By Ben Joravsky
In 1961 he moved to New York City, where he worked his way up to a top marketing job at Revlon. He returned to Chicago in the 1970s and eventually found himself working under commissioner Leonora Cartwright in the city’s Department of Human Services. In the political reshuffling that followed Harold Washington’s 1983 election, Cartwright resigned and Pinkney was let go. He figured the time had come to stop the nine-to-five nonsense and go to sea.
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“I started sailing in Puerto Rico and I loved it from the start,” he says. “I think it’s the independence of it. In sailing you have absolute sovereignty. You have an opportunity to at least temporarily capture nature and bend it to your will. I say temporarily because nature changes. The sea’s calm and then it’s stormy. When you think you’ve mastered it, it masters you. You must be a quick study. You learn that if you put the sail up a certain way in a certain wind you’re going to get knocked down. So if you face that same wind, you have to do things differently unless you want to get knocked down again.”
“People ask what I did during all that time alone. It’s simple. I talked to myself. I listened to music. I read 150 books, everything from Shakespeare to Clancy. My trip was being charted by dozens of schoolchildren and I found a big batch of letters waiting for me at every port I stopped at. There must have been several hundred letters. They’re very moving. The kids got captured by my journey and they poured out their hearts.”
He’s most disappointed by the lack of support from wealthy black Chicagoans for his Middle Passage trip. “You would figure this voyage would be significant to them–an opportunity to symbolize the journey that brought us to this country, a way to honor our forefathers or to educate people about slavery. But there was no response. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the subject’s too painful. It’s certainly not because I didn’t try. I tried them all. I don’t mean to say that I get no black support. I get lots of support from working people. I’ll go on Cliff Kelley’s radio show and get people digging deep into their savings to give what they can. I’ve come to the conclusion that people who have less give a greater proportion of their money in donations than people who have more.”
He hopes to be out of debt by then. “I’ve never been deterred by a challenge–don’t tell me what you can’t do. People say ‘I can’t sail because I get seasick.’ But that’s no reason not to sail. Everyone gets seasick at times. I get seasick. But you don’t stay seasick forever. The temporary discomfort is outweighed by the long-term gain. I’ve learned that so much about success has to do with opportunity and attitudes. So many people have convinced themselves they can’t do something. It’s like dancing. Many people, particularly men, are taught to be ashamed of their bodies. They think they can’t do this or that with their hands because it would be effeminate. It’s very hard for them to get over that–they’re stiff, they’re afraid to move. Other people never get the opportunity, so they don’t realize what they’re missing. There’s no law that says black people can’t be great sailors. Why is Tiger Woods such a great golfer? Because his daddy took him to so many courses when he was a kid. Why are so many black kids good at basketball? Because there are basketball hoops in every city. In other words, the opportunity’s there, so people take it.
