Authors: Carl Hart
High Price (22 page)
But my father wasn’t having it. He looked me right in the eye, knowing well the real reason for my choice. I continued my story about responsibility and helping out after Big Mama’s death. He stopped me. Carl didn’t often give me advice, but he felt that he had to speak up now.
“Junior,” he said, “pussy is everywhere.”
He had instantly discerned my reason for wanting to stay. I was getting way too comfortable back home, possibly setting myself up to fail by being sucked back into the life I already knew, rather than moving on and at least trying something different. He knew all too well how easy it was to lose sight of your goals and drift aimlessly.
“You don’t have to get it here,” he said.
I just nodded. I didn’t want him to know that he’d precisely pinpointed my motives. But over the next few days I thought about what he’d said and realized that he was right. The balance was back in favor of my success in college, which would truly begin in England.
I came to the place of my birth, and cried, “The friends of my youth, where are they?” And an echo answered, “Where are they?”
—
ANONYMOUS ARAB SAYING
S
ir, we pulled you over because your taillight isn’t working properly,” the police officer said. He added, cordially, “We just wanted to let you know.”
I had been driving into one of England’s ubiquitous “roundabouts,” which are similar to American traffic circles. I was on my second overseas assignment at Royal Air Force Base Fairford, in Gloucestershire, England. I was in my light green 1980 BMW 320; I’d purchased the car shortly after I arrived in the United Kingdom because I needed my own transportation to live off-base. It was around midnight on a summer or autumn evening in 1986 and I was on my way home from hanging out with friends to change into my uniform and work a night shift in the base computer room, where I was responsible for disseminating base supply reports. As always, it was drizzling.
The cops asked to see my license. While I was handing them the appropriate documents, one of them smelled alcohol on my breath.
“Have you been drinking, sir?” he asked, still respectful.
I admitted that I had had a pint, and complied as he administered a Breathalyzer test. I wasn’t too worried that I’d fail: I knew that I wasn’t intoxicated. Indeed, I blew well below the level that indicates any sort of impairment and the officers simply thanked me and let me go.
As I drove away, though, I suddenly realized that something was missing. I felt okay; my heart rate was pretty much normal. There was no dry mouth or sigh of relief. I’d just had an encounter with police that had involved very little tension or fear. It was peculiar.
The police hadn’t flashed their lights at me; they hadn’t stiffened or puffed themselves up when they saw that I was black. They’d been kind and respectful, not assuming that a black man in a nice car must be a drug dealer or some other sort of criminal. Even when they smelled alcohol on my breath, they did not become confrontational or judgmental and assume I was drunk. While my military ID might have helped, I’d still been treated like an ordinary person, not a second-class citizen or sketchy foreigner. I’d never had such an experience.
I thought back on a traffic incident I’d had with Florida police, which had also occurred late at night, in this case when I’d first returned home after boot camp in 1984. That had been completely different. Alex, my high school friend, had been driving his hideous brownish orange Pinto. I was in the front seat. The car—yes, it was the type that had been recalled for the minor problem of being at risk for exploding if rear-ended—was at least ten years old and probably looked twice that.
We’d pulled into a convenience store parking lot: in fact, it was that same old U’Tote’M that we’d frequented growing up. The shop was garishly lit, which usually meant it was open. Just after we’d stopped, Alex came around to my side of the car. He was carrying a large screwdriver, which was required to pry the dented door open so that I could get out. But we soon discovered that there was no reason to get out: the store was actually closed.
Just then, two cop cars pulled up and whooped their sirens at us, blinding us with their lights.
“What you boys doing here?” one of the officers drawled, full of undisguised contempt.
I produced my military ID, figuring that this might turn the situation around. After all, I was now part of the American security team, just like them, as I saw it. Alex simultaneously tried to explain about the problem with the car door. However, rather than placating the officers, this seemed only to antagonize them. Although I knew we’d committed no crime, I was flooded with apprehension. Everyone knew the many ways this situation could go terribly wrong. Images of police brutality flashed through my mind.
One cop said, “Where’s your state ID; you know you’re supposed to carry state ID.” I wanted to say that military ID was a federally recognized form of identification and should be respected, but I could tell by this point that the best thing to do was to keep my mouth shut.
Meanwhile, the officers remained fixated on Alex’s screwdriver. “What y’all doing around here?” they asked again. “You gettin’ ready to open that door?” The implication was that we’d stopped at a store that we knew was closed in order to break in.
Fortunately, because they had nothing on us, they let us go after only a few minutes of disrespectful, condescending treatment. Then Alex laughed at my naïveté. He said, “You thought that military shit was going to help, air force boy. That shit don’t work.”
That same humiliating scene, which I and countless other brothers had been through before, would be poignantly described a few years later in Ice Cube’s verses on N.W.A.’s 1988 “Fuck Tha Police.” Cube’s angry but brilliant analysis describes how the police routinely harass young black men mainly because of their race and gear, which may fit some stereotypical view of how drug dealers and criminals dress.
Driving home that night in England, I thought about how different things were there. My second foreign post had been an eye-opening experience, in more ways than one. Although I’d begun my college career in Japan—and had also had my first real exposure there to ideas about black consciousness and politics—it was in Great Britain that I really began to become knowledgeable about the profound effects of race in the United States and what it meant to be a black man from my background. I’d always known that shit was fucked-up, of course. But I hadn’t had clear, precise language to describe it or to understand how best to fight back.
Having been schooled by Mark in Japan, I now schooled the younger brothers in England. And, as any good educator will tell you, convincing others of the superiority of your arguments is often the best way to master them and to fully convince yourself, too. In Great Britain, I used the social skills and leadership potential I’d developed during my youth to turn other guys on to Gil Scott-Heron and Bob Marley. I immersed myself in their music and studied their lyrics hermeneutically. They became my holy texts.
On the BBC, I watched documentaries like the PBS series
Eyes on the Prize
, learning more about the history of the civil rights movement and the real stories of the people behind the fight against segregation and other forms of discrimination. I also saw
Cry Freedom
and participated in actions opposing financial investments in South Africa, to help bring down apartheid. I began to regret having missed the activism and consciousness-raising of the 1960s and early ’70s.
Ironically, as I began lamenting having been born too late to join the Black Panthers or protest the Vietnam War, I was unaware that a new assault on black people was being launched back home. That was Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs.
Getting ready to go out and party in England while in the air force.
In 1986, in the United States there were isolated protests against Reagan—and in the United Kingdom, a much more visible revolt against Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher—but it all seemed pale in comparison with what I’d missed during the black power years. I didn’t realize what was going wrong at the time in the States.
But being in England did give me a vital distance from which to analyze America. Though Britain was no prejudice-free paradise, its obsession with class and its early abolition of the slave trade made its racial politics different from ours. I wasn’t constantly facing people who dismissed me before they’d even talked to me there. And English white women certainly didn’t view black men the way American whites did in Miami. In fact, American military personnel—including blacks—were seen as having good jobs and greater opportunities than were available to the British working class. Our economic prospects were viewed positively, which was far from the case in South Florida.
Back home, one of the most conspicuous forms of racism I’d observed was related to interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites. So when I started to date Anne, a tall, soft-featured brunette whom I met about three months after I arrived in England, I was especially aware of our respective races. As a boy, I’d always had to hide the brief encounters I’d had with white girls in high school and junior high. It was clear to me that seeing them publicly would bring nothing but trouble, so I stayed away. If I’d been on the street or in a store with a white girl in Miami, we would have run a gauntlet of stares and muttered remarks or worse. However, in London and even in smaller British towns, no one seemed to care. I moved in with Anne not long after we met.
And although she felt she had to diligently work to prepare me before she thought I’d be ready to meet her parents, her concerns about how they’d see me were about class markers, not race. Anne came from the British upper middle class. She was seen to some extent as the family fuckup because she didn’t go to university. Her father was an aviator for the sultan of Oman and her parents spent most of their time in that country.
But as an American airman, I was seen as a “good catch” because of the economic opportunities open to me through the military and by virtue of being an American citizen. Compared to the Brits she’d dated previously, I was a definite improvement. Her parents didn’t even object when I moved in with her to the family home. They had a huge four-bedroom house in Wootton Bassett, a suburb of Swindon; it was where I’d been headed when I was pulled over by the police that night. To assuage their slight discomfort about us “living in sin,” I paid rent.
Before Anne introduced me to her parents, she carefully taught me to use silverware correctly and other table manners, which to me had been previously obscure. I didn’t find this condescending or inappropriate. Instead, it was educational. I had a spongelike attitude and was determined to soak up any kind of potentially useful knowledge. I wasn’t intimidated by the British class system because, even with all I knew about America’s deep flaws, I still retained the notion of our country’s ultimate superiority.
I learned a great deal from Anne and from observing British attitudes. The way they viewed American ideas about race, their support for civil rights and the equality of black people in the United States, confirmed for me that such positions were normal; this was how all thoughtful people should think about these questions. Fighting for civil rights wasn’t some kind of “special pleading,” or refusal to let go of “ancient history,” the way it was often presented by white folks back home. Of course, criticizing the United States was easy for the Brits because it was another country; they weren’t looking at their own issues. And their tolerance was far from perfect: they still had police brutality targeted at ethnic minorities and there was a persistent stereotype of Jamaican blacks as “lazy.” Nonetheless, it was an improvement for me.
And hearing Gil Scott-Heron perform in a small club, with a mixed-race audience of about fifty people, further provided me with a real sense of being part of a conscious community. We all sat on the floor and he interacted and conversed with us, as though it were an intimate party and we were part of the music, not just an audience. Anne and I listened together. Times like that—and turning other guys on to him myself—energized me to take action and learn more.
Importantly, in England, I began to be repeatedly encouraged both by the professors with whom I formally studied and by the men I schooled about the black experience. They thought I had something special and that I could and should use my brain to help others. My job on base was to be a supply clerk in stock control, ordering necessary items via a very primitive computer. From salt for the runways to uniforms for the basketball team, if it had to be obtained and supplied, we had to order it, sometimes millions of dollars’ worth at a time. But usually, this wasn’t a particularly demanding position. There was plenty of time to think and study. Inspired by Scott-Heron and by my earlier talks with Mark in Japan, I decided that I’d become a counselor and work toward a career helping at-risk youth.