America Behind the Color Line (11 page)

The street kids who developed hip-hop are inspiring other people, who have become more sophisticated and more educated. Our next generation of entrepreneurs will be a lot more sophisticated and will have a cultural base in being entrepreneurs. I had a number of runners and drug dealers, and now they will have legitimate businesses run by people they respect, that inspire them, that will make their lives different in terms of their possibilities, or make their belief in their possibilities different.

That’s why I support people like Jesse Junior. One of the things that Jesse Junior talks about is equal high-quality education. A very important concept. That’s the key. When I was campaigning for Mark Shriver, his dad, Sargent Shriver, said that the war on poverty and ignorance is the only war we can’t win, because it’s underfunded. When you come out of a really difficult environment and you walk into a beautiful school where you can eat and be treated a certain way, where you’ve got books and you’ve got computers and you can learn, it’s exciting to go. You go to a school that looks like your house and you live in a ’hood, it’s not good. It’s obvious that we need to educate.

Do we think that blacks have found themselves where they are today because they’re stupid? They’re slave victims. They’ve had issues since slavery, but first they’re slave victims and then they’re other victims, and that’s how they found themselves in their current situation, not because they’re stupider than everyone else. This is a commonsense issue. If everybody in America had the same lack of opportunity, then everybody in America would be all mixed up. Under the circumstances, we’ve been very spiritual people. We have a lot of issues and there are a lot of problems, but they stem from a lack of opportunity and a lack of education and a lack of knowledge of our higher self, God, whatever you want to call it. Individual responsibility has everything to do with your heart and your leading, with having a connection to yourself and your truth. We are born love and born God and born good, and we get made something else.

Black kids ain’t identifying success with being white so much as they used to. Their image of themselves is ten times better than it was, and it’s getting better every day. I think that people even in our great institutions of learning have that rebel thing they learned from hip-hop and that is supporting their new energy, their new ideas of what they can be. Hip-hop is a new extension of poetry. Brand-new, and hitting the mainstream now. It has to keep evolving, like anything else. But rap is here to stay as long as it’s got new energy and creative people to fuel it.

The thing about hip-hop culture that’s so good is that it has a lot of honesty and integrity. It’s not fabricated in any way. That honesty comes from the heart. It’s a voice for people who have been voiceless. Its integrity allows them to transcend the environments and ideas they’re accustomed to. These are big environments with big problems and big possibilities. But the poetry of hiphop, and its description of the environment it comes from, is so honest that people who knew nothing about these kids are learning about them. They want to listen, because the articulation is true.

MAURICE ASHLEY
Chess Master

Chess—the real thing—is what I’d call a reflection of life, because there are so many similarities between chess strategy and life strategy. The most important concept in chess is the center. Not just in terms of the physical space, the board itself, but in terms of you, because you have to be centered, same as the sun is the center of the solar system. You always want to control the center of the board: d4, e4, d5, and e5.

People point to these squares because geometrically they form the center of the board, but centrality is more a concept than a reality. It’s about directing emotions this way as opposed to that way or out on the side. Sure, you know you’ll make a move like e4, which occupies one of the four central squares and controls the squares f5 and d5. But it’s not so much the move itself, although that’s important. It’s the idea that you’re coming forward through your middle, through your center, and staying centered, and your pieces want to harmonize with that drift.

I said that chess is like life. To succeed in either one takes patience, planning, concentration, the willingness to set goals, and an inclination to see deeply into the nature of things. You can’t just go for the first available option; you have to go for the thing beyond. The first option is generally not the best, and it’s often terrible. Chess is about seeing the underlying reality. You have to get a feel for what’s happening on the board.

Usually a strong player won’t give you any holes. You start thinking about what’s in front of you, slowly, rank by rank. You look at a rank and you see it’s well protected because of all those pawns. Pawns are small, yet their importance is in inverse proportion to their size. They have tremendous influence. They’re the peasants, the workhorses, the body. They go slow. But they’re essential for making sure the structure stays together. A knight, a bishop, a rook, a queen—these are the flashy pieces, the fighting forces that do the big damage. But they follow in behind the pawns.

We’re the workers, the peasants, the pawns, in relationship to the white community. Chess is a mechanism for turning pawns into the power establishment. Chess transposes the imagination of inner-city black kids so they can see themselves in the back row where all the power pieces are. The pawns are the people. And just because they have less power doesn’t mean the others can take advantage. The others can’t just go where they like. A bishop or a knight can’t just decide to go right where that wimpy pawn is, ’cause that wimpy pawn is going to decide the game. Weak, so to speak, but deciding the whole future of the game. I can gauge a chess player from the way he plays his pawns. If players are carelessly sacrificing their pawns, they’re not going to make it. They don’t have a clue.

It’s all about long-range thinking. The secret to success lies in the preparation. If you prepare for an eventuality, then your opponent is going to have to outprepare you, and if you keep working hard, they’re going to have to work harder than you. To me, hard work is a challenge. Lots of us were told that in order to succeed we would have to work ten times harder than white people and be ten times smarter. But I’ve worked hard and I’ve prepared, and now they have to be smarter than me.

The forces on a chessboard are equal to start off with. Then you use your intellect to try to outwit the other guy. If you’re prepared, and you bring on all the force of your intellect, you win. For me, chess has always been about achieving at the highest level. I remember hanging out in parks in Brooklyn, playing chess and watching other people play. For some guys, their whole world was playing in the park. It was the be-all and end-all. Then I had friends who were playing tournaments and who wouldn’t try to bring their rating up because they might not win at the higher level. You might win some money staying where you were, but if you went higher in the rankings, you’d have to compete against elite players. But that’s all I ever wanted to do. Some of the guys I knew wanted me to stay in the little pond so that I could be the big fish. I didn’t understand that. I had learned as a child to strive to be the best. And chess can accommodate that because it’s a fair game.

Where I come from in Kingston, Jamaica, to be working class was to be rich. There were few television sets. I learned to play many different games at an early age: card games, checkers, dominoes, all kinds. By the time I was seven or eight, I could beat the other kids and I could compete with all the adults. A friend introduced us to chess, and we all started playing. It was just one of the games we played. My brother is eight years older than I am, and I didn’t know his friends that well. But I hung out with them and we played chess and I learned. I picked up little things from them. I remember even then catching on a little faster than they did. They were surprised that a little kid could play.

I think that being from Jamaica, we had a very strong sense of accomplishment, of trying to succeed despite the odds. There’s a famous Jamaican saying:
Wi likkle but wi tallawah.
We may be small, but you can’t break us down. We know we have our Bob Marleys and our Marcus Garveys. We’ve made it on the world stage. Even though we’re from a very small island, we’re all about excellence and success.

I was twelve years old when I moved in 1978 from Kingston to East New York, a tough section of Brooklyn close to the Brownsville area that formed good old Mike Tyson. My mother had done what West Indian parents often do. She had left her three children in the care of her mother and had come to America and worked as a nanny and done odd jobs and made some money. Ten years later, she brought us up to Brooklyn. So we were without a mother in Kingston for ten years. My grandmother had a very strong educational background. She was a teacher, and she made sure we were great students and we kept up with the intellectual side of things. When we came here, we were prepared to study hard and to consider our moving to America as an amazing opportunity to be successful.

When we arrived in America, we had nothing. I slept in a room with my older brother and sister. I remember wearing reject sneakers ’cause my mother said she wasn’t spending money on the fancy $100 kind; she was just going to get us something we could wear to school. But the critical part of our experience was always that you’d strive and you’d strive to be the best you could be. You tried to be great.

My brother is a two-time world champion kick boxer, and my sister is currently a world champion boxer. I beat my brother in chess and then he beat me up. He beat me in the last game we ever played. He refuses to play me in any more games ’cause I got better.

The stereotype that chess is a white game didn’t permeate our community because so few people knew how to play. The other stereotype about chess— that it’s the epitome of intellectuality—didn’t get applied either. I don’t think the other students thought the kids in the chess room were geniuses. I think they thought we were just guys who loved to play the game.

In tenth grade, when I was fourteen, I had a friend who played chess a lot. I thought, I’m better at games than all the rest of the kids, so I’m going to play this guy and beat him. He crushed me. It was ugly. Then one day when I was at the library, I came across a book on chess. I was stunned. It was like, what? There’s a book? There are strategies? It was love at first sight. I pored over the games and reveled in the majesty of the pieces. I remember my excitement one afternoon as I read about a famous game of Paul Morphy’s, who was a top-grade American chess player in the nineteenth century. I was hooked.

It turns out, of course, that my friend was also reading books, and that’s why he was crushing me. To beat him, you couldn’t be just a chapter ahead of him; you had to be books ahead of him. That’s when I discovered that reading could open your mind to the wonders of everything you wanted to know. For the first time I understood the power of books, because after I started reading them, I began crushing players I couldn’t beat before.

When the American Chess Foundation, now the Chess-in-the-Schools program, asked me to coach kids in Harlem and the South Bronx, I was a student at City College and I was playing at the Senior Master level. The top 10 percent of all chess players are at the Expert level. Masters are the top 4 percent. Senior Masters are the top 2 percent, and International Masters are more like a fraction of 1 percent. International Grand Masters are pretty much off the scale. Back in the 1980s, to be a black chess player and an Expert, five levels down from the highest level, was considered fantastic. We were proud of that. If you were a Master, you were a freak of nature. There were one or two guys who were Senior Masters; we didn’t even think of them as real people. But to me the only level that mattered was International Grand Master. When I broke that barrier in 1999, everybody and their grandmother started talking about being a Master and an International Master. You can’t aspire to be just an Expert or Master anymore because now that’s considered nothing. And that’s what having aspirations is all about.

One group of kids I coached for a year in elementary school moved on in 1989 to the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Junior High School—also known as JHS 43—right in the heart of Harlem, on Amsterdam Avenue. Together these kids had a kind of synergy. There was Kasaun Henry, Charu Robinson, Brian Watson, Michael Johnson, Steven Yow, Jonathan Nock, and others. They may not all have been doing great at school, but they had a passion for chess, and I felt their passion.

I remember Kasaun clearly because he thought he was a chess superstar. When Kasaun arrived for lessons, he would march into the room and say, “World Champion Kasaun Henry.” And the thing is, he backed it up. I can spot a kid with skills, and I said, this kid’s got the attitude and he’s got the mind to back it up. I used Kasaun as motivation for the other kids. They were furious that Kasaun was getting so much attention, and they wanted to beat him. Kasaun would be arrogant with them, the same way he’d been treated back in middle school. It’s easy to motivate the kids to play against one another because they’re so competitive; they all want to be superior and they all want to be the coach’s favorite player. I remember Charu being furious and saying to Kasaun, come on, man, how can you beat us like this?

It was business when we went over games at the school. It was like, come on now, no messing around, no talking; why are you talking? Charu would say, if you start acting up, you gotta leave. We’d have a score sheet where we’d record everyone’s games. If a kid didn’t have all his moves written out properly so we could review his game, we tossed the game in the garbage. We didn’t even want to talk about it. We’d say, what’s the deal? This is your business. How can you conduct your business like that? The kids understood that, and they would get like, oh God, I can’t believe I can’t show this great game. We cultivated the attitude that we were about winning; we were about excellence. Mike used to say, gotta go to work, gotta go to work. This is a job. We’ve got to take care of business.

Some of the kids at first wanted to just grab the pieces, and I would say, uhuh, you can’t touch the board. There are eight of us; we can’t do that. Articulate your ideas. Tell me your ideas first. Slowly, we learned how to talk chess together. We talked without having to move the pieces. They’d come up with an idea and I’d say, have you thought about this? Or this? Finally we’d move the pieces to check out our ideas, and the kids started learning to visualize the game. That gave them a bit of confidence and power. I coached the kids twice a week, but they played every day at lunchtime and they played at home. I guess my love for the game was infectious. I’d tell them about the competitions I played in and how intense the battles were, and they’d start on me like, yeah, man, that sounds like fun, who can we go crush? I felt like the Pied Piper. They loved what they saw and what I was doing. And so we started a team. Someone came up with the name Raging Rooks, and we were like, yeah, we gotta call ourselves that.

We knew we wanted to compete in the 1990 National Junior High School Chess Championship in Salt Lake City. We wanted to participate against the best. So we traveled to tournaments on the weekends to practice competing. We’d go in totally confident, and we dominated the games. The other kids didn’t want to see these kids coming. As a team the kids didn’t do as well as they had hoped to at the 1990 Nationals, although Kasaun Henry won the top unrated title in the varsity section. After we lost, I walked to the park with the kids and said, you want to win the National next year? We’re going to start working right now, and we’re going to win next year. They jumped on my back; they were really into it. They said, come and teach us; we’ve got nothing to do in the summertime. I was on school break, so we hung out and I showed them ideas and they practiced and they read books. We spent the next year going to tournaments and playing and practicing. By the time we got to the National Championship in Dearborn, Michigan, in April of 1991, we were the most honed and practiced team there. We’d won a lot of tournaments in the city, and for us, the Nationals were just an extension of all we had prepared for. It was a tough fight, but in the end we tied for first. We weren’t surprised.

On April 26, 1991, the Raging Rooks made the cover of the
New York Times.
The headline read “Harlem Teenagers Checkmate a Stereotype.” It happens that on our team we had six African-American boys, one Latino, and one Asian boy. The mother of one of our boys put the
New York Times
photo in a store, and a black man walked in and looked at the photo. He saw Stephen, the Asian boy, and said, “So
this
is why they won. Now I
know
why they won.” The mother who had put up the picture was mortified. What was curious was that Stephen wasn’t on the first-string team; he was on our second-string team. It was the first-string team that won the championship. Stephen’s team came in seventh, and did a very good job, because seventh in the nation was fantastic. But still, he was on our second-string team. So we could look at our own black faces, see black accomplishment, and still reinterpret it a different way, because we’ve been taught a horrible, horrible thing about ourselves: that we are not that bright, we are not that smart, we are not that capable.