My family was a model of compassion for me. It was a wonderful bittersweet experience to feel so much pain in the streets, and then to have such extraordinarily good stuff going on in my family. As horrible as it was to have my grandmother in her condition, everyday I saw my Uncle Julius come into the house and nurse her and take care of her. The things that I feel best about having written, I wrote about him, which shows what I think about him—the love comes out. I once said of him that all I had to do to get loved was to show up.
I was getting hatred from so many people, and when I would come into his presence, it would be like the Christ child had just walked in. And he would always say the same thing. He would beam and he’d say, “That’s my boy!” He was like that with everybody. He was a pharmacist at this time in his life and had a drugstore down on Woodward Avenue, which was in an all-black neighborhood. He was never robbed because he showed everybody who came into the store this strong compassion. When anybody was sick in the family, they would call him, because as a pharmacist, he knew more medicine than anyone.
When I knew he was dying, I wanted to make sure that he knew what a wonderful soul he was for me to have in my life. He was living with his daughter in Dallas. He had lost a leg, and was in a wheelchair and I could see that he was about to die. I just said straight out that it was critically important to me that he know what a powerful source of love he was, and that he get that message very clear. I said that it would help me to understand how he could do that—(the question you’re asking me, I was asking him)—and I could tell from his response that he loved the question. He said that he had had some very good teachers. The best of all his teachers was my grandmother, the woman he had taken care of, who was his mother-in-law, not his mother.
Although I knew her only as an incapacitated person, I had heard legends about her. I’ve since done a lot of history on her, and someday I would like to write about her. She had nine children and lived in hard-core poverty, but always had like a settlement house. My mother and my aunts and uncles always told me they never got to sleep in their own beds—grandma would always be taking people in. She had a great spirit. She was known for a saying, “Never walk when you can dance!” She would be taking care of all her kids and doing everything else and dancing—literally dancing. She was a very heavy-set woman but she loved to dance. She strongly objected to the fact that only affluent kids got dancing lessons, and she organized dancing lessons for the working-class kids at Packard Motor Company where my grandfather worked as a laborer. A granduncle told me some stories about her. He had come to Detroit not knowing anyone. Somebody told him to go to my grandmother’s. That’s where he met my aunt. He was one of the many people that came by. I asked him, ‘I’ve heard a lot of stories, Uncle, but what was she really like?’ He said she was hard to describe, and asked me if I had heard about the tailor. I had. She saw the tailor crying on a street corner because he had just lost his business, and had to go home and tell his wife and two kids about it. She brought them in, and they all lived three years in the house. He asked if I had heard other stories. I had. Then he told me one I hadn’t heard and love to tell because it brings my uncle back to me. [weeps]
One day a gentleman, unkempt, with a long straggly beard, shows up at the back door, and says to my grandmother what many people said—“I’m hungry.” She brought him in and fed him. Then she asked him his name. He says “my name is Jesus.” She asked if he has a last name. He says “I’m Jesus the Lord.” Well, he stayed in the house for seven years. He worshipped my grandmother, helped her with the kids, cleaned up, but he seldom left the house, and hardly said anything. The only time people can remember him leaving the house was to get clothes for the kids to go to school. Where could he have gotten clothes? I asked my aunts if they thought he had stolen them. I was amazed at how angry my aunts got at this insinuation. They wouldn’t entertain the possibility. So this grandmother was my uncle’s inspiration.
I’ve been asking my mother about our family, and I’ve learned some fascinating things. My grandmother was very outgoing, while my grandfather was very quiet. He worked twelve hours at the Packard Motor Company, and wouldn’t even come into the house to eat, he would just go back to his little urban ghetto garden, and work there. My grandmother would say to him, “Du bist drei hunnert jahre alt!” You are three hundred years old. Then it dawned on me this has been going for three generations! My father was a stick-in-the-mud, and it drove my mother crazy. She had her own way of saying to him “Du bist drei hunnert jahre alt.” I knew my wife Gloria would love to hear this story, because in her own way, she keeps saying to me that I am three hundred years old. My father would always be described as “such a good man” [laughs], but not giving .., unavailable emotionally, in his own world. My father and I and my grandfather are very much that way. We can be around each other all day without saying anything. It just drives the women crazy, they can’t stand it. They want us to be much more available and excited.
I was fortunate to be blessed to have this balance to my misery. I witnessed and was the recipient of the best in people, and that was in me, even during my violent times. I always knew that, as nasty as I was, it was really an act, and that something else was important to me, something different from what other boys would be into. I always knew that I was different from the other boys. I never fooled myself. Only in recent years in men’s groups have I come to realize how universal that was, that we all feel different.
A few years ago my younger son, my mother, and I were going through photographs. My son saw a newspaper picture of me teaching kids to box—“Dad, I didn’t know you taught boxing!” God, how much I boxed, and I hated every second of it, and yet I taught it to inner city kids. But I always knew it was fake. It was also very confusing because there is so much that is good and fun about boxing and other sports—a pleasure in throwing and hitting, mixed together with violence and competition. Over the years, I’ve learned to sort out the good and bad. I still experience and almost orgasmic reaction to swinging a baseball bat. Today I was throwing stones at the lake. I love to throw, and I throw very well. The best part of my life when I was young, was sports. I loved, worshipped them. I couldn’t wait to get out of school and play. That’s still true. When I come into town, I can’t wait to get out in the field to shag some flies and hit come fly balls.
I should give a word to Clayton Lafferty here. He was the person from whom I first heard about psychology. I didn’t come from a very intellectual background. No one in my family had gone to college. My father was brilliant, is brilliant, but I can’t remember him ever reading a book. My mother was a voracious reader. She reads more than anybody I’ve ever seen, but all trash! [laughs] So I never knew much about what field to go into or anything. Clayton Lafferty was the oldest kid in the neighborhood, and the first person I had ever talked to who was from college. He said he was going to be a psychologist, and that’s the first time I remember hearing that word. Shortly after that, I wrote a paper for high school on criminal psychology. It seemed to meet this need that I had to deal with suffering, to learn about psychology, to learn why people are nasty to one another.
Next: A Career in Psychology