(Worsham school, after years of dis-use. That door on the bottom right was the back entrance we used to sneak in as teens, with the room to the left our base of lounge where we had dragged in a few couches.)
As is normal when forced to accept dysfunction as
integral part to what made you how you are, I’ve been contemplating the psychic
mine field traversed, and wondering “why me?” in terms of survival. Been
thinking a lot about a dude I grew up with who died almost two years ago, who I
was close with in youth, but wandered apart as adults, as everybody who got
through that mine field went their own ways to some extent. I guess a lot of
them are more in touch with each other than I am, but my method has been to
cross bridges and never go back. But this dude – SAH we’ll say – was public
school kid like me. At the time we both started (late ‘70s?), Prince Edward
County had three elementary schools active: a private one called Prince Edward
Academy (open only to whites, and opened as response to forced desegregation in
the 1960s), the Campus school (I think related to Longwood College training
teachers, and most of the college – now university – staff who had kids sent
their kids there because it wasn’t racist but also not public), and then
whoever was left went to the public school. I’m not sure how the white
demographics broke down, if that was class-based (the Academy cost a lot of
money) or my folks ran with a mixed crowd or what, but I went to the public
school.
SAH and I were not in the same kindergarten class,
but from 1st grade through graduation, we literally had the exact same class
schedule all the way up. We were inseparable best of friends during chunks of
elementary school, and at least solid bros throughout, despite normal youthful
conflicts from time to time which resulted in a couple of fistfights here or
there. There were times where teachers would call us by each other’s name by
accident, partially because of us being friends, but also (this is hard to
explain) in certain ways we carried ourselves similarly metaphysically. I
guess.
Anyways, the Campus school closed when we were in 3rd
grade, so a new influx of white (and other) kids showed up to the public
schools in 4th grade, an immigration of children whose parents didn’t support
the white supremacist vision of the Academy school (which sat on the hill just
above the trailer park my grandmother lived in then; used to go shoot
basketball on their elementary school courts every day, with a mix of ratty
white kids from the trailer park and black kids from across the creek in the
old houses bordering the housing projects). This batch of new kids gave me and
SAH a good chunk of who we rolled with the rest of our publicly schooled years.
SAH stayed at my house at times, and one weekend
he was there, my folks had decided to go out to a party (which was not
uncommon, nor necessarily an actual party in the noun form of the word, but
more likely just the general verb form which was weekend mainstay of the mine
field) so they dropped me and SAH off at my grandmother’s trailer for the
evening. This caused a bit of stern discussion because SAH was black (which is
more an enculturated way to describe him than reality, because he was
light-skinned, like his grandmother – a wonderful, no nonsense old lady who
raised a handful of her grandchildren).
[There’s an inadvertent theme – the hand
grandparents, grandmothers in particular, have in raising children who come from
the mine fields. They, by default a lot of times, become the elders who instill
values in the kids, although often times that missing generational bridge
causes the message to get lost, or ignored, or I don’t know. I was at my
grandmother’s trailer a lot as a kid, and my younger sisters even more so. But
the result of me and my wife attempting to recover from inherent dysfunction
means my kids don’t even have grandmothers around, though both are still
alive.]
By the time we all got to high school, due to my
environmental exposures, I was synchronized to drugs and alcohol at an earlier
age than most of those kids SAH and I ran with, from (I’m assuming) more stable
homes. But I didn’t know no better, and I introduced my “good” friends to all
the things I did with my “bad” friends, and inadvertently did my part at a
young age to scatter more mine into the mine fields. Sterling was one of those
folks. He didn’t drink, or smoke, or do harder drugs, but in the small circle I
was part of, he was introduced to it. The first time he got high was in the
shed behind my house, because we could all skip school and get fucked up there
and there was a certain amount of lack of oversight by my folks that gave us
the space.
Once we got to college, our paths split. SAH went
to the local prestigious private school on full scholarship, part of their
largest freshman minority class ever (it was 7), and I headed off to Richmond’s
wonky public art school to get lost down fresh paths of self-induced chaos. I
probably saw SAH less than a dozen times after that, but word had gotten to me
through others about his bouts with alcoholism and other drug problems. I want
to clarify here before I mention all this that SAH was one of the smartest
people I’ve ever known. He loved to read, loved to learn, loved figuring shit
out, and loved to do it faster than anyone else. He had a sports-like
competitiveness to his intelligence, which I guess I actually have as well, and
perhaps that’s something that comes to smart kids who come from
less-than-stable backgrounds who constantly feel like they have to prove their
mental worth.
But SAH had those problems, which apparently was a
multi-generational problem, and part of the reason his grandmother had raised
him. One time, after I’d quit drinking already, I was down visiting my mom with
my middle child, and we stopped at the gas station towards that end of the
county. A dude that looked enough like SAH was in front of me, buying beer, so
I called out to him on the way out the door. It was SAH, who was riding with
him mom, and had been visiting. We talked for ten minutes, he got to see one of
my kids, he asked about my dad (who’d been dead for a number of years, which
bummed SAH out because my dad loved SAH in paternal ways), and I told him I was
sorry about his grandma (I had heard she died a few years earlier).
Somehow, even though he was one of the smartest
people I ever knew, SAH ended up back where his mom was from, in New Jersey,
and whether due to personal demons or economics or racism or combination of all,
SAH was unemployed for some time. When I google his name now, a linkedin page
shows up that says he’s working in scrap metal due to long-term unemployment.
Knowing SAH, he wouldn’t have been happy about that, and put that on his
linkedin page as an aggressive call-out message to those who knew him. In that
perfect storm of instability, it sounds like his demons were allowed to
flourish, and drinking became a bigger problem. His younger sister was murdered,
and then he was found dead a few months later, health issues. I can speculate
it was related to drinking, but who the fuck cares? Specifics are not important
in my opinion. The mine field got him.
SAH lived on the southern end of Prince Edward County,
down the dirt road by where we all went to 5th grade, which had been a high
school at one time – Worsham School. It was a white school until 1963, when,
after Prince Edward was forced to desegregate, the school was one of four in
the county that taught African-American kids. They were called black then, as
black and white were the terms used, with white as the norm and black as the “color”.
I still struggle with how to type those classifications because they feel
clunky and I don’t want to perpetuate them, but they are an important part of
what makes us who we are, adding or removing mines to our individual paths
through the mine field. By the time we were in high school ourselves, Worsham
had been closed down due to being outdated and falling apart, and we often
broke into it on weekends to party (verb form) there. Many of the windows got
busted out one night while a member of our entourage was tripping in
destructive ways, and we did our best to add to the graffiti and trash inside,
while not trying to bust too much shit up so we didn’t ruin a good party spot.
Only in the mine fields do you eventually get to get fucked up and trash the
abandoned building where you used to go to school at.
I lived on that end of the county too, and when we
were in 5th grade, there were about ten of us maybe who arrived by schoolbus a
good 45 minutes earlier than everyone else. The rest of the kids came in on
shuttle buses from the centralized public school compound. The main school
wouldn’t be unlocked, so we’d hang out in the cafeteria (an external sort of
pre-fab building/doublewide trailer), where the old lady who ran the cafeteria
who lived nearby would give us free breakfast on the down low. This was
appreciated because all of us from that end of the county tended to be some
hungry ass kids. At the end of the day, after all the other kids had been
shuttled back to the central school compound, we again spent another 45 minutes
in our little ragged clique. Paper folding arts were big back then, making
ninja stars and footballs, so some fairly intense paper football games happened
in this evening period across not-necessarily-heavily used math book covers on
the floor. One of the other white kids in that little ragged clique came across
my social media feeds recently because I almost bought some firewood from his cousin.
That dude – my end of the county, same little group there at Worsham – has had
pretty steady series of drug and alcohol arrests – heroin and cocaine, and
social media pics show a heavily tatted up dude with the glazed eyes of one who
gives very little fuck about the rest of the world. He grew up not far from
where my youngest sister (and little nephew) lives now. Granted, this dude was
a lot more out of control than me back then, in fact I got kicked out a high
school football game one time covering for an act of setting off fireworks that
he actually did. But I got blamed by my bus driver (who hated me… I was the
only white boy on the bus, thus stuck out, and I guess earned his ire due to
that, but I honestly don’t know why that dude didn’t like me) who doubled as
sheriff security at football games, and one of the things my dad was adamant
about teaching me was don’t snitch.
SAH lived right there but didn’t get there early
with the rest of us kids. I think he probably walked there when the shuttle
buses came in. That other kid with the ongoing adult legal and drug issues who
played a thousand games of paper football with me, the mine field obviously got
him too. But why not me? That other kid was as white as me, and he’s straight
fucked (by society’s judgment). SAH was smarter than me, and way harder of a
worker in school, and he’s dead. Why did I survive the mine field and they didn’t?
Intelligence, privilege, skill… that can’t explain it, because there’s contrary
examples to each.
I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a combination of
all that, and a complicated storm of reasons with blind luck being a pretty big
ingredient as well. You can consider that blessings if you believe in
spirituality, or chance if you believe in scientific method. But I had a lot
less to do with it than standard American meritocracy theories would lead you
to believe. That’s not to say I didn’t have to work to survive, but I used a
lot more luck than work the first thirty-some years of my life.
The Worsham school, after we helped tear it up in
our teen years, and after it was left to rot for a few more, got renovated in a
weird example of rural gentrification. It’s loft apartments now, and the
website highlights the one year it was an African-American only school instead
of the previous 40 as all-white, or following 25 as singular 5th grade building
in overcrowded and underfunded rural school system. One of the insulting
aspects of gentrification is how derelict buildings are seen as salvageable and
worthy of repackaging as an entity normal society could appreciate, with the
right amount of investment. That other white kid who may or may not be in jail
again right now, and if not is likely battling the same demons on the outside
that will inevitably put him back in, does not have that benefit. He is just a
derelict human, unsalvageable in the eyes of normal society. SAH, despite his
natural intelligence, was not a good enough human resource, left to fester in
under- and unemployment. He wasn’t worthy of investment either. That’s the
culture we live in, and I don’t feel comfortable with it. I think that’s the
hardest part of the “why me?” when you’ve gotten through the mine field with
your dumb luck and ever-adjusting survivalism… I don’t feel comfortable coming
out on the other side. These people don’t feel like me or think like me. But
allegedly, I’ve made progress, just like that Worsham school that’s now
expensive (by that rural end of Prince Edward County’s standards) lofts. Every
time I drive by that place I want to burn it down. I’m not sure that feeling
will ever go away.
