(Museum of the City of New York, Berenice Abbot)
Game playing: The Stoop, the Street and the Schoolyard
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I was thinking today about growing up in NY (with part of each summer in Philly) and had memories of games I learned to play sitting on the stoop, or out on the sidewalk (or in the street dodging traffic) in Brooklyn, realizing that many of us share those same urban memories, though some are probably culturally specific. Others are generational - not sure how many kids still play simple games that don't have a game controllers attached these days, but I can hope.
I remember hopscotch, skelly (or skully) played with bottle caps filled with tar, jonny-on the pony, ring-a leevio, jacks and jump-rope. I had roller-skates that you tightened with a key. No roller rinks for us; we had cracked sidewalks.
I remember graduating from simple rope jumping to double dutch which became an art form and now has become a national competition. There was a "black girl" style to it which required timing and rhythm, whether you were turning the ropes or jumpin' in - sometimes with more than one of your girlfriends.
Double Dutch
In African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana Mona Lisa Saloy discusses, playing the dozens, and other verbal forms of expression which start with simple rhyming and hand-clapping.
Verbal artistry among African American children is equally expressive and creative, although the forms are different. Children's lore in New Orleans Black neighborhoods bears a necessary developmental function. Sidewalk songs pass on attitudes and knowledge of self, imitations of adult life and values, and distinct criticisms of adult life and societal norms.
She illustrates with this sidewalk rhyme:
I like ice cream
I like cake
I like a colored boy
And he don't fake
So step back white boy
You don't shine
I'll get another colored boy
to beat yo' behind
Last night,
the night before
I met my boyfriend at the candy store
He bought me ice cream
He bought me cake
He sent me home with a stomach ache
Mommie, Mommie, I feel sick
Call the doctor, quick, quick, quick
Doctor, Doctor, before I die
Close my eyes one to five
I said a one, a two, a three, a four, a five
See that house
On top of that hill
That's where me and my boyfriend live
Cookin' that chicken and cookin' that rice
Come on baby, let's shoot some dice!
-Sunni Maria Fitch, age 6, with John Anthony Fitch, 4
New Orleans, 1987
I don't remember anything quite that complex-what sticks in my head is "Miss Mary Mack"
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see the elephant, elephant, elephant
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.
He jumped so high, high, high
He reached the sky, sky, sky
He never came down, down, down
'Til the 4th of July, ly, ly!
which crossed cultural groups-though I thought it was a black thing when I was a kid.
A great book about this is:
The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop
The Games Black Girls Play illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn—how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Kyra D. Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried into adulthood. In this celebration of playground poetry and childhood choreography, she uncovers the surprisingly rich contributions of girls’ play to black popular culture.
But as I said - it crosses cultures. Found an interesting subway video of hand-clap play
Some play was simply a matter of cooling off. Public swimming pools were rare, apartments not air-conditioned, so summer time was run under the pump time in many neighborhoods.
Equipment to play with was cheap. A clothes line rope, a "spauldeen ball" or a simple set of jacks.
I still remember chanting "A my name is Alice and my boyfriends name is Al ...I come from Alabama and I eat apples,"as I bounced the ball under my leg.
The boys used the spauldeen to play stickball (as a tom boy I played too). You didn't need fancy baseball equipment or a field. The street was where you played till it was too dark to see and your mom made you come inside.
The spauldeen was used in schoolyard handball. If you were really good you had a special old glove with the fingers cut off. Rarely did boys play with girls.
Sometimes I'd head uptown on the subway to East Harlem (El Barrio) and the games were pretty much the same, with the addition of dominoes. You could hear the clicking on the outside card tables in front of tenement buildings and shouts of "capicu!" could be heard up and down the block. Everyone played, from the youngest kids to community elders.
I didn't realize dominoes were part of African American history till I saw this painting by Horace Pippen:
As soon as you could hold a deck of cards you learned to play those games too. I started with tunk and spades but couldn't wait to be old enough to play bid whist with my older cousins.
I never met anyone white who played bid whist, unless they grew up in a black neighborhood. By the time I was in college, whist playing was damn near a profession. I had classmates that flunked out of school cause they spent more time trying to "run a boston" than they did in their books.
Black artist Annie Lee documents bid whist in several of her pieces - notably
"6 no uptown", meaning you were bidding no trumps with Ace king high...a very hard bid to make, and if you and your partner make it you have bragging rights for the night.
What games did you play growing up?
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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How Race Colors Death Row ‘Justice’. Colorlines: Beyond Troy Davis
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The state of Georgia ignored a mountain of evidence and killed Troy Davis on Wednesday night. But the movement that grew out of the effort to save his life has cast irreparable doubt on the country’s death penalty system. That a man whose innocence seemed so clear to many—or, at the very least, worth of a second look—can be so hastily killed casts doubt over nearly every stage of his prosecution. And that fact has become a rallying cry for people around the world.
Davis’s case is sadly typical. The Chicago-based Innocence Project, a group that has successfully fought for the exonerations of dozens of people from Illinois’ now-defunct death row, lists eyewitness misidentification and government misconduct as two of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. And even then, questions of guilt or innocence seem almost beside the point when you consider the fact that people of color often receive more harsh sentences for the same crimes as whites, especially when the victim is white. As historian and author William Jelani Cobb told our own Akiba Solomon this week, “The implication is that a white life is worth more.”
Anti-death penalty groups like Amnesty International and the NAACP are working hard to use the momentum surrounding Davis’s case to ask more probing questions about how to fix America’s broken punishment system. Here’s a closer look at who ends up paying the most for which crimes.
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Police beating of a 5 ft tall Down Syndrome young man. NewsOne: Man With Down Syndrome Beat By Police Over Colostomy Bag
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A twenty-two-year-old man with down syndrome is recovering from his injuries nearly a week after Miami-Dade police officers beat him outside his home.
According to police reports, a violent confrontation ensued after officers tried to handcuff Gilberto Powell to investigate a bulge they spotted in his pants.
After he was detained they realized the bulge in his waistband was a colostomy bag.
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The first African woman to win a Nobel prize has passed away. BBC: Kenya's Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai dies aged 71
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Kenya's Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai has died in Nairobi while undergoing cancer treatment. She was 71.
She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for promoting conservation, women's rights and transparent government - the first African woman to get the award.
She was elected as an MP in 2002 and served as a minister in the Kenyan government for a time.
Ms Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted 20-30 million trees in Africa.
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In a fiery speech at the Congressional Black Caucus awards dinner, President Obama challenged Republicans in Congress to show they care about job creation and was roundly cheered for showing he’s “going to fight” to fire up his supporters in a battle to “save the country.” CNN: CBC members react to Obama's speech on jobs, the black community
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As he has done frequently in the weeks since he introduced the American Jobs Act, the president repeatedly called on Congress to pass the bill.
With the unemployment rate higher for blacks than for any other ethnic group - at 16.7 percent - the president has come under criticism from some in the black community who believe his administration has not done enough to address the issue. Saturday night, he made a point of spelling out some of the measures in the jobs bill that would help the hardest hit communities, like the 100,000 black-owned businesses that would get a tax cut for hiring a new worker or giving workers a raise, and programs to help low-income youth get summer jobs.
"These Republicans in Congress like to talk about job creators. How about doing something real for job creators?" he said, prompting cheers and applause. "You say you’re the party of tax cuts. Pass this jobs bill, and every worker in America, including nearly 20 million African-American workers, will get a tax cut. Pass this jobs bill, and prove you’ll fight just as hard for a tax cut for ordinary folks as you do for all your contributors."
The audience erupted with laughter when he joked that Republicans have not always been against the kind of infrastructure spending he has proposed. "You all used to like to build roads, right? What happened?" the president asked, tongue firmly in cheek.
After the speech, several CBC members said they were pleased with the message. Rep. Donna Edwards , D-Md., said it was a "call to action." She said lawmakers on both sides of the aisle know where the battle lines are drawn on the issues and complaining about that will not accomplish anything - they must fight for what they want.
"He showed he's going to fight," she said.
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
The codified practice of bureaucratic dispatch and detachment. The orderly linear momentum of justice that is not justice, set in motion by a judgement of our peers who are not our peers. The cold calculation of levers and buttons, switches and gears, silicon chip electricity opening a tube of ice cold liquid forced through a syringe puncturing the pulsating vein of warm, soft existence.
The banality of evil that would kill each and every Troy Davis. The banality of evil who walks our streets and eats at our tables. Who prays to the God of Forgiveness. Who tithes at the altar of the gun and the hangman's noose.
The Innocent and The Guilty are equal here. No one escapes the codified practice of bureaucratic dispatch and detachment; the orderly linear momentum of justice that is not justice.
Nightmare Begins Responsibility
I place these numbed wrists to the pane
watching white uniforms whisk over
him in the tube-kept
prison
fear what they will do in experiment
watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands
breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes
distrusting white-pink mending paperthin
silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes
shrunk in his trunk-skincapped
shaven head, in thighs
distrusting-white-hands-picking-baboon-light
on his son who will not make his second night
of this wardstrewn intensive airpocket
where his father's asthmatic
hymns of night-train, train done gone
his mother can only know that he has flown
up into essential calm unseen corridor
going boxscarred home, mamaborn, sweetsonchild
gonedowntown into researchtestingwarehousebatteryacid
mama-son-done-gone/me telling her 'nother
train tonight, no music, no breathstroked
heartbeat in my infinite distrust of them:
and of my distrusting self
white-doctor-who-breathed-for-him-all-night
say it for two sons gone,
say nightmare, say it loud
panebreaking heartmadness:
nightmare begins responsibility.
-- Michael S. Harper
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Grab your favorite seat and a bite to eat