Joe Camel was everywhere when I was a child. He was on television, he was on bus stop benches, and he was selling cigarettes on billboards in the same manner that Billy Dee Williams was hawking Colt 45. This was the late 1980s which represented the last days that such blatant targeted advertisements would be allowed in the African-American community. My childhood was impacted by Joe Camel in the same way that kids of today are being impacted by Blueberry vape pens. The drawing of Joe Camel smoking a cigarette as he played a game of pool was hella fly to me. In my young preadolescent opinion, even though he didn’t speak, he was the dopest cartoon image ever. He had more charisma than Bugs Bunny and was a bigger boss than Leonardo from the Ninja turtles. Even more significant than that was the fact that he was the mascot for my Uncle Red’s preferred brand of smokes. Which meant that he was present at my grandmother’s house, family get togethers, or where ever my uncle happened to be.

When I was little I thought my Uncle Red was the coolest man in the world. Partly because he had been to prison and partly because he used to be a pimp, but really because he smoked Camel cigarettes. He would blow smoke rings in the backroom of my grandmother’s house and let the kids break them up with our fingers. He had a thousand stories and never told the same one twice. In retrospect all of them were wildly inappropriate for a boy in elementary school to hear, but I still soaked up all of his game like a sponge. Anytime I was able to walk with him down 3^rd Street in the Bayview section of San Francisco or down E14th in East Oakland it was like basking in the light of a celebrity.

 Uncle Red is sure to walk on the outside of me and my cousins so that he is the one closest to the traffic. He lets us run to the corner while he stays behind with a Camel cigarette pursed in between his lips. We make it to the corner and stop to wait for him before we cross the street. I turn around totally out of breath and look back at my uncle who is taking out his lighter to light up another cigarette. He is wearing white leather platform shoes, white bell bottoms, a white button up shirt, a white blazer, and a nappy chest. His hair is combed back. His hairline is barely receding. The sun catches his bronze complected face in a way that makes him look like a mixture of Goldy from The Mack and Joe Camel himself. By the time he catches up with us we have caught our breath. We walk together across the street and into the liquor store where I get animal crackers and a soda. My cousins get Lemonheads, Jolly Ranchers, and Funyuns. My uncle asks for Camel Menthols which are behind the counter. Uncle Red pays for everything. While he steps out of the door he flicks his cigarette butt onto the concrete and I run to step on it first. He opens up the new box of Camel Menthols and shakes another cigarette into his palm, then he places it into his mouth. My cousins and I run ahead to the next corner and I am in the lead.  

My uncle went to prison fairly often for drug related offenses. When he was granted parole he went straight from San Quentin to my grandmother’s house where his shoe collection was there waiting for his release. He had snake skin boots, gator skin shoes, suede platforms,  and loafers of every imaginable color. Most of them were still in their boxes in my grandmother’s backroom. The backroom at my grandmother’s house was central to family life because that was where the television was located. There was another television in the living room, but we couldn’t watch that one. The living room was just for show. It had plastic seat covers on all of the furniture and if it wasn’t a very special occasion my grandmother would slap you for setting your foot in there. So we would watch tv with my Uncle Red in “his room.” 

On this particular day he is fidgety and slightly annoyed. He taps his box of Camels but it is empty. He then takes a deep breath, curses, and asks my sister to go to the corner store and buy him some smokes. My sister is 12-years-old. I am 8. He gives us enough money to buy some candy with the change and we’re off. We walk down Shafter Avenue to get to 3^rd Street where the Arab store is. We bring our candy to the register. My sister asks for a pack of Camel menthols. The Arab man behind the counter tells her that she is too young. She replies that they’re not for her. They’re for her uncle. The Arab man says that she needs a note. We go back to my grandmother’s house and tell Uncle Red. He says to my sister “Well write a note.” My sister writes a note in her very best cursive handwriting and signs my uncle’s name on the bottom of it. We go back to the corner store and purchase the cigarettes without a problem.

Over the next few decades there would be a justifiable war on cigarettes and the harm that they had done to generations of people. They would be exposed for lying about all of the health risks that their products cause and for specifically marketing menthols—which is the most addictive form of cigarette—to the African-American community. Billboards and commercials promoting tobacco products would be strictly prohibited. Joe Camel became a relic and places of business that sold cigarettes to minors would face serious sanctions. My grandmother passed away in 2016 and the family lost her home in the Bayview. My uncle, however, is still going.

About a year ago I saw him on Macarthur Boulevard in Oakland. He had checked himself into a program for drug addiction. The program was run through a church. I passed the church and saw him standing out front. He had finally given up the bell bottoms and the platforms for blue jeans and sneakers. Yet he still was wearing a button up shirt and had a nappy chest. I pulled over and called him to my car. I got out and hugged him in the street. He said he was proud of me and he meant it. I told him that I was proud of him too and I thanked him for always making me feel safe as a child. We reminisced for a minute and laughed, but he looked incomplete. When I was about to get in my car to leave he stopped me. 

“Say nephew. Do you have some change? I need some smokes.”

“For sure,” I said with no hesitation.

I gave him a bill and then gave him another hug. As I drove off I saw him walking toward the corner store in my rearview mirror. I sped through the green light at the corner.  

-Roger Porter

Roger Porter

June 10, 2011

Note: Here is a piece that I wrote for www.oaklandlocal.com that was published today. Just to let you all know I do write about positive things from time to time, though I try not to. LOL.

As I walked down Oak Street on my way to attend the College Bound Brotherhood Graduation Celebration earlier this week, I met a young man named Charles Breed who was heading to the same destination.

He wore his hat to the back and walked in the slow, cool, strut that seems to be unique to African-American males. Charles, along with 65 graduating seniors from Bay Area high schools, was being honored at the annual event held at the Oakland Museum. When I asked him what the evening meant to him, however, he was at a loss for words.

That’s when his aunt who accompanied him could not help but to jump in:

“I registered him for this event because it’s a milestone. He is the first,” she slowed her speech down for emphasis “man in the entire family to graduate from high school.”

Now Charles who 30 seconds ago was the epitome of cool could scarcely conceal his grin as he blushed and looked away.

The Wednesday evening graduation, which was hosted by the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, was created to celebrate the young black men in the Bay Area who graduated from high school and plan on attending college in the fall despite the abysmal statistics. Statistics such as only 11 percent of the black males who graduate from high school in the San Francisco Bay Area have the courses and grades required to attend a California university.

The young men who participated in the ceremony were given a $100 stipend along with a first class celebration. Karen Bevels catered the banquet portion of the event and soul food was definitely on the menu. There were chicken strips, greens and macaroni and cheese. The vibe was extremely positive as predominately young black people milled around the room in business attire and dress clothes. The scene stood in stark contrast to the murderous war torn Oakland, which is consistently depicted in the media.

Akili Terry, a sophomore at Marin Catholic High School who helped out at the event, captured this misrepresentation perfectly when he said, “Everybody in the hood don’t smoke, drink or get hyphy but we do have that spirit.”

That spirit was on full display while an African drum procession led the large gathering of graduates, friends and family into the auditorium for the ceremony. It was there that Jahsiri Asabi-Shakir a graduating senior from Bentley High School gave a riveting performance of a poem that he penned himself called “Skin tone.” It’s no wonder that Jahsiri will be attending the prestigious Morehouse College in the fall.

The keynote speaker was Lloyd Pierce, an assistant coach for the Golden State Warriors. And he was on point with his address: He simply challenged all of the graduates to look toward the future and told them “to be better than you are right now.”

His brief, yet powerful, speech seemed to resonate with the students as they took the stage and announced where they planned on attending college and their intended major. Each of them strolled across the stage exuding the confidence of a man who made it even though all the odds were against him. They all possessed an undeniable swagger – a swagger that seems to be unique to African-American males.

Roger Porter

April 30, 2011

Me and my cousin are 11-years-old. We are lying down in his room, he is on his bed and I am on the floor. We are both recuperating from our first full week of football practice.

“You think we gone make the team?” My voice seems to carry quicker through the darkness. “Yeah we both gone make the team.” He responds confidently as if he has inside information from the coaches. Right then my uncle bursts into the room wearing Gazelle sunglasses, a white tank top, boxers, and green Pumas with fat laces (even though it’s the mid 1990’s not the 80’s).

“Hey,” he says in his deepest voice. His speech slightly slurred and a camel cigarette behind his right ear. “If ya’ll hear something going on in the living room don’t worry about it just go on back to sleep. And uh, if ya’ll got to go to the bathroom then go right now cause me and Precious gone need some privacy.”

We each pull our blankets over our heads and giggle. Precious is his longtime girlfriend—his main chick. Together they made my little cousin so we know they had sex, but to see my Uncle’s compact muscular frame in his underwear announcing to us that he is about to get some was ridiculously funny. “Alright, man down,” are his final words to us before he closes the door.

I couldn’t imagine him making that announcement before we started playing football. His son signing up for youth football seemed to be the best thing that had happened to him since he had children. Five total but only one boy. He was once a star running back at Southern University and he always wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. So he videotaped our first day of practice and bought us catfish and French fries afterwards. He told us some of his old football stories and for the first time in our lives he treated us like men and not children.

We stayed awake listening to Precious’s high pitched half screams and my Uncle’s loud panting that followed. Our white teeth glowed in the darkness of that small room as we tried to feel vicariously what they felt.

Roger Porter

It’s early November 2010 and finally after months of me complaining about seeing her ride through my hood with her new boyfriend, but never coming by to say hello, my cousin pulls into my driveway with her two young daughters in the backseat and her boyfriend in the front. She gets out of the car and we begin to catch up.

She asks me whether or not my daughter is in the house and I tell her no. Her daughters, ages 3 and 5, say they want to go see the pit bull behind my neighbor’s gate down the street, but every time we make it halfway they both scream “Noooo!” and scramble back to the car.

My cousin asks me about amateur boxing; how can she sign up, when my next fight is and why she wasn’t invited to any of my other ones. Her boyfriend asks me if I mind him smoking in front of my house and I tell him yes. He’s slightly irritated, but he understands. So my cousin and I continue to converse until we notice a car creeping up the block.

The driver is a light-skinned man with a slight build and small afro who sticks his head out of the window to survey the scene. My cousin stops talking and halfway rolls her eyes;

“That’s Sa’rye’s daddy.”

The man gets out of the car and as he approaches I think about the drama that may unfold. I mean here was his ex-girlfriend talking to two guys who he doesn’t know while his 3-year-old daughter is playing in front of some house in East Oakland that he’s never been to. I notice my cousin’s new boyfriend tense up a bit as he sits in the passenger seat with the door open and his right leg hanging out of the car. He watches the scene from the rearview mirror. The man crosses the curb and steps onto my lawn and I can’t help but to wonder how I would handle the situation if I were him.

He picks up his daughter without even acknowledging anything else.

“Hey Daddy!” Sa’rye screams in excitement.

I introduce myself to him and he tells me his name is Darryl and shakes my hand. He then tells his daughter that he is on his way to work, but will see her later before kissing her on the cheek. He says peace to us, heads back to his car and drives off. While he’s leaving I say to myself, “Wow, that’s exactly how I would have handled that situation.” Meanwhile the girls keep playing, my cousin and I resume our conversation and her new boyfriend relaxes once again in the passenger seat of her car.

A few months later my cousin called me to see how I was doing. I told her our grandmother was in the hospital and then she told me about drama at her job. We talked about our daughters and how they need to grow up around one another like we did.

Then she paused and said, almost as an afterthought: “You know Sa’rye daddy got killed right?”

“Naw, I didn’t,” I replied. “That was the one I met right?”

“Yeah, he got killed at the liquor store right down the street from your house.”

And then she spoke to me of no arrests being made in the murder, that it happened on Dec. 18 and that she suspects it was probably some youngsters trying to earn stripes, all in an extremely detached tone. A tone that conveyed 30 years of ghetto conditioning.

I listened to her as she told me that he had been robbed in the month leading up to his murder and that some men who stood on a local corner resented the fact that he had 20-inch rims on his black Infinity and that he was relatively new to the neighborhood. It didn’t matter to them that he earned the money by working at a hotel or that he wasn’t involved in the street life at all. They looked at Darryl as being an easy mark so they went after him. In the final weeks of his life he began to develop very real premonitions of his murder. So much so, my cousin went on, that on at least one occasion he asked to spend the night at her house just so he could be under the same roof as his daughter.

My cousin thought this was a bizarre request considering they were no longer in a relationship and that she was now heavily involved in a new one. I could tell that of all the things that occurred in the time leading up to Darryl’s death this puzzled her more than anything else. For myself, on the other hand, I couldn’t have related to him more.

My two-year relationship with my girlfriend was already rocky by the time my daughter was born during my senior year in college. But when my little girl entered the world, I became determined to make things work so I asked my girlfriend to move in with me. And even if the relationship was clearly failing I was still determined to put up the best front for my child so that she could enjoy the luxury of growing up in a two-parent household – something that I never experienced.

On the contrary, my girlfriend wasn’t nearly as delusional. After about five months of extreme tension, very little conversation and no affection – except for the shared but ultimately separate love that we had for our daughter – she came to me suggesting that we break up. I didn’t disagree. As a matter of fact, I felt really relieved until she told me that she would be moving out, which, of course, meant that she would be taking our daughter with her.

I tried to talk her out of leaving to no avail. Next, I tried to get her father to talk her into staying, but not staying in the relationship, just staying in the house so I could come home to my daughter every day. He thought the idea was ridiculous.

“What if one of ya’ll wanna bring somebody else home?” he asked.

I thought about it for a minute, but couldn’t come up with a response.

So no more than 48 hours after we broke up all of my daughter’s and ex-girlfriends things were being loaded into a truck. I made sure that I wasn’t home when she moved out. I didn’t want to deal with it so I stayed at the campus library and studied all day and deep into the night. By the time I got home and stepped in the door, I immediately felt the emptiness and was almost sickened by the silence. I made my way to the room where my baby used to sleep and was incredulous to see the crib still there, fully intact.

As it turned out they didn’t bring the tools to dismantle it so they had to leave it there for a few more days. As I approached it I could still hear my daughter cooing while slapping the thin mattress. I could see her as she pushed up on her stomach like a baby seal at the Pier. But when I looked over the upraised sides and into the crib the only thing I saw was a Winnie the Pooh bedspread and a set of multicolored toy keys. I then remember leaning into the crib and crying uncontrollably. I realized then that I hadn’t merely lost a girlfriend, but I had lost my family. Things would never be the same.

After I got off the phone with my cousin, I couldn’t stop thinking about Darryl’s murder. It was just another reminder that fatherhood, like all other things in the hood, is extremely uncertain.

This weekend, I pick up my daughter who is now 6 years old. I have been fortunate enough to have consistent visitation as a noncustodial parent since her mother and I split. We have dinner together, go to the movies and play basketball. I always look forward to picking her up, however, for the past few months often times when I hold her in my arms I think about my cousin’s daughter.

Sa’rye is an assertive, young 3 year old with an ebullient personality. She has her whole life ahead of her, but it disturbs me to know that she will have to navigate through this often times shady world without knowing her biological father.

There is no doubt that when Sa’rye gets older she will learn the footnotes of her father’s life. She will know things like his name was Darryl Starks, he attended Castlemont High School and he died Dec. 18, 2010, at the age of 26.

But will she ever know how much he loved her? Will she ever be able to feel that love? Will she remember the day when her father stopped his car in the middle of the street just to steal a hug and kiss from her before he went to work? Will she ever be told that one of the last things her father wanted to do before he left this Earth was to sleep under the same roof as her? Or will she grow only to be obsessed with his absence, fueling an unconscious resentment toward every man she encounters? I don’t know.

I do know Sa’rye comes from a resilient culture and a strong family. I also know that she can grow up and accomplish whatever she wants to achieve. On the other hand, I will never understand why her father was taken from her and I’m sure she won’t either. So now when I kiss my daughter on the cheek or help her with her jump shot I know that I’m not just doing it for me. I do it for all those men who wanted to be fathers, but couldn’t. I do it for Darryl Starks and countless other men who are just as righteous as me.

by Roger Porter

I had to leave work early that day in order to pick up my two year old daughter Shasee from daycare. At the time I was teaching at a non profit organization in Richmond, CA. I started working there as a part time tutor my junior year in college, and once I finished I was promoted to a full time position. I was young, committed to the kids, and had earned a fair amount of respect at the job, therefore it was OK for me to leave early every now and then.

“Alright then Mr. Porter,” a 10th grade student I worked with told me as I opened the door to leave.

“Peace,” I replied as I walked slowly to the parking lot while checking my cell phone to see who called me.

I thought about my daughter while stuck in traffic on highway 80. She hated her daycare. On the mornings when I would have to take her she would cry from the time I strapped her in her car seat to the time I rang Mrs. Carrie’s doorbell. Luckily for me the daycare was only two blocks away from our house.

I kind of felt her though. I mean it was unfortunate that I had to put her in childcare at such a young age, especially when I only saw her every other week, but I had to work every weekday. I couldn’t quit and I couldn’t rearrange my schedule so that was that.

As I pulled into my driveway and stepped out of my car I saw one of my friends from Junior High School driving in an old Buick with his stereo up full blast.

“Rog,” he yelled as he smashed by!

“Ayyyy,” I replied rather delayed and not sure that he heard me!

As I stepped into the living room of my house I saw a puzzle with big colorful letters that read KINSHASA. It was something my mother bought so that my daughter could learn how to spell her full name, since she had already learned how to spell Shasee, the nickname that everyone called her.
I changed clothes quickly, wrote a check for thirty dollars to pay Mrs. Carrie, sent approximately two text messages and began walking around the corner to pick up my daughter. As I approached the block that her daycare was on I received a text. I read it as I walked briskly down the Avenue. It was sent by a young lady I was dating and it made me smile.

When I looked up I could see about ten little toddler to preschool age children playing in front of Mrs. Carries daycare but I couldn’t see my daughter. They were pushing each other in toy cars and playing with a bright red bouncing ball. There was one kid in particular whose eyes were transfixed on me as I walked toward him.

This kid had to be about four years old with a honey colored complexion. He wore his hair in long cornrows that I’m sure his mother had allowed to grow since birth. He whispered to the other children and then he began to slowly walk toward me.

I looked down at him and he looked up to me with very large light brown eyes.

“Are you Shasee’s dad,” he asked me in a wondrously curious tone?

Shasee’s dad? Did this kid really just refer to me as Shasee’s dad? My name is Rog I wanted to tell him and I grew up in this neighborhood. As a matter of fact I probably went to school with your mother. I am Roger Porter I played football for the Oakland Dynamites and the Skyline Titans. I ran track for the West Side Kickers and got into college. I even graduated from college with a degree in English and still work and live in the hood. I am Mr. Porter. I teach kids how to appreciate books and use writing as form of therapeutic release. Shasee’s dad; was this little bastard serious? I looked around at all the little children at play and realized that none of my accomplishments would ever matter to them. To them I was only Shasee’s dad.

I was twenty four years old man stopped dead in my tracks by a little boy twenty years my junior. To make matters worse he maintained eye contact with me so I felt that I couldn’t simply walk away without answering him. Not that I was ashamed of the title I just wasn’t really aware of it so it kind of startled me. The term Shasee’s dad meant that my little two year old had developed her own identity and had made friends to compliment her little smart mouthed personality—which I was oh so aware of. My daughter was now her own little person and I was merely her dad. I was simply the old guy that dropped her off, picked her up, and bought all of her clothes.

It was shocking to me that after all of my success in beating the odds I was being identified through a two year old. It was all happening too fast, I wasn’t sure that I was ready. But then I had to be because the time had come. I no longer had a baby who had to be around her family all the time and cried in the middle of the night if she felt around the bed and no one was there, but rather I had a big girl who had just taken her first steps toward independence.

“Yeah I’m Shasee’s dad,’ I told him ‘could you go get her for me please?”

That little bastard.