Alvin Hall - Beyond My Viewmaster Dreams

 

Good evening. Let me get this up here. We only went to town once a month when I was a little boy. We had a farm, we grew, raised or hunted everything that we had. When we went to town, my mother and grandmother would give us a nickel or a dime to buy whatever we wanted as a treat. I so looked forward to that. While my brothers and sisters would go off and buy toys and candy, I would go to the back of the five-and-dime store, to this one area where they had these little bitty discs with bits of film in them, and I would buy a View-Master slide. [audience chuckles] 

 

I would go through the row and look for places like Rome, London, Paris, and a town called Constantinople. [audience laughter] I would then come back home in the truck, go into the backyard, pull out my View-Master slide, and point it at the sky, and I would sit there in reverie for hours. I would cross the Bosphorus, I would go up the Eiffel Tower, I would create these travelogues, a word I didn't know at that time, [audience laughter] in my mind until my mother called me to do a chore in the house. 

 

I was raised in a very WASPy black family. [audience laughter] We did not talk. My parents spoke in syllables. If they really liked what you did, they would go, "Mm-mm." [audience laughter] If they thought what you did was adequate but expected, "Mm-mm-mm." [audience laughter] If they thought what you did was horrible, it was, "Hmm." And the lower the register of that, mm, the more judgment was imparted by that. [audience laughter] 

 

When I was nine years old, my mother-- I recall my mother making this statement all the time. She kept saying, "I raised you to leave my house. When you get to be 18 years old, all of you, I raised you to leave my house." My brothers and sisters and I would look at each other and wonder. At age nine, I decided to tell her, "I'm going to leave this place." My mother looked at me, she said, "What did you say?" I said, "One of these days, I'm going to leave this place." She went, "Hmm." [audience laughter]

 

Integration occurred in 1968, and I went from an all-black school named Shadeville, very Faulknerian, [audience laughter] to the county school. And there I had probably my second fight of my entire high-school career. This guy called me something, and we got into a fight, and I fought to win. At the school, people became aware of me, and so they recommended me to a program, a Lyndon Baines Johnson program called Project Upward Bound at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. What a destiny I had. [audience laughter] 

 

Nonetheless, I got into the program, and there was a lady who ran the program, the most glamorous black woman I had ever met, a lady named Ms. Freddy Grooms. She had a medium sized afro that was perfectly coiffed every day. She wore clothes that were in blocks of colors. I can see them to this day. And at this program, she really took an interest in me. In my classes, however, I was the eager kid. I was constantly putting up my hand every answer. I knew the answer to everything. I was really, really on. And the teacher said to me, “How do you know so much?” And I said, “I read the World Book Encyclopedia.”

 

When we had no money at night, my mother, who subscribed to the World Book Encyclopedia, would say to us, “Don, my middle name, pick out the letter Q, boy, and read something to us. Pick out the letter B, boy, and read something to us.” Well, little did we know that I was learning all that stuff. So, in class, I was really eager. This does not make me popular with the other people in the program. [audience laughter]

 

Eventually, I got into a little scuffle. I was put on parole. But Mrs. Grooms took interest in me and recommended me to her friend, Dr. Joel Fleishman, who had started a program at Yale University called Yale Summer High School. And I applied to that program. The day I got that letter, I sat in the kitchen of the house. I knew with everything in me that I was going. I was going to go if it took everything to make it happen. I think my parents suspected that. So, on the day I got ready to go-- I wasn't afraid of anything, not a single thing. Because in my mind, I'd already traveled to Paris and London and Constantinople. [audience laughter] So, going up to New Haven, Connecticut, cinch. [audience laughter]

 

I got on that plane, got to New Haven, Connecticut. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was home. There was John Wall, John Laemmle, Alba, Clyde, all the tutors and counselors made me feel so at home. I loved it. At the end of the summer, I had to come back home. I got off the plane, came home. My grandmother walked up to me, put her hands on my face on both sides, looked into my eyes, and then held me close to her and said, “You are never coming home again. You are never coming home again.”

 

I then applied to college, went off to school in Maine, had a wonderful time, did well in school. Life was good. It was pretty good. I got a good job. I traveled a lot. I would write my parents postcards in tiny little writing. I'd write these entire narratives, and I would say to my parents, “Did you ever receive my postcards?” My parents would go, “Mm, mm, mm.” [audience laughter] Nothing more was said about the postcards. “Curious,” I said to myself.

 

Well, eventually, I got a job in New York City, a job that I really loved on Wall-Street. Things were going really well for me. I started to travel. I still wrote my parents cards. When I told my parents that I was moving to New York City, my grandmother said, “Mm. [audience laughter] You know that Richard Pryor man lived in New York.” [audience laughter] Wall Street was really good to me, and I found a place where I could work, I enjoyed the creativity of being in training on Wall Street. But in one of the recessions, I got laid off. I knew that the layoff was coming. I got so mad about the layoff, in anticipation of it that I decided I was going to fight. I was going to fight when they laid me off. 

 

So, on the day they laid me off, I said basically to myself, you're going to have to pay me to get rid of me. You're going to have to pay me. I fought that day, one of the hardest fights I've ever fought in my life to get a great severance package. When I walked out of that office, I had a severance package that was beyond my dreams. I walked out of the office, got into a taxi and said, “Take me to Tiffany's.” [audience laughter] I took the taxi from downtown to Tiffany's. I told the taxi to wait. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause]

 

I had wanted these green celadon bowls for three and a half years. I would go to Tiffany's and I would just lust after them. And today, I was going to give them to myself as a present for that package I negotiated. I had them wrap them in the blue and white box, put them in a bag, and I came down in that side elevator at Tiffany's, got into the taxes, and said, “Take me to the D'Agostino's.” I went to the D'Agostino's bought a half gallon of milk and a box of Cheerios and then said, “Take me home.” [audience laughter] I went home, opened the box, washed the bowls, and poured the Cheerios and the milk in the bowl. [audience laughter] And I thought, if I have to be unemployed, every day I eat from these bowls, [audience laughter] I'll be happy. I sat there and I ate my Cheerios blissfully.

 

As I was eating those Cheerios, I said to myself, "It's time to go to Paris." I had avoided going to Paris, I don't know why, but it was time to go to Paris. So, I called and booked a ticket. Called a friend of mine and said, "I'm going to come to Paris, can I stay with you?" He said, "Sure." I got on that plane to Paris. It was so exciting. Got off at Charles de Gaulle, took the [unintelligible 00:22:40] in, and uncharacteristically, I missed my stop. I travel a lot, I never miss a stop. I missed my stop. 

 

So, I got off at the next stop, came out of the metro, walking down the street and turned a corner. It was like everything went out of me. I was in exactly the same spot where that picture was taken that I used to sit and look at through that View-Master slide. I was in my own dream. I had made it real. I sat there for a moment, and then I burst into tears. I just thought, I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe I'm here. And for the next five days, I went all over Paris, and I saw every place that was in those View-Master slides. I did not miss a single one.

 

That first night in Paris, my friend who lived in the 1st arrondissement had a rooftop terrace. And so, when I arrived late, he said, “Oh, I have some champagne and caviar upstairs.” So, we went up to the rooftop. As the sun was setting over Paris, I watched as all of the lights came up on the monuments one by one. As I stood there, I heard my mother and my grandmother say, “Mm-hmm.” [audience laughter] This year is a significant birthday for me, and I've decided that it's time for me to see that city once call Constantinople. Thank you.