CYCLES

My mother grew up relatively poor on the East End of Cincinnati.

Her father was an extremely handsome man with lots of promise. He worked as an engineer at the University of Cincinnati, but wasted each of his lofty paychecks on whiskey, women and dance. He was quite a charismatic man. College material, Creole origins, and a mysterious love of trains.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was a product of an educated family with an abundance of high achievers. Although her momentum was derailed when she was forced to drop out of school in the eight grade to tend her sickly mother. Her paternal grandmother was college-educated and a schoolteacher. Her grandfather was a descendent of blacks who hadn't tasted slavery since the mid-17th century, and even then it was described as indenturement. Her father and his brother both attended Walden University [present-day Tennessee State]. Her father worked briefly for the Kentucky governor, and his brother became a doctor. Proud AMEs with political standing and a social strategy to marry light but never white.

My grandmother's father, however, married an orphan who suffered from depression, strokes and numerous miscarriages. "She was mean", my mother said in the one time she mentioned her. "Mean, little and very light." But her husband lived life fully. He was often described as jolly, charming and who would recite poetry every morning if he wasn't at a baseball game. However his life didn't unfold like his doctor-brother, or even his younger brothers, who were classically-trained pianists. A die-hard Cincinnati Reds fan, he eventually worked as the infamous ice and coal man for Cincinnati's "colored" community to support his ailing wife. A few years ago, one of my grandmother's cousins from Minnesota, the wife of a botanist, told me she remembered my great-grandfather, how lovely and smart he was; but how unfortunate it was that the Catholic church almost took away his children. I was shocked by this news. And too afraid to ask the impetus behind such scandal, afraid of being looked upon as pathetic by educated relatives who were already suspect of my not-light-enough skin. So I kept my mouth closed as my heart bled for my grandmother's father.

I can't help but to think about the cycles in my family. People with lots of promise, falling short. The patterns of attraction. My grandmother married a man much like her father. Charismatic, full of promise, but curtailed by some mundane or tragic obstacle. A few cousins also fit the bill. And a few aunts seemed to have been seduced by the magic of an uncle or two, and ultimately left in confusion, and vice-versa. Even me, drawn to the illuminating power of another, feeding off their potential, but often disappointed that the potential has nothing to do with the actual.

Some of my intellectual-artist friends like to talk about the economic and social woes within the black community. But I often like to humanize my people. Sometimes it's good to break cycles... in order to peel back the gunk and look the truth in the face. What you'll discover is that nothing is random.

Until next time,

Keith