A photo caption from Humans of New York inspires Greg Liotta to dissect manhood, compassion, forgiveness, and what it means to truly claim the title of King
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“Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.” — Jalal al-Din Rumi
Some people like running around taking pictures of sunsets. Some can catch the light bouncing off a building, or the wing-span of a bridge connecting islands. But there are those rare folks that can look at an ordinary thing and see galaxies dirty-dancing with rainbows. They zoom in and somehow capture the magic inside the trick. Brandon Stanton, who started the “Humans of New York” photo blog in 2011 is one of those guys that looks at people the way the ancient Greeks looked at the night sky. He photographs constellations walking around on the ground. He presses some buttons and out pours a million little stories made of stardust. Wherever Brandon goes in the world, he captures that moist, earthy radiance, and we remember how connected we all are. He asks a question and from within a photo come stars shooting across the sky. We look up and make a wish before it vanishes into space.
As it turns out, we’ve all got the same stardust in us. We all love somebody, and we’ve all lost somebody. We’ve all been hurt by some disappointment or betrayal. We are all full of hope. Some of us are seeking peace, some are swimming in it. Every experience in the universe is bubbling inside of us. All of us.
Here’s a photo that becomes a poem. Listen to this song about a father telling a tale of redemption between himself and his son in prison:
“My youngest son was fooling around with some friends, and somebody got called a ‘pussy,’ and then somebody got shot. And now he’s doing 20 years. That’s my baby boy. I always told him it would happen. I used to come home from work late at night, and he’d be gone, and I’d find him in the streets and chase him back inside. After he went to prison, I asked him: ‘What more could I have done?’ And he started crying and said: ‘Nothing, Dad. You raised me right. Everything you told me was right. There was nothing you could have done.’”
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When I saw this photo and read this story, I was struck by so many things all at the same time:
I wanted to write about the code of “manhood” so many of our young men are raised with. I wanted to write about machismo, a wimpy little sapling that wants desperately to become a Redwood, if only it could risk the tribal shaming on the streets.
I wanted to talk about how, while living and working with teens in Spanish Harlem & Washington Heights back in the 90’s, I saw how perilous it is just to be…just a boy. In some places, if someone calls a boy a “pussy”, a “faggot”, or “mericon”, he must be prepared kill or be killed. I wanted to write about how the over-arching culture we live in renders even the best fathers handicapped as they seek to impart an ethic of goodness in their children. I wanted to write about how boys are not allowed to have any emotion other than anger.
I wanted to talk about how our system is rigged to incarcerate them rather than bless and empower them with tools to express the full range of FEELINGS.
And I wanted to write about sexual politics, the way it maims young men AND women. I wanted to write about how emasculating it is to refer to a man as a woman’s body part, but not before the woman is assaulted by assigning her body the name of an animal. We can talk about a reality, that in some neighborhoods, if someone calls you a “pussy”, more than your manhood is tested before the community.
I wanted to write about how we’ve stripped meaningful rites of passage from our culture, rendering our boys with no transformative agent to become a noble man. We’ve abandoned them to create ethics and challenges of their own, where there is another code deeply connected to their survival. And if one rare man-child refuses to fight out of some higher character, we honor him for having uncommon strength.
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The landscape of this story has many twists and turns. There are too many cuts on this diamond, each one casting off a kaleidoscope. Let’s talk about fathers who give their souls to navigate sons and daughters through terrain that wants to eat them alive.
I’ve never met a man who said he was “ready” to become a father, but once the child is born a man is forced down on the mat with a knee in his back. Here begins the epic wrestling match every father has with a culture that wants to steal everything from a child’s soul.
We’re all sons, and whatever the story, we all carry our fathers with us. For almost all of us there lies these questions to our fathers: Did I become the man you wanted me to be? Are you PROUD of me? Have I been a Good Son?
What more does any son care to know?
And in every father’s heart, the questions: Did I give you the right tools to become the man you wanted to become? Was I there for you enough? Did I do enough? Was I a Good Father? Back breaking, soul crushing questions bloated with losses and remorses.
A man looks at his grown son and sees “my baby boy” even as he sees a man. A father’s blessing is light to the leaf of every son, lifting him into a man like a tree dropping all manner of seeds on the earth, good, bad and ambiguous.
A son looks at his father and sees a mountain that begs, “come climb me, come stand on the tippy top and witness your inheritance.”
But those pesky questions, and the swirling rapids of what it means “to be a man” in most neighborhoods can knock down buildings full of Good Fathers. Bars begin to grow in the mind.
They start early, one doubting thought at a time. We’re filled with false messages about who we are and how to “be a man”, until we’re locked in. For most boys, especially boys of color in inner cities, lockdown happens before any crime is committed. Sooner or later, bars in the mind turn to steel, and freedom has to come from a road less traveled. The code of “manhood” on the streets is a bondage.
There are sons who learn how to become men worthy of their father’s admiration, even from within the steel bars of a prison cell. There are forces that blast holes in every brick, like forgiveness, vulnerability, and integrity.
Sometimes ideas melt bars, but no one flourishes in an environment full of bars and chains. Some other kind of grace has to bring freedom to a soul. Sometimes that comes when a father humbles himself, opens his heart to his son, and asks for absolution.
- This is story about how to melt bars from within. It’s a teaching for all of us on the outside that are still trapped in our thinking.
- This is a story about how one becomes a king, even when stuck behind bars.
- Its a story about how a father and son spread their wings and became eagles, flying above the cultural tide, beyond the hemming in produced by machismo programming.
- This is about a conversation between father and son, how the walls crumble when their questions are put into words.
- It’s about how a father’s heart opening causes a boy’s mind opening.
A river of grief, compassion, and forgiveness finally flows. Until people rise up out of the box.
A father asks, “What more could I have done? But a boy becomes a man when he takes full responsibility for the man he has become.
“‘No, Dad. You raised me right. Everything you told me was right. There was nothing you could have done.’”
And that’s when a Prince becomes a King.
He wears a crown of made of Freedom.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
“A father’s blessing is light to the leaf of every son, lifting him into a man like a tree dropping all manner of seeds on the earth, good, bad and ambiguous.”
That’s some damn juicy gold. Love it.
Evan Daily! Thanks, brother! I appreciate you <3
This is BRILLIANT, Greg. Thank you so much for writing this. I shared it with all my boys/Kings. I also shared it in my groups, and on my business page. Thanks again for sharing it with me.
Thanks so much, Melissa! Your boys are lucky Kings. <3