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My Vanishing Country

Page 5

by Bakari Sellers


  In 2012, Bamberg Hospital closed its doors because of petty politics and lack of funds. The closing was a confluence of idiocy and stubbornness. It should have remained open. If Pop had been shot any time after that, he could have died. Who knows whether he could have survived the twenty-five-mile trip by ambulance to the next-closest hospital in Orangeburg? I hate to even imagine how many people may have lost their lives because there’s no hospital in town anymore. As Pop says, “It could have been lights out” for him.

  For a while after the shooting, Pop kept his distance from us, though he thought we were doing the same. He said that he wanted to prove to himself and to us that he could get his life in order. When I ran for South Carolina lieutenant governor in 2014, Pop called me and was on the streets holding up banners. Meekly, he told me and my father at different times that he wanted to go to college. “Mr. Sellers encouraged me to never give up even though I made some bad decisions,” he says. “Bakari also encouraged me. Once they saw me take the initial steps, they supported me, and that meant a lot to me.”

  In 2013, Pop got his GED. Several years later, he earned an associate’s degree in science at Denmark Tech. “I’m no dummy,” he likes to say. In 2017, he got his bachelor’s degree in business administration from Voorhees, with a focus in finance. He studied hard and graduated with distinction. He was inducted into the Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Society. Then, he spent one semester working on his master’s degree at Claflin University in Orangeburg. By then, he had two children. His mother said he needed to get a job to support his family, so he quit graduate school. But what kind of job can a man with a prison record and no driver’s license get in a town where there are no jobs? After all that studying and a college degree with honors, Pop, who’s now forty, works for a company that makes kitchen sinks and doors and is paid eight dollars an hour.

  Pop has no shame discussing his faults. He’s the first to say he drank way too much, but he has cut down, now only drinking Busch Light. When he does get drunk, his heavy southern accent turns to a deep-throated mumble, which can make it hard to understand what he’s saying if you don’t know him, but I know him. He’s never nasty or belligerent, only philosophical.

  One recent winter night, Pop’s voice on the telephone was crisp and clear. In the background, I could hear him talking to someone. It was my father, who had taken sandwiches and sodas to Pop’s family. After my father pulled away in his truck, Pop wanted to know two things from me. The first was this: “If I’m Bakari’s brother, why wasn’t I invited to be in your wedding?”

  The answer to the wedding question is simple: only two people were at my wedding—my stepdaughter and my brother Lumumba, who’s now a minister. But I don’t think that’s really what Pop was asking me. I believe Pop was wondering whether his past scared me away. I needed to honestly consider my own possible failings in this regard. We were not around each other as much as when we were children, but I was always there for him. What should someone who has gained a certain amount of privilege do about a friend who hasn’t? It’s a very difficult question, and something many of us with siblings, parents, cousins, and old friends either struggle with or ignore.

  My answer might not put me in a good light, but it’s honest. The last thing I will do is talk down to someone like Pop, a grown black man who’s made mistakes but has done his damnedest to turn things around. However, we all need moments of introspection. I will never push away Pop; he is as much a part of my life as he is part of the fabric of Denmark. But Pop needed the time he took to put his life together, to complete important things, like graduate from college. I think Pop realized there was a point where he had to grow up. It might sound harsh, but it’s true. So many people had poured so much into him that Pop began to understand it was time to make a return on that investment. He began to change, I believe, when he had children.

  Pop’s second question was even deeper than the first. “The Sellers say they love me; then why did they leave me in the hood?”

  For me, this is a frustrating question, and I call it bullshit. I will do anything for Pop, and I will never leave people behind. And for most of my adult life I’ve been a legislator—a representative elected to serve all the people in my district. My personal focus is on Pop, of course, but in my profession, I also focus on all the similar stories in Denmark, all the voices that go unheard that Pop represents.

  For instance, in November 2018, I filed a lawsuit against the town of Denmark for unsafe water. Residents in my hometown had been complaining for ten years about the rusty-colored liquid that dripped from their faucets. Some collected water samples, and many drank only bottled water, despite the mayor saying everything was all right.

  As I stood in a community meeting talking to those residents, all I could think of was how the world has forgotten Denmark. It wasn’t until after a year-long investigation by CNN that we learned the state government for a decade had been adding a substance called HaloSan to one of the city’s wells in order to regulate naturally occurring bacteria. Between my lawsuit and the national attention that Denmark finally received, I believe the water problem will one day be fixed. But nobody knows the long-term effects it might have on an entire generation. Will there be learning disabilities in a community that already has a ton of preexisting health issues, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes? Will we ever know how this could have happened for ten years without anyone informing Denmark residents or without the permission of the federal government?

  The indignity that people in my hometown suffer makes me feel physically ill, and I just have to do all I can to help. Sometimes, and in Pop’s case, painfully, it’s never going to be enough. When I think about Pop’s question, I also have to think about his pain, and where he is coming from. As a child he wanted nothing more than to get away from trouble. He deeply loved his mother and siblings but enjoyed the order in our home and the quiet of our struggling neighborhood. We treated him as one of us. He ate, played, and slept beside us. Maybe deep down he wonders, How did the Sellers children become so successful and I haven’t? I lived in that same house. Why am I not where they are now? I’ve made big changes in my life, but why am I not doing better?

  He believes his prison record will haunt him for the rest of his life, despite his academic success and all the changes he made in his life. As far as the lewd act, he didn’t have sex with the girl, but he still doesn’t get a pass on that, even if she did lie about her age. He spent thirteen months in prison on a five-year sentence.

  Pop says he has learned from all of his mistakes. And for that reason, and all his academic achievement, I view him as being successful—with still a ways to go. Yet even with all his accomplishments, and all the help he’s received, there are things Pop won’t achieve because he is shackled by his past, by poverty, and by the dirt roads of Denmark. I know people say we all must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but that doesn’t give value to being poor, black, and isolated in America.

  Before There Were Trolls, There Was Jiving

  In rural, segregated areas like Denmark and Orangeburg, black people live similarly to how they lived during the Jim Crow era. Regardless of class, we reside in the same black neighborhoods, often attending the same black schools and the same black churches. The children play and grow up together among the same black families, regardless of who their parents are and how much money their parents make.

  Segregation wasn’t some remembrance of the past for us; it was, and is, our reality.

  Pop, a child of a struggling mother, was my friend, but so was Jarrod, who was raised by two educators in nearby Orangeburg. His mother is an English teacher and has been teaching for almost fifty years in Orangeburg County. His father was a social worker with an advanced degree. But even though some of us had parents who were well educated, they were all from these rural outposts in South Carolina and very familiar with all the challenges of such communities.

  “We grew up with guys who ran the gamut,” Jarrod often says, “from those who
ended up dead or selling drugs to those who ended up being doctors. They were all our friends.”

  I remember clearly the first time I met Jarrod, who would become my closest friend, my roommate throughout college, and one of my biggest supporters in life. But back on the first day of my sophomore year of high school, Jarrod was nothing less than petty. Since he was born and raised in Orangeburg, he grew up reading in middle school about the Orangeburg Massacre and my father, but none of that mattered on my first day at Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School.

  I was a sophomore but new to the school. As I walked into my first class, there was Jarrod looking me up and down. To this day, he is more than happy to tell anyone who will listen about that moment. “I was one of the kids who would wait at the door to see what your new outfit looked like when you walked into the classroom. If what you were wearing was bad, we’d start jivin’.”

  Depending on where you’re from, this game of monster putdowns is called playing “the Dozens” or rekking, signifying, ragging, but in rural South Carolina, we called it simply “jiving.” The colossal one-liners that are the stars in this game of insults are “snaps.” The best way to describe this game is verbal dueling, a tangle of raw offenses slung from one person to another until one of them gives up, or gets angry. Sometimes a bunch of people insult one person like in a Hollywood roast. Others go straight for the jugular, insulting “yo mama”; in fact, the “yo mama joke” is a subgroup of playing Dozens.

  There have been sociological studies about the Dozens, a black American tradition that is believed to be linked to Africa or slavery, but no one really knows where it came from. What we do know is that it started in the rural, black South and spread to the streets of urban America long before rap.

  That first day of class, I walked into a cloud of adolescent jabs targeted strictly at me and led by one person. Leaning against the door, Jarrod asked, “Who is this kid? No, please tell me he ain’t wearing a family reunion T-shirt?”

  “Ahhhh!” the rest of the boys shouted, and the jokes and laughter started immediately.

  In between putdowns and pretending he could barely catch his breath, Jarrod asked, “Who the fuck is this kid?”

  Some of the boys who had gone to school with me said that’s so-and-so. But Jarrod didn’t care who I was. He said, “Wait! This kid is wearing windbreaker pants, some sneakers that aren’t new, and a family reunion shirt?”

  The crowd of silly boys roared.

  “He’s tall, but probably 120 pounds soaking wet!”

  Jarrod was on a roll.

  “He has an afro. In fact, he looks just like a Q-tip!”

  “Ahhhhhh!” the group roared.

  After everyone settled down, Jarrod looked at me and said, “At the end of the day black folk like to look good, and in my opinion this kid looks terrible.”

  But here’s what shocked them and what quickly got me in the good graces of a group of boys who were all trying hard to be part of the “in” crowd: I laughed with them and as hard as they did. I was right there with them catching my breath and holding my stomach from all the laughter. My actions threw them off. The target of the snaps usually snaps back or gets upset or moves on, which is exactly the goal.

  But why would I get angry? It was crystal clear to everyone, including me, that I hadn’t done my due diligence, which was putting in the time and effort needed to look good for the first day of school, and that was a sort of sin. So, it would have been pure insanity to try to argue against the point with these kids, who had nearly perfected the art of jiving. Truth be told, Jarrod was right: I looked exactly like a Q-tip, skinny with an afro.

  It didn’t matter that the reason I didn’t have a cool outfit was because I spent my ninth-grade year at a white school, where your first-day-of-school outfit wasn’t a thing. I liked the teachers and the students at that school, but it was an hour each way from home, and I never got to see my friends. However, I started to quickly learn that I was even more out of place at this black high school.

  The kids picked up that something was different about me, but they couldn’t put their fingers on it. As it turns out, I entered high school at the age of twelve. When I was much younger, I had skipped two halves and a whole year. I went to kindergarten for a semester, and then after Christmas I was placed in first grade. I was also a good standardized test taker, resulting in my going to third grade the next year at Felton Laboratory School on the campus of South Carolina State. Yet as much as I might have been a mature little boy, a strange old man in a little boy’s body, I could also be a socially awkward teen.

  Here I was, this skinny kid with a big head, from the countriest dirt-road town. I was the perfect target during lunch, but I continued to laugh and learn. The truth? I had been teased for being the youngest since third grade, so there was nothing these boys could say that I hadn’t already heard.

  Orangeburg-Wilkinson had two thousand students, so lunch had to be in two different places: the main school and nearby Calhoun-Orangeburg Vocational Education Center. The truth is, lunch at the vocational center didn’t help overcrowding. It was pure chaos. You had thirty minutes to either pay $1.25 for regular school food or buy a Chick-fil-A sandwich or a Papa John’s slice of pizza, sit down, eat, snap, and laugh.

  Our group consisted of Jarrod, Reggie Abraham, Tim Jennings, Ryan Brown, and Joseph Brandon. Reggie would start beatboxing, which is making hip-hop sounds with your mouth—like scatting but more percussive. Someone would often join with a rap. Depending on what day it was, we might start jiving. Someone would take a shot, and you had to shoot back. I’d say something like, “Jarrod’s mama’s so dumb, she takes an hour to cook Minute Rice.”

  He’d snap back, “Bakari’s mama’s so old, her memory’s in black and white.”

  Then I’d say, “Yo’ mama’s so fat, when God said ‘Let there be light,’ he told her to move out the way.”

  Someone else would claim you got dressed in the dark, or that you’re wearing your sister’s hand-me-downs. None of it, of course, was true, and nothing was out of bounds.

  We kept up the jokes in class, though we also remained earnest about our studies. One of our favorite teachers was Mrs. Miller, who taught AP history. She was serious, but she let us be ourselves—a group of AP kids who loved to tell jokes. Mrs. Miller allowed us to snap on each other as long as it wasn’t out of bounds. Maybe she saw jiving as a true rite of passage. After all, most of the guys at the table did well in life. Reggie became a political operative and has worked for Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris; after Jarrod finished a degree at Morehouse, he went on to Harvard; Ryan and Joseph are both doctors; and Tim, a cornerback, won the Super Bowl in 2007 with the Indianapolis Colts and later played for the Chicago Bears.

  Not everyone at the table was as successful, but those who didn’t have the opportunities that the rest of us had can still jive with the best of them and probably are wittier than any of us. To this day, those verbal acrobatics I learned back then still give me an edge, especially in the courtroom. Anything that someone says about me, I’ve already heard. It helps me to deal with social media trolls, to battle veteran politicians, and to be quick on my feet for television.

  * * *

  Mr. Brown, who taught philosophy, was a white teacher from New York City at this black high school in rural South Carolina. We had quite a few white teachers, but none from New York. Jarrod and I did a lot of writing and loads of presentations in his class. We read books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I remember as being heavy and challenging. Jarrod says no one forgets that book, but I don’t know whether I read it for comprehension or to just get by.

  Schoolwork came easily to me, but not through osmosis. Once I read something and wrote it down, I remembered it, digested it, understood it, and could spit it back. Part of the way I learned was natural, but some of it stemmed from the way my parents raised me and my siblings—always trying to challenge us, and introducing us to other adults, like my “uncles” and “au
nts,” who talked to us about grown-up issues.

  My grandmother always said an idle mind is the devil’s playground, meaning children shouldn’t get too bored. My parents put us in situations that challenged us, which is likely why they didn’t hesitate when my elementary teacher suggested I skip a grade. Now that I’m a parent, I can act on the belief that it’s much better to challenge children than spend energy protecting them from failure.

  My high school physics teacher realized the class wasn’t difficult for me and let me leave to talk with one of my other favorite teachers, a young white woman who helped me figure out my future. My parents were encouraging me to go to a black undergraduate college, but I needed more direction. So I talked to the teacher about colleges I liked, what to study in college, and where I should go. She suggested books I should read, and we talked about books I’d already read.

  Many people have stories about high school counselors undervaluing their abilities and not encouraging them to attend college. Although I was a straight-A student with very high SAT scores, I too was told to join the army rather than apply to Morehouse College. Such teachers and counselors don’t mean to underrate students but to protect them from failing. When I was in high school, there were far too many cautionary tales of Orangeburg students not doing well at big colleges. In fact, all Jarrod and I heard was, “Don’t be like Lenny.” Lenny had graduated from Orangeburg-Wilkinson and went to Morehouse, but he failed and had to return home.

  Teachers gave all they could, even when the state and government tied their hands; but the truth is that the schools didn’t do a great job preparing rural children for a competitive twenty-first-century global curriculum. Across this country, tens of millions of students drop out of college before finishing a degree, and a large percentage of them are rural children, who may not be emotionally or academically ready for big institutions. So when teachers underestimated us, they just didn’t want us to become cautionary tales.

 

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