Editor’s Note:

I NEVER had the chance to meet either of my grandfathers; both passed before I was born. And so what is left of them are the stories: What I know of my father’s father is that before he passed, he advised his son to join the Air Force. At the time, the Second Indochina War– the “Vietnam Conflict” — raged in the jungles of Southeast Asia, worlds away from the Virginia earth he farmed and raised six other kids on, with my grandmother. My father, the eldest male, enlisted in the Air Force, just after his father’s death, upon his urging, since sticking around with the primary bread winner gone and six mouths besides himself to feed, was tantamount to a catastrophic idea. It was a move that would have him avoid the fate of conscription and becoming the victim-of-circumstance-dodging, perilous drudgery of a soldier’s life beneath the sweltering jungle canopy. For my father, ducking out for a couple of years or going to college, was financially out of the question and his enlistment meant that Uncle Sam would pay for his further education; college, after all, is for the kids who have money. Kids like me. That discussion my grandfather had with his son, led to me and the fortuitous life I’ve been given. And so, beyond the obvious case of my birth, I am forever indebted because of the quality of my life and opportunities — in no small part, because of him.

He  grew up very different than his grandson. His world never entertained the idea of a black American president, when for the majority of his time black people were “discouraged” from voting. This is to say that the idea of a black president wasn’t even a challenge to orthodoxy, it was an upending of fundamental human laws here for him; it was denying the rule of gravity. As far as his generation were concerned, black people were earth bound, if not inhabiting the places beneath, because for all of the ideals and high-reaching principles embedded in our founding documents, blacks were still a people apart; apart from the society and even much of the American story and experience, with some exceptions. While that can still be argued, one would be remiss in thinking that things haven’t moved forward toward the positive.

Lawyers, doctors, pilots, President of the United States of America: if you were to name any prestigious occupation (outside of entertainment or sports) and theoretically placed a black person in it, it was more or less a fairy tale. That was the world he was from and the world he understood. Those occupations were false-hoped dreams, the equivalent of the poor child in the central-city hoping for the rarity of the moment where his jumpshot delivers him from squalor. When he was in the Army, black men, for the most part, couldn’t even fight in combat. There were the Tuskegee Airmen and a black infantry division or two, but the fight for “freedom” was mainly a white man’s duty, and so white men fought the wars and black men cooked, cleaned and drove trucks. My grandpa drove trucks. But I lived to see another America. An America still shabby in certain areas, but closing in on the  “more perfect union.”

Hey Grandpa,

I KNOW that we hardly ever talk, but something BIG happened, and I wished you were here to witness it; just for you to know that this place isn’t as bad as it treated you, but I think you already know that. And honestly, last time we talked was so brief, and that small sheet of paper may have failed to stay at your grave long enough for you to see it. I’m so sorry it had to have come on the day that we put your middle son into the earth. In it, I told you that I graduated school finally, and that it was an “elite” one. However, I didn’t tell you where, but maybe you watched me; Jackie Robinson had gone there too. It was like a dream when they called to tell me I was accepted. Me and Dad cried.  The call, it was before the package even came in the mail. And the school, it was the same, in some ways, as Jackie’s day. I ran into a man at my work who was one of the first of us to attended, when I was in my last year in school, he was about seventy-years-old. The things he asked me about: “Do they still ask if you’re an athlete?”, “Are the numbers similar?’, made it sound the same, at least. There just weren’t a lot of us. Black enrollment was so down from their already small size, those years I attended, because of  policies that looked to help minorities — enacted after you left — being repealed. The people in California voted and said it was “unfair” to have such social mobility measures. It was “reverse discrimination” they cried, and in some sense, it was a measure of how far we had come; that many could and would argue something like that. In fact, the man who was partly responsible for that ballot initiative, is black. Still I don’t buy the idea that anyone was being discriminated against. It just didn’t bear out; their view of injustice. And still that college and most colleges are for the rich primarily. Most of the kids were headed there or somewhere else, somewhere even better, far before they applied.

Robinson’s memory made me feel like there was so much pressure on me to succeed, and there was this other man, Ralph Bunche, a black diplomat and Nobel Prize winner, whose name on the main building for my major and his bust in its hallway acted as weighty reminders. It made me feel like I was to be a credit to the race every day. It made me feel as though I had to compete with their ghosts. It was hard and for a time during my first year and change, I might’ve buckled under it. I wouldn’t have thought so, so many years after they walked those halls, but my skin never felt so dark. The scientists who study this kind of thing have begun to call it stereotype-threat and I don’t think I was affected by it, but I really felt alone. I got a lot out of the experience, but I could have and should have been better. I know that, now. I worked hard in most of my classes. I did take one or two where I really slacked, but it’s all somewhat forgotten now. I earned my degree is what matters, but I understand that you would be disappointed that I had wasted an ounce of my time there, being that we weren’t really ever afforded the opportunity to attend once such hallowed grounds unless we ran track, played basketball or football. I will earn another degree, however, so I actually have a second chance at being near-perfect, or at least, being better; to do you proud, and to negotiate an even greater life. I worry that you look down from the heavens and think that I waste a lot of opportunities and that I should be even more for our community. I just haven’t figured enough of me out yet, but that shouldn’t ever be my excuse. I know that I don’t need all of the answers, but right now, I feel like I have so few.

You should also know that I’m going to be fine, no matter what, and that Pops is sick again. Me and Mom are hopeful and believe that the technology and health care facilities around us will allow him to get better quickly and have him live long enough to see a grandchild, I hope. Like cousin Karen said: “Shirley men don’t live long.” And so I feel this bears repeating: your son has done his best to understand me and he has given me so much to be able to compete. I’m happy to report that my world is so very different than yours and his. I’ve only been called a “nigger” twice to my face, and no one could ever stop me from doing something I wanted to do. I’ve had some minor run-ins, but my stories are different and digestible with little pain. There is not a law or known practice that has kept me from achieving all that I have set out to do, or will keep me from achieving those things. It is actually quite different, I’d say. Everything I’ve ever wanted I have received, and I’m very lucky. I am aware of that. People may think that I am not, but I am. Whatever I am or whatever I am not, I will have no one to blame but me. For now, I write, report and read a lot.  It’s my job and also who I am, I think: my “calling.” (I never have to really lift anything heavy or fight for my dignity and respect.)

I should also tell you that my generation is looking to fix some things: Things that recently came about and things that have always been. We want to address the wrongs of your life and our lives, Gramps. And I feel like I’m a vocal and demonstrative part of that. It’s really so very different for guys like me, because of your generation and Pop’s. Now those of us who are given a decent shot, we can actually be anybody we choose with some help. Our color means less, but generally one has to have to come from the middle class. I think we have so much more power than we understand or even tap into, now. We have higher rates of community involvement and university attendance when coming from economically and socially similar backgrounds as white kids*. And the world has opened even more recently, it’s like much of the sky was clear, and the last patches of clouds drifted away, in some sense. We don’t have to be entertainers or athletes anymore, to really have a nice life. That big thing that I was talking about that happened last week?  WE now have a president who is black. He was sworn in January 20th, 2009. The country for all of her warts, consternation and unhealed, gaping, festering racial wounds,  put a guy that looks like us into the highest office. He’s the President of the United States, and he’s black. It’s so unbelievable, that it seems like a movie. His election was a collective exhale from the weary heart of the struggle and the depths of our pained, bullet-riddled ghettos. I followed him for two years, I watched him run like he knew that the future of us and our country depended on it, as though America itself needed him to be a vessel for national redemption and a national resurrection.

I know that you saw bad times, but America has hit a really rough patch. And we might have been and may be still are on a down slope, if we aren’t mindful. Our national banking system has been under attack by greed, and now my generation is facing the prospect of having a life lesser than our parents’, and it’s scary.  Also, after communism fell (yeah, that happened too) there was another threat to our borders and it wasn’t another nation, but a small group of people who perverted Islam and mobilized global economic injustice for bad. This new guy, OUR president, he understands a lot of things about this though. Unlike others before him, he seems to understand that the diminishing of that threat will not just happen on the battlefield, but will have to incorporate communication and the building of lost American goodwill around the globe, and the amelioration of some of those injustices used against us and specifically the ones we created. I wish and hope that you can see him from up there, because he’s special. I watched him for the whole two years, pleading for him to run, hoping to God he would run. I blogged — it’s like typing on a typewriter without paper and pen — about him so much, and I told anyone that would ask me that he was different and better than almost all of these other guys that ran before him and he was in the field against. And I talked to not just the black ones who asked, but the white ones too. And my “case” for him, wasn’t ever about race. He ran as a legitimate candidate: the best, most-prepared man, for an increasingly cold world. His run was about all of us now, all of the kids who take his place afterward. He’s trying to make a new, better America.

I was always into politics, but I was so invested in him compared to the others before. And I was really invested in the others. I lived his campaign, and just when I thought he couldn’t do anything else to surprise me, he went even beyond my expectations. He was like Jackie Robinson out there or Jesse Owens or Joe Louis or Cassius Clay, he was just perfect for my time. And I know you weren’t here when America lost all faith in politicians, but he’s bringing some modicum of  trust back. He tells the truth more than the other guys, he’s a bit like this other guy, Carter, in that way. But even with his small missteps, he finds his way out of a pickle, just like Jackie would, eventually sliding into home plate. It was like how they’d try to trap him, and he’d go the opposite way and find a safe space. His wife and family are beautiful too, it’s the most positive image of us I’ve seen in a while. I think there would have been many moments that would have had you weeping. I actually saw Dad wipe a tear or two during his Denver speech. They say he speaks with the power of Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King, John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

We truly needed him. It’s hard for me to say this, but I think our people lost our way for a while. They especially needed him in the cities, Gramps. They needed him in South Central, down by where Pop works. It’s as though, after you left, we had all become so anti-establishment and disenchanted, that it hurt our cause. We didn’t believe in government; didn’t participate, after our rights were soaked in your generation’s blood. We took pride in being marginalized, just as they designed.  And now, in some ways, being black and poor is worse than the Jim Crow days. It was like the struggle to vote and to live with the same rights as everybody never happened; as if we didn’t fight to have the same opportunities. And because a lot of our schools failed us, we would chant these things like “keep it real” when negative images of us were portrayed, we used it as an elevator, and we even vaunted those images. It was the height of our pop-cultural identity, in fact. We became confused and thought that the epitome of being “black” was being uneducated. This guy is going to change some of those things, he’s a return to excellence as the standard. It’s hard to explain and even harder for you to understand probably, because you might have never seen him, but he’s the kind of excellence that represents all of Humankind. He makes mistakes, but its usually from trying to be so good, and trying to get it so very right.

Grampa, he is the apex of every theory they taught me at that fancy school. He understands things about how the system is supposed to work and that there are so many different kinds of people here that need to be loved and acknowledged and brought in, and he trusts in government more so than anybody else it seems. On Inauguration Day he spoke in this bone-chilling cold, speaking so resolute about an America that has genuflect to the forces that have become greater than it, and still a warmth seemed to radiate. This is despite him saying we had some of our very toughest times ahead. He’s just a sensitive and fair, worldly man. You may not understand, Grandpa, but our last guy wasn’t about the world; He was about his friends, and the rich.  And it hurt us in the ghetto and especially in New Orleans: The city became flooded after a levee broke, and because that last man hated government and didn’t believe in it, he left us unprotected. Him and his cabinet people believed that less government allowed for a better place, and so he took agencies designed to protect us for granted.

The images from that time would have turned your soul inside out. We were wading in disease filled waters, swimming with dogs, there were these poor black corpses lying in the street, swollen from water, and people reaching for news helicopters that filmed us as desperate people, grasping from on top of homes’ roofs, hoping for anyone to pull us out. He didn’t care. This new guy cares about us, and also everybody else. I imagine he’s like you, in that way. You probably know how I like planes so, the best I could describe it is: it’s like he’s a pilot and everyone’s telling him the plane is going down, but he doesn’t believe them and he says, “Trust me, I wouldn’t let anything bad happen, I’m on this plane too; with my kids and wife.” And because of it, I think we’re going to be okay. It’s scary now, everywhere, but we’re going to be fine. We are doing some things right, Grandpa, and you can rest now. You can really rest.

Love,

Vaughn Jr.

* Statement based on Derek Bok and William G. Bowen, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions [Here]