This is another excerpt from my journey with the tapes. I taped one dozen tapes. Sadly one, tape number 10, was stolen so I only had eleven to transcribe. This excerpt is from the eleventh tape. Today, February 8th is father’s birthday. He would have been 94this year. He has […]
Transcribing and redacting the tapes has given me a more nuanced sense of not only who my father was but of who I am as a second-generation immigrant of West Indian heritage, as a breed, as a black woman, and as an offspring of artist parents. Of course, my father […]
When my father was a child he gave his Kingston, Jamaica born mother the title of duchess. He told me it was because of the stately way she walked down Harlem avenues, the sharp way she dressed and one particular hat she wore which was like a hat that Grace […]
Music was a foundation of growing up. I remember my father building a speaker when I was quite young and then taking me to the Sea of Music record store to buy (used) records. He bought a musical for me (I think it was West Side Story) and some jazz […]
When on his way to the OAU my father received the suggestion to do a story about the breaking down of the East African community. This meant going to Tanzania and Kenya. Uganda was chaotic at the time and not accessible. My father left Gabon for Kenya to begin the […]
My father made multiple trips to the African continent traveling north, east, south, and west. His first trip was to Algeria and Morocco. His second trip started in Gabon in 1977. He was there for the conference of the Organization for African Unity (OAU). That part of the trip did […]
When I was a child when I thought of Africa I was pretty steeped in racist clichés . I had seen endless pictures of nearly naked Africans dancing around gigantic cast iron pots with trembling white missionaries cooking inside. I knew nothing of Benin Bronzes or Zimbabwe Ruins / I […]
The story below is one of those stories that my father intermittently told my brother and I while we were growing up. We loved the idea of gangs as protectors, of clubs organized around mutual survival, and I loved the idea that feuding factions could find common cause and move forward. […]
My father first visited Berkeley when he was a yeoman in the Navy. Less than a year after my brother was born in Chicago, the three of them took a train to Berkeley to begin their California life. I was born in Berkeley, but that city was too small for […]
An obvious question for my Dad was what was his road to writer and how and why did he find his home in non-fiction. As a second-generation writer I had my father, god father and many of my parents’ friends as shining beacons. But my father was from a different […]
