Cedar Rapid Retreat

While my trip to Cedar Rapids to truck driving school did not reap the results intended, on reflection I can share the general premise that it was an valuable learning experience that I will have more to say about as time moves forward. Some things take a certain amount of percolation before I really know what I saw and heard and more importantly—what it means.

I can tell you where I was when the news flashed across the television screen interrupting the Rio Olympics about the race riots in Milwaukee earlier this week. I was the only White man in a room full of angry Black men from cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson and Mobile. All the air left the room and suddenly it got very hot, very fast. I felt my face blush and I felt every pair of eyes turn on me and that every Black face was looking at me while I stared intently at the television monitor, not daring to make eye contact with anyone.

I just sat there immovable and I let them easy into their pain. Every White man in America—especially Donald Trump—got called names I have rarely ever used. Walls were punched and several times so many people were talking at the same time at the top of their voices—everyone but me—that I felt less like a friend welcomed to the party as a forgotten adversary they would get back to beating later. That went on for about a half hour and then Elijah, age 24 from Mobile, Alabama, remembered me, turned and asked me point blank in his loud Southern city dialect:

“Fool, whatchu got to say for yourself about this here?” He pointed to the television screen.

I swallowed hard and followed the end of his finger to see the violent scene being captured on film in Milwaukee. I drew from history and I said, “Malcolm X would say it's ‘chickens coming home to roost.’"

Well, the tension broke immediately and all the feelings of becoming the roast evaporated. One man—a tall man with a natural hairstyle complete with a hair pick said, “Hey ya’ll, Kentucky said something smart.” And the conversation really started and more importantly my education began with those men one at a time telling me about their lives and why they made the choice to be at truck driving school.

To the last man, they came to stay in their children's lives and to escape a future in prison.

These are men younger than 30, mostly with multiple baby mamas, and most of them had not ever been married. Many of them had children with White women that had tried to eject them from their children’s lives, and more than a few had moved to places like Wyoming and Arizona to take the child out of physical reach of their father.

I learned about Jay, who is 22 and has a baby six months old that he has held once. He had already been in jail for pot and would still be there except he got a parole officer that worked on his behalf and had even joined him in Cedar Rapids for truck driving training at his own expense. He planned to get his CDL and return home to be a part of his daughter’s life in a way he wasn’t quite sure of since he had never had a father present in his own life. If he and his parole officer kept to the court appointed checklist, he could be completely released in three years having served two and got his career and family on track.

I’m not sure how Tuffer is spelled but that’ll be my best guess, but it could be Tougher or Toofer. He is in Cedar Rapids because he never learned to read in school in Memphis because he’s dyslexic, but got passed forward because the teachers weren’t really into their jobs. He got some help learning to deal with his disability in prison after being caught robbing a liquor store on a gang initiation. He is going to drive a truck for “a million miles and make a home wherever he's at” so he is not tempted by gangs in Memphis.

One by one, their stories resonated with me and I saw a part of America I would never have visited, and had I visited I would have never seen. These men are from an America hidden to most of us. I picked up on a few common threads and slowly grew brave enough to ask questions. One thing I asked was, “How many of you were raised by people other than your parents?” And many were. Many had aunts, older sisters, grandmothers. Few had uncles, older brothers, or grandfathers. Who did they admire more? Al Sharpton or Ben Carson? Neither had a fan in that room. They listened to Tupac Shakur but to the last man hated, despised and pissed on the name of Kanye West. They each respected President Obama. They also liked men like Jimmy Fallon and Jon Stewart but looked down on Kevin Hart as a half-sized Eddie Murphy wannabe.

After all the stories had been shared, I walked around and I shook hands with every Black hand in the room and noticed that Elijah had grown sullen and quiet in the corner of the room. He sat on an end table and picked at a wart on his right hand. I nodded in his direction and asked the question, “Elijah, what about you?”

In his deplorable English he began telling me about his cousin Lambert that got pinched selling cocaine two weeks prior. He faces life in prison without parole until he is about sixty years old and Lambert was Elijah’s supplier. He explained how he had spent a few sleepless nights in hiding until he knew that Lambert wasn’t going to roll over on him to get an easier sentence. He came out of that experience, turned from making approximately $10,000 a month to $400 a week in truck driving school.

What was the overall lesson I learned?

These are men that given the chance made good choices of economic mobility, to improving their standing in life, to improving their quality as parents, to everything from learning to read when it isn’t easy to rebuilding their living from an exceptionally good illegal life to a lean but legal living on the road.

And I noticed the common threads in our stories. Every man in the room missed their fathers. Some had memories, some didn’t. Every single person in that room had a father that left them too soon. Myself included. Every man in that room had a strong maternal, god-fearing mother-figure in their life whether it was biological or not. And they talked about going to church with her and being taught from the Bible when they were younger and wishing they had never strayed from ‘the goot way Auntie lived,’ as one man expressed it. They each wanted a future with their families, lives being good citizens, living within the law. They all respected the police but all had been stopped, searched and some arrested without breaking the law. A few claimed they had done time from being framed by policeman.

So, my trip might have not been for myself after all. I may have traveled all that way to be in that room at that moment when news of more loss of life came to us; one timid White face in a sea of angry Black ones. In many places at that moment, fires lit the skies, men and women wrought additionally unnecessary violence in retaliation. In our moment, I learned to look on these reformed hoods as brothers.

The time came to tell my story. I told them the similarities I shared with them. And I told them about growing up never being accosted by law enforcement, that I had friends that I trusted completely with their jobs, and I was even Facebook friends with the chief of police in my small Kentucky town. I told them about my church raising and how people of my grandparents generation referenced Black people. And I told them my affection for the Voting Rights Act and my work at Berea College. Most of them were easily sold on my solidarity but Elijah held out to the very end. He sat on the end table and then at the end he asked me why he didn’t “beat my mo-foing ass” just to make himself feel better.

I just shrugged and I said for him to go ahead. If he felt in his heart that was the future he wanted for himself, his family, and Black people, that I would not resist. He stood up, clenched his fists, and breathed in and out very fast. I clinched in a moment of fear as he walked toward me and extended his hand. “Brother,” he said with a big tear sliding down his cheek.

I affirm that this is a true occasion. It all happened just like I’ve described it. When I “washed out” and told them I would be leaving because of my vision issues, they took me out to Arby’s on Monday night. Once again, I was the lone White person in a sea of large Black men walking the sidewalks of Cedar Rapids to supper at Arby’s. Tyler, one of the men, set the group off into a gale of laughter saying, “If we had suits, we’d look like the mo-foing Secret Service.” They each laid a single dollar on the counter and told me to order. I knew what that meant for them. Some of them had gotten there on their last dollars. I told them I would pay my own way and they should each take back their dollars. And they did reluctantly.

One man told me they had never met a White boy like me. I told him I hoped he would meet more like me as time goes on. They promised that if they ever made it out to Bowling Green, they would call ahead and we would reconnect ‘over some hot wings or some shit,' as Tuffer said with a smile, his big Black hand squeezing my shoulder.

So, no, this trip might have been a dud for me personally, but overall, I think I received a great gift and one where little pieces of the conversation come back to me a little at a time, like daylight coming after a long night.

I know Milwaukee hurt those men. I know they wanted to take revenge. I felt a kinship to Bobby Kennedy in Indianapolis in 1968, when he told the crowd that Dr. King had been killed. There were no riots in Cedar Rapids that night but I feel strongly that a revolution of hearts took place. I matched faces and names to the unknown hoods and thugs of stories I’ve heard all my life. They found an unlikely ally and met a White man on their side.

Will I ever see them again?

I hope that I hear from them and that they stick it and get their licenses, they they keep their pledges to never go—or return—to prison and that the women in their lives see their good hearts as I did and let them into their children’s lives. As one Black man—Cory—said, “I just want him (his son) to know that he meant more to me than just any name on his birth certificate.”

It’s late—nigh on 2 AM—as I finish writing this but I want people to experience what I saw, felt, heard, and saw over my long weekend. It meant little for my financial bottom line or my personal career but the things I learned about how people in my country live, endure, and overcome makes my life look like a cake walk.

– August 19, 2016

ALH