HARD CRACKERS

It was always a gamble going somewhere with Mamma Cheese.  She was light-skinned.  The white women disliked her because they thought that she thought that she was “as good” as them.  But the black women disliked her because they thought that she thought that she was “better” than them. Mamma Cheese didn’t take shit from anybody.  Once, when I was […]

My dad, Nathaniel Spain Chism, whom we all called Daddy Cheese, or just Cheese, told the following story.  He got drafted and went into the Navy.  But he ended up in the brig–in prison.  Why?  The Navy, of course, had wanted all its soldiers to declare that they were going to fight “the enemy” for […]

In 2005 I was hired by a non-profit in San Mateo County to design and teach classes in a combined English as a Second Language and Family Literacy program in the community room of a low-income housing development. The development was run by a different non-profit, and yet another non-profit ran an on-site childcare facility. […]

Devastated. My long time friend Joffre Stewart has died. Joffre, a long time anarchist and pacifist (after serving in the military during World War 2) was a poet and was referred to in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. [Ginsberg was taken by Stewart when they met years ago at a gathering in San Francisco. In his poem […]

As I parked, I heard a tap on my window. The tap came from a neighbor from the building next door, a 40-ish African-American man with an unfashionable, immaculately coifed Afro and John Lennon-style glasses, radiating quiet intelligence and blue-collar dignity. We had never interacted much, outside of a few occasional nods, but he seemed […]