by Carl Hart
CHAPTER 2
Before and After
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
—PHILIP LARKIN
When my mother returned from the hospital after the fight with my father, she seemed to recover rapidly. We saw her bandages and knew not to say anything. We hoped that was the end of it. But although the hammer fight was not their last one, my parents would separate and divorce not long afterward. Oddly, however, even when I thought that my mother had been murdered by my father, before she came back from the hospital, I don’t remember missing her or worrying about her.
Maybe I’ve just blocked it out because it was too painful; maybe it just came out in other ways. For example, in my family after my parents’ split, we gradually stopped calling her “Mom” or “mama.” In my teens, we started calling her “MH,” an appellation I’d given her after noting the way George Jetson of cartoon fame referred to his boss by using his initials.
Looking back, I think this was a sort of distancing, a wish to deny her the affectionate names others used for their mothers. Because in many ways, for much of my childhood, despite her best efforts, she just wasn’t there. After my parents broke up, my mother spent two and a half years in New York, away from all of her children. I now know that she left in search of higher-paying employment so that she could give us a better life. But back then, all I saw was that we were scattered among various relatives.
I’m sure I must have been upset that she was gone but it wasn’t something I verbalized. We never knew when she was going away and when she would come back. My sisters now say they felt like orphans. I realize that I did, too. But we didn’t share our feelings with each other then. I think I resented my mother for years because I couldn’t admit, even to myself, how hurt I’d been.
Already by age six, I had learned to hide my feelings as well as any vulnerability or need. I thought then that this was the only way to protect myself from further hurt, the only way I could properly be the man of the house. I’d begun compartmentalizing. That would turn out to be a critical skill for my emotional survival. To make it work, I wouldn’t even show most of my feelings to myself. I’m still struggling with the detrimental “side effects” of this response to my childhood in my relationships today.
I sometimes catch myself thinking that I have revealed too much personal information to someone I care about and start worrying about how it can be used against me at a later date. Often I recognize that my fears are ungrounded, but well-learned behaviors are difficult to change, whether they involve drug use or any other sort of emotional coping tool.
And when I look now at six-year-olds, I can’t help seeing how young and vulnerable children are at that age. I realize now that I must have been quietly devastated—but I thought then that I had to be hard. It was the only way I knew how to cope.
MH and Carl at a family reunion in the summer of 1978, about six years after they divorced.
However, I don’t want to blame or judge my parents: they faced severe challenges that I managed to avoid in my own early adulthood. Before either of them had reached the age of twenty-nine, my parents had had eight children. They’d scraped and saved and had bought a nice home together. Their parenting skills were limited by their upbringing and their education. My father, for example, had lost his dad to cancer by the time he was seventeen and had had only limited male guidance throughout his youth. Despite this, both of my parents were extremely hardworking and did what they thought was best for us. For years, my mom worked the graveyard shift as a nurse’s aide, doing as much as she could to support her kids. Unfortunately, the jobs for which she was considered didn’t typically pay a living wage.
In contrast, when I reached that age I had only one child that I knew about and was on the verge of receiving my PhD: I had resources at my disposal that they couldn’t even dream of. It would be easy to say that my parents made poor choices; the reality is that it is impossible to understand their experience and my early life without fully appreciating its context.
And so, putting aside any thoughts of missing my mom, I focused on wanting to be with my father when my parents first split. As a boy, my behavior was continually shaped by my family’s notion of masculinity, virtually from birth. For example, when I helped my father mow the lawn or fix the car, I’d get patted on the head or be given other types of encouragement. In behavioral psychology, this process is called reinforcement. The more immediate the reward or reinforcement* following the behavior, the more robust and frequent that behavior becomes in similar situations. And so I quickly learned that emulating my father was what I should do.
In contrast, I was encouraged to play with my sisters when I was very young, but this behavior was no longer reinforced as I got older. It wasn’t seen as an appropriately masculine activity for a growing boy. I gradually stopped doing it because this behavior wasn’t rewarded. This process is known as extinction. Behavior that was once reinforced but no longer produces praise or reward will eventually be discontinued and that’s what happened to my engagement in my sisters’ activities.
Similarly, while my sisters would be comforted and soothed by adults if they cried or expressed sadness as young children, my brothers and I were quickly shown by example or experience that displaying such vulnerability was not appropriate male behavior. If my sisters were emotionally expressive, that behavior was reinforced. But the boys in my family were actually punished for engaging in such behavior, which decreased the likelihood of us crying in similar situations. Like reinforcement, punishment that has a high probability of occurring immediately after the behavior is more effective. Punishment, of course, is the use of aversive experiences—like reprimands, spanking, or other ways of inflicting pain—to decrease behavior.
I didn’t know it then but I was being conditioned by the consequences of my behavior. Through the work of B. F. Skinner and others, I would later learn how those subtle and not-so-subtle reinforcements and punishments profoundly influence our actions. At the time, though, I just knew that what I had to do, what I wanted to do, was become a man. And the best way to do that was to watch and copy my namesake, Carl. I wanted to spend as much time with my father as I could, to get those rewards and avoid being punished, to try to become who I was meant to be. He treated me like I was the center of his world. He taught me how to mow a lawn, how to wash and repair a car, and when I wanted the much-coveted Daisy BB gun, he bought it. With a child’s unconditional love, I didn’t see any contradictions in idolizing the man who hit my mother and drove her away.
Also, I didn’t like some of the alternatives that faced me if my parents split up and I could not stay with my father. My aunt Louise—whom we called Weezy—could not have been happy being saddled with one or more of her sister’s children. When we did stay there—and I would ultimately do so for weeks at a time sporadically throughout my childhood—we felt like she would sometimes take her frustration out on us. For example, her children received preferential treatment. If there was a fight or dispute with our cousins, we rarely got the benefit of the doubt. My sister Joyce described feeling like Cinderella when she lived there, with a wicked stepmother and treacherous stepsisters. Even though some of the ways that Weezy treated us were undoubtedly driven by lack of money and being overwhelmed, that isn’t something that children can understand. All we saw was that we were not wanted.
Then there was my maternal grandmother’s place. At any given time, at least six grandchildren were staying in Grandmama’s Hollywood, Florida, residence, sleeping on thick blankets on the floor. My mom wasn’t the only one of her three full sisters to rely on her mother for long-term child care—but she certainly did it frequently. I’ve already mentioned that my oldest sister, Jackie, lived with my grandmother. My brother Gary, who was only seventeen months younger than me, also had a permanent home there. He was sent off to Gr
andmama’s even before my parents divorced. Though I was used to sharing my space with a half-dozen or more kids, her house didn’t feel like home to me; I didn’t feel welcomed. In fact, I was far from her favorite grandchild.
Instead, I experienced some distinct hostility from my maternal grandmother. She was a tough countrywoman who had been raised on a farm in Eutawville, South Carolina. My mother grew up there, too, deep in one of the most rural areas of the South. My grandmother and grandfather had packed up their family and moved to Florida in 1957, just before my mom turned seventeen. That was five years after Willie-Lee, my mother’s then-fifteen-year-old brother, was kicked to death by a mule. My grandmother just couldn’t take farm life anymore. Still, she’d spent virtually all of her life before that working the fields and facing the prejudice from both whites and blacks that comes from having dark skin, blackened even further by work in the sun. A big woman, five foot eleven and heavy, she kept her long, graying hair in two braids. Her natural skin tone was the same deep brown as mine.
While Grandmama always made sure we had a place to stay, some of my most vivid memories center on her telling me that I was just like my father. Like him, she said, I was ill-mannered, stubborn, selfish, and rude. Like him, she repeated, I’d never amount to anything. Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a mother would see the man who beat her daughter and ultimately abandoned her with eight young children as a bad guy. I couldn’t see that, though, as a child. I just felt her rejection of me. Much as I tried to deny it, it hurt.
And what I also sensed was that Grandmama—like most of white America and, sadly, some blacks—seemed to link my father’s bad behavior with his blackness. Someone as dark as him could never have been good enough for her daughter, she felt, even though her own skin was dark. Her Mary could do better. Since my skin was black like my father’s, that literally colored our relationship.
Much has been written about how racism often makes its victims into perpetrators, how it is impossible to live in a world that hates people with your skin tone and not have this seep into your own dealings with black and white. When I later read Nietzsche’s line that “whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster,” I knew exactly what he meant. Battling twisted prejudices can twist and distort you, often without your awareness of it. Throughout my early childhood, I saw over and over how my grandmother favored the lighter-skinned children: praising them, while punishing or ignoring the dark ones. The conditioning was insidious.
It’s not clear to me that she was conscious of this behavior, but it surely reflected the way she had been treated. We were all molded by these attitudes and behaviors before we could even name them. As I’m sure is true for my grandmother as well, I can’t even describe my own earliest experiences of racism—it was so pervasive that it’s like trying to recall how you learned to speak. You know there was a time before you had language, but it’s impossible to remember or to delineate particular incidents or to know what it was like to not know.
Nonetheless, when I sat down with my sister Beverly to research this book, she showed me just how deep it went. In my family, Beverly and I have the darkest skin—and there was nothing subtle about the way the darker children were treated in my grandmother’s home. They called us “blackie” or “darkie.” Sometimes Beverly was “teased” that way even at home. I would always shrug it off but the tears in Beverly’s eyes as she recalled those words made me realize how much it had hurt everyone. Our behavior is shaped over time by sequences and patterns of reinforcers and punishers, often without much conscious awareness on our part of how we are being affected. Even racist behavior is learned this way.
For most of my early childhood, however, I myself had little direct experience with white people, since I was growing up in a black neighborhood that they rarely visited. But I did see how the children of the people my mom worked for casually called her by her first name—a way we would never be so rude as to address an adult with whom we had not negotiated such intimacy. And I also saw how my parents and other adults in the neighborhood responded to their power and how cautious and cowed they could be in its presence.
One of my worst memories is seeing my mother break down and cry when confronted by an unsympathetic white bureaucrat about our food stamp allowance, when I was nine or ten. We clearly needed the assistance: I could see how bare the cabinets and fridge were. Yet this woman acted as though my mother were trying to steal money from her personally. At home, MH was tough. She often stood up to my father, who was much bigger and stronger. She never showed much emotion beyond anger about it. But this unyielding bureaucrat’s power and petty condescension and my mother’s powerlessness in the face of it just broke her.
Indeed, although I don’t remember feeling sad about my mother’s absence, I’m sure I missed her and was angry that she wasn’t around. I was frightened by my parents’ fighting, felt powerless over the way I was treated, and was enraged by things like the biases I saw in the world and at my grandmother’s house. In my family, one of the few feelings it was okay for males to express was anger—and to do that properly, you needed to have power or else you would be crushed. When I was little, I got crushed a lot: by my mother, aunts, sisters, and cousins. So that was a lesson I learned early as well.
Although I had carefree and childish fun, too, much of my childhood was spent securing status and power in any way I could. If it didn’t give you clout or influence, if it didn’t make you cool or make you laugh, I wasn’t interested. That focus shaped my youth in many complicated and often conflicting ways. As I look back, it’s painful because this struggle for respect ultimately marred or even took the lives of many of my peers. I know now that childhood shouldn’t be dominated by a preoccupation with status. But to some extent, mine was. This obsession was another key survival strategy that molded me.
So did the stark contrast in my world before and after my parents split. When they were together, the fighting was terrifying, but we lived in a nice neighborhood of young working-class families. It now reminds me of the idealized suburb of TV’s The Wonder Years, only with black people. The homes were neat, with manicured lawns and flat one-story houses of the psychedelic-faded-to-pastel colors people seem to favor near beaches. Ours was a particularly lurid aqua.
The smell of freshly cut grass brings me back there even now, my dad taking pride in our yard with fruit trees—lemons, limes, oranges, Chinese plums, some belonging to us, others in the neighbors’ yards—out back. Our lawn and yard were always extremely well kept, though the chaos of a family with so many young children meant that toys would sometimes be scattered about. My father was especially fond of our lime tree, which grew fruits so large, they looked more like green oranges. He loved to show off those huge limes. Fresh citrus fruits like that remind me of that time before it all changed.
Before the divorce, Christmases and birthdays brought the Big Wheels and Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots that we boys coveted; after the divorce, you knew not even to ask for those kinds of presents. Before, our neighbors were mostly intact families, people with decent jobs, adults who believed in the American dream (at least the black version) and had children with similar aspirations. Our neighborhood was relatively safe. We had the occasional break-ins and robberies but no gunfire. Its values were those of the mainstream, that broad swath of mainly white middle-class America that social scientists and politicians use as a measuring stick and try to evoke as a cultural touchstone.
True, one of my uncles had been shot to death while sitting on the toilet in the bathroom of a club, an innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that was unusual and it happened far away from our home. That kind of violence didn’t haunt our neighborhood. While we didn’t live in the Miami of postcard-perfect beaches and Art Deco hotels, our block was clean and tidy. It was occupied by hardworking strivers, the type who sought above all to be respectable.
Afterward, however, although my mom kept us out of the
actual projects until 1980 when I was in high school, we moved about once a year and often lived in neighborhoods that were dominated by entrenched poverty and the knot of problems associated with it.
Of course, before, there were also those fights and the fear and the running to the neighbors to call the police. Before, the chaos for us was mainly in our home; after, it was everywhere. And no one bothered to explain it all to us. There was no sitting the children down and telling us, “Mommy and Daddy still love you but we can’t live together.” My parents weren’t much on explanations in general. They lived in a world where you learned by example, not by explanation. You were told what to do, not why, and that was it. You figured it out or you looked like a fool. There wasn’t time for childish questions or wondering.
Consequently, when I learned later about research comparing the spare verbal landscape of American childhood poverty to the richer linguistic precincts of the middle class, it really resonated with me. The classic study by Todd Risley and Betty Hart compared the number of words heard by children of professional, working-class, and welfare families, focusing specifically on the way parents talked to their kids.
It was painstaking research: the researchers followed babies in forty-two families from age seven months to three years. The families were drawn from three socioeconomic classes: middle-class professionals, working-class people, and people on welfare. The researchers spent at least thirty-six hours with each family, recording their speech and observing parent-children interactions. They counted the number of words spoken to the child and described the content of the conversations.
