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You talked about your biological father and meeting him, and I just wanted ask just a little bit about your family and their community.
That's a great question. I am, as I told you, getting to know my biological dad. In '98 we had two years together before he passed. By the way, I don't think I told you, in 2000 he took me back to Oklahoma to the little all-black town that I was from and that he and my mom had grew up in. And so, I got to go there, and there was a actually a guy that remembered me. He asked what happened to all of my aunts and uncles, who were his age, and I told him who was dead, who was living, what they were doing. He said, "No, there was one more." I said, "No there wasn't. My grandparents had ten children." And I had told him that I was Thelma's son when I met him. And he said, "no," and I told him, and he said, "no, there was one more." And I finally told him, and I listed them again, and he said, "no, there was one more." I said, "who?" He said, "Whatever happened to Butch?" And I said, "So-And-So, I'm Butch." And I'm thinking, "I left there six years old, and I was fifty-seven, and why would he remember a six-year old kid for fifty-one years, this is a grown man. He was almost grown when I left. And my dad said, he said because, "Son, it's a quilt. And, when a patch is missing, you may still use the quilt, but you notice the patch is gone." And so, my biological dad was, as I told you, after I accepted my call into the ministry and been preaching a few years, I meet him, he's a retired Baptist pastor. At the time, he had three daughters, one son. One son and daughter lives in Tampa, Florida, they live in Tampa; the other daughter, Brenda, lives in St. Pete which is across the bridge from each other, just like Oakland and San Francisco; and then the third sister, Marylyn, the middle girl, she lives in Macon, Georgia, she the dean, provost at Emory College, which is a Southern Baptist school in Atlanta. That will be around Emery—no, Mercer, which one is it? Mercer? Mercer, I think. It's Mercer. It's a Southern Baptist school, I think. Anyway, Sheryl has worked in TV, and she went back to school, she's a psychologist now, works with children. Junior, he's a technocrat, he does computer stuff. And Brenda was working, and she and her late husband—passed away a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law, he was a pastor. And so, she spent her life working in the church, now, he passed away so she works. I forget what she does.
I spent more time in St. Pete than Tampa, but I've been in both of them. And it's really interesting, because they have some of the same problems that we have, you know, drugs, gang stuff. Not nearly as severe, but their communities are much more intact. One of the things that I do, and love to do, when I get to a town that I haven't been to before—now they live in an area that's a lot like downtown, but there are a lot of African-Americans that live around there, but there are white people too, but a lot of African-Americans, because there are a lot of black people down south—first thing I want to do: take me to where the black folk are. I want to see. Because I can tell a lot about the town by seeing what they have there. And they're not real pleased with what they've got, because when you're in the situation that African-Americans are, you're always working harder to make it better. But when I go, it's like, nirvana for me, because I see—just when we get ready to eat, I got six, seven, eight different soul food restaurants I can choose from, if I want to eat soul food. And after I preach on Sunday I always prefer soul food, I don't always eat it, because it's hard to do unless I want to drive over to Oakland, except for Powell's, you know. We got one place, pretty much, in this town. There are others, but, I don't know much about them. So, that's one major plus for me, I mean, my brother-in-law takes me downtown, in the hub, where the black businesses are, and we order crab, we just get a bunch of bags of crab, those little blue crabs. And we just come back home, and by the time we get back home, they got newspaper all over the dining room table, and we just toss them on the table, and we just sit there and eat crab until crabs coming out of our ears, and laugh and joke and have a ball. To go to the neighborhoods where there are African-American businesses. Down there they even have a couple of little clubs and stuff that we don't really have here. Now we have, on Fillmore Street, Rosella's, and Shiva Lounge. Shiva's a really nice place that you guys can't go to yet. But they're getting ready to have Yoshi's, which actually, you'll be able to go to when you're eighteen, 'cause they have food. Yoshi's nightclub is getting ready to open, and the Blue Mirror, which is going to be a restaurant, is getting ready to open at Eddy and Fillmore. That's black-owned, that development, Michael Johnson, a friend of mine who's an African-American real-estate developer, developed it. And I think up until now, it'll be the largest and most expensive project developed by an African-American man or woman in this city that I know of.
But in Florida, for me now, I'm a church guy. So, I love it because people still go to church down there. Churches are packed. We go to stores on Sunday. One Sunday we were going to the supermarket, and my sister's telling me, "Well, it's only been a couple of years that you could even shop on Sunday." I remember when I was a boy, everything you wanted to buy on you had to buy on Saturday. Because you know how the mall is open on Sunday, it's a big shopping day—oh hell no. You wasn't doing that on Sunday. Now, as a Christian, that's fine, but that ain't why I like that. You used to not be able to go to the store on Thanksgiving and Christmas either. I think there needs to be slow-down time in our lives. There needs to be, once again. Time taken out where we can reflect, think, spend time with family. Folk don't have to make money 24/7, damn! You know? I mean, we see our civilization, our way of life, getting away from us, man. And nobody knows how to put it back and I think it gets pulled back by doing very simple things. Very simple things, having collective time. Because on Sunday was the day you was kicking it with your family, whether you went to church or not. You know, people came by the house after church on Sunday. I tell you, a lot of times we'd be sitting around the house after church, Sunday afternoon, get out of church about one o'clock, come home, kick back, eat dinner, kick back, you know you eat early on Sunday, three o'clock, especially in the summer, five or six o'clock, knock on the door, there's uncle so-and-so, my dad's friend and his wife and the kids, "Oh we was in the neighborhood, just thought we'd come by..." "Oh, we was sitting up at home and wondering what you was doing, thought we'd drive over..." 'Cause a lot of folk wanted to get out of the house and take a drive, just to see. Just to see. I don't know if you know, but that's really hip stuff. And the way you guys have been raised, living your life, it may not really seem like it, but if you had a taste of it for a while... Now, most of the time when we get together, it's arranged. In those days, a lot of times we got together, it was spontaneous. Well, they still do that, down south, is my point.
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