A Man from Another Land: How Finding My Roots Changed My Life (4 page)

As I learned and discovered more about Africa and the atrocities befalling my South African brothers and sisters, I continued
to work to use my acting career to make “my dark skin” worthy of love and respect. I was sickened by what I saw happening
there to dark-skinned people, people who looked like me. I wanted to use my work to become a living example of trying to effectively
reconnect with the motherland. I knew clearly that I would have to remain disciplined and never deviate from my goal. Eventually,
I would try, in my own way, to do what many great men before me—W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Marcus Garvey, and
Malcolm X—had tried. Like them, I wanted to reverse the effects of the Middle Passage and slavery and elevate black men back
to their former place in history, as kings, treated with all the respect that position garners.

At every step of my career, I have had to break down walls of ignorance and stereotypes. For years I was offered nothing but
“evil thug roles.” I took them so I could earn a living. My portrayals of “strong men” who also happened to be “dark skinned”
is what eventually propelled my career forward. Those portrayals got the attention of Shonda Rhimes, the producer on
Grey’s Anatomy
. They are what got me roles in films like
Dancing in September
. And it is what I believe will help me continue my quest toward making the concept of “dark-skinned” men obsolete through
my art. My desire is for the world to see me and those who “look like” me as human beings. It is a quest I am still on today.

Howard University was just the beginning of my journey. While even today the school lists me as one of its “alumni,” the
truth is, I never graduated, nor have I ever received an honorary degree. After one semester, I dropped out. I didn’t have
the financial means to continue my education there, although, despite the social challenges on campus, I wanted to. I never
want students to think that by “dropping out” of college as I did that they will easily become rich and famous anyway. It
still bothers me today that I didn’t finish. I have never been the kind of person who walks away from difficulty.

Still, I took much of what I learned at Howard into my continued transformation into adulthood. I left understanding that
effecting great change, taking on challenges, stepping into unknown territory, and rising above difficult circumstances are
what Africans have done since the beginning of time. As an African American man, I believe it is what I was born to do. I
would eventually discover it is in my DNA.

After seeing
She’s Gotta Have It
in 1986, I gave myself ten years to achieve my goal of appearing in a Spike Lee film. It was a goal I met—by 1996, I was
not only a working actor, but I was shooting my fourth film with Lee, playing a gay African American Republican in
Get on the Bus
, following
Crooklyn
,
Clockers
, and
Girl 6
. But it took a lot of hard work to get there, and I had help along the way.

In 1987, when I was just twenty-four years old, Howard University drama teacher Professor Vera Katz took great interest in
me as a student. She was a small-framed Jewish woman with reddish hair and a voice that packed a punch and she insisted that
I meet a gentleman named Harry Poe.

My first impression of him was that he was a man of great discipline, a kind of taskmaster. He resembled the great theater
director Mr. Lloyd Richards, who staged the original production of Lorraine Hansberry’s
A
Raisin in the Sun
in 1959 and
directed numerous productions of August Wilson’s plays, such as
Fences
and
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
.

Harry loved shopping at Banana Republic. He always dressed as if he were going on safari—leather beret, starched jeans, white
sneakers, and khaki utility shirts and vests. Apparently Richards made this look popular and was one of Harry’s idols. Harry
reminded me of a revolutionary still stuck in the 1960s, a martial arts instructor slash jazz musician. His receding afro,
full beard, and potbelly made him look much older than his forty-two years. Even my mother commented on how old he looked
after she came to visit.

In fact, Harry and my mother became good friends. She truly appreciated his support and careful watch over me, and to this
day I remain grateful to him for that. With our eighteen-year age difference, Harry quickly became a father figure and a mentor
to me. Through his Ebony Impromptu Theater, I was introduced to and performed staged productions with writer B. Mark Seabrooks,
novelist Courtney Long (who gave me my first copy of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
), and actresses Wendy Rachael Robinson and Robin McClamb, all talents and forces to be reckoned with.

Harry also further exposed me to various African peoples, such as the Akan of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria, and African
religions such as the Ifa divinations, and Vodu (Lucumi or Santeria). He insisted that I immerse myself in African studies
and African art, and learn more about the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, meditation, vegetarianism, Iyengar
Yoga, and proper diction. He demanded that I study the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison, Langston Hughes, and the Harlem Renaissance.

In the summer of 1987, Harry allowed me to rent a room in his two-story duplex in the northeast section of Washington,
DC. He had a very large apartment that was filled with the squawking sounds of his parrot Iago and the many zebra finches,
society finches, and parakeets he had. I remember feeling as if I were living in an aviary slash art museum.

I saw Harry as a serious, intelligent, private, kind man, who was quite eccentric in his ways and thinking. Harry loved rich,
“light-skinned” women and often expressed his hope that I would marry a “light-skinned” woman for her money so that I would
have financial support during the “lean periods” typical of an actor’s career.

Like many of the students I encountered at Howard, Harry believed that a light-skinned, long-haired woman would open doors
into the white man’s world, signaling that I was a safe and assimilated dark-skinned man. I would laugh in his face when he
went on his diatribes about the subject.

His lifestyle was all so new to me, yet, somehow, his home felt very familiar. Creativity and life were teeming from every
corner of his place. I could hardly move without being stopped in my tracks, intrigued and enlightened by a framed lithograph,
painting, book, or photograph. One day, I finally got up the nerve to ask Harry, “Why is it necessary to have nearly every
inch of your wall space covered with various artifacts?”

He simply answered, “I need to see the beauty of our history, our literature, our art and be nourished by what I own of it.”

His words landed on my ears as lightly as a feather, but their impact would transform me forever. I stood quietly, thinking
to myself for a moment, allowing the words to resonate within me and then silently I repeated to myself, “nourished by what
I own of it.”

Harry taught me that if you want something, get a photo of it, hang it on your wall, and meditate on it every day. I fell
in love with two paintings. The first was
Portrait of a Negress
(1800) by Marie-Guillemine Benoist. The moment I laid eyes on this
beautiful painting I decided that my wife would look just like her and we would have a son. The second was
The Moorish Chief
(1878) by Eduard Charlemont. I immediately connected with this painting and began to see my spirit self in this image. I
later had prints of both framed and displayed prominently in my apartment.

Harry and I spent many hours engaged in political and creative debate. Some conversations lasted from the afternoon well past
midnight. The debates were interrupted only by his constant searching for some page in a book or article in the
Economist, Utne Reader
, or
Time
to help him make his point of view clear. I knew very little about what he was trying to teach me, but I sensed that his
feeling of urgency matched mine in my desire to figure it all out… fast.

I always knew when my private lessons were over. If Harry found our conversations or me intruding on his TV time, he would
silently retreat to his cluttered refrigerator to grab his trademark frozen mug filled with ice, a pomegranate, some tuna,
and Breton crackers. He’d sit down, point the dusty remote at the TV, and start watching his favorite show,
The Honeymooners
. When this happened, I knew class was officially over. I would retreat to my room and drift off to sleep to the sound of
Jackie Gleason’s trademark threat, “One of these days, Alice! POW! Right in the kisser!”

One bitterly cold day in November, I finally found myself alone in the art-filled apartment. Harry was out of town for the
holidays. I could not afford to travel back to my native Houston, so I stayed in DC and turned the heater to high. While it
was freezing outside, I felt warm, surrounded by Harry’s African art, black memorabilia, and
Jet
and
Ebony
magazines. It was the eve of Thanksgiving 1987. I turned on the TV and suddenly heard my last name. It was the heartbreaking
news about the death of one of my heroes, Mayor Harold Washington. I sat in the
kitchen, the smallest room of the apartment, watching Harry’s tiny TV perched atop some open shelves that housed bags of sugar,
rice, cookies, flour, beans, and various boxes of tea.

Hearing that the first African American mayor of Chicago had died left me feeling numb. I was so proud when Harold Washington
took office. I remembered that no one expected him to win in 1983. Across the nation people argued about the impossibility
of the city of Chicago ever having a black mayor. When he won, I felt as if a member of my family had been elected.

We had more in common than just our last names. When stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines from 1981 to 1983, I read
an article somewhere that during World War II Harold Washington served in the United States Air Force. He helped build some
of the very runways at Clark Air Base that I proudly traversed daily as a 431x1 Aircraft Maintenance Specialist.

Washington rose to the rank of First Sergeant while he served, definitely not an easy accomplishment for a black man in the
1940s. Prior to his becoming mayor, for me, Chicago was synonymous with Al Capone, the great migration, and urban blight.
Seeing him at the helm changed my perception of Chicago and made me want to visit. Now he was dead. This beautiful African
American man… gone forever.

I sat there alone, in the kitchen, feeling cheated, as if something was taken from me personally. I started crying, not really
understanding why I cared so much. Still, I knew one day I would get to Chicago.

My relationship and conversations with Harry had ignited a thirst and passion for knowledge of self, my African self. To this
day, for this, I am eternally grateful to him. However, he gave me an even bigger gift. When I announced I was going off to
New York to pursue acting, even knowing I wasn’t ready to compete with other more trained and seasoned actors there,
unlike so many others—friends, family members, professors, strangers—who, in the past, hadn’t hesitated to tell me what I
was and wasn’t capable of, Harry didn’t talk me out of it.

Looking back, I realize that what happened on a bitter cold day in 1988 was actually quite miraculous. I auditioned for one
of Harry’s former students, Dianne Houston, and I got the job. It was a long-term gig with her CityKids Repertory Theater
in New York City.

Living in New York was a major turning point in my life. For as far back as I can remember I wanted to know more about Africans.
It had started when I was a young boy, with “the Rerun” which left me wanting to connect to and understand the dark-skinned
people in my recurring dream. There was the strong, mysterious, dark-skinned man I met at the house party whose presence and
persona never left my mind. And there was my awakening at Howard, where I learned more about Africans, the transatlantic slave
trade, the horrors of apartheid, and the esteemed Nelson Mandela. I mistakenly thought that by studying at Howard I would
find the answers I was looking for. But little did I know how serendipitous my time at Howard University would turn out to
be, and how intricately woven the paths of those I had yet to meet in New York would also be in supporting my efforts to find
my way. It was in New York that the foundation was laid for my Pan-African spirit.

I
n the summer of 1989, I lived in a loft in Brooklyn, New York. I would catch a bus to the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop and
change for the A train for my journey into Manhattan. My old friend “the Rerun” was occurring nearly once a month and haunted
me more intensely than ever before. One hot summer morning I awoke filled with anxiety, having had the recurring dream again
for the umpteenth time. What did it mean? Feeling hopelessly inadequate and directionless in body and psyche, I decided to
enroll in an African dance class to lift my spirits. I scrounged up some subway tokens, and headed out with the cash from
one of my unemployment checks.

My heart raced at the thought of this new adventure. As I walked from Washington Street to Myrtle Avenue, I noticed people
looking at me strangely. I put my head down and quickened my pace, ignoring the looks. Why were they staring at me? Was it
the way I was dressed? I always wore a colorful kente cloth, either as a scarf during the cold winter months in New
York or as a sash or belt during the warmer weather. I took precious time to meticulously cut slits into the legs of all my
jeans with my razor blade, and the stone-washed pair I wore that day was carefully ripped from my knees up to my thighs.

I had African locks with a cowrie shell dangling from one of them and the sides and back of my head were closely shaved. I
wore a necklace with a cowrie shell centered on a square patch of leather. Most of my fingers had various types of sterling
silver rings on them and my wrists were adorned with several bracelets fashioned out of leather, copper, and cowrie shells,
which I bought while attending the annual African Festival at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Boys and Girls High School. I must have
looked like a walking African jewelry store!