On February 24, 2008, I wrote a letter to a correspondent in England, and with that correspondent's consent I am sharing a portion of that letter here for those readers who have asked me questions about my childhood.
Under the title 'Rio Grande Valley Journal: In Remote Valley, A Grim Redefinition of Fishing' there is a photograph of two boys bent over a river's rock-strewn pool in The New York Times' February 15 2008 issue. They are looking for fresh water shrimp.
The photograph conjured up memories of being a nine year old, more than fifty-five years ago, in the exurb of Markham, Illinois. A farming community twenty-five minutes from downtown Chicago.
I can remember getting up long before sunrise, right after my guardians (here read my maternal Great Aunt Lois McKinley-McGee and her husband James Edward McGee) left for work. I only saw them on Sundays, because Monday through Saturday they left in the early darkness of the morning and did not return until late at night.
On the morning in question I quickly dressed, then went outside to pump a bucket of water. I sat the bucket down so all of the rust particles could settle in the bottom. I got my short-axe, and began cutting a supply of wood beneath the naked light bulb that shone brightly above our little shack's front door. I took the wood inside and built a fire in the pot-bellied stove that stood in the middle of the room's dirt floor. Then I poured the sediment-free top of the water into a large pot and put it on top of the stove.
Twenty minutes later the pot of water was hot. I washed up, and brushed my teeth as dawn quietly began to illuminate my late autumn garden. I went to the garden and pulled up two large carrots. I used the water that was left in the bucket to wash them. I started eating one and wrapped the other in my handkerchief - it would be my lunch at school.
Mine was a love/hate relationship with Lowell Longfellow School, in Harvey, Illnois. The school was just short of being five miles away. It usually took me about thirty minutes to walk to school, where for a time I was the only person of color in attendance. I loved school, but unfortunately, I learned very little in the way of reading, writing and arithmetic, but became an expert at fighting extremely racist White boys.
I am sorry. I did not mean to go on so, but for a few minutes I was transported back to the schoolyard during recess - the fights, and the words uttered in them, did not bring back pleasant memories. I am finding this difficult to write. Let me get back to wrapping my carrot.
We lived in the center of a floodplain. The kind of flooding that Katrina gave New Orleans was a yearly occurrence in Markham. Consequently there was a huge drainage canal less than seventy-five yards south of our shack. After I put my carrot in my back pocket I started thinking of dinner. There was nothing to eat in the shack.
I found a five gallon can. I got a hammer and large screwdriver and then punched at least fifty holes into the can's bottom. I cut off the end of our clothes line that was not in use and tied it to the handle of the can. I left for school, but I took the eastern canal route.
A mile or so later, when I walked up from the canal bank onto the Dixie Highway Bridge, I tied the other end of the clothes line to the bridge and lowered the can into the fast flowing Westward current. I made sure that the can's open end faced east. I then continued my walk to school. I walked into Mrs Summers' classroom at three minutes after nine. Needless to say, Mrs Summers was angry. As I hurried to the back of the classroom she said, "McGee, you are three minutes late. You need not come out of the coatroom for thirty minutes!"
I did as I was told. Mrs Summers was a good teacher, but she could not abide a student's tardiness, not even three minutes.
Getting back to the New York Times article, the boys in the photograph reside in the Rio Grande Valley of Jamaica. In bold type are the words "Spearing the giant shrimp is like work. Poisoning them is quicker". As I read those words I wondered if the reporter intended to suggest that the boys are lazy? Maybe, maybe not.
In Portland, Jamaica, a little hamlet that is near the Rio Grande, many of the residents eat the shrimp and crayfish that can be found in the river's rock pools to keep from starving to death.
The people there are as poor and destitute today as we were more than five decades ago in Markham Illnois. While I used a five gallon bucket to catch my after school meal of crayfish, the poor people of Portland, out of necessity due to poverty, have started to use poison.
Marc Lacy writes: '...any toxin will do. Some favor the pesticide used to keep insects off the coffee plants. Others use the potent solution used to rid cows of ticks. When subjected to the poison, the shrimp [and crayfish the size of lobsters] large and small float right to the top. So do the fish. Catching them is as easy as scooping them up before the river washes them and the poison away.'
Speaking of the poison, a fisherperson named Kimberly John, who works with the Nature Conservancy, is quoted as saying: 'You have to put all morals and conscience aside, and then you throw a toxic pesticide in the river... It's [a] very cold, hard reality to put poison in the river, and what ever jumps out, you catch.'
It goes without saying that no one should be poisoning the river. What humans are doing to the environment all over the world is wrong. I think that only a handful of people like George Bush would disagree. We all need to be doing more to help than hurt the environment.
Yet in my sixty-five years on this earth I have come to question whether some of those who profess a desire to save the environment have taken the time to notice that their fellow human beings are an integral part of the environment as much as a river, valley, mountain or frog.
People like Kimberly John worry - and rightly so, I think - about the river being poisoned, but not nearly enough about how POVERTY POISONS the lives of the world's poorest peoples.
I plan to come back to the Rio Grande Valley Journal article later. Bear with me while I fast forward to another New York Times article dated February 18, 2008, appropriately titled 'Poverty is Poison'. It was written by Paul Krugman. The first paragraph reads:
'Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain'. That was the opening of an article in Saturday's Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
...neuroscientists have found that 'many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones which impair neural development'. The effect is to impair language development and memory - and hence the ability to escape poverty - for the rest of the child's life.
So we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America's record of failing to fight poverty.
I am always just a little angry when I read of a recent million dollar research body coming up with a finding like this one. I mean hey, I have been Black and poor in America all of my life! I have never attended a high school and yet, had I been asked I could have saved those researchers a lot of time and money: All poor people know what those researchers found out.
Mr Krugman goes on to remind us that the former President Lyndon Bains Johnson 'declared his War on Poverty 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.'
Then one day a few people saw a handful of so-called 'welfare queens driving Cadillacs' and tax payers got angry and ended the War on Poverty. The majority of people who were and are on welfare actually need the help welfare provides. Alas, because of a few cheats, millions of children were taken off America's welfare rolls - by and large for political expediency. Former President Bill Clinton was instrumental in that removal process.
If people could muster the courage and compassion to care for each other as much as they do for the rivers, I doubt that poor people would be poisoning the river.
Mr Krugman goes on to report that 'to be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child's brain' [emphasis added].
People like Kimberly John have a myopic view of how that river gets poisoned. It is not the boys pictured in the rock pool. Poverty is what poisons the river in Portland, Jamaica.
A member of the Portland Conservation group is quoted as having said 'my fear is that the food that we depend on, that is part of our cultural tradition, will die'.
Where is the concern for the two boys in the rock pool?
As I sit in this prison cell I am reminded that on more than a few afternoons when I went back to the Dixie Highway Bridge after school, the five gallon can did not have one crayfish in it. Those were the times when I would go and steal something to eat from the local grocer.
Yes, there are a number of people who survive poverty, some rise high above it. I am happy for them. Nevertheless, at least half of the children who live in poverty never get out of poverty, even as adults.
Americans, as well as people of other nations, are in desperate need of asking our so-called leaders why poverty is not nearly as important as the environment?
I am a sixty-five year old child - locked away in a multi-million dollar prison - still living and dying in poverty.
