Hey, Ma:
I woke up this morning thinking about you and how much you mean to my life. I thank God so much for you, Ma. I know I would not have been able to pursue my dreams—or even see them—I would not have been able to love so freely and purely if you had not been there for me.
Ma, you showed me what true love is, what God-like love feels like, by loving me unconditionally and with such fierce strength. You have always been the most important love in my life. I don’t know what I would be without your caring and your teaching and your listening and your nurturing—and your being bossy!
Growing up, I just knew that you would always be there for me. I would look at my friends and see that they didn’t have that same support. I saw how hard it was for them not to have a mother who could care the way you did. I knew then it was you who gave me a chance. I love getting to pray with you, Ma. Thank you so much for making me go to church, even when I tried to get out of it. Thank you for being my mother before you became my best friend.
I have always felt loved, Ma, and if you know it or not, that has made me a better person and a better man, a man who can love. Because you loved me, I was able to love myself, and because I can love myself, I can love others. I know I wouldn’t be doing the things I am doing if you hadn’t given me that foundation. You showed me strength and sacrifice and caring and hard work. You showed me hustle.
I know you tried to get me to appreciate things earlier on that I didn’t get until late—and I do wish you had taught me how to cook! But just learning from you to care for others has been the most important lesson in my life.
Lately I’ve been stepping out, saying I gotta make my own decisions. “Ma, stay out of this one!” I have to live my life with all its ups and downs. I know you want the best for me. I know you try to keep your hold on me because you love me so much and don’t want to see me hurt. But, Ma, I have to experience life to become the child of God that He wants me to be, to become the man I want and need to be.
I will make more mistakes on my own than I would if I followed your every word, but know that God has blessed me with a supreme mama. You have taught me to love wholeheartedly, to think beyond limits, to make others better, to up my father game, to handle my money, to give to others, to enjoy life, to seek God, to be still, to have faith, to be joyful even in the pain, and to let my leadership radiate.
Yeah, Ma, I know that sometimes you haven’t agreed with me if I’m giving some money to one of my guys or splurging on my girl. But what’s funny is that I learned that giving spirit from you. You know I’m not going to let anyone take advantage of me. I still remember that day you told me that God put us here to help others. “That’s our purpose,” you said. I needed to hear that because I can get so caught up in my work and in my goals.
Even when we don’t agree, I know you want what’s best for me. I’m growing up, Ma. I am a child of God, but I am a man, and I want you to know that if it’s one gift I thank God for most, it is you. You have been the beginning to me sharing my gifts. And you have helped me develop into a gift giver who can love life and love myself and be in love with others.
I know you always tell me you want me to be with the right woman. When you’re gone, you want to know that I will have someone to care for me, someone to be there to share my life. Well, Ma, no one will replace my mama, but know I will choose wisely and the woman I marry will undoubtedly have some of the beautiful things I see in you.
Know this: I am a man, and I will be wonderful in a relationship, and I will be a great father, and I will fulfill my purpose on this earth doing what God wants me to do. I thank you for holding me up to take the first steps on my path and I know you will always be there watching, loving, and praying as I walk it.
I love you, Ma.
Rashid
THE FIRST EMOTION I EVER FELT WAS LOVE. THE SECOND WAS fear. The love I felt was for my mother and her love for me. This love draws you into open arms and holds you close. It’s the love of certainty.
The fear I felt was the unshakable awareness that her love could be taken away from me. It’s the fear of loss.
I’ve felt this same combination of love and fear whenever I’ve felt something so deeply that I couldn’t imagine living in its absence—the way I love God, the way I love my daughter.
My mother showed her love for me every day, not just in words but also in deeds. Insisting that we go to church on Sunday, no matter what—that was love. Making sure that I had new clothes for school and new equipment for sports—that was love. Making me catfish and cornbread—that was love. Reading books to me and, later, having me read to her—that was love. All of these things, both great and small, combined to envelop me in a warm embrace that stayed with me throughout the day and throughout my life.
So I loved my mother and I knew she loved me, but I feared that somehow that love might leave. Those two emotions—love and fear—motivate me to this very day.
I often marvel at the strength of my mother’s will. With all the responsibilities that she had to take on, where did she find the strength to love so hard? Where does a love like that come from? Part of it comes from growing up around poverty, loving the little you have with everything you’ve got. Part of it is just a testament to her character. She was afraid too, intent on protecting her son from the dangers of the streets without sheltering him too much and making him even more vulnerable. How could she raise a young man who would be tough enough to take the weight and sensitive enough to love with his whole heart?
I raised Rashid in such a way that if anything ever happened to me, someone would say, “I’ll take that child.” I wanted him to be well behaved, well groomed, well nourished. I wanted him to be the kind of boy that would be a joy to raise, not just for me but for someone else if I was taken from him.
Why was I so concerned about him losing me? I don’t know. I suppose there was the fear of his father that still gripped me from time to time like a spasm. But it was more than that. It must have been the remnants of a feeling I had as a child. We all are a product of our histories. I know I’m a product of mine.
Growing up in Chicago, you learn how to survive—some people call it hustle. Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, black or white, you’ll find hustlers of all kinds in Chicago. For me hustling meant that even as I grew older and got more education, I was still able to relate to people on the streets. It meant that I could make a way out of no way, even if it meant bending or even breaking the rules sometimes.
As a school principal, they said I was “creatively insubordinate,” which is just a clever way of saying that I took care of my kids—and myself. I was successful because I always did what I thought was best for the students while at the same time doing what was best for me and my family. They’d say, “Aren’t you scared of losing your job?” I’d say, “No, because I’m willing to wait tables, work at a checkout stand, whatever I need to do.” I know how to get money, and I mean legally. I’ll take another job before I’ll work in a place where I have to do something I don’t believe in.
As a child, I saw that my mother always had two or three jobs at a time. We lived in a working-class black neighborhood. Most people had nine-to-fives, but there were a lot of street hustlers too. You had those who made their money running numbers—our street version of the lottery. I saw men who might have made their money on the wrong side of the law save up that money and buy Laundromats and corner stores and apartment buildings. So even though my mother always stressed education and pushed me to succeed, I also received a separate education in how to survive. Now I can sit down with someone from the street or someone from a university or corporation and be able to gain respect either way.
Here’s my definition of hustling: knowing how to survive in a world that’s set up for you to fail. That’s why, as black people, we’ve had to strive so hard to develop a hustler’s instinct and pass it on to our children. You have a door closed in your face? You have to learn how pick the lock or maybe just knock it off the hinges.
THIS IS MY LIFE IN EIGHT BLOCKS—the people and the places I love. This is where I had my first kiss and felt my first heartbreak. This is where I took my first sip of beer and got into my first fistfight. This is where I learned to breakdance and where I drove my first car. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago: Eighty-eighth Street and Dorchester Avenue, Eighty-sixth and Blackstone, Eighty-ninth and Bennett, Eighty-seventh and Stony Isle in a black middle-class neighborhood rubbing up against poverty. You had hardworking families with plenty of kids, but then you had gangbangers, too. That’s just the culture in Chicago, I guess. It’s a city of hustlers, legal and illegal.
I was born on March 13, 1972, at Chicago Osteopathic Hospital. My mother said it snowed that day. My father said it rained. I guess we can agree that some meteorological disturbance announced my arrival here on earth.
My grandmother likes to tell the story of how she rushed to the hospital as soon as she heard her first grandchild was born. She arrived at the incubators and started searching through the glass, looking for the beautiful little baby she knew she would find. When the nurse came up to her, my grandmother had already picked out a couple prime grandchild candidates.
“Which one is yours, Grandma?”
“Oh, I’m looking for the Lynn baby, ma’am.”
The nurse scanned her chart, glanced through the glass, and pointed me out to her.
“Is that him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am. Lonnie Rashid Lynn.”
My grandmother rushed to the recovery room where my mother was resting.
“Did you see the baby?”
“Yes, Mama. Isn’t he beautiful?”
“Beautiful? Have you seen him? That little old red, long, dry-looking baby. He’s so . . . ugly!”
My mother just shook her head and smiled.
“I need some sleep, Mama.”
A couple days later, after my mother had brought me home, she called up my grandmother.
“He is kinda ugly, isn’t he?”
THEY STILL TEASE ME about it to this day.
“Boy,” my grandmother says now, “you were the ugliest little baby, all red and scrawny with a patch of hair up at the front of your head. But you know what? You’ve just gotten better and better every day, praise God!”
I may have been scrawny in the beginning, but I already carried a heavy legacy. I took my father’s name, Lonnie Lynn. He and my mother also gave me another name, Rashid, the name I now go by to my friends and family. Rashid means “guide to the right path” in Arabic. I’ve always believed that our names hold our fate. I’ve tried to live up to the higher purpose hidden in my name. Early on, my mother noticed I had a spiritual side to me. I guess they say that all children are close to God.
His first babysitter was the trees. When he was no more than six months old, I’d lay him down underneath the large picture window in the front room and let him watch the trees sway in the breeze. You should have seen his face! He’d grin from ear to ear and just giggle like it was the greatest of jokes. Whenever I needed some time to myself, some time to my thoughts, I’d just set him under the window near the trees, and he was content. An hour or more would pass, and he would never cry. What a child I had!
LOOKING BACK, I can’t recall much about my first years of life. My earliest memory was of a birthday party, maybe my fourth. It was on a party bus and there were different things to see and do. They had clowns. There was this little toy jail that you could get behind. That’s the first thing I remember in my life: people having a good time on that party bus. I remember looking at the grownups, and they were having fun, too. It was my party and I was enjoying myself, but there was something missing. Even in my joy, I felt a certain sadness. I had on one of those little hats, the kind that looks like a cone on top of your head. I can still remember that jail, too. I had a picture of it at one point—little hands clutching at the cardboard bars.
The next thing I remember from childhood is playing around at my babysitter’s house. Her name was Sheree, and she babysat me from birth until I was eleven years old. I loved staying with her because she used to play music. We’d dance and sing. I didn’t know the names at the time, of course, but she would play Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye and the Commodores.
One night there was a knock at the door, and she went to answer it. I followed close behind. When she opened it up, there stood a man, impossibly tall, that I knew was my father but somehow not my father. He was wearing a mask. Was it Halloween? Then again, maybe he wasn’t wearing a mask at all. All I know is that I felt the warmth of recognition followed by the chill of fear. I was scared, but I wanted to see my dad, too. That’s all that I can remember of that night. It’s only a little glimpse, like glancing through the crack of a door while running past.
These early memories come at you in pieces, scraps of sight and sound, color and light. But even if the pieces don’t fit together just right, you feel the truth of them in the emotions.
One of the strongest early emotions I felt outside of my family was for a place, for Chicago. Chicago is in my blood. My family has lived there for several generations on my father’s side and three generations on my mother’s side. Grandma Elva, my mother’s mother, was born in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1927, the year of the Great Mississippi Flood, the most devastating river flood in the history of the United States. That spring the Mississippi River broke through the levees, covering an area fifty miles wide and a hundred miles long. People were still cleaning up from the wreckage that fall when my grandmother was born in the home of her grandparents. The day after my Grandma Elva’s birth, her mother, Emma Donelson, went back to work as the cook at a private high school for whites only.
Like so many black folks around that time, my family was drawn to the North by the promise of greater opportunity. Historians would later call this mass exodus of blacks from the rural south to the urban north the Great Migration, but for the people themselves it was something more specific: it was a chance at a better life. Grandma Elva, after all, was only two generations removed from slavery. She can still recall meeting her great-grandmother Melinda, or Linda, who was born a slave. “All I remember,” she once told me, “is that when I sat on her lap, she would always pinch me, and I would holler!” My great-great-great-grandma Linda was 103 when she died.
My grandmother’s grandparents, Mahalia and Simpson Stubblefield, owned a store and farmed a small plot of land down in Mississippi. They had carved out a life for themselves and their family, but they wanted something more. Not long after my grandmother’s birth, the family decided to move to Chicago, including their daughter and their new grandchild. My grandmother’s mother, Emma, however, wanted to stay down south and continue working. She knew, though, that her daughter would have a better life in the north so she asked her parents to take her child with them. It was the hardest decision she ever made. It might have been the best one, too.
That’s how my mother’s family ended up in Chicago. My grandmother along with her grandparents took the train north from Mississippi bound for possibility, but prepared for uncertainty. The Chicago they found wasn’t exactly to their liking. After arriving on the South Side, my great-great-grandparents found that the hustle and bustle was just too much for them to handle. So they packed up again and kept moving, this time farther north to South Haven, Michigan.
South Haven was a rural community, almost entirely white. For my grandmother and her grandparents, it was like moving to another planet; they were the first black family to live in the town. My grandmother enrolled in the all-white school. “They treated me like a paper doll,” she said. “But I didn’t feel prejudice. There was no color bearing that I can remember.” My grandmother and her white classmates went to school together, they went to church together, they made a life. From time to time, her mother would visit from Mississippi, but she was raised almost entirely by her grandparents up north. “I loved those old people,” she told me once. “They taught me common sense. My grandfather always said that an educated fool is the biggest fool going. So I never wanted to do anything that would make them ashamed of me.”
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER finished school, she went to live with her sister in Washington, DC, where she met her husband. When he went away to fight in World War II, he left her pregnant with my mother. My grandmother then went back to South Haven for her daughter to be born. My mother was the first black child ever delivered in South Haven hospital.
My grandmother ended up having three more children, getting divorced, and moving back to Chicago, becoming a single mother of four. She had little formal training but a great sense of hustle and ambition. She went to beauty school and worked on the South Side in a hair salon. Then one day she read an ad in the newspaper looking for a shampoo girl in a white salon on the North Side. She knew she could make more money there on tips alone than she could on the South Side, so she took the job. Her mother finally moved from Mississippi, motivated by her desire to help out, to take care of the four children during the day while my grandmother worked. All the while, my grandmother honed her skills. Before long, she had moved from shampoo girl to manicurist, then to owning her own shop. She started the first nail salon on the South Side, on Seventy-ninth and Champlain Avenue. She did nails for thirty-six years until her retirement, rarely missing a day of work.
Some of my earliest memories take place in my grandmother’s salon. It’s a place I associate with lots of love. My mother was working two jobs, so she asked my grandmother to drop me off and pick me up from day care. But my real day care was that nail shop.
“As soon as I would turn the corner to that day care you’d start crying and crying,” Grandma told me years later. “So I’d just keep on driving.” She secretly kept me out of day care for about a week before she confessed to my mom.
“Ann, I just can’t stand to take him there. They’re mistreating him.”
“Mama, they aren’t mistreating him. That’s a good day care,” Mom said.
“Then why does he start crying as soon as I get near the place?”
“You want to know why? Because he knows you can’t stand to see him cry. He knows if he cries, you’ll keep him with you. He’s making a fool out of you!”
After that, they came to an agreement. My grandmother bought a playpen and set it up for me right there in her salon. The customers and workers loved me, and I loved them. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been so comfortable around women. I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life. I thrive on their energy.
My grandmother loves to tell a story about me at age three. There was a young lady who worked at her nail shop who just couldn’t get enough of me. So every day, she would take me out to lunch with her. We’d come back an hour later and I’d be as happy as can be. Well, one of those days, my grandmother and I were driving home from the salon, and I started pointing out the car window at a bar.
“Grandma! Grandma! I had cocktails in there.”
“What did you say?”
“I had, I had kiddie cocktails there.”
Little did she know that every lunch hour, my new girlfriend and I would head over to the bar and have a drink to go along with our lunch. I think my drink of choice was a Shirley Temple. For the next month, my grandmother tells me, every time we’d drive home along Seventy-ninth Street, I’d point to that bar and squeal, “Kiddie cocktails! Kiddie cocktails!”
ALL THE LOVE and happiness of my childhood exist side by side with a certain pain. When I think of my mother and my father together, I think of a pain that I don’t know if I actually witnessed. Images flash before my eyes—my mother crying, the two of them fighting—but I don’t know if these things actually happened or if they are simply my suppressed emotions made visible.
As long as I can remember, it’s just been my mother and me. I can’t recall ever living in the same house with my father. In fact, I’ve only seen my parents around each other a handful of times. But the pain I associate with the two of them together has affected me emotionally in ways that I’m just now beginning to understand. It’s certainly affected how I’ve dealt with women. They say the first lessons you learn about relationships come from your parents. Not all of those lessons are good ones.
“In the bottom of my heart,” my father once told me, “I think your mother loves me so much she hates me.” Somehow that made perfect sense. For the longest time, I would measure how a woman felt about me not just by the love she showed me but also by how upset she would get at me. Pain was as good as pleasure. They both told me that she cared enough to feel something. The worst thing was indifference, a flat line. I never wanted that, so I would do things and say things to provoke a strong emotion, regardless of what that emotion was. “I want to be the one to make you happiest and hurt you the most,” I once said in a rhyme. Over time, though, I’ve come to understand myself well enough to know the difference between a healthy and an unhealthy love.
I don’t think the love Rashid’s father and I had for each other was good for either one of us. The good thing that came from it was our son. I met Lonnie in college. He was at Wilberforce University in Ohio, and I was at its sister college, Central State University. I had always loved basketball, so when I arrived on campus I got involved at Wilberforce working in the basketball office for the coaches. I got to know a lot of the players. That’s how I met Lonnie. He was a big man on campus, in every way: a giant at six foot eight, a street-ball legend from our native Chicago. He walked around all the time like he had theme music playing. I was drawn to him from the start.
Lonnie and I had been seeing each other for several months when my mother came to visit for an event they had at Central called Mother’s Day. They had a garden party with all the mothers and daughters. I asked Lonnie to come by so my mama could meet him. I was so excited because this was the first time I had ever really been in love.
“Mommy, you got to meet him,” I said. “You’ll love him!”
She talked with Lonnie for all of ten minutes.
“What do you think, Ma? What do you think?”
“He’s not for you.” She said it with a finality that brooked no dispute.
“But Mama, all he needs is just a little push.”
She paused for a beat, then looked past me across the expanse of lawn to where it fell off in a steep ravine.
“You see over there?” she said. “If you push him off that cliff, that’ll be your best bet.”
Of course, I didn’t understand what she was saying. I was in love and love is deaf, dumb, and blind sometimes. I stayed with Lonnie because I thought I could change him. I stayed with him because despite all that was difficult about loving him, I recognized the kindness in his heart. I stayed with him, too, I must admit, because I was a young girl and part of me dreamed that he would become a famous ballplayer.
My mother cried at the wedding, but not tears of joy. They were tears of fear and pain.
The trouble started soon after. Lonnie had always loved to party, but soon he got caught up in drugs. That’s when I knew we were not going to stay together. I got pregnant, and I still had faith that we would find a way. But I had no idea just how bad things had gotten. I should have seen the signs. We were living in a small apartment together, and every morning I would wake up to go to work, and he would stay in bed. He had a hard time facing rejection. He had a hard time facing reality. He was Superman. He didn’t feel like he could do a regular job.
Once Rashid was born, I thought for a while that things might get better, but they only seemed to get worse. It was horrible back in those days. I had to get a restraining order so Lonnie couldn’t come near us. He would come to our apartment late at night and shoot at the windows. He kidnapped us when Rashid was only a baby, then kidnapped me again on my own just a few months later.
One day, though, I just got tired of being scared. He banged on the door, demanding to see Rashid. I opened it up with a gun in my hand.
“Come and get him, then,” I said. “Come on. Come on. Why don’t you try to come and get him?”
That was it. He turned around and walked away. Once he knew I wasn’t scared of him anymore, it was over.
When he left to go to Denver, I was all alone with my son. I had to pay every bill. I was teaching school by day and working at Walgreens by night, but we made it work. I always thank God for those experiences—maybe not in the moment that I was in them, but when I found my way through to the other side. That’s what shapes you. Now I look back and think, “Did I really go through all of that? People shooting at me, pulling me over, and jumping on me in the middle of the street, kidnapping me and my son at gunpoint?” It doesn’t even seem real.
But I don’t hate Lonnie for any of those things. And I never wanted Rashid to think less of his father. Honestly, I take pride in the fact that I never uttered a bad word to him about his father. No matter what went on between Lonnie and me, it had nothing to do with Rashid. He didn’t choose his father; I did. He should not have to pay because his parents’ relationship didn’t work. A son needs his father, and Lonnie always loved Rashid. When it came to the two of us, though, Lonnie and I were just too different. I think I knew that from the start. I was always into changing people, though, into saving people. I tried to change Lonnie. I tried to save him. But you can’t change anyone; you can’t save them from themselves. In the end, the best thing you can do is to change yourself, to save yourself.
MY MOTHER WAS STRICT and she was protective, but there are certain things that you have to experience on your own. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, you have very few opportunities to interact with someone who isn’t black. Yeah, you might buy an ice-cream cone from a white store clerk or see Latinos or Asians when you went downtown, but in most of the places where you spent your time, you really didn’t cross paths with other types of folk. That shapes you. It wasn’t until I started high school that I had any significant contact with people who weren’t black.
Think about it: in my community, the richest person and the poorest person were black. You had black bankers and lawyers and businesspeople, but you also had black bums and hustlers and junkies. You had my mother, who was a teacher, a businesswoman, and later a principal. And you had my uncle, who was struggling with addiction. The point is, never in my life did I think that being black would help or hinder me in a way that I couldn’t address with hard work. It just was.
I first experienced racism when I was six years old. My mother and her sister had taken me and my cousin with them on a shopping trip. They wanted to go to T. J. Maxx and Marshalls, stores that were available only out in the lily-white suburbs. So we made the trip. It was so exciting for us because they also had a SportsMart. I remember I got a baseball glove and a new hat. It was nice.
I wasn’t even thinking about race, about the fact that we were black and almost everyone else was white. It didn’t cross my mind, that is, until we entered the last store of the night. There was another mother, a white woman, with a kid about our age. She was busy pulling clothes from the rack and checking labels and he was just kind of wandering in and out of the rows of clothes. Every now and then he would peek his head out and stare at us with a strange kind of smile on his face. It was strange because it was a smile, but it wasn’t really friendly. It wasn’t the kind of smile that made you smile too, in spite of yourself. It just made you wonder.
We inched closer to him, though, drawn in by the possibility of a new playmate. As we got closer, it sounded like he was singing or something but I couldn’t make out the words at first. When we got to within about six feet of him, I could hear what he was saying, but I still didn’t understand it at first. In a singsong voice, he kept saying over and over again, “B-L-A-C-K . . . B-L-A-C-K . . .”
When it finally sank in, I just looked over at my cousin and then down at the ground. I don’t know why I felt ashamed, but I did. Something started crawling under my skin and suddenly it didn’t matter as much that I had a new baseball glove or a cap. Suddenly I felt like something very small. I didn’t tell my mom. I didn’t tell anybody. As a matter of fact, as I’m writing this, I realize that I’ve never told anyone before now.
I know a lot of people went through a lot more than I did that day. A few years later, I would learn about Emmett Till, the boy who wasn’t much older than I was who was tortured and killed back in the 1950s for whistling at a white girl. He was from Chicago just like me. No, what I went through was nothing like that, but it put me in touch with feelings I had never felt before and would never want to feel again.
We all have moments like this in our childhood, when we suddenly become aware that for all the love our parents showered on us, we’re finally on our own. How do you respond to this awareness? I guess that’s one measure of your independence. Those early reactions go a long way toward shaping your personality. I know that’s been the case with me.
I was a disciplinarian. I was strict because I had to be. It’s not easy to discipline a child. But if you’re a parent, that’s your job. Rashid was a good boy, but he still was punished. I remember when he was first in the public eye, some news program came over to the house to do an interview. They had the two of us sitting on the couch, and the reporter asked, “So, Common, what do you most remember about your mother?” His little smart ass said, “She used to whip me.”
I suppose I did. I knew that raising a son without his father meant that I had to be strict at times. Nowadays, I often speak to groups of young mothers. They ask me, “Well, how were you able to raise your son the way you did?” To begin with, I never liked him more than I liked me. I don’t mean love—I loved him more than anything. But I always liked me best. If you don’t like yourself, it makes it very hard to like and to love your child. So when I was raising Rashid, there’s no way that he could have three pair of shoes if I only had two. And I’m the one working? That’s not reasonable, mothers. How in the world do these young mothers go buy their child a designer something that costs a hundred dollars and you don’t have a savings account? You don’t have a house. You live in an apartment.
Being the parent of a child brings with it certain responsibilities. You are not their friend. You are their parent. You can be friendly, but you’re not their friend. I’d tell Rashid in a minute. I’d say something, and he’d get ready to say something back—“We are not in a conversation. I didn’t ask you a question. There is no reason to answer.”
A lot of people think that’s bad, I guess, because they want their kids to talk to them. Rashid and I talked. But he knew I could give him a look and not only would he be quiet, but he would stand at attention. I can give my granddaughter, Omoye, that same look. They both understood the difference between conversation and direction. When Rashid was growing up, if I told him we need to talk, or if he came to me wanting to talk, then we would have a conversation. We’d often end up talking about any and everything. But if I told him to go get me a glass of water, then he’d get the glass of water. There is no conversation.
WHEN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, my mother bought me a bicycle. It was the first one I had ever owned. It was a blue Schwinn with racing tires, and I was sure that it was the best bike on the planet. It meant so much to me that for the first two weeks, I hardly even rode it and if I did, I’d spend a half an hour polishing it back up to a shine. The beginning of its third week, I took it on the longest ride yet—about eight blocks, down to the 7-Eleven. I drove it all the way onto the sidewalk right in front of the store window so that it would never be out of my sight. I bought myself a Slurpee and went back to my beloved bike. That’s when they surrounded me: two older kids from the neighborhood—one fat and one skinny—that I didn’t know by name but knew by sight.
“I ride the rhythm like a Schwinn bike when in dim light . . .”
—“RESURRECTION”
“Nice bike,” the bigger one said.
I was silent.
“I said, nice bike.”
“Thanks,” I finally responded.
“I wish I had a nice bike like that.”
“Yeah, me too,” piped in the skinny kid.
“You want to give me your bike,” he said.
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.
“Give me the bike, kid, or I’m going to take it from you.”
What did I do at this moment of challenge? Did I fight the two kids off and ride away in triumph? Did I make a quick getaway, pedaling fast just past their reach? Did I take a beating but hold my own? No. I simply gave them the bike.
“Take it, then,” I said.
They didn’t even steal it; I just gave it away. The fat kid straddled the seat and started pedaling, his knees rising up almost to his chest. Before long, they had turned the corner and were out of sight.
It took me more than an hour to walk home. I don’t think I ever walked so slowly. I could imagine the shame I was going to feel when I told my mother what had happened. But more than that, I kept feeling a churning sensation in my stomach from knowing that I had let myself down most of all. How could I give up so easily on something that mattered so much to me? How could I just surrender without a fight? Had I been scared? That was part of it. But fear alone had never stopped me before. It was something more: it was the suspicion that maybe I didn’t deserve that bike in the first place. Maybe giving it up was the right thing to do. Maybe it was easier to be passive and just do nothing at all.
I’ve lived with this memory all of my life. It’s a source of private shame, a fear of my own fundamental weakness, a hidden flaw buried deep in my character. My knowledge of it has driven me to react at times with extreme violence in the face of even the slightest provocation. At other times, it has led me to give in yet again, just like I did that day. I think we all carry with us these hidden shames, these deep-seated weaknesses. It’s how you confront them that counts. From that moment on, I would try to live my life without shame.
On the face of it, my childhood was spent wrapped in love. Certainly, I was loved as much as any child could be. My mother made sure of that. But that love lived next to other emotions, ones that would find definition as I stepped outside of the protections of home.