If you don’t see it by now, Gerald is facing some personal turmoil. Like so many of us. What he faces is the stuff you don’t see from the mirror. Or how you look from the outside. It’s the SOFLY stuff. The inner stuff.
Struggling, yet, trying to champion his way throughout childhood and youth, Gerald speaks his mind and questions life:
He has considered that he is a boy defined by his circumstances. He shares, [Is it that it shames us to admit how limited our power is, how much we can submit—have submitted—to the things we did not choose?] I’m just imagining the pressure of his young soul.
This one here stopped me in my tracks—A response he had to his sister whom offered him praise on his college application—She says, “You can’t ever tell if he’s upset or not. He doesn’t show emotions. He just moves on.” Gerald memoirs, “Perhaps she could have asked if I was upset, or how I felt at all. Perhaps she or anyone could have knocked on the bathroom door after twenty minutes of hearing the faucet run. Perhaps instead of being proud that a kid could endure so much, she should have been troubled that there was little sign of any harm.” I’m asking, can you relate to this?
More of Gerald’s inner anguish lands here. [“I should say—or maybe I shouldn’t, but I will—that I do not recommend this life to anyone… Don’t do it…”]
Throughout this story, young Gerald was indeed a leader. Destined, even, to become one. As a leader, you learn to be for others. A leader must love. Gerald discovered what it takes to love and what love means in a book. He shares a line with us from this book All About Love by Bell Hooks. This line, via M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm reads, Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.
Would Gerald be willing to give and receive love this way? That’s hard to tell as he struggles with who or what to love in the first place.
The struggles continue as Gerald decides to take charge of claiming his race. He would be Black. How he put it was actually funny. He pointed out that Whites with all its different ethnicities, regionalities, nationalities and so forth- would simply be called White. But, Gerald, and all of us like him, would be called African-American. I quote Gerald here. As he wants to understand why (he)—someone “who had hardly been to Oklahoma, let alone to Africa—was given this hyphenated title, this other continental allegiance that I had not asked to have been taken from me in the first place and had not asked to be branded with, either.”
But, seriously, this is no laughing matter. This is a space where Gerald is expressing his own sense of ‘choice’. I’m sure there are people who would guff at the slight disconnect that Gerald has with his African ancestry. But we would have to understand his personal history. He was told he had to be a lot of things that he never had any connection with or say-so in the matter, and tired of it. I am neither judging or defending here. I’m just saying that for a young person, this is a classic feeling. If anyone is expected to have a connection with something, that person must be empowered by being included.
To Be Continued… in Chapter 4 Finale Review