Aside from his own dalliances, he gave advice on affairs in letters and even published a tabloid newspaper with the first ever sex advice column. The other founders pursued pleasure more than occasionally as well. The Madison White House saw lavish parties, with Dolley Madison and her sisters inviting soldiers to have a good time. Jefferson dined a dozen every day. Whatever a peevish Patriarch might say, I have never yet seen the day in which I could say I have had no Pleasure, or that I have had more Pain than Pleasure.
Relying on unpaid slaves to run their homes certainly allowed them more time than most to pursue whatever they chose to pursue. And the fact that the likes of Jefferson and Madison both condemned slavery but held on to their own slaves shows that their own ease and comfort even overrode some of their stated principles.
The fact is that they often chose to pursue their own enjoyment and advocated that others do the same. There is good reason to embrace pleasure and positive emotion and to count them as important elements of the happy and healthy life. Modern medical and psychological research shows that positive emotions and pleasurable experiences can eliminate psychological and physiological stress, makes us more creative, help us perceive new opportunities, open us to relationships, and develop personal flexibility and open-mindedness.
Physical touch and sexual pleasure bring a wide variety of physical and psychological benefits. Moderate red wine intake and even marijuana have been shown to have some health benefits. University of California, Berkeley, 29 Sept. Psychology Report, ;; S. Yet, for the founders, and the philosophers who so deeply influenced their thinking, true happiness was not to be equated with pleasure alone.
Indeed, they recognized that pleasure has its pitfalls, and can become the enemy of happiness if not taken in measure. Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. Pleasure is always before us; but misfortune is at our side: while running after that, this arrests us. In a letter to his nephew, George Washington encourages pleasures in moderation at the proper time, balanced with hard work, frugality and virtue.
And those views are lent support by the findings of modern science. The fact is that humans are physically, mentally and emotionally programmed against continually getting the same rush from repeating a pleasurable experience.
This means that sensual pleasure is at best fleeting, when indulged regularly is diminishing in its returns, and at worst can be addictive and damaging to health.
Surely the happy life is something more. On this the founders agreed. Fulfillment: The Founders of the United States, while certainly fond of their pleasures, saw true happiness as requiring the vigorous application of our strengths and talents and a heaping helping of virtue. Benjamin Franklin, party animal though he may have been, saw a struggle between our passions and our reason — between what we want and what we know is good for us and others.
There is no happiness then but in a virtuous and self-approving conduct. Unless our actions will bear the test of our sober judgments and reflections upon them, they are not the actions and consequently not the happiness of a rational being. In other words, the happy life is one in which a person strives with diligence for excellence, for meaning, and for greatness of character.
I have little appetite or relish for anything else. Man was made to be active, and he is never so happy as when he is so. It is the idle man who is the miserable man. The opportunity and energy to engage fully in fulfilling pursuits was clearly an aspect of happiness important to the founders.
In a letter to Amos J. If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form? How happy should I then be in the favor and good will of all honest men and the sure prospect of a happy immortality! If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.
No theoretical checks-no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea, if there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men.
So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. This line of thinking was also a natural extension of Lockean thought and Enlightenment ideas about happiness more generally. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke stated, The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire, set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable good, till we have duly examined whether it has a tendency to, or be inconsistent with, our real happiness: and therefore, till we are as much informed upon this inquiry as the weight of the matter, and the nature of the case demands, we are, by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desires in particular cases.
Well-considered, virtuous action in line with our higher good was the goal, not immediate gratification. Numerous Enlightenment philosophers continued this line of thought. Men living in different countries, under different circumstances, different habits and regimens, may have different utilities; the same act, therefore, may be useful and consequently virtuous in one country which is injurious and vicious in another differently circumstanced.
It was essentially an argument that true happiness lies in reason and virtue, and not in passions or pleasures. He made a list of 13 virtues, and after failing to master them all at once, he focused on one a week. The list was as follows: Temperance.
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. This also hearkens back to the ancient Greek civic virtues like courage, moderation and justice. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.
Imitate Jesus and Socrates. While grounded in Christian tradition and the virtues of the ancient Greeks, these are not high-flying ideals but practical and attainable human strengths. Relationships and Civic Virtue: Personal pleasure is certainly wonderful and much to be desired in balance, of course. Expending energy in activities that challenge and inspire gives life meaning.
But none of this could quite be considered happiness if experienced in total isolation. The Founders of the United States also included intimate relationships and friendships and a broader relationship with our community, country and world in their conception of happiness. Personal Love, Family and Friendship: Personal love was for the founders, as for all of us, a vital component of happiness. I acknowledge that a lady is in the case…I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages A Quaker friend reminded him of his pride and th insolence, prompting Franklin to add the And so it was with the founding generations as it is with all generations.
Whether or not each of them found a loving, happy marriage, they recognized that kind of partnership as essential to happiness. Beyond partnership, the founders also acknowledged the importance of family and friends for a happy life.
Civic virtue was amongst the highest virtues for the founders, and essential to happiness. It is an idea that again goes back to ancient Athens. Since human beings were political animals, the best way to exercise virtue and justice was within the institutions of a great city the polis. Only beasts and gods could live alone. A solitary person was not fully human.
In fact, the Greek word "idiot" means a private person, someone who is not engaged in public life. It was only in a fair and just society that can men and women could be fully human--and happy. No religion was needed anymore to proclaim moral rules, because the virtuous pursuit of happiness would be sufficient to ensure 62 Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Francis Willis, April 18, 63 th Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Martha Jefferson Randolph, January 15 , 64 th th Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, June 9 , Frances Hutcheson, known as the founder of the Scottish Enlightenment and George Turnbull, another Scottish Enlightenment thinker, envisioned an education system in which students would learn that individual and societal happiness depends on a personal duty to act with benevolence toward others.
That as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously. These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions.
The same can be said of most of the other founders as well. They again and again put public service above more pleasurable pursuits. Throughout his life, the letters of Thomas Jefferson ached again and again to leave public life for retirement to Monticello, to the point of driving some friends to exasperation. Washington likewise agonized over service as a general and as a President when he wished to withdraw from public life; but serve he did and refused financial compensation for it.
Happiness, in the view of the founders, requires a certain amount of care for and service to others. Conclusion The inclusion of the Pursuit of Happiness as one of three specific unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence was no fluke. The founding generation shared near universally the assumption that governments exist to facilitate that pursuit and should be judged on their performance in doing so. This idea was the result of immersion in the philosophies of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the great theologians and the varied great minds of the Enlightenment.
The happiness they envisioned included the enjoyment of life, but also full engagement in purposeful activities, the practice of virtue and meaningful relationships with and service to others. In assessing how well the government of the United States fulfills the intent of the framers, then, Americans would do well to look to the extent to which it facilitates the widespread happiness of its people.
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As the last beating she ever gave me, it certainly prevented me from even thinking about stealing anything for a very long time—at least until I was a teenager. The reality was that we all sensed Terry was on his way to trouble, one of those kids born to be a hoodlum. Nothing shaped my view of life more than The Wizard of Oz, my favorite movie from childhood. One day I planned on living in Kansas where nothing bad ever happened except for a very occasional tornado.
We spent most of that day while the adults were out by sliding down the stairs in cardboard boxes that went zooming down the steps and colliding into bumpers we made from the couch cushions. Boys against girls!
It was him and me versus two of my sisters and three of my girl cousins. The next thing we knew he had smacked his sister Elaine in the head with his lead pillow, followed by shrieks, screams, and blood every- where. Bessie, Paul Crawford—a carpenter, handyman, and hustler—was very much present in the Big House, not only as our resident sheriff but as the provider of limitless supplies of one-hundred-pound bags of pota- toes.
Once she was bandaged and taken to the emergency room, Paul Crawford summoned all of us to the living room in the Big House, where the furniture had been pushed to one side. We all claimed not to know who was responsible, including Terry. Instead of being a gunslinger, he was a belt slinger as it came alive in his hands, like an angry, out-of-control snake. Looking for less controversial pursuits sometime later when the weather had turned beautiful and sunny, Terry and I thought no one would mind if we built ourselves a little clubhouse in the yard out back with some of the loose lumber lying around.
Then I became aware that Terry had stopped hammering. Suddenly, the clubhouse begins to disintegrate around me with a giant reverber- ating sound going Whop! All I know is that the clubhouse is being chopped down with me in it, and Terry has split.
Freddie is impervious, like a human buzz saw, demonically possessed with turn- ing our annoying noisy project and me into mulch. Amid the whop! Stop it! Momma comforted me, making sure to clean out the gash on my leg and put a bandage on it. When it started to scab over, the irritation was so bad that I picked at it and the scab was soon infected.
Momma applied another bandage that happened to fall off one day when she was at work. I placed it carefully over the scabbing area by tying it around my leg. Who should I run into on the street but my cousin Terry? You crazy? Take it off! Right now! It was yet one more reminder of how much I hated Freddie, how badly I wanted him gone from our lives. How could I do it? With a gun? The prospect was terrifying. At age eight, my track record with a loaded weapon was dismal.
A couple of years before, one of my friends and I had been playing in an alley near the Thunderbird Inn and found a. Without knowing if it was real, we decided to test it out by aiming at somebody—a true nightmare scenario. We missed, miraculously, but the girl we aimed the gun toward could have been killed. When Freddie got that phone call, which may have come from Momma for all I know, he barreled for me.
Before I had a moment to exhale, Freddie had lifted up the entire bed, exposing me there, shaking like prey. The belt lashing was bad, but the sense that he was omnipotent was worse. Glory Hallelujah, praise the Lord! He bled profusely, but after they removed the bullet and kept him in the hospital overnight for observation, he went right on in to work the next day. Not knowing what tactic would serve me in the quest I had absolutely resigned myself to undertaking, every violent episode was further proof that I had no choice but to do away with him.
That was very much in my mind one night when he was obviously preparing to beat Momma again and I ran to call the cops. Triplett, can we use your phone? We need to call the wagon.
Fuck you! They eventually coaxed him to go with them down to the station. Once he was gone, I asked Momma why they had tried to use our phone to call the police if they were the police and were already at our house. The owner, Mr. Waving his shotgun, Freddie stalked her into the store, demand- ing that Mr. Odom shrugged. You hear me? Odom suffered no fools.
Knowing this, Freddie, like all bul- lies, was actually a coward when confronted by someone who re- fused to be bullied. Without so much as an argument, Freddie turned around and left, continuing up the block, holding his shot- gun in broad daylight, looking for Momma.
She was able to lay low until later that evening, when he appar- ently cooled down. But the signs were sometimes misleading, so we all walked on eggshells, all of us—me, Momma, twelve-year-old Ophelia, four-year-old Sha- ron, and two-year-old Kim—all the time.
That is, until I happened to stumble over one of the only clues to her inner world that I would ever have. Around this time, Moms actually made one of the only refer- ences to the man who fathered me.
I had never seen the letter, the money, or his name. Momma pointed out that she was always giving me money, as much as she could, which was true. The contents were over- whelming, staggering, especially the sheer panic in the words at the very start of the letter: Help, I fear for my life. But still, it took my reading of that letter to know the truth about what she was feeling and to know that she was trying to get help. Without realizing it, I had already developed the family skill of being able to keep a few secrets myself.
As a result, when at long last I came up with a viable method of killing Freddie and began to concoct the lethal potion that he was going to mistake for alcohol, nobody had a clue about what I was doing. All bubbling and foaming, it was better than anything any Dr. How was I going to get Freddie to drink it now? One possibility was to leave it in the bathroom and just hope that he would take a sip out of curiosity. Great idea.
Ridiculous as that was, I lit a match and tossed it in. Besides my death potion being a bust, I was now going to burn myself up. The only option I could see was to empty the burning, foaming mess down the toilet. My latest plan was to try to do it in his sleep. Little did I know that my mother, with her gift for secrecy, was being pushed to a similar extreme. On one level this was the most surreal atmosphere of denial, with Freddie acting the part of the ax murderer in the horror movie while Moms and I pretended to play the part of the kid watching TV and the mother reading the newspaper, a normal family at home.
Her stillness was fueled by a million times the energy that thundered in Freddie. A table moves more. Her stillness defeated his storm. It may have been then that she decided to take the necessary precautions to make sure that she had all of her children out of the house, me included, one night after Freddie had returned home drunk and passed out. Or that was the story I would eventually hear. But I do know Freddie used her at- tempt to kill him to support his claim that she had violated her parole from her earlier imprisonment—which he had also insti- gated.
And once again, his actions caused her to be sent back to prison. The full details were never revealed to me or my sisters. All I got from this time was a mechanism for becoming still when scary forces preyed on me. Fear of losing my life, losing the life of a loved one, or the fear of losing everything I have—those fears followed me for years.
Stillness has been my refuge and my defense. Even later, as an adult, I would cope by being still. Very still. I get still. I n the blink of an eye, one of my greatest fears came to pass. After a return of only a few years, my mother disappeared al- most as suddenly as she had reappeared.
It was as though the script I was living one day got switched and I had to just jump in the next day with a new script and a whole new cast of characters, without asking any questions. Almost ten months went by—a lifetime to an eight-year-old— before I had even a clue about what had happened to Momma and where she was.
Then, on one of the saddest occasions of my child- hood—at a funeral, as it happened—I caught sight of her standing at a distance with a prison guard at her side. Now the second most important person in my life was missing. Explanations, as always, were vague; but many, many years later I learned that Uncle Willie and Aunt Ella Mae had decided that my twelve-year-old sister would be better off living in a kind of detention home and school for girls who had trouble conforming to rules.
While Ophelia initially did her best to adapt to the rules, I initially re- belled, hating that I suddenly had a bedtime and had to do chores and that there was one way to do them.
I had to do them if it was so ordered by Aunt Ella Mae—dark, tall, and big-boned, built like one of the last Ama- zons—who watched over us hawkishly in her cat-eye glasses. But dishes? This went against my rules. Actually, it was the subject of one of the few arguments I ever had with Ophelia when Momma had left her in charge and my sister had tried to force me to clean the kitchen—including the dishes.
There was no running from Aunt Ella Mae. To conserve milk, for example, she had all of us kids take turns eating cereal out of the same bowl, with a fork, one by one. Maybe Ophelia was already at a breaking point from residual anger over our situation, or from an accumulation of the fear and hurt we all had experienced. It was only after Ophelia was no longer in the household that I really appreciated how she had always been there for me, how we were there for each other.
We hardly had ever fought, except for maybe once when I performed surgery on her Barbie doll and sort of decapitated it. Maybe this was about jealousy over her having more Christmas presents than me—some years my take was just socks.
Of course Ophelia was mad at me for destroying her toy. But she soon for- gave me. That burned like hell, but what really injured my eye was when I ran home and tried to wash the soap out with a rag that had cosmetics in it already.
I was mad at Ophelia for not being more concerned—and it did cause permanent trouble for my eye. For the rest, we had been almost inseparable, best friends.
The previous July 4 stood out in my memory. To get there, we had to depend on Freddie to drive us there, drop us off, and come back to pick us up. That was, until, as though choreographed, the last rocket burst into a thousand glittering chards in the sky and there was a sudden roll of thunder as the rain began to pour down. There was no shelter, and before long we realized that there was no Freddie to pick us up.
Combating the wet, cold, and hunger and our fear of getting lost, as we walked and walked we talked and talked. Still my main source of information about everything I knew nothing about, Ophelia decided to ex- plain to me why the mail never came on time in our neighbor- hood. When we arrived at home, nobody was there, so I managed to break in by squeezing through the milk chute. That, in a nutshell, was how we survived as a team, cheering each other up, complaining to each other, distracting ourselves from thinking about the troublesome stuff that was too painful to discuss.
The perfect antidote to the no-daddy, no-momma, no-sister blues, they collectively helped me to realize, just when I had started to feel sorry for myself, how lucky I was to be a Gardner. Whenever I went to visit or stay with Uncle Archie, I took away lasting lessons about the value of hard work, goal setting, focus, and self-education. A union man in his blood, Uncle Archie eventually ascended the ladder to become president of his union, all the while reading, studying, and familiarizing himself with issues of concern to the community.
Calling someone crazy—an equal opportunity euphemism that could have applied to someone like Freddie, who was probably bipolar or borderline schizophrenic, made worse by alcohol—was really another form of denying how troubled someone was, which made the problem, if not okay, then at least typical. He just crazy. That solution was crazy itself to a lot of people. He just drunk.
Probably he should eat some- thing to coat his stomach against the liquor. That became his undercover disguise; it helped him blend in, so he said. Wow, this was cool! One of those claims that I heard from others, for instance, was that he had some original Picasso paintings stashed in an undisclosed location and that he had willed them to Ophelia.
These were glamorous, bold visions, the kind of daydreams that I loved to think about and that I hated to learn were only true in his fantasy world. Still, he could be very convincing. It seemed that Uncle Willie—who frequented the racetrack—had checked in at the front desk by showing them his winning stubs from the track.
As one of the family members along for the ride to coax Uncle Willie out of the penthouse, I had the fortune to catch a glimpse of the stuff of which dreams were made. But as I cajoled Uncle Willie into going home with us, I planted that fantasy inside myself just the same. So when I started picking up on my family mem- bers not being quite right, it gave me something new to fear. If this crazy thing ran in the family, what did that say about me?
What if I had it or was going to get it? The fear may have also been why I stayed away from becoming much of a drinker. Besides the foreign ports of call he described from his time in the service—in Korea, the Philippines, Italy, and other stops along the way—he also talked about how beautiful and welcoming the women were over there, a subject that was to become an in- creasing source of fascination for me.
But the person who most opened the door to the world be- yond our neighborhood and made me know that I had to go see it one day was my Uncle Henry—who came shining into my life in this era as if he had been sent just for me.
Now that he was retired from the mili- tary and working as a steel man alongside my other uncles, he suddenly appeared on the scene—as suddenly as Momma had disappeared. He made me feel as special as Momma had when she visited at the foster home and made candy. I knew what that falling-in-love feeling was with the important women in my life, like Momma, with her spreading smile—always reminding me of an opening refrigerator door that the light of hope and comfort spilled from.
I knew the love of my sister, how it was without condition or limitation. By the time I came tiptoeing downstairs, there was always a party going on, with Henry Gardner at the center. Never once did I see him looking anything but perfectly at- tired, every crease, every cuff pressed to perfection. When I arrived, there was one distinct groove going on—with soul music, blues, and standards coming off the record player as singers like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Sarah Vaughn stirred up the festive atmosphere.
Between the music, laughter, chatter, and smoke, it was hot and happening, boisterous and loud. Then, all at once, the mood changed when a record was put on that I had never heard. Everything stopped: the laughter, the chatter, even the smoke. But what got me that night was the power of Miles Davis to alter the mood in the room like that. It even seemed that I moved differently with Miles on the record player. The music bug done bit. The Pursuit of Happyness 69 The music and the time spent listening together formed a shelter in the storm so that all my angst was forgotten, if only for a while.
He pointed out the facts and cultural descriptions of these dif- ferent places, recommending that I always take advantage of re- sources like the encyclopedia. He made a point of emphasizing that the world was full of many different types of people with at- titudes, customs, beliefs, and colors different from ours. Then there was the smile that lit up his face when he described the women over there.
There was one day on the river that I remember as the essence of happiness, one of those perfect summer days that stretch on forever. Sensations of well-being ran through my senses: the ups and downs of the small craft skimming over the mellow rolling of waves; the feel and sound of the waves slapping on the bottom of the boat; the spray of mist around me, lovingly touching my face and skin.
Uncle Henry had a look of satisfaction as he saw me happy, as if he had done well to set me on a path that he might not always be around to guide me along.
Or so I later interpreted our most memorable time spent to- gether. I sat up in bed in a panic, not only because I had never heard grown-ups cry before, but also because I knew. It was Uncle Henry. No question. The pain was so pro- nounced it reverberated all the way up to the attic where I slept at the time. He drowned. In that place of stillness where I went to brace myself against hurt, I pushed away the haze and tried to understand the chronology of what happened.
When he at- tempted to swim out to the boat and bring it back in to redock it, the undercurrent was too strong and took him down. Nothing made sense. So I took all that emotion, that weight of the world hanging over me in the shape of a massive question mark, and dragged it deep down below, into a dangerous undercurrent of my own. Every time I tried to move toward her, various relatives blocked my path. I wanted Momma to see that I was starting to get tall, that I was composed, strong, being a mostly good kid.
Every time I looked over at her, hoping for some sign that she had seen me, all I saw was the pain of losing her baby brother and not being able to talk to her chil- dren. When it hit me that the woman standing next to my mother was a female prison guard—the only white person at the funeral, dressed in a navy-colored uniform—it came down like a thunder- bolt where she had gone.
But as one monumental question was answered, a whole batch of confusing new ones were born. Why was she in prison? When was she coming back? Was she coming back? Only much later would I piece together that this was her sec- ond imprisonment. But even that day my gut told me that Freddie was responsible. Though he was the one who should have done time for his abuse, Freddie told the authorities that she had at- tempted to burn the house down with him in it, thereby breaking her parole.
Not surprisingly, he did it without an ounce of concern for what it would do to us kids. I was also reunited with Ophelia. Then me and my boys were going to cruise around town, out to the lake if we felt like it, or pedal all the way uphill to the highest point in our part of Milwaukee, near the water reservoir, and look out beyond, feel- ing like kings of the world.
And then, living large, we were going to take that plunge down Snake Hill, the biggest rush of our lives, taking our feet off the pedals so we could go even faster, pushing the limits of danger and excitement and just letting it rip. For the next two years I did the best I could not to break down. One of the only redeeming aspects of having the scourge of Freddie in our lives was how good his sisters Baby and Bessie were to us.
Baby saw how her brother rode me and tried to compensate, saying nice things whenever she could, and she would even kick a few dollars in my direction here and there. Without hesitation, I head down to the basement and begin to pull the wet clothes out of the washer when a smell surrounds me. Without explanation, and with Freddie. Between the ages of ten and fourteen, without asking for it, I received intensive on-the-job training for a career as a professional gofer.
This entire money thing was to become a subject of necessary interest, since I had no daddy to bankroll my wants and needs— like a certain style I wanted in my threads, which I learned to af- ford by economizing and stretching what cash I could earn doing odd extra jobs, and later, when having a car of my own would be- come a preoccupation. But I kept my misgivings to myself. The Pursuit of Happyness 77 One of the errands that I had least enjoyed was during the time when we were all getting settled back in together and DeShanna was still being kept in foster care, until Ophelia was able to get a job and bring her home to live with us.
My assignment was to pick up DeShanna from the foster home, ten blocks away, and bring her to visit Ophelia at our house, and then return the toddler to the foster home. Pretty soon I was ready to cry myself, because I had no say in the matter. Every trip she seemed to scream louder, and she also got heavier. That meant I had to hold her hand, which gave her another reason to scream and try to pull away.
People stopped and stared, saying nothing, but obviously thinking, What is he doing to that child? This was the gofer job I most hated. Because Moms wanted the light red pack- age, Ophelia the sky blue, and Linda the lavender. How could the same brand of sanitary napkin have so many variations?
My cousin Terry had been through this plenty with his three sisters and walked by smirking. Pussy Man! Or ignore them and suffer how fast this would get around school and the neighborhood? How was I going to live that down?
The Pursuit of Happyness 79 Still, I chose not to take the bait and kept on trudging back to all those waiting female family members who were having their cycles at the same time, not appreciating that my sensitivity to women could be an asset one day.
Even though I was pissed off at whoever called me that, my MO with my peers by now was to take the path of least resistance whenever possible.
It was bad enough to have to be in battle mode all the time at home, so at school and around the neighborhood I preferred using diplomacy. That was street logic. Tired of the routine, more than once I thought, Man, I got to get me some big friends.
But before long I learned how to use my size and my intensity, with a look or a remark, to avoid a confrontation. There had to be serious provocation to make me hit someone. Talk about insult to injury. Even my uncles fell short in not standing up to Freddie. Not that I needed any more incitement to kill Freddie Triplett, but when Norman decided to do his imitation of my mother run- ning from my stepfather, it increased my sense of urgency tenfold. Where is she? From then on nobody ever had the nerve to bring up my momma, dozens or not.
But I never forgot it. He was already missing a kidney, which meant that I could probably have killed him with one kidney punch. There was no forgetting what he had said to Momma and no for- giving.
That was what being deeply provoked was to me. But in other cases with my friends, when it came to someone having a laugh at my expense, I developed a fairly thick skin.
Bot- tom line, I wanted to be liked, not so much to be popular with everyone—including my teachers and principals—but to be spe- cial, to have my own identity, to be cool. More and more, it seemed that whenever an idea got into my head, I had an ability to focus on it exclusively. But I was re- lentless. Even outside the house, she rarely wore any other sort of attire, and never did I see her in dressy clothes.
Take my goddamn eye? Hell, no! Since I knew where she kept her glass eye—in a jar with some liquid to keep it wet at night when she slept—my plot was to stop by in the morn- ing, borrow it while she was asleep, then return it at lunchtime just before her usual rising hour. All went beautifully that morning, and when I arrived at school, I could hardly wait until my turn at show-and-tell. Nobody had ever brought in a glass eyeball.
Give me back my eye. Give me my eye. Give me back my goddamn eye! I want my eye. Embarrassment weighed on me like cement shoes as I had to go up to Sis, in front of everyone, reach into my pocket, and pull out her eyeball. She squinted her good eye at what looked like a marble in my open palm and snatched it from me, plopped it right back into the socket in front of the class, turned around, and exited, cussing me out all the way back down the hall. I thought my teacher was going to faint.
Apparently neither of them had ever seen the likes of Sis or the insertion of a glass eye. It was at school where I felt the pain.
For a long while I was the laughingstock of Lee Elementary, and kids were talking about Sis and her glass eye for weeks. But of course, I lived to tell. Other than that debacle, I usually did well in school—as long as I was inter- ested and challenged.
Not like the questions that dominated at home. During the few years after Moms came back from prison, I tried to get a read on what they had done to her, how she had changed, or not, and what was in her heart. Freddie, the old man, was a prison for all of us, a ball and chain. After a while, I wondered if she was really afraid of Freddie anymore. In fact, if she ever felt low, if she ever got down, Moms refused to reveal it. But the couple of instances when she did, in her inimitable style of brutal understatement, she made her point better than with any ass whupping.
That day made me work even harder to watch my mouth. Not to excuse myself, but the tendency to use words in mean, hurtful ways, without thinking, was an ugly characteristic that I had picked up from Freddie. Actu- ally, my three sisters and I all developed the ability to be verbally abusive in extreme situations. Even now I have to make a con- scious effort, not always successfully, to keep my mouth in check.
In her way, Moms showed me how powerful both words and silence can be. As I head out the door, reality sets in with a tap on my shoulder from a store manager. Now I am a criminal, schoolbooks and all. Bracing myself for a stern lecture and a warning, I get walloped by something much worse: the arrival of two white cops who push and shove me out to their patrol car and take me down to the sta- tion.
Once more, I prepare for the painful phone call home and the subsequent arrival of my upset mother and crazy, drunk stepfather. Naw, leave his ass in there. Fuck him! This also causes the white cops to laugh their asses off.
So naturally, on those few occasions when I let her down, it hurt me forever. My trumpet playing, I hoped, could be something to make Moms proud. With my gift for extreme focus, I was so locked into practicing, I forgot all about the beans until a scorched smell came wafting into my room.
When I ran to the kitchen and took a look, the beans were burned pretty badly. My stomach clenched. Momma worked her magic from day to day to stretch our re- sources and feed us all, and I had to let the beans burn up. The other truth was that she would do anything for me, even incite his wrath if it meant taking my side. Was it true that I was the main reason they fought?
If it was, that was crazy, as crazy as Freddie was. Moms, having said her piece, let it go. She turned and went back to the kitchen, opened up a can of tomato sauce, and added some seasoning, salvaging the burned beans and turning them into a hearty pot of good beans that we had for dinner that night.
Yet for all that I knew about her, she was a mystery. Only a couple of times did I catch a glimmer of what she experienced in her inner world.
Moms loved Bette Davis, I always assumed because of their names being almost identical. No, my mother said, all bluesy and philosophical, the reason she liked Bette Davis movies was because she was so strong and convincing. Probably it was when she felt that she was being who she was meant to be—a teacher. In her own way, to me and my sisters, she was our professor, our Socrates.
It had to make her happy to see that she was getting through to us, seeing me respond to her repeated insistence that without the abil- ity to read and write, I would be nothing more than a slave. When I left for the public library over on Seventh and North Avenue with only one book or question that I wanted to answer, but then got caught up exploring the card catalog and discovering book after book, reading all day long—that made Moms happy.
Books made her happy. She got me hooked on it too. We both read it cover to cover and then discussed the issue together. Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. She said that was her favorite poem and my discovering it made her happy. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year of the Great Awakening for me. It set off a Big Bang in the universe of my being, exploding with the atomic energy of my own coming of age and the monumental changes taking place all around me.
This period marked the dawn- ing of my consciousness as a person of color, following on the heels of my discovery, lo and behold, that the world was not all black. Five years earlier, the adult reaction to the assassination of President Kennedy had been a hint about what it meant to be a minority and to lose a champion. But it was a year after that when I and some of my classmates were bused to a white school on the east side of Milwaukee that I saw with my own eyes what Moms experienced every day when she left the neighborhood to go to work.
It was also feeling what it was to have my color as my identity, to be looked down on, to be regarded as less than, to feel shame, or to be invisible, a non-entity other than a dark-skinned black boy. Seeing Momma crying as she watched the TV coverage made the lightbulb go on.
They could have been my sisters. And in fact, I now saw, in my connection to the black community at large, that they were indeed my sisters. With new outrage and fervor to pro- test all past, present, and future wrongs done to my people, I expe- rienced a new sense of connection as I began to follow what was happening in the world outside Milwaukee.
In the Watts riots in Los Angeles took place, the same year Dr. A true character, Zulu was not a good-looking cat by any stroke, but he had brilliant acting talent and could have gone far putting it to use. Later on, he actually got on a kick that he was going to be in the movies and convinced me that I could be an actor too.
I got the point. Zulu was the one who really should have stuck with it. Garvin and I were amazed. To have such a powerful boost to my self-image—especially at a time when my preoccupation with the opposite sex was all-consuming— was a true blessing.
For years I had hated Smokey Robinson for being the epitome of the kind of guy that every girl I knew wanted. Yes, Smokey could sing, and he was an amazing songwriter and performer, but so were a lot of darker-skinned black guys. Before long, processes that never worked for me and hideous- smelling conks that only burned my scalp were out while Afros and naturals were in, along with dashikis and beads. Smokey Robinson could kiss my ass. James Brown was my man. When my boy Garvin and I started hanging out at St.
Nonetheless, we were proud of our efforts as we headed back to St. Unfortunately, by the time I got there nothing was left in my size and all I could grab were some clothes I could never wear. Among the one hundred or so injuries, three people were killed that night.
Muhammad Ali had been my hero as a boxer even before he changed his name from Cassius Clay, back when he was a new- comer and turned the boxing world on its head by beating Sonny Liston.
After returning to St. King went to support, how he was shot on the balcony of his motel. They mur- dered Dr. Lifetimes pass in these seconds. Then a wave of sorrow and rage explodes in the room, rocketing through me, carrying all of us outside into the street, as we begin to throw whatever we can get our hands on.
Some of our idealism had been struck down at the same time that the momentum of power to the peo- ple was unstoppable. Over the next few years I journeyed through black history by reading whatever I could get my hands on.
Moms would never discourage me from reading any book, although she was slightly alarmed when I came home with Die, Nigger, Die by H. Considered by some the greatest musical masterpiece of the twentieth century, it was almost as transformational as the invention of jazz itself.
That fusion also felt like a musical expression for what was go- ing on in my personal life during my teen years—a simmering brew of new preoccupations and old ones. On the new frontier, right along with puberty, had come the most unbelievably constant interest in girls and sex.
I loved everything about both. For several years now everything about the feminine species had turned me on. Everything, apparently, turned me on.
All of a sudden, the wind would blow and my dick got hard. It had started earlier and with- out warning. Riding the bus, the jostling got my dick hard. No- body explained to me that this was normal or that sometimes when your dick got so hard you thought it might break off or something, it was both normal to feel that way and not likely to happen.
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