Growing Up Story – GUS: His life, like the metamorphosis stage of an African butterfly going through lots of dramatic changes thought him tremendous things, both negatives and positives. It all started on the suburban street of Amanful Westin Takoradi, Western Region of Ghana where he mingled and entangled in a life-style some described as being ‘Gutter-Snipe’ or seemingly ‘Ghetto-like’. Thus, both lowly and highly cherished characteristics of a boy with futuristic ambitions in relation to his passion of every-day life. He’s a teenager with heart for reading, writing and reciting what he later termed as ‘Read Aloud Session – RAS’ for short. Thus, literally or meaning his solitary moment he picks a story book, newspaper or magazine and hides himself at a backyard or close-door to read aloud like communicating in front of audience coupled with gesticulation and sensation in an atmosphere of loneliness. Factually, learning new things and sharing ideas became his hall-mark.
Well, as the saying goes “All works and no play, makes jack a dull boy”, viz he sometimes played on sandy pitch football with some neighbors and subsequently played for his primary and junior secondary school football teams. Academically, he’s brilliant and good in lots of subjects hence won the hearts of head teachers to become school prefect in both primary and junior secondary levels respectively. Needless to say, ups and downs as well ‘Doubting Thomases’ of the hood never stopped or bothered him, as he focused in turning his passion to profession in the Arts global industry. LOL, one of his comical growing up character during his early child-hood days of life as a boy, he combined ‘Crying tears with bathing water’ often-times when he’s asked to bath and come for his meal. Well, if this were Scripture in the book of Psalms, I’ll state ‘Selah’ literally ‘Pause and Think’. So, this GUS happens to be a mixed bag of nostalgia about the Ike Boat chap as it brings to fore deeper things yet to come in his creative arts life-style.
From Chains to Freedom: A Journey of Freedom for the Black Man
Review by Dr. Bianca Stewart, MD
Mr. Michael Robinson’s published work, “From Chains to Freedom: A Journey of Freedom for the Black Male” is a beautiful depiction of the intricacies of race relations that is effortlessly executed in Mr. Robinson’s distinguishable style. His work is provocative yet, delicate. As a black woman, his work is raw, unfiltered, and in so many ways, comforting. “From Chains to Freedom” takes the reader on a journey of the resilience of the African American race from the Mother Land to Jim Crow and to Modern America.
He draws inspiration from Langston Hughes’ “Suicide Note” in his “Seas of Freedom on the Horizon” where he articulates the torment of the slave trade and speaks of death not as an enemy but as an old friend — “In the sky ahead the horizon calls, Calling him by name each day they sail. On a night when the moon had receded, And all was sleeping, the sea took him in.”
“Beginning of Grief” and “Crosses for Black Men” recounts the trepidation of the Jim Crow era — remembering the “when the light of the burning cross casts a shadow” and how, even now, “Four hundred years later, a rope still waits…”
In spite of it all, “From Chains to Freedom” is work about peace and hope. In “Midnight with God,” Mr. Robinson reminds us that “A desire for freedom has not been banished from his invocations” and leaves us with a message of “Some Place Special” “…where the sun speaks to the moon, While the mountains listen to the wind’s singing…” “A shooting star streaks across the sky.”
From Chains to Freedom is available directly from Michael Robinson, please contact him at mjrobinson@rollins.edu
Welcome to June 2021’s issue of Synchronized Chaos. We extend care to the regions of the world where Covid still rages and hope for the world to become safe and healthy.
This month, our writers and artists are seeing and being seen, observing and being observed.
Zara Miller, author of young adult historical novel I Am Cecilia, also analyzes literature, pointing out that one-dimensional, less complex characters worked in Shakespeare’s plays because everyone has some people who only seem to play one role in their lives. Although we are all full three-dimensional human beings, we don’t fully experience the inner life of everyone around us, and Shakespeare’s work reflects that.
A Cheap Trick
A cheap trick is something like this:
when I lived with my brother and our parents
sometimes I took a shoe or sneaker
and balanced it between the door and its frame
so there was an open gap to the vestibule.
(You can only do this occasionally. If you do it
too often it simply won't do.)
I then called out to my father to hurry and come quick
he had to see this; and when we saw him at the open space
we held our breath and he never even looked in he just pushed the door and the shoe dropped on his head.
My brother always was in stitches after this
and my father well
he was bitter but didn't speak of it.
Just so you don't think I'm a creep or something
I want you to know that my father was very serious:
he never once, not ever, told either of us a joke.
Shoppers All"I'm looking for a man
cut from granite
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for adventure and who can blame them.
The sun comes up on schedule
and dives down regularly like
the back and forth of ping pong players.
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You control exactly what you want
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Maybe autumn, when the chestnuts are falling
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The Right Stuff Redux
we were in the court
on the uncut grass
playing ball
we saw contrails above the roofs
we heard a boom
someone said the aircraft
broke the sound barrier
we were impressed
we all said "wow"
and then resumed the game
and threw the ball home
The town was called Halloway. More than a century ago it was a fishing village, and the fishermen went out each morning for cod and menhaden and lobsters and the streets were full of shrieking children and the sour smells of the harbor. There were mysteries about its past: rumors about an eccentric old woman being burned alive in the town during the Salem witch trials. Another rumor had it that, a generation later, after he was killed in an ambush by the Puritans, the head of a rebellious Indian chieftain was stuck on a pole outside the town’s palisade and left there as a warning for any other ambitious young natives.
A pleasanter rumor was that Halloway had been the last stop on the underground railroad for slaves trying to escape to Canada before the Civil War. But like the other rumors, there was no certain evidence to prove it one way or the other.
Then the fishing failed and the town fell on hard times. Many businesses closed, much of the younger generation moved out, and the town gradually shrank into itself, like an old man. Over several decades the small harbor silted up.
Then the war struck. Even this remote place was traumatized with the country at large for four long years, tragic telegrams coming even to this small community, until, like a gigantic Roman candle, the war burned out. Once it was over, young couples living in the big cities were eager to forget the war’s privations, and, like many another quaint seaside place, the town was discovered and for a time became a fashionable resort for the summer, with a trolley service and new streets planned and sewer lines and new telephone posts riding out far into the surrounding countryside like threads from an enterprising spider’s web.
But those times were ever a roller-coaster ride: the state was hit by another economic slump, the summer trade petered out, and the town was once again forgotten; two motels shut down, unfinished houses crumbled away with no one to occupy them, and to top it off, the local pastor murdered his wife and ran away with the church funds. The new roads ended in the middle of the surrounding woods, and the sewer lines stayed empty and waterless, hollow and echoey to the young local boys who stuck in their heads to explore their mysterious, fusty darkness.
It had finally been almost forgotten when elderly New Englanders discovered the little forgotten town near the sea, filled with untouched architecture going back half a dozen generations: a sweet little place, they thought, to retire to (the darker historical rumors were effectively suppressed by the local chamber of commerce). One of the retirees, a mailman from Burlington, Vermont, posted on the internet photographs of the town in its autumn splendor, though locals knew the deepest beauty in the region always came in the depths of winter, when the sun was disappearing like molten bronze through the stark, leafless woodlands.
A computer worker in far away California saw the photographs and promised himself to visit the lovely town next time he was back east. And when he did, he found himself not only in a pocket of natural loveliness, but also in an oasis in time, where people kept up old “analog” traditions on the verge of vanishing from the rest of the twenty-first century—scrimshaw, sampler weaving, knitting bees, building matchstick sailboats inside old whisky bottles, writing the entire U.S. Constitution on a kernel of dry yellow corn . . .
And, since he could work offsite wherever he wanted to, he decided to stay. And started posting his own pictures.
His friends in high tech soon learned how happy he seemed to be, and how perfect the peace and quiet, far away from the rat race of commuting, bad traffic and punishingly high housing costs where they were trying, with mixed success, to make a living. And, naturally, they grew envious . . . So, over the next few years, late into the night, the dark streets became increasingly lit by prim New England house windows behind which diligent techies worked, coding, testing, recoding, retesting, sending ghostly communications all over the world from this place which could be anywhere and so, in a sense, was nowhere.
Halloway had an Episcopal church with a white spire pointing heavenward and a small library with statues of John and Abigail Adams out front. Regularly you could hear, in the distance, the clang-clang of one of the trolleys from the service built long ago during the resort’s glory days.
Hickories, oaks, sycamores lined the streets, and deer were often found standing in the early morning on the front lawns, sniffing the dawn air as if listening to a far off call.
One day a young computer game programmer and his wife (who sold fashions on the internet and had a passion for Russian writers) moved to the curious old New England town.
As techies, neither was tethered to an office, so they had taken a deep breath and decided to move away from the “tent city of billionaires” (as the young woman called San Francisco, where they had been sharing an apartment with six other techies for an egregiously high rent—and where “never in the next millennium” would they ever be able to buy a home). But where to go? Then they had seen the idyllic little New England town and its many pictures on Instagram.
It offered an ideal combination of rustic seclusion and the stimulation and conveniences of the digital age—Netflix, Amazon, Skype chats! They would be able to live and work there comfortably while paying off their astronomical student loans. And it appealed to the earnest romantics in them.
A year after they moved to Halloway, they had a child. They named him Peter Myshkin Stephenson, after the hero of a famous Russian novel.
He was a curious little boy—in both senses of the term (as his great Aunt Marguerite noted on one of her visits from the city a hundred miles to the south): an “odd creecher,” full of wonder at this peculiar planet he had fallen to as if from outer space, full of doubt at people’s glib responses to his questions about why things were done the curious way they were in this world, full of objections to many things that seemed to strike many people as reasonable but struck him as ridiculous, and full of what he considered stupendously great ideas, a number of which, rather notoriously, backfired, such as his invention of a self-administering bathtub for their cat Max, or the self-propelling slingshot that turned rather too quickly into a boomerang and almost knocked the inventor’s eye out, or his revenge on Chace Fusillade, the son of their wealthy neighbor, for Chace’s burning of Petey’s homework assignment about Paul Revere, which paradoxically made Chace one of Petey’s best friends but made their parents enemies for life.
“Is Peter a complete idiot? The boy is impossible!” his mother lamented to his father, adding accusingly, “And where did he get that orange hair? We’re all blond in our family!”
The father—a quick, irritable man with a beard as thick as a hedgerow, and who looked older than his years and often acted younger—would roll his eyes and twist his mouth and say nothing, or smirk to himself, which made his witty, willowy wife hopping mad when she caught him. (His attitude was, what was the point in even trying to answer questions like that? There was no conceivable app!)
But the mother could never leave unanswerable questions alone. And soon they would be in the middle of one of their rows, which were becoming harsher over the years, as they blamed each other for their unhappiness in the old town far from the world they had tried to escape but had brought with them like an invisible monkey on their back: they had expected too much from Halloway, and Halloway, through perhaps no fault of its own, had let them down.
The Stephensons, it seems, still believed in happiness, and they blamed each other for not finding it.
Petey, alone in his room, exploring something in his home-made lab—the wing of a late summer moth, a crystal of purple mineral he had found in the garden, the mysterious result of mixing unknown chemicals in his little glass retort—would overhear these exchanges, which would build in intensity until the whole house seemed to shake with their fury – even when that fury was silent – and then, feeling frightened and ashamed, the young boy would sneak to a distant corner of the house where he didn’t have to know what was happening.
This place was often the bathroom, and he would look at himself, with alarm and scorn, in the mirror. What he saw was a moonlike, pudgy face, with two questioning eyebrows above blinky eyes and a pug nose covered with freckles and a small chin and two large, shapeless ears.
Was he stupid? Was he ugly?
The mirror stared back at him silently. “Well, what do you think?” it seemed to ask.
So: was it maybe true that it was entirely his fault that his parents were fighting like two mad dogs?
Maybe he really was an idiot. They valued above all things cleverness, good grades, cunning. His father made a big deal about outsmarting his rivals in the company, and both parents loved to play verbal one-upmanship games, sparring over dinner until his father, who was always a little behind his mother in the quick, blunt verbal rejoinders department, grew red in the face.
Petey’s grades in school were not bad. But then everybody’s grades were not bad. Even a true, genuine dope (everybody agreed on this one) like Charley Dunkin didn’t get really bad grades—just not bad enough.
On the other hand, if Petey truly were an idiot, how would he possibly even know it? This was a conundrum that gave him much food for thought, until his brain ached.
And then there was the other question: why was his face so round? Neither his mother nor his father had a round face. Even his grandparents had high cheekbones and long faces, like horses.
And where had his orange hair come from? He used to be quite proud of it, it was unique, no one else he knew had orange hair—but now he hated it.
And he hated himself. The mirror didn’t lie: he was fat, and he was ugly, and he was stupid . . .
He had been a mistake. He was sure of it. (The other day he had overheard Kelly in homeroom whispering to Melissa that Gretchen had been a mistake. No wonder nobody liked Gretchen, Kelly had whispered! Even her parents had never wanted her!)
The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became. It explained everything. Why had he been born so soon after they arrived in Halloway? Had they perhaps moved here so they could hide him from their families, so they would never even know he existed? He had never even seen his grandparents, except on Skype, and he sometimes darkly suspected they were in fact CGI . . .
He grew quieter around the house, and started saving his pestering questions for his teachers at school, and his reveries for the privacy of his room at the end of the corridor off the dining room, where he had a bed and a desk and a bookcase and his stuffed toys (Andy, Lionel, Monkey, and Lucile) and his telescope and chemistry set and his laptop and his charger, and a window that overlooked the backyard with the swing set and a great casement of sky speckled and sandy with stars on a cloudless winter night for as far as the eye could see (like last night, after the snow stopped and the moon rose like a face brooding over a stark, white world), and a door he could shut, turning his room into a place where he could dream up entire universes, inventing any possibility, worlds on worlds upon worlds, far from all perplexities and shame . . .
Chapter 2. To Otherwise
The trolley turned the corner, clanking through the freezing predawn, and, with its single headlight blinding bright, glaring like the head in the raised hand of the headless horseman, directed straight out of the fog toward Petey where he had been waiting, alone and half-frozen, under the old flickering streetlight.
It was a brand new trolley he had never seen before, shiny as if it had just been washed, which was of course impossible in this cold, or it would have been covered with a film of ice, and with a new route number and destination Petey had never seen before displayed above the windshield.
The bell clanged twice. The trolley squealed and groaned on the rails gleaming with ice and snow melt. There was no other traffic on the street and the night was pitch dark just before dawn.
The new trolley was painted bright yellow, and the new route number and destination appeared above the windshield in glowing capitals: “2 OTHERWISE.”
Petey had never heard of any place with the weird name of “Otherwise” – huh! It must be out near the ocean, or far in the other direction, where the old unfinished roads died out and the woods began. Someday, he would go to the end of the line and find out. But there was no time to do anything like exploring right now.
He hugged himself, his breath steaming in a shapeless white cloud in front of his face, and frowned ruefully. He has been waiting here for almost half an hour. Why was it so late? He mustn’t be late for school – not today!
The front, like that of most of the trolleys, looked very much like a face that was trying to hide a joke and doing a poor job of it.
Petey jumped in and clambered up the steps as soon as the trolley stopped. He asked the driver, who he could barely see where he sat in the dark cabin, whether this trolley went past his school.
“Yes, young man,” said the driver’s voice. “It does.”
Not entirely convinced, Petey slipped a school token into the coin box, trudged to a seat near the back and sat himself down.
There was no one on the trolley he knew, so he sat by himself and stared glumly out the window.
He had been late too often recently, so much that he’d been threatened with suspension if it ever happened again.
It was unfair; it wasn’t as though he was lazy. He’d had good reasons for being late. Once it had been because his mother had overslept after a particularly nasty late night quarrel with his father. Another time it had been because he’d had to make his own breakfast and prepare his own lunch. And the last time it had been because the cat had run away after the failed bathing invention and he’d gone looking for it. They never did find Max. He never came home again.
Now school was threatening him with suspension. He’d been suspended once, for breaking the principal’s window with a paintball gun while playing with Chace Fusillade. It had been an accident, he hadn’t meant it. But his father had beaten his bottom with a broken surge protector when he got home that night, shouting at him to “apologize! Apologize! Otherwise I’ll . . . !” And maybe for that very reason, he had clammed up.
When he was grown up, he sometimes thought, he would run away. Then they’d see. . . .
He listened to the trolley as it moved over the rails, seeming to say, in endless repetition, “Apo-lo-gize, apo-lo-gize, apo-lo-gize, oth-er-wise . . . ” and stared sleepily up at the winter sky.
It was a blue so dark it was almost black above the snowy ground, with the stars going out one after another like distant candles in a huge cathedral (he had been inside a cathedral once, in New York City), and there was a pasty pallor just above the horizon where the sun would soon be rising, and he felt his eyelids grow heavier and heavier as the trolley clanked in a lulling rhythm on the tracks. The sky just before dawn always seemed to be beckoning . . . “Must-not-be-late-for-school, must-not-be-late-for-school,” the tracks seemed now to be saying, over and over, “must-not-be-. . .” He felt his eyes becoming heavier and heavier. Whatever he did . . . he must not . . . miss . . . his school . . . stop. . . .
Soon he was fast asleep.
“Otherwise!” the trolley driver suddenly called out. “Last stop!”
Petey started awake—Oh no!—and rushed to the open door.
He halted.
If he got out now, how long would it take him to get the next trolley back?
On the other hand, if he just stayed on this trolley, it would have to go back eventually – wouldn’t it?
He looked around him. There was nobody in the trolley car but himself and the driver.
Suddenly the door closed.
Overcome with despair, the boy returned and plopped back down in his seat and stared into the blackness outside, imagining the principal’s face twisted in wrath as she suspended him and the reaction of his angry and “disappointed” (that awful word saved for only the most unforgivable humiliations) parents.
After a small torturous eternity that was in fact only ten minutes as the driver took his break, the trolley jolted awake and started moving again.
But something strange happened: instead of turning around, it continued going straight ahead.
The boy felt a little spike of panic, craning his neck toward the driver, though all he could see was the tall back of the seat inside the little cabin, and a jacket swinging from side to side on a hook near the front door. Then he turned back to the window and the darkness outside. He would never make it to school on time.
Then something happened to him. Oddly, now that there was nothing whatever he could do about being late for school (the sound of the trolley’s wheels on the track seemed to say, over and over again, “nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do about it”), the despair collapsed over him like a great wave and almost immediately washed away, leaving behind it the strangest tingling feeling – a curious combination of helplessness and a feeling of resignation, a sense of irresponsibility, and a peculiar feeling that he recognized, after a moment, was—yes!—relief.
He even felt a little thrill.
What would happen next?
Where were they going?
What would he find there, in this place with the strange name “Otherwise”?
And the yellow trolley carried him ahead into the darkness.
A potentially friendly cab driver suddenly turned silent when I showed him the address: 7 Kaspi St. He drove to the neighborhood, gestured brusquely down the street, and left. My companion and I had trouble determining if we were even on the right street, as street names are sometimes printed on the sides of buildings in Cyrillic or on hard-to-find street signs. We asked directions of several people, including a neighborhood delivery truck driver, but everyone shrugged and appeared not to know the place.
Fifty kilometres from Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, is Gori, a picturesque city at the confluence of rivers, surrounded by mountains. Gori’s claim to fame is that Joseph Stalin was born and went to school here. Many people don’t realize that Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი in Georgian), otherwise known as Josef Stalin, was born in Georgia and began revolutionary activities here after abandoning theological studies. Ironically, Stalin enjoyed neither the process of remembering his childhood nor coming back to visit Gori in later years. Busloads of summer tourists visit, though. Although Georgians, understandably, have an uneasy tolerance of Stalin’s fame, the desire to preserve his memory is strong here.
At the centre of town: Stalin Square, Stalin Avenue, the Stalin Museum and a huge poster of his head dominating the upstairs window of a storefront.
Past the peddler selling Stalin novelties on the museum grounds are two interesting things.
One is Stalin’s personal, armored railroad carriage, unrestored, complete with Venetian glass mirrors, carved wooden furniture, a bathtub and toilet, and an office with a phone, table and sofa.
The other is his family’s original house, with intricate woodwork, where Stalin was born into a shoemaker’s family and lived until age four. The family lived above the ground-floor cobbler’s shop. It is now protected by a columned structure with golden yellow stained glass in the roof accented by a hammer-and-sickle design in the corners.
Stalin Family Home, Stalin Museum, Gori
The truly fascinating artifacts are not in Gori, however, but back in Tbilisi. Stalin’s samizdat (underground) printing press is literally underground, 15 metres beneath an old house in the Avlabari district of Tbilisi, a somewhat decrepit neighborhood of bleak apartment blocks and car repair garages.
No. 7 Kaspi St. is now an unofficial museum of early Communism. A few of us attending the 2017 Summer Literary Seminars in Tbilisi agreed to meet at this house one morning. We all got lost on the dusty streets before finally finding each other and the house, whose iron door has a hammer and sickle on it, and were treated to a full tour by none other than the 78 yearold chairman of the Georgian Communist Party, Zhiuli Sikhmashvili.
Energetic and lively, he was happy to show us around the donation-funded museum and talk to us in broken English. Luckily, three people from Poland who spoke both Russian and English showed up soon after we did and were able to translate Sikhmashvili’s Russian so that we got a much more informative tour than we would have otherwise.
The office, crowded with memorabilia and books, had a desk with a pale yellow rotary phone balanced on a stack of papers.
Portraits of revolutionaries working at the printing press, newspapers such as Pravda with Lenin on the front cover, flags, photos and documents occupied several rooms.
In the yard is a replica of the house Stalin was born in, its rooms reconstructed with original furnishings, including a small platen press for handbills and small posters.
But the main purpose and focus of this site is the existence of the large, underground printing press. Between 1903 and 1906 thousands of flyers, pamphlets and newspapers were printed at this location, in Russian, Georgian, Azeri and Armenian.
A large printing press made in Germany in 1893 had been imported from Baku, then disassembled and its parts lowered fifteen metres down a well shaft hidden by a small shed in the yard. At the bottom, a side tunnel of about four metres was dug to connect to another shaft with a ladder up to the underground cellar where the printing press would be. There, the press was reassembled. Not a job for those with claustrophobia!
The house had to look “normal”, so two women lived on the first floor and kept a few chickens in the yard. In case of potential danger, a hidden electric alarm bell would alert those underground. The young Bolsheviks worked in shifts, sending completed material in a bucket up the shaft to the house. Flyers would be hidden in street sellers’ carts, taken to the railway station, and from there would travel to the Caucasus region and beyond.
Down a rusty spiral staircase (constructed for the museum) is a dank cellar lit only by a few lightbulbs, making photography tricky. The press itself is quite rusted, because the cellar flooded a few years ago. The bucket, rope and ladder are still there in their shafts.
Visitors have left coins on the flat surfaces of the press. Leaving coins there seems more like a show of respect for historical objects than the equivalent of tossing a coin into a fountain. In 1906 the police raided the house, but in 1937 Stalin and Beria—the brutal Georgian chief of the USSR Secret Police—reopened the house as a museum. An official, government-funded museum until 2012, it apparently also contains the offices of the current Georgian Communist Party. The day we visited, other people were just sitting outside, reading or writing.
We were careful to remain neutral in our comments so as not to offend our host, while managing to convey appreciation for the history displayed there. We left a donation in thanks for receiving a history lesson and a tour of Communism seen through Georgian eyes.
