A Reason to Believe (5 page)

It appeared that the work in his class had no connection whatsoever to life outside that classroom, save for the ability to translate the inscriptions on the crests of other elite schools. Strange indeed. But the cadences were similar to those in the King James Bible, which was standard reading at home. Studying Shakespeare for the first time was a similar experience: exotic and inscrutable at first until I stumbled across swear words that I thought my grandmother had invented. When I heard her call someone a “son of a mongrel bitch,” it seemed like such an original putdown until I read it in Shakespeare. At least Gram was profane in a learned way.

Beyond the classroom lay a class-conscious minefield. I tried to befriend other students, but their worldliness, their aura of entitlement, reinforced my own insecurities. One boy commuted from home in an antique Rolls-Royce. Another took ski vacations to Switzerland. Some bore the same surnames as the buildings. Many had traveled or lived
on multiple continents. They all seemed to know the code of dress, language, and manners.

The very confidence I lacked seemed to come naturally to everyone else. It was at Milton that I first observed how self-assured the rich so often appear about everything and everyone else, as if wealth were a substitute for experience. I cannot count the number of times I sat at the dinner table of a classmate and listened respectfully to a parent’s dissertation on the causes of black poverty or family breakdown, only to be asked by that parent if he or she could touch my hair, wondering what it felt like.

Race, of course, was its own complex dynamic. Back home, we would make fun of the way white people spoke, with their distinctive nasal sounds and their use of such words as
guy
and
pal
, terms we would never use. Now I was outnumbered. I was the one who spoke funny, and I was often on the defensive.

Some of the slights were relatively harmless. I was called “nigger” once by an English teacher who thought he was just being familiar. The larger problem was how Milton actually interpreted racial integration: More often than not, it was a one-way street. I was expected to absorb and display the ways and habits of this monochromatic culture, to adapt until I fit in, but I was not expected to contribute to that culture, to enrich it by sharing my own experience. I was welcome in that new world, it seemed, so long as I did not bring too much of my old world along.

It was impossible to explain any of this to my family
back home. In early, infrequent phone calls, after the initial excitement of hearing my mother’s voice, I would lapse into an awkward silence. “How are you?” was followed by an obligatory “Fine” and little more. As a parent, I have come to know how natural that is. But at the time it seemed I had a lot to say without the vocabulary to express it.

When I returned to the South Side for my first Christmas break, I began to realize how difficult it would be to balance my two worlds. As I was greeted by my family in our front hall, Rhonda looked me over and deadpanned, “He talks like a white boy.” Gram shot her a look and replied, “He speaks like an educated boy.”

My mother and grandparents had had no real idea what they were sending me off to, beyond a vague notion that it was a better opportunity in safer surroundings. Their eyes glazed over when I tried to tell them details about my experiences back East. My friends were variously indifferent and resentful. “What’s an ambassador?” one of them asked with a sneer, as I tried to describe the foreign service family of an eighth-grader at Milton. I had to confess that I didn’t really know. The truth is, I could no more explain Milton to my family and friends on the South Side than I could explain the South Side to my peers at Milton. Understanding the difference required more effort than either side wanted to give.

My father hated the very idea of prep school. Milton was only a few hours’ train ride from New York, so I saw more of him when I was there. But during those visits he
would make clear his disapproval of my attending Milton. He thought the school would “make me white.” He himself was widely read in the Black Power literature of the late 1960s and feared that I would forget that ours was a heritage of struggle and pain for which whites were to blame. He was concerned that I would lose a sense of who I was. In his view, my identity as a young black man was defined by white oppression. America was profoundly and irredeemably racist, he would say, so pain was inevitable. He worried that I would let my guard down at Milton and open myself to hurt.

He had reason to believe I was naive about race. He knew how hard Gram and Poppy tried to shield us from racism and how my mother had urged us to take people as they come. She had been moved by Martin Luther King Jr. and his message of love and reconciliation. So my father could hardly have been faulted for his wariness. He had seen the way popular black musicians could not patronize the clubs where they performed. He knew the indignities of the road trip. He believed every white record producer exploited the talents of black artists. But I was just a kid hoping to experience the best of the great, wide world without limits, and I was determined to figure out the ways of the world on my own terms.

These were the tensions in my life. My father wanted me to reject the school, and all that it represented, that my mother so desperately and indiscriminately wanted me to embrace, and the school where I wanted to excel didn’t
seem to have a comfortable place for me. I continued on this wobbly ground, straddling these two worlds, trying not to let the one know much about the other. I was conflicted, worried, and confused. Not every kid survived this dissonance. Once again, I was saved by the love of adults.

My freshman English teacher, Albert Oliver Smith, was extraordinary. The other teachers called him “A.O.” or “Toby.” Students, current and former, simply called him “Mr. Smith.” He was right out of central casting: wizened and bent, with a crew cut that seemed last in fashion in the 1940s and was especially out of place amid the wayward manes of the 1970s. He wore a musty, ill-fitting tweed jacket that smelled of the lit cigarette that was often wedged in the corner of his mouth when he was not in class. With his white Oxford button-down shirt, the collar almost always frayed, he wore plaid knit ties or ones with tiny school seals. With his family’s roots dating back to the beginnings of the Bay State in the late seventeenth century, he bore the look of old money. He also had the right résumé. He had attended St. Paul’s School and Harvard College, served—for reasons I never understood—in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and then, in a telling flash of independence, married Aubrey, a spicy and voluptuous Texan who spoke and taught Spanish.

With only fourteen of us in his class, we could not escape Mr. Smith’s demands. (Neither could his pet, which lounged under the table, an old black standard poodle that had evidently never been washed.) If he thought you were
dithering in response to his question, he would make the sign of two horns with his pointing and pinkie fingers, indicating “bullshit.” He only needed to say the word once or twice at the beginning of the semester. After that, the gesture was enough. His other tactic was to make you stand, face the class, and recite, “I am ignorant, Mr. Smith.” He believed that no one learned until they acknowledged what they
didn’t
know.

I struggled in the class, yet it was magic. Mr. Smith spoke musically, with total command of the language. He remains the most fluent English speaker I have ever heard. He insisted that one’s writing and speech be energetic and precise. Find just the right word. Shun pretense and ambiguity. Simple sentences are best, and when you finish writing them, read them aloud—which we did when we read Shakespeare, then other plays or prose. He taught us that written language, at its best, has a rhythm and timbre that is every bit as powerful as the musical riffs that my father played. Perhaps not surprisingly, this old Yankee also loved jazz.

Over a long weekend, when the other boys were off to their family retreats and overseas junkets, Mr. Smith invited me to go with him and his family to Cape Cod. The land on Pleasant Bay in South Orleans had been “in the family” (another new expression for me) for generations, and the Smiths had built a weekend home near the water a few years earlier. When I asked the housemaster for permission to go, he raised his eyebrows in surprise and
told me this was an “important invitation.” Mr. Smith was revered among the faculty. I should appreciate the honor and significance of being asked.

Of course, this did nothing to help me relax. When Mr. Smith picked me up at the dorm in his battered green Ford station wagon, with his slightly younger children in the backseat, I was a bundle of nerves. Katherine and Peter were just as awkward at first, but we loosened up with games on the drive down. The Smiths had a tradition of competing to be the first to glimpse the Sagamore Bridge when coming around the last bend south on Route 3. The winner got to decide whether to stop for ice cream. Mr. Smith usually won, so the stops were rare.

At the very end of a long, narrow road, which offered glimpses of the bay as we got closer, we arrived at their driveway, which wound down a hill to their simple, lovely home. It was dusk on a cool, cloudless evening, and the glow was warm through the big glass doors leading into the huge central room with a cathedral ceiling and massive brick fireplace. Aubrey had gone down ahead to open up the house and start dinner. The smell of the wood fire and marinated chicken charring on the grill mixed with the sea breeze coming off the bay. There was red Bordeaux, of which A.O. was a connoisseur. He showed me how to hold the glass, judge the “legs” as a measure of the tannin, open the wine up with air, smell for different fruits and elements, and taste it on different parts of the tongue. Who knew? I was all of fourteen, and my sole experience with
wine had been Mogen David at Christmas dinner. We were studying the
Odyssey
in class, so when I mentioned a “libation” to honor the occasion, A.O. beamed with a teacher’s delight. Their welcome was so warm and natural, and their interest in both finding out who I was and telling me who they were was so genuine, that I still think of them and that weekend as a model of hospitality. A.O. and Aubrey were urbane and conversational with me in a way that no adult had ever really been before. I was supposed to respond and engage, not just say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir.” But all I really wanted to do was listen.

That first weekend, we were all turning in on Friday night, and A.O. was saying good night to his own children while Aubrey was making sure my bed was comfortable and the towels were fresh. He said “Good night” to Katherine and Peter, adding whatever pet name he conjured for the moment, then told them, “I love you.” He then said the very same words to me. He was matter-of-fact, natural, authentic, neither more nor less than he had been with his own children seconds before. It was the first time any man had ever told me he loved me. I had never heard this from Poppy or my own father. For that matter, I had rarely heard it from Gram or my mother. They felt it and expressed it in various ways, to be sure, but saying so out loud and offhandedly was a new experience. I let it wash over me. I did not know what to say in response, but I think my desire to emulate A.O.—his emotional candor, his generosity of spirit—started then and there.

A. O. Smith deeply influenced many students over the years, forming bonds and lighting intellectual fires. In my case, I think he recognized that I needed someone to help me navigate my new world and that I was eager to learn everything about it. That I respected authority and tradition in an era of rebellion and defiance surely strengthened our friendship (which lasted until the end of his life, fifteen years later). My difficulties at Milton didn’t end after that weekend, but I no longer felt like an outsider.

If A. O. Smith became my surrogate father, then June Elam was my surrogate mother. In the early 1970s, June was an upper-middle-class black resident of Milton, a rarity. All three of her children were students at the school. I now joke that I started out dating her elder daughter and ended up in love with her mother, but that’s not much of an exaggeration. Tall, with sharp features and a small, intimate voice, June is the most giving individual I have ever known. The first time I met her, late in my sophomore year, in 1972, she asked for my mother’s telephone number. She promptly called and told my mother to take comfort in knowing that another black family lived only a mile from Deval’s dormitory and he would always be welcome in their home. My mother said that call was the answer to her prayers.

June was that for me, as well, in ways large and small. I had trouble finding a barber nearby, so she drove me to Roxbury, a largely black neighborhood in Boston. I delivered newspapers on and near the campus, and during one
brutal snowstorm she drove me to all my customers. I did what I could to reciprocate. Using oversized poster boards, I created a Mother’s Day card for her with a sentimental inscription. Once I saved enough money to hire a limousine to take us to a famous seafood restaurant in Cohasset. She made a point of amicably protesting these actions, but I took great pride in showing my gratitude.

June seemed undeterred by the same racial contradictions that initially bedeviled me at Milton. She was married to a politically connected lawyer from a prominent Roxbury family and lived in a sprawling ranch house on a landscaped acre. In Milton, she attended parents’ meetings, teas, and dinner parties; in Roxbury, she participated in church and community gatherings. Her personality seemed to transcend place. She was exactly the same giving, open soul wherever she happened to be.

She seemed to treat race as other people’s problem. If I walked through town to her home, I would almost invariably be stopped by the police and asked for identification. It was humiliating to have to explain that I was just walking to a friend’s house or to the convenience store and was not the thief they presumed I was, casing the neighborhood. It helped a little when the school issued identification cards. Once a cruiser pulled up behind another student and me when we were strolling on Randolph Avenue and put on his blue lights. A young, gruff officer with sunglasses swaggered over to us, asking what business we had in the neighborhood. “We’re just
walking up to the Curtiss Compact,” I said. When he asked for identification, I took unnatural pride in displaying my card, showing I was in fact a resident. After many months of this ritual, however, my pride turned into resentment at having to show identification at all. June seemed to take it all in stride. “That’s their problem,” she’d say. “You know who you are, don’t you?”