The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership Read Free Page B

opening act, as the astounding boy preacher from Brooklyn. I knew Mahalia was huge, but I had been preaching for so many years already that this became second nature to me. One of my distinct memories from that period was opening for Mahalia at the 1964 World’s Fair, at the circular pavilion and replica of the globe—the Unisphere—in Queens, that you can still see when you fly into LaGuardia, next to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center where the U.S. Open is held. This made a serious impression on my classmates. So what was at first odd and amusing soon became a reason to hold me in a certain amount of esteem, or at least respect. They’d point to me, saying, “There’s the boy preacher.” But no more “Ha ha ha” to go along with it. Opening for Mahalia Jackson at age nine will do that for you.
    Just because I was the boy preacher didn’t mean that I wanted to be isolated from my peers, but that’s what happened. If I went outside to play punchball, guys would play with me, but I could tell they really didn’t want to. And as for the girls? They found it all extremely weird. How are you going to do naughty things with a preacher? I was a rigid fundamentalist Christian, but I was still a growing boy moving into adolescence and puberty, with an escalating interest in girls. And no outlet for that interest. And the adults around me either exalted me or admonished me because they were holding me to an entirely different standard than my peers. In the middle of all that, I was still seeking a father figure. So it was a big, messy stew of difficult emotions I was grappling with at the time.
    When I got older and had children of my own, I realized that I had no road map to follow, no role model to help me figure out how to do this thing called fatherhood. But I quickly realized that maybe the most important element of fatherhood was to be a bedrock for my children, to be there always as a support system for them—all the things my father never was for me. When my wife and I weren’t able to sustain our marriage and we separated, I became even more convinced that my job was to make sure I remained available to my two daughters. Developing a strong, unbreakable bond with them became one of the most important things in the world to me.
    But it wasn’t easy, primarily because I had nothing to emulate. Many men move into the role of father quite easily, smoothly, because their own fathers had always beenthere as examples. They could either duplicate their fathers’ strength or eliminate their weaknesses. But I had none of that. All I had was absence, emptiness. I didn’t know the elements that made fathers successful or the things to avoid. So I would find myself watching fathers, trying to figure out what worked or didn’t work and how to incorporate it into my own fathering style.
    My goal was to break the generational cycle of dysfunction that hung over my family. I already had a failed marriage; I didn’t want a failed fatherhood, too. But I had to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I needed help, that I had many shortcomings in this area. I knew my goal would be impossible to reach if I didn’t figure out how to fix them.
    The world is not a perfect place; none of our families are perfect, either. All of us who come out of “broken” or dysfunctional homes first must comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we’re not responsible for our family situations. I had to bear some of the shame, the embarrassment, and the lack of security from what my father did, but none of it was my fault. So while embarrassment might be an understandable response, I could not burden myself with guilt. Just as some people inherit wealth, I inherited dysfunction. And just as those who inherit wealth should not act as if the wealth accrues some sort of merit on them, granting them a superiority over those whose beginnings were more humble, you shouldn’t be humiliated if you’re on the other side of the