1
A BOY CALLED HORSE
You are the sum total of everything youāve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgotāitās all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.
MAYA ANGELOU
The pounding woke me up in the early morning. It was a violent bam bam bam on the door, echoing like machine gun shots. They werenāt coming just from the front of our home but from multiple doors in our community. Our family had moved from the south-side projects of Columbus, Mississippi, to these north-side projects a few years after I was born. It was like going from nothing to nothing. The north-side projects did have a more tightly knit, family atmosphere, with two units residing in one building and multiple buildings spaced closely together. The loud knocks woke up everybody.
My four older sisters jumped out of bed, and I quickly followed. They were all teenagers, the youngest ten years older than me. There were eight of us children. I had an older brother who passed away before I ever met him, and my only other brother was twenty years older than me. The baby of the family, Tomasina, was a year younger than me.
As we all gathered around the door, I could see Mama looking startled. We wondered if somebody was about to burst through the door.
āStay back,ā she told us.
After pausing for a few moments, my mother opened the door. Nobody was there to be found, but there was a note left on the floor. My mother picked the note up and began reading it aloud. I can still hear her reading it.
Dear Niggers: Thank you for doing our jobs for us. Thank you for killing yourselves, and thank you for being so ignorant. You know, we expect nothing from you niggersā
My mother stopped reading. It had two or three paragraphs, but she was finished sharing it with us. The damage had been done, however, because my older siblings were furious. Especially when we realized that other people in our community had gotten the same sort of letters. Handwritten messages of hate.
As everybody filed out onto the lawn between the buildings, I felt the morning dew on my bare feet. There was a hint of daylight breaking on the horizon. It was just dark enough that somebody pulling this sort of hateful act could run away without being seen or caught. Grandmothers and mothers stood in their nightgowns talking while kids still were groggy from just waking up. As a young kid, I didnāt understand why everybody was so angry. I didnāt know what the commotion was about, and why people wanted to find whoever wrote it.
This was the day I learned āniggerā was a hate word.
Hearing a letter like that had an effect that it might not have today. The word meant something different back then. It carried the weight of the world on its shoulders. In Mississippi back then, there was literally just black and white. Racism was real and it was raw. āNiggerā was not just a word; it was a weapon. Now when you hear this word, it can sometimes be used as a term of endearment that blacks use toward one another. Itās used so often itās become diluted. There are those who feel entitled to say it but know others canāt dare utter it. Back then, āniggerā held so much weight that it would keep you from breathing. I donāt use that word as either an endearment or an entitlement.
When we were back inside, my brothers wanted retribution and talked about what they would do if they found the culprits. My mother wasnāt having any of that.
āYouāre not doing anything,ā she said. āYouāre going to sit here. Youāre going to do what you always do and live for another day.ā
My mother was a very kind woman, and she wasnāt someone to feed off of a situation like this. Among many other things, Emma D. Rush was a midwife at one time in her life. I love my mother to death, but I grew up to be angry at her sometimes; Iām angry because she was the one who put so much fucking love in my heart, so much that it made it hard for me even to this day to look at people with hatred.
This was the 1970s, which was a difficult period for racism. The Ku Klux Klan was still active, and we eventually discovered they were behind the notes. The kids talked about doing something, but nobody could do anything. We were young and I was just starting to understand the reality of racism, the ignorance behind racism, the damage it does, and the heartbreak I felt when I knew I couldnāt insulate my family from it. At the time, I was a follower, looking up to my brothers and sisters, so I thought, If theyāre angry, I should be angry. But my mother was telling me I shouldnāt be angry, and she explained why.
Hatred and anger came from emotions.
āEmotions can save lives and emotions can take lives,ā Mom told me. āEmotions can put you in jail and emotions can make you do things that you canāt take back.ā
My mother tried to explain that being emotionally destructive is feeding off something that somebody wants to happen. She knew that these letters were meant to cause a reaction, but that reaction, back then, would have been suicide.
āYou canāt just react to things you donāt know anything about,ā my mother told my brothers and sisters.
We didnāt have weapons and we didnāt have people to join us in combat. We were just a bunch of families in the projects trying to make a living. And trying to stay alive.
***
While my mother showed me how to love, it was my father who showed me how to work. Harder than everyone else.
āDre, letās go,ā he would tell me before leaving to go work on a farm.
Tommy Lee Miller was a very aggressive man, very dark-skinned. I remember veins in his arms that were as big as your fingers. He called me āDre,ā not in an affectionate tone but rather in a stern and direct manner. As a kid it sounded harshāeven scaryāwhenever my father said it. He worked in construction for fifty years, and this was when construction was real construction, with fewer machines and more manual labor getting the job done. My fatherās brawny physique proved this. Even though he could be the nicest man in the world, his persona felt so dominant to me, so intimidating. While he also worked as a truck driver, his most important job was to teach me my work habits and work ethic. Little did I know he was showing me how to be a man.
As was true among most of the families I knew in the projects, my dad and my mom werenāt married. I didnāt know what marriage was. Maybe one or two families had couples who were legally bound, but all I knew was thatās your mom and your dad. Thatās how it was. My dad was always there.
As soon as I could walk, my dad put me to work. He came to the house every day or every other day and I would climb into his dirty and rusted-out truck that he drove to one of the local farms. One day I asked him why we needed to go to work.
āWhen I was eight years old like you, I had to drop out of school to help my mom and dad,ā my dad said. āThatās how I got these rough hands. Thatās how I learned how to build the first house I ever finished.ā
I had seen a picture of my grandfather, taken on a farm. It was a grainy black-and-white photograph, and the image reminded me of one of those stereotypical movies depicting a very dark-skinned man working on some sort of plantation. My grandfather was lean but muscular, and I could see my fatherās reflection when I looked at the photo.
After working at his regular job, my father took me and my siblings to different farms to help him in the fields, picking peas, tomatoes, corn, and green beans, and heaping them in thirty-pound, brimming bushels. I even had the pleasure of picking cotton. It hurt. It hurt a lot. But I always did everything my dad asked me to do. My dad was so in tune with the earth, and he tried to teach us how to be this way.
āDre! Pick it like this. You gotta do it this way, Dre.ā
I would be holding a dirty vegetable in my hand and my father would say, āTaste it, Dre! What does it taste like? Just bite it!ā
Like a gourmet chef sampling a succulent dish behind a giant stove, I sampled the ingredient. I didnāt want to bite a dirty vegetable, but I did. I didnāt like vegetables, but I would learn much later that we didnāt eat a lot, so these vegetables were pretty damn good. Soon I would be eating vegetables before going anywhere, and I would eat so much that my father finally had to start saying, āDre, stop eating all the food!ā
Some days, as I walked beside Dad under the searing Mississippi sun, seeing the beads of sweat on his forehead, I listened to him mumbling things, whether to himself or only for me to hear. We didnāt have a radio or anything else to listen to, but that was okay because I enjoyed hearing him talk. He spoke to me with the passion of a preacher, and I soaked in the words as if I were listening to Martin Luther King Jr. give one of his most memorable speeches.
āDo you see this soil?ā he asked as he began to dig in the dirt, pulling out a long and twisting worm. āDid you know that even earthworms provide all the nourishment we need?ā
āYou donāt eat worms,ā I said.
āSure you do. Theyāre high in protein and lots of other things.ā Then he took that dirty worm and ate it like it was nothing.
The first time he ate a worm, I couldnāt believe it. Sometimes I think he ate the worms to show me they were Godās gift to us. It was pretty funny and disgusting at the same time. Little could I have imagined that years later, Iād be doing the same thing with real bugs while I was in the military.
The gravitas my dad carried with his dogged work ethic came from the fact that he was old to have a young kid. All of my brothers and sisters were much older than my younger sister and me; by this time in his life, my dad could basically have been our grandfather, and he spoke as such. His words resonated with the wealth of a lifetime of memory. He had already gone through two decades of seeing his children grow, so he could reflect on this and teach me. I know now this was why he was so hard on me, and why he made such an impact on me. He pushed me in ways he never pushed his other kids.
The bushels we filled werenāt only for our family but for others. Sometimes we helped strangers pick bushels, and at the end of our work I watched them drive off with them in the back of their trucks. At the time I didnāt understand why we went to different farms and picked all these things. When we had visited white farms, I had seen machinery for picking vegetables, so why then were we picking all these by hand, bit by bit and piece by piece? One day my dad explained.
āDre. Do you know why weāre doing this?ā
āNo, sir,ā I replied. āI know that weāre getting some food. I know we get some vegetables.ā
He shook his head, his eyes piercing me. āThis is what weāre supposed to do. We help each other, grow from each other. We learn from each other. We pick for each other. This is a community. This is what we do.ā
His dark ebony hand pointed at the farm we were walking across.
āYou see me doing it for the black man. You see me doing it for a white man. You see me do it for my family. You see me doing it for us.ā
This was Mississippi, and back then the world was painted in a very distinct black and white way. There was no in between, so sometimes when you were spoken to as such, you could tell by the way people talked to you. When I heard a white person talking to my dad, the tone sometimes sounded degrading and dismissive. My dad always answered with a āYes, sirā spoken as a sign of respect but not one of submission.
I grew to understand that we were part of a community, and my dad wanted me to learn that we all needed to keep going and keep strong and never forget where we came from. Going to these fields to pick vegetables was more than a simple part-time job; it helped me understand a greater purpose in life. The food this work produced ended up representing something far bigger than a meal.
The older I became, the more I realized that these werenāt just my meals for the day. I was sharing a little food with nine or ten people. Sometimes my mother would also share a portion of our meals with homeless people who came through. She never hesitated to invite them into our house to come and eat. I would see a stranger suddenly at the dinner table, and they would be so dirty. Nobody but my mother ever gave them anything.
I recall one man who my mother invited in. He was so filthy and he smelled like a latrine. My sister and I were the only ones living with my mom now, and I remember us hiding behind a couch and peering over to look at him. We were wondering why she let him into our home. My mother gave him a little bag of stuff and then he left. I was still scared when the stranger left, but my mother came up and explained why she had let him come inside.
āYou know, Andre, everybody needs help. Everybody is human. You need to take care of everyone. Some people need a little more help than others.ā
My mom said a lot of things like that. As Iāve shown, she was an incredible woman. My dadās philosophy was different. He would look at a stranger and say, āHey, you gonna work for it. You got legs you walk on all day, so you can put them to good use.ā
Love others and work hard. Those phrases sum up my mother and father, and they pretty much sum me up too.
* * *
āCan Andre come out and play?ā
I h...
