Helena Clare Pittman, one of the Center’s most dedicated teachers, has written, painted, and taught her entire life. In her monthly Helena Writes series, she shares a lifetime of wisdom, one pearl at a time.
In her 64th post, Helena remembers a mentor from her teenage years and reflects on the challenges of writing about the most profound influences on our lives. Enjoy!
Nonfiction: First meeting with Percy
When I was 15, I met Percy. Percy was 15 years older than I, a friend of Ted’s. It would be two years before Ted and I got married, Percy and Bette standing up for us. Ted wanted me to meet Percy, or it was a natural thing that grew out of the configuration of the time. It was life that wanted me to meet Percy, and it must have been inevitable.
Ted and Percy worked together at the TA, the Transit Authority. That alone seemed like fate or destiny. My father had worked there in his early years, though not as early as his time as a projectionist in Montreal. That must have been before my father went to Poly—Brooklyn Poly Tech, in Fort Greene, just a few blocks from the Transit Authority. Maybe my father was 22 or 23 when he lived in Canada, and showed the first talkie there—the family story doesn’t say whether it was in English or French.
Ted was 23 when we stood in front of Asia House on 64th Street to hear a talk about Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet. I knew that I was to meet Percy that day, but he was already known to me through Ted. Ted and Percy and a few other people had formed a group called The Philosopher’s Club. They met at lunchtimes and breaks to talk ideas. It was high talk, and I’d caught the vibe of it. I knew that tone in Ted; it was the thing that drew me to him. And now, I felt it magnified in Ted’s words about Percy.
Percy held some office in the Transit Worker’s Union—it comes back to me now that he was the Union Representative there, at the Transit Authority, downtown Brooklyn. I would have to look it up to try to figure it out. But that isn’t important to me—Percy was important. He played a significant role in the union, at the TA, and he was a hub for a group of people who recognized in him the humanity that would place him at the center of my life.
After I knew him, I’d walk over to 174 Livingston Street, a few blocks from Schermerhorn, where I was teaching at The Friends School—one of my first teaching jobs—take the stairs up to the third floor where he and Ted worked, to see Ted, and to talk to Percy, because that’s what it became—we didn’t use the word then, but now I know the name of it. Percy was my mentor. And though he’s gone 40 years, time has proved that truth.
We were a crowd, standing in front of Asia House on 64th Street that sunny afternoon in fall or spring. Ted and I had taken the subway into the city. I was wearing my Harris Tweed coat, a wool dress, stockings, heels—mid-height, the only kind I ever wore, like my mother’s heels, and my sister’s. Stylish in a particular way: tweed, wool suits, silk blouses. I can’t see who makes up the crowd; I don’t think Bette was there. There must have been 20 or 25 of us talking, milling around on the sidewalk that day. There was plenty of time before the lecture. Everyone was older than I was in my leather heels and tweed coat at 15. Everyone was dressed well. It was 1960, and it was a sophisticated group of people.
I don’t know who Ted was talking to. I was by myself—alone in a crowd, same as ever, the way I am—and I didn’t know anyone. I don’t think I minded that Ted wasn’t standing next to me. But I think I was lost. Later, I’d find ways to connect with people, but then I was just so out of time. I’d left my peers behind; they had become too young. I had nothing in common with anyone, it seemed. I was already painting, and that’s where I think I lived. I gravitated toward people who were older than me.
A man approached, big, toothy smile, but real. He said something. I turned to see who he was talking to.
That’s the first memory of Percy, standing in the sunlight, a breezy day, me, 15. He had a close-clipped Afro, cocoa skin—dressed in a suit, maybe a head taller than me. I was stunned by his stature, the open cleanliness of his attention, his presence—his Being. That’s why I turned to see who he would be addressing. But it was me. It was to me he was speaking.
So began the inside-jumping years, the jumping-from-foot-to-foot years, meeting Percy to bring him my life, young as I was. Jumping because I could barely understand what he said, except I knew it was important. Jumping because listening to him was like looking into the sun.
I remember other moments, jumping like a bean with a worm inside. A worm that needed to get out. The things he said were recorded in me, and play back now, and I better understand our kinship.
It must have been five years, maybe seven, when Percy and Bette’s second child, Darius, was born. Percy and I stood talking next to Darius’s crib—Darius Jahan, Darius Jahan Knight—me still jumping. Percy spoke a language different from mine, different from anyone’s I’d ever heard. I could touch his words, understood the tone of his voice, but I couldn’t hear him. We’d gone to the crib so that I could see the new-born Darius, when something inside me popped, gave way. It was a physical sensation. My solar plexus became an ear, and I heard Percy, at last. Then we talked—talked for eight more years, until Percy got sick. Until we all lost him.
Percy saw me, before I saw myself. And now I know who it was he saw. “We’re friends,” he once said. I took that into me with awe, another piece of myself handed to me. Another time he said “There are people who are friends in the heat, and people who are friends in the light. You and I are friends in the light.” He said that to me, his eyes squinting, burning into mine.
It was unconditional love that approached me that day. A love that saw everything and called me out of myself. It was the beginning of everything for me.
I don’t know what my life would have been like if we hadn’t met. If Percy hadn’t seen me. I don’t know who I’d understand myself to be, how I ever could have recognized myself.
I see Percy now. I hold onto him for dear life. It’s in him, in Percy, that I remember who I am.
A writing prompt
This is the first time I’ve written about Percy, though I’ve tried many times. I talk about him, often, to some people, at some times, when the moment seems to require it of me. I don’t know how to write about him except by writing sharp yet oddly undefined impressions of my time with him. Writing about Percy is like trying to write about magic, or grace, or river waters flowing through my fingers.
This writing was the result of a prompt, given in a writing group I recently sat with. Here’s the prompt: “Write about a person you met in your early years who changed your life.”
Is there someone in your life, past or present, about whom you have trouble writing? Will you try Helena’s prompt to write about a person who changed your life? What did you think of Helena’s latest column? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: Helena Writes
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