Morgan - I Become A Playwright - part two

Talk about sophomoric. Before the Beginning, After the End. That was its title. My first play. Set in the womb-tomb of time-space. Very eerie sound track by a fella named Satie. Eric. Wouldn't touch it today, but, there it was: my virgin voyage. I'd written poetry (or what I fancied passed for poetry) for years, however, except for school compositions, I'd never written anything else. It wasn't my intent to write anything else this time either, certainly not a play, but it somehow came out that way - an older man and a younger man arguing about - what else? - Life. Me 'n' my father? Who are you? Dr. Phil? 

My writing career may not have begun at Morgan, but it certainly got a jump start there. Opening night the Morgan auditorium was packed. It was a fine night - beautifully dressed and well bespoke folks right there because I had written something. It was a lead article in the Afro-American, the local Negro newspaper. Politicians, local gentry, students, faculty, friends, family -- all right there filling all five hundred seats in the Morgan auditorium. To see something I had written. After the performance, my father came up to me backstage, put his arm around me, and said, "Well, I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all." I remember him standing there all natty in his gray Chesterfield topcoat with the black velvet collar. We weren't close. He died two months later. Often I felt he was disappointed in me because I wasn't very good at very much. There was one time, however. One other time. 

I'd been away from home for five months, three on Parris Island, two at Camp Lejeune. In that time I became a United States Marine. My first liberty I arrived in Penn Station, Baltimore, in uniform, red PFC hash mark on my sleeve, marksmanship medal on my chest, and walked towards the entrance to meet my father who was walking in the opposite direction. Towards me. And damn if he didn't walk right by me!

        "Dad," I called out.

He stopped, turned, saw me, recognized me, choked up and stifled a cry. I wish I could remember what we said to each other. I wish I could remember whether we hugged or shook hands. 

One play led to another. Morgan was gracious enough to grant me an honors scholarship which obligated me to write another play. I can't remember anything about it except the actress sat in a rocking chair. This play opened at Center Stage, Baltimore's only professional theatre. After almost sixty years the actress, Carolyn Dotson, and I still talk from time to time. This past time - just a couple of weeks ago, actually - she told me something I hadn't known: our play broke the color line at Center Stage. We did that. Yes, we did. We broke the color line. 

Morgan granted me a third opportunity as well. A local television station approached the drama department about doing some kind of project together. As a result, I wrote a show called, The Unknown American, the first TV program ever to document in detail the contributions to the United States of its Negro population. The range and breadth of accomplishments was astonishing to all of us, in science and business, military, medical, academic, literary, as well as the arts and entertainment. The Unknown American. Morgan students appeared in and narrated it. It even won a few awards, as I recall. The Unknown American. Not any more. Go, Morgan!

Morgan - I Become A Playwright

I was seventeen when the trifecta kicked in. That same year I heard Miles Davis', Kind of Blue; read Jack Kerouac's, On the Road; had my heart broken for the first time. I remember sitting in a circle in an unheated beatnik "pad" feeling oh, so cool, yes, cool, but dark and brooding as well. Portrait of the artist. Lord Byron. "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." I remember thinking Kerouac had written me a personal letter. "Where do y'wanna go, amigo? I'll take you there!" I remember the agony of that broken heart, worse, I fancied, than the malaria our troops contracted in the jungles of Burma. It came in waves. Each wave worse than the last. Seventeen, and I wanted to die. Instead, I wrote poetry. It was this trifecta that years later led me to Morgan. Let me explain.

Why a blues loving poetry freak decided on medical school is a matter of speculation? But, there y'go. America in the fifties played by stricter rules, and those rules dictated a button down conformity that no longer exists in the same gun point way. Kerouac might have become my guru, but med school was still my go to, as if carving a cadaver in a cold morgue were the same as reading Keats', "When I have fears that I may cease to be...", on a windy hillside.

Heartbroken, infused with the rhythm of beat street, wailing with Miles' horn, broke down and undone, I wrote my first poem, a love poem: Love is a feeling, a feeling feeling, a hell of a feeling, a wonderful ecstatic feeling, or is it...? What a load of crap, huh, but it caught on, and suddenly I was reading my poem to packed houses in coffeehouses up and down the East Coast. Suddenly, I was a real live poet complete with Beatnik "chick", Shelly, who wore too much eye make-up and, after I finished my reading, would roam through the audience with a bread basket beseeching , "Bread for the poet". Can you believe this crap? All true. Shelly managed to rupture my heart even further by running away to South America with a drummer.

What has all this got to do with Morgan? I was still a poet when I got there. The Marines never stopped me. In fact, it was in the Corps that I discovered Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both World War One poets of immense power. It was also at the base library in Camp Lejeune that I discovered, "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I don't know what the base librarian had in mind, but that material burrowed deep down into my soul, and I've never been the same since. Once a Marine always a Marine. True. Still, something lodged like grape shot, dug in, and stayed there. I no longer harbored the desire to do bodily harm to someone else equally as innocent as I now knew I was. At this point in my life I consider myself fortunate that I never saw the worst of it except that I've been left with a serious case of "Survivor's Guilt". Better that.

I don't know where the idea came from, but it struck me that I had a poem to write that was essentially a dialogue between two men - an old one and a young one. As usual, once I got started I could not stop, even during class which, in this case, was romantic poetry taught by Dr. Holmes, a gentle man with doe-like eyes and coca colored skin. After class he asked me what I'd been writing, gave me a skeptical glance when I told him I'd been taking notes, and gestured for me to turn it over. I remember him wiggling his fingers. It was Friday. I did. He read it, told me to finish it. Go home and give it to me Monday, he said. I remember running to the library and writing 'til the lights went off then writing furiously all week-end until the thing was finished - a very lengthy poem that was kind of like a play. Kind of. I'd never written one before and didn't know I was writing one now, a play in verse, no less. Anyway, Dr. Holmes read it, turned it over to Dr. Waters Turpin, head of the drama department, who took it the next step, produced and directed it. The production even went to a venue in New York City. Now, I was a junior at Morgan State College and a playwright. Life was finally getting to be fun.

PS

The following excerpt is all I remember of my play. It's the young man speaking to the old one.

"This I know and only this, that I am given a life, a gift that only once I will receive to do with as I choose, and I choose to wring it dry of all its pleasures so that when I am wombed in death's certain eternity I cannot reflect in anguish that I have had but birth and death and nothing more."

I was twenty-one. Say what you will. It got me into Yale.

Morgan - The First Day Of School

Nobody said a word, at least, not to my face. Nobody frothed at the mouth. Nobody cursed. Nobody’s face twisted in hatred and anger. If they were thinking I didn’t belong there they didn’t show it. I might just as well have been another student. I was aware of the difference, but it made little difference to me. A few minutes before I had been crossing campus in the middle of the quad when the bell rang to change classes. Two thousand five hundred and ninety-nine Negroes and one white boy. Surrounded. You’d think that would’ve snagged my attention, and, being human, I guess it must have, but not for long. A nanosecond. Maybe it took me that to realize that the world as I’d known it had changed. Of course, that was the case with the Marine Corps as well. Life after Parris Island would never again be the same, even now, as I write this, sixty plus years later. Except most of my fellow Jarheads were white. Not now. Just me. Singular. Only no one seemed to notice but me. Whatever negative thoughts they harbored, the students kept them to themselves. No one ever even asked me what I was doing there.

What was I doing there?

My academic record was so abysmal that my choices were limited to none. I had failed out of college yet again. Re-upping for another tour of active duty was a possibility, but my personality was no longer suitable to such an authoritarian institution. I had “Sir, yes, Sirred” one last time. A neighbor, a white woman, suggested Morgan. She worked as a secretary to Dean Whiting, dean of students. Why not talk to him? Why not?

It was a hot, humid day between the start of summer school and the end of the semester when I set foot on campus for the first time. Dr. Whiting had agreed to meet with me. He was a gentle man with a sweet smile in an office lined wall to wall with books. I don’t remember our conversation, but I must have plead my case: Gimme another shot, please. I do remember his response: what makes you think you’d do any better here? And that’s when years of delusion came crashing to a halt. Because I’d be studying what I wanted, not what other folks expected of me. I’d taken it into my head that pre-med was the way to go, that comparative vertebrate morphology and not Wordsworth was my future. I can blame my parents for a lot but not that. I think my Dad didn’t really care what I did. Maybe he just assumed I’d go into the business. That would’ve been fine with Mom, as well. So, it wasn’t them. The notion just seeped in. Be respectable. Be a doctor. All the while, nobody really cared but me. 

Education Of A White Boy - Morgan State College

1955

I was a sophomore in high school when the first Black kids integrated the place. My parents' decision: you're going to school. Walking through that venomous mob of protesters was bloodcurdling. I prayed, “Please, God, don’t let them find out I’m Jewish.” About that same time, Gwynn Oak amusement park, a great date place, a Caucasian crowd, foam and spittle from their twisted mouths, massed violently and threatening at the entrance. I watched from across the street with fear in the pit of my stomach. Even so, it was hard to turn away. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen except for all the other ugliest things exactly like this. I’ve come across photographs of lynch mobs leering at the camera with Black bodies hanging from trees, same faces of the mob that assaulted the Capitol, proud and stupid and murderous. Look at those photos side by side - proud and stupid and murderous white people. I’ve had an entire spectrum of feelings (sometimes within minutes), but it’s hard to imagine feeling that much hatred. If I were an actor I think I’d go mad trying to recreate such a vile and nasty cesspool for my character. A plague came to our shores in 1619, metastasized, and infects everything we do from fixing potholes to walking on the sidewalk. And everything else. Remember “Love it or leave it”? Leave it. I don’t want you here.

OK

Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland is an historically Black college, now a university. I graduated Morgan in 1964, the only white guy matriculating there at that time, with a BA in English and minors in philosophy and German, well prepared for my next stop - Yale. I am grateful they took me, and fortunate to have stayed. It was shortly after I was discharged from active duty Marine Corps. Then Yale? Who da thunk it? I still carry the pain and humiliation from years of academic failure. I failed out of college three times, high school as well. My average for ninth grade algebra was Zero. Zero! I didn’t get one single question correct for one entire year. Not kidding. Not one. Jules Older, a friend and former classmate, and I covet the honor of being the only two Jewish boys to ever fail out of the “A” course. Jewish boys simply didn’t do that. A serious “shanda”. And that was only the beginning. So, how the hell did I get into Yale? Truth is, I admit to having been a bit nervous about all those students from Harvard, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Sarah Lawrence, Tufts...Yeah, so what, big shot, you graduated magna cum laude? But, you didn't go to those schools. You went to Morgan. Was Morgan Triple A? Great players but never the majors? I knew full well the brilliance of my professors and the serious pursuits of the students. Didn’t matter. A latent virus, a feeling I would rather have done without yet there it was. 

Our first serious exam at Yale was dreaded by my class, but no way to avoid it. I studied as if everything were at stake, which it was. I worked as hard as I did in the Corps because everything was at stake, which it was. At Morgan we’d have our arms around each other’s shoulders, swaying gently in a circle, singing “We shall Overcome” with such hope, such yearning, such kindness.On Parris Island we’d stand at attention in front of our racks before lights out singing “The Marine Corps Hymn” at the tops of our lungs. Both will bring me to tears. I enlisted in the Corps because my life seemed to be at a dead-end. I graduated from Morgan feeling I could do anything I chose to do as long as I chose wisely. 

  

Folks have been urging me for years to write about my days at Morgan. I understand their enthusiasm. You’d think it’d be a cakewalk. No lack of material, right? Morgan always crackled with energy. The days were vibrant. Even so, college was day to day normal. Campus wasn’t on fire; my brain, finally, was. I was happy as I hadn’t been since kindergarten. Yet, it was so normal. I don't know what else to call it. Men carried briefcases, wore sport coats and ties. Women wore Jackie Kennedy pill box hats, purses, and white gloves. Football rallies, fraternities and sororities, lectures, labs, exams, papers, ROTC, grad school applications...Fact is those years at Morgan were intellectually lively but politically, with one major exception, fairly uneventful. Of course, civil rights was an issue all over campus, but it hadn’t yet become radicalized. Black Power was not yet a meme. Really, Morgan, was no different than any other campus. I'd been tossed out of enough schools to attest to that fact.

  

Yes, the civil rights years were brewing. Kennedy was assassinated. Stokely was in the wings. Rafer Johnson visited campus to pitch the Peace Corps. Of course, most of the students were politically sophisticated and angry, itching to get into it but not yet, as I remember, truly radicalized. Selma was still years away. Malcolm X traveled to campus to debate Professor August Meier representing Morgan. Dr. Meier, a Caucasian sociology prof, a passionately devoted if bumbling Leftist, way before it became popular. I remember him rushing across campus like Groucho Marx, arms bursting with papers, disheveled, dogmatic. Martin Luther King, Jr. at that time was the major political and philosophical influence. A goodly portion of the audience left the debate still partial to Dr. Meier’s arguments which, basically, were Reverend King’s. They wanted the american dream but a dream that included them. The student body then determined to integrate a nearby movie theater in a shopping center only a quick walk from the school where students were not allowed to eat, not allowed to shop in the department store, not allowed to try on clothes. They endured arrests and venom, but damn well did it, three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears endured by the students that broke down that barrier and integrated that place. Ironically, the theater was owned by the father of a guy I knew socially. One further irony: my cousin Peggy’s father-in-law, Phil Goodman, was mayor of Baltimore at the time. Feisty guy. Wrestling champion. Local legend has it he marched into the theater, confronted the owner, and bellowed, “You will integrate this place now!” However, no politician did this. Morgan students did. It was an act of devotion and determination pulled off by a student body determined to be polite yet determined not to budge.

Go, Bears!

And that fearsome exam at Yale? I scored highest out of some two hundred others. I consider those years the beginning of my life. From then on, I didn’t know everything, and neither did anybody else.