The Bold World Read online

  I thought Penelope’s body was amazing. Whenever he was jumping on our trampoline, or splashing in the pond, or flipping around with his brothers, or hugging me—at those times Penelope’s body was magical, and I wanted to tell him that all the time. Affirmations have always been big in my family. “Your body is awesome! Your body is beautiful! Whoa, look at those legs!” were my go-tos with the kids. My parents used to do the same with Ramona and me, complimenting us all the time on our physicality.

  But with Penelope, those kinds of affirmations went only so far. When the body is the enemy, it’s not to be trusted. So Joe and I began to switch tactics. Instead of praising the form, we started encouraging Penelope to do things—things that needed the body, pushed the body, relied upon the body.

  At night, I taught him meditation so he could learn to still his muscles and control his breathing; his heartbeat would slow, and his emotions would shift. Joe encouraged sports, and I signed him up for karate (which proved to be a total game changer). These were activities that actually needed the body, required Penelope to work in conjunction with his body, to trust it. Each time Penelope learned something new, like dribbling the ball between his legs, swimming without floaties, or staying up on a skateboard, he beamed with pride.

  I was amazed by what he’d accomplish, seemingly stronger and grittier than his brothers. When Cassius would eventually leave the basketball court, exhausted and ready to relax on the couch with a book, Penelope remained for another hour, shooting free shot after free shot—eventually making one out of thirty attempts. Where Othello would shrink if anyone ever raised a voice near him, Penelope rose up in those moments. Whether it was when Master Bill belted out karate commands, or when Joe reprimanded him at home, or when his brother told him he would always be “better” because he was “older,” Penelope never buckled under pressure, never shied away from a taunt. He’d get more focused, more determined, push himself further.

  Penelope’s body defied every one of those stereotypes that said girls are less than boys. So I stopped talking about “boys’ ” or “girls’ ” bodies, stopped comparing and contrasting them altogether. I took up a human-centered approach instead, using phrases like “some humans” and “this human” and “your body.” “Some of us develop, carry, and feed babies,” I’d say, “while other bodies carry the ‘seeds’ to help make babies. Both abilities are equally incredible.” The kids would nod, giggle, and then look at themselves and one another as if they’d just discovered their superpowers.

  Getting past physical bias is difficult, even now—it is so ingrained in us to believe that men and women are not physically equal. Clearly, the key was retraining the mind, putting the body to work and letting the soul lead. And that meant thoroughly separating gender from body parts, activities, and behaviors. It meant placing gender in the brain, as part of the identity process we all experience. So regardless of Penelope’s body, or how he looked, I repeated to myself all day, every day, like a mantra: Penelope-Boy. Penelope-Boy. Penelope-Boy. Slowly, consistently, I would rewire my brain.

  At night, I started throwing all the kids into the bathtub in the same rough-and-tumble style. I adjusted my voice so it never sounded as if I were favoring one over the other. And when the kids fought, which was often, I held myself back from jumping in too quickly and coddling, especially not Penelope. In fact, I started intentionally allowing for a couple of shin kicks to connect before I broke them apart.

  Watching Penelope play basketball all day in the country with his brothers, cousins, and uncles, I held myself back from correcting him when he got in someone’s face. It’s okay, P—Get dirty. Be smelly. Be entitled. Get rough. “I know!” I blurted out one afternoon when I’d had enough of his sad-face routine during bath time. “Let’s call your vagina a tiny penis!” More and more, I was diving into unconventional approaches, just so I could really make the point to Penelope, to myself, and to the world: This here is a boy, my boy—full stop. I pushed for hyper-boy, tough-boy, assertive-boy—and I encouraged Penelope to step right in and get comfortable, to grab what was rightfully his. Each one of these changes took another bit of mental power, another level of conviction.

  “I’m not that type of boy, Mama, one who just likes to crash cars,” Penelope said to me one day when I asked him if he wanted to play with Cassius, who was doing exactly that on the living room floor in the mountain house. “I want to draw. Can you color with me, Mama?” He caught me off guard with that one—“I’m not the type of boy who just likes to crash cars.” In fact, he often caught me off guard with the things he knew and saw that I did not. He shared those things with me, gently, patiently, until eventually I understood.

  Clearly, Penelope was telling me there was still so much more for me to learn. So instead of veering him—and really, all the kids—in any one direction, I started looking for signs to reveal each of their particulars—the unique things that made them happy. In the mountain house, I sometimes spent twenty minutes at my sink, washing, exfoliating, pampering my skin. All the kids gravitate toward me when I’m in the bathroom at night. Georgia, Cassius, Othello, and Penelope all huddle in my one bathroom, elbowing each other while we reach across for the toothpaste, holding our noses while one uses the toilet, complaining when another leaves the lid off a jar of very expensive French face cream.

  I started noticing that Penelope always reached for my lotions and potions first. He loved to slather my creams all over his face. Then he’d spritz himself with a toner and rinse everything off with a scrub. No concern for order or economy, he simply indulged in the smells and textures, in this me-time in front of the mirror that made him feel so loved. During those nighttime bathroom rituals, he got all into his reflection, appreciating what he saw. We all brushed or picked or twisted our hair, smiling at the new styles we’d come up with. This private, cozy place is where I began to see another side of Penelope, different from the athlete, the competitor, the kid who destroys one-arm push-ups. In the bathroom, his soft side, his creative side, emerged.

  Form follows function. I stumble upon on those words one day while sitting on our screened-in porch in the mountains. It’s a principle in architecture that means the shape of something should be based primarily on its intended function or purpose. I think again that we aren’t meant to be pretty—we’re meant to be capable, strong, and alive.

  * * *

  —

  When my sister and I were little, my mother trained us to be strong in her own way. During car trips, she’d climb into the backseat, squeezing herself between us, and start telling us stories—about Afro’d princesses named Jodie and Ramona, revered in all the lands for their beauty, their brilliance, and their bravery. These princesses could do anything. We’d often interject during Mama’s stories with burning questions like “So Rapunzel has cornrows, Mama, just like ours?” I loved those stories because they made me feel as if the entire world, from east to west, north to south, was familiar with me. As if I were not foreign, or strange, or an anomaly. As if I were the prototype.

  I’ve done the same thing with my kids—making up stories for Georgia when she was younger, and doing it with Penelope, Cassius, and Othello now. In my stories for the boys, three brothers named Penel, Cash, and O lie very still in their beds at night, waiting for their unsuspecting parents to fall asleep. As soon as they do, the magical brothers climb out of their beds, unfolding gorgeous black wings from underneath their pajamas.

  Out the bedroom window they soar, swoosh!, into the brisk night. On their special wings, Penel, Cash, and O take flight, soaring into the night air, skimming the stars with the tips of their fingers as they whiz past them, circling a big yellow moon before continuing into the dark. With great speed, they fly across the earth, touching down in Ghana, in Vietnam—wherever they please—visiting family and new friends, tasting delicacies, simply for the adventure and the excitement of it all. After roaming the world all night, thoroughly spent
from all the fun they’ve had, they soar back across the ocean against an approaching sun, climb through the window and into their warm beds, then tuck themselves under the covers just before Mama comes in to wake them with morning kisses.

  In my stories, the children are brave and undaunted, flying thousands of miles without tiring, getting by on the strength of their wits, the capability of their bodies, and of course the bond they share with one another. They are their own idols. They are the masters of whatever universes they create. This is how I see all of my children, free and powerful.

  I tell these stories for all three of my boys; there are lessons in them they all need to hear. But I know Penelope pays particular attention. He drifts off to sleep visualizing himself as a hero—a brave, strong boy who can soar confidently beside his brothers and explore the world. And when he wakes up the next day, my hope is that he carries that grace with him—that feeling that tells him, I am not a weird boy or a pretend boy, I am this boy. A boy made of magic.

  Soon after I started telling this story to the boys, Penelope left a story he’d written in school under my pillow. It began like this: “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Penelope…”

  SEVENTEEN

  The Highest Vibration

  One of our problems has been that we have had no mechanism, except the black church, for transmitting our struggle or our tradition of excellence and hard work from generation to generation.

  —

  DR. JAMES P. COMER,

  Associate Dean of the Yale Medical School, on the state of Black America

  IN 1976 MY PARENTS FOUNDED a small, private after-school program in the historic community of Sugar Hill—a beautiful, mostly Black, and relatively quiet part of Harlem. It opened during a time when my “uncle,” Gil Scott-Heron, Aunt Lurma’s longtime lover, was singing songs like “Save the Children,” and the conscious world was quite aware of a serious divide between the lives of white families and those that were Black. Mama and Daddy named their progressive institution the Patterson School, and they built it around (and for) a community that had largely been counted out: Black families. People who had historically been alienated from good schools, good neighborhoods, good jobs, and a good life. The state of affairs of Black people in America—and particularly how Black kids were faring—was the impetus for the Patterson School’s founding.

  Around the time when Ramona and I were in grade school, my mother started seeing that we were the “tokens,” often two of only a few Black kids in our classes. It was a narrative she’d heard from many other Black parents with children in mainstream schools—that their kids were also “the few” and “the only”—and Mama saw that as a critical danger. Dangerous because, rather than being grounded in our heritage, celebrated in our Blackness, we were being conditioned to see the world through a white lens, and to see ourselves as a minority. Typically, our backgrounds were left out of those mainstream school environments, and our history was often relegated only to stories of slavery. In the books we read and on the posters we saw on our classroom walls, only a sprinkling of Blacks were mentioned—Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass were standard favorites.

  Gil Scott-Heron, with his longtime love Aunt Lurma, taught us the revolution will never be televised. It will happen live and direct.

  When explaining to people curious to know how their school was different, Mama went back to her own academic experiences. “In learning how to compute averages, for instance, we had to figure out Babe Ruth’s batting average. Here at the Patterson School, we’ll use Hank Aaron’s as the example.” She stressed that the point of a school like theirs was not to push a radical agenda. “It’s not about being militant or separatist, it’s about being aware. The more you know about your culture and heritage, the more productive you are and the more confidence you have in dealing with others.” She meant that a child’s understanding of self is primary, and until that feels right, everything else takes second place.

  Mama grew up with Grandmother Gloria and Great-Grandmother Lurline, women who felt that education and the church were the lifeblood of the family and the foundation of the individual. The church was the one place where our information could be shared and recorded—passed on from person to person, generation to generation. The Black church preserved our history and exalted our traditions. In contrast, the outside world attempted to erase us. Education was how we counted ourselves back in. It was about gaining back the information that was kept from us. The mechanism of slavery was to take—our labor, our religion, our families, our customs and language, our food, our heirlooms, and our bodies. And even after slavery was abolished, that theft continued. Going to school was activism—our middle finger to those who had denied us for years.

  For my mother, education was, without question, her weapon. She earned her Master of Arts degree in teaching at Wesleyan University, and later did postgraduate work at Harvard and the University of Strasbourg, in France. She wanted to make sure good schooling had a place in her children’s lives. My parents’ school, located on a quiet street behind a small and unassuming church, became a kind of surrogate family, injecting not only heritage and history into Black lives but pride.

  The Patterson School was a collective of civic-minded and community-oriented people. The parents were a close-knit team—they often socialized together, staying up late in their living rooms talking politics, music, and business while we kids piled into sleeping bags, giggling together in back rooms. Some of us lived in communities outside Harlem, mostly on the Upper West Side, while the majority were local families rooted in the surrounding neighborhood. If any parent couldn’t manage the monthly tuition, which was often the case, my parents found a way to cover the cost. No one was ever dropped; every committed family was kept inside the fold.

  The school was for the entire community, regardless of economic background. We didn’t buy into the division of Black people along economic lines. Race was our rallying point; the hard issues that we were fighting against affected us all. We came together and used what we had. Those who had more, gave more—of their time, their skills, their networks. The film director Stan Latham taught us storytelling. The journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault sat with us and talked current events, and the jazz musician Ron Carter gave us our fundamentals in music—their own children learning alongside the rest of us.

  Our parents took it into their own hands to create the exact environment that was missing from mainstream schools: a reflection of self, the Black self. When the images, language, and customs of an entire community are not acknowledged, it can break an individual and break apart an entire community. The conscious world understood this dilemma, yet the mainstream world was in denial of racism and its widespread impact. But the Patterson School didn’t hide behind the notion of race. It supported the child by putting Black culture at the center of learning. Enabling each child to be secure, happy, and bold in the world.

  During our childhood, Ramona and I were able to leave our “otherness” behind whenever we walked through the doors of our parents’ school. Along with our daily doses of math, history, science, and the fine arts, we learned even stronger lessons in community—in what it means to belong.

  School, for us at least, was the mechanism of transmitting our struggle, our traditions, and our excellence that Dr. James P. Comer thought missing. I grew up believing that in the hands of the right people, people who truly cared, school was much more than good grades and report cards—it was a place to learn about yourself, and what you could become.

  * * *

  —

  Thirty years later, with children of my own, and in constant need of community support, Joe and I gravitated toward a school in Brooklyn for our kids that mirrored the environment my parents designed in Harlem. Our kids attended a small private school in the heart of Crown Heights. Established inside two converted brownstones, the Miriam Ann Carr Aca
demy for the Development and Education for Multicultural Youth or MACADEMY as it’s commonly called, sits unassumingly on a residential street. Most of the families and the administration are of West Indian descent—Black, religious, and conservative. The administration are predominantly women who come from backgrounds that place tradition—no-nonsense parenting and old-school markers of respect—as the cornerstone of their personal ethos.

  Adults are addressed by their last name, always: “Hello, Ms. Patterson!” “Good day, Mr. Ghartey!”—less for formality’s sake than as a sign of deep respect. And the kids aren’t regarded at arm’s length the way kids are in many schools these days. The students at MACADEMY are hugged tightly and loved passionately, just as they might be at home, by their own family. The women of MACADEMY (and the handful of men who teach there, too) model tough love at its best: stern in their discipline, exacting with their expectations, but always free with their affection.

  The captain of this academic ship is Bishop Sylveta Hamilton-Gonzales, the founder of our school. Fondly known as Bishop, she is a tall woman in her sixties with long dreadlocks that are always beautifully coiled into a bun. Bishop usually strides into work each day wearing real “ready-for-action” clothing. Often that looks like a Bob Marley T-shirt, sandals with thick woolen socks, and a long, beautiful African print skirt. In fact, each staff member wears clothing that best expresses who they are. There’s no uniformity about the way people are put together at MACADEMY, but it’s always meticulous and full of self-pride. Some have naturals, some have weaves, some have long, decaled nails with ornate designs and rhinestones. It’s refreshing to see the school’s commitment to individuality. Under Bishop’s leadership, that message is pervasive—it’s reflected not only in the African artifacts that line the school’s shelves and the many Black faces that appear on the walls, but also in the presentation of its people. The adults that these kids see every day are a reflection of themselves, multiplied in a beautiful variety.