![]() I paint pictures of scenes for inner-city youth that are familiar, and I people the scenes with brothers and aunts and friends they all have met. TODAY I am a writer, but I also see myself as something of a landscape artist. ![]() Perhaps even younger, before I had started my subconscious quest for identity. But later I realized how much more meaningful it would have been to have known Baldwin’s story at 15, or at 14. When I left Baldwin that day I felt elated that I had met a writer I had so admired, and that we had had a shared experience. The story gave me a permission that I didn’t know I needed, the permission to write about my own landscape, my own map. By humanizing the people who were like me, Baldwin’s story also humanized me. Then I read a story by James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues.” I didn’t love the story, but I was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, and it was a story concerned with black people like those I knew. Fueled by the shortest and most meaningful conversation I had ever had in a school hallway, with the one English teacher in my high school, Stuyvesant, who knew I was going to drop out, I began to write short columns for a local tabloid, and racy stories for men’s magazines. My post-Army days became dreadful, a drunken stumble through life, with me holding on just enough to survive. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I would become - an odd idea that I could not have articulated at the time, but that seems so clear today. They were more like friends with whom I no longer felt comfortable. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.īooks did not become my enemies. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. I read voraciously, spending days in Central Park reading when I should have been going to school.īut there was something missing. In the dark times, when my uncle was murdered, when my family became dysfunctional with alcohol and grief, or when I realized that our economics would not allow me to go to college, I began to despair. Every book was a landscape upon which I was free to wander. I was a person who felt the drama of great pain and greater joys, whose emotions could soar within the five-act structure of a Shakespearean play, or find quiet comfort in the poems of Gabriela Mistral. To an extent I found who I was in the books I read. I stood on the plain next to David as he fought Goliath, and tasted the porridge with Goldilocks.Īs a teenager I romped the forests with Robin Hood, and trembled to the sound of gunfire with Henry in “The Red Badge of Courage.” Later, when Mama’s problems began to overwhelm her, I wrestled with the demons of dealing with one’s mother with Stephen Dedalus in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” But by then I was beginning the quest for my own identity. In the landscape of my mind I labored as hard as I could to get up the hill. When I got my first books - “The Little Engine That Could,” “Bible Stories for Every Day,” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” - I used them on the same journeys. The magazines and comics pushed me along the road of the imaginative process. Later, when my sisters brought home comic books, I got Mama to read them to me, too. I didn’t understand what the stories were about, what “bosom” meant or how someone’s heart could be “broken.” To me it was just the comfort of leaning against Mama and imagining the characters and what they were doing. She probably read at about the third grade level, but that was good enough for the True Romance magazines she read. From my comfortable perch on her lap I watched as she moved her finger slowly across the page. ![]() I don’t think my stepmom thought of what she was doing as more than spending time with me in our small Harlem apartment. Reading came early to me, but I didn’t think of the words as anything special. ![]() Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.
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