on a dirt road, with an overly fertile imagination and strange ideas, the concept proved to be irresistible.
Thus science fiction, thus Star Trek, thus notions of teleportation and warp speed and solar-powered cars and gravitational fields and Maxwell’s equations; thus the ambition to become a Black Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov, a PhD in the physical sciences and a writer of science fiction—for I had always written, knew I always would write; thus Chapel Hill, on a track for a BS in physics; thus computers.
When I came to Chapel Hill in 1981, the personal computer craze was essentially in its infancy. Apple had yet to introduce Macintosh, and kids like me, who were weaned on BASIC in high school, were dying to learn the more sophisticated, more powerful languages. As a physics major, I was required to take a course in numerical analysis in my sophomore year. The professor was an experimental nuclear physicist from New Zealand who wore khaki shorts and boots and socks, and who essentially made us learn FORTRAN on our own, for that was, in his opinion, the best way to learn it. I remember staying up for thirty-six hours, most of that time in Phillips Hall, creating a program that would translate Kepler’s laws of planetary motion into a graph. All this was done on a big mainframe computer. In the laboratory where I reported as a work-study student, the physicist who worked with the microbiologist there was going to teach me the latest version of PASCAL, which was one of the hot new computer languages.
Most of my comrades-in-arms in those heady and headache-provoking years were from backgrounds of a little more financial substance than my own, and a few had their own personal computers. They knew much more about hardware and wiring and circuitry than I, largely due to the fact that they had had a head start. I had only been able to work on a computer when I attended North Carolina’s Governor’s School in 1979. Duplin County high schools had no computers in those days. (And some still don’t.) Nonetheless, I had no intention of letting any of that stop me. I was well on my way to becoming a computer geek in the grand, nerdy fashion. (Back then, the word “geek” was not as widely used as it has become today. Science folk were known as “nerds,” but a “geek” was a badge of honor: it meant you knew machine language, the stuff of the future.)
Somewhere in my sophomore year, my designs went badly astray: I got distracted by literature and writing. I found a mentor in a kindly and loveable old curmudgeon named Max Steele, who was then the head of UNC’s creative writing department. And he wasted no time in informing me that most of the science fiction I so deeply regarded was essentially trash. I bristled with resentment. He said that my background was rich and fecund and just made to be written about, and that I didn’t know what I was wasting if I neglected it. He suggested I read some real literature. Fully intending to prove him wrong, I did just that. I discovered he was right; I also discovered something that I can only describe as vital about the process, and the danger and the possibilities of writing. I came to know the work of James Baldwin and Richard Wright and Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. I fell in love with Isaac Bashevis Singer and Yukio Mishima and V. S. Naipaul and Henry Dumas and a man named William Shakespeare.
