A Reason to Believe (4 page)

Indeed, the tumult that had swept through the neighborhood had taken root in my school. Nearly forty kids filled every class, and the teacher’s job was primarily to maintain order. Police hovered at every intersection in the hallways, and bicycle chains secured the outside doors. To go from one building to the other during class, you had to slip a pass under the door so the officer on duty could slide the chains off. Many of the glass windows had been shattered by the riots and replaced by Plexiglas or plywood.

Going to DuSable involved a longer walk from home, and the gangs made those walks treacherous. I was routinely “jumped,” my lunch money or school supplies stolen, mostly because I was a “good” kid. I was also at risk for not being black enough, a mark of authenticity conferred on those with the darkest skin. Color consciousness among black people is an ancient issue, but after Dr. King’s death, the militancy in some black circles only intensified the intolerance toward African Americans who were comparatively fair. I was meek, bookish, bashful, and, in some people’s view, “high yellow”—thus an easy mark. It only added to the uncomfortable self-consciousness that I carried around anyway. I just wanted to be in step and left alone. Surely there was some place where skin color was not the center of everything.

Though getting to DuSable and home again was hazardous, the school, like Terrell before it, was a refuge. There, in the seventh grade, I met another teacher who would radically broaden my vision of what was possible. Darla Weissenberg was a twenty-two-year-old idealist who was committed to improving the world and making sure those of us on the South Side had a place in it. She was also my first white teacher. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had attended schools with black children in Rockford, Illinois, and had been deeply influenced by a sixth-grade African-American teacher who had told her students about the indignities of growing up in segregated Baltimore. So when Mrs. Weissenberg received her teaching
certificate and was initially assigned to a white high school, she requested the inner city and landed at DuSable.

She was in only her second year of teaching when I had her for Language Arts and Social Studies. The students were discovering how easily they could intimidate whites, and they badgered her on a regular basis. In the confines of so much free-floating hate, she was very brave to come to DuSable every day with such compassion and commitment.

Hers was my favorite class, and I opened up to her in my writing assignments. In an essay grandly titled “The Story of My Life,” in which we were asked to describe our short lives to date and also our future, I recounted my rather harrowing birth and boasted of my academic and extracurricular achievements. I then envisioned a future for myself that was far removed from DuSable and the South Side. “Thinking about my life, from being born in the morning, to almost death, to outstanding student, I think about my life 10 years from now. I should be out of UCLA and in to real estate with a home and a family. I thank God that He has thought enough of me to take me this far.” I had a clear notion of what middle-class direction I wanted to take—though Lord knows where the UCLA came from!

My aspirations and interests caught the attention of Mrs. Weissenberg. Middle-class ambitions were not what she had come to expect from DuSable students. The following year, she noticed—either on a bulletin board or in a teacher’s journal—a message about a foundation called A
Better Chance. Its mission was to identify kids from non-traditional prep school backgrounds, as the euphemism of the day went, for placement in Eastern prep schools. She thought about me and asked to meet my mother.

I was by then in eighth grade, the last year of junior high, which meant there were choices to be made about high school. In those days, students had three: I could go to a vocational school, a technical school, or the high school in my district. None of these options was very good.

Vocational school was the least appealing because, at that time, it did not have a college track. Though no one in my family had gone beyond the eleventh grade, I was determined to go to college, and I was blessed beyond measure to live in a household where no one discouraged that notion. So, while vocational schools taught things I now wish I knew—like auto mechanics and tailoring—that option was not for me.

The technical school made more sense because it taught mechanical drawing, and at the time I wanted to be an architect. My drum teacher, a family friend, was both a timpanist with the Chicago Symphony and an architect, the first black professional I can remember who was not a teacher. He had given me a three-edged ruler so I could draw room layouts and buildings to scale, and I spent hours with the Sunday newspaper real estate section evaluating designs and creating my own. The city had only two technical schools, with the far better one on the North Side. Though I was graduating first in my class at DuSable,
our guidance counselor could not persuade the North Side school to take a South Side student. The North Side was for white, middle-class people. The South Side was for us.

That left DuSable High, which would mean returning to the very environment I was trying to leave. Knowing what I faced, my mother and I met with Mrs. Weissenberg about A Better Chance. We applied, and I was accepted, sight unseen, by Milton Academy in Massachusetts. I was apprehensive, of course. My mother was wary but fatalistic. “You can always come home,” she said.

I am hardly the only product of Chicago’s South Side to have gone on to better things or the only kid from a hardscrabble background to have had a measure of success. That “rags to riches” story is distinctly American, and though it is not told often enough, it is still told more often in this country than anywhere else on earth. In my own case, I knew that my circumstances, however difficult, need not be permanent; I could shape my own destiny. That was the true gift of my childhood. The
power
of that gift is that I was surrounded by adults who had every reason to curb my dreams. My grandparents had grown up with Jim Crow. My mother knew all too well the humiliation of poverty and betrayal. Mrs. Threet, Mrs. Quaintance, and Mrs. Weissenberg knew the constraints of Chicago’s public schools. Yet in different ways, they all taught me to reject the cycle of despair that had trapped so many others and
to pursue opportunities that I could barely imagine. It was as if they had been schooled in that famous admonition of the late great president of Morehouse College, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who said, “Not failure, but low aim, is sin.”

Gram tended to roses in a little garden right behind our tenement. Early in the morning, when the weather was warm, she would go into our backyard, pick up the trash that had blown in, brush away any broken glass, and work that soil. Believe me, that soil had things in it that God would never put in dirt.

But she brought forth her roses. With one cutting she had brought north from my great-grandfather’s house in Kentucky, she grew a climber that reached nearly all the way up the side of our two-story building. It was magnificent. And it was improbable. In that place, in that soil, it defied all reason and expectation. Still, Gram believed.

The adults in my early life, in the teeth of their struggles and setbacks, believed in me as well. Just as Texaco needed a vision many years later, I needed one as a child, and they provided it. I did not know then which path to take or even what I was looking for. To this day I’m still not sure if we were poor or broke. But I learned to think big and to brew in my own imagination a vision of a better life. I just had to go out and pursue it.

Milton Academy was not just a different place. It was a different planet. I was suddenly around people who had second and third homes and household staffs, who traveled frequently to remote countries, and who poured tea with gloved hands. The language was foreign:
summer
was used as a verb. My family’s middle-class aspirations had certainly not prepared me for Milton. It seemed we just skipped that passage. These people were
rich
.

I thought I had been sent to Milton by mistake, as if some clerical error had dispatched me accidentally to an enchanted land, and I lived in dread that someone would discover the lapse. What I didn’t appreciate at first was
that all the boys were trying to find their own path. In my case, I had to learn to bridge two starkly different worlds. Each had a claim on me and insisted that, to be authentic, I had to choose one over the other. I learned, like everyone, that life is full of choices, but I came to suspect that most of them were false. Authenticity is a matter of values. Know those and be true to them, and you can comfortably navigate the uneven terrain of life.

I arrived in Boston on a sun-kissed September afternoon in 1970, one of those soft, still New England days when the autumn colors are just beginning to appear. A blue van, with an orange M on its side, collected me and a few other kids from Logan Airport and drove us through the city toward our new home. I said nothing as I stared out the window. From the elevated central artery, the Boston on view did not seem like much of a city. The downtown was a few stolid gray buildings of modest height compared to those in Chicago. As we passed the sign that said
ENTERING MILTON
, all pretensions of a city were abandoned. On the hill across a salt marsh where small wooden boats floated listlessly stood large homes on large lawns with large spaces between them.

Suddenly our driver shouted, “Here we are!” On the right, he pointed to the boys’ school; on the left, the girls’ school. As we passed the library, we came upon the main green at the center of the campus. I had never seen so much private lawn in my life. The whole place breathed of tradition and privilege. Surrounding the perfectly manicured
grass were stately brick buildings with clean white trim, Doric and Ionic columns, and ivy creepers. The huge elm and maple trees, which seemed to have been there since Creation, added a sense of entrenchment and stability. The structures themselves—Forbes House, Wigglesworth Hall, Straus Library—taught me an early lesson: The graduates never really die; they just turn into buildings.

At the far end of the lawn, on its own grassy knoll, was Hallowell House, my new residence. Though it had a Georgian Colonial exterior like the rest of the campus, it was Milton’s newest dormitory, built in the 1960s, and lacked the hoary charm of the older halls, with their dark wood paneling and window seats. It did have “alcoves” in common with the other boys’ dorms, the warren of spaces on the top floors where the eighth- and ninth-graders lived. Arriving shortly before dinner, I was starving. The other boys had left for the dining hall already, but I wasn’t sure what to do or say, and I didn’t want to walk in last. So I stayed in my quarters. It was just as well. I had time to explore.

My room itself was spartan. Instead of walls, fixed dividers that did not reach the ceiling separated uniform spaces. There was a curtain in place of a door. Each alcove had a single twin bed made of steel with a hard mattress; a plain but sturdy wooden bureau, desk, and chair; and a shallow, built-in closet with another curtain across the front. The floor was cold, bare, and institutional. I didn’t
have enough clothes to fill the bureau. The bathroom with its common shower was down the hall.

I had a single window, just like at home. But instead of an air shaft and the view of our neighbor’s window a few feet away, this window opened onto that same lush park in the center of the campus. I could see nearly a half mile of green, gold, and red. I couldn’t believe I had my own bed and no longer had to sleep on the floor every third night. Most of the kids complained about their room, as they were used to more lavish accommodations. I thought it was sublime.

On that first day of class the next morning, I just wanted to fit in, but it wasn’t easy. The dress code required that boys wear jackets and ties to class. When the clothing list had arrived at home the summer before, my grandparents splurged on a new jacket for me. But a jacket in our world was a Windbreaker, so when the other boys at Milton were donning their blue blazers and tweed coats, I emerged in my dark blue Windbreaker, off the rack from Sears.

Clearly, I had a lot to learn, starting with the actual learning. I was used to being the prized pupil, but now I was intellectually adrift. In my freshman English class, it seemed that the other boys had already read many of the classics and could cross-reference other texts that I had barely even heard of. I was intimidated and embarrassed. I also read more slowly and was constantly
behind. I received my first C, on a short writing assignment, and was demoralized.

I was even more astray in my foreign language class. When I was told that it was Latin, I smiled and thought, “You have
got
to be kidding.” Our teacher, a kindly man with thin white hair, translucent skin, and a dry voice that made you want to take a drink of water, was widely presumed by his students to have been around when Latin was still spoken. He used Latin phrases when he gave us direction, such as
magna cum celeritate
for “hurry up.”