The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (8 page)

I have rarely been more depressed, or more convinced that my words meant absolutely nothing, than when the judge’s words, all-powerful words, revealed your future. Life. In prison. An oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one.

You have managed to squeeze an ounce of invention, or should I say, selfreinvention, from the pound of cure that prison is said to represent. When I first learned of your new identity, Everett Dyson-Bey, I was neither dismayed nor surprised. Frankly, my position is simple: do whatever is necessary to maintain your safety and sanity in prison without bringing undue harm to another person. You’re a strong, muscular fellow, and I didn’t think you’d have much trouble staying safe. I took your change of religions—from the Christianity you inherited as a child to
the Moorish Temple Muslim belief of your new adulthood—to be an encouraging, even creative defense of your sanity.

I am disappointed, though, by the response of the black church to your predicament. I suppose since I’ve been to see you countless times over the last five years, it could be claimed that those visits count for my church’s mission to those locked away. But we both know that’s bogus. That line of reasoning insults the integrity and slights the example of so many who’ve followed Jesus in “visit[ing] those who are in prison.” You haven’t been visited a single time in prison by anyone visiting as a Christian minister, or as a concerned church member. Thank God our pastor visited you in jail before you went to prison. But the church is larger than him. I spoke several times to the minister in charge of prison visitation about going to see you. My requests were futile.

I don’t know why so many black Christians avoid the prisons. Of course, I realize that hundreds of black churches have prison ministries that make a real difference in inmates’ lives. But the average pew sitting member, or for that matter, the regular church minister, rarely gets into the thick of prison life in the same way, say, as members and ministers of the Nation of Islam. Or the Moorish Temple. Perhaps it has something to do with how black Muslims with smaller numbers than black churches must proselytize when and where they can. Since many of their members have served time, they may be more willing to reach back to help those left behind. Then, too, the application to prisoners’ lives of the stringent ethical code taught in black Muslim settings often brings welcome relief to the moral chaos into which so many inmates have descended.

Another reason for their success may be that black Muslims take seriously their theological commitments to racial uplift and reconstruction, especially among the poor and imprisoned who are most in need of that message. Perhaps it’s a simple class issue. The more legitimacy some black Christian denominations gain, the higher class status they acquire, the less they appear inclined to take care of “the least of these.” In the end, I’m glad you’ve discovered in the Moorish Temple what you couldn’t find—or perhaps what couldn’t be found in you—through Christian belief.

Many people think the sort of religious change you have experienced is a “foxhole” conversion, a transformation brought on by desperate circumstances that will be rejected as soon as you’re set free. That may be the case. If it is true, you certainly won’t be the first person it has happened to. But hold on to the hope your religion supplies as long as you can. There will be other desperate situations after you leave prison. Besides, so-called normal religious people experience a series of crises and conversions over the years in settling down to a deeper faith. Even those folk who don’t walk through its doors every time church opens often have meaningful conversations with God.

I think our father was one of those people. He was a complex man who worked extraordinarily hard and who believed deeply in God. But he wasn’t very religious, at least not in any traditional way. When people discover I’m a Baptist
preacher, they often ask if preachers run in my family, if my father was a preacher. I laugh inwardly, sometimes out loud, thinking of what an odd image that is, Daddy as a preacher. It’s not that he cussed like a sailor. I know too many preachers who do that as well. And it’s not because he had a short fuse. So do most prophets, biblical and current ones too. I guess it’s their righteous rage at evil, their ill-tempered tirades translated as holy damnation. But the line between their baptized fussiness and plain old invective is sometimes quite thin.

I think what causes my bemused response is Daddy’s genuine humility. Most preachers I know aren’t that humble. I don’t think that’s all bad. Many can’t afford to be. The tribulations of their office are enough to shatter a fragile ego. But the annoying hubris found in so many ministers was completely absent in Daddy. Yet this humble man also displayed ferocious anger which frightened me. True, it didn’t last long when it surfaced. But its concentrated expression had devastating consequences. And often—I think too often—it had its most harmful effects on his children’s behinds, not to mention on their minds.

To be honest, I don’t completely understand why Daddy so readily turned to the strap to discipline us. Perhaps he was treated the same way when he was a child. Maybe the humiliations he suffered didn’t have any other outlet. I remember once when he and I were working for “Sam’s Drugs” as janitors. I was in my middle teens, which meant Daddy was in his late ’50s. A light fixture had been broken in the ceiling of the drugstore. In order to reach it, Daddy climbed a step ladder that I was holding as Ben, the Jewish owner, looked on. When Daddy misstepped and slipped down a couple of rungs on the ladder, Ben became angry.

“Oh, Everett,” he indignantly declaimed. “You’re just like a little boy. Can’t you do anything right?”

Daddy didn’t say a word. I was so mad at Ben, and humiliated for Daddy at the same time. I remember thinking of how strong Daddy was, how physically domineering he could be. Yet none of that mattered as Ben reduced his humanity, and as I interpreted it then, attacked Daddy’s manhood as well. If I felt that as a teen, what did Daddy feel? Where did he put that anger? Is that at least part of the reason he let his rage loose on us?

As you know, the debate about corporal punishment is raging in our nation. There used to be a belief that there was a racial divide on these matters, at least when we were growing up. Black folk in favor, white folk opposed. Even though I don’t think it’s that simple (where one lives, either in the city or the suburbs, and one’s class identification, are important too). I don’t deny that racial differences exist.

Recently, though, I think the gulf between black and white views on child rearing has probably narrowed. A new generation of black parents has questioned and often rejected the wisdom of whipping ass. To be sure, you still hear black folk saying, “The problem with white folk is that they let their kids get away with murder, let them talk and act any way they want to without keeping them in check.” You also hear black parents and the experts they listen to arguing that corporal punishment encourages aggressive behavior, stymies the development
of moral reasoning, hinders self-esteem, and even causes children to be depressed. No such theories prevailed in our household.

I must admit, I tend toward the newfangled school of thought, even though I haven’t always put it into practice now that it’s my turn to parent. In fact, during your nephew Michael’s childhood and early adolescence, I didn’t know anything about “time out.” As a teen father, I had barely survived the pain of my own rearing and the violence I’d encountered. I knew what I saw, repeated what was done to me. And I regret it.

One of the most painful moments I experienced involving punishment occurred when I was a teacher and assistant director of a poverty project at Hartford Seminary. Brenda (then my wife), my son Mike, and I were in our car as I drove to work to pick up some papers one evening. Down the street from the seminary, Mike had behaved so badly in the car that I pulled over to the side of the road to discipline him—three licks on his hands. In my view, it was a very light and welldeserved spanking. After administering this punishment, I drove the single block to the seminary.

Before I could park my car in front of the seminary two white policemen drove up in a squad car. They got out of the car and one of the policemen approached my door, instructing me to get out of the car. His partner walked up to Brenda’s side of our car.

“Can I ask you why you’re stopping me, officer?” I asked politely and professionally. I’d learned to do this, as most black men in America have learned, to keep the blue wrath from falling on my head.

“Just get out of the car,” he insisted.

As I got out of my car, I informed the policeman that I worked at Hartford Seminary.

“I’m a professor here,” I said, pointing to the seminary behind me.

“Sure,” the policeman shot back. “And I’m John Wayne.”

The policeman instructed me to place my hands against the car and to lean forward. I knew the drill. I’d done it too many times before. I could hear the other policeman asking Brenda if everything was all right, if my son was harmed. Mike was in the back seat crying, afraid of what the police were going to do to me.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mike cried. “Why are you doing this to my Dad?”

From the pieces of conversation I heard between the second cop and Brenda, I gathered that someone—a well-meaning white person no doubt—had spotted me spanking Mike and reported me as a child abuser.

Just as Brenda told the cop how ridiculous that was, two more police cars rolled up with four more white men. “Damn,” I thought, “if I had been mugged, I bet I couldn’t get a cop to respond within half an hour. And now, within five minutes of spanking my son, I’ve got six policemen breathing down my neck.”

As the other cops surrounded our car, the policeman hovering over me refused to explain why he stopped me. He forcefully patted me down as we both listened to Brenda and Mike explain that nothing was wrong, that Mike was fine.

“You sure everything’s all right?” the cop talking to Brenda asked once again for degrading emphasis. She angrily replied in the affirmative.

Finally my knight in shining armor spoke to me.

“We got a complaint that someone was hurting a child,” he said.

“I can assure you that I love my son, and that I wasn’t hurting him,” I responded in a controlled tone.

“I spanked my child now so that he wouldn’t one day end up being arrested by you.”

“We have to check on these things,” the second cop offered. “Just don’t be doing nothing wrong.”

He shoved me against the car to make his point. With that, the six cops got back into their cars, without apology, and drove off.

I don’t have to tell you that the situation was utterly humiliating. I resented how I’d been treated. I felt the cops had deliberately intimidated me. They embarrassed me in front of my family under the guise of protecting them. I think their behavior is fairly typical of how many white men with authority treat black men. They are unable to be humane in the exercise of power. They run roughshod over black men in the name of serving a higher good, such as protecting black women and children from our aggression. The irony of course is that white men ignore how their violence against black men has already hurt millions of black families, including black women and children. In fact, the effect of much of white male hostility is not to help black women and children but to harm black males. Fortunately for me, Brenda and Mike understood that truth. Neither of them trusted the cops’ motives for a moment.

Still, the incident forced me to imagine the impact my punishments had on Mike. I thought about how he might interpret the discipline I gave him. I wondered how spankings made him feel, despite the reassurances of love I prefaced to any punishments I gave him. The irony, too, is that I was reading social and cultural theorists who were writing about discipline and punishment. While I found many of them extremely enlightening about big social forces and how they molded people’s habits of life at home and in the world, I sometimes wondered if they had any children. I continued to talk to Mike about these matters, apologizing to him about my past disciplinary practices, promising him, and mostly living up to it, that I would look for alternatives to physical punishment.

Of course Daddy lived in a world where such considerations were impossible. If you don’t control your kids, they’ll control you. That’s the logic that informed his decisions. If you don’t beat their asses, they’ll beat yours one day. I guess depending on where you stand on such issues, the rash of recent slayings of parents by their children either proves or undermines such a theory. In any case, I eventually grew to hate Daddy for the violence of his punishments. I can still hear him saying “get me that ‘hind pepper,’” referring to the quarter-inch-thick, twelve-inchlong piece of leather he used to whip us. Occasionally, he’d plant his size twelve foot right up my posterior.

I know, of course, that no one on our block would have called that child abuse. And neither did I. Given the black cultural logic of the time during which he was reared, and during which he and Mama reared us, Daddy was simply attempting to keep his brood in line. (What we must not forget is that during an earlier time in our nation, black folk beat their children at home so they wouldn’t give white men lip in public. If a black child wasn’t strictly disciplined, he might say or do something that might cause him untold danger away from the protection of parents. Even though that logic may be long exhausted, some habits die hard.)

My resentment of his whippings got so bad that he once told Mama that he thought I hated him because he wasn’t my biological father. When Mama told me that, I was crushed.