Reputations Fade Away [Paperback]

Dawayne Williams (Author)

Book Description

By any yardstick you want to use, Dawayne Williams had a very tough childhood. He and his younger brother were raised in the projects in Washington, DC by a single mom while his dad (who denied paternity) was in and out of prison for a variety of criminal offenses. Consequently, Dawayne grew up without a male role model to emulate. So it's no surprise that he joined a street gang as a junior high school student to deal crack and weed and woo older women until he ended up shot and stabbed multiple times and behind bars like his absentee father. This autobiography is written in vivid words that jump right off the pages. Since being born again, Dawayne has found Jesus and sworn off most of his profligate ways once and for all, though he does confess to falling off the wagon occasionally.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dawayne Williams has defied and prevailed beyond the many stereotypes that society has about young African American men. In his book, Reputations Fade Away, he courageously tells the story of his journey from a street hustler to a dedicated father. Williams shares the details of his past lifestyle to give others an understanding of the challenges young African Americans face, and to inspire youth to write their own stories as a path to healing. As an adolescent lured by easy money, Williams got involved with the crime that plagued the Washington, DC area in the 1980s. Living the street life, he realized that the path he walked was endangering his life and the lives of others. Several times Williams barely escaped death, and he began to realize that his life had been spared for a purpose. His new book, Reputations Fade Away, is an important part of that mission.

Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: Kojack Enterprise; 1st edition (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978654722
• ISBN-13: 978-0978654726
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,088,997 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breaking the Code to the Cycle of Urban black-on-black Violence, October 22, 2008

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reputations Fade Away (Paperback)

By now the story told here has become a familiar motif in the ongoing internecine struggles of urban warfare in which "gang is pitted against gang," neighborhood against neighborhood," and in some cases (as this one), even family members against each other. This story is important not just because of its easy and much over wrought cover theme of "redemption of a lost soul through Christ," but mainly because embedded within and behind this familiar pretext remains enough truth in the underlying subtext of the book to decode the "Rosetta Stone" of urban violence. This not so well hidden code, the last remaining psychological barrier to understanding why there is so much "black-on-black" crime and violence, lies "hidden in plain sight" both at the center of this story and at the center of the tragic cycles of petty internecine warfare that for the last half century has provided the backdrop for a major part of the urban American social drama.

The strongest clue to this underlying secret is the uncanny way in which the "code of the streets" defines, dictates, utterly dominates and then ultimately undermines all "individual self-construction projects" of the life of young urban black men. Its centripetal force of peer group pressures, like an evil gravity in the ether, captures them at an early age, and then inexorably "pulls them in," by their noses, their Dicks, their spirits and their souls. And importantly, it does so well before they have had a chance to decide on healthier choices and alternatives, which, in any case, are, as often as not, missing in these diminished circumstances. Mr. Williams got an early start in his own "manhood self-construction project" and was already well on the ladder leading down into the urban social abyss and to his inevitable demise, by age seven.

Where the larger Culture Meets the Black Male Self-Construction Project

It is in the subconscious where the individual's self-definition and self-creation projects are hatched and where they eventually intersect with societal rules to help shape ones personality. Even though it is taking place in the background, it is at this vital juncture, this interface between the "individual mind" and "larger cultural rules and forces" where all the tension and action of the struggle for self-discovery is centered. And because self-construction is a "private affair," indeed a solitary project even for young kids, shaped mostly by peer pressure, intervention can often be next to impossible: Independence mandates that self-discovery be closed to too much external interference, assistance and teaching. Thus, it seems to matter little whether there is a strong or a weak parental figure, or positive or negative role models involved. The results are all the same: The "call of the streets" the theater of self-discovery for urban youths, is always stronger than the strongest of "role models," and stronger than all but the most determined parental authority.

Put simply, the real story here lays not so much in Mr. Williams' tale itself (which, meaning no disrespect to the author) we have seen repeated ad nausea. The real story lies in the psychology behind (beneath and between the lines of) his carefully woven "self-styled" autobiographical tale of his own urban heroics. His story of survival against society's grim reaper, and his eventual redemption through Christ is now the signature story of the urban ghetto denizen's rise from a mostly self-imposed "pre-determined failure" to "limited success through religion." It is now the familiar and expected tale of "the urban warrior's" struggle against "the man" or more accurately, against the recycled urban jungle that his own actions have helped to create and sustain.

Mr. William's tale is the archetypical version of this story: The hero begins by learning at an early age how to fight, then moves on to petty thefts and muggings, how to engage in risky and mindless sex, gets thrown out of several schools, learns how to gamble, stabs and gets stabbed (by his own cousin Tyson no less); shoots and gets shot (again by his own cousin Tyson), and on up the ladder to dealing drugs (following in his already jailed father's footsteps), and then as his life hangs in the balance, just before death or a lengthy prison sentence puts a natural or societal end to his climb, he has an epiphany: a "comes to Jesus moment" in which his life is miraculously turned around. Now the newly "saved" (like our lame duck President, GW Bush) also due to his own over night conversion, becomes the new recruit for Christ, a new "Proselytizer in Chief," and the new ever-wise and ever-self-righteous and morally superior "savior" himself.

The Rosetta stone: the "psychology of the missing hyper-masculine non-white male," reincarnated as the "Urban Hustler."

There is something eerily similar about the tales told here by Mr. Williams and by all the erstwhile "urban warriors like him:" from Johannesburg and Pretoria, to Rio and Sao Paulo, to Kingston and Marrakech, and from Detroit to Newark and LA, and back to Southeast DC. These "hero's tales" have identical shapes and themes: they are about actions designed to create and sustain a reputation as "self-created full men" in societies which only want "societally adjusted" and "psychologically (if not sexually) neutered" or "truncated men of color," men whose humanity is cut off and stops "just above the waist," and who are denied access to the things that could lead to normal societal respect and descent reputations. And thus these stories differ only in their inessential details -- whether they are told in the U.S., South Africa, Brazil, Portugal, Morocco or Kingston. They are all based on, and driven by the same Rosetta stone: the "psychology of the missing hyper-masculine non-white male model."

But it is clear enough for anyone willing to see it, that the psychology that is really at work here is indeed a kind of "false consciousness," rooted in the "imagined and urgently needed heroics" of the hyper-masculine black male image. Although only an image, The "Super-fly" Hustler is as real in its impact on the "code of the streets," and in its consequences on urban black life, and on black values more generally, as the "false psychology of the Western Cowboy" is real to mainstream white American boys and its corresponding impact on mainstream American values. It is just that the rough and stumble cowboy image on the one hand, is made to seem that it has redeeming positive qualities, while that of the hyper-masculine "Super-fly" non-white male, on the other hand, most assuredly is made to seem that it does not.

This symbol of the Hustler is the cultural answer to the deficiency, the gapping hole that lies at the center of the black male psyche. The "urban street Hustler" is the "Field General" on the urban battlefield. His image, that of the "hyper-masculine black male hero," is the psychological gestalt, standing in counter-position to that of the meek "societally adjusted neutered black male," which in any case is a wholly unattractive, unappealing and unacceptable hero to any young male of color struggling to become a "full," rather than a "truncated," or "psychologically neutered," man. James Baldwin has written about this phenomenon at length.

It is the image of the "Hustler" that is magnified beyond reason and that becomes a larger-than-life condensation symbol, one that serves to compress and then tries to integrate into the larger culture, all of the missing psychological elements of pride, ego, stifled sexual prowess and diminished societal status. Not accidentally, these just happen to be all of the same elements that a racist society works so relentlessly to deny and remove, both from the reality, and from even the image of the "the young criminal to be," black male buck. The crucible in which the "hustler's" image and psychology is created, incubated and nurtured is thus American racist society confined by racial segregation to the urban sub culture. It is a day-to-day grind, "being always on the struggle," the drama of tension against racism, poverty, over-crowdedness, alienation, harried and weak parental authority, and always weak disproportionately single mother-run families.

The cruelest of societal paradoxes is that black youths like Mr. Williams, when they engage in internecine struggles of violence, as they search vainly for the missing parts to their male psyches, are in actuality not so quietly engaged in a larger psychological conspiracy with the very racists who are bent on denying them their manhood: The more they kill each other, the more they lose their own self-respect and the respect they so desperately seek as individuals and as a group. And the more they fill up the morgues and the jails, the more they prove to their real enemies, the racists, that they are the wild animals who are un-deserving of the withheld parts of their missing psyches.

The urban battlefield is thus a vicious psychological circle without any redeeming qualities.

In the process of "becoming," that is, in the process of fashioning a life of which one can be proud and thus can become an assertive force and "agency" in defense of their own survival, young men of color have no choice but to elect to "become" through the false reality of their self-made heroes fashioned from their own self made sub cultural materials. Men of color cannot become, or even see themselves as "whole people" in the constricted leftover psychological space provided by racist white society. And as is typical of "missing" and "needy" psychological elements, both the individual and the collective ego, refashions the new hero into an exaggerated larger-than-life caricature of these urgent and vital needs. And from this we get the grotesque inversions of values,... Read more ›

5.0 out of 5 stars I brought this book for me and my son and his friends read it and loved it!!!, June 1, 2010

By 

Author Kim Gladden "Author KG" (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reputations Fade Away (Paperback)

I read the book first and thought this was something that I'd like to share with my sixteen year old son. Mr. Williams engages and overcomes so many obstacles that I had to share this with the youth of today. My son, who is not really a reader, took this book and got so engrossed in it's pages. He enjoyed all that it had to offer. I later saw his best friend with it in his bag, so I know that the message is being well recieved and appreciated. Having grown up in DC, I relate with the story and all that it communicates. Thanks for curtailing events of your journey so that they may be used as a blueprint of guidance for the young men of today. Growing up in urban america is hard work but we have a lot of success stories that evolve from our communities. Just know that your struggles and sacrifices weren't in vain and you have made a difference in the thinking and desicion-making of someone's child.(I have since then purchased another copy for my son. I wanted the boys to have their own copies for reference.)

Thank you for this wonderful contribution to the literary world,

Author Kim Gladden
author of "Caught All Up In It"

5.0 out of 5 stars A Ubiqitous Story of Street Life the Fades Into a Powerful Message, August 13, 2009

By 

S. Haskins "PoetryDiva" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reputations Fade Away (Paperback)

Dawayne's memoir may not be unique to the public eye, but his story is special in the way it was written. Most stories about street-life is so jammed pack with vulgarities that a reader can lose the sense of the message that the author is trying to convey...that's not the case with Dawayne who tells just enough for readers to get the point, paint the picture in their minds and move on to the next page. Dawayne's memoir is honest and he puts your attention into the minds of how young black males think and why they think and feel the way that they do, including his own mind-set as he tried to press on to maturity and escape the streets. He discusses the common issues that face many black families in urban American today, particularly the single mothers who are often stuck to raise their children without a father and the detrimental effects that it can have on children. Dawayne was a product of that "single mom" generation that tried to raise a boy and make him a man. Yet, Dawayne is a man determined to break the cycle of fatherless children by trying to set an example for black men to be better fathers and to break the cycle of self-hate, resentment, and jealousy. Dawayne realizes that what matters most in life does not come with a price-tag, and is not sold in a dime bag. But he realizes what matters is gaining an understanding of self, forgiveness, having a personal relationship with God, your children, family and friends. Since death almost took him twice and he was blessed to have escaped, he is now avoiding a third strike by establishing a "reputation" that really matters with his family and his community, and he's hoping that this type of rep won't fade away.