Except for a certain facility in unloading prams at Sickser’s, I had not yet excelled at anything. I was the “good kid,” the “good worker,” no more. I did well enough at Morris to win a letter for track, but after a while I found slogging cross-country through Van Cortlandt Park boring, and so I quit. I switched to the 440-yard dash, because I could get it over with faster, but I dropped out after one season. We had a church basketball team at St. Margaret’s. I was tall, fairly fast, and the senior warden’s son, and the coach was inclined to give me a chance. I spent most of the time riding the bench, so I quit the team, to the relief of the coach. In later years, I frequently found myself asked to play or coach basketball, apparently out of a racial preconception that I must be good at it. As soon as I was old enough to be convincing, I feigned a chronic “back problem” to stay off the court.
My inability to stick to anything became a source of concern to my parents, unspoken, but I knew it was there. I did, however, stand out in one arena. I was an excellent acolyte and subdeacon, and enjoyed my ecclesiastical duties. Here was organization, tradition, hierarchy, pageantry, purpose—a world, now that I think about it, not all that unlike the Army. Maybe my 1928 prayer book was destined to be Field Manual 22-5, the Army’s troop drilling bible. Had I gone into the ministry in those days, it would have pleased my mother. I did not hear the call.
I remained unprecocious and unaccomplished in another department. I never received a word of sex education at home. The street was my teacher, and a crude one. All the guys carried condoms in their wallets, mine yellow and brittle with age. I had a puppy-love romance with a girl who lived a few blocks away that lasted throughout high school. I invited her to a family party once, where Marilyn spent the whole evening giggling at her. Later, my sister said, “What’s so special about that girl?” Not special? I had thought my girl was beautiful. For all our squabbling, Marilyn’s opinion mattered to me. If my girlfriend was not pretty in Marilyn’s eyes, she began to look less attractive in mine, and the romance faded.
In later years, I would turn out to be a good student, but no one would have predicted it then. Marilyn continued to set the Powell standard in education. She had been an honor student at Walton High, and she excelled at Buffalo State. And so, in spite of my final high school average of 78.3, I started looking at colleges because of my sister’s example and because my parents expected it of me. Education meant the difference between wrapping packages or sewing buttons all day and having a real profession. Education had led to an extraordinary record of accomplishment in my family. Among my blood relatives and extended family of lesser kinship, my cousin, Arthur Lewis, served as U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone, after a career as a Navy enlisted man. His brother, Roger, became a successful architect. Cousin Victor Roque became a prominent lawyer. James Watson became a judge on the U.S. Customs Court of International Trade. His sister, Barbara, was U.S. ambassador to Malaysia and the first woman assistant secretary of state; another sister, Grace, served as an official in the Department of Education. Another cousin, Dorothy Cropper, became a New York State Court of Claims judge. My cousin Claret Forbes, one of the last to migrate from Jamaica, is a nurse, with two children in Ivy League colleges. My sister’s daughter, Leslie, is an artist with an M.A. from Yale. Yet another cousin, Bruce Llewellyn, Aunt Nessa’s son, is a businessman, philanthropist, former senior political appointee in the Carter administration, and one of this country’s wealthiest African-Americans.
Not every cousin became a professional. Some worked as motor-men on the New York subway, some had small businesses, some clerical jobs. But all of them have been good providers and parents, keeping their families together and educating offspring who continue to turn out well. I look at my aunts and uncles, their children and their children’s children, and I see three generations of constructive, productive, self-reliant members of society. And all my relatives, whatever their professional status, enjoy equal standing in the family. No cousin stands above another in respect or affection. Some have experienced disappointment. Some did not achieve the success they desired. But they have all been successful in what counts in the end; they are useful human beings, useful to themselves, to their families, and to their communities.
Most of my parents’ brothers and sisters stayed in Jamaica, and their children have turned out well there too. My Meikle cousins, Vernon and Roy, went to the University of Toronto and the University of London respectively. In the 1970s, when the Jamaican government took a socialist turn and practically wrecked the economy, more relatives left the island, this latest immigrant wave settling in Miami. And the pattern of success began repeating itself.
American blacks sometimes regard Americans of West Indian origin as uppity and arrogant. The feeling, I imagine, grows out of an impressive record of accomplishment by West Indians. What explains that success? For one thing, the British ended slavery in the Caribbean in 1833, well over a generation before America did. And after abolition, the lingering weight of servitude did not persist as long. The British were mostly absentee landlords, and West Indians were left more or less on their own. Their lives were hard, but they did not experience the crippling paternalism of the American plantation system, with white masters controlling every waking moment of a slave’s life. After the British ended slavery, they told my ancestors that they were now British citizens with all the rights of any subject of the crown. That was an exaggeration; still, the British did establish good schools and made attendance mandatory. They filled the lower ranks of the civil service with blacks. Consequently, West Indians had an opportunity to develop attitudes of independence, self-responsibility, and self-worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for three hundred years, the fate of so many black American slaves and their descendants.
Of course, my ancestors had also been ripped ruthlessly out of Africa, the ties to their past severed by slave traders. In Jamaica, some blacks replaced this hole in their culture with British culture, its church, its traditions, its governmental institutions, its values. Others remained attached to their African roots through the Rastafarian movement with its religious linkage to the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopa. I appreciate and admire the impulses that have led many African-Americans as well to reclaim the culture that was stolen from them and to draw spiritual sustenance from it.
American blacks and West Indians also wound up on American soil under different conditions. My black ancestors may have been dragged to Jamaica in chains, but they were not dragged to the United States. Mom and Pop chose to emigrate to this country for the same reason that Italians, Irish, and Hungarians did, to seek better lives for themselves and their children. That is a far different emotional and psychological beginning than that of American blacks, whose ancestors were brought here in chains.
There is, undeniably, a degree of clannishness among West Indians, Jamaicans included. My family socialized and found friends almost entirely within the Jamaican community. Consequently, my sister, Marilyn’s behavior came as a real jolt. Ever since she had gone off to college, Marilyn had been bringing home girlfriends, some of whom were white. The South Bronx was a bit different from what they were used to, but Marilyn was not concerned. She was proud of her family, and my parents welcomed all her friends. In 1952, she announced that she was bringing home a boyfriend. She was in love. They wanted to get married. His name was Norman Berns, and Norman was white.
This bit of proposed integration was occurring two years before Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, a time when few people, black or white, could have identified Martin Luther King, Jr., when Americans would not have known a sit-in from a sofa. Marilyn’s choice was the source of much tut-tutting in the family. Our girl from Banana Kelly going with some white boy from Buffalo? What’s going on? Why do they want to get married?
The time came for Norm to meet the family and answer the question. He turned out to be a prince and obviously in love with my sister. An interracial marriage, nevertheless, troubled Pop, and he
understood the shelf life of youthful passions: “You two want to marry. Fine. Wait a year,” he said. “See if you still do.”
In the meantime, we went to meet Norm’s folks. An adventure for me. Buffalo, New York, 460 miles from New York City. Out West! The Berns, it turned out, were a little more tolerant than the Powells. They took the attitude that if the kids were in love and wanted to get married, let’s wish them godspeed.
In the end, love triumphed, and the wedding was planned for August 1953. Luther Powell’s only daughter was getting married, and only the best would do: best caterer, biggest cake, finest band, and poshest site, the Concourse Plaza Hotel on the Grand Concourse, the biggest hotel in the Bronx. A decade of skimping, saving, and sacrifice must have vanished that day. But the light dancing in my father’s eyes said, what’s money for?
I might add that Marilyn and Norm, with their two daughters and one granddaughter, recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary.
Following Marilyn’s example and Mom and Pop’s wishes, I applied to two colleges, the City College of New York and New York University. I must have been better than I thought, since I was accepted at both. Choosing between the two was a matter of simple arithmetic; tuition at NYU, a private school, was $750 a year; at CCNY, a public school, it was $10. I chose CCNY. My mother turned out to be my guidance counselor. She had consulted with the family. My two Jamaican cousins, Vernon and Roy, were studying engineering. “That’s where the money is,” Mom advised. And she was not far wrong. In the boom years of the fifties, demand for consumer goods and for engineers to design the refrigerators, automobiles, and hi-fi sets was strong. And so I was to be an engineering major, despite my allergy to science and math.
The Bronx can be a cold, harsh place in February, and it was frigid the day I set out for college. After two bus rides, I was finally deposited, shivering, at the corner of 156th Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem. I got out and craned my neck like a bumpkin in from the sticks, gazing at handsome brownstones and apartment houses. This was the best of Harlem, where blacks with educations and good jobs lived, the Gold Coast.
I stopped at the corner of Convent and 141st and looked into the campus of the City College of New York. I was about to enter a college established in the previous century “to provide higher education for the children of the working class.” Ever since then, New York’s poorest and brightest have seized that opportunity. Those who preceded me at CCNY include the polio vaccine discoverer, Dr. Jonas Salk, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the muckraker novelist Upton Sinclair, the actor Edward G. Robinson, the playwright Paddy Chayefsky, the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal, the novelist Bernard Malamud, the labor leader A. Philip Randolph, New York City mayors Abraham Beame and Edward Koch, U.S. Senator Robert Wagner, and eight Nobel Prize winners. As I took in the grand Gothic structures, a C-average student out of middling Morris High School, I felt overwhelmed. And then I heard a friendly voice: “Hey, kid, you new?”
He was a short, red-faced, weather-beaten man with gnarled hands, and he stood behind a steaming cart of those giant pretzels that New Yorkers are addicted to. I had met a CCNY fixture called, for some unaccountable reason, “Raymond the Bagel Man,” though he sold pretzels. I bought a warm, salty pretzel from Raymond, and we shot the breeze for a few minutes. That broke the ice for me. CCNY was somehow less intimidating. I was to become a regular of Raymond’s over the next four and a half years. And it either speaks well of his character or poorly of my scholarship that while my memory of most of my professors has faded, the memory of Raymond the Bagel Man remains undimmed.
As I headed toward the main building, Sheppard Hall, towering like a prop out of a horror movie, I passed by an undistinguished old building. I do not remember paying any attention to it at the time. It was, however, to become the focus of my life for the next four years, the ROTC drill hall.
My first semester as an engineering major went surprisingly well, mainly because I had not yet taken any engineering courses. I decided to prepare myself that summer with a course in mechanical drawing. One hot afternoon, the instructor asked us to draw “a cone intersecting a plane in space.” The other students went at it; I just sat there. After a while, the instructor came to my desk and looked over my shoulder at a blank page. For the life of me, I could not visualize a cone intersecting a plane in space. If this was engineering, the game was over.
My parents were disappointed when I told them that I was changing my major. There goes Colin again, nice boy, but no direction. When I announced my new major, a hurried family council was held. Phone calls flew between aunts and uncles. Had anybody ever heard of anyone studying geology? What did you do with geology? Where did you go with it? Prospecting for oil? A novel pursuit for a black kid from the South Bronx. And, most critical to these security-haunted people, could geology lead to a pension? That was the magic word in our world. I remember coming home after I had been in the Army for five years and visiting my well-meaning, occasionally meddling Aunt Laurice. What kind of career was this Army? she asked, like a cross-examiner. What was I doing with my life? Snatching at the nearest defense, I mentioned that after twenty years I would get a half-pay pension. And I would only be forty-one. Her eyes widened. A pension? At forty-one? The discussion was over. I had it made.
During my first semester at CCNY, something had caught my eye—young guys on campus in uniform. CCNY was a hotbed of liberalism, radicalism, even some leftover communism from the thirties; it was not a place where you would expect much of a military presence. When I returned to school in the fall of 1954, I inquired about the Reserve Officers Training Corps, and I enrolled in ROTC. I am not sure why. Maybe it was growing up in World War II and coming of age during the Korean conflict: the little banners in windows with a blue star, meaning someone from the family was in the service, or a gold star, meaning someone was not coming back. Back to Bataan, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, Colin Kelly, Audie Murphy, the five Sullivan brothers who went down with the cruiser U.S.S. Juneau, Pork Chop Hill, and The Bridges at Toko-Ri. All these images were burned into my consciousness during my most impressionable years. Or maybe it was the common refrain of that era—you are going to be drafted anyway, you might as well go in as an officer. I was not alone. CCNY might not have been West Point, but during the fifties it had the largest voluntary ROTC contingent in America, fifteen hundred cadets at the height of the Korean War.
There came a day when I stood in line in the drill hall to be issued olive-drab pants and jacket, brown shirt, brown tie, brown shoes, a belt with a brass buckle, and an overseas cap. As soon as I got home, I put the uniform on and looked in the mirror. I liked what I saw. At this point, not a single Kelly Street friend of mine was going to college. I was seventeen. I felt cut off and lonely. The uniform gave me a sense of belonging, and something I had never experienced all the while I was growing up; I felt distinctive.
In class, I stumbled through math, fumbled through physics, and did reasonably well in, and even enjoyed, geology. All I ever looked forward to was ROTC. Colonel Harold C. Brookhart, Professor of Military Science and Tactics, was our commanding officer. The colonel was a West Pointer and regular Army to his fingertips. He was about fifty years old, with thinning hair, of only medium height, yet he seemed imposing because of his bearing, impeccable dress, and no-nonsense manner. His assignment could not have been a coveted one for a career officer. I am sure he would have preferred commanding a regiment to teaching ROTC to a bunch of smart-aleck city kids on a liberal New York campus. But the Korean War had ended the year before. The Army was overloaded with officers, and Brookhart was probably grateful to land anywhere. Whatever he felt, he never let us sense that what we were doing was anything less than deadly serious.
That fall, I experienced the novel pleasure of being courted by the three military societies on campus, the Webb Patrol, Scabbard and Blade, and the Pershing Rifles, ROTC counterparts of fraternities. Rushing consisted mostly of inviting potential pledges to
smokers where we drank beer and watched pornographic movies. The movies, in the sexually repressed fifties, were supposed to be a draw. I hooted and hollered with the rest of the college boys through these grainy 8-millimeter films, in which the male star usually wore socks. But they were not what drew me to the Pershing Rifles. I pledged the PRs because they were the elite of the three groups.
The pledge period involved typical ritualistic bowing and scraping before upperclassmen, and some hazing that aped West Point traditions. A junior would stand you at attention and demand the definition of certain words. To this day I can parrot the response for milk: “She walks, she talks, she’s made of chalk, the lactile fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species …” and on and on. I can spout half a dozen similar daffy definitions. When we finished the pledge period, we were allowed to wear distinctive blue-and-white shoulder cords and enamel crests on our uniforms. I found that I was much attracted by forms and symbols.
One Pershing Rifles member impressed me from the start. Ronald Brooks was a young black man, tall, trim, handsome, the son of a Harlem Baptist preacher and possessed of a maturity beyond most college students. Ronnie was only two years older than I, but something in him commanded deference. And unlike me, Ronnie, a chemistry major, was a brilliant student. He was a cadet leader in the ROTC and an officer in the Pershing Rifles. He could drill men so that they moved like parts of a watch. Ronnie was sharp, quick, disciplined, organized, qualities then invisible in Colin Powell. I had found a model and a mentor. I set out to remake myself in the Ronnie Brooks mold.
My experience in high school, on basketball and track teams, and briefly in Boy Scouting had never produced a sense of belonging or many permanent friendships. The Pershing Rifles did. For the first time in my life I was a member of a brotherhood. The PRs were in the CCNY tradition only in that we were ethnically diverse and so many of us were the sons of immigrants. Otherwise, we were out of sync with both the student radicals and the conservative engineering majors, the latter easy to spot by the slide rules hanging from their belts. PRs drilled together. We partied together. We cut classes together. We chased girls together. We had a fraternity office on campus from which we occasionally sortied out to class or, just as often, to the student lounge, where we tried to master the mambo. I served as an unlikely academic advisor, steering other Pershing Rifles into geology as an easy yet respectable route to a degree.
My American Journey Page 4