Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Lena, who called my father “Stan,” would have used the phrase “our first” in describing his new position. I heard that phrase repeatedly in reference to him and the other Black pioneers of his era, as though their accomplishments had been achieved by an entire community. She might also have slipped in a scriptural reference to my father as Daniel. Those I recall speaking in such biblical terms about Blacks in never-before-held positions, like my maternal grandmother, often stopped with that simple comparison and left dangling the image of Daniel thrust not of his own choosing into the famed lions’ den.

  * * *

  Postwar racial codes swirled around my father as he walked into IBM’s headquarters on Madison Avenue. Heads snapped to attention, tracking him as he parted a sea of White faces on his way to the elevators. Unaware of his presence, a few people stepped into the elevator car with him, then looking up and seeing him, they suddenly stepped out. Some already inside hurriedly exited. Others hesitated at the car’s threshold, peered at my father and the Black man at the elevator’s controls, and waved the car on.

  During the years that I taught at IBM’s New York Advanced Education Center, Thomas “Tommy” Barnes sat all day at a small desk just to one side of the elevators on the eleventh floor. Tommy always had a joke ready, greeted those who stepped from the cars, held the doors open for us, reached inside to push buttons, and could suggest the best restaurant for lunch.

  A tall, well-built Black man in his late fifties, with a mustache and graying black hair, Tommy also had a uniform: dark pants, a short-sleeve white shirt, and a dark blue tie. When not acting as the Education Center’s concierge, Tommy buried his head in books on Greek mythology and esoteric philosophy. Give him some time, as I often did, and he would regale you with stories of Zeus, Ariadne, Sirens, and nymphs or tales of Atlantis and Lemuria.

  Tommy, who lived in Brooklyn, watched over a threshold between a world “out there” and a world inside IBM. And he made that sometimes hostile world of IBM more welcoming for me.

  “How you holdin’ up, my man?” he’d whisper as I stepped off the elevator.

  I’d nod. He’d wink. Then he’d nod back.

  Sometimes, Tommy would pop his head through a classroom door or take a seat at the back for a little while, just to see for himself how the young Black kid with the big Afro was actually holding up.

  Managers, instructors, and students all took to Tommy. Part guard, part greeter, part guide, Tommy’s position was never fully clear to me. Did he work for IBM or the building’s management? Electronic controls had long since made elevator operators obsolete, though in his younger years Tommy had been an elevator operator himself.

  Now, much like an old fisherman who still went down to the docks early every morning to watch the fleet leave the harbor, and returned in the late afternoon to see it come in, or like a retired porter sitting in a station or by the side of the tracks, awaiting the arrival of memories that rolled in with each train, Tommy seemed at peace, sitting by the side of his elevators.

  Tommy and my father knew each other, although Tommy never once talked about my father to me. I do not know if Tommy ever carried my father in his car, but Black men like Tommy surely did ferry my father between floors. As a younger man in the late 1940s, dressed in a dark blue double-breasted uniform with gleaming brass buttons, white gloves, and a cap with a black patent leather brim, Tommy Barnes, the elevator operator, would surely have reminded my father of his father dressed in his Pullman porter’s uniform.

  And I can hear Tommy say matter-of-factly, before sliding the doors closed on my father that first day of work, “Sir, do you know where you are going?”

  “To work at IBM.”

  “Hot damn!” Tommy would have whispered, loud enough for my father to hear. “One-one. I’m playin’ the numbers today, yes . . . I . . . am. . . . First Negro on his first day at work for IBM. Now that’s a sign. A sure sign.”

  My father crossed the threshold of his IBM office to the din of voices, the ringing of telephones, and the clacking of typewriter keys. But the voices suddenly hushed. The typewriters fell silent. THINK signs stood quiet sentry on top of desks. Only the telephones continued to ring. My father slipped off his hat and held it nervously to his side, unsure of where to go, who to see, or what to say. He just stood there inside the doors for a moment, and he stood out—to the men clustered in the middle of the large open space, and to the women gathered to one side in the secretarial pool.

  When a secretary rose to offer my father assistance, another layer of racial codes quickly set in. It did not matter that she was young and attractive or that she smiled at him. She was White, my father was Black, and the entire office stared at them. He dared not smile back. Instead he nodded and simply thanked her for pointing him to a manager’s office.

  My father’s first walk across that IBM office floor to his manager’s office must have felt like Robinson’s first walk from the Dodgers’ dugout to take a stance at home plate. The air my father passed through was thick with the same taunts and jeers and racial epithets that Robinson heard, but muttered in silence behind closed lips.

  My father knocked on his manager’s door, and upon being invited in, he met a tall man in his late forties with chiseled features, wide shoulders, and a graying crew cut. The man hammered down his phone, then pointed to it, barking at my father his displeasure to have just received a call from the Old Man, as employees called Thomas J. Watson, inquiring whether my father had arrived, whether he was situated, and what the manager’s plans were for him. He uttered something about the Old Man breathing down his neck, then made a point of telling my father not to “fucking screw up,” because if he did it would cost not only my father’s job, but his as well. He then dismissed my father and ordered him to go find a suitable desk.

  Outside of his manager’s office, my father stopped at the desk of a young man about his age. He reached out to shake his hand, but the man barely lifted his head, and he did not reach back. He nodded over his shoulder and mumbled something about a desk “back there for you.” My father walked toward the lone empty desk at the back corner of the floor, in an aisle just before the secretarial pool. Once there, he noticed that someone had placed his lacquered THINK sign upside down in its base. He took his seat and stared at the wooden sign before him. He slid it out, righted it, and slid it back into its stand. Then he looked over the IBM office floor before him. With desks arranged in orderly rows, the floor brought to mind a large chessboard. White always moved first, before Black had a chance to counter.

  * * *

  My earliest and fondest memories of my father came from the home we lived in at 760 East 221st Street in the Bronx. John Baptist Ford, my grandfather, had purchased the home not long after he migrated north from South Carolina and began working as a Pullman porter. His wife, my grandma Tena, lived downstairs, even after he died in 1947. I was born in 1951, when our family occupied the entire second floor.

  As a child, I’d anxiously await my father’s arrival home from IBM each day and greet him at the apartment’s front door. When he stepped into our apartment, I’d step atop his shoes, my right foot over his left foot, my left foot over his right foot, and wrap one arm around each leg. With my father at six feet, my head rose just above his knees. He’d walk me around the house for five or ten minutes that way. I learned to explore the world by walking in my father’s footsteps.

  As a child of a similar age, my father had the nickname Buster. But my mother rejected that name for me; instead, she named us Big Bub and Lil Bub, and between the ages of three and five, Lil Bub is what I was called within our family.

  Mythic tales of the father quest abound, spanning all continents and all ages. The Greek goddess Athena visited twenty-year-old Telemachus and said to him, “Young man, go search for your father,” that father being none other than wandering hero Odysseus. Slayer-of-Monsters and Born-of-Water, the Navajo twins, traveled north in quest of their father, the Sun. Horus, the Egyptian falcon-god, set out t
o avenge his father, Osiris. Dionysus, born from his father’s thigh, descended into the underworld on a quest sanctioned by his father, Zeus. Jesus, in the biblical account, was given of a father, then willingly sacrificed himself to return to that father.

  Psychotherapists speak of an unavoidable Oedipus complex, pitting father against son for the love of the same woman—as wife or as mother. I do not know if my mother was the unconscious source of my conflicts with my father, but I do recall the intensity of our skirmishes.

  At the height of his career at IBM, my father escaped New York City with his family for a suburban life north of the city. Our Rockland County home sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, on a large tract of land with a view of the rolling hills along the west side of the Hudson River. We’d spent more than a year looking at homes north and west of New York City. But the acreage of this plot seemed to close the deal for my father. We fled the Bronx for a split-level home, fruit trees, a large lawn, and a garage. We moved to Rockland County in the spring of 1966 and became one of the few Black families in our town.

  At six feet tall and slightly overweight, with a pipe clenched between his crooked teeth and blue smoke curling up from his lips, my father dominated the space in front of our kitchen window. He pulled the pipe from his mouth and pointed it out the window to our large backyard. In his deep baritone voice, he called my mother, Vivian, my younger sister, Claudia, and me over.

  “There. There. There. And There.”

  In the air, he’d marked a rectangle’s corners, sixty feet long and twenty-five feet wide.

  “We’ll put in a pool.”

  My mother smiled. I did not.

  As a child heading to Virginia for family summers, I recalled a pervasive fear that settled over our family as we entered the South; laws forced us to change to a “Coloreds Only” bus and forced me to swim in a “Coloreds Only” pool. My father recalled that fear too. He saw his pool as an antidote for such injustice: as a testament to all the values and freedoms he had fought for in World War II, all the racism and bigotry he’d fought through in his career at IBM, and as a status symbol that would finally allow him to leapfrog ahead of his older brother, Gene.

  We would be the first in our family to have the luxury of an in-ground pool. Being first, however, held risks. That, I knew. As the first all-Black family in our Bronx co-op apartment, I regularly ran a gauntlet of rocks hurled by other kids in the six blocks to the subway station on my way to and from school. I endured the repeated taunts of “Nigger” from Irish and Italian youth who lived in our building and “Schvartze” from the yentas who rode the elevators (as if masking the slur in Yiddish somehow hid their disdain). As a family, we learned not to trust our neighborhood mechanic’s shop, where once, a flat tire resulted in a gas tank filled with sugar and an astronomical repair bill.

  A secluded home along the Hudson’s Palisades promised my father a peaceful paradise to escape the racism we’d known, a confirmation that he’d achieved the American dream, and a tribute to his accomplishments as the first Black systems engineer at IBM. Except, the world beyond the Palisades experienced no peace. Civil rights battles set cities ablaze; a war in Vietnam vaporized human flesh; and in two years, King would step fatefully onto a balcony in Memphis.

  “Build your pool,” I said. “But don’t expect me to ever swim in it. It’s nothing more than a monument to you finally becoming part of the Black bourgeoisie.”

  * * *

  As a child walking around on my father’s shoes, I had unconsciously begun my father quest, which unfolded through my conflicts with him. Then I continued this quest by going to work for IBM myself.

  Several years ago, as I started to write this book, I contacted IBM’s Employee Records Department with a request for my father’s employee records and also my own. IBM had positioned itself as a leader in Open Human Relations, and I assumed this would translate into open access to personnel files, particularly for a former employee, like my father, who’d been hired seventy years ago and retired almost forty years ago.

  Furthermore, Diane Gherson, IBM’s chief of human resources, had recently announced, “Our job in HR is to create that connected, transparent, mobile, personalized, searchable and 24x7 universe through our workplace and our tools. It means investing in new technology and reinventing all our processes through the lens of the employee.”4

  When several weeks passed without a response, I contacted them again. This time, I received an email informing me that I had not included enough information with my previous request and that employee records were provided only to actual former employees or to those with power of attorney granted to them by actual employees. It seemed not to matter that I was a former IBM employee.

  My father passed away in 2000, and as the executor of his estate, I had been granted absolute and enduring power of attorney for any matters related to him and his affairs. I also offered proof of my identity by photocopying my Washington State driver’s license. I re-sent the request for my father’s records with this new information. When I did not hear back from IBM after several weeks, I contacted them again by email and by fax. After three similar requests for these records went unanswered, I realized my efforts would not bear fruit.

  IBM’s silence on the matter now raised its own set of questions. What information lay in those personnel records? What did the company not want me to see? I had heard of other investigators into IBM’s past facing similar corporate roadblocks in seeking information. I just could not imagine anything in my father’s past, or mine, that warranted stonewalling on IBM’s part.

  But then I pieced together the stories my father told me about his early years with the company; I recalled my own experience working at IBM; and I dug deeper into the shadows of IBM’s corporate history to unravel the tale that lay there.

  When I went to work for IBM, I risked following the thread of my father’s path into the very corporate behemoth that nearly swallowed him whole. And where I had thought to find a contented man reaping the benefits of good fortune to build a comfortable life, I found a troubled soul battling both inner and outer demons arrayed against him; where I had thought to find a man quietly accepting of his place, I found a man covertly working to bring about change; where I had thought to find a company awakened to social justice, I found a business blinded by corporate greed; and where I had thought to come only to a deeper understanding of my father, I came also to a deeper understanding of myself.

  2

  A Sacrificial Pawn

  Liebesträume No. 3, the rich tone poem for piano by Franz Liszt, scores many of my earliest memories of my father. He and my mother had an arrangement, whereby she stayed at home with my sister and me, while he earned an MBA in the evenings from New York University, and he watched us on those nights when she worked toward her master’s in education from Hunter College. For dinner, my father almost always made one of his signature dishes, Hungarian goulash, which he spun as his own secret, special recipe but which was, in reality, cans of whatever the pantry offered dumped into a single pot. After dinner, he’d put us to bed and then sit down at the piano, and I would drift off to melodies of Liebesträume.

  As classically trained musicians and vocalists, my parents left little doubt about the role of music in my future. “From any instrument,” my father pronounced, “you should be able to produce a reasonable sound.” It’s an expansive belief that has stuck with me to this day. Lessons began at age four. My father insisted I study the piano with his teacher, Carmen Silva, a stern older woman who lived not far from us in the Williamsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. Stepping down into Miss Silva’s basement felt like a descent into hell, where two monstrous, gleaming wooden guardians—a grand piano and a bass piano—snarled with their pearly white teeth. Miss Silva, mistress of the monsters, insisted I play with my fingers bent at ninety degrees to my palms. She sat on the piano bench next to me holding a ruler with which she rapped my knuckles whenever my fingers lost their required form.

  To make m
atters worse, Carmen Silva delivered each syllable of a word, overannunciated and accompanied by a fine spray of spittle. She also substituted a u for an a in any word ending in -able. So, vegetable sounded like “veg-ge-tubble” and comfortable like “com-for-tubble.” The whole experience of being with her felt alien and did nothing to endear me to the piano. None of this seemed to faze my father, who recalled his own difficult time with Miss Silva as though shared torture might strengthen a bond between us.

  Then came time for Miss Silva’s annual music recital, where each of her students played onstage in front of an audience of adoring family and friends. My father’s excitement grew even as my enthusiasm plummeted. I pleaded not to perform. He insisted. I yelled. He told me not to worry. I cried. He ignored me. He had to perform, and so would I. I may have been only four, but in the face of his intransigence and insistence came my first inkling that he saw himself in me, perhaps more so than he saw me. Pleading and crying would do no good. So I stopped. But I did not stop my planning for Miss Silva’s recital.

  When the day of the recital came, my father had me dress in a dark blue suit and bow tie. He and my mother also dressed up for the occasion. They stepped from our upstairs apartment before me, and I told them I’d forgotten my music in the living room. I calmly walked back into the living room, closed myself into the closet, stuck a skeleton key into the lock from the inside, and turned it, locking the closet and keeping the skeleton key in place so that no one could open the door from the outside without first breaking it down.