The Journey of My Life

The Journey of My Life

The journey of my life began, with my being born in a deep southern Mississippi town during the mid-1950's.

Not knowing who I was and only learning what it was to be equal with others who didn't look the same as me was a new experience. All after being moved reluctantly to the north at the age of ten.

Pascagoula, Ms., a small southern city housed along the Atlantic Ocean, actually sitting right on the Gulf of Mexico, its population 20,000. It's a funny sounding name which comes from a Native American Indian tribe. I lived there during my early childhood years with my grandmother and siblings most of the time while my mother and father were completing their education. After graduating college and playing one year of professional football my father was selected for a pilot program for who were then called "colored people," to go up north and teach in what were then predominately white schools. Now once up north, as I remember, my father a hard working man had to work three jobs, including teaching. This was the early 1960's, I was the oldest, but I had a two brothers and a sister. A third brother was then born in the late 60's. During the earlier years my father had to work two sometimes three jobs just to support our family. And because of that he was never home and to make matter worse I had to live and grow up in what was then called the "projects." My mother and father were not affectionate people; I think they were loving as individuals, but they just didn't express their love by demonstrating it or saying it, however they were

always there when I needed them. So, as a child I kind of grew up the same way, very caring, compassionate and respectful, but not knowing how to express, or put into words what I was really feeling. My teenage years were okay, my family got along well. I don't think we knew each other the way most families did, though. We didn't interact much with each other as a family at all.

By this time I started to realize that we had no extended family to interact with either, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins or grandparents. We were in the north and they all in the south. None of our relatives had ever come to visit us and going back south wasn't anything that was in my mother and father's plans either. It was just us and that was it. My mother and father had very little to no friends and very rarely, even as a child had no visitors to our home.

I always thought of myself as being shy, especially as I became a teenager, but really I think I felt inferior to some of the guys that I was growing up with. I was good at a lot of things, but I was also an underachiever; small for my age and not allowed to dress the fashions the way other kids were, so I stood back and only dreamed that I could be the way the others were.

My mother and father were quick to punish for almost anything, any type of behavior that was contrary to their ways and their punishments were sometimes weeks of confinement to your bedroom, a massive whipping with a belt, or sometimes both. By the age of sixteen I decided I could no longer live with my family and I moved out of the "project house" and in with friends where we shared an apartment in a nearby town. I continued to go to school and worked to pay my portion of the rent. That arrangement lasted nearly a year. I then tucked my "tail" back between my legs and went back home for a short lived stay.

After returning my father started to treat me in such a way that one would think that he had no respect for me and that I was a total embarrassment to him in every way. What kept me going during this period in time was the drum & bugle corps. I had been in several by this time and had done quite a bit of traveling in and around the states of Connecticut and New York during the summer time and a lot of rehearsing during the winter so I still wasn't home much. The people I met and had gotten to know in drum corps were like family to me and they were the folks I wanted to be with all the time.

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