In the song “ABC”, Mr. Berry Gordy defined reading, writing, and arithmetic as the “branches of the learning tree”. For myself, education has always bloomed far lusher than that Charlie Brown Christmas-esque image. There’s art and science and language and circus skills and then practical stuff like learning to tie your shoes or re-close the bread bag with that little flat plastic thing. Life in our glorious age is a series of “Challenge!” and “Challenge accepted!”; every time they update the software on my iPhone, it’s back-to-school time.
The Jackson Five single “ABC” reached the top of the charts in 1970; and (hold on tight for this one) it got there by knocking off the song “Let It Be” by the Beatles. I know, I know! I know. I didn’t know that either. But what I’m most embarrassed not to know regarding the song lies within its lyrics – the learning tree: not the spindly metaphorical branch in the song, but the book and film by a man named Gordon Parks, who I now realize is my closest real life connection to both Buckaroo Banzai and Doctor Who.
If you’re not familiar with Mr. Parks, he was born in 1921 in Kansas (same as I, well, the state, not the year); and in his lifetime became an award winning photographer with Life Magazine, an author of novels and screenplays, a classical and jazz composer, an iconic filmmaker, and could probably make a brilliant martini and a pretty serviceable Waldorf salad. As a kid I was familiar with his name, as there were places named after him in Kansas City, but he didn’t come up in school because right around that time he directed “Shaft”, which was not on anybody’s grade school syllabus.
The Learning Tree is his first film, and if you research it the first thing you’ll find is that it was the first film to be directed by a black person for a major Hollywood studio. He also wrote it, and produced it, and composed the music. I’ve always been tetchy about the “first black” anything, but in this case I get it; his direct circumstances necessitated extra effort on what was already a pretty challenging road. Despite all that, The Learning Tree was in the first group of films added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, along with Dr. Strangelove, Singin’ In The Rain, and Citizen Kane.
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Now, no one explicitly told me I had the permission to want to grow up to be a multi-hyphenate. It was hard enough wanting to be one thing. After church one Sunday, a lady from my Grandmother’s missionary group stopped me and said I was getting so big. My Grandmother said, “Well he’s doing really well at school.”, so the woman said, “Well, I guess you’re gonna be a judge like your Grandpa!”
When I told her that I wanted to be an author, she said my name was just fine and I shouldn’t change it. Explaining further that I wanted to be an author of books and not change my name she paused and said, “Books? Why you wanna do that?” I then waxed on (as you can probably imagine) about Encyclopedia Brown and William Shakespeare, which went nowhere. I remember my Grandmother looking very nervous; she was about to steer me away with her Vulcan nerve pinch thing when the woman stopped her and said quite seriously,
“Well, that’s nice. That’s a good thing. I…” and here she paused, and in this moment her eyes went back sixty years, her face reflecting something… then she looked at me, much differently, and I realized that whatever it was she’d been looking at, she didn’t want me to see it. “You could be a Black writer…” she said, carefully . “You could do that.” My Grandmother’s hand slowly lowered from it’s hovering point near my left ear as the woman added, as if she was inventing something, or creating a recipe from scratch, “…like, WEB Dubois. Or Langston Hughes.”
She didn’t name Gordon Parks; his success was still being written, the bridges he’d built untested. I must’ve looked like the most naive vulnerable little blue polyester suit wrapped ten year old, dreaming of the impossible, wanting to build paths rather than walk them, but for that moment she believed, if not directly in me, that the world might just allow a little impossible, if I was careful. The times we each lived in were not directly comparable; when life depended mostly on remaining alive one just didn’t have the room, philosophically, to PLAN. Instead you had to learn to dream. So why not dream big?
“Yes, you can be a black writer. That would be nice.”
So the little boy read books, comics, magazines, encyclopedia volumes, all day long, even at night under the blanket with a flashlight. Fully dedicated. As for writing, he wrote all kinds of things, constantly, and though he would never be an arithmetic person, he learned to love it through technical and somewhat socially isolating mathematical card tricks. Then he added art and music and science and, that boy is me: I just wanted to make that clear.
And for circus skills: I can juggle three things for like 18 seconds (might be useful at a really short circus). And I do use the little bread closing thing, but honestly after you eat four slices you can twist it really hard and just double it under the loaf. We are, all of us, multi-hyphenate, and should give ourselves the permission to be proud of the various verbs we’ve learned to do, though I wish I’d known more about Gordon Parks earlier in life, ‘cause he’s a…
…ok, I was gonna directly reference the Shaft theme song here, but my mother reads these. Y’know.
Although The Learning Tree has been uploaded numerous times to free online sources, I went ahead and ordered the two disc remastered Criterion Edition. Inspiration should be high definition.
Mr. Gordon Parks’ most impressive achievement, for me, was becoming an old black man, as the words themselves present a modern miracle (factoring in disease and various historical pitfalls), so it is a truly inspiring feat. I’m not gonna EGOT, but if I can get a head full of grey hair, I will rock it like a Pulitzer Prize.
A picnic by the Learning Tree