JULY

Keenagers

            Keenagers are the elders of our tribe; those members with years and experience enough to be revered.  They are unique in many ways.  Collectively, they have amassed the most knowledge and the most life points.  They have been fortunate enough to see more change in their lives than any other nation in its first 250 years.  The elders are the digital cameras to our recent past, the silent historians, and in many instances, the forgotten people.

            So, I was shocked to learn recently, that I am now a Keenager.  I haven’t reached sixty years, three score, six decades, five dozen years, three generations.  I’m just a little more than half a century; not even two thirds of a hundred.  Yet, it seems that I have arrived.

For nine months, in this year of Our Lord, 2008, I tried to gain professional employment.  I have an excellent resume – of course, I do, I’m a Keenager.  I have a wealth of experience (Keenager).  I have years of business and professional knowledge (Keenager).  That sounds like it should qualify me as a Keenager, but – I’m still young!  I still have two children at home that have never left; they haven’t had a chance to come back to the roost yet.

I still like to participate in sports.  Tennis has always been my racket.  But there’s volleyball, bowling, softball, and running.  Ah, but the last three years, only my mind has been a participant, my body finally decided that it had enough.  I walk now.  I try to get in the required ten thousand steps of senior citizenry.  I greet other young looking people as I balance on arthritic knees during my circuit in the park.  Do they see an old person when they look at me?  I feel young, vibrant, ready to go – to contribute to the world.

But I find myself contributing from my arm chair; on my websites, on the telephone, and in supermarket check out lines.  How did I get here?  What am I to do now with this active mind, my overactive imagination?  Am I to go quietly into some uncertain future presided over by – by – by - children?

Is that how Keenagers have been looking at me all my life?  I knew it all then.  I was smart, on the move, on the go, making snap decisions, going places.  Yet, I wound up right where they are.

I admire them.  Why am I having such a hard time resigning myself to their fate?  Is it fear?  Is it that I’m not good enough?  Or is it because I don’t think that I deserve to be venerable?  We all deserve to be respected; so why not be valued for the things that I have learned; for my life skills?  I’m not getting old.  Like fine wine, I’m only getting better.

I guess that makes me a Keenager.

~

American Keenagers come in many colors, shapes, and sizes.  Their ages, it seems, begin as early as 55 and keep on going.  Some are fifty to sixty years older and all have varied reasons for their longevity.  I’ve heard a woman say clean living kept her alive and I’ve heard a man say a cigar and a shot a whiskey a day are the keys to his long life.  There’s probably more to it than that, but I guess we won’t know what the reason is until we reach our platinum years.

I usually think of Keenagers as men and women who remember hearing first hand accounts of Al Capone, have hard tales to tell of the Depression, and talk of how their lives changed during THE BIG ONE - WWII.  I wasn’t even born until after all that happened.

But across our great land, there are people out there who know secrets that could change our history.  They hold on to them, waiting for someone else to make them known, willing only then to confirm or deny.  There are stories out there like Rosewood, and people out there to tell them.  There is historical data about every aspect of our culture and we need only look as far as Keenagers who worked as domestics, maids, and janitors, railroad porters, gardeners, cooks, and house servants.  We will also find them as having retired from hotels, saloons, barber shops, beauty salons, filling stations, and clothing stores.

~

While many young people are unwilling to admit that their parents or grandparents did such menial labor, they should know that this menial labor, along with slavery is what built our great country and elevated it to the status that it maintains today.  They should keep in mind that the majority of Americans of Color who worked outside their home did this type of work from post Civil War to Brown v. the Board of Education and through the Civil Rights Movement.  That’s almost 100 years of subdued history, fallible historical facts, and inaccurate newspaper reports.  This not only concerns Black Americans, but all Americans.

Doing research for an article a few years back in the New Orleans Times Picayune, I kept running across inaccurate dates.  Inaccurate according to my family’s Keenage storytellers who argued over every little detail; so therefore, wrong.  I talked to several of my relatives and followed their leads.  Some of them led to things that I knew as a child growing up in New Orleans.  Finally, I remembered The Louisiana Weekly, a Black Institution since 1925. Searching for details in this small newspaper was like a trip down memory lane, not only for me but for my mother and her siblings.  This was The People’s newspaper.

To my chagrin, I realized how many White People were also left out of the annals of history because they selflessly helped People of Color as priests and nuns.  Fortunately, they made news in the Black periodical.  But, are the families that they left behind aware of the good that they did?  Did the families know that they offered advice and counsel to many who became leaders in the late 1950s and 1960s.

I researched Black newspapers around the country and found very few still in existence; almost none have indices that allow the public to view them in libraries.  Again, this is a reason to talk with our Keenagers while we still have them.

~

When and if you reach out to these Keenagers, don’t be discouraged if they are not willing to talk to you.  While spending Thanksgiving with the in-laws, I overheard my mother-in-law say, “Of course I remember, but many of those things were hurtful and I don’t want to talk about it.”  Over the past thirty years, she and I have discussed many topics that she won’t discuss in a group.  On one topic, she told me, “If you tell anybody that I said it, I’ll deny it.  My sons are going to believe me - not you.”

During the summer of 2008, I interviewed Keenagers at the Southeast Neighborhood Senior Center in Atlanta.  Many of them had pleasant memories of families, family gatherings, holidays, special events, and humorous adventures.  However, each one that grew up in a rural Georgia county had horrendous stories of growing up Black, fighting the odds, and leaving home because there was little of their adult life to enjoy in those areas.

One common thread among the women was the trip to school.  Most had to walk, but a few of the younger Keenagers rode a school bus.  Whether they walked all the way or just to the bus stop, a daily morning occurrence was to have the white school bus slow down so that the white students could throw urine out the bus windows onto them as they walked along the side of the road.

At this late date, this was my first time ever hearing this story.  This did bring to mind stories that I heard in high school.  Several teachers said that when they were younger, when colored folk were made to sit in the balconies in theatres, but had to walk to the basement to use the bathroom, they would just pee from the balcony down into the audiences.

The common thread among the men’s narratives all dealt with the military.  Soldiers and sailors who served during WWII and the Korean War all talked about the Europeans wanting to see their tails.  “What tails?” I asked naively.  My Dad didn’t mention any tails and I don’t remember reading about it in the autobiography of Malcolm X.

As we shot pool together, each man wove a colorful account of their encounter with either the enemy or civilians who asked about their tails.  These people had received advance notice that the American Negro sported a tail.

My friend Ray Bailey and I became friends because we didn’t believe in being politically correct.  We stood toe to toe as he complimented me on a favor that I did for him.  He said, “That’s mighty…,” and stopped.  I continued for him, “white of me.”  He smiled; I smiled.  Over the next fifteen years, our friendship developed enough that he could tell me that in his former life, he had been a Klansman.  I didn’t ask and he didn’t divulge any more.  It was enough that he’d moved beyond that.  What was done was behind both of us.

In his seventies, he was surprised to find that women could learn science and engineering.  So, later, it wasn’t as big a shock to find that Black women could excel in both. 

We are often victims of our families, cultures, and mores.  We learn reaction and retaliation.  Hopefully, there comes a time in life when, if we mature enough, we become Keenagers.  My mother-in-law, who doesn’t like to be reminded of the hurtful things in life, steps out of her comfort zone to ascertain that she is mindful of other peoples’ needs.  When I asked her how she could do this, she pointed out that when you’re young, you color things in black and white, but when you become old, you are just that – old.  Old has no color.

Not all Keenagers want to talk about certain aspects of their past, but there are many who are waiting for someone to ask them the right question.  Some are waiting for any question at all or just to have a chance to discuss the present with you.

Keenagers are not the only people who lack trust in different age brackets.  Many non-Keenagers define the elderly as old, useless, toothless, senile, ugly, and funny.  They refer to them as crones, hags and say that they make strange sounds.  Old people have wrinkles, liver spots, and segregate themselves from everybody else because they are afraid of young people.

Keenagers are misunderstood.  We (Did I say we?) don’t all like rock music or old school.  We don’t all love the weather channel.  Even though we are not a drain on society, we don’t all volunteer.  We have gangs – AARP, DAR, Red Hat Society.  We don’t all play Bingo, and we are not jealous of youth.  We are not helpless nor do we have an aversion to change.

And we are not the worst drivers.  Very few of us have blue hair.

I find most Keenagers to be tolerant.  Some have amusing anecdotes, funny stories, and life stories involving pain, sorrow, loss, suffering, and love.  These are the stories that we need to tap into.

~

            It’s time for Keenagers to be recognized.  Most families have a few and most certainly they are loved.  But in these fast paced times of economic uncertainty, urgent challenges to our futures, occurrences of immediate gratification, and the virtual world, how many of them are utilized to their fullest?  How many of us take the time to learn grandma’s recipe without having it handed down from Mother or Aunt Gerda?  How many of us listen to grandpa and his buddies when they tell those ridiculous stories that have got to be made up because they’re so incredible?  How many of us take the time to listen when our neighbor brings over a jar of preserves, hoping that you will invite her in to partake of this disappearing craft - or to just have a few words about the weather, her garden, her children who no longer visit, or her friends that have gone on before?  Who of us has the time and strength to assist the grumpy old recluse who lives alone in the decrepit house?

            Spring ahead forty years – oh, that’s me!  Me in a different world!  A world made up of sameness.  A world made up of everyone who was here forty years ago - and read the same headlines, and surfed the same web, had the same Facebook friends, ate the same store bought food.  Forty years from now, we will all have the same historical memories.  By then, our real past will have been lost, the people who lived it – just names on headstones in gray places.

            Already, too much of our history has been lost.  Lost in a ploy of political correctness, insensitivity to our brothers and sisters, and hatred of things that we don’t understand.  The word used to be prejudice.  But prejudice is gone, I’m told.  This is a newly recreated United States.  There is no prejudice here.  We are all equal.  There’s proof.  It’s written in our Constitution, in our Bill of Rights.  If it’s in writing, it must be true.  If you dispute it, take it to court.

Or, take it to the elders of our American tribe – the Keenagers.  The older, the better.  Our twentieth century went by so quickly, a mere five years in time, creates a rift in the continuum.  We are a nation with millions of Keenagers.  Many of them live in senior high-rises, away from the masses.  Some live in assisted living communities even farther from the throngs who need them.  But many are living in our attics and basements, in half of the double garage.  Some are living in our homes to baby-sit our young while both parents go out to work.  The family of fifty years ago is no longer, and once we’re home from work, grandma’s way of living - her rules and discipline; her old way of talking and thinking - are not impressed upon our kids.

“She’s old,” her children say to the young that should be relishing this age of wisdom and knowledge.  And so the children run off to watch TV, play video games, and talk on the phone without really communicating anything to their friends.

It’s time for us to correct these errors, to become a part of all human life, not just the lives of those who are just like us.  We need to expand our thinking to include all Americans.

I remember as each decade passed during my life, those of the next generation assured me that life begins at 20, 30, and 40.  However, we fear crossing 30, but feel at 40 that our lives have passed us by.

There are Keenagers that we need to remember.  Pulitzer Prize Winner, James Michener, now 101, penned his first book at age 40.  Colonel Sanders began franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 62.  Grandma Moses began painting at age 70.  Ruth Ellis is a centenarian LGBT activist, and the person who lived the longest, to date, lived to the ripe old age of 122.

That’s a long time to be a Keenager, to offer wisdom, advice, and recount life experiences to those who will listen.

~

While I would love to say that I coined the word, Keenager, I have to admit that I did not.  My friend, August James Williams, coined it at the age of 15, back in the 1960s.  He was raised by his grandmother, Hannah Todd, and was amazed at her resourcefulness.  August was smart enough to recognize that, besides the fact that he couldn’t get anything over on her (as brilliant as he was at 15); no one else could pull the wool over her eyes, either.  He paid attention and realized that she hadn’t reached old age; she had reached a keen age where she incorporated all the knowledge of her life in order to insure that he did well in his and lived a good life.

A few years my junior, I understand that in his heart, he’s always been a Keenager.  Through his grandchildren, he watches time march slowly on.  Changes are wrought on a daily basis and we all gain life points.  If we utilize what we have, what we’ve been given, our talents and treasures, we march into the future as Keenagers.

Yeah, that’s me.  Now, if only I could find a job.