Authors: Gil Scott-Heron
Sociology and every other inexact approximate science of odds and oddly negative prognostication be damned. Those sciences of vague, uneven basis and potential seemed to have been discovered to
generalize and generally discourage humankind from being the kind of humans they could really be. That reminded me of that old Brook Benton tune about “the odds against goin’ to heaven,
six to one.” Well, you had to figure that was absolute bullshit! I knew that odds-maker Danny Sheridan covered a bunch of subjects out there in Vegas, and that the British had odds on damn
near everything, but I still doubted if numbers had or would ever be posted on heaven or hell, aside from the sure bet that you’d eventually have to get the hell out of here.
A few years later, I called my mother from London on her birthday, June 6. We had a few laughs before she reminded me that it was a real long distance call; we agreed we’d pick it up again
when I got back to the USA. I told her I’d try to call her from Newark airport in New Jersey, where I was heading next before getting a late shuttle from there back to Washington.
Providing it took the usual amount of time to locate my bags, roll them through customs, and find my next boarding area, I’d have a tiny window to make a quick call—if everything
worked.
It didn’t. My big Continental jet from Heathrow landed an hour and a half late because of a storm. The last flight to D.C. was in thirty minutes, and was overbooked by too many seats for
me to dream of catching, even if I stood on the wing. What do do?
I decided to go to Newark’s Union Station and try to catch the last southbound Amtrak train of the night. While waiting for a cab, I called my mother. I couldn’t reach her because
the line was busy. I shrugged it off and got a taxi ride from a hassled and harassed brother complaining about the weather.
I missed the last train south by ten minutes, arriving at Newark station shortly before ten o’clock. The next train wasn’t until three in the morning, a red-eye that arrived in
Washington at six or seven in the morning. I could wait for that, the ticket agent informed me.
I looked unhappily around the dismal accommodations provided by Amtrak for Newark train riders. Obviously this station was for catching trains, not waiting for them. There wasn’t even a
newsstand or a soft-drink machine. Nothing to make you feel like you’d be waiting for anything but a robbery.
I made another call to my mother, to cry on her shoulder. But the line was still busy.
There was a 9:55 to New York’s Penn Station.
I went back to the ticket agent, who was closing up for the evening, putting away his money and tickets.
“I’m going north,” I said.
Suddenly I could almost locate my lopsided grin. I brightened considerably. Hell, in New York I could eat and get a magazine. There were people and signs of life. It would beat the hell out of
waiting for God only knew what in the gloom of Newark’s near morgue.
I heard the whistle of the arriving train and had just enough time to grab my bags and struggle down a flight of stairs before it
shushed
to a stop.
Two phrases came to mind right away when I arrived in New York City. It never failed. The first one was from Stevie’s song “Just Enough for the City,” when during the opening
you hear his brother Calvin saying almost reverently, “New York! Just like I pictured it!” That was the perfect phrase with perfectly paced awe at the wonder of it all. The second
phrase was, “New York, New York—so nice they named it twice.” This was doubtless a contribution from a self-employed New York poet whose artistry was unrewarded by the city
jaycees, whose perspective ran more to Frank Sinatra than to a frank description. Which also meant there might not have been many kudos available for the person who coined the term “the Big
Apple,” which was rotting to the core just then.
There was another saying that fit New York like a pimp fit in Times Square: 24/7. That was street folks’ description of something open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. New York
was that, and several institutions of legitimacy were counted on for day and night service, 365 days a year. No down times, just shift changes.
Penn Station was one of them. With trains bound for somewhere, everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere, there was an ongoing chaos that could remind you of the world’s steady spin regardless of
terrestrial complications, or involve you in how the madness of thousands of destinations could be coordinated in the brain of a human being.
At that moment, I was being impressed by the system of coordination that got the cheeseburger I was eating from wherever the hell it had been just in time to save me from starvation. I took a
minute before I decided on dessert and called my mother again. It was a little late, but hell, she was the one doing the yakking on the line. It was busy again, so at slightly past eleven I ordered
a milkshake to help me contemplate.
I didn’t like what my contemplating was indicating.
Maybe you had to know my mother or know the Scotts in general, as she was a good representative of them. They were not loud, talkative, gregarious, flamboyant folks. They were not great users of
telephones. The three hours I’d been unable to get past a busy signal would have been three months’ worth of her talking. There might have been a talk once in a while with Mrs. Cox, her
good buddy from Jackson. And there were one or two other ladies and a male friend who called. But I could hardly remember a phone conversation of hers that lasted more than fifteen minutes. And a
conversation this late? I wouldn’t call her after ten o’clock without a life or death situation.
At midnight I tried again. Busy. I just knew the line wasn’t “engaged.” And there was no reported trouble on the line. When the line had been busy at 8:30 and 9, it was unusual
enough, but now it was into the realm of unbelievable. My name would not be the first name to come to mind if the question was bravery, but I was not one to panic. And I wasn’t going to panic
now.
Still, I made up my mind quickly. I thanked the phone operator, found a locker for my luggage, and hailed a cab in front of Penn Station. I headed for 106th Street.
Soon I was banging—no, make that BANGING—beating with both fists on the door of apartment 19A in the presence of a startled woman from the Housing Authority Police who was determined
not to show she was startled. Beating in flurries of five that rang out like cannon shots without room to echo in the closet-sized hallway. Until even the barricaded, blasé,
mind-your-own-business New Yorkers were disrupted. Until the lady in her neatly pressed uniform touched my arm lightly to say . . .
“Who is it?” came a squeak of a shaking voice from behind the door.
And then again, “Who is it?”
I was shouting, “It’s your son! Open the door!”
“My son doesn’t live here anymore,” I heard.
Then the door opened as far as the chain restraint would allow, revealing my mother—or at least as much as I needed to see.
There was a gash across her cheek, with dried blood and drying blood like a halo around it as it turned shades of blue. Recognizing me, she let us in; her son and the lady in uniform who was now
speaking into her radio.
I helped my mother back to the kitchen and safety while we waited for the ambulance.
In late February 1989, I was playing a weekend at Blues Alley in D.C. and noticed Lurma—the mother of my son Rumal—in the audience. It had been a long time since
I’d seen her, though I had never stopped wondering why she had forbidden me to say anything about Rumal and therefore forbidden me from saying anything to him. I wondered who he thought his
father was. Maybe the man rumor had connected to Lurma from time to time. I remained mystified until that night.
I went over and sat down, spoke to her, even took a picture with her. She told me she needed to talk with me, so I invited her to my hotel after the show.
I literally had no idea what we would talk about, but I knew it must have something to do with the boy. That was obvious.
Starting very slowly, she said, “I think it’s time you had a talk with your son. He’s beginning to ask me questions I can’t answer.”
“Birds and bees questions?” I asked with a crooked smile. “And does that mean it’s all right for me to tell people he’s my son?”
I wish I could describe all of the expressions I saw flash, focus, and fade from her face. About three seconds stretched out between us as we looked into each other’s eyes. Both of us were
looking for things we were surprised not to find. I was looking for the honesty I could always count on from her the quick reply or retort that she would lay in front of your shallowness or bounce
off your arrogance. She was looking first for an indication of snide, then fake, a pretense of misdirection, then an attempted stab at some joke in poor taste. And finally, her judgment collapsed
on shock and recognition.
“You’ve never mentioned him, I mean Rumal,” she started, stopped, started.
It was my turn to be assertive.
“Never,” I said. “To anyone. You told me not to tell anyone he was my son, and I haven’t. Not even my mother.”
“Your mother,” she repeated.
“You didn’t point out any exceptions,” I told her, looking away. “So I couldn’t make any. I haven’t told my brother or sister or, hell, anyone. Does this
visit mean I can tell them?”
As we talked further, she took me back as far as her visit to my house. She was trying to buy a house for her and Rumal in Alexandria. She felt as though she needed to have a fiancé with
her when she showed up to see the house. That it was better to take a colleague from the
Washington Post
with her who could help represent stability and didn’t want word circulating
through the negotiations that her child was actually the son of a married man on Martha’s Road.
She got the house. It was a three-story brick row house on Pine Lake Court. And as soon as the deal was complete and the papers signed, the brief charade with her coworker was abandoned. But no
one had ever told me anything.
It had been obvious that some of Lurma’s buddies at the
Post
and the
Washington Star
had not been sworn to secrecy. Unless they could only fuck with me about what they knew.
And if they reported back to Lurma about my vague, evasive, and vacuous responses when they asked about my son, what had she thought? And what had she expected me to say?
Yes, quite right,
I’m a thorough shithead. Of course I know about the boy. Lurma brought him over to my house. Matter of fact, when she calls I hang up. When she writes I throw the letters away. So now that
she’s resorted to messing with me by messenger I’m mortified
.
None of the above. She was standing in the middle of my hotel room while I sat down opposite her. She was talking to herself more than to me, about people knowing things.
“Yeah,” I agreed, telling her the names of some of the people who had asked me questions over the years. “But they all came up slidin’ and hidin’, like they were
back in junior high, like ‘psst! Hey, Gil!’”
“And you said . . .”
“Nothing real! Or nothing at all. I gave them all of the information I could: None.”
I ran out of words around then. Because I had run out and run down. And sort of felt run over.
I knew what I was being told within all she was not saying. But there was nothing I could do.
Lurma came out of it first and sat down. I asked if she wanted something to drink, some juice or something.
“How is he doing? Hell, how are you doing?” I tried to laugh.
“I’m fine,” she said. “He’s doing well.”
She was a little brighter as we moved on to her favorite subject. Our son.
A month later I had been in a cab on my way to JFK Airport to catch a plane to Brussels when I suddenly directed the driver to go to Laguardia Airport instead, to the terminal where the shuttle
to D.C. flew.
An hour and a half later I was knocking on the door on Pine Lake Court. And then Lurma was at the door with a little smile.
It was good to see her. I was at the right place.
I became very fond of Rumal Rackley, and I’ve been amazed at the similarities in our lives despite the distance we started with between us. He has the disadvantage of looking a great deal
like me, with the same wide smile that he flashes on occasion and the same offbeat sense of humor. He was also a fairly good student, and our lives ran parallel all the way to graduate school. We
both had beautiful mothers from Southern states who were college graduates. We both went to private high schools—in his case Sidwell Friends in Washington. We both went to Black
colleges—he graduated from Hampton University. And he went on to grad school—at Tuskegee’s medical school.
My third child, a girl named Ché, was born in England. She is a real trip, thoroughly full of near atomic energy, and allegedly possessing an IQ that equals her mother and father’s
combined.
She’s a curious, furious, hurricane of movement with more questions than
Jeopardy
. Her specialty is hotel rooms. She finds them fascinating, with altogether too many things to
explore.
How I became a father again at nearly fifty years old is a story I will save for another time.
On a typically warm Los Angeles evening in 1990, we were scheduled for two shows at Club Lingerie on Sunset Boulevard. The producers, the folks who ran the club, had to return
some money when the second show was cancelled. I take 100 percent of the blame for the fans’ disappointment that night. As I was leaving the stage between the two shows, I suffered a
stroke.
I wish I had been more aware of my responsibilities as an observing artist. It would have been quite a coup for me to be able to describe to you exactly what happened to my body as I stepped
with my usual stork-like grace. But I can’t for the life of me remember the process, the actual changes that my body went through. I suppose it would read like those two-page centerfold
stories in the
National Enquirer
: “I Died and Came Back to Life,” by Jesus Christ or something.