For my mother
I can’t breathe.
Beneath the ground, the wooden casket I am trapped in is being lowered deeper and deeper into the cold, dark earth. Fear overtakes me as I fall into a paralytic state. I can hear the dirt being shoveled over me. My heart pounds through my chest. I can’t scream, and if I could, who would hear me? Just as the final shovel of soil is being packed tightly over me, I convulse out of my nightmare into the sweat- and urine-soaked bed in the small apartment on the island of Manhattan that my family calls home. Shaken and disoriented, I make my way out of the tiny back bedroom into the pitch-dark living room, where my mother and father sleep on a convertible couch. I stand at the foot of their bed just staring … waiting.
What kind of dream is this for a five-year-old? What have I experienced to produce this kind of imagery? It’s 1969. The only violence I’ve seen is in cartoons of Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner on the eight-inch black-and-white screen of our Singer portable television.
Mom senses my presence and awakens. What’s wrong? I confess I’ve had a bad dream. She picks me up and carries me back to my bedroom. She quickly changes the sheets, brings a warm washcloth to wipe me down, and dresses me in fresh pajamas. She consoles me. I drift back to sleep.
This dream recurs countless times. Years pass before I understand its true meaning.
I now know that God was speaking to me. I believe the dream was telling me that life does not end in the grave. There’s something beyond. Something eternal. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I want to go back to the beginning of the journey.
MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN
GREENWICH VILLAGE, 1963
On the small bandstand of a cellar jazz club, where the air is thick with smoke and the lights are low, John Coltrane commands his rhythm section. With a gentle nod of his head, he sets an achingly slow groove. Elvin Jones effortlessly works his whisper-quiet brushes. McCoy Tyner plays a subtle piano intro. Bassist Jimmy Garrison provides a gentle heartbeat. Then Coltrane, breathing deeply, exhales into his horn. The sound of his tenor sax is startling—rich, lush, sultry.
At a corner table, a self-assured Jewish man looks into the eyes of a beguiling Afro-Caribbean woman.
She’s my mother, Roxie Roker, and he’s my dad, Sy Kravitz.
Dad’s a thirty-nine-year-old journalist-producer for NBC News at 30 Rockefeller Center, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. Years before, he started out as a page in this same building before working his way up. He’s a self-starter. A former Army Green Beret who saw action in the Korean War, he’s also a member of the Reserve. His parents, Joe and Jean Kravitz, live in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, with many other Jews of Russian descent.
Dad’s divorced with two daughters. He lives alone in a $350-a-month one-bedroom apartment at 5 East Eighty-Second Street, just off Central Park on the Upper East Side. A graduate of New York University, he’s a sharp dresser and a consummate charmer. He loves music, especially jazz, and theater. He has his artistic side, but it’s overpowered by order and discipline.
It’s at 30 Rock where he meets Roxie Roker, age thirty-four. My mom is a soulful, deeply elegant person. An Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority member and drama major, she graduated from Howard University with honors before studying at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and joining a theater company in Copenhagen. She performs in Off-Broadway productions and supports herself working as an assistant to a high-ranking NBC boss. She’s the ultimate executive secretary: efficient and graceful in every manner.
She has inherited the work ethic of her parents. Her Bahamian father, a self-made man, and her Georgia-born mother, who works as a domestic, own the home where she was raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
Roxie has never dated a white man before. But it’s not my father’s skin color that bothers her. It’s the fact that they work in the same office. She’s also a little uneasy knowing he’s been married and divorced. And the fact that he doesn’t seem very close to his daughters. She is skeptical of his nature.
Dad takes Mom to a Broadway revival of The Crucible; they catch Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot; they see Alvin Ailey at City Center; they hear Langston Hughes read at the 92nd Street Y. Sy and Roxie are kindred spirits. He’s determined to win her affection.
You see,