THE JOURNEY

THE BEGINNING

Some words become so familiar that people stop feeling the time behind them. Slavery ended in 1865, Reconstruction ended in 1877. My mother was born in 1937 and I was born in 1957 — only eighty years later — during jim crow.

The Civil Rights Act would not become law until 1964, when I was six. The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965, when I was seven. Those were not distant chapters in a textbook. They were part of the America into which I was born.

I did not create that world. I inherited it.

And from where I stood, America did not appear to have prepared much of a place for a poor Black boy to rise.

The threats to a future could seem everywhere — the streets, drugs, alcohol, prison, hostile policing, war, institutional racism, or simply the weight of trying to survive long enough to become something more.

One of my favorite poems as a child was Langston Hughes’s I, Too. There was something about that poem that resonated then and has ever since. As a young child growing up in a complex “matrix” of a world, I never truly understood why that poem mattered so much to me.

Now, as I sit and reflect—closer to the end than the beginning — the truth has settled deep in my bones: I wasn’t put here just to leave behind generational wealth, though Allah knows I tried.

I chased every opportunity, measured my worth in dollars and cents, and treated my ability to provide like armor. Growing up, the term “generational” anything was not part of my lexicon. That concept didn’t exist in our world. Still, when I began to hear talk about generational wealth, I wanted that too. Like any man who loves his family, I dreamed of leaving something behind—something they could build on and expand.

What no one ever explained was the foundation—the part that comes before the wealth. Before you can build anything lasting, you need solid ground to stand on. That means breaking the cycle of poverty to stop the sinking.

The truth is there’s a brutal, invisible labor just to reach that solid ground. Poverty wasn’t just something I experienced — it was the very terrain I entered life in. I was not standing on firm soil; I was dropped into quicksand.

It pulled at my ankles the moment I stood up. It gripped your every step, always threatening to drag you under. There were no boots, no ladder, no blueprint—just instinct, struggle, and sheer will. I had to fight just to stand, let alone climb.

What I’ve come to understand—with the clarity that only time and hindsight bring—is that my true mission in life wasn’t to hand over monetary riches.

One deep enough and dry enough to keep my children and grandchildren from sinking into the same quicksand I was born into. I bore that weight so they wouldn’t have to. I laid brick after brick—through hard work, sacrifice, pain, and persistence— so those who came after me would have something firm beneath their feet.

THE MAN

The man behind q2K did not appear fully formed.

He was assembled over time — by responsibility, observation, mistakes, victories, disappointment, family, work, faith, love and repetition.

A Fatherless Boy Learning Manhood

I was a fatherless boy trying to be a man in a household where there was no man to show me how.

Then I became a young man navigating adulthood without ever having been taught what manhood was supposed to look like.

Later, I became a father without having had a father show me what fatherhood looked like.

I sometimes describe myself as a mutt of a father. I do not mean that as an insult to myself.

I mean that I pieced fatherhood together from what I saw, what I admired, what I wished I had received, and what I wanted my own children to have.

I made mistakes. I learned while I was doing it. I was not always present in every way I now wish I had been.

I am not asking for sympathy or recognition.

I am asking only that my story be understood in the context in which I lived it.

What I understand now is that fathers can nurture too. Vulnerability has depth. Love has to be felt, but it also has to be expressed.

I love my daughters independently and collectively — each one for who she is, and all of them equally for what they mean to me.

The Observer

Long before I had a name for the way I think, I was watching people.

I remember going into bookstores with friends. They would head toward MAD Magazine or Ring Magazine.

I would find myself in the psychology section.

I wanted to know why one person responded one way while someone standing beside him responded differently.

That curiosity eventually became part of the way I approached everything: people, systems, history, technology and myself.

The Two-Move Method

That way of thinking eventually became what I call the Two-Move Method.

Most people naturally think about the next move.

I learned to ask:

The move after the move. The consequence after the decision. The opportunity beyond the obvious opportunity.

It became the way I approached problems, people, work and life.

Principle Before Comfort

One of my earliest tests in corporate America came when I was eighteen or nineteen, only months into my first corporate job and still trying to understand whether I belonged there at all.

One day, four of us — all young Black men — were standing around talking when the Managing Partner came into the area.

He told us to go into the men’s room and clean up the Newports from the bathroom stalls.

The others went.

I went back to the print shop.

From what I later understood, this was something he had asked others to do before. That may explain why they reacted differently than I did. Looking back, I can also understand that he may simply have thought that if we had time to stand around talking, we had time to do something else.

But I was young, newly trained as a Photo Offset Lithographer, and I saw the situation differently.

I had come there to run the press.

I understood who had given the instruction and what refusing him could mean. I had no college degree, very little time with the firm and almost no standing inside that corporate world.

I packed my belongings into my press apron because I expected to be fired.

Then I was called to his office.

When he asked why I had not done what he told me to do, I answered him plainly:

His response surprised me.

I was not fired.

In fact, something changed after that. I began receiving opportunities to show what I could do and to demonstrate that my value was not limited to simply doing what had always been done.

What could have ended my career became one of the first real challenges on the road I had chosen.

The choice had already been made. That choice had placed me on this road.

Now the question was how I would carry myself while traveling it.

I stood my ground.

From Survival to Responsibility

I kept moving.

I became a husband. A father. A professional. I built a career and tried to build a more stable life for my family.

I tried to give my children more than I had. I tried to protect them from some of the fires I had already crossed.

I did not always get everything right.

But almost everything I did, I did with purpose.

I was trying to build something stronger than what had been handed to me.

Through all of it, faith remained part of the road.

I cannot separate what I survived from my belief that Allah carried me when I did not always know how I would carry myself.

Success Was Not the Finish Line

By the time I was around fifty, I had reached my first six-figure salary.

On paper, I had already traveled an enormous distance from the poverty I had spent my life trying to escape.

If money or title had really been the finish line, I could have stopped running then.

But around that same period, my mother passed.

Instead of feeling less responsible for my younger siblings — all of us grown by then — I somehow felt more responsible.

So I ran harder.

I did not understand why at the time.

Freedom at 66

The realization did not come until I was sixty-six.

Something happened that made me stop carrying the family role in the same way I had carried it since childhood.

And once I stopped carrying it, I also stopped running.

For the first time, I turned around and looked at the road behind me.

I had been so busy running that I had never stopped to measure how far I had already come.

That was when the eight-year-old “man of the house” finally became something I could put down.

That was freedom.

That realization became the heart of a song I wrote as a testimony to my siblings: I Gave It My Best.

It was not a declaration that I had done everything right.

It was a statement of peace.

The Man Was More Than the Struggle

My story is not only burden, poverty and scars.

I survived, but I also lived.

I developed my own rhythm, my own way of moving through the world, my own humor, creativity, confidence and style.

The struggle shaped me, but it did not get to own everything about me.

FROM qUICKSAND 2 KING (q2K)

qUICKSAND 2 KING is not a slogan I invented for a website.

It is the shortest way I know to describe the Journey.

q — The Struggle

The conditions I inherited. The poverty. The weight. The expectations placed upon me.

2 — The Transition. The Bridge.

The roads. The forks. The choices. The obstacles encountered after those choices. The lessons carried forward as one road led to another.

K — The Rise

Not wealth. Not status. Not royalty.

The rise toward becoming the man Allah intended me to become.

The throne is not power over people.

I did not follow a blueprint.

In many ways, I wrote it as I went.

And somewhere along that long dusty road, I became the man they said I never would.

THE PORTFOLIO

My professional life began when I entered Touche Ross in August 1976.

But my work life had begun long before that.

I had been working since I was eight or nine years old — first selling penny candy at Frank’s corner store, and later at Philadelphia General Hospital, PGH, where I worked from 1968 until 1974.

By the time I walked into corporate America at eighteen, work itself was nothing new to me.

What changed in 1976 was the world in which I worked.

I entered that world armed academically with a nine-month technical-school certificate in printing and a determination that I was never going back to the poverty I had come from.

I was there to produce financial statements.

But almost from the beginning, I started looking at the equipment differently.

I was interested not only in what the machines were being used to do.

I wanted to know what else they could do.

That distinction would shape much of my professional life.

The First Wave — Color

The presses in the Philadelphia office were being used for black-and-white production.

That was the job.

But I knew the presses were capable of more.

So I bought a can of blue ink.

Not because the company had asked me to experiment with color. Not because there was an initiative underway to expand the print operation.

I bought it because I wanted to prove that it could be done.

And it worked.

That first can of blue ink introduced the Philadelphia office to something new: color printing on equipment that had previously been treated as black-and-white only.

The Opportunities Were Not Waiting for Me

That became a pattern.

Many of the opportunities that shaped my professional life were not opportunities the company presented to me.

They were technologies, disciplines and possibilities I encountered outside the boundaries of the job I had been given.

I learned them.

I brought them inside.

I proved that they worked.

Then I demonstrated why they mattered.

Color led to graphics and customization.

Basic black-and-white financial-statement production began evolving into custom covers, designed proposals and materials that looked different from anything our shop had previously produced.

The print operation began becoming something more than a print operation.

Riding the Wave of Technology

Looking backward, I describe much of my professional life as riding the wave of technology.

Roughly every three or four years, another wave seemed to arrive.

Traditional printing gave way to new forms of xerography and high-volume reproduction.

Production began opening into graphic design.

Graphic design moved onto computers.

Desktop publishing changed how entire pages and publications could be created.

Presentations expanded into multimedia.

Computers opened the door to the web.

The web opened the door to corporate digital services.

And eventually those services carried me into intranet and enterprise information systems.

But the waves did not arrive with instructions telling me what my next job would be.

Usually, I encountered something and saw possibility.

Then the process began again.

I usually chose to learn it.

Often I used my own time, my own avenues and sometimes my own money to learn a technology before the company had decided it was worth investing in.

Then I had to prove it.

From Printing to Visual Communication

As the capabilities expanded, so did the work.

Color led naturally into graphics and customization.

Graphics pulled me deeper into design.

I began working with disciplines that had once existed outside the traditional boundaries of the print shop.

Instead of simply reproducing something someone else had created, I was increasingly involved in determining what the finished product should look like in the first place.

The work expanded into designed proposals, publications, presentations, graphics and other visual materials.

What had begun as a traditional production operation eventually evolved into something broader — a Visual Communication Center.

The name had changed because the work had changed.

And the work had changed because the technology had changed.

From the Pressroom to the Computer

Before computers, I learned production the physical way.

I set type by hand from a California job case. I worked with platen presses. I shot negatives in darkrooms. I stripped film. I worked with process cameras. I made plates. I ran offset presses.

I learned what happened before a finished page appeared.

That mattered later.

When desktop publishing arrived, the computer did not erase what I already knew.

It gave me another way to do it.

The tools moved onto the screen, but the principles behind the work remained familiar.

I sometimes call myself a dinosaur entering the technology age.

But being a dinosaur had an advantage.

Because I understood the process before computers automated it, I often understood what the computer was actually doing.

Desktop publishing became another wave.

Then graphics software.

Then presentation technology.

Then multimedia.

I kept moving with them.

The Web — Another Wave

Eventually the web appeared.

Once again, it was not something my original job description had prepared me for.

But by then I understood the pattern.

A new technology had arrived.

The question was the same one I had faced before:

I learned the tools.

I began building for the web.

What started as another technology I had taught myself became something useful to the office.

Local work became broader responsibility.

What I learned and proved in Philadelphia eventually expanded into regional responsibility and then into national intranet work.

The young man who had entered the company to put black ink on white paper had traveled a long way from the press.

The Method Behind the Work

Long before I understood it as a “method,” the pressroom had already taught me principles I would carry into every later technology.

Precision. Registration. Consistency. Repeatability.

And perhaps most importantly, protecting a setup that worked.

In the pressroom, if everything was properly registered and the press was running correctly, you did not start moving things around simply because you could.

You protected the baseline.

Years later, the same thinking appeared in my technology work.

From Local Proof to National Responsibility

At one point, a Managing Partner called me and said:

That sentence represented years of movement.

Something I had first encountered on my own. Something I had learned. Something I had brought into the office. Something I had proved locally. Something I had turned into a useful service.

Now it was being asked for on a larger scale.

The young man hired to operate a black-and-white press eventually became responsible for technology and services reaching far beyond the print shop where the journey had begun.

I spent more than thirty-two years in that corporate chapter.

When I left Deloitte, I believed I had retired.

I thought that part of my life was finished.

It wasn’t.

The same will, fire, responsibility and desire that had kept me moving for most of my life were still there.

So I went back to work.

I continued working afterward, including time in a corporate call center and at Fidelity Investments, for roughly another decade.

Eventually, I finally retired for good.

What the Portfolio Means

That is why my Portfolio cannot simply be a gallery of finished work.

Every design represents a stage. Every publication represents a stage. Every presentation. Every website. Every system. Every piece of artwork. Every project.

They show a man changing as the tools around him changed.

They show skills accumulating rather than disappearing.

The printer did not vanish when I became a designer.

The designer did not disappear when I became a technologist.

The technologist did not erase the writer or the storyteller.

Each layer became part of the next.

And today q2K brings those pieces together: the printer, the designer, the technologist, the writer, the storyteller, the historian, the husband, the father, the grandfather and the student.

The man who spent most of his life moving forward and only later learned how important it was to look backward.

From Survival to Legacy

Each step I took was never only for me.

I wanted to build enough solid ground that the people coming behind me would not have to begin in the same quicksand.

That is what legacy means to me.

The boy who once read I, Too grew into a man who learned to claim his own place at the table.

I am not asking anyone to believe I did everything right.

I am saying that I lived it with purpose.

I stumbled. I learned. I loved. I worked. I survived. I built.

I became a father without having been shown fatherhood. I crossed worlds that had not been designed with me in mind. I made mistakes, but I kept moving.

This page is not the whole story.

It was never meant to be.

It is enough, I hope, for you to understand something about the beginning, the man, the method, and the work that grew from them.