As you might suspect, it’s mainly the mothers who come to the parent meetings and support their sons through the demanding Scholars program. Not too many fathers are that involved.
One young man in the program put his head in his hands and searched his memory when asked about his father. “I know his name, I just can’t remember it,” he said, screwing up his face in concentration. He is one of a few young men in the program who have never even met their fathers.
Another scholar, Quameen, eighteen, is a beefy 245-pound football player with a confident smile. Yet he didn’t used to like what he saw when he looked in the mirror. He resembles his dad, in the round shape of his face and his chocolate skin. For years, he wrestled with the fact that he looked so much like the man he hated.
Quameen didn’t see much of his father in his early years. He stayed in school and kept out of trouble, with no help from Dad.
Now the idea of creating a relationship with his father “is like building a house on water. It’ll never work. We can never get there,” he said.
As a young boy raised in a house of women—a mom and four sisters—Quameen recognized as a teenager that he needed a man’s influence. “If you were raised like I was, you might take on women’s tendencies: catch an attitude, get moody. It gets hard because you don’t have that father to be that extra voice. Point-blank, a woman can’t raise a man. She just can’t put that killer instinct into you like your father can,” he explained.
So he went in search of male role models. He walked up to the corner and sold marijuana for a while. “Only reason I went up there to the corner was I was looking for somebody to be like and that’s all there was around. I was a nickel-and-dime hustler. I sold five-dollar and ten-dollar bags. But I found out I was smarter than that. My mother didn’t raise a fool. Even the guys on the corner told me I was too smart to be standing out there with them.”
He knows now that it was an immature phase. “I didn’t realize the seriousness of it. It was like a game to me. Soon as they say a certain word, you gotta run because the police might be coming. It was a game of who could sell out the fastest.” Luckily for him, he never ran into any trouble with the law before deciding the street hustle wasn’t for him.
Now he hangs with college-bound boys through the Scholars program, and he’s found a mentor, his mother’s ex-boyfriend, who encourages him to stay focused on his schoolwork. “Education is a small price to pay for a lifetime of pleasure” is one of his mentor’s favorite sayings. A high school senior, Quameen hopes to find a career in the communications field, maybe as a radio host.
The hardest lessons to learn without a father, Quameen said, are about sex and love. “A dad is supposed to give you your first condom. My mother attempted to talk to me about sex, but I don’t want to talk about it with her. That’s what the fathers are there for. When you don’t have your father and you don’t want to talk about sex with your mother, then who do you talk to? I went to the wrong people about it at first.”
He had to undo the messages that urban culture sent him about women, and teach himself right and wrong. “At first, I was under the impression that you ain’t no man until you had sex,” he said. He had a lot of friends who sought sex constantly and carelessly. Some became fathers before they got out of high school.
Yet he knew that he didn’t want to go that route. All four of his sisters became pregnant in high school. He watched each of them repeat his mom’s pattern as a single mother. “I’ve seen the struggles and hard times they have to go through. I wouldn’t want to put a woman through that,” Quameen says. “My mother and my sisters are the five strongest black women I know today. All of them have raised children without help. That’s hard.”
So he found a steady girlfriend, and although they’re now in a long-distance relationship, he’s faithful to her. “I don’t do anything to people I don’t want them to do to me.”
Quameen has navigated his way through the most common pitfalls and is well on his way to college. He’s surrounded himself with positive messages—the Scholars program, the football team—and decided to let the distractions alone. He had the good sense to look past the influences on the corner, and kept searching until he found better role models.
WILL
One of Sampson’s closest friends while growing up in Newark was a guy named Will, who lived in the projects. Will’s parents separated when Will was only a few months old. His dad found time for running the streets, drinking, and heavy drugs, but never had any time for his son. There was nothing unusual in this—that was the pattern in our Newark neighborhoods. But as any little boy knows, it doesn’t feel good to be neglected by your father.
When Will was young, he occasionally ran into his father while visiting his paternal grandmother. He got birthday cards faithfully every year from his father, but they were always signed in his grandmother’s handwriting.
His mother tried to fill in the gaps and rear him on her own. A strict mom, she set firm rules in hopes of protecting Will from the problems that plague fatherless boys. As a youngster, he was always the one who had to be in the house by nine P.M. when everybody else stayed out until ten or eleven. She kept him busy with sports, trying to prevent him from having idle time on his hands. “I was always walking through here with a basketball when the other kids were stealing cars,” he remembered. It touched him to see how much she sacrificed. She never broke down in front of him, but sometimes he could hear her crying softly in her bedroom when she couldn’t afford to buy him new sneakers or something else he needed.
” I give my mother all the credit, she was great,” he said. “But she couldn’t teach me the toughness of being a man.”
While hanging out in the streets as a teenager, he made the typical mistakes. Without a father in his life, he relied on his friends to give him the scoop on women and birth control.
It’s such a familiar story that it’s easy to predict what happened next: Will conceived a child with his girlfriend before he graduated from high school.
But that’s where the predictability ends in this story.
Realizing that it’s natural for most men to copy their father’s parenting style, whether it was good or bad, Will made a conscious decision not to go down that road. For him, it wasn’t difficult. “I never had my dad there for me so I knew I could be a better dad than that.” He knew he had to “man up.” He told himself, “I created this baby and I need to take care of it, no matter what.”
It meant that he had to make some drastic changes. By age seventeen, he had left school, gotten a job at a psychiatric hospital, and rented an apartment, and was supporting his girlfriend and their baby daughter, Asia. He couldn’t afford a car so he commuted to work on the train and the bus. He felt alone because his friends were still enjoying their happy-go-lucky teen years. “It was a lot to swallow,” he admitted. “When my friends were hanging out, I couldn’t go have fun. I had to go buy Pampers and milk.”
Breaking out of the unhealthy patterns he sees all around him hasn’t been easy. When his daughter was young, he watched how many of his friends with kids neglected their families, and he struggled mightily against the desire to run with his old crowd. It took him a while to realize that what his friends were doing was selfish: “They would rather run the streets and leave the baby in the house with the mother.”
For Will, it helped to remember how unloved he felt by his father. “I make sure I see my daughter every day. That’s something I didn’t have,” he said.
Eventually he split up with his daughter’s mother, but he has remained a committed father to Asia.
Will, now thirty-three, married two years ago and has three young sons. He is the picture of stability. His wife’s father helped him get a good job as a chief chemical operator making antacids and antiperspirants. He still lives in Newark, only five minutes from the housing projects where he grew up, but now Will has a three-bedroom house with a finished basement and a yard.
His successes as a husband a
nd father are huge accomplishments, considering that Will almost never glimpsed any happy marriages when he was growing up. Yet he made up his mind that he wouldn’t walk away from his commitments. “I feel like I’m doing good, although there’s always room to do better. I’m a Mr. Mom type. I’ll do the laundry, pick the kids up from school; I take care of it all, it doesn’t matter.”
His fourteen-year-old daughter, Asia, is Sam’s goddaughter. Will is an affectionate, involved dad who chaperones Asia’s field trips and still calls her his “baby girl,” although she’s now five-foot-nine. Her achievements at school are a testament to the power of having an involved father. She makes good grades, and her teachers speak highly of her. In eighth grade, she headed the school’s robotics team. Although she’s tall and breathtakingly beautiful, she isn’t fixated on her appeal to boys.
Perhaps that self-confidence is the biggest gift that her attentive dad has given her. Will admits it gives him a heart attack when Asia wears what he calls her “where’s the rest of it?” outfits—yet he trusts her when she goes out. “Don’t let temptation take you where you don’t want to go,” he has often told her.
At age seventeen, Will told himself to man up. It’s the kind of thing a father should say to his son, but Will didn’t have a dad and he didn’t allow himself to use that as an excuse, either. Although he didn’t have a role model, he’s certainly become one by raising sons and a daughter who are emotionally complete and fully equipped for the world.
Chapter 5
GEORGE
What I Know Best
IT’S NO SMALL TASK to teach ourselves to become men without a role model. Sam, Rameck, and I banged our heads against the wall so many times that it’s a wonder our ears aren’t still ringing. It’s important for men who came up this way to pass along their hard-earned knowledge. We asked ourselves, what is the best advice we could offer to those in the same circumstance, forced to navigate their way to manhood without a father? These are the bread crumbs we leave for you. Learn them, live them, and then pass them down to someone else.
Get your education. Yes, how you look is important, but too many kids prize their appearance over more substantive things. Education can let you be in control of your life. Even if nobody else around you is thinking about tomorrow, don’t let them dictate your future. Set your goals and achieve them. Look into colleges and find out how to access scholarships and financial aid.
Use the buddy system. Hang with the friends who have solid goals, not with the ones who will steer you in the wrong direction.
Find a mentor. Better yet, find more than one. Identify the people in your community who are doing positive things and ask for their help and advice. And never let the fear of embarrassment keep you from asking the questions that will help you unlock success.
Think before you act. When you can, walk away from confrontation.
Don’t have unprotected sex if you’re not ready to be a father. Recognize that when you lay down with a girl, it’s a huge responsibility. Young men chasing after an orgasm have brought too many babies into this world that they have no intention of taking care of.
Show respect to women. Never mind what the songs and music videos say. Whenever we see a man mistreating a woman, we need to challenge that.
Be an individual with your own identity. Don’t fall victim to negative peer pressure or temptation. Stay away from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.
Stay busy. Keep yourself occupied, especially during summer breaks. Sign up at the local boys and girls club, or become a leader in your church youth group. Introduce yourself to someone in a career that interests you, and ask if you can accompany them to work. Find out where the internships are in your community. Your free time isn’t something to be thrown away on video games. Take control over it and commit time to shaping your dream into reality. Odds are that you’ll be recognized for it. Opportunities naturally seem to come to young people who show some ambition.
Learn how to give back. Instead of complaining about the problems in your community, donate your time to do something about them. Volunteer your time at an after-school program, or help raise funds to buy more basketballs for your local recreation center. The true reward is in the overwhelming good you feel in reaching back and helping others.
SECTION TWO
SAMPSON
Chapter 1
SAMPSON DAVIS
The Beginning
TO THIS DAY, I’m grateful to The Cosby Show. When I was a kid, it allowed me to dream.
Back then, I didn’t have any personal contact with people who were doctors and lawyers. Families like that lived far away, in the safe suburbs, and kids from my rugged Newark neighborhood couldn’t even catch a glimpse of that world. But the Huxtables never turned me away.
I loved looking into the center of this TV family and seeing a father there. Cliff Huxtable always knew what was going on under his roof. He made sure Rudy kept her promise to go to dance rehearsal, he helped Vanessa search frantically for a missing history paper, and he always steered flighty Denise back to reality. He was the kind of dad who passed male traditions on to son Theo, even if they were silly rituals like the Christmas episode where they struggled to put up the holiday lights.
Cliff and Clair fascinated me. They touched tenderly, they laughed. Together, they supported their children’s ambitions and pushed them to reach even higher. Their brownstone in Brooklyn seemed like a laboratory for life lessons: they gave their kids advice, then stood aside and let them make it on their own.
Those Thursday nights spent watching Cosby on our basement couch opened my eyes. But when the sitcom went off, my brief escape ended.
My world didn’t look anything like that.
One of my Christmas memories is the year that my father pulled a gun on my mom. I was about six years old, and I remember it happened on a day when every one of my five siblings was at home. My sisters and mother were in the kitchen fixing a holiday meal. Nobody can remember what started it, but Pop definitely had been drinking. He didn’t usually drink heavily, but when he did, you could count on the fact that some sparks would ignite his daily conversations at home.
I remember hearing my parents scuffle in the kitchen, and it spilled out to the living room, where my sisters were peeling potatoes. It got so bad that Pop went upstairs and got a gun. He came downstairs waving it and yelling. Everything happened very fast, but it will always be a frozen moment in my memory. My father stood on the third step, pointing the barrel of the gun at my mother. “I’ll shoot you, woman. I will kill you.” I stood there with my brothers Carlton and Andre, not believing our eyes. I tried to cry but couldn’t. All I could see was Moms dying and my father going to jail.
My mother stood still but taunted him: “Go ahead, shoot me,” she said. If you’ve never heard your mom sound like Clint Eastwood, believe me—it’s not a good feeling. I knew this was it. All the previous arguments had built up to this day, the day where it would all come to a climactic end. I didn’t want my mom to die. Please, God, don’t let him pull the trigger. My older sisters jumped up and stood in the middle of the battle. My little brother Carlton was crying hysterically and my older brother Andre was shouting, “Stop! Why don’t y’ all stop?” I just stared. Is this how life is supposed to be?
Then it ended. Dad lowered the gun and retreated upstairs.
MINE WASN’T THE KIND of house where you could learn a lot about conflict resolution. My mom picked relentlessly at my father. She’d rag on him for coming home late, for not being able to wake up in the morning. Anybody who knows my mother, Ruthener Davis, knows that she is a self-determined, strong-willed person who follows her own drummer. Moms is a homemaker, and I think a lot of her fights with my dad stemmed from the fact that she felt hemmed in by serving thanklessly all the people crammed into our small house on a trouble-plagued Newark street. Still, my always-supportive Moms is my hero, and I’ve watched her show superhuman strength in dealing with the tough realities of her life. She is in essence
a country girl, raised on a South Carolina farm and transplanted (with some difficulty) to Newark. She’s been an early riser since girlhood, when she had to feed chickens, and to this day, she rises at four A.M. to sweep clean the streets of her neighborhood. “I’ve just got to keep busy,” she says. For decades after she left the South, she insisted on using a washboard to do our laundry by hand and hanging our clothes outside to dry. My dad found some of this behavior annoying and sometimes shouted at her, “You still got those old ways!”
It’s not hard for me to put myself in my father’s shoes. His daily life had to be hard, supporting a family of eight on one small salary. My father, Kenneth Davis, grew up in South Carolina, served in the army during World War II, and probably had every intention of taking part in the American Dream when he returned home and married my mother. She was a pretty and petite fifteen-year-old he met at a country carnival. “Breathtaking” is what my father said the first time he laid eyes on my mother. From the moment they said “Hi,” he knew she was the one he would marry.
They lived in a small South Carolina town called Hemingway for about ten years and had two kids together—my brother Kenneth Jr. and my sister Roselene—before deciding to join the great migration north in the early 1950s. In Newark, Pop found steady employment fueling planes at Butler Aviation, where he worked for thirty-five years until he retired. Moms played the role of housewife and nurturer for our family, which was expanding rapidly. Four more children arrived after the move to Newark: Fellease, Andre, me, and then Carlton. In 1968, five years before I was born, Dad used the GI bill to purchase our wood-frame house on Ludlow Street, a nice area at the time. But once crack entered the scene in the 1980s like a thunder-clap explosion, our neighborhood seemed to sink into despair, under attack from within. Crack pulled apart many of the families living near us. Women, who traditionally served as our community’s backbone, lost their maternal instincts once they fell under the spell of the white powder. Not since the riots destroyed Newark in the 1960s had we witnessed such vast devastation.
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