On Corey Pittman
He was the first person my age to tell me to grow up. I was 17 and hadn’t lived in the neighborhood for two years, but would come back to do dirt every chance I could. When my mother was working, I would take the same bus I took when I was younger to go to suburban schools and head to Al Davies Boys and Girls club to find places to drink, pop pills, chill with old homies, and wild the fuck out when they didn’t want to remember the good times. People had tolerated me; some even felt sympathy because they had heard the rumors that my grandmother had died from my father’s hand, with the Police didn’t give enough of a fuck to prosecute him for it. Yet I would cross lines, invade group spaces, or act uncouth in a way to earn the dislike of many people, and was at the point that I was going into some dark areas.
That is what Corey Pittman told me in the Ballfields outside of Al Davies. Corey was eloquent and cool without being a knucklehead. He was cordial to me when other people weren’t. I was drawn to him in social situations because he exuded a quiet confidence that my neurotic self wanted. There was a sweetness that hadn’t left him, that attracted even the most grizzled people. More than that, there was a way that he could guard it at the right time, a particular way of code-switching that let me know that he had a sophisticated mind.
In short, he was the perfect person to give me this warning that I had to leave or I was gonna get shot. He told me he used to see me so together with my brother, who went to the Lincoln High school disabled student program, and he was sad to see me in a tragic place. Yet, he reminded me that there were many people in this block in a tragic place, people who didn’t have someone like my mother who climbed that agonizing mountain to get out of Hilltop. My presence, of someone who had chances to have a better life, yet who came back to block to be this cyclone of uppers, Mogan David, anger, and sadness, was the reason that my old friends had beat my ass, and if I came back, people would do worse. Pittman not only closed that chapter of Hilltop in my life, he indirectly saved it.
For two years, I started to make the best of my life. I stopped drinking, improved my grades, ran cross country and track, and began to improve my disposition. Our paths would cross at the Mall and bus stations, and he would make comments noticing my improvement before he went to school. The last time I saw him, he was going to school, and he wanted me to be where I was, and we would hang more often. We would “chop it up. Swap stories about college, and talk of big things,” he said. He was starting to become what Albert Murray called “Joe College,” the epitome of cool youth elegance.
In my senior year, I had excellent grades and was accepted to go to Western Washington University. By mid-may of 1997, I would go back to the neighborhood and started to look for him. I had heard he was coming back from Alabama State. I was almost unrecognizable, being nearly half my size with my western gear on. I wanted not only to hang out but to get his progress report of me, to show how I had improved my life and had become that dude by respecting my mom and being a solid citizen. More than that, I wanted to know what to do now, the game plan I should follow to make it in college from the block. I tried a couple of times to find him, even warmly received in Al Davies in my search. I told myself I’d catch him at a cookout or when I’d run errands with my grandaddy. I had time, I thought.
I didn’t. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19970525&slug=2541099 I was not the first or the 100th person whose life Pittman had changed. I had only known him from a periphery, ad this mentally broke me in half. To those who were close to him in Black Tacoma, Devastating isn’t enough of a word to express what his murder did to them. a https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jun/02/800-mourn-drive-by-shooting-victim-death-of/ It was so public, so heartbreaking, and so viscerally horrific that it even changed the discussion about hilltop outside the neighborhood. The Carpetbagging suburban teenagers who thought they would make careers selling fake gangster stories stopped coming to the community for a very long time. The Hilltop Action Coalition, controversial in progressive black circles for advocating safety measures that didn’t curtail black men’s feelings, became at the center of the city’s politics to get crime out of the city. Pittman’s death was so painful that everything that wasn’t about the block’s safety and health had to go away.
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It isn’t a falsehood to say that my transformation from the painfully troubled kid at Al Davies to this ( https://www.thestranger.com/genius-awards-2016/2016/09/14/24558332/robert-lashley https://player.fm/series/new-books-in-literary-studies-2421456/robert-lashley-green-river-valley-blue-cactus-press-2021 ) is shockingly remarkable. Yet, it only is a cursory glance of the story. I successfully fought horrific obstacles to be Washington State’s first born-and-raised black literary star. However, I did it with a quality early education, a mom who still had connections, a black family with a good name in the community, a father who thugs took pity on, and later thugs who took pity on me because of my father. My friends at Al Davies had none of these things. Many of them arent’ here anymore.
To fend off the overwhelming and unspeakable survivor’s guilt, I create to fulfill the debt Corey told me I owed my friends and community. My books are my best self through art and the opportunities given to me. They are also shot from the starting points of my family, culture, and Pittman’s particular example of what a black man from a neighborhood of mine was and could have been. When I do cross that threshold, I hope to see him someday. I hope we can chop it up, exchange stories, and talk of big things, big things.
