Secondary Break. Marvin Williams
about my family and what they need. I can’t think about how my back hurt after that hard work out and practice last night. I can’t think about my need for breath as my chest heaves to gain the necessary air to live, or how nervous I am before this set began that made me feel like I wouldn’t have the strength to play. All I have are these four seconds!
Three seconds. I turn to my left with wide legs almost in a squat as I catch it. I’m at the top of the key, and because I have it, I see the bodies, shifting in my direction. They are moving away from me, and in a split second, I have to change their momentum to keep them from reaching me before I extend myself and release it. The shift in the momentum of my adversaries coming at me increases my need to breath, my need to focus, and my need to complete my task. Will I succeed? The seconds are ticking away.
Two seconds. I’m bringing my feet together before I spring into the air. All the force I generated, now climbing up my body into my arms that are holding it. The energy, now reaching the tips of my fingers. All other moments in my life have led to this moment. These two seconds are all that I have. As I send it propelling off the tips of my fingers into the air toward the rim, I have put it all out there. I have put all of my mind, body, and soul into its propulsion. I can’t do anymore. I have put all I have into this shot.
One second. It is now flying in the direction of the circle of my life! The circle is my enemy and my friend. It is my confidant and my adversary. The circle has brought me my greatest triumphs and my most difficult defeats. I trust the circle enough to know when it takes my side and when it will reject me with all of its force.
Swish! Today is my day. Today, this moment I lay bare, the vulnerable me, because all I gave comes back full circle.
We are fortunate. We who have found a place to exert our passions. We who intentionally accept the journey of life represented within our passions. Have you ever taken the time to look at that one thing you love and notice how it seems to mirror your life? In your passions, you have laughed and cried. You have prayed and you have sacrificed. In your passions, you have had to wait for its acceptance, and you have seen your innermost insecurities surface time and time again. In your passions, you have seen your kids also grow and develop even when they did or did not follow in your footsteps and share your same pathway. This is a story about how, in my passion, I have been able to see God, life, love, and a journey that lives on in the seeds I have planted along the way.
Every step of my life has mirrored that four-second play. That is what our lives consist of: seconds! We make split-second decisions that affect not only our lives, but the lives of everyone we touch. We decide if we want to eat healthy or not-so healthy. We decide in seconds if we are going to commit our lives to that one person or another. We decide if we are going to take a chance and do something that is scary, like trying something we have failed at before.
Seconds are all we have. Then we have to live with, or reconcile the consequences of those split-second decisions. None of us get to choose how we make it inside this human existence. However, there is a point in all our lives that we not only get to choose but, also get to decide, which lane we are going to run in.
From a very young age, I grew content with my split-second decision to choose to live instead of letting life choose for me. I didn’t always understand that was what I was doing. But when I look back at the choices I have made, some great and some very, very bad, I can see I was making split-second decision about the lane I would take for my life. Every step of the way, I chose my passions and did my best to pour the lessons, of what those split-second decisions to live my passions have taught me, into the lives I have been blessed to touch.
Chapter 1
New York, 1964. I was born Marvin Gaye Williams, one of the eight children to my parents. It’s been said that the sixties was the best time in Black-American history, and in a lot of ways, it’s not difficult to see why that’s not too much of a stretch, especially when you have today to compare it with. Think about it. The sixties gave black folks leadership. The kind of leadership we still talk about today. Hell, the kind of leadership that resulted in national holidays and a new way to see our own value as a black person in America. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and the Black Panthers. These are the legends that I remember growing up with and the names that filled the house, the streets, and the shape of our lives and struggles.
In a lot of ways, my first home set the pattern for many of my earliest struggles and achievements, to say nothing of the underlying sense of how life was back then. I grew up on Legion Street in Brooklyn, right down the road from our school, P.S. 156. We lived in a Brownstone. Our brownstone was three stories high, and every family knew one another. There were apartments on each floor within our brownstone community. There were eight of us living in our brownstone apartment in the back on the first floor: Mom; my brothers Harvey, Jeffrey, and Bradford; the baby; me; and my sister, Theresa. My dad worked in Long Island, doing his cooking show for a nice Jewish man, but would come home on the weekends.
The other families in our brownstone community included the Muslim family on the first floor. I went to school with their kids. on Sundays, I would sometimes go with them into the Harlem mosque where we would all sit together in one big room, all on the floor, no chairs or nothing, listening together to the message from a single jukebox. The single jukebox sat at the front of the mosque on an empty table. The jukebox, positioned like a pastor in other churches, was the only voice in the room. The message of Elijah Muhammed was delivered by notable persons like Malcolm X.
I remember running down to the Muslim family’s home when I needed to get away from my own family’s craziness. I was young but inquisitive (black folks would call me “Nosey”), and I loved interacting with people. I remember loving to learn in school and also from people whose lives appeared different than mine. That’s what struck me about the Muslim family. Their family was different than mine, and they always let me come over and stay awhile. I remember I got my first ear piercing from a Muslim woman when I was just eight years old.
Another neighbor was a karate teacher I called Mr. Kelly, and I remember being impressed as all hell with his abilities. It was so cool to know that he studied under and trained with Chuck Norris. My father once asked him to train my brother and me in karate. We would visit our new karate teacher and learn some techniques. I just remember it being fun to play with all of his equipment, or toys as I saw them.
Living on Legion Street was a time where everyone was allowed to be in everyone else’s business because it helped everyone stay safe. If a kid was in the middle of the street, acting a fool, any neighborhood parent could come out and pull them by the ear, pop them with a switch they just grabbed off of the closest tree, and then take the kid to their parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle to report they were being bad. Every kid on the block knew if a neighbor witnessed them being bad out on the street and brought them to their family, the punishment they had coming from their family would be twice the pain. They would get their ass beat once because they did something bad and the second time because they embarrassed the family. Kids knew they were better off being good, or at least acting that way. The communities embraced each other, protected each other, watched out for each other because typically, everyone was in the same or similar situation. Families with working or trying-to-work parents just trying to survive. For better or worse, some of the best lessons of my life went hand in hand with the hardness.
The community was real back then. Every Sunday, like clockwork, the whole family would come out to gather on the stoop, like a family reunion. This family reunion took place not just with our family but with most of the families in our communities. For me, it was my mom and dad; brothers; sister; cousins Madeline and Marie; aunts Pearl, Mary, and Thelma; and also my uncles Rudy, sometimes Kirby Lee who lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It always felt like we had enough food to feed the whole block. All of the food that makes a black family gather again and again: macaroni and cheese, ham, greens, baked beans, cornbread, and more all cooked to perfection with every cake and pie imaginable available as well.
One of my favorite memories about the place, and one that really defined how the classic Brooklyn brownstone neighborhoods worked,