The film Think made only vague allusions to this “network of mutuality,” yet this network, more so than any social media or digital network, is the one through which we must all communicate if progress in racial relations is to be made.
16
Leaving
My father sat at his folding card table, the one he set up to serve as a makeshift desk or for a chess match, in the downstairs family room of our Rockland County home. He had flowcharts spread across the table, and next to them a book. He held the book toward me like a shield: The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability by Arthur Jensen.
“You still believe that garbage?” I asked.
“Explains a lot to me,” he said, “like why I never achieved all that I could have.”
I sat down across the table from him. I wasn’t there to argue about whether people with darker skin possessed innately inferior intellects. I wasn’t there to double-check the logic represented by his stenciled diamonds, squares, and connecting lines. Nor was I there to engage him in a game of chess.
The front door swung open. My father and I looked up the stairs.
“We need some vegetables,” Marilyn said. “I’ll be back soon.”
The front door closed.
My father smiled. “She’s cute.” He waved a finger back and forth between me and the front door. “You two together?”
“We’ve been seeing each other for a few months.”
“Serious?”
“I don’t know.”
He winked. “Well, she’s got the right stuff, in the right places. That’s for sure.”
“Stop.”
“If you’re not serious, maybe she’ll go out with me.”
“Marilyn’s off-limits.”
He grinned. “You seem pretty serious. You come up to talk to me about a girl?”
“No. I came to tell you I’m leaving IBM in the spring.”
A long silence followed, animated by my father tamping down the tobacco in his pipe bowl. He lit the pipe, took a few puffs, leaned back, and turned slightly away. A thin stream of blue smoke vented from between his lips.
“I’m going to chiropractic college in Portland, Oregon.”
“To be a chiropractor?”
“Yes.”
“They’re quacks.”
“Ignorant people say that.”
“Do you even know what a chiropractor does?”
“Yes. I’m seeing Doc Jasper, and what he does seems to work.”
“Black chiropractor from White Plains?”
“Yes.”
“You know he grew up in the ’Bridge?”
“I do.”
“He’s a relative of Cab Calloway.”
“Yep.”
“And he also works as an insurance adjuster because he can’t make a living as a chiropractor. At least go to medical school.”
“Not interested in being a medical doctor.”
My father took a long drag on his pipe. “You’re just like your mother.”
“How’s that?”
“Pick up and do whatever pops into your mind.”
“She’s wanted a PhD for most of her life. It didn’t just pop into her mind, and going to chiropractic college didn’t just pop into mine.”
“What’s she think about you leaving IBM, anyway?”
“She thinks I shouldn’t leave a good-paying job.”
My father chuckled. “Finally, she’s making some sense.”
I encountered surprising resistance to striking out on my own, and not just from my father. Gradually, I came to understand this as a symptom of the “mirror effect,” where the actions of others serve as a mirror for us to observe ourselves. Only this time, instead of observing myself in the mirror others held up for me, I observed others in the mirror I unwittingly held up for them. At first, it appeared that those around me championed my best interests.
“What do your managers think?” my father asked.
“One’s trying to convince me to take another leave of absence. The other says not to quit before I’ve worked for ten years and I can receive a pension from the company.”
“Your colleagues?”
“Like Mom, the ones I’ve told question why I’d leave a good-paying job.”
My father shook his head slightly, let out another thin blue stream of smoke. “They’re right. All of them . . .” He winced. “Even your mother.”
Ultimately, I came to understand that my father, my managers, and my colleagues were not as concerned about me as they were about what my decision to leave IBM reflected about them. This surfaced during my exit interviews.
My first-level manager called me into his office, then shut the door. I anticipated a scolding or at least a peppering of questions about my time at IBM and what more the company could have done to retain me. Instead, he reached out to shake my hand.
“Good for you,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to open a bookstore in New Jersey. Perhaps someday I will.”
He left me speechless, after all that he had said and done to convince me to stay.
Another scheduled exit interview took place with my second-level manager, a man who’d been particularly stern about my plans to leave. Behind closed doors, this man, dressed in a three-piece suit, also shook my hand.
“I expect I’ll read great things about all you accomplish.” Then the corners of his mouth turned down and he confessed. “You know, all I’ve ever wanted is to be a wildcat oilman in Texas.”
Again, I found myself at a loss for words.
Back at my desk, a female colleague sitting behind me touched my shoulder and began sobbing.
“I really want to leave,” she said. “But the money’s just too good. I feel trapped.”
When I told Tommy Barnes I was really leaving, he stood up from his seat by the elevator, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “My man, you gonna be all right. I just know it.”
I don’t know if that bookstore ever opened, if that wildcat well ever gushed forth, or if that colleague ever left IBM on her own terms. I do know that from them I received a marvelous lesson, not merely on the power of the “mirror effect,” but, more importantly, on the need to live an authentic life—one that unfolds according to the dictates of one’s conscience rather than the demands of one’s society or social group.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” asked poet Langston Hughes. “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”
From my father came additional lessons about what happens to dreams deferred. That spring, I was back in Rockland County, and my father was back at his makeshift desk. My packed van was parked in his driveway. I no longer worked for IBM, and I was ready to drive west. My mother, I let my father know, was now glad I’d decided to leave IBM. She’d invited me to her new home in California when I got to the West Coast.
My father pulled the pipe from his mouth and rested his elbow on the card table. He stared at the blue smoke rising from the pipe, then spoke to it as though addressing a ghost.
“She forbade it,” he said.
“Who? Forbade what?”
I learned for the first time that my grandmother insisted that my father work for IBM, even if that meant sacrificing his dream of becoming a professional musician. I learned too that my grandfather had sacrificed his dream of being a minister, then a doctor, to work as a porter, so my father had more opportunities in his life. It struck me more clearly than ever: in their time, being Black and being first meant dreams deferred. It was my turn for silence and for gratitude that my father and grandfather had sacrificed their dreams so I could now go in search of my own.
Jensen’s book, along with others on race and IQ, still occupied a prominent place on my father’s bookshelf. Considering all he had accomplished at IBM, all he had done to bring forth a miraculous new age of high technology, I found it hard to understand what sway these discredited theories held. Yet navigating the challenges of race in America, particularly for Blacks, is a perilous journey for which precious littl
e guidance exists.
My father used chess as his guide: Black begins with a disadvantage. You have to look further ahead, work extra hard, rely on cunning, and assume everyone else is your opponent. My grandfather’s guidance was more simply put: just be the best. “I’d rather be a good porter,” he told Dartmouth students in 1924, “than a bad president.”1
I’ve often wondered, in the absence of stiff racial headwinds, without feeling compelled to treat his coworkers as adversaries, how far my father would have gone just being his best at IBM. Although, watching his struggles against racism within the company and experiencing my own led me to conclude it was essential to wrestle with the existential question, Who am I as a Black man in a society that resents my very being? At least I knew, thanks to my father, that the path he’d taken in answer to this question was not mine. Eventually, through the study and reflection required to write several books on social justice and race, I came to a place of quiet comfort, though not resolution, with being Black in America. My father never found a similar peace.
Though I no longer worked for IBM, my father still did. Prior to heading west, I caught him, as usual, with his head buried in a flowchart.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
A sheepish look contorted my father’s face. “Secret.”
“Virtual machines?”
“Nope. All done with that. Look, I can say this: it has to do with the antitrust suit brought against IBM by the Justice Department. Lawyers have a massive number of documents they need to search, then view on a screen.”
“So you’re designing a massive document-retrieval system.”
He mumbled. “Something like that.”
By late 1976, my father’s career at IBM had begun winding down. The company deployed him on special assignments such as this document-retrieval system, a predecessor to Cloud storage. This time I spent with my father before heading to the West Coast also coincided with the beginning of massive changes sweeping through the computer industry, and especially through IBM. The Apple I had debuted six months earlier, and many fretted over IBM’s business, which was still bound tightly to monster mainframes.
Most thought IBM too ponderous to get up to speed quickly enough to meet Apple and the other early entrants in the personal computer marketplace. Rich Seidner, a former IBM programmer, recalls a colleague examining the IBM quality-control process, then remarking that, when applied to designing and releasing a personal computer, “it would take at least nine months to ship an empty box.”2 So IBM set up semiautonomous IBUs (independent business units) in response to this competition for personal computers, charging each one with the responsibility of coming up with the best design.
“I’ve seen the future,” my father whispered a few days before I drove off, “and IBM’s there. Though I’m sworn to secrecy on this matter, let’s just say I entered an IBU room, where on several desks I saw computers no bigger than briefcases with keyboards in front, and monitors on top. And the labels didn’t read ‘Apple.’ No sir, they read ‘IBM.’”
From design, to production, to marketing, to sales, to service, everything about a personal computer was antithetical to the way IBM had conducted business for more than half a century. Retail computer stores, a new and burgeoning business in the late 1970s, would sell personal computers, not the traditional IBM sales force. A personal computer needed to be constructed of standard parts that computer store employees, rather than IBM field engineers, could repair. And IBM would have to market personal computers to the general public, something they had never done before.
In 1980, IBM officially entered the quest for its own brand of personal computers by upgrading one IBU to code name Project Chess. To the astonishment of many, a year later, and four years after my father first glimpsed an IBM personal computer prototype, the company began manufacturing PCs using commercial, off-the-shelf parts in Boca Raton, Florida. Microsoft, then a small Seattle-area software company, was chosen to write software for the IBM PC, and the Little Tramp, Charlie Chaplin’s iconic character with his bowler hat and cane, was chosen as the public marketing symbol for this new machine.
Small, lightweight, and easy to use, the IBM PC became an instant success, with more than forty thousand units ordered on the day of its announcement.3 The IBM PC established, then dominated, the non-Apple PC market. Ultimately, it became the industry standard. By 1984, PC sales accounted for $4 billion in IBM’s annual revenue, double that of all competitors, including Apple, combined.4 The IBM PC would even become one of the first personal computers to incorporate virtual memory and virtual machines.5 With everything new about the IBM PC, one thing remained unchanged: IBM’s fascination with assigning numbers to the machines it created. Internally, the IBM PC was designated the IBM 5150.
My father had glimpsed a digital future and he was proud, for good reason. He had a hidden hand in helping shape that future. When the IBM PC was announced, my father ordered one. Just as he had with the IBM 407, 705, 7080, 1620, 1130, 360, and 370, he learned everything he could about the IBM 5150. He believed in IBM, and he believed in staying abreast of the latest digital technology. “Whatever you do in life, learn about computers,” he told me often. “That way, you’ll never want for a job.” That advice I took west, across the country, and with me throughout life. That advice from my father has withstood the test of time.
The afternoon sun beat down on me the day before I left. I’d just finished mowing my father’s oversize lawn, and I was dripping with sweat. Beyond a locked gate, a slight breeze rippled the surface of his pool.
“Dad, okay if I take a swim?”
He tossed me a towel, unlocked the gate, and said, with his sly, crooked-tooth grin, “Thought you’d never ask.”
17
Long Walks
After retirement, reflection proved much easier for my father. While I was undergoing my divorce, my therapist insisted that I interview both parents. I rose to her challenge. For several summers in the late 1980s, I drove up from Richmond, Virginia, to spend time with my father in Rockland County. We took long walks along the Hudson River, talking about our time at IBM, talking about our time as a family, talking about the conflicts we endured and about the men we had become.
In some ways, walking and talking with my father seemed to me to be like spending time with an operative toward the end of his long and distinguished career of clandestine service. On each visit, I checked the bottom drawer of his dresser. The dog-eared envelope was no longer there. My father smiled but would never say if he’d actually handed off his covert operation to someone else inside IBM. I hope he did.
While my father did say much on these walks, he also chose not to reveal some key details of his life and his career. With no hint of remorse or regret, without skipping a beat in his retelling, my father would flash his crooked-tooth grin and utter his well-worn phrase, “And the rest I’ll have to take with me to my grave.” By this time, I’d learned not to prod or plead, not to step into this trap laid down by a master of the game. He’d given me what he felt he could, provided me the overall arc of his story, and, after all, more would never be forthcoming.
Not long after our last walk, my father suffered a series of ministrokes. He became increasingly debilitated, relying on a cane or walker. He reminded me of a King at the endgame, limited to slow movements one chessboard square at a time. Yet in a flourish befitting a chess master’s grand finale, my father managed to surreptitiously slip away from a five-star care facility in Florida, elude authorities, and make his way back to Rockland County. There, along the banks of the Hudson, in the shadows of a life and a career that no longer existed, he soon died.
When I arrived to clean out his apartment, I noticed his IBM personal computer on a stand alongside his bed, next to a tray of pills, his chessboard, and his pipe. I pushed a button to turn on the computer, listened to the disk drive whir, and watched the screen flicker to life. He’d worked at his computer right to the end. Eventually, I needed to say a final g
oodbye. I held down the POWER button, listened to his drive spin down one last time, watched his screen flash to black, and allowed my father to now became a truly hidden figure.
Still, he’s never far. Whenever I hear the blips and beeps, the whines and whirs of a computer, I recall what I learned from my father about these machines, about being a man who’s Black, and about being first. Those lessons live on in me. And while the goal he hoped for—that Blacks would rise to the highest leadership roles in IBM and other technology firms—remains largely unfulfilled, the contributions he made to the Digital Age live on in computers to this day.
Epilogue
The Words of a Poet
With his background in accounting, my father first worked in IBM’s Accounts Payable Department, where he coded debit memos, deductions from amounts owed by IBM to its vendors. He would pass this information on to keypunch operators, who then typed vendor information along with deductions onto punch cards for subsequent sorting and tabulation by the IBM machines known at the time as Hollerith machines or electronic accounting machines (EAMs).
In 1947, my father penned one of the early poems of the Digital Age, devoted to coding debit memos for IBM electronic accounting machines.
DEBIT MEMO
Hail to thee, trite paper!
O nightmare of a clerk!
The cause of many a caper
Of some pencil pushing jerk.
Comes night when I am sleeping,
And resting peacefully,
I see you plainly weeping,
And begging, “Please code me.”
I blow a fuse, more or less,
And nasty words I mutter;
But truly, I will confess
You are my bread and butter.
Author’s Note
Think Black Page 23