Voices/ Dr. Jean Daniels
Learning life by living it
     "Young lady!" Then I would feel my grandfather's hand on my shoulder. I was wide awake and up from the bed, quietly so as to not wake my grandmother. On those mornings when television stations preempted the daytime games and soap operas, the news would last almost until mid morning, until after the astronauts were in orbit. I remember watching the lift off of Wally Schirra in a Mercury spacecraft. With Schirra's flight, I learned the names of the first seven astronauts and watched the subsequent launches of the Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts.
     I had to know about space and the planets, and I spent days looking at pictures of planets and trying to re-create them with crayons and construction paper. I decided that although Saturn had awe-inspiring rings, I would rather fly to Jupiter to learn the mystery of its orange-red color. I thought to myself, one day, I will arrive at Cape  Canaveral as Schirra's fellow astronaut. Strapped in our seats, we will hear: You have go! And we would be on our way to Jupiter. Looking out my spacecraft, I would spot this orange-red ball, and it would draw me closer and closer, until I landed and found myself engulfed in its glow.  Schirra will report back to NASA that, for a girl, I did well, quite well.
     In my little diary, I wrote about my experiences. 
     One uncle was in Korea and sent me a little girl's kimono and shoes. I could wear the kimono and the little canoe-looking shoes and feel so very fancy and colorful. The other uncle was in Okinawa. I knew they were in places far away, but I did not understand that one was in a war and the other had signed up for a career in the Air Force because there were few jobs for a Black man. I looked at the pictures of my uncle seated in a buggy pulled by a man who was not White and was not Black.  Pouring through the National Geographic Magazines my grandfather put at the dining room table for me, I fell in love with a place called Kenya and the wild giraffes and green fields as far as the eye could see. At night, I started thinking about the light beige sands of Sudan and traveling on a camel with a family of nomads. Until my uncles returned, I had to learn to read and read everything so we three can talk of our various adventures.
     I had heard the names of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X occasionally from CBS News. Occasionally, I allowed to see the unleashing of dogs and water hoses on Black adults and children running for cover, but it was happening to some distant people in an even more distant place called The South, far from the Southside of Chicago -- so I thought.
     Then in the fall of 1969, I attended the first Black Expo of Operation Breadbasket, SCLC, with a group of my high school classmates. The older young people, already attending Chicago City Colleges and the University of Illinois seemed to carry history on the tip of their tongues. They always knew the recent and immediate, happening-today-news that I had no way of knowing or hearing from home. I heard about the name Hanrahan and the ordered raid on the West Monroe Black Panther Headquarters that killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I listened to these young people and thought about those young people like myself.  
     I was busy catching up, attending every meeting just to sit back and listen to the other young people rap on. You dig! It was really cool to board the buses and set out for a march in Springfield or a march downtown on State Street downtown, passing Goldblasts, Woolworth, and Sears and even Marshall Fields where some of us were not even shopping.  
     Read this book. Read that! Have you heard Purple Haze or Down by the River? It was cool music. Diop and Fanon at Timbuktu Bookstore. Soledad Brothers ain't anybody's band. Sister Angela. Wear this button. Go back and absorb Sojouner, Ida B. Wells, Bethune, and dig Rosa, Fannie Lou, and Ella. I took in all this wonderful new knowledge, even more intimate than that gained from Scarlett Letter, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn -- the books my grandfather had removed from the trash cans he would strap over his shoulders everyday. I need a full picture of origins and journey to craft a trustworthy pair of wings.  
     I told my grandfather, crippled by a stroke, that I had learned about college from the older young people. I would find my way there, I told him before he died.
     I remember. Something so simple as remembering changes a great many things.
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