Hope dies with the heartbeat
An interview with Rev. Harry Williams, author of Straight Outta East Oakland, which is available through Amazon.com.
Q Did you have a particular audience in mind when you wrote the book?
Yes. I’m a minister to prisoners through my church. So often we go out to the penitentiaries and we preach and we have services and we talk and we share with young men, many of them from Oakland. And I’ve worked for years with ex-offenders in the Bay Area, so my first thought was to give people a novel that they could relate to, and then also to talk to the greater society at large about our responsibility to people caught up in the drug game. Because we’re all, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, we’re all bound together in one fabric. “In one immutable garment of destiny,” he would have said.
Q The title. There’s a documentary called Straight Outta Hunters Point, was that an inspiration for the title?
The idea for Straight Outta East Oakland came from perhaps the seminal gangsta rapper album by N.W.A. called Straight Outta Compton. Straight Outta Compton talked about the lives of Eazy- E, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube, who were rappers, who talked about the hard streets of Compton and brought it to the world stage, brought gangsta rap out to the world stage. So there have been other pieces called Straight Out Of… Mr. Epps borrowed the title too.
Q The main character, Firstborn Walker gets into this fix because he’s been offered a scholarship to go to university but he has to make up 20 percent of the fees himself and he has only a short time to do it. From there, would you say, he almost loses his way because he gets caught up in it?
Yes. The drug game is all-consuming. Most people don’t realize what it takes to become involved in that game at a high level. Hustlers say that it’s a 24/7 operation, and so he’s always running for his life. He’s always in fear for his life. He’s always trying to stay one step ahead of the police, and that can certainly destroy his moral compass after a time.
Q The book begins with a young man who’s sitting in a funeral parlor, and it’s an open casket funeral of someone who’s had a hole blown in the front of his head. At the end, you round back to that young person’s reaction to what he sees in the coffin. To what degree does the media making these kind of multimedia things available on the internet, is it a prurient thing for other people or is it a genuine attempt to shock the people whose lives are impacted by it?
I think that many of the people who are purveyors of the violence that is shaking the City of Oakland are certainly not going to be looking at the Oakland Tribune website or the newspaper because they’ve grown up around it. They live in a war zone, much like Fallujah, much like some remote area of Pakistan where it’s not unusual to walk outside and find a dead body at the curb or to see someone murdered. So they’re not going to be very much moved.
They live in post-civil rights America. At one time the African American community in particular was undergirded by strong churches, religion and education were a factor, and there were a lot of upper-crust people who lived in the community who gave the community a balance. When the civil rights movement was successful, those people were able to leave the inner cities and what they left behind was a cauldron of hate, a cauldron of nihilism. Nothing worked. The educational system failed. The sanitation system failed. The fabric of the community was destroyed.
And factor in crack cocaine, which hit in the mid-Eighties, and the proliferation of handguns, of powerful firearms into the community and a lot of fast money. It destroyed the fabric. Many of the young people grew up without parents. They grew up in a place where random violence took place all the time, where the police were hated and feared, so as for them to look at a picture of somebody shot in the newspaper isn’t going to really move them too much because they live with people who live like that or watch it for entertainment on television.
Q: That’s kind of driven by the media outside there, and then there’s the media thing that’s driven from within that community. I’m thinking of gangsta rap. The people you’re writing about in this milieu, are they persuaded by those kind of lyrics or is it just that it’s something that’s there anyway in their lives?
You can talk to any of the rappers who are really well known and they’ll say that’s a circular question. They’re gonna say that they talk about what they see, but many of the rappers—the people who are able to create those records—never lived that lifestyle. Many of them came up in affluent homes. They might have had a cousin who was involved in that lifestyle. They might have seen it but many of those people didn’t actually live that lifestyle. And it has a tremendous deleterious impact on the youth in the community.
What most rappers would say is that they’re keeping it real, and much of it does resonate because of the level of violence and apathy, and the abandonment of the urban colony. That hopelessness does resonate. Much of that hopelessness does resonate in the hearts of young people. When they hear the lyrics, they feel like the rapper is talking to them.
Q: Firstborn, the main character in your book is wanting to get an education, and there are so many obstacles in the way to it. Is that what you see among your clients, the people that you deal with? Have they gone that path… tried to be educated and not been able to do it?
I’ve worked with many people who lived in communities that do not benefit from a powerful education, where education is not seen as option because they live outside on the fringes of the greater society. They’re on the outside looking in. One preacher says that when people become involved in the drug trade, they’re really truly American because they want the fruits of the greater American dream.
But early on, society is telling them… I heard a drug dealer once—I saw this in a film—he said, “Society told me that success is 10 feet up and they gave me a 5-foot ladder.” So we’ve given them a 5-foot ladder early on that the education system in their community is certainly not the same as it would be in a suburban community. So, early on we’re telling the child something about himself. And he looks at the community around him and sees that negligence, that violence, the decay, automatically he’s internalizing a viewpoint of himself and the way he fits into the world stage.
Q: Pretty much the three people I see as the main characters—Firstborn Walker, Drama, and Latin Caesar—each one of them at some point in the book is a philosopher, isn’t he?
I believe so.
Q: Aside from the person, Oliver, who’s eventually kind of a redeemer.
There was a literary agent in New York who read the book a few years ago and she thought the characters were too intelligent, too well-spoken. What she doesn’t realize is that some of the most brilliant people that you’ll ever meet are caught up in those situations. They just haven’t had the outlet, the pathway to live another kind of life. Malcolm X said in his autobiography that he met people who could have been anything who were in the underworld. People could have been scientists, doctors, explored space, but were trapped in this netherworld because they didn’t have the opportunity to live out those dreams.
I’ve seen that in my life, and it’s definitely in that book. Someone like Firstborn is able to transcend that because he had a father who was very literate and because he himself read, so he understood that there was a world beyond the walls of the ghetto. But some of the people he’s around every day are brilliant. They don’t understand-I’ve seen this time and time again—that there’s another world and they don’t know the road to get there.
Q: The people you interact with, is there a common point at which they give up? In the story, there’s hope. Really, Firstborn’s optimistic that he’s going to get this scholarship. All the way through that’s what driving him, that he’s going to get that education.
People are driven to crime, many times, by desperation, but hope is the last thing to die. Hope dies with the heartbeat. People who might have walked out of the door of the penitentiary after serving 20 years of a life sentence still work toward another better day for themselves and their children. Many times people are surrounded by negative people in the inner city who haven’t managed to achieve their own dreams. They have friends who say, Oh, this won’t work for you, or can’t work. And they just accept that attitude.
You have a lot of people who come out from behind the walls of the prison and who find that they can’t get a job because they have a prison record. I’ve seen what it does to people to be turned down time and time again for jobs that they could easily do because of a mistake that they paid for. They paid that debt to society. That can make people give up sometimes.
You’d be surprised at the level of optimism you find in people who have really come through the harshest circumstances and the least glimmer of hope can give somebody reason to smile and to seek toward triumph.
Q: Tell me about the book.
Straight Outta East Oakland is a novel of hope, and it does tell people who are caught up in the drug life and the world of the fast money and the wealth that there is a life beyond for you. That God loves you. That God has a plan for your life. But it also tells us that we as a people of color have a responsibility to our community. The theme of genocide, and the fact that we are indeed committing genocide against our own community is underscored again and again. Then, the relationship of other people, the education system and its responsibility to the people of the inner cities is put forth, so that it’s not something that’s just about a narrow group of people.
When people walk away from the book, I want them to understand that we’re all part of a human family and that we have to reach back to help people who are in the most desperate of circumstances. If not, America’s future is dead. America will never rise above the treatment of its poor. In the Bible, nations were destroyed for the way they treated poor people. Minor prophets like Amos, in the Book of Amos in the Bible, Israel again and again was punished for the way it treated people who were considered “the least of these”.
I believe that America is going to be judged by the way that it has treated poor people. We cannot afford to let more of our nation just languish in poverty without hope. My book talks about our responsibility to the poor, but it also tells people in that circumstance that you can rise above it and escape.
Q: It’s part of the genre of urban literature. What ties books together in that category?
Urban fiction—it’s also called gangsta lit, hip-hop lit, urban lit—is one of the fastest growing genres of our time. When you go to many of the book markets in the major urban cities, a huge percentage of the books are these books. Many of them are self-published. The underlying theme is usually someone who is caught up in a life of crime. They’re often very violent, and sometimes the people escape and ride off into the sunset with a big bag of money in the back of the trunk, and often they spend the rest of their life in jail. Or they’re dead. That’s urban fiction in a nutshell.
Q: It’s not like the ‘40s pulp fiction or the detective novels. It’s not written from the law-enforcing point of view, usually, it’s written from the point of view of the people who are involved in that life?
Hmm-mm. Often the main character is going to be a drug dealer or a pimp, a prostitute. And often these books are written by people who emerged from that life. Vicki Stringer is one of the leading fiction writers, and she has a company that is very successful. She served seven years in the penitentiary and came out and started this company because no publisher would touch the books. She started her own publishing company and became a multimillionaire. Teri Woods started off as a self-published writer and her books sell hundreds of thousands of copies, not only to people in the inner city but people everywhere are interested in inner city America.
Q: You’re a man of God and obviously the larger part of the solution, you feel, will come from there. But what about the social solution, or the political solution? When you talk about education and jobs are those things that can be legislated for? Are those things that people can say, I want to elect a politician in my area who deals with these things? How do you see that?
One of the biggest crises in the urban community is fatherlessness. When I talk to young men about What happened in your life? How did you end up in this situation? they’re not complaining… they just say, I have no father. So many of them had no level of guidance. There was nobody to say, This is who you are, this is who you can be, this is right from wrong. So they went out into the streets and they found role models, people who are gang members, people who are doing negative things, but who had a facade of masculinity and they aspired to achieve the same level of notoriety as these men had. One of the things we have to do is to provide role models. That’s gonna mean some of us going back into the inner cities and mentoring kids. Working with after school programs.
Then, I think, at a level religion has to play a part because in the African American community, the church has often been the pillar of the community. During slavery, churches in the North would hollow out their walls or have a place in the basement where runaway slaves could run to in the middle of the night and escape from slavery. The churches always were leading the fight against the scourge of racism and discrimination. But church has kind of slipped away from that now because young people with their pants sagging, with the rags on their head, dreadlocks, are seen as pariahs.
Many of the church people are people of means, and they look and they frown upon those people. It’s deteriorated to the fact that the church is very class oriented. It has been for a long time, but I think it’s even become more pronounced. The church will have to embrace young people, the church have to change to create a religious atmosphere that those young people can thrive in. People who listen to hip-hop music are not necessarily going to be turned on by bringing in the sheaves.
I was in one church service one day and a young man sat in front of me. It was a very traditional church. He came in with two young ladies—it looked like they were his sisters—and he sat in front of me. Everyone in the church had a suit on except for these young people. This young man, he was nodding his head. He was sat there in front of me nodding his head, and I didn’t think the preacher was particularly interesting that day, so I was surprised: This 17-year-old kid must really be getting into what the preacher is saying.
At one point the preacher stopped talking and I could hear the sound of drumbeats, boom, ba-pow. Very quiet. I looked and he had an iPod in one ear, so the preacher was not reaching him at all. I think that so many of those things, if we developed a heart for the people of the inner city, we’d find a way to save them.
Q: Your analogy about East Oakland and Fallujah—the State Department, USAID, and the Army go around all these neighborhoods that have been destroyed by war or by being neglected for years before the war, and give out money for people to start businesses and create jobs. Why is that happening in Iraq but it’s not happening in inner city America?
We lack the political will to do it. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had a program called the Great Society that poured a lot of money into urban areas and I believe that his dream, flawed as it was in implementation, was to eradicate poverty. At that time, there really was a clarion call to tear down the slums. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., before he passed on went to live in Chicago and decried the state of urban America, but he could never raise the level of will in America to understand that people live in such desperate situations.
I don’t think that many people understand the way that people live in the Harlems, the Watts, the East Oaklands of America. They don’t even understand that that level of poverty exists in America that is Third World-like, and it’s worsening. I think that perhaps if they really understood—
Q: But Katrina supposedly opened everybody’s eyes to that. And now that’s faded, don’t you think? It’s like America has these moments of wake-up calls and their eyes are open for maybe ten minutes and then they’re closed again. How can that awareness be sustained?
It’s difficult when you watch billions being poured into Iraq and you watch America’s urban cities become so blighted, and young children walking around in rags, people in these desperate situations because there’s no hope. It’s difficult to say. I keep hoping in the goodness of the American heart and people, if they really understood, would do something. But I guess we have to… in my own life, in my daily work, I have to do what I can.
So, apart from being a writer, I’m a minister, I work among the poorest people. I live in Northern California trying to help them achieve, get housing, food, legal assistance. I just have to live that out and I just have to hope and pray that somehow we can alert before it’s too late. Because a crisis is coming in America if we just allow these people to live on the outer fringes of the American Dream with no way to get inside.
Q: Where do people like Barbara Lee, Ron Dellums, Barack Obama even—any of the elected people, African Americans who are in those really responsible positions—it’s not their burden alone, but they’re not unaware of all of this, how can they help?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say that America will need a radical redistribution of wealth in order to help people who have been historically held back to achieve parity. I believe that many of our politicians have made some changes at great sacrifice to themselves, but I think there hasn’t been enough to effect the kind of change that we need and I think you have to touch the will of people.
It can’t be seen as just a black problem. In America, we still don’t see it as an American problem. They can only do so much. We need a huge inflow of resources, great resources, a rechanneling of a lot of money to commit to places like East Oakland, and I think they’ve been able to do that. You would need somebody at the top of the food chain to grab that vision.
Q: In Iraq, small businesses are the spearhead of the recovery. In America we think, If only there was a Wal-Mart here, it would bring 400 jobs. Do you think that it could be done on a small scale, supporting small businesses?
I think we have to put a lot of money into the education system. And I think there’d have to be a lot put into vocational training, because not everybody is going to have the tools or the will that you need to complete a four-year college degree. Many of the young men that you see on the street corners, years ago they would have been working in factories. They would have been working in warehouses. They would have been able to support their families on the kind of wages they could get working in a factory in East Oakland. Those jobs are gone overseas now, so there’s very little for a blue collar worker.
Even McDonald’s—when I was younger, the people who worked at McDonald’s were teenagers, they were young. And now they’re mature people. If we’re going to have a difference, we have to have vocational training in jobs that someone could… manual labor jobs or jobs where someone could learn some basic skills and make a good living.
Q: When you said, they often say I didn’t have a father in my life, when they have children themselves do you notice that because they recognize that lack, that they’re in their children’s lives more?
Some people are. I worked with an anger management group when I worked for my church, and a lot of the young men struggled and they really wanted to be part of their children’s lives. Sometimes there were legal issues that stopped the man from being involved in the life of his children. He might have had a stay-away order for a former girlfriend or spouse who was not agreeable to his involvement because he was not with her any more. Many of the guys, because they had suffered fatherlessness, wanted to be in the lives of their children.
Q: Tell me about you.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in Asbury Park, NJ. If you ever listen to Bruce Springsteen’s music, he sings about Asbury Park a lot. I lived in New York a large part of my life. I was a hip-hop artist. I recorded under the name of Incredible Mr. Freeze. I was released on Pow Wow and London records, and I had a chance to tour Europe as a recording artist. I became a Christian when I was in my early twenties, which was a dramatic change in my life.
At 32 years old I started college from credit one, and achieved a bachelors degree and then a masters degree, a Master of Divinity degree. I became a youth pastor for two years, and I came to Oakland in 2002 to teach at a small bible college in a war-torn neighborhood called Sobrante Park, and that’s where the seeds of Straight Outta East Oakland were born. Today I work for a very large, well-known church in San Francisco that does a lot of very powerful social service work with the most poor people. That’s it in a nutshell.
Q: Anything I haven’t asked you?
Basically I want to re-emphasize that we can make a difference. Everyone can make a difference. Sometimes just by writing a letter to a politician about a certain issue. And that we’re all tied together. It’s NEVER “them”; it’s ALWAYS “us”. That’s what I’d like people to walk away with.
Q: So the responsibility is with us.
Yes, right. And we can make a difference.
--END OF INTERVIEW—
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