As I grew up, I watched Mom bust her behind to take care of us. She had a rigorous schedule: wake up, dress us, and take us to Willa Mae’s house, go to work all day, pick us up, come home to fix dinner, shop for groceries in the middle of the night when we were asleep, and do laundry on Saturdays. I suffered with asthma as a kid, so sometimes I disrupted Mom’s routine with my wheezing episodes. On many nights, she had to drop everything to drive me to the emergency room, with Garland in tow. It took a few hours for the medicine to take effect, but I’d feel better by morning and then sleep for hours at the babysitter’s house. Mom didn’t get to rest. If the next day was a weekday, she would have to hurriedly comb her hair, throw on her work clothes, and go in for her eight-hour shift.
I never felt then that my dad visited much, and he rarely sent money. Mom knew that my father didn’t earn a lot running his store, so she didn’t push him to send more child support. “Why aggravate myself to get whatever little he has?” she would say.
She had a village helping her out to raise the two of us. Her eight siblings, who had all moved north, chipped in to help. Mom’s family had a big influence on me, instilling a huge respect for hard work and higher learning. Four of my mother’s sisters went to college, and I have two aunts, Catherine and Mary, who have master’s degrees. It baffled me that my mother never went to college, so I started nagging her about it. “Go to school, Ma,” I told her repeatedly. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get a degree. It would have sent me an even stronger message about the importance of staying in school and getting an education. I also had an ulterior motive—secretly, I wanted her to get a college degree so she could earn more and buy me more Christmas presents.
When I was about eleven, my mother reunited with Garland’s father. The two of them got married, and he moved into our apartment. I had my fantasies about what a father would be like—I had observed my friends’ fathers and also had watched plenty of TV dads over the years—but the new addition to our house didn’t exactly fit my expectations. Heyward Mack was a quiet man who just didn’t communicate much. One day, five years after he arrived, he moved out without much warning to any of us.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to appreciate what he actually did for us. He pitched in to chauffeur me to my dental appointments after I got braces in my early teens. He always bought me Italian hot dogs after my orthodontist visits although I couldn’t eat because the tightened braces made my teeth tender. Heyward generously shared his family with me. I loved going over to his parents’ house, especially at holidays when his mother would cook a big pot of the best greens I ever tasted. I think Heyward is like many men of his generation. He was a provider but a businesslike one. I won’t forget how he picked me up from college every semester when it was time to move out of the dorm and helped me lug all my stuff back and forth. He showed his love through action, not by flowery talk. While I was in college, he and Mom reconciled, and he remains a big presence in my life.
Yet I never called him Dad. That wasn’t the way our relationship worked. I usually called him Heyward, and, on rare occasions, I felt comfortable enough to call him Pop. Mom knew she had to step in and be both a father and a mother to Garland and me. Bluntly, she told us about the facts of life. She would remind us often, and quite matter-of-factly, to wear condoms. “Look here, let me tell you,” she would say. “You’re growing up—so make sure to wrap that thing up. When you lay down with somebody, what you do could lead to a baby, and that means you’re tied to that person for the rest of your life. So if you’re eyeing a girl and it’s not someone you want to be with next year and the year after that, then I suggest you keep walking.”
In case any doubt remained, she’d tack on a final warning: “Don’t bring no babies here.” She said it so often that to this day I’m still haunted by those warnings.
Mom made it clear what not to do, but I still needed some instruction on what to do. I needed somebody to explain things. At age fifteen, I found one in Reggie, a dude I worked with at Murray Steaks, a frozen food company. I respected Reggie because it seemed like he knew how to handle his business. Only eighteen and already a father, Reggie was holding down a job, taking college classes, and caring for his young family. A good-looking guy, he’d had plenty of women chasing him in his earlier days so he had lots of expertise to share when we weren’t unloading meat trucks or stocking shelves. He gave me my first condom, which I kept in my wallet. Eventually, it got so wrinkled that I couldn’t use it, but it had done its duty by then, serving as an educational tool. Before Reggie, I’d had some experimental encounters, always rushed due to the fear that somebody’s parents would bust in on us. Thanks to his coaching, I got a better sense of what to do when the opportunity presented itself and how to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
Mom never shied away from the tough parts of parenting, but a woman can’t show you how to be a man. The older I got, the more I found myself scavenging in the streets to pick up the basics of male behavior. Everyday situations mystified me. For one thing, I never felt confident when dealing with the constant confrontations that arise when you live in a neighborhood like mine. Somebody’s always losing his temper; somebody’s always getting shoved around. The root of these beefs is usually something so trivial or petty that I just couldn’t get worked up about it.
I taught myself to sidestep confrontation, either by talking my way out of it or by just walking away, allowing my opponent to feel big and bad. But misgivings always nagged at me when I took the nonviolent approach. Should I have popped him in the eye? Did I look soft when I walked away? I never knew for sure. I could have used a father’s advice to teach me where to draw the line and guide me through the minefields on Newark streets, where fistfights could ignite in a flash.
Newark was a tough town, the kind of place where it felt as if danger was all around you. In the Brick City, as it’s been called, you always stood a good chance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if you avoided obvious trouble and minded your own business. The city Rameck, Sampson, and I grew up in became synonymous with poverty and violence during our formative years, as Newark’s white middle class fled to the suburbs. During the 1970s, the black population grew, and the city erected tall brick housing projects that teemed with poor people. In 1975, Harper’s Magazine dubbed Newark the worst city in America. The city was still recovering from the deadly riots of 1967, and over the coming decades continued to be torn apart by drugs, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness.
It was normal to see teenagers take stolen cars and spin them out, which we called “locking it up.” We could be standing at the bus stop, and all of a sudden we might see a Honda Accord zoom down the street doing sixty or seventy. When the driver slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel sharply, the car would do a complete 180-degree turn. Even though we all knew the cars were stolen, we would watch admiringly. We even had a dance called the “lock it up.” We also had fun watching cop chases. TV shows and movies are full of high-speed pursuits today, but we could see real action from our street corner. One big difference between Hollywood and our Newark reality was that the thieves usually got away. Everybody knew that the police couldn’t go over a certain speed in residential areas because it would put the public at risk.
The crime-ridden brick housing projects towered over our neighborhoods, limiting our ambitions. I didn’t understand a world beyond the Newark projects until I was in third grade at Louise A. Spencer School. There, I encountered an unforgettable teacher, Mrs. Viola Johnson. She took us on field trips to New York City and sent us postcards when she traveled. I became particularly fascinated with England because Mrs. Johnson had formed a Shakespeare club and had us inner-city kids holding weekly meetings to discuss Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. I was the club’s president. I remember dreaming of exploring England’s grand theaters and palaces.
Suddenly, with Mrs. Johnson’s help, I knew that the world had more to offer and that it was up to me to go after it.
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sp; By the time I got out of elementary school, I had made up my mind to go to college. “George, you’re bright enough to earn a scholarship,” Mrs. Johnson often told me. Her words influenced me for a lifetime.
In sixth grade, my school recommended that I take the entrance exam for University High, a prestigious magnet school in Newark. It was a lucky break for me. I had no desire to go to our local high school; it didn’t seem as though it adequately prepared students for college or even tried to challenge them.
I passed the test and entered University High in seventh grade. I remember being overwhelmed at seeing the high school seniors walking around. They were so much bigger and seemed so cool. University High in so many ways was a haven for a kid like me. I was surrounded by students who wanted to achieve. It was here that I met Sam and Rameck, who would change and challenge me.
Despite those positive influences, Newark’s violence still intruded on my daily life. There was no escaping it. The incident I remember most vividly happened when I was in tenth grade. I had left school with my girlfriend and a longtime friend who lived near me. We were at the bus stop with a bunch of kids from my school, all waiting for the number 13 bus. One of the guys at the bus stop was a “pretty boy” type with a refined look, not very tough at all.
Then some kids showed up from Hawthorne Avenue, a few blocks away. Loud and rowdy, they had a reputation for harassing students from our magnet school. They looked ready to fight. I recognized one of the guys rolling with them because he was in the special education program at my school. We made eye contact, but he didn’t mess with me. Relief flooded through me. Special-ed kids had their own classes on the third floor and they took a lot of teasing for not being able to keep up with the rest of us academically. I never joined in the taunts—bullying other kids never appealed to me—plus, I had played basketball in the gym against this guy and held my own. Those are the only two reasons I can think of that gained me enough of his respect to make him nod to me and keep it moving past me and my friends.
He and about eight of his friends went right for the pretty boy and started picking on him. I have no idea why. Maybe the pretty boy made fun of the special-ed kid in the past, or maybe he just looked weak. Whatever the reason, they lifted him up by his collar and pushed him against a fence. But they didn’t hit him or rob him, I noticed with surprise. As after-school altercations go, this one seemed extraordinarily mild. As I watched, I told myself, “I don’t know that guy. As long as my friends aren’t in it, I don’t need to get involved.” But I wished the bus would hurry up and come.
But then the friend with us did the unthinkable. He walked up to the guy who had the pretty boy pinned up by the collar and put his hand on the guy’s back, as if to ask him to please leave the kid alone. I couldn’t believe it. It was essentially a suicide mission. The whole situation had seemed so benign, on the verge of blowing over. But by jumping in, my friend instantly took it to another level. I recognized the rhythm of street fights: now the bully would feel like his manhood was in question if he let the kid go.
I was right. The crowd turned on my friend and started beating the crap out of him. To make matters worse, other people from the vicinity joined in, so now it looked as if fifteen people were wailing away on him.
I wish I could rewrite this story and tell you that I jumped in heroically and took on half the crowd for him. But I wasn’t that great of a fighter, and I knew my assistance wouldn’t have helped matters. So I did what I thought I had to do, and that was escort my girl right on the bus, which arrived just as the fight was ending. Later, she told me I did the right thing. “He had no business crossing the line like that,” she insisted. Although the friend who suffered the beating never criticized me, I never forgave myself for being a bystander.
To be honest, I didn’t like fighting. I still don’t. Although I knew I had to be ready to defend myself, I didn’t believe fighting really resolved anything. I guess my outlook had something to do with growing up inside High Park Gardens, where my neighbors shared a strong work ethic and knew how to be civil to one another. To this day, I marvel at how I managed to make it through my teen years without getting loaded down with all the hostility and violent behavior that statistics show are tied tightly to fatherlessness.
Somehow, I felt immune to the peer pressure. When our neighborhood basketball games ended and everybody got bored, I’d head home to read a book while the other guys walked down the street to steal a car. Nobody bothered me, and I didn’t bother them. Possibly it was the street credibility I earned for being an aggressive athlete, scratching my knees up for life on the concrete parking lots where we played football and basketball. Or maybe it was my streetwise cousins who lived nearby and made it clear that nobody should mess with George. For some reason, I didn’t have to fight for my honor every time I went outside. I didn’t bully anybody, or gossip, or laugh at the special-ed kids. I just tried to be straight up with everybody. Eventually I got labeled as a cool dude who studied hard and was sure to make it out of the ghetto one day. On my block, everybody knew that school was my hustle, instead of the streets, and they grew to respect me for it.
What I know of self-defense, I learned from my best friend from the neighborhood, Cash. He was the best fighter I knew, thanks to his father, Shahid Jackson, Sr., a Newark police officer who made sure that Cash worked out at the Police Athletic League every day. I watched Cash win all kinds of boxing trophies and tournaments. I learned the hard way about Cash’s skills when we were playing a boxing game called “hard to the body.” The object is to throw closed-fist blows to punch your opponent in the stomach, chest, and arms—no face shots. Thinking I would be able to hold my own, I tried to throw a punch. But before I could get my shot off, he hit me fast with three stomach and chest blows. Gasping for air, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t even continue the game.
Over the coming months, Cash showed me some of the fundamentals of boxing and I became good at slap boxing: I had good instincts and my long arms were assets. I tried to soak up all the knowledge I could when Cash gave me lessons, but I couldn’t help thinking he had an asset I lacked, a father to instill the self-assurance that helped Cash navigate the confrontations of daily life, while I second-guessed everything.
Luckily for me, Cash’s dad didn’t mind letting me borrow him.
Once we moved into High Park Gardens, I hung out nearly every day at Cash’s house. Since I was always around, his father kind of adopted me. He was a former boxer who ran the Newark police’s youth athletic league. He was well known in the entertainment world, as well, having served as bodyguard to stars like Kool & the Gang and Smokey Robinson.
He was well respected in our neighborhood. One day Cash and I came running into Shahid’s house to tell him that the kids in the projects had jumped us on our way home from baseball practice, stealing our bats and gloves. Shahid was dressed only in his pajamas at the time but he swung into action. He walked right up to the projects and loudly announced that his boys better get their stuff back right away—or else. He stood outside the apartment building and waited. Within minutes, a window on a nearby apartment opened and the missing bats and gloves were returned, including some we didn’t even own.
Shahid did the things for me that I thought a father should do. He put me on the sports teams he coached, and he took me to boxing matches and to Continental Airlines Arena to see the Nets play. Whenever he bought tickets to take his sons to an event, he always bought one for me.
Many’s the time that he and his wife took me out to dinner. He loves a good meal, and he introduced me to the joys of a fine steak. When I was seventeen, I had to hide my astonishment the first time Shahid tossed me the keys to his gold LeBaron. “You guys can go to the mall, just don’t wreck the car,” he said, nonchalantly giving us permission to go out without him. Here I was getting a chance to drive the family car before Cash, who was ten months younger, got to slide behind the wheel. The trust Shahid showed in me meant a lot.
He listened when I had something to say. I didn’t have to put up a macho front when I talked to Shahid. I could ask questions freely, share my insecurities, and get good advice.
It was Shahid whom I excitedly talked to on the fateful day when I met a caring dentist who took the time to show me his office and instruments. It was the first day I ever dreamed of becoming a dentist. Shahid still remembers the enthusiasm in my voice. To this day, it’s Shahid I go to for fatherly advice. I’ll always see him as larger than life, a broad-shouldered hero of a man with refined taste but a down-to-earth attitude.
Caring fathers like Shahid were rare in my neighborhood. But during my younger years, I brushed up against a few good men whom I studied closely as if they were rare biology specimens, always looking to pluck insights on how men should behave. My friends Anthony and Al lived with both their parents, and I admired how they got along with their father. Whenever I came over for their dad’s poker parties, I paid close attention, watching how he treated his male friends, how he trained his sons and me to play the game, and mimicking the fine art of talking trash while playing cards.
Al and Ant were considered the rich kids on my block. Their father had a well-paying job with benefits, and his mother made additional money caring for foster children. They had five-hundred-dollar Mongoose and Diamond-back bikes outfitted with lugs on the wheels that they used to do wheelies and other hot tricks. Man, how I wished I was in their shoes when they zipped up and down the street on those bikes, the two-wheeled equivalents of Ferraris.
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 2