May 30, 2020, her name is Jordan, like the river, not the basketball player. She is not your diversity. She is her own self. Venture off from downtown, could be Chicago, Paris, Tehran, someplace you’ve never heard of, someplace I’ve never heard of, either/or I’m telling you it’s Philly. Jordan’s downtown. Fresh off SEPTA. That attitude. Hootie hoo!
Middleclass shoppers used to fear hip-hoppers coming in from the suburbs to our John Wannamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbal’s department stores, Bookbinder’s restaurant. What you lookin' at? Yah heard? But if you want to impress us, be a skinny shooting guard, barely over six-foot tall, he sacrificed his body, but they couldn’t take his heart. Number 3 could’ve been nicer to the staff at T.G.I Fridays, but so could a lot of us. You see what I’m saying?
By a gentleman’s agreement, no building taller than the statue of Billy Penn atop City Hall. Every tradition one day finds itself mocked, old-fashioned, straight off the cobb, akin to a superstition. Attire once inappropriate in the West Market Street district of One Liberty Place, Melon Bank Center and Commerce Square, even on a casual Friday, became every day, gentrification chic. But we in a hoodie? Still. Never mind. Those department stores we were once so proud – not really, the way rent-a-cops hounded us – went the way of the necktie and pantyhose nobody needs anymore in the surname-less modern office where every demographic claims it is the new black, but it wouldn't want to trade places with the old, even that other Jordan, the basketball player, when disco lights flash behind his Mercedes, the flashlight shines in his face, and its license and registration, keep your hands where they can see them.
Now instead of relying on traditions, downtown relies on interchangeable chain restaurants and outlet stores, chasing trends that pop, pop, pop like soap bubbles landing on the rusted I-bars of construction sites too often repurposed and perpetually unfinished, like the Disney Hole at 8th and Market. While the chorus sings, make America great again, make America great again.
The 1950s?
The 1850s?
1776?
America was never great for Jordan. That doesn't make Jordan unpatriotic, it makes what you call patriotism un-Jordan. And didn’t you used to have the potential to make life better for yourselves than your parents? And they better for themselves than theirs? And so on? Up until you started singing that make America great again all the way to the ballot box? Back in 1980, the year Bob Boone chased that soft, Frank White, pop up down the first base line only to have it drivel out of his glove. Everyone in the Delaware Valley thought, oh no, here we go again, before Pete Rose swooped in and picked it clean just before ball hit AstroTurf.
‘Let's make America great again’ was Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980. Nineteen-eighty, the first time the Eagles went to the Super. Ron Jaworski got picked off three times by Rod Martin, Rod who? Yet it was Donovan McNabb, 2008, that we can't forgive? Em-hmm. In 1980 the Sixers went to their second NBA Finals in three years . Lost ‘em both. But Doc wouldn’t forget he owed us one. And there he is in 83’ time running out, the game and the championship in the bag, calling for the rock, Maurice Cheeks blowing by him, rising up for that exclamation point slam dunk, like who knew Cheeks could get up like that?
Nineteen-eighty, also the last year unemployment benefits were tax free. Reagan needed that revenue to decrease the capital gains tax. Keep that in mind the next time you’re laid off, you never had any stocks, and the IRS comes a’ knockin’. And antiracists, although your hearts may be in an Allen Iverson place, don't forget moonlight is a reflection of the sun it revolves around. It is not its own light. They can’t make White a capital noun if you don’t play capital B L A C K.
As early as the 1940’s Richard Wright was saying he could forget he was a Negro if America didn't keep reminding him. Black children can tell you the moment they discovered they were black children outside of their homes and not just children like they are to God and their mothers. For me it was in the second grade. Wee Willie Webber’s Colorful Cartoon Club – hurry home from school, they’ve already started – Dr. Shock’s horror movies, Captain Noah’s rainbow, Sally Star was Our Gal Sal, Pixanne had her puppets, Gene London illustrated stories as he told them to a group of kids gathered around him. The boy's name was Charlie, but it wasn’t his fault, it was his mother who taught us both on which side of the color line each of us belonged. How she did it … Like I said, every black child has this moment. They are remembering it right now.
But first, The Klu Klux Klan didn’t come to the party until ninety-five years after Crispus Attucks lay dead, an unarmed black man killed by white men in uniform with guns, and the first casualty of America’s Revolutionary War. The Klan had to whitewash white indentured servitude into something like serving in the Peace Core; ‘White men never ruled white men in America; the African was born to be ruled; that’s the way God intended it!’ This ignores that George Washington, the father of our nation, thought to be incapable of fathering children the old-fashioned way, the most prosperous slave owner of his time, owned many white slaves. His white slaves ran away from him just like and sometimes with his black slaves. Just days after the battles of Lexington and Concord, The Father of Our Country posted ads in the Virginia Gazette for the capture and return of eight white people. You can look it up.
The Klan is correct in that it was the cotton boom that allowed a spurned European to become sultan of those manors popularized in fictions like Gone with the Wind. But not every spurned European found this a land of milk honey. And of the rest, some were indentured servants who self-identified as no different than slaves. Even of those who were free, why would an Ashley Wilkes pay them top dollar to do what his slaves could do for no payment and as though their lives depended on it: Their lives depended on it.
To put this another way, if slavery had not been abolished, white baseball would not exist. George Herman Ruth would not have been able to become ‘The Babe’ a.k.a. ‘The Sultan of Swat.’ Larry Bird wouldn't be ‘Larry Legend'. Tom Brady would have had to find another reason to call himself ‘Tom Terrific.’ So would Tom Seaver. Carpenters, masons, barbers, seamstresses, caters, musicians … Anything a slave could do, as we’ve established, their lives depended on their achievements. What could you, young, free, and twenty-one, have incentive to do better? That includes the slave trade. Sooner or later, they would've taken that over. Because don’t those people take over everything? Quiet is kept, on the other side of the water, a lot of Africans prospered off of the slave trade. Muhammad Ali – the Egyptian not the former Cassius Clay – was the greatest sultan of the slave trade of all times!
It is like when men could have multiple wives. Many men died virgins while others had harems. So why didn't virgin man revolt against Muhammad Ali? The sultan convinced virgin man that his mythical superiority included him in a ‘them’ that as long as ‘they' stay in power, there was nothing to stop virgin man from one day finding himself a sultan, you never know. Or damn the odds, the only sure way not to hit the lottery is not to play.
Gambling problem, dial 1-800-The Gambler.
Confederate soldiers were so ragged Confederate General Heth filed a report that he ordered his men into Gettysburg in search of provisions and ‘shoes especially’ which led his men to ‘stumble into a fight' that began hostilities prematurely to Robert E Lee's orders. Which in many historian’s estimates cost The South the Battle of Gettysburg and subsequently the war. Really it was Lee’s fixation on Richmond and limiting his presence in the Western theatre that makes him the most celebrated winner in history of the best none out of one. So why would ragged, poorly provisioned, foot sore soldiers leave their families, take up rifles and follow genteel Confederate officers off into bloody battle to protect a way of life that before hostilities began was the infantryman’s own ‘Jordan black’ and would have prevented Babe Ruth? Because the South convinced the lowborn Southerner that after the war, if we win, that plantation just like mine you always wanted, that harem in the slave quarters, keep playing that lottery, son, you never know.
Gambling problem, dial 1-800-The Gambler.
Or it’s just like Conservatives and Liberal politicians behave toward one another as though they are of different races. But if they do not put on that performance, at least in public, each could not convince their supporters to abandon their best self-interest and vote against their fears. Or how else to explain the majority of political candidates we are forced to choose between and worse, try to feel good about? Their victory isn't ours. We say ‘we’ won. Just like we say ‘we' won the big game where we paid to watch someone else getting paid to play.
Politicians should be buying our jerseys.
Looking back, Charlie's mom could see by the way my parents dressed me, by the way I was trained to present myself, by her own standards, if anyone wasn't measuring up, it wasn't me. But who was to say it would always be that way? One day she may be a Sultana, you never know.
Gambling problem, 1-800 …
North, south, west across the Schuylkill River, east across the Delaware River, it doesn’t matter, leave center city Philadelphia in any direction, very quickly you’ll find yourself where every neighborhood has a corner store where the people behind the counter don’t look like the ones handing them their money. So stop asking us how we can burn down the stores in our own neighborhoods, most of the time, we can’t even get a job there. Each of these neighborhoods has its Jordan. If she’s lucky she won't be alone. Before the COVID time I’d see them on the El, backpacks at their feet, notebook in lap, charting out x and y axis, fingers tracing yellow highlighted passages in textbooks, nodding, pausing, asking each other questions, laughing and having fun, or just chilling, one with the right, the other with the left of a pair of earphones into a shared device.
In the COVID time, each weekday morning, in her neighborhood, not too far from center city, Jordan sets a milk crate under the front window and sets her chessboard atop it. This is her desk. A fall jacket piled under her on a thin carpet over a weak hardwood floor, this is her chair. From 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM and from 12:45PM to 3:30 PM (she gets 45 minutes off screen for lunch) Jordan stares at a tablet staring at her, mic muted, unless she has a question or she has to answer one.
Jordon chooses the front window because it gets the morning sun. She’s not allowed to turn on a light. Who is she to run up the electric bill? And since she’s home, there’s no need to pay a babysitter to watch her little brother, and the baby: Move. No come back. Show me how to work this thing. Never mind, you do it. Then I need you to go to store for me, or change the baby, or take these clothes to the laundromat, play my numbers, move, your blocking the light, turn that thing down too. That voice. How can you stand it?
What do you mean your teacher wants to talk to me? How do you work this? Yes ... Thank you. I know there’s a pandemic going on ... This is my house. Jordan is my daughter. When she’s at school I don’t tell you how to run it. When she’s home, like you said, this is an emergency ... Why shouldn’t Jordan pitch in? Her future? Right now, we’re just trying to make it through the present. Aren’t you? Hmm … Yes, I wear a mask. My kids? I told Jordan’s brother, are you wearing your mask? You know what he says to me? Mom, it’s the same, whether it’s a gun or the virus. Three-hundred and sixty-five murders in Philly last year. When I’m gone, I’m gone. My boy tells me that and he’s only eleven-years-old. Yes, yes, I know we’re getting off the subject. But are we really? Bye.
Her name is Jordan, like the river. I’m not telling you her story so you can feel sorry for her. Or so you can thank me for sharing it with you. Jordan is not like a restaurant everybody is talking about and you’ve been trying to get a table there for months. Don’t sample her pain. Don’t ask about her future like its today’s special. Her name is Jordan. The only thing you have that she doesn’t isn’t necessarily wealth or education. A lot of you don’t have any more of that than she does. What you have is a sense of Sultan & Sultana Lottery Entitlement that works against your own self-interest. This allows you to claim things like baring assault rifles are baring arms, according to the Second Amendment. Those arms Constitutional Originalist, not so fast, were single-shot breech loading muskets, put those assault rifles back on the shelf, the same way you claim abortion is not a right to privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Which is ironic because when you talk about the right to life, guns kill more children than abortions do. Guns kill pregnant women too.
Her name is Jordan. An admirable intellect will not be her savior from the same circumstances her mother found herself, and her mother before her was trapped. Jordan is still going to need a break. She’s also going to need the knowledge and the confidence to be able to take advantage of that break without becoming the opportunity for somebody else to reap the harvest she has sown. If she’s going to help herself, Jordan is going to need our help to be successful. A lot of it. Just like I am fortunate enough to have had help to become who I am. You needed help too. Only you didn’t call it affirmative action then. Or have you forgotten your Dutch uncles, your legacy applications, and those who simply saw the myth of themselves in you, just like the sultan said.
For six years I was a caseworker for The Pennsylvania Department of Welfare. We had a saying, ‘There is a lot of money in poor people, just not for poor people.’ Food Stamps or as it is called now, The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was invented to help farmers have a guaranteed market for their crops. SNAP is only redeemable for what politicians say it is, the same way mine workers were once paid in company script, worthless outside of a company store. Speaking of the politics of SNAP, SNAP takes up less than one percent of the federal budget. By comparison, in 2019, defense spending took up fifty-seven percent of the federal budget.
The real welfare queens are military contractors.
At the time I worked for the state, there were nineteen welfare offices in Philadelphia. Find a welfare office, find a supermarket [company store] that does a big business in SNAP benefits, within walking distance. Outside South District, at 990 Buttonwood, before you could get down Spring Garden to the supermarket, there was a check cashing place that separated those behind the counter from those in front of it by a thick, bullet proof, glass partition with a revolving dumbwaiter of that same glass. The cashier controlled the rotation.
This country has from its beginnings, a history of not wanting dark hands to touch it, while at the same time using us for wet nurses and body servants. Social distancing and masks, we understand it, but it brings back memories we shouldn’t have to relive every time we put one on. Especially since the sign had to take down banning we in a hoodie to put up the one banning we without a mask. There has to be others who feel as we, Jews who must feel as we, Dalits who feel as we, Mexicans passing a Chipotle. Native Americans. A Muslim in a burka just sees the irony.
Her name is Jordan. Her heart pounds in her ears the night she hears the loud booms and plate glass crashing in the shopping plaza down the street in a scene we watch on TV, May 30, 2020, from the comfort of our sofas, far away from angry voices carrying through her front window. This isn’t a protest for yet another cop caught on video holding a black man face down to the ground, knee on his neck, the black man submitting, not fighting back, pleading, weaker and weaker, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. This man is calling out for his mother. Multiracial looting used George Floyd’s murder to create chaos.
Now some say because this isn't the first time, black people have been strange fruit for 400 years, this looting is justified. As much as I may want to, I’d be lying to myself if I said two wrongs make a right. They don't even make you feel like you thought you would.
Gambling problem? You know the number.
The scent of smoke and burning rubber choke Jordan. A police car jumps up off the ground exploding into flame. Looters step through smashed store windows, over doors ripped off hinges. Bright colored suit jackets, pants, dresses, a baby stroller, a bag of shower curtain rings and other things lay broken or brand new in the parking lot. Jordan and her family stay wide-eyed all night, her mother armed with a butcher knife, her little brother clutching a baseball bat. Jordan holds the baby, praying the looters won’t come up their front step.
The police? They are just standing by. Any other time? Philly's finest? There is a long history of police brotherly love that is the inspiration behind downtown protesters, waving: I CAN'T BREATHE picket signs, tying ropes around former police commissioner – before he became former mayor – Frank Rizzo’s statue and trying to yank it off its pedestal. But like the mayor when it came to his antebellum paddyroller policies, the statue won’t budge.
There is more than one way to apply a chokehold.
Before the lockdown, these stores had been well stocked, anticipating neighborhood families (the real job creators) to use their tax refund checks to bolster sales and carry the businesses through to the Christmas season. Now it's getting to summer, the doors still shuttered. The refund checks long spent. The owners were going to be stuck with all that outdated merchandise. The looters, many white – nobody in the neighborhood had seen them before – made sure that won't happen. Insurance money will cover their rage. Some business owners watching this, breathe easier. Now they can start over in a neighborhood where Jordan won't feel welcome. Not that I’m alleging the looters had this mind, but this is going to be the result.
Her name is Jordan like the river. You have your myths about her too, but that won’t stop Jordan from going through what she does and turn on that tablet tomorrow morning at 8:20 AM. Because for her ten minutes early can still be too late. Yet, for you to hear her name again, Jordan may have to catch the eye of the wrong man with a badge, like Breonna Taylor didn’t even get to see what was coming for her until it was there, like Sandra Bland was found in her cell, like Ahmaud Arbury out for a morning jog, like George Floyd couldn't breathe, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and so many, many more only their loved ones might remember, and those more yet to come. Some, we’ll protest what happens. Others we won’t know what happened. All, so far, have always been forgotten, except in evocations such as this, when we are asked to remember when here we go again.
No Megan’s Law for them.
The real shame isn’t that other countries can interfere in our elections. The shame is that other countries can use a fear of Jordan and we to interfere in our elections. We’ve gone from one president demanding, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ to ‘Mr. Putin, says he doesn't use our racism against us to influence our election. He says he doesn't do it. He doesn't do it. I believe him.’ And why would Mr. Putin? That kind of thing would be stealing American jobs.
Or what’s a voting zoning board for?
While you’ve been singing ‘Let’s make America great again’ for the last 40 years, maybe you're unemployed now, uninsured, certainly you're unsure what tomorrow may bring. America couldn’t be better for the sultans and sultanas. Thanks to you, it’s getting better for them all the time. And Jordan's the factory closer, the downsizer, the enemy? Jordan’s the one sending jobs overseas, raising prices, defunding retirement plans? It’s her fault you’re paying well over four dollars for a gallon of gasoline?
Her name is Jordan, like the river. America has been her home a lot longer than it has been a lot of yours. To love America, there's a lot of Jordan in it. Grace Wisher, African American indentured servant to Mary Pickersgill, helped in the creation of The Stars and Stripes. There was (look them up) Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Tubman, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Callie House, Sojourner Truth, Mary McCloud Bethune, Zora Hurston, Billie Holliday, Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Coretta Scott King; to that good mother that all she did was raise good children and only those children know what she meant to them; that grandmother that wasn’t anybody’s grandmother but the neighborhood called her Nana capital N; that sister who pulled your coat when you didn’t even know you were wearing one; to you may not have even caught her name, but you’ll never forget what she did. Without Michelle would we have gotten Barack?
I challenge anybody to get more American than that.
Not that it’s a competition, but who has paid a heavier price to be an American? It is often these Jordan who make a way out of no way. Sometimes by a small kindness to someone who has been so cruel to her. I want so badly to tell her, Stop, Jordan, you cannot heal the world, you can only hurt yourself trying. Then I remember, if Jordan wasn’t that way, we wouldn’t be this way. We don’t hate the job, the job hates us. There’s a wide, wide swath of America that is literally stabbing itself in the wish to see our blood pour forth from the wound. Maybe that makes sense of the senseless killings of us better than anything else said.
Gambling problem? It breaks my heart.
Jordan’s phenomenal resilience to get up one more time than anything can knock her down was long before Iverson learned it. I’ll bet there’s some Jordan in Iverson's mama. There was a lot in the way I was raised. How can anybody not love a somebody like a Jordan? Do your thing, Jordan, keep on doing your thing. Please don’t get shot by stray bullets from confused and angry blacks while waiting for the El, the trolley, the 12, the 21, the 42 … While sitting on your stoop, while wherever stray bullets can find you. Confused and angry blacks, please don’t shoot Jordan or each other. Don’t be the same ‘just a few bad apples’ as confused and angry whites. Killing Jordan won’t make you a sultan any more than killing you makes anyone a sultan.
Brothers, don’t feel like, oh, now he wants to talk about us? Like this? Typical. Pssh! Brothers, who do feel that way, I faced what you face. I still do. We all do. There are more of us, like me, than you realize. Or maybe you do. Maybe you are. Anyway, these words, these are my receipts. I’m not saying if we did it, why can’t you? First of all, I, for one (I can only speak for myself here) I haven’t done that much. Except read a lot. Unless you count that I can walk into a restaurant and not need to calculate how much everything is going to cost before I order, but that I know such a thing exists, you cannot say if I moved passed such a thing, that it is impossible to do so. Just implausible. You have to battle the Sultan and those degenerate gamblers not just today, tomorrow there they are again. Yesterday means nothing. Tomorrow I could be back to counting my change and depending on coupons and deals to scheme on my next supper. That said, even so, potential-wise, I’ve seriously underachieved by any standard we can measure except one, I’ve over-survived a few times to do it.
No matter your potential, the score is only 1 to 1,000,000,000 against you. If you’re lucky. You won’t be lucky. Check ball. I’d be lying if I told you that every day I feel like this battle again. I don’t want to let Jordan down. It hurts her when we don’t try. She’s seen her own implausible we can’t begin to imagine. She doesn’t have a gambling problem. Her faith is in a higher calling she answers to phenomenally.
Her name is Jordan, like the river. You can tell by the way the Sultana used to ridicule her lips, her hips, her style – until a designer or influencer the Sultana trusts counterfeited and egregiously gentrification chic overcharged the Sultana for a paltry facsimile of it. Sorry, no matter your influence, you cannot keep up with her. No one can do the way Jordan do the things she do.
Her name is Jordan, like the river. Do your thing, Jordan, keep on doing your thing. America wouldn't be America without you, down to our flag. Neither would be a lot of brothers whose dreams get kicked around, but they cannot keep us down either. That other Jordan, the basketball player, not the river, if this is any indication, his mother, Delores Jordan, a Clinton Global Initiative Award winner of 2005, Mrs. Delores, among her many charities, established the Kenya Women and Children's Wellness Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Do your thing, sisters, like the song says, you are appreciated.
A James Alan McPherson Finalist, I am a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow. My fiction and nonfiction is forthcoming or appears in The Idaho Review, Five Points, Joyland, StoryQuarterly, Apogee, Harpur Palate, and others.
