Kevin Powell

was born and raised in an American ghetto. I have no direct memory of the Civil Rights Movement, of Dr. King, Dolores Huerta, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bobby Kennedy, Yuri Kochiyama, or Malcolm X. I also have no direct memory of what life was like in America before the 1960s. What I did know was my single mother, my absent father who never married my ma, horrific poverty, violence, abuse, rats, roaches, and much sadness and loneliness as an only child. What I am convinced saved my life was the vision of my mother—in spite of having only an eighth-grade education—to instill in me from the time I could form and comprehend words a love of learning. Even at age three I was already questioning the world, and my place in it: this I do recall.

Apart from reading, which my mother pushed hard and is the reason why I am a writer today, I had a bottomless love for television as a kid, particularly cartoons. I believe, truthfully, that these animated images represented both a feeding of my imagination and an escape, at least temporarily, from our very dire and unpredictable living conditions. We moved much, as poor people often do, but there was always a television, a black-and-white television, with a hanger on top serving as a replacement for the antennae, and a thick line often running through it, distorting the images at times. But I did not care. I loved animation, and I watched them all, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, The Jetsons. But then there was Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the entire Peanuts gang. I do not remember if I first saw the comic strip in our local Jersey City newspaper, the Jersey Journal, or if it was one of the TV specials that hooked me. No matter, hooked I was, and I absorbed Peanuts in every imaginable way as a boy.

My earliest memory was of Charlie Brown trying to kick a football and Lucy always removing it just as he was about to do so. That image served as a metaphor for my own tough life. How can we ever not be poor? Will we ever be able to leave this ghetto life? Why do I feel so close yet so far from relief, from hope?

There was also a certain kind of melancholy that permeated Charlie Brown that I related to instinctively, a loner mentality in spite of his being a part of a community of other quirky children. I likewise related profoundly to how Charles Schulz rendered the voices of adults, parents, teachers, authority figures as, well, inaudible. My mother was a mighty yeller, doing the best she knew how to raise me, a man-child, but there was an unfettered pleasure I took in how the youngsters of Peanuts had their adult yellers speaking what seemed to be a foreign language. Youth do not want to be yelled at or talked down to; they, we, want to be spoken with, and heard.

I can say now I have battled depression much of my life, and I can say with certainty that Peanuts, the comic strip, the television programs, the characters, remain one of the things that still brings me tremendous happiness to this very day. I had a framed image of Snoopy on my wall for many years, and only in storage now because I am married, and space is at a premium. This is how deeply connected I am to these characters, even as a grown man.

For sure it has been in my adult years that I have come to love and appreciate Peanuts in a very different way. One of the ways I have dealt with the traumas of my past has been years upon years of therapy. One of the counselors said to me, a while back, “Find the things that actually made you happy as a child, and keep those things close for the rest of your life.” Almost immediately I went out and purchased A Charlie Brown Christmas, sat there and watched it alone, and I cried, profusely, as all the memories came flooding back to me.

On another occasion, while I was doing a speech at a historic all-black private boarding school in Mississippi, it blew my mind to learn that Charles Schulz had donated money to this institution, and there on campus was the Charles M. Schulz “Snoopy” Hall. My hosts told me that Schulz, a very shy man, had once been scheduled to come speak at the school, but he called the school’s president and said that he would just like to send a check instead. Those funds built Snoopy Hall, the girls’ honors dormitory. Mr. Schulz also lent his name to the Charles M. Schulz Scholarship Fund, which still provides tuition for student leaders to this day.

I am someone who has spoken at well over a thousand institutions at this point, has been to all fifty American states and many places overseas, too—me the poor boy from the American ghetto. But whenever I think of my fondest memories of my speeches and my travels, my mind and soul forever return to that Mississippi dorm named after Snoopy. This, to me, is the essence of Peanuts, of the impact it has had and will continue to have on generations of people of all backgrounds. It is the reason why I find myself, even in middle age, posting Peanuts quotes and images across social media platforms whenever the mood hits me, whenever I do not have the words myself to express a feeling, any feeling.

I have escaped the worst of what I experienced as a child, this I know. But what I will never escape, what I do not ever want to escape, is the incredible innocence and joy I feel whenever I see or think about Charlie Brown, Snoopy, all the Peanuts characters, and the freedom they gave me then, that I still have with me now, to be all of who I am, quirks and all.