Two of my close friends threw a fine birthday party for me. Two daughters,
a grandson, a couple of former wives, an ex-girlfriend, old acquaintances,
champagne, wine and good music filled the elegant room overlooking New
York’s crystal skyline. It was an evening not to be forgotten. Later, joy
still coursed through my thoughts when I plumped my pillow and attempted
to sleep. But no matter how I twisted and turned, sleep refused to come.
Then, in the silence, one large number began roaming through the darkness.
Ninety! I tried telling myself that it had nothing to do with anything,
but through the leftover haze of red wine, I realized it had a lot to do
with just about everything. On my next birthday I would be ninety. I had
better get on with it. Later could be too late.
Since that night I have revisited the banquet that life has laid before
me. What a superb feast it is! The sweetness of recognition and success,
the bitterness of poverty, hunger, and bigotry overlying the rituals of
existence: marriage, birth, work, seasoned with pain and joy, and most of
all – love. My mother, father, and fourteen brothers and sisters sowed
love’s harvest. Years after they were all gone, I ate from that harvest
when I needed it. Eventually I was to learn to share their love with those
who asked for no more than also to be loved.
Nostalgia blankets me when I think back over the years passed. Sometimes I
knock on the door of my memory and it opens to an event that came close to
denying me a future of any kind. I was born dead. But a young White doctor
plunged my blood-soaked remains into a tub of icy water and miraculously
gave me life. With determination he had disallowed even death to defeat
him. Years later, when told about that event by an older sister, I went to
give him my thanks. But by then he was dead. My mother had expressed her
gratitude to him by giving me his name. Dr. Gordon was the savior whose
color had nothing to do with his giving me, a Black child, a right to
life.
Resting deep in the corridors of my memory is another event that helped
give shape to my future, though I was only ten at the time. Just a few
moments away from death, my invalid brother Leroy turned on his pillow and
looked steadily into my eyes. “Pedro,” he said, “you’ve been roughing up
people lately. That ain’t good. Your brain’s more powerful than your fist.
Try using it. You’re to remember that, okay?” I stood silent. Words failed
me as I gazed into the shadows beyond his bed. He reached for my hand.
“Okay, Pedro?” I placed my hand on his. Then, with my tears flowing, I
blurted out, “Okay! Okay!” and fled the room. His words claimed their
rightful place in my upbringing, and within my heart.
I was born in a small town in the middle of the vast Kansas prairie, Fort
Scott, a place touched by all the hands of nature. It bathed in lovely
twilights, burned in scorching summers, froze in icy winters, and was
occasionally battered by tornadoes. Fort Scott was also the mecca of
bigotry, where discrimination was solidly built on the stones of
segregation, in grade schools, movie houses, churches, even the
graveyards. The local high school was racially integrated simply because
the town fathers couldn’t raise funds to build a separate one. But even
there bigotry spewed its venom. Black students were denied participation
in sports and social activities. It was a large school, but for them, all
that space was deserted.
During those days I ate hatred, a lot of it. Yet, thanks to a caring
mother and father, I also ate cabbage, cornbread, grapes, apples,
strawberries, watermelon, and slaughtered hogs from a smokehouse. So I
well remember what I was and what I wasn’t. Still, it is impossible to
forget what I lost along the way. Johnny, my best friend, writhing in a
pool of blood after being shot by a jealous rival. Buster, knifed to death
after a dispute over a bag of marbles. Emphry, gone after a fatal razor
slashing. Then there was Kirby, the brutal White cop who carried two big
guns on his hips, who earned the title “murderer” by sending a number of
Black people to their graves. But thankfully, my birthplace no longer
lives in yesterday alone. The present is more like an old clock with young
hands moving across its face. I have reason to hope that bigotry is dead
in my birthplace. I think I hear it saying, “What I am now, is not what I
used to be.”
Ken Lunt, my hometown’s mayor, writes to me often. I’m not sure why I
penned this poem for him, but I did. The local newspaper opened its
editorial page for it.
Homecoming
The small town into which I was born,
has, for me, grown into the largest
and most important city in the universe.
Fort Scott is not as tall, or heralded
as New York, Paris, or London –
or other places my feet have roamed
but it is home.
Surely I remember the harsh days,
the sordid bigotry and segregated schools –
and indeed the graveyard for Black people
(where my beloved mother and father
still rest beneath the Kansas earth).
But recently, the bitterness,
that hung around for so many years
seems to have asked for silence, for escape
from the weariness of those ugly days past.
Thankfully hatred is suddenly remaining quiet,
keeping its mouth shut! And I’m thankful
to find the contentment we lost along the way.
My hope now is that each of us can find
what GOD put us here to find – LOVE!
Let us have no more truck with the devil!
Long before I was born, and for more years than my father could recall,
small bands of gypsies roamed the prairie towns begging for food and
coins. An older brother, Clemmie, told me a story about their occasional
visits to our old clapboard house. “Poppa always fumed up a bit when they
came and Mama shared our food with them. ‘Sarah,’ he would say, ‘we’ve
hardly ‘nough grub to feed our own, let alone them.’ Mama’s answer always
shut him up. ‘The poor people have to eat, Jackson. We’ll make it
somehow.’ The gypsies always left with a basket full of food.”
From Clemmie I was also to learn that she held another reason for
befriending the gypsies. A Dr. Cavanaugh had told her that she would not
give birth to another child. After reading her palm a gypsy woman told her
differently. “You’re going to have another child – and he’s going to be a
very special one. Take my word for it.” A couple of years later I arrived.
Today I regret that Mama isn’t here to know that I have tried to give
truth to that prediction. Just before my sister Gladys died, she smiled
and said, “Don’t worry, Pedro. I’ll tell Mama and Poppa about everything
you’re doing.”
Like all of my brothers and sisters, Gladys was magnificent. At times I
can’t help but wonder about what she would say to them. Then comes the
question I now ask myself. “What have you actually become, Pedro?” I then
recollect those years when death robbed me of so many of my youthful
friends. All of them had been denied the existence that I had been
granted. In those years, death was working overtime. And I became obsessed
with it. Fear walked beside me when I approached my mother’s coffin in the
middle of the night and raised the lid to take one final look at her. She
seemed to be smiling, relieving me of my misery, taking my fear with her.
Trembling, I lay down beside her coffin and went to sleep. The fear of
death gave up and left. At dawn my father found me there on the floor,
asleep.
I was only fifteen. Before death took her, Mama had persuaded Poppa to
send me to live with my sister Peggy in St. Paul, Minnesota. Up there, she
thought, I would escape the bitter trials of Kansas. My father hardly
looked at me after the funeral. When Dan Stover’s spindly taxi came to
take Peggy and me to the train station he touched my shoulder and looked
toward the barnyard. “Just remember your mama’s teachin’, son, and you’ll
be all right.” Then he walked off to feed the hogs.
Poppa was a man of few words and, like Mama, he was fearless – with a
heart as big as a mountain. I remember when he had skin stripped from his
back and thighs to cover a child who had been burned in a fire. When Mama
asked him why he didn’t tell her he had gone to the hospital to do that,
his reply was, “It’s all right, Sarah. You would have agreed to it
anyhow.” Years later I asked him if the child’s parents came to thank him
or bring him flowers. The reply was typical. “No. But I didn’t do it for
thanks or flowers. I did it for the child.”
Winters in Minnesota were unbearably cold. The only thing I was to find
colder was my brother-in-law David. From the very beginning he made it
clear that I was unwelcome. Autumn was flying off leaf by leaf when I
entered his house. He was a porter on a railway. It was a good house – when
he was away. When he was present everything looked at me with
disdain. Ceilings and walls frowned. Doors creaked. Windows whined in the
blow of frigid wind. The softest carpets turned to nails under my feet. My
sister, spattered with lumps of hurt, went about in sadness and I, the
intruder, was helpless to do anything to lend her comfort. It was
thirty-five below zero, and Christmas was only two days away, when David
and I had our confrontation. I had been invited to a party by my
schoolmates, and for some reason David objected to my going. I insisted,
and soon our words turned into blows, and I had him on the floor.
“Get out,” he commanded, and pushed me out the door. My few clothes soon
followed. I stood in the snow for a few moments, speechless. Then I picked
up my clothes and moved off to face the world. I was at the bottom of it,
and there was only one direction to take. That was up. “Try using your
brain, Pedro. It’s more powerful than your fists.” Leroy’s words were
echoing through me, but during those terrible moments I could find nothing
encouraging in them. No one could have convinced me that the next years
could bring skies filled with brand-new stars. And I could not have
dreamed that my world would change so much in just a few months.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from A Hungry Heart
by Gordon Parks
Copyright © 2005 by Gordon Parks.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Atria
Copyright © 2005
Gordon Parks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-6902-0
