Born Gray in a Black and White World
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Somewhere in my first year of grade school my mother, brother and I moved a few miles away to a low income housing project on Hwy 55 and Lyndale Ave. Mom said that the 1st grade teacher at Willard Elementary, the school I had just left had offered to pick me up, bring me to her class and then drive me home after school. I don’t remember her but it would be quite interesting to meet her and find out what she saw in me that she would be so willing to do something so beyond the norm. It was here in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city of Minneapolis at my new home in the projects (they have since been torn down) that I would have one of my richest life moments. It would be my first test of character and first noble experience. It was also my first fistfight.
It was high noon on a summer day when Sherriff Wade went over to the playground in the center of our projects to play. At the playground was a townsperson around my age playing on the slide. He was having fun while minding his own business. On the monkey bars next to the slide playing was the town bully known as Black Bart the Meanie. As Black Bart began to harass the little boy, Sherriff Wade took off his white hat to wipe his brow with a handkerchief that was saturated with cold holy water. I (Sheriff Wade) told Black Bart that this town is a simple town with simple folks who simply want to be left alone. Or, it could have been “leave him alone,” I can’t remember. At any rate, Black Bart jumped down from the monkey bars threw down his cigar and walked with showdown in his eyes towards me. We unbuckled our holsters and laid our lollipops and hot wheel racers on the ground. This was going to be a man fight.
After throwing a few punches we became entangled on the ground wrestling until I had him pinned. As I was sitting on top of him, there was a small crowd of people gathered around cheering and encouraging me to keep punching him. The fight ended with no one sustaining any injury that I am aware of, except my opponent may have received a bruised ego. You know you live in the jungle when people are encouraging two six year olds to fight and whop up on each other.
To my surprise, Black Bart and I wound up in the same 1st grade class together at Harrison Elementary. In class on one of our drawing projects he had painted a picture using yellow as his primary color. He said yellow was his favorite color. I was oddly fascinated with that. I thought yellow was a girl color. Later in life I went through intense color therapy and was corrected of my inaccurate pastel color gender association. This is a shout-out to all of the bullies. If you want to be a better bully, change your preference of lighter subdued colors for darker colors that behavioral scientists say will make you more aggressive; yellow doesn’t work.
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About the Book
From the moment I was born in the Psychiatric ward at the University of Minnesota Hospital in 1965, Minnesota would never be the same. With a little naivety on my mothers’ part back in the early 70’s, a little boy had more leash to explore than a little boy should have had. Combined with a stepfathers influence that was geared more for inmates at Alcatraz, a wild pony was created and set loose into the world until being reigned in at the age of 24.
In the book I chronicle many of the events in my life up to the present. By the time I was eleven years old I had crashed two cars; the second on Hwy 100 in the middle of the day. I had an extraterrestrial visit, been chased by the police on the back of my drunken step dad’s motorcycle, and had done and seen numerous other things that were years to early.
The craziness of my life continued throughout my school years, into the military and then as a young adult man after the Air Force. What makes this book special is the transparency of my failures, successes, fears, and hopes from my heart that are common to most people as I became an adolescent and a man; as well as those things that are unique to having one foot in and one foot out of the white European and black African gene pool.
This book is more than a rollercoaster ride and window into my life. It answers the two most important questions that are at the core of every human heart; ‘who am I and what is my purpose’? I show how God rescued me from myself and transformed my life without removing my playful and sometimes zany antics.
About the Author
Wade Oliver is married and has three adult children, one dog and one very demanding cat. He lives in Robbinsdale, Mn. and works for the USPS in Minneapolis, Mn.