Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  Now came my father’s turn to plead and to yell. He insisted I open the closet, which I steadfastly refused to do. He banged on the door. I did not budge. He threatened me with all manner of corporal punishment. It did not matter. I had quite a simple plan: stay locked in the closet until the recital was over. After that, I’d take any punishment he meted out.

  This standoff between my father and me lasted for some time until finally my mother intervened. If I’d taken to locking myself in a closet, she reasoned with my father, maybe I really didn’t want to perform, and maybe they shouldn’t force me. So he bargained.

  “If you come out of the closet, you won’t have to perform at Miss Silva’s recital.”

  I hung tough. “No more music lessons with her.”

  Silence descended on the other side of the closet door. Finally, my father relented. “Okay, no more lessons. Now come out.”

  But I had a plan, and by God I was sticking to it. An hour later, when my mother said, “It’s too late to go to the recital anyway,” I unlocked and opened the closet door. She hugged me. My father angrily stormed off. In truth, he’d only backed away in strategic retreat.

  Not long after Miss Silva’s recital came another of my father’s pronouncements, one he repeated often. “A man needs only three things for happiness: a good pipe, a good game of chess, and a good woman.” He enjoyed parenting through such pithy sayings, cribbed from others and then refashioned in his own words. A serious gaze, without a hint of self-deprecation, accompanied this pronouncement. Although originating in a comedy sketch by George Burns, when reformed and restated by my father, it became a philosophy of life.

  The sweet aroma of his cherry-blend pipe tobacco would waft through the air as he’d unfold a spindly legged card table, open a chessboard, and begin stamping down pieces on the board. I’d move. He’d pull his pipe from between his teeth. I’d hear his rolling baritone voice.

  “Sure you want to move there?”

  By then, it was already too late. He’d glimpsed many moves ahead to certain checkmate.

  My father lived for, lived by, and lived through chess. Never just a game, chess served as a way to apprehend and manipulate his world. He saw average people as pawns with limited moves at their disposal, and he believed intelligent people to be rooks, knights, bishops, queens, or kings in possession of more sophisticated means.

  “If you’re going to succeed you have to think three or four moves ahead. Where will I move? What will the other person do if I move there? Back and forth like that,” he said. “Life’s a chessboard, and you have to think like a chess player if you’re going to win.”

  Chess and IBM have long been connected. Secret IBM efforts were often code-named Project Chess. IBM poured millions of dollars into developing Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer that defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997. And IBM employees, like my father, relished the game. IBM also realized that the public could better comprehend computers if they were associated with a well-known game like chess. If a computer could succeed in tackling the complex problem of two people playing chess, it could certainly take on any other problem humans faced.

  My father was a member of the IBM championship chess teams of 1957 and 1959. Even before IBM, he played correspondence chess, from the 1940s through the 1960s, with moves sent back and forth on postcards. A special code recorded the game: For example, “e4 e5 Nf3 Nc6” meant that White had opened with its King pawn played to column e, row 4. Black responded by moving its King pawn to column e, row 5. White then moved a Knight to column f, row 3, and Black played a Knight to column c, row 6.

  Through numbered rows and lettered columns, through single-letter abbreviations for chess pieces (lowercase for pawns, uppercase for other pieces), this code condensed a world of limitless possibilities. If you understood the code, you saw beauty, imagination, creativity, and daring. If you understood the code, you peered into the mind of your opponent. If you understood the code, you communicated your own deep thinking with regard only to the color of your pieces, not the color of your skin. If you understood the code, you lived in a world inhabited by others who also understood the code. My father understood this code, and before he even began working with computers, he understood the power of any code to create, shape, and transform the world.

  Manipulation. Deception. Feigns. Gambits. My father studied winning chess moves and found great comfort in understanding himself in the rigid Black and White terms of chess—a respite, I’m certain, from the fluid color terms of race and racism that he also knew.

  “If you’re White, you’re all right. If you’re Yellow, you’re mellow. If you’re Brown, stick around. If you’re Black, get back!” goes a ditty handed down from slave master to slave, now enshrined in the beliefs of many Americans, Black and White.

  Standing on the banks of the James River in Virginia in 1712, Willie Lynch, a plantation owner from the West Indies, offered a group of fellow slave owners his advice.

  “Gentlemen,” Lynch began, “in my bag here, I have a foolproof method for controlling your black slaves.”

  Lynch went on to discuss treating slaves as chattel and breaking them as one would a horse. But he returned often to a favorite theme: sowing divisions.

  Don’t forget you must pitch the old black male vs. the young black male, and the young black male against the old black male. You must use the dark skin slaves vs. the light skin slaves, and the light skin slaves vs. the dark skin slaves. You must use the female vs. the male. And the male vs. the female. You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks. . . . Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them, never miss an opportunity. If used intensely for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful of each other.1

  My father described himself as the “black sheep” of his family, which he meant quite literally. In the 1800s, my great-grandfather Thomas McLeod of South Carolina, who had Scottish ancestry and was perhaps a slaveholder or the child of a union between a slaveholder and a slave, fathered children with my great-grandmother Abbie Davis. From that union came several generations of my father’s family, some fair enough to “pass” for White. My father believed that his darker skin placed him at a disadvantage. It also made him perpetually distrustful of others.

  Skin color conveyed intelligence for him. Lighter skin meant greater intellect, darker skin the opposite. My father read widely of such racist views in books and articles by authors such as Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray, and he did nothing to counter what he read.

  Jensen sat on the board of the German neo-Nazi journal Neue Anthropologie (New Anthropology) published by the Society for Biological Anthropology, Eugenics, and the Study of Behavior. His work, which set the tenor for many articles published in the journal, is often quoted by White nationalists today. Jensen worked actively and closely with American scientists and business leaders to oppose and reverse efforts to effect school integration and affirmative action. His statements are chilling:

  There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions, somewhat like the distribution of blood types. The number of intelligence genes seems to be lower, over-all, in the black population than in the white. As to the effect of racial mixing, nobody has yet performed experiments that reveal its relative effect on I.Q. If the racial mixture weren’t there, it is possible that the I.Q. differences between blacks and whites would be even greater. I think such studies should be done to lay this uncertainty to rest once and for all.2

  It has been shown that The Bell Curve, coauthored by Charles Murray, relied on “tainted” sources linked to eugenicists, White supremacists, and Nazi sympathizers.3 Yet Murray still stands by his equally chilling racist and misogynistic findings, though couched in a scholar’s lofty language:

  The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or al
l of the century (the pessimists). Women of all races and ethnic groups follow this pattern in similar fashion. There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.4

  Even with the theories of these authors debunked, and their reasoning shown to be corrupt, my father argued in their favor, despite all the contrary evidence of his own substantial intellect and his many fine accomplishments. His vociferous support of this self-inflicted racial wound was a constant source of friction between us.

  When I was in high school, a typical afternoon would find me parked in New York City’s Schomburg Library, devouring books on Black history. I savored the accounts of men and women whose greatness had not found its way into the texts forced on me at school. Then I’d come home to a man lamenting being born with dark skin.

  My father even ranked my sister’s children—his own grandchildren—by the color of their skin, whispering to each a selective message of their inferior or superior intellect. Such internalized racism, as Willie Lynch understood in 1712, is not difficult to instill in long-oppressed people.

  Although personal genetic testing was not readily available during my father’s lifetime, I wanted to better understand our ancestry, in part because of his wide embrace of these racist ideas. So a few years ago, I spit into a small test tube, which I sent off for DNA testing. When my results arrived, they seemed wrong!

  A map showed four principal genetic “hot spots,” when I’d long assumed there would be five, if not six. One large hot spot, and the only one in Africa, showed ancestry from the Angola/Congo region, which came as no surprise. I had long suspected African origins in Angola, in part because, before Alex Haley’s Roots, I’d traced my mother’s side of the family back to a slave named Scipio in the Tidewater region of Virginia along the banks of the James River, where my DNA test also revealed a hot spot. In 1974, after several summers searching through the Virginia State Archives and the Surry County courthouse, I actually found the deed of manumission that freed Scipio from his slave master, Thomas Bell. Scipio Brown, born in 1762, married a woman named Amy Johnson, apparently born free.

  The Johnson name among free Blacks in this area is very old and hints of a lineage dating back to the first “20 and odd Negroes” who arrived in the Virginia colony aboard the English ship the White Lion in late August 1619. English sailors had captured those Africans from the Portuguese slave ship the São João Bautista, whose captain, Manuel Mendes da Cunha, had boarded them in Luanda, the present-day capital of Angola. These first Africans were sold by the English for food and bought by colonists who later turned around and resold them in Jamestown—not into slavery, as most suggest, but into indentured servitude. Many eventually worked off their indentures, took anglicized names, and married. Among them in 1628 were Anthony and Amy Johnson, whom I suspect were relatives of Amy Johnson, who married Scipio Brown.

  One explanation for the lack of a second genetic hot spot in Africa is that my father’s ancestry is also traceable back to precolonial Angola/Congo, which would not be surprising, since the Angola/Congo region gave up many sons and daughters to the horrendous trade in human beings.

  My European ancestry really shocked me. I knew that I had European roots on both sides of my family, but instead of two European hot spots—one for each parent’s lineage—I found only one major hot spot in Europe.

  Even now, my hair and beard, both with more gray than black, show streaks of red, especially after time under the summer sun. I call these red hairs my “Nancy’s hairs,” after Nancy Campbell, my Scottish grandmother, several times removed on my mother’s side. In the middle of the nineteenth century, she, along with other White women, fled to the South to escape the prejudice and bigotry toward Scottish and Irish immigrants in northern cities like New York. There they married Black men freed from bondage or those still in chains, whose freedom they then secured.

  I found another hot spot in South Carolina, where I knew my father’s side of the family originated, but it seemed odd that there wasn’t at least one more major European hot spot on my father’s branch of the family tree, since he had so many light-skinned relatives. With all the major hot spots of my genetic makeup accounted for, where did this obvious Caucasian ancestry enter my father’s side of the family?

  As I pondered this conundrum, I was contacted by a woman who’d been notified by the DNA testing company of the high probability that we were related. When Edna Messick and I compared notes, the family name McLeod kept coming up. My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was McLeod. I had often heard my father identify himself as a McLeod. On my father’s side, the McLeod branch of my family tree had roots in the same region of Scotland as the Campbell branch, on my mother’s side.

  My test results showed only one major European hot spot because my family on both my mother’s and my father’s side had roots in the same Scottish Highlands. Clan McLeod (originally MacLeod), my father’s side, with its tartan of black lines running over yellow and red squares, squabbled with Clan Campbell, my mother’s side, with its tartan of black lines over blue and green squares. Eventually, both clans intermarried and joined forces against Clan MacDonald over several centuries of Scottish clan wars beginning in the 1300s. Friends and enemies, allies and adversaries—that is how one might describe both my parents and their respective clans.

  3

  The Bones of the Machine

  As far as machines go, it looked unremarkable. But, then, so did that Ethiopian gully where Donald Johanson made his remarkable archeological find. A card reader, a converted typewriter, a door at the far right end, all housed in a plain gray frame. A humerus, some vertebrae, the back of a skull, all lying on a slope above the gully. One by one, Johanson and his graduate student, Tom Gray, picked up the bone fragments, piecing them into a skeleton named Lucy, which told an astounding story of the dawn of the human race.1 One by one, smartphones, laptops, notebooks, the internet, social media, crowdsourcing, Apple, Microsoft, Google—fragments of our digital era—can all trace their stories back to that unremarkable machine at the dawn of the Digital Age.

  While many specialized computers had been built before, no programmable computer had been mass-produced or was commercially available until IBM introduced the model 407. In fact, there’s still some debate over whether to call the IBM 407 the first true computer or the last programmable accounting machine. Just as Lucy had characteristics of both modern-day humans and apes, the IBM 407 had characteristics of both modern-day computers and older accounting machines. Still, it’s a safe bet to trace the origins of modern humans at least as far back as Lucy. And it’s a safe bet to trace the origins of modern digital technology at least as far back as the IBM 407. IBM announced the model 407 in 1949, not long after my father began his career. The company trained him to operate and program the machine. So it’s safe to say that my father was present at the dawn of the Digital Age.

  You can swipe or type to enter data into your smartphone or laptop. But the only way to enter data into an IBM 407 was through punch cards, read at 150 cards per minute by a card reader built into the machine. The smartphone you’re carrying contains at least 8 gigabytes of memory. The IBM 407 had none. Still the idea of memory could be found within the model 407: punch new cards to store the data required, and then load that new deck back into the machine.

  Today, we take for granted being able to view the results of a spreadsheet computation on a monitor or video display. With a model 407, you had to wait for a clackety line printer to slowly spit out results, line by line. But that line printer—essentially a typewriter connected to a computer—was, in itself, a revolutionary advance in information processing. Until the advent of the 407, the best typists could produce one hundred words a minute. Along came a machine that could compute, and produce results, much faster than any human could type. Line printers, capable of printing customized text at one hundred lines a min
ute, rather than one hundred words a minute, bridged this gap between the information a machine could produce and the information a human could understand. Printers were the window into the mind of the machine. The 407 produced output that a line printer could print and humans could read. In that humble beginning lies the foundation of much of our modern-day human-machine interaction.

  Vestiges of the 407’s line printer are still with us today. Modern-day operating systems, such as Windows, possess an LPR command (short for Line PrinteR) that sends output to a printer, and modern-day software developers describe their output in terms of “lines of code,” hearkening back to a time when line printers produced a single line of print for each written line of code.

  At more than several tons, including supporting equipment, an IBM 407 often occupied its own separate room. By modern measurements, the all-electromechanical IBM 407—with no solid-state devices, no transistors, and not even vacuum tubes—was ancient and primitive. Yet in its day, the model 407 represented state-of-the-art digital technology, and it was the first of many IBM machines my father mastered.

  To an untrained eye, the fully wired control board of an IBM 407 looked like a jumble of wires or a woven basket; systems engineers at the time even called the practice of wiring control boards “basket weaving.” Patching sockets together controlled how one internal circuit communicated with another and therefore governed how the machine added numbers and printed results. Software had not yet been invented. Long before HTML, BASIC, Java, or C#—modern-day software languages used to program computers—my father hard-wired control boards.

  My father brought home an IBM 407 control board in 1957. After dinner, he placed it on our kitchen table and pulled out a bag of patch cords. He set down a list of written connections, which he read to my sister and me, while supervising which hubs we pushed the ends of the patch cords into. At six years old, I was programming a computer. At three years old, Claudia was a bit too young to do much more than play with the colored wires. As usual, a pithy quote accompanied the lesson.