Then, one Christmas, a lesser number of presents gave way to an even greater surprise: my father and mother had remarried.
“Why?” I asked.
“For you and your sister,” they said.
“But it was better for me when you weren’t together and fighting.”
“That’ll change this time.”
Twice my parents entered into a relationship with each other that was arranged more by honor, duty, deceit, deception, and guilt than by love. Twice they could not bring themselves to admit that while they loved each other, they were not meant to be with each other. Twice their détente proved short-lived, yet this second time it was long enough for us to move out of New York City to a home in Rockland County and for my father to enter into a new phase of work with IBM and a new relationship with me.
10
Doing Small Things in a Great Way
On August 28, 1963, I scanned the small black-and-white television screen in my grandparents’ living room for glimpses of my parents. A mellifluous baritone boomed, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”1
Eleven years old, I searched through the millions of Black faces lining the grassy mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial while I allowed Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to sear me deeply: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. . . .”
I never saw my parents on television that day, but that did not arrest my pride at knowing they marched for something really big, for something really important; they were marching for me, they said upon leaving me behind with my grandparents.
I knew the horrors of Jim Crow, even as a child. A few summers before the March on Washington, we’d taken a Greyhound bus south to visit my mother’s family in Virginia. At the Mason-Dixon Line in Maryland, we were forced to change to a bus marked “Coloreds Only” that waited behind the Maryland House, now a popular rest stop on I-95.
My father ushered Claudia and me onto the waiting bus, though he said little on the ride from Maryland to Newport News. I’d become so used to my father extolling the promises of a digital future that it stunned me to see him rendered impotent by the shackles of a draconian past. Newport News, a segregated city in the early 1960s, boasted barriers that Black people dared not cross—drinking fountains marked “Coloreds Only”; one swimming pool for Blacks, another for Whites; areas of the city where my family and only Blacks lived. I loved those steamy summer nights, swaying in a swing seat on my aunt’s front porch, even as I feared the hatred swirling around us as thick as the humidity in the air.
After a few days in the city, we left Newport News for my maternal grandparents’ ancestral home in rural Surry County, on the other side of the James River, even farther on the Black side of the racial divide. The White Bell family, who once held our family as slaves, still lived on property adjoining the shingle and clapboard house that my grandmother grew up in. That ramshackle home bordered the Blackwater Swamp, where cypress trees grew alongside mosquitoes, copperheads, and water moccasins. A sultry southern sullenness settled over my father that summer. He said little. Then, one day, a copperhead slithered into the dirt yard where I played. He grabbed a shovel and bludgeoned the snake, beating the serpent over and over, long after it lay dead.
* * *
My father covertly wanted me to know that to understand him, I would also have to understand the burdens he bore being Black in America and being the first Black systems engineer at IBM.
Writing in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois succinctly captured the fundamental psychological burden of being Black in America, which he labeled “double-consciousness”:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.2
Double-consciousness lies at the heart of a basic question asked over and over again by members of racial minorities: Is what is happening to me because of who I am as a person, or who I am as a person of color? The question also lies at the heart of White privilege because, with Whites, it simply never has to be asked, for there is no double-consciousness. What pathology, then, arises when the soul’s dogged strength alone cannot keep these warring ideals apart? What happens when that measuring tape of contempt turns inward as a yardstick by which one gauges oneself? It becomes the “internalized racism” that my father struggled with throughout his life.
My father enjoyed telling the story of taking White IBM colleagues on a walk down 125th Street in Harlem. Twentieth-century Harlem stood as a bastion of Black America, a neighborhood where few Whites dared to venture.
“I told them, ‘Without me walking beside you, you would not make it down this block alive.’” My father always capped this story with a self-assured laugh.
What a tortured self-identity my father possessed. Then again, shifting the theater from an all-White office downtown to an all-Black street uptown represented one of the few ways he could also experience a shift in the balance of power—from feeling disempowered while working at IBM, to feeling empowered while walking in Harlem.
* * *
In the early 1960s, Jim Crow still thrived not only in the South but also within IBM. The company, of course, tells a vastly different story, portraying IBM as an early leader in diversity, in an equal opportunity workforce, and in improved race relations in the United States. IBM’s official story begins with Thomas J. Watson Sr. hiring Thomas J. Laster in 1946 as its first Black salesman. This official version skips Watson’s hiring of my father as the first Black systems engineer less than a year later and moves directly to a seminal company document that has come to be known as “Policy Letter #4,” written by Watson’s son Thomas J. Watson Jr., then the company’s president. His short correspondence to IBM management, issued on September 21, 1953, states:
The purpose of this letter is to restate for all of the supervisory personnel of the IBM Company the policy of this corporation regarding the hiring of personnel with specific reference to race, color, or creed. Under the American system, each of the citizens of this country has an equal right to live and work in America. It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed. If everyone in IBM who hires new employees will observe this rule, the corporation will obtain the type of people it requires, and at the same time we will be affording an equal opportunity to all in accordance with American tradition.3
The company touts plants in Kentucky and North Carolina as the first integrated workplaces south of the Mason-Dixon Line and offers Policy Letter #4 as the gold standard for equal opportunity hiring practices.
Recently, IBM has even gone a step further, claiming that in 1899 it “hired Richard MacGregor, IBM’s first black employee, 10 years before the founding of NAACP and 36 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.”4 This assertion angers me. It’s extremely misleading and borders on disingenuity. There was no IBM in 1899. The Computing Scale Company (CSC) hired MacGregor, twelve years before it was purchased along with three other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Twenty-five years after MacGregor was hired, Watson acceded to the helm of CTR, and only then did he change the company’s name to IBM. IBM came into being in 1924, and Watson was never involved directly with CSC or its hiring practices. Nothing on the IBM website from which this assertion about MacGregor was taken describes how he was actually hired by CSC.
Here, IBM is more than willing to lay claim to the actions of a relatively insignificant predecessor company when it serves the purpose
of establishing IBM as a leader in diversity and inclusion. But the company has been unwilling and unable to publicly take responsibility for the actions of Herman Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company—one of the major companies purchased along with CSC to ultimately form IBM. Hollerith’s business, as I discuss in the next chapter, paved the way for IBM to use its punch card technology in outright support of some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century.
Thomas J. Watson died in 1956. My father, who throughout his life considered Watson to be a personal champion, did not get the opportunity to say goodbye.
Then came time for my father’s big promotion.
By the late 1950s, my father had worked as a systems engineer for more than a decade. His promotion to systems engineering manager seemed a logical next step. My father’s promotions often coincided with his performance reviews and pay raises. Anticipation loomed large in our house. First, my mother would take a late afternoon call from my father, alerting her of the good news. Not known for her cooking, she would still set about preparing a big meal. My father would arrive home around six to a hero’s welcome, with flowers in hand for her. They’d meet at the front door and kiss. Then we’d all move to the kitchen, to gather for the good news of his promotion and pay raise.
Only this time, when my mother put down the telephone, she did not head for the kitchen. Later, when I peeked out the window, I saw my father walking down the hill toward our house with nothing but his briefcase in hand. He stepped quickly through the front door, mumbled “Good evening” to Claudia and me, pulled my mother into their bedroom, and shut the door. Muffled, angry voices seeped under the door and vibrated the wall between their bedroom and the kitchen. Afterward, my mother served a somber meal.
Midway through his meal, my father turned to Claudia and me. “I got a pay raise,” he said. “But not a promotion.”
“Is that good?” I asked.
He wobbled his hand. “Yes and no. Good because we have more money. Not so good because I didn’t become a manager. I did get a new job.”
“You still work for IBM?”
He and my mother laughed hard at my question. “I hope so.”
“What’s your new job?”
“Training the man who will become my manager.”
To my father, the death of his hero stripped away his protection from the crueler impulses of the men who worked under Watson: men who, despite Policy Letter #4, were not ready for a Black man to become an IBM manager. Then chinks began to appear even in his hero’s armor.
Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM5 sat on my father’s bookshelf alongside his other prized books. In this account of the company and its founder, author William Rodgers describes how National Cash Register (NCR, or the Cash) plucked Thomas J. Watson off a horse-drawn wooden wagon and launched his career as a ruthless salesman who employed strong-arm tactics to strip business away from competitors, to the delight of NCR founder John Henry Patterson. “We do not buy out, we knock out,” said Patterson,6 and Watson soon became head of Patterson’s squad of top secret “knock-out men.”7
Watson began work with the Cash from the company’s office in Rochester, New York. In 1903, Patterson sent the relatively unknown Watson to New York City with a budget of $1 million and a charge of setting up a fictitious business, Watson’s Cash Register and Second-Hand Exchange. Watson’s new company had only one mission: to decimate the competition from cash register companies across the country. So secretive was Watson’s mission that other NCR dealers in the area were not informed.
Watson learned the secondhand cash register business, set up his company near others, dramatically undersold competitors, intimidated their customers, and did everything he could to disrupt their business. One by one the competitors fell, either going out of business or selling out to Watson under ironclad, noncompete clauses. Watson had no need to make a profit; he only needed to knock NCR’s competitors out of business. It took several years, but he succeeded. Then he took his fictitious company and moved on, with Patterson’s blessings, to do the same in Chicago.8
In Chicago, Amos Thomas and his cash register company represented one of Watson’s biggest prey. Watson set up a second fake company near Thomas, whom he would badger three or four times a day to sell. By now the Cash didn’t care whether Thomas knew Watson’s real intentions, so NCR invited Thomas to an executive dinner at company headquarters in Dayton, Ohio, where they first feted him and them threatened him: if he didn’t sell, NCR would continue to open new stores close to his, underselling cash registers until Thomas no longer had any business. Watson and the Cash brought Thomas to his knees, and even as Thomas agreed to sell, Watson squeezed him further to obtain the best price.9
Patterson hired an extensive sales force, incentivized them well but demanded their loyalty, required strict adherence to a dress code of dark suits, paid them on commission, and instituted a 100 Percent Club for those who achieved their tough quotas—all policies that Watson would establish at IBM.
NCR’s monopoly through predation did not go unnoticed or unchallenged. In early 1913, after a Department of Justice antitrust investigation, an Ohio jury convicted Patterson and twenty-seven other NCR executives, including Watson, and the judge sentenced them to jail. Watson remained defiant and unbowed, even as other defendants pleaded for leniency.10
Then massive floods hit Ohio in 1913. Watson and NCR pounced. Watson spearheaded a massive relief effort to help ninety thousand victims. NCR produced rowboats instead of registers. Water, food, and sleeping cots were given away. From his offices in New York, Watson organized a train to carry medical and relief supplies to Ohio. When that train hit a broken stretch of track, Watson simply hired local men to carry the supplies on their backs. Watson helped transform a disaster into a humanitarian success and a public-relations windfall. Evangeline Cory Booth, leader of the Salvation Army, anointed Patterson an “instrument of the Lord.”11 The efforts of Patterson and Watson were lauded in the press and by the public. Letters appealing for clemency reached the desk of President Woodrow Wilson, and in 1915 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision. Watson never served a day in jail.12
So, if Watson was capable of benefiting from the suffering of those hit by disaster, what was he capable of regarding my father?
* * *
My father hid stress well. But by the early 1960s, the stress of being the first Black systems engineer at IBM had taken its toll. He now smoked cigarettes, he stopped exercising, he played the piano less, he gained weight, and most of all, a tremor in his right hand became more pronounced. He told many that his tremor resulted from a combat injury, which may have garnered him sympathy but simply was not true: he never saw direct combat in the war.
His superior intelligence first placed him at a desk in England with the 339th Fighter Group of the US Army as a quartermaster in support of pilots flying bombing runs over Germany. Then he received a transfer to Officer Candidate School (OCS) at Fort Benning, Georgia, where a racist drill sergeant nearly caused him to wash out. After OCS, he was assigned to the famed 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hellfighters. He stopped in Seattle on his way to the Pacific Theater in 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war.
My father’s war record remained a sore point between him and his brother, Gene, who fought with the 369th as an infantryman in France. I’ll always remember the German helmet that sat beside other war memorabilia in my uncle’s cabinet. As I stared at the gaping bullet hole in it, my uncle would say, “It was either him or me.”
My father’s tremor interfered with his writing or signing his name. Under duress, his tremor increased to the point that he’d sometimes steady his right hand by grasping it with his left just to sign a check. Even then, his writing remained shaky. I often exploited this weakness. Whenever a teacher in grade school or junior high school required a parent’s signature on a truant slip, a behavioral demerit, or some other doc
ument I did not want my parents to see, I’d place a pen in my left hand and sign my father’s name. The shakiness of my writing mimicked his signature, and compared very well to anything a teacher already had on file.
Many medical tests showed no underlying neurological condition, such as Parkinson’s, as the basis of my father’s tremor. He alternated blaming his fate on the color of his skin and the existence of this tremor: He did not get a promotion to manager because of his tremor. He did not get an excellent performance review because of his tremor. His colleagues secretly made fun of him because of his tremor. I never heard him connect the two; never once heard him admit that the stress of being Black in a company where many despised him gave rise to levels of stress that exacerbated his tremor.
Yet I believe the origins of my father’s tremor lie even deeper than the stress he endured while working at IBM. I’m convinced my father was born left-handed and forced to be right-handed. It fits with what I know about his tremor, his parents, and the latest scientific research on handedness.
Hold a cup or pencil in your outstretched arm. Wait a moment and watch the cup or pencil. It will begin to shake. Most of us have this subtle shaking, called a physiological tremor. Under stress, this normal physiological tremor can be amplified to become an abnormal essential tremor, which is very similar to stuttering but in the muscles of our limbs rather than our vocal cords. Both physiological and essential tremors are controlled by our nervous system and usually do not interfere with activities of daily life. My father’s essential tremor, dramatically more pronounced than most, increased under stress but decreased when he engaged in activities he enjoyed. While writing software programs, his hand shook, but while playing the piano or the violin it did not. While signing a check, his hand shook, but while moving a chess piece it did not. While talking about the challenges he faced at work, his hand shook, but while driving it did not. During his time at IBM, he took medication and underwent hypnosis in a quest to banish this tremor. These treatments helped to some degree, though his tremor remained.
Think Black Page 13