Badder Than You

When I taught in Brownsville Brooklyn in 1989, one particularly powerful young man, among my students, was Antoine Butts.  He was wise beyond his years, an exceptional rapper and raconteur, he was finishing off a high school degree as a twenty-year-old, which life in Brooklyn had earlier interrupted.  And Antoine had a number of poignant phrases that remain immediate after thirty years of shelf-life.  One of which was: “There’s always some nigger badder than you.”  Antoine was bad indeed.  The utterance forced you to consider just who might actually be badder than Antoine.  And though that was not easy to conjure, one could simultaneously appreciate the timeless wisdom of the phrase.  No one's king forever.  It’s just the way it is. 

Among the foreign community living in, say, China, one variant of Antoine’s logic is the following:  There’s always someone who has been here longer than you have.  And the other night a friend introduced me to a remarkable gent not so much older than myself who was there in Tokyo as a boy with his family in the 60’s.  I barely remember Westchester County in the 1960’s.  One imagines Tokyo as rough, dirty, commencing a swift ascent, in that decade, not unlike the China I came to know, thirty years later.

His father had been in the Navy, in Tokyo, during the Occupation.  Later, he had written a remarkable book about his travels through China at that time, in 1948: “China on the Brink.” He and his brother’s progression across and through the country, in the final year before “liberation” is both piercing and subtle as its not unlike any other young men bouncing along their travels, however we know what’s about to change and though they do to, they don’t belabour it but rather stay focused on what they see. 

We discussed his father's the book.  I told him how much I’d enjoyed reading it and offered a few ideas on good people who might like to look it over before it was published.  And as we talked we got on to kids.  I mentioned that I might take my kids for a trip across the Trans-Siberian rail road this summer.  He stopped me and mentioned that one summer, his family had left Tokyo and done the trip as well.  I didn’t realize Americans were even allowed to tour around the U.S.S.R. in the 1960s.  And as he shared flashes of steam trains and babushkas and Red Square from that time I thought as I have many times in my life, of Antoine’s quip and nodded quietly on my end of the phone. 

Monday, 3/26/18