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Building a Future

A Little Black Book on a Big Journey

By Jessica Paige Published 3 years ago 8 min read
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Building a Future
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Philosopher Jidda Krishnamurti once said “the ability to observe without evaluation is the highest form of intelligence”. But don’t take his word for it. Krishnamurti wasn’t the first to acknowledge this, merely the first to put it on paper. Still, someone deserves the credit.

“CHARLIE!”

“HEY CHARLIE!”

“CHARLES TUCKER LEWIS, WAKE UP AND HELP YOUR FATHER AT THE STORE, BABY”

I could smell the toast mom burned in the kitchen. I never ate it, but the smell filled my senses enough.

“Your father hasn’t been feeling well, he appreciates you working at the store” she told me as she scraped the top of the charred bread with a buttered knife.

Working at the store was fun, I really felt like I was helping people—in a small way of course. I felt like I had a legitimate purpose. Until the Henley boys showed up; the white school boys who teased me about my socks and shoes. They never talked to me, but I could hear their thoughts as loud as I could hear their laughs, I could see their ruthlessness as vividly as they could see the color of my skin. I didn’t like how they spoke to my father when they came in to buy his products. HIS products! As if they knew for sure that the merchandise could be traced back to a white distributor. I would get angry with my father for being nice in return, leaving them with a sincere

“Have a great afternoon gentlemen”.

One day, the Henley boys came into the store to buy supplies for school. The first day of common school started the next day and I would have been in the eighth year with them if we had the same things they had. I only know they had more because that’s what my momma told me; rooms filled with bookcases, shelves to put their bags or coats, pencil sharpeners that worked and didn’t break your pencil until it got down to the nub. I always wondered what made us so different, it didn’t seem fair to me. That day Todd Henley left behind the little black notebook he had bought. Normally I would hold it aside in case the customer came back, but the Henley’s would agree with my motto of “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. It just so happens the trash left behind the treasure that day and I took the notebook home with me.

At first I didn’t know what to write about, so I started drawing. I liked to draw the buildings downtown, especially during rush hour. Something about the stillness and shape of the buildings against the chaos and onlookers’ hateful stares intrigued me. There was a lot to look at, so many different smells downtown, and a lot to listen to.

“I surround myself with the best”

“You need to make people believe in you, to believe in your product”

“Being smart is the only advantage over an enemy”

These were pieces of conversations I heard, ones I felt obligated to write down. They gave my drawings motivation, even though they came from the white men casually parading around the city blocks on their extended lunch breaks. I never figured I could learn anything from them. It seemed like until now, all the positive remarks I heard didn’t ring in my ears as loud as the negative oppression they normally spoke to my face. They didn’t even notice me listening, as if I didn’t even exist at points. Nonetheless, the things I learned from the average white man, seemed more useful than the things I learned at my school. Hell, my school didn’t even care that I skipped all week to draw pictures of buildings halfway across the city.

Looking over these notes, they seemed more like rules; rules about being successful, rules about being a white man, all in this little black book. I wrote in that book for years, carried it around everywhere I went, just in case something caught my attention. At one point the binding ripped so bad, mama took crazy glue to it and some of the pages got stuck together. I saw the Henley brothers a few times throughout those years. They never mentioned the notebook they left at the checkout counter. I guess they didn’t need it. But I remember the day they wanted it.

I caught them smoking marijuana in the park with some friends after their twelfth year graduation. Many of them were getting ready to head off to universities, but not before causing some trouble in their hometown first. I was minding my business that day when I walked passed them. The next thing I remember was waking up with a headache, laying on the cold cobblestone ground, and finding my book and one of my shoes in the river a couple yards away. My drawings were ruined, my eyes scanned, only the faint words remained:

“Rule 7: Profit is a metric .... important....”

“Rule 80: Offer value...”

“Rule ... visualize...”

Most of the lessons I learned, gone, as if my entire education wasn’t based on this little black book at all. I made it my life mission that day to rewrite anything I could remember; to relive the conversations I hadn’t had the privilege to have myself. Every morning I would eat my eggs and rewrite my notes and many nights I would ride the railway closer north. I always hopped on the back of the train at the last minute, they never check the outside for passengers. The railways were new at the time, I didn’t know how them things worked, not one bit. But, they got me to places much faster, which gave me time to find lodging and rewrite more of my notes. I met a woman during my stay in Baltimore, my Carolyn.

She admired me. It reminded me of my mama. Carrie found love in my routine, my mystery and my little black book. She never wanted to know what was written in it, she only wanted to protect it because she saw how much I valued it, how long I had held onto it. She used to joke and compare it to my child;

“Bound at the hip, you and that book”, she would say.

That’s when I knew that my future son would inherit it. I saw how nurturing we were together, I didn’t see that with my parents. It was the same feeling you get when you open the window on a breezy day. We wanted a family, a fresh start. The pregnancy was rough, at least for me. Even with all of the knowledge I acquired, the book still didn’t feel ready. One thing Reginald taught me was that living life is about handling things you’re not ready for. He was born four weeks early.

After a while, I wasn’t sure if the notes I was writing were conversations I’ve heard or my own thoughts.

“Rule 222: Surround yourself with the right people.”

“Rule 245: Always be on a never ending quest to learn.”

My son Reginald was ten years old when I fell sick with the same illness that killed my father. He had gotten a job shining shoes to help cover our expenses at home. I didn’t even ask him for help, it was like the motivation and passion for a work ethic rushed though his veins. On his fifteenth birthday, I told Reggie about my story, this story, the foundation of a great future. I told him about the drawings, and that day in the park, and all the possibilities filed into this little black book. Things I could accomplish if I had more time.

It was then that my jaw dropped.

Reggie went into elaborate detail about the men that came to get their shoes shined.

“I wrote some things down myself”, he said with gleaming eyes as he shoveled into his apron pockets to reveal several hand written notes on old chewing gum wrappers.

This was the biggest bonding experience I ever had with my son, and the last. My mother died the following Christmas, leaving me with a heavy heart and an inheritance that didn’t feel like mine. It became too easy to drink the pain away. When alcohol is involved, rules don’t exist. I wasn’t present enough in my son’s life after that. I didn’t add anything to my little black book.

When Reginald turned eighteen, I reread his notes, gave him that little black book with the receipt for two thousand dollars from the remaining inheritance slipped inside, and a week later he was gone. He was off on a bigger journey, off finishing the journey I started all those years ago. He would send us post cards from Wall Street, each with a little drawing of a new building. I don’t know what he added to the notebook, I just always knew he was going to do great things. His letters spoke of ideas of oversea trade and buyout deals, something I never envisioned a Black man being on the business side of.

This is not the story of a beginning. This is change in motion. My son carries that in our legacy. New York is a city for dreams and my son is a dreamer.

“Rule 999: Strive to be the person you aspire to be, to make people say ‘Because of you, I did’t give up’”

goals
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