Secondary Break. Marvin Williams
wars. See, every building (or most of them) had open rooftops, and most rooftops had a pigeon coop. Flying pigeon became our thing, something to make our dad proud. It worked like this. My father would go and buy us, say, half a dozen homing pigeons, and we’d keep them in the coop for a while to get them used to us and their color. The key here was color. Our coop would be painted a bright blue. A building two streets away might have one bright red inside and out. The birds would then associate their color to their home flock. Then this is where it got fun because you would keep an eye out for when your neighbor let his birds out to fly. We would jump up and let out our flock when theirs got close and let the birds mix, then whistle for them to come home. If your birds were smarter than theirs, then they’d pull the whole mixed flock back to your coop, and suddenly, you’ve got all the birds, or you lost them all to smarter birds and a sharper whistle.
Where the current New York Nets arena sits used to be a market where they sold live pigeons. My dad bought about ten pigeons. We had them for a couple months, training them to recognize our blue coop. There was a Puerto Rican guy with a corner store. His nephew would compete with his pigeons. During one competition, we lost all the pigeons to this guy, and my dad threatened us, saying it would be the last time he would buy us pigeons. It could have been our desperation or sheer luck, but the next time we competed with him, we took all sixty of his pigeons. My dad had to build us a larger coop. The Puerto Rican uncle approached my dad, asking for his birds back. My dad told the guy; “You know the rules. If we lost, you wouldn’t give our birds back!”
I was surrounded by family. I had my mom and dad, my brothers and sister, my aunt Thelma lived in the next brownstone building, and my aunt Pearl lived with her husband, Rudy, not too far away from us. I went to school with my cousins Madeline and Marie, and My aunt Mary was always around to show us what Jesus had to say about whatever we were doing good or bad. Despite all the challenges in our lives, we had love. My parents were both major players in my life, but it took me a lifetime to be able to look back, as a grown man, at the lessons and dynamics that were fully in play. Black families have a long-standing tradition, be it good or bad, of not really opening up with each other. Rarely do you find adults in black families, sharing their past experience with relationships, abuse, mental disorders, family secrets, or anything. This means that as a kid, you see the end results of all decisions and issues but don’t know their cause. My brothers, sisters, and I were then left in a bad spot a lot of the time, thinking all the troubles our parents were going through were somehow our fault.
My parents were together for forty-one years. They had all of us kids moved back and forth from North Carolina to New York and remained unmarried. Although it is painful to say, my parents were also alcoholics. I believe my parents loved each other and were somehow, in a crazy yet cool way, made for each other. The circumstances that resulted in them being unmarried, raising a family for forty-one years stems from some generational, cultural, and economic shit that was just what it was—the truth in the black community! The stuff that came from the hundreds of years of slavery in the South. Thousands of families ripped apart where fathers and mothers have children, then the mother or the father is ripped away from one plantation to other plantations where new families get started. Thousands of years where men and women had to be hard toward love and family. A hardness that numbed both men and women into believing that it’s okay for men to have multiple families. A hardness that numbed my mother, or perhaps my father’s wife, into accepting that my father had nineteen children and maintained two separate families.
My father was a strong man who struggled all his life, both with what life threw at him and also with his own decisions. My dad finished the sixth grade and never put much stock in books or any kind of education. But he was one of the smartest men I have ever known. He had a PhD in street smarts. If there was an angle, he could find it and make it work. If any man could be called a jack-of-all-trades, it was my daddy. He was a mechanic, a tank driver in the Army, a chef, a handyman, a baker, and just about everything else at some point in his life. Then of course, there was the television cooking show on Long Island, where my brothers and sister got to watch and be proud of our dad. Cooking was one thing that, I remember, he really loved, he took incredible pride in everything he did because he did it damn well.
My dad grew up in Chinquapin (Chinkapin), North Carolina. He grew up with a tough father, which in turn made him tough. When my dad was young, he grew up in a poor family. He used to talk about how hungry he was growing up. He and his five siblings would go to school and church in the same building. They were all in a one classroom church, like the one on Little House on the Prairie, just not like that because he was black. He talked about going to school and church where he would have to tighten his belt so much to stop the grumbling in his stomach. My father grew up in a time in the South where sharecropping, or just a step above sharecropping, was how his family cared for the kids. The slave mentality was alive and real as many of the men of the family had been slaves as children. The family worked for the white man and hope was a scarce thing.
I remember a story my father told me that summed up how hard my grandfather was on my father. It was about him and his brother, Kirby Lee. My grandfather, who I don’t remember meeting, would get drunk at night and fall asleep. My dad and uncle wanted to learn how to drive, so they would sneak out of the house when my grandfather fell asleep. They would steal the car, and with my father behind the wheel, my uncle would push the pickup truck down the dirt road so that they could practice driving. On one of their driving lessons, they drove the truck into a water well. Keep in mind, they only drove in the dark, and the only lights were those on the headlights of the pickup truck. When my grandfather found out and reached my father and uncle, no words were spoken, only screams and yelps from how badly Granddad beat both of them. I believe that between the beatings and the lack of physical affection, since neither my grandfather nor father believed in hugging or being touchy-feely, my father became tough as nails.
My father’s family was very interesting. My aunt Katie was the youngest worked for Macy’s in New York for over twenty years. I remember going to all the Macy’s Christmas and Thanksgiving parades with her. She was a very beautiful woman whom I spent a lot of my young life with. Her husband, Rudy, was also an amazing (but very strange) man. He was a plumber by trade and taught me a lot of valuable lessons growing up. He taught me the value of love and hard work, and my weekends with him were always exciting. There were times we would be working in dark and smelly basements, fixing people’s pipes. Aunt Pearl and Uncle Rudy had a great love for dogs. The bad part about living with them was that I had to clean out the room where all the dogs were kept. Nearly every day after school, Aunt Pearl would come get me from Legion Street, and I would spend the week (or weekend) with them. I would be responsible for taking up the used filthy newspapers and putting down a fresh layer for the dogs. In return, she would pay me some pocket money, though I remember Uncle Rudy believed that if I ate his food and slept in his house, taking care of the dogs was my fair payment in return for spending the night and feeding me.
My dad also had another sister, Aunt Mary, who lived in the city. We all lived close to each other. Aunt Mary was very religious, so when she would come around to visit, all of the family would stop their drinking and gambling because if you didn’t, she would give you an earful of God’s word. My dad also had an older brother, Kirby Lee, who lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He would hardly come around, but when he did, all of us kids knew that something in the family had gone wrong and that he was there to straighten it out. Uncle Kirby Lee wasn’t a loud man. In fact, as a kid, I barely heard him speak. He wasn’t a loud boastful man. He was the guy that when he came to talk, you knew something was wrong. I loved him because he was so unlike my dad—a forward thinker. He would always come by during the summer to try to get my dad to take us somewhere fun (like Las Vegas or Disneyland), but my dad would never do it. My dad believed in hard work and buying us the things he thought we needed and the things he wanted us to learn from, like the pigeons, or the musical instruments. My mom, on the other hand, was very adventurous. She believed in trying anything and felt like we (as kids) should get to see the world.
My mother’s family was from the Deep South, and we would go to North Carolina some summers to see our granddad and grandma. The Deep South in the summer, unlike New York, was extra hot, had lots of dirt roads, and outhouses. Outhouses, meaning that if you had to go to the bathroom, you could not go in the house. You had to go outside of your house to go to the bathroom.