Random memories of a 21st century Cimarrón

I

come from a family of teachers, storytellers, artists, and activists—wise people, strong people, respected people, gumbo and con gris people, Black people. The eldest of seven, I was born in Harlem and raised in the South Bronx. I’m a project kid, and New York to the bone.

As a child, I was at once bookish, curious and, often, recklessly adventurous—“hard-headed,” as the Old Folks would say. And I probably earned the many spankings received for my antics—though I never doubted the motivations of the adults of my multi-national extended family. I knew that I was much-loved.

My father’s people are Jamaicans, by way of Santiago de Cuba. His father left Cuba in the early 1900s, touching down in Savannah GA and Charleston SC. My father, Harold, was a WW2 vet who had served overseas as an NCO in an all-black MP battalion. Honorably discharged in 1946, he moved to NYC where his dream of attending art school was blocked by an Army benefits counselor who advised him that there was no such thing as a Black graphic artist—however, he could sign up for training as a meat cutter. Likewise, when the GI Bill was paving pathways to suburban home ownership for White veterans, my father was repeatedly denied a mortgage loan until Urban Renewal stalled in the late 1960s and banks were suddenly anxious to make federally-insured loans to anyone willing to buy in the devastated South Bronx. Harold died in 1991.

My mother, Doris, was born in New Orleans, the only child of a divorced, single-mother who worked as a domestic until well into her 80s. They moved to NYC at the tail-end of WW2. Mom was proud of her Creole-Cherokee heritage and, with her long dark hair and café con leche skin, was often mistaken for Latina. She smiled easily, was a devoted jazz fan, chain-smoked Winstons and enjoyed her evening beer. Mom invented tasty fusions of Cuban-Creole food. Doris also kept the sadness of multiple miscarriages that even her strong Catholic faith could not salve. She died in 1977, of heart failure, not yet 50—I was 28, and my baby sister was all of 10-years-old.

My Great Aunt, Mrs. Enola Lewis, “Aunt Sissy,” owned a brownstone apartment building on W.117th St., just off Lenox Ave. She gathered a broad, extended family of Black and Brown people from many parts of the states, the Caribbean, and Central America around her. Steaming dishes of gumbo, red beans, and jambalaya were the medium of engagement and bonding. She also tended the only tree on the block—protecting it fiercely against the presumptions of the odd wino or stray dog. Aunt Sissy was also a neigh-borhood activist in her own right, and a veteran of the Harlem Rent Strikes of the 1930s, raising funds for the Scottsboro Boys defense, and campaigning for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. the first Black man elected to New York City Council. She was a founding member of her neighborhood’s block organization, and was a well-respected fixture in the community. She came out of retirement in 1976 to resume active membership as the street slid into serious decline. Aunt Sissy passed quietly the following year.

My earliest memory of being Black was as a six-year-old in 1955, when they dragged the mutilated body of Emmett Till, a Black Chicago teenager, from that Mississippi swamp. I found the photos of his autopsy and funeral in a magazine laying innocuously under a coffee table in my parent’s livingroom. Till had been brutally beaten and murdered by a group of white men because he was young and foolish, and had broken one of their most sacred cultural taboos: he dared speak to a White woman. Till’s death was meant as an object-lesson to other Black men on knowing one’s “place” in White America. My accidental encounter with those horrifying images shook the world I knew, and my childhood ended, abruptly.

I was full of questions that made most of the adults around me visibly uncomfortable: why did they do this to a boy? Why has no one been punished? And could they ever do something like that to me, or to my two baby brothers? Fortunately, “Aunt Sissy” listened intently and, rather than offering vague assurances, helped me to transform fear and dread into the righteous anger and dogged determination she’d brought with her from rural Louisiana at the turn of the last century. “Honey,” she’d say, “You can die fighting—or just lay down and die—but no one ever leaves this world alive.”

The 60s were a period of widespread social ferment—a time when most African Americans were just getting used to the notion that “Black Was Beautiful.” I quickly tired of just watching the black-and-white TV images of peaceful protesters confronting firehoses and police dogs, or footage of the not-so-peaceful Long Hot Summers bringing down fire and fierce police retaliation, or the many grainy newspaper photos of young men shipped home in flag-draped coffins from someplace called “Vietnam.” I was age 16 in 1965 when I heard the call to join this battle, and I’ve been fighting on its many fronts ever since.

Some people might consider me a curious throwback to an earlier time, asking why I keep going after 40 years of constant, uphill struggle, rewarded by numerous setbacks. For me, the answer is deceptively simple: I’m never going to get any Whiter— besides, you can’t defeat someone who refuses to stay down and submit (I think Fidel said something to that effect). Moreover, I have the example set by our Ancestors, particularly the daring “Cimarrón,” to sustain me.

The schoolbook history of the Western Hemisphere papers over many acts of wholesale kidnapping, terrorism and genocide—shameful episodes that have shaped what too many people consider “natural” arrangements of wealth, status and power. But if one cares to listen, history also tells powerful stories of resistance to this aggression, oppression, and exploitation. From the earliest days of the European invasion, there have been stories of the Cimarrón—Africans in the Americas who escaped bondage in Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Also called “Maroons,” the Cimarrón bonded with Native peoples to establish free communities high in the mountains, or in the deepest swamps—and then waged war on their former masters to defend their freedom and liberate those left behind. More than anything, the story of the Cimarrón challenges the outlandish myth that the Americas were carved from Wilderness by the heroic deeds and sacrifices of White Soldiers, White Settlers, and White Statesmen. The Cimarrón never compromised, never avoided their duty to the people, and never conceded defeat. Today, the Cimarrón live on in the hearts and deeds of everyone willing to take up the struggle for justice, dignity, and respect.

Like its namesake, Cimarrón seeks to establish a liberated zone engaging a free-thinking people in wide-ranging critical dialogue on contemporary global politics, popular culture, and issues related to social identity. “No one is ‘free’ until all are freed” was the sacred promise of the Cimarrón. And we intend to honor that pledge. — Cimarrón Ω