photo by Alex Lear

UNFORGETTABLE

That day was circa 1962, a Sunday like most Sundays of my adolescence—or so the early afternoon initially appeared. Our hours-long church service had ended almost a half-hour earlier. Anxious to be gone, we had eagerly piled into the sedan; as best I can remember, Reverend Copelin had a long, large Oldsmobile. The founding pastor of the church, my grandfather usually was among the last to leave. We waited for him with the windows rolled down, fidgeting as youngsters do when forced to sit still in a parked automobile.

My mother, my two brothers and I were scrunched into the back seat. At four-foot eleven and weighing less than a hundred pounds, my mother was the smallest member of our family. Back then my brothers and I were referred to as Mrs. Ferdinand’s three strapping boys. We were fit to play the front line on anybody’s football team.

My grandmother, Theresa Copelin, the church matriarch, was in the front seat talking to one of the church sisters who was squeezed in next to grand ma. They were talking about some young man who attended service for the first time after a lengthy absence. My grandmother launched into one of her characteristic stories whose message you did well to decipher and heed.

After all this is the woman who could send you to get a switch from the whipping tree and you would not dare bring back anything less than at least a three-foot long, limber instrument of instant torture that whistled when flicked across your backside.

As young teenagers we most need instruction at exactly the time in our lives when we, on the threshold of adulthood, are generally least disposed to respond to elder advice and admonitions.

In post-fifties America, technology and other factors were radically changing society so that the latest fashion was far removed from yesterday’s norms. Moreover, each generation experienced faster and more liberal conditions than the immediately previous generation, which inevitably contributed to youth believing that grown folks were hopelessly out of touch.

When we are teenagers we certainly don’t think we know all the answers to life’s questions, however we are nonetheless equally, or should I say more certain that adults don’t understand present conditions. Hell, the average adult was dumber than the smart phone the adult doesn’t know how to fully utilize. Or if, for example, using the tv remote was too complicated, what could a middle-aged person possibly know to tell a teenager about negotiating modern life?

Moreover, in my particular case I was affected by a social conflict that at the time I didn’t even realize was playing out in our home. My mother, the Sunday school teacher and back-up pianist, was the eldest of three daughters. Her only male sibling was a slightly older brother who had married a seventh ward woman. My uncle Sherman’s two children were being reared as Catholics even though our grandfather was a prominent Baptist minister who founded a church in the city: Greater Liberty Baptist church located at 1230 Desire Street, outside of which we were waiting; and also founded an earlier church down in St. Bernard Parish in Violet, Louisiana.

On the paternal branch of my family tree, my country-bred, Donaldsonville, Louisiana-born father only occasionally attended church and rarely (as in once in a blue moon) contributed his melodious baritone to the church liturgy.

Consumed with my own fantasies, sublimated desires, and budding aspirations, I paid absolutely no attention to what must have been a major and ongoing family conflict about the role and requirement of religion in the lives of our family members.

I can imagine my soft spoken mother making quiet but persistent requests of my father, not to mention the more likely cutting asides, tsks-tsks, and whispered innuendos from older members of our close knit church community.

Two of Rev’s children had married Catholic, a third daughter was divorced, and here was my mother married to a man who didn’t regularly attend church. That was not the way the spiritual leader’s children were supposed to turn out.

I never directly heard any criticism addressed to me or even within my earshot, nor, once I left the church, did I ever feel any kind of major parental pressure to return to the fold. While I never gave it much thought back in the tumultuous times of the early sixties, nonetheless the abdication of Reverend Copelin’s grandson and star understudy had to have caused some consternation among the congregation and also caused far from negligible discomfort for my dear mother.

Although I never felt any heat, as an apostate who abandoned the teachings of his upbringing I must have left a good portion of the church members wondering what the devil had gotten into my mother’s eldest son, the same young man who seemed pre-ordained to build on the foundation laid down by his grandfather.

Not surprisingly, at the time I didn’t fully understand myself. I don’t remember what impelled me to flee from the cross. Although obviously I must have had some motives, I actually don’t remember embracing any particular philosophical beliefs that led me to reject the church.

Perhaps it was the Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Richard Wright books I was voraciously consuming. I can see the pattern now: Hughes’ sharply satirical short fiction that skewered church leaders; Baldwin a former child evangelist who not only left the church but also proclaimed his homosexuality; from a Christian perspective Jones was absolutely hopeless; and Richard Wright was writing godless, existential novels. At the time I didn’t believe what my writing mentors believed but in unconsciously following them, I was also unconsciously turning my back on people who loved me and were dismayed by the choices I made.

Sometimes you can be in worldly waters swimming for your life and not fully realize how wet you are, how out of it, how unconnected on a conscious level to the benevolent social forces around you. Perhaps that is a perfect description of what it means to be young and headstrong, moving on the ideas in our heads thinking that we know what we’re doing when in truth we are oblivious to critical concerns swirling all around us.

What a paradox: how wrong we can be in our self-assessments as we grow into full adulthood. We really think we know what we are doing and by the time we reach fifty we look back and, in amazement, wonder at how we survived our own naivete. We especially focus on how we came to be whoever we have become, and not infrequently linger as we self-examine our relationship with our parents and elder kin and acquaintances and their impact on our own individual personalities, beliefs, habits and ways of being in the world.

Although my mother had a deep-going and obvious affect on my development, and although she and I talked often and intimately about life experiences, nevertheless when she died I was counter-intuitively at peace with what church folk call “her home-going.” Conversely when we three sons nodded our consent for the medical people to pull the plug on my father who lay comatose a day and a half after falling into a fatal unconscious state of undetermined origin, whether because of all the uncertainty about the cause of his death or the bewildering swiftness of his unforeseen demise, I found myself all adrift emotionally, hopelessly unmoored, treading in a suffocating swamp, fighting for breath in a morass of feelings for which I had no name and very little understanding of why I was in so much pain.

Back when I was fifteen, I didn’t know I was hurting people. I thought I was simply a lone individual finding my own way in a hard, cruel world, a world about which I had only an abstract understanding of just how hard and how cruel was the road that lay ahead of me as I eagerly stepped into my tomorrows. Oh, the mistaken self-confidence of youth.

Of course, I had heard the saying “no man is an island” but I never realized that the lives of each of us is actually a country peopled by many others who are connected to us in diverse ways and to differing degrees of intimacy. Indeed and paradoxically, the great lesson I missed then but fully embrace now is that our individual identity is actually a social construct. Despite the conventional wisdom, who any of us is, is not simply a sui generis identity, not really a solipsism, not an unconnected unique individual but rather a conglomerate specific of various and diverse social influences, connections, and intersections.

Now that I have matured, I can really, really hear and understand what the old folks meant when they would ask: who that boy peoples is? Each of us is composed of all the people in us. No matter how we individually manifest our internal social multitudes, none of us are a simple individual. Both physically in our DNA and bodily makeup as well as socially in our beliefs, habits and tastes, all of us are complex combinations of other people and their influence on us.

My father’s people were country folk: raccoon and possum eaters, consumer’s of blackstrap molasses out of tin, one-gallon cans rather then maple syrup from small, store-bought, 12-ounce glass bottles. The elder members of Big Val’s extended clan all talked like they had mouths full of turkey stuffing. They gave us kids suffocating hugs you had to endure if you wanted to get at those lemon-coconut cakes and pans of yams with melted dollops of real butter or warm, deliciously gooey sweet-potato pone. Those relatives always called my father June, I didn’t know why. It never occurred to me, who was named Vallery Ferdinand III, that June might have been a familial, country-style contraction of Junior, which was of course how my farther was known to his close family.

Inherent in being city-bred was a dangerous disparaging of country ways. My formal education was teaching me to be ashamed of my social antecedents. Don’t talk like them, don’t dress like them, don’t eat like them, don’t be like them. And not unlike Chinua Achebe describes in his Things Fall Aparttrilogy, I was completely unaware of the social dissonance my formal education, or should I say social indoctrination, was engendering in me. By becoming an eager student I became complicit in the tearing apart and destruction of black traditions. Had it not been for my parents encouraging us to be active in the Civil Rights movement there is no telling how socially irrelevant and alienated I may have grown to be.

However, what I could not discern while encased in the fog of my coming of age, the elders surrounding me keenly spied and accurately identified, i.e. my quickly growing alienation, even in its early stages, was obvious to the unlettered and untutored Black people from whom I sprang. So there I sat, resentful of having to go to church even as I knew that as the oldest, Baptist-reared grandson I was fully expected to carry on the word of God. But being a young, budding militant, politically what we would later call “a neophyte,” I had no time for embracing old and out-moded ways. My future was in the future not the past, or so I thought, once again not realizing just how short-sighted was my thinking that my future was unconnected to my past.

I completely ignored that both my grandfathers were preachers, my mother’s father formally as a respected minister, and my father’s father informally as what was called a “jackleg” preacher. I didn’t understand that for most of the long and terrible history of being Black in America, preaching had been a profession that a colored brother could legally pursue, that delivering the word of god was a leadership position the formally uneducated could attain, that pastoring a church was one of the few socially honored positions available to the average black man. Even though I thought I was smart enough to figure stuff out for myself, in reality I was too dumb to know how ignorant I was. For example, as obvious as it may be, many years passed before I realized that my mother’s first name, Inola, came from the abbreviation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

So on that fateful Sunday I will always remember, on what might metaphorically be identified as my great getting up morning, I sat on the car seat completely oblivious that I was at a major turning point in my life. My grandmother cleared her throat and calmly declaimed a narrative about a man who resisted his calling. As the story unfolded the distinct impression gradually dawned upon me that the unnamed protagonist of my grandmother’s parable was the same young person who was so good at reading bible verse in the pulpit and seemed so gifted an orator whenever he led the church in conducting the order of service. Even though she was looking at the sister sitting to her right, a voice inside my head was asking a startling question: was grand ma really talking about me?

I don’t remember the details of her story but I will never forget the gist and ultimate meaning. Seems as though there was a young church goer who loudly and proudly proclaimed that he was called to be a preacher and announced that he planned to attend the seminary. However, after going off for religious study, he returned to church un-ordained.

As she paused for dramatic effect, I wondered but did not ask, what happened.

Grand ma now turned slightly sideways and spoke a little louder, so we in the back could clearly hear her. “I asked him what happened. Didn’t he say God had called him to preach.” she said he said yes. “Well,” she continued, “when God calls, you’re supposed to answer.”

“I did,” the young man had told her, “but when I got there and asked the Lord, what did he want of me, the Lord said ‘never mind!’.

My grandmother was not only looking at me who many thought would follow in my grandfather’s foot steps, I felt that my grandmother was also looking deeply into the me who was intent on walking his own path.

A strange but welcomed calm seeped through me, as warmly comforting as a hot shower on a winter day. I felt free at last.

—kalamu ya salaam