Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  For my grandfather, a devout Baptist who once sought to be a preacher, my father’s left-handedness would have signified the devil. He would have beaten it out of my father as though righteously called to an exorcism.

  Scientific research shows that stress of all sorts amplifies and lengthens periods of essential tremors. Cigarette smoking, caffeine, anxiety, employment problems, financial problems, lack of sleep, changes between day and night, dehydration, and emotional stress (from forced handedness, for instance) are some of the many stressors that can exacerbate such tremors. Under periods of prolonged stress, essential tremors remain even after the stressor is removed, much like post-traumatic stress disorder.13

  My father’s tremors rippled through our family in hidden but often insidious ways. In principle, at the IBM Country Club at Sands Point, Long Island, men golfed with customers while their wives and children frolicked in the surf. Before the advent of modern freeways, Claudia and I would pile into our dark green 1954 Ford sedan with our parents for the winding trip from the Bronx through island towns to get to the club. As the first Black family to set foot on country club grounds,14 we were placed under a microscope of withering scrutiny, forced to be on continuous display, and expected to behave with uncommon and unchildlike perfection. After all, as we heard so often from our parents, our family represented our race.

  My father took this idea of representing his race seriously and passed that burden on to me. Of course, the very notion that one person, or one family, can represent a race is absurd, and certainly an impossible burden to bear, hence another factor contributing to his tremor. But when passed on to a child, this notion of representing one’s race is also a malicious thief of childhood.

  For one of their first outings to the IBM Country Club, my parents left my sister, Claudia, behind with my grandmother, while reluctantly bringing me along. At four, I wore a brand-new dark blue summer suit—shorts, a matching jacket, a white shirt, a bow tie, and a beanie hat. While walking the half block up the hill from our home to the garage where we kept our car, I tripped and fell, skinning my knee and getting dirt on my shorts. Ordinarily, my mother would have applied a Band-Aid, dusted off my shorts, warned me to be more careful, and sent me on my way. But this time, my father looked at me, frowned, and declared me unfit to accompany them. My cut, and that dirt, were my scarlet letter, a mark of imperfection and unfitness that day to represent my race. As I wailed, they returned me to join Claudia.

  Even on a typical country club day, I stayed close to my parents, frozen with the fear of not being perfect enough, while watching the carefree play of other children. Then, toward the end of the day, my parents would allow me to wander off to the swings, only to watch other families hurriedly round up their children, leaving the entire row of swings to me. Alone, at the top of the swing’s arc, I’d let go, slide off the metal seat, and for a few brief moments before my feet hit the grass, I’d shed the onus of perfection, shed the burden of representing my race, and sail through the air, just a child flying free.

  Outings at the IBM Country Club on Long Island afforded such brief interludes of freedom, while the annual IBM Christmas party in New York City did not. Each year, my mother would slither into her girdle and slide into her dress, neither of which suited her body. My father donned his IBM uniform—dark suit, white shirt, tie. I wore my own matching, diminutive corporate outfit, while Claudia looked like a doll in a pink pastel dress, puffed out by a crinoline slip, and black patent leather shoes over white socks. My mother would press down her hair with multiple braids.

  When we walked into an IBM Christmas party holding hands, the quintessential nuclear family of the 1950s, though in permanent “blackface,” all eyes turned toward us. My father and mother were never as adoring or adorable than when in front of an IBM audience. An operatic baritone and a soprano, both accomplished pianists, they’d step to a piano, switching off who played and who sang, to offer unrehearsed programs that often began with Bach chorales but always ended with popular carols, while my sister and I looked on, smiling, from their flanks.

  In support of my father’s job, we impressed IBM as stalwart ambassadors of our race. Though not quite a minstrel show, it seemed clear to me, even then, that the Ford family’s performance never ended, that we must always be onstage. This sense of a never-ending recital for our race no doubt augmented the stress behind my father’s tremors. It may also have been one reason why, when my father placed Claudia on IBM Santa’s lap, she howled in a way the rest of us never could.

  * * *

  While Martin Luther King’s voice only crackled over my grandparents’ television, it certainly resounded throughout the mall.

  “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”15

  His words surely struck unique chords in the lives of all who heard them that hot August day. My grandmother, a devout Christian, hummed a spiritual and filled King’s brief pauses by whispering “Amen.”

  “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. . . .”

  I know King’s words resonated with my father.

  “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check . . .”

  Like many men and women, mostly Black though many White, King’s eloquence advanced the jittery needle of their determination to a point of no return. Many had not ridden buses into the Deep South during the summer of 1961. Many would not register voters in Mississippi during Freedom Summer of 1964. Many would not go to Selma to lock arms on Bloody Sunday in March 1965. Yet these many found ways—huge or humble, overtly or covertly, vocally or silently—to cash King’s check.

  After returning from the march, something inside of my father changed. Our family returned to Virginia that next summer, but this time we drove. On the trip home, we stopped at the Maryland House, where only a few years earlier we’d been forced to change buses heading south. We sat at the lunch counter, reading our menus, when behind the counter, a waitress walked over to inform us, “We don’t serve Colored people here.” She turned to walk away.

  My mother looked across my sister and me to my father. She whispered, “Stanley, now’s the time to take a stand.” She held her hand out in front of us. “Stay where you are,” she said.

  When we did not rise, the waitress returned.

  She snarled. “Thought I told you we don’t serve your kind.”

  My father snapped. “And we’re not leaving until you do.”

  Our waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I looked up. Moments later, a man in a white shirt and tie, presumably a manager, pushed through the kitchen doors, a determined look on his reddened face. The waitress trailed him, smirking. I twisted around on my stool. The entire restaurant had grown silent as the other customers, all White, turned to follow the unfolding set of events.

  “Don’t look at other people,” my mother scolded. “Turn around. Look at your menu.”

  But the manager must have felt the stares as well and perhaps paused to ponder the wisdom of alienating his White patrons, many of whom stopped here when heading north on their way home. By the time he reached us, the manager’s determination had dissolved into an insincere, syrupy, southern smile.

  “Hi, folks. What y’all having?” he asked.

  After we made our selections from the menu, the waitress stormed off. We sat and waited, while behind us the buzz of conversation slowly returned. When the waitress finally appeared with our order, she slapped the plates down on the counter.

  “Don’t know what you people hope to accomplish,” she hissed.

  * * *

  Back in New York City from the March on Washington in 1963, my father became a founding member of a new organization called 100 Black Men. The organization’s name hearkened back to W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the “talented tenth” among Black Am
ericans, where one in ten were destined to be leaders. 100 Black Men boasted among its founders and later members prominent Black professionals, businessmen, civic and political leaders, and educators, such as Jackie Robinson, David Dinkins (the first Black mayor of New York), David Satcher (the first Black man to be US Surgeon General), Eric Holder (the first Black US Attorney General), and Cyril deGrasse Tyson (a social activist and the father of the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson).

  100 Black Men, which has since grown to more than one hundred chapters and more than ten thousand members worldwide, has as its mission “to improve the quality of life within our communities and enhance educational and economic opportunities for all African Americans.” A primary focus of the organization is to provide positive role models and leadership for young people, especially Black youth, as evidenced by the group’s slogan, “What they see is what they’ll be.”

  With King’s words still fresh in his mind, with the goals of 100 Black Men newly in sight, and now with nearly sixteen years at a company where his advancement had been systematically thwarted, my father began to realize he was up against something much larger than he first anticipated. My father set in motion his own plan to bring about change at IBM.

  11

  Covert Ops

  In the bottom drawer of his blond-wood dresser, beneath his boxer shorts and sleeveless undershirts, my father kept a stash of Playboy magazines. It must have been an open family secret. After all, my mother washed, hung, folded, and put away his laundry. Growing up, I found in the magazines, which changed each month, an endless source of excitement and titillation. I’d carefully replace them after spending time with the centerfolds and the women on adjoining pages. But I soon discovered that the large, gray, dog-eared envelope lying next to the Playboys contained much more risqué material.

  Periodically, strange men would appear in our home. My father would insist that my sister and I find something else to do and somewhere else to be. He’d close the bedroom door. I’d hear him slide his bottom dresser drawer open, rummage through its contents, and then close the drawer. Then he would emerge cradling the large dog-eared envelope. He would sit with these men at our kitchen table, the envelope’s contents spread out in front of them, and speak in hushed tones.

  A month or two later, my father would announce with great surprise that so-and-so had just been hired by IBM, one of the few Blacks smart enough to pass the IBM entrance examination. During subsequent visits to my father’s bottom dresser drawer, I inspected the contents of that dog-eared envelope. It contained copies of both the questions and the answers to that storied exam.

  Exactly how this information came into my father’s possession remained a secret throughout his life. For fear of letting on that I’d thumbed through his Playboys, I too kept his secret. Knowing that my father risked his career for the sake of others elevated him in my eyes. Then came time for me to take the IBM entrance exam and to receive my certain inheritance from that dresser drawer. But when I would have most expected his assistance, that dog-eared envelope suddenly disappeared, even though the Playboys remained. My father would not help me. He denied any knowledge of secret copies of the IBM entrance exam.

  I passed my IBM entrance examination, but I never found out my exact score. My father did, and although he never revealed it to me, he reported with glee that, years earlier, he had scored higher on his examination.

  Not long after taking the entrance exam, I had a meeting at an IBM office on Wall Street with a man who would ultimately become my manager.

  “You’ll start next week,” Art Conrad said.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean? I just offered you a position with the company.”

  “And I just graduated from college last week. I’m intending to work the same job over the summer that I’ve worked for the past several summers.”

  Art took a deep breath. An awkward silence balanced between us.

  “I’ll start the day after Labor Day,” I said.

  “It’s not what I intended,” Art said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s what I need to do.”

  My father could well have been in that room with us, because by the time I got to our home in Rockland County, he grilled me.

  “Whaddya mean, you turned down Art’s offer of when to start?”

  “I have something I need to do.”

  “What could be more important than starting your career?”

  “Working at Project Double Discovery one last summer.”

  * * *

  Project Double Discovery, PDD as we called it, identified inner-city Black kids who failed or flunked out of high school and gave them a second chance. I taught mathematics at PDD, and the kids in my class were a challenge I eagerly awaited.

  With a cue stick in hand, I started that summer’s geometry class on a pool table. Begrudgingly at first, the students, most of whom far surpassed my skill at pool, had fun learning about supplementary angles from pool balls careening off the felt sides of the pool table and about the similar and congruent triangles in play when banking one ball so that it hit a side wall and then struck another.

  Things got a bit testy, however, when it came time to learn about geometric proofs and I handed out copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.1

  One young girl shouted, “What you got us reading this for?”

  “Ain’t geometry,” another said. “It’s politics.”

  “Don’t think Malcolm ever took geometry,” someone blurted out.

  The class chuckled.

  “But he damn sure knew how to prove a point,” I said.

  The class grew silent.

  “And that’s what geometric proofs are all about.”

  We took apart passages from Malcolm’s book. We defined terms like definitions, axioms, postulates, and previously proved theorems. We argued over how these should be applied to Malcolm’s statements. Then I set the class up as a court. A group of students (the prosecuting attorneys) had to prove the truth of a case to a jury (the remainder of the class), as I sat as the judge. The students really got into it. The court’s first cases came from Malcolm’s book and the concepts and ideas he presented. The next set of cases came from anything in the real lives of the students. By the time we came around to the third set of cases, actual geometric proofs—like proving two triangles were similar—the students offered a different set of comments on the class.

  “This all there is to geometric proofs?”

  “Why didn’t they teach me this in school?”

  “Malcolm may not have taken geometry, but I bet he’d be pretty good at it.”

  By this time, the students had grown accustomed to my classroom antics. So when I walked into class one morning with plywood, nails, rubber bands, rulers, hammers, and saws, they were more curious than suspicious. We cut plywood squares, measured and penciled symmetrical lattices onto the plywood, and partially hammered in nails where the lines of the lattices crossed, creating what are called “geoboards.” Then we stretched rubber bands around the nails to create various geometric shapes and used the boards to better understand the properties of those shapes.

  Now it was my turn to be surprised.

  A young man named Victor, who’d sat quietly through much of the summer, approached me after class and said softly, “Mr. Ford, I think I understand what you’re getting at, and I wonder if I could try teaching some of the remaining classes.”

  So, for the remainder of that summer, I coached Victor on what I felt the class needed to accomplish, and I took a seat in the front row to watch him teach.

  From the bottom of my father’s dresser, I learned the value of reaching out to help others. And with the help of my mother, herself a master teacher, I found one way to accomplish that over several summers working with PDD.

  While I wish I could also have been a beneficiary of my father’s copies of IBM’s entrance examinations—and it hurt that I was not—I also understand the importance of his actions
. For years, my father ran an underground railroad within IBM that provided promising young Black men and women a pathway into the company by offering them a first look at the keys to the realm. His covert operation, which began after he returned from the March on Washington, would have been inconceivable just a few years earlier, owing to his unshakable faith in Thomas J. Watson and his unquestioning allegiance to Watson’s company. But my father had watched his career falter in the face of a company unwilling to admit Blacks to the higher echelons of corporate power. His faith in Watson’s legacy had foundered. His unquestioning allegiance to IBM had frayed. Ever the chess master, my father sought other ways of advancing his pieces. Though he might not get there himself, he could provide a way so other Black men and women might reach the top ranks of IBM.

  * * *

  “I don’t know why,” my father said. He raised his cane briefly to shrug both shoulders.

  “C’mon, Dad,” I said. “You don’t have any suspicions about why Watson hired you?”

  “You asked what I know, not what I suspect.”

  We stopped walking. My father rested both hands on his cane. He grimaced, pushing himself up against the ankylosing spondylitis that was relentlessly, insidiously, pulling him down.