So, in FORTRAN, that strange line of code might read ANSWER = ANSWER + 10, and in COBOL it might read ADD 10 TO ANSWER. In both cases, these statements are manifestly easier to understand than the original statement. FORTRAN had a very crisp, human-readable syntax. COBOL had a long, meandering set of divisions to describe each aspect of a program, such as an Identification Division, a Data Division, an Input Division, an Output Division, a Procedure Division, and a Printing Division.
For obvious reasons, many considered COBOL, the brainchild of famed computer scientist Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, to be too verbose. Defenders of COBOL claimed that its wordiness made it self-documenting. Regardless, by 1970, COBOL had become the most widely used computer language in the world.
My father maintained the Data Division of the first IBM COBOL compiler. He had the responsibility of identifying and correcting errors, or bugs, found in the way the IBM COBOL compiler managed the memory of an IBM 705. Especially in early computers, a complex program like a compiler, which takes English-like instructions and translates them into assembly language statements for execution by physical circuitry, could contain many errors despite the best efforts of diligent programmers to create error-free code. Often, those errors were encountered only when the COBOL compiler was running in a customer’s real-life production environment.
An error could surface in many ways. For example, a card reader might stop suddenly in the midst of reading a COBOL program from a stack of punch cards; once a program card deck was read, lights on the IBM 705 operations console might flash with an error code and halt the program. Or a program might produce garbled results. If it involved the Data Division of the early IBM COBOL compiler, such an error frequently landed on my father’s desk. He’d return home with a thick stack of pages called a “core dump,” staying up late in search of “bugs.”
Bug and core dump are buzzwords from the dawn of computing that are still used today. Grace Hopper is credited with elevating the term bug to prominence in the late 1940s, when she reported finding a moth lodged between the contact points of relays, preventing them from closing. But frustrated engineers in pursuit of glitches and gremlins in their creations had used the word many decades before her. “‘Bugs’—as such little faults and difficulties are called,” said Thomas Edison, “show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached.”2 Origin aside, by the late 1940s, the term bug stuck in reference to any computing error, hardware or software.
Core dump, on the other hand, originally referred to printing out the status of computer memory at a time when that memory was composed of the small ferrite cores described earlier. Today, and even in my father’s time, a core dump is any printout of a computer’s memory.
Core dumps, by their very nature, are messy. My father was handed as many as several hundred folded, printed pages containing line after line of numbers and letters, and then instructed to “find the bug” within that massive hexadecimal sea.
Locating a bug in a core dump is a little like following clues in a hexadecimal treasure hunt. One hexadecimal memory address often contains a pointer to another address that contains a pointer to yet another address, and so forth. In this way, the state of the computer at the time of the error can be traced and the bug, hopefully, found.
Pipe in hand, blue smoke curling up, THINK sign above his core dump, my father would hunker down at his large wooden desk in our apartment in Williamsbridge. When we moved from the ’Bridge to Pelham Bay, and there was no space for his desk, he’d unfold a card table and hunker down over a core dump in the living room of our thirteenth-floor apartment, THINK sign close by. When we moved from the city to Rockland County, he’d hunker down over that same spindly legged card table in the basement entertainment room of his dream home, the THINK sign not far away.
Regardless of where he hunkered down, I recall a man consumed by the search for elusive bugs; a man unavailable for family vacations, outings, or playtime, precisely because he was hunkered down; a man burdened by his determined quest for the errors created by others; a man in relentless pursuit of perfection. My presence as a young child walking into his office, or standing beside his card table, seemed to cause painful questioning of these trade-offs and choices. More than once, he lifted his head from a core dump to answer a question I never asked.
“A Black man has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good as Whitey.”
I grew to deeply resent this notion, even as I learned to accept its truth.
Then I went to work for IBM and had my own core dumps to plow through. I’d been assigned to IBM’s New York Financial Office; my team’s only customer was the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Once a week, I’d report to my IBM home office at 1 Wall Street. The other days, I’d simply commute directly from my apartment in the Bronx to the Fed. At twenty-one, after a year and a half of IBM education and training, I had my own office in the bowels of the fortresslike Federal Reserve Building, which occupies the entire block between Liberty, William, and Nassau Streets and Maiden Lane, in the Financial District of Manhattan.
COBOL programmers lined up at my office, their outstretched arms laden with heavy core dumps. Like anxious supplicants bearing gifts for some worshipped idol, embarrassed parishioners slipping into confessionals, or wounded children with skinned knees running to their mother, one by one they dropped stacks of pages on my desk with the universally uttered demand, “Fix it!” The Fed, after all, paid several millions of dollars a month to lease our computers and expected attentive IBM service in return, even from the kid with the big Afro.
Bruce, an IBM colleague, also had an office at the Fed. I considered Bruce a wizard of the dumps. Pencil in hand, programmer hovering over him, Bruce would tear through a core dump, circling a hexadecimal number, drawing an arrow to where in the dump that number pointed, examining the data at that next address, and using that data to point to yet another address—over and over until he got to a place where what he expected at a location in the dump did not match what he found.
“Here’s your problem,” he’d announce. He’d tap the address, then double-circle the error, sending the happy programmer back to his cubicle with a thoroughly marked-up dump.
I wanted to learn from Bruce, who freely offered me his insights into navigating this hexadecimal swamp. But the more I circled addresses and penciled in arrows, the more frustrated I grew. I did not want to end up like my father, whom I’d seen spent by the process. So I developed my own technique for reading core dumps, one based on the Socratic method, which meant I never even peered at the pages programmers plopped on my desk.
I looked beyond the core dump, directly at the programmer, and asked, “What was your program trying to accomplish?”
I’d nod while listening to the programmer’s answer, even if I did not fully understand what the program was meant to do.
“How did you go about doing that?”
A short moment of silence preceded the programmer’s next answer. Like a sympathetic psychotherapist, I kept nodding my understanding and approval.
“And why did you choose that method of accomplishing the task?”
The silence grew longer, and I continued to nod.
“I’m wondering if there was a better way of going about this?”
It rarely took more than four questions before the programmer would snap his fingers, point at me, and say, “That’s it! That’s what I did wrong!”
Though I frequently never knew what had actually gone wrong, I’d say, “Wow, we found the bug.”
“Thank you, so much,” the programmer would say.
By this time, he had already grabbed the core dump from my desk. Like a priest, I’d reach out to touch the dump, bless his discovery, and send him back to his cubicle, smiling, with a stack of unmarked pages.
* * *
Binary, octal, hexadecimal mathematics, core dumps, computer programs. For the untrained eye of the uninitiated,
examining computer software is much like a nonmusician viewing the score of an orchestral arrangement. Lines, marks, symbols, squiggles everywhere. But what do they mean on their own? More important, what do they mean taken together?
Music, anyway, is not a bad analogue for computer software. Music is a written code that, when executed correctly, causes a physical device to perform in an expected way. It’s one reason my father loved both, as did many early systems engineers. It’s also one reason my father insisted that I learn not one or two instruments but many.
Before I landed in Carmen Silva’s fifth- and sixth-grade class, my father pushed me to study the accordion, even though I could barely lift a full-size instrument or see around it to the music on my stand. My father was a classically trained violinist, and for a few brief moments I tried learning the violin under his tutelage, until we both agreed that such an arrangement would never work. He bought us both recorders, an alto and a soprano, and we practiced duets together.
When my sister made her way into Carmen Silva’s music class, my father’s dream of a family quartet could finally be realized. We would get together for family music time with my mother on the piano, my father playing the violin, my sister on the flute, and me playing clarinet. A special bond exists between members of an ensemble, and those times playing music stand out as some of the closest I felt to my family.
Then I discovered the guitar.
It happened one summer at camp, about the time I first held hands with a girl named Betsy Schwartz. I loved everything about the guitar—how its shape reminded me of the female form, how it was cradled while being played, how one’s fingers moved over the strings in a sinewy, sensuous way. I feel in love with the guitar, and for a time with Betsy Schwartz too.
But a guitar in the early 1960s also stood as a powerful symbol of political protest and social change. Odetta, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Leon Bibb, Dave Van Ronk, and all the other marvelous folk singers of the 1960s wielded their guitars almost as weapons accompanying voices that rose to demand a new order, rebuke the existing order, and ask how long the oppressed must wait.
In the early 1960s, when I was twelve or thirteen, New York City flourished as a center of music and social unrest. Community Church, which I attended regularly, fostered it. At one Sunday’s service delivered by the church’s youth, I played my guitar and sang Dylan’s epic song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
My father, however, would have none of it, and it caught him in a bind. He loved music and expressed some satisfaction that I’d finally found an instrument that spoke to me. Yet he detested what the protest music I loved stood for—a strong stance against the war in Vietnam and a soundtrack for urgent and direct action on civil rights for Blacks in America. He dismissed me, and anyone who played this music or participated in the protests and actions it inspired, as just a “bunch of commies.”
As my relationship with my father began to fray, other significant male figures came into my life. Sitting in the balcony of Community Church one Sunday morning, I spotted Pete Seeger in a pew down below. As the service ended, I made my way over to Pete, a tall, gaunt man, tugged on his sleeve, and handed him a church program, which he autographed with his signature drawing of a banjo. He leaned over to speak with me. His graciousness in those few brief moments profoundly touched me. Many years later, toward the end of his life, I had a long telephone conversation with Pete, in which I thanked him for that day and for serving as a role model for me.
Immediately after our youth service, a church member, Charles E. Wilson, pulled me aside. “The world hates a smart-ass kid” were his first words. And with that began our years-long relationship. “C.E.,” as he was known, showed me how to channel my youthful exuberance, enthusiasm, and anger to create meaningful social change. Education was one of C.E.’s abiding concerns. He worked tirelessly, fighting the New York City Board of Education, to establish IS 201 (independent school district 201) in Harlem. He served as the district’s first administrator, and I worked as his part-time, unpaid assistant throughout my high school and college years. C.E. introduced me to a world of Black radicalism and intellectualism tethered to pragmatism. He also served as an unseen mentor to other radical Black movements in New York City, like the 1968 uprising at Columbia University.
As I began spending more time with this man, and as my respect and admiration for him grew, my mother asked me, “Would you rather have Charlie as a father?”
Her question came on the verge of her divorcing my father, and I wisely sidestepped the answer.
Around the time I met C.E., I also had my first experience of truly independent social and political thought. Unitarian-Universalist teenagers throughout the country organized weekend regional conferences that featured speakers during the day and dancing to the latest music at night. Paul Krassner, a comedian, social critic, and founder of the Realist magazine, spoke at the first conference I attended. I was thirteen. I recall sitting at the back of a meeting room in a Unitarian church on Long Island as, late in the afternoon, Krassner spoke about America’s involvement in Vietnam.
I huddled with a group of friends afterward, most of them two or three years older.
I stammered with excitement. “I got what he said.”
“So?” a kid name Danny replied.
“I mean, I understood his words, all of them, individually and together.”
Danny squinted, then shook his head.
“Least you’re not some kind of idiot.”
No doubt, it helped my receptivity to Krassner’s message that an hour before he spoke, I’d had my first real slow, deep kiss with a girl in the coat closet at the rear of the meeting room. Later that night at the dance, that girl, Susan, grabbed my hand and dragged me off into a corner of the dance hall. We passed Danny on the way there. He nodded his approval as we walked by.
The muffled voices of the Drifters crooned “Under the Boardwalk,” as I rambled to Susan, in a stream of consciousness, about understanding every word and idea that Krassner spoke; about years of my father drilling me on chess and binary math, salted with the message that I should think for myself; about years of watching him work twice as hard as others in the relentless pursuit of perfection.
She smiled as though she understood and then pulled me in for more kisses. In this coming-of-age moment, I not only had the experience of my first kiss, but I also had the first experience of myself as an independent being who could think on his own. I could not turn back from this awakened sense of self, even as it set me further on a collision course with my father.
9
The Arrangement
My father faced many challenges as IBM’s first Black systems engineer, while simultaneously navigating sweeping storms in his personal life. Yet my father’s challenges outside of the company were often self-inflicted, his employment at IBM generating much of the personal turbulence he weathered. But IBM also served as an anchor for my father in times of great personal upheaval, especially in his marriage to my mother. My parents entered an arranged marriage, and like many throughout the millennia who have known such arrangements, they each loved someone else prior to being wed. My mother’s first love was a boy named Reginald. My father loved the actress Ruby Dee.
Marriage based on the freedom of individuals to love whomever they choose is a relatively new idea. It emerged in Western culture in the fourteenth century, and it is still nonexistent in many other parts of the world where arranged marriages are de rigueur. Arranged marriages have long served as a pathway to achieve greater political or economic power and a means of advancing social mobility.
For Black Americans in postwar America, arranged marriages were also a vehicle for overcoming the opportunities denied the partners because of their race. The calculation, if not romantic, was certainly straightforward: the reduced opportunities afforded one member of the couple, in a given field, were compensated for by the opportunities available to the other member of the couple, in a differen
t arena.
Where my father’s career was thwarted because of the racism he faced at IBM, my mother’s career as one of the first Black principals with the New York City Board of Education helped to make up for a portion of my father’s reduced wages. Similar considerations, still common among upwardly striving socioeconomic groups, contributed to the rapid rise of a postwar Black middle class.
As in more traditional arranged marriages, the families of the bride and groom had some say in the matter. My grandparents on both sides, only a few generations removed from slavery themselves, approved of my parents’ marriage precisely because they recognized that my parents might be able to advance beyond them economically and socially. And they disapproved of anyone who might not afford such advancement.
What’s love got to do with it?
In his upper desk drawer at our Rockland County home, beneath the picture with his IBM colleagues at the New York City Playboy Club, my father kept a photograph of a young Ruby Dee. It was signed, “To Stan. With Love, Ruby.” Growing up, I dismissed the wistfulness that accompanied his mention of her name as the infatuation of a young man for a beautiful young starlet. Then I read Ruby’s autobiography and later spent many hours with her over several years, only to have her confirm everything my father said about their relationship and hint at much that he left out.
After her family moved to New York City from Cleveland, the legendary stage, film, and screen actress Ruby Dee (née Ruby Ann Wallace) grew up in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx along with my father and my mother. She spoke of my father throughout her autobiography, which was written with her husband, the equally legendary Black actor Ossie Davis.
My father, she said, introduced her to a world “outside the all-girl cocoon”1 and also to her acting career, which began at the American Negro Theatre:
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