Cold, Black, and Hungry: From the Author of Beyond Bougie

By Stephen Earley Jordan II

Cold, Black, and Hungry dares the reader with Jordan's "what if" approach in "Karmic Trilogy," which comprises three selections questioning fate by alluding to actions of high-profile individuals as Johnnie Cochran and JonBenet Ramsey. Jordan opens the envelopes of unheard voices in a series of "Unsent Letters", reflecting the readers own psychoses and self actualization processes. Jordan distressingly and poetically chronicles the hard-knock New York City life in poems "A Poem for Latisha Binn," "The Mitchel Houses", and "Words for Sean Bell." Whether Stephen Earley Jordan II is writing about internet predators or family members who prey on children, his encounters with the NYC homeless, or his attempt to search for a new James Baldwin, Jordan's vision in this collection is unswervingly honest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257338894

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Introduction

I was born cold, black, and hungry as Aquarius destroyed Capricorn, taking over winter. At the same moment Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, pushing materialism even further into the forefront of our worldview with his false promises to lower prices of goods. Some would see no correlation between the two events—but there is.

Some say that as an Aquarian I’m friendly and a humanitarian; honest and loyal; original and inventive; independent and intellectual. Others would say I’m intractable and contrary; perverse and unpredictable; unemotional and detached. All of these are true. And just as I had no control over being born, I had no control over the fact that I was born with these characteristics into a line of murderers, addicts, gay/lesbians, divorcées, child molesters, and bastard children I’d never know. At the time, America couldn’t imagine that its people and the generations to come would be damaged goods. President Carter’s perfidy merely brought to ripeness the seeds of wretchedness planted years before, and that fruit has been rotting on the vine ever since. But I’m hardly a politician and don’t claim to know much about politics. I merely know of mankind’s hidden agendas and unwillingness to accept and to change.

Being cold, black, and hungry is innate for me—I never even knew to consider being anything different. And with age, each characteristic becomes even more prominent than it had been before. It became especially noticeable when I released Beyond Bougie and had to spend time constantly on my toes defending my personal thoughts from those who share my blood line—but barely know me, let alone the concept of having a global metaphor in creative nonfiction. After all, just because you are family doesn’t necessarily mean you are family, if you get my drift.

I believe I knew I was cold and hungry before I knew I was Black. My coldness derives from those who have placed negativity upon me and even placed me into an outsidership. Simply because we can not be shelved categorically inside given perimeters, or social norms, doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be an outsider. But I have been. Too often we get trapped into believing the onedollar words of others telling us we can not be what we were placed on this earth to be. Too often we’re molded by family and supposed friends into an attempt to fulfill a part of their lives they’ll never achieve. Too often the start of our demise is with an individual in whom we’ve placed the most trust—the best friend, a family member. And once this trust is broken, this unspoken contract is broken, we may become cold, frigid, and heartless toward them and perhaps the world-at-large. Never again will things be the same. But when it comes to the brass tacks of it all, we cause our own demise by believing and accepting such hollow words from others. After all, the only one who has my back is me; the only one who can pull you out of a rut is you. More often than not, we can’t honestly blame others for our situations.

Once when we were very young, my sister and I had to stay with relatives for a few weeks. It was January. My birthday. I was to receive a miniature Space Invaders game, which my relatives hid in a Deskin’s Grocery Store brown bag on top of the china cabinet. My dad was working what seemed to be endless hours while my mom was undergoing some sort of surgery. I remember several things. I remember that I was not allowed to leave the dinner table until I ate all the fat off of the chicken. I remember not eating. I remember that I didn’t share my Space Invaders game with my other relatives. I remember that it was taken away from me and I was not allowed to play with it again until my dad came to take us home. Finally, I remember laying underneath the bed, cold, black with soot, and hungry, dialing 911 for Steven’s Clinic Hospital, telling the operator where my mom was and that I was hungry. But no one else remembers things like that—we have a tendency to remember only the incidences we want to remember. We’re funny like that.

Life is disturbing like that. I don’t just make things up—I live through them. Sadly, no one wants to dwell on the bad times in our lives, the struggles. Even if the drama belonged to someone else we tend to not want to remember, to shove it away into the dark corners of memory we never look into. But to heal and progress we must go against our natural inclinations and remember those bad times and discuss them openly. Otherwise there will be no progression in life and we’ll be trapped in our own hateful stereotypes and psychoses.

I’ve witnessed the hidden agendas of man and how he holds his own people back. I’ve seen how we hold our own selves back because we can’t be true to who we are. Think of the Watermelon Man, a Eurocentric stereotyped image which has brought shame and anger to the Black community. Why has something so unreal become so real to us? Are we, as Black folk, ashamed of our past? Of these iconic images? Are we afraid to understand and accept the fact that our people do come in various shades of browns and blacks? And, importantly, if we are that dark, as dark as the Watermelon Man, are we less of a man? Studying such fervently reviled images as the Watermelon Man forces us to think, forces us to peer outside of our social norm, and forces us to realize that even with our Armani suits, we’re still fundamentally the same person with a damaged history. As the cliché goes—you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy; you can take the Watermelon Man off of the plantation, but with his firm grip, can you really take the watermelon from his hands? It’s a difficult thing to deny something that is a part of you or your culture, and in the end, the denial causes more harm than good.

My personal mission in writing Cold, Black, and Hungry is to bring forth our damaged goods—our souls. Race, class, or gender aside, we’re all healing humans who tend to live naively inside our stained-glass windows hoping that everything will be okay and that the people with whom we choose to associate are genuinely kind; that the man who is homeless on the street is truly homeless or won’t spend your pocket change on liquor; that the mother who cries for her deceased daughter is not the murderer; that a woman is not suppressed in her marriage; that families and people of the same ethnicities are emotionally linked, and so forth.

We can hope for all of this, but hope doesn’t necessarily equate truth. To learn the truth we must be hungry to gain knowledge, to progress in life. Ultimately this comes down to accepting ourselves and being held accountable for the actions that will create our futures and the future for our children. Just because something is expected doesn’t mean it will be so. Just because it is expected that I, as an Aquarian, may have certain characteristics, it doesn’t necessarily justify my actions. Just because my people were enslaved generations ago, it doesn’t necessarily justify hatred for other races. We control everything if we are willing to open ourselves and experience our differences.

Billy

I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't.

-Nikki Giovanni

I had just graduated from college and I thought, as college trains us to think, that I could conquer the world. I was 22, I believe. I had a B.A. in Writing and a B.A. in Literature. I went on to graduate school—simply to waste time and come up with a master plan.

I had taken my GRE's a year before, the General one and the Literature one. I had applied to various MFA Writing programs and one MA in English program as a backup plan. And, for months (from January until May, the day of graduation) I was under the impression that I would be going to University of Idaho—the furthest place I could imagine from West Virginia. After speaking to the chairperson once a week for 3-4 months, I was led to believe I was accepted into their MFA Poetry program. But I was wrong.

The same day of graduation, I received not one, but two rejection letters from MFA programs and one acceptance letter to the MA program I had only intended to use as a backup.

After graduating I started graduate courses one week later. This is where I met Billy, who ultimately became my demise.

Upon entrance into graduate school, I was placed into an outsidership that no one else understood or even saw. Like racism, you don't necessarily understand this form of outsidership until you are forced into it. For once, it had nothing to do with my race, but rather my age. I believe the closest person to my age was 27 or 28. The rest were even older. They had spouses, children, extensive work experience. The phrase I heard over and over from professors and my peers was You'll understand how to do this better when you get older.... What they didn't know was that when it came to teaching the English 101 courses, I already had somewhat extensive classroom experience. And, importantly, I knew there was a difference in teaching high school and teaching college. Most of my peers had attended the same university for undergraduate studies, which gave them a closer contact with the professors than I had, which led to them having special privileges of which I