Hungry Heart

Chapter One Two of my close friends threw a fine birthday party for me. Two daughters, a grandson, a couple of former wives, an ex-girlfriend, old acquaintances, champagne, wine and good music filled the elegant room overlooking New York's crystal skyline. It was an evening not to be forgotten. Later, joy still coursed through my thoughts when I plumped my pillow and attempted to sleep. But no matter how I twisted and turned, sleep refused to come. Then, in the silence, one large number began roaming through the darkness. Ninety! I tried telling myself that it had nothing to do with anything, but through the leftover haze of red wine, I realized it had a lot to do with just about everything. On my next birthday I would be ninety. I had better get on with it. Later could be too late. Since that night I have revisited the banquet that life has laid before me. What a superb feast it is! The sweetness of recognition and success, the bitterness of poverty, hunger, and bigotry overlying the rituals of existence: marriage, birth, work, seasoned with pain and joy, and most of all -- love. My mother, father, and fourteen brothers and sisters sowed love's harvest. Years after they were all gone, I ate from that harvest when I needed it. Eventually I was to learn to share their love with those who asked for no more than also to be loved. Nostalgia blankets me when I think back over the years passed. Sometimes I knock on the door of my memory and it opens to an event that came close to denying me a future of any kind. I was born dead. But a young White doctor plunged my blood-soaked remains into a tub of icy water and miraculously gave me life. With determination he had disallowed even death to defeat him. Years later, when told about that event by an older sister, I went to give him my thanks. But by then he was dead. My mother had expressed her gratitude to him by giving me his name. Dr. Gordon was the savior whose color had nothing to do with his giving me, a Black child, a right to life. Resting deep in the corridors of my memory is another event that helped give shape to my future, though I was only ten at the time. Just a few moments away from death, my invalid brother Leroy turned on his pillow and looked steadily into my eyes. "Pedro," he said, "you've been roughing up people lately. That ain't good. Your brain's more powerful than your fist. Try using it. You're to remember that, okay?" I stood silent. Words failed me as I gazed into the shadows beyond his bed. He reached for my hand. "Okay, Pedro?" I placed my hand on his. Then, with my tears flowing, I blurted out, "Okay! Okay!" and fled the room. His words claimed their rightful place in my upbringing, and within my heart. I was born in a small town in the middle of the vast Kansas prairie, Fort Scott, a place touched by all the hands of nature. It bathed in lovely twilights, burned in scorching summers, froze in icy winters, and was occasionally battered by tornadoes. Fort Scott was also the mecca of bigotry, where discrimination was solidly built on the stones of segregation, in grade schools, movie houses, churches, even the graveyards. The local high school was racially integrated simply because the town fathers couldn't raise funds to build a separate one. But even there bigotry spewed its venom. Black students were denied participation in sports and social activities. It was a large school, but for them, all that space was deserted. During those days I ate hatred, a lot of it. Yet, thanks to a caring mother and father, I also ate cabbage, cornbread, grapes, apples, strawberries, watermelon, and slaughtered hogs from a smokehouse. So I well remember what I was and what I wasn't. Still, it is impossible to forget what I lost along the way. Johnny, my best friend, writhing in a pool of blood after being shot by a jealous rival. Buster, knifed to death after a dispute over a baParks, Gordon is the author of 'Hungry Heart ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780743269025 and ISBN 0743269020.