A Reason to Believe (6 page)

At that moment, I’m not certain I did know exactly who I was or where I belonged, but I was feeling more comfortable with myself and the different worlds I was straddling.

June herself was working her way through an unhappy divorce. She was worried about the impact on her own kids, so we spent hours talking about what my parents’ separation was like for Rhonda and me. It helped her, but it also helped me recall and retire many feelings. Like A. O. and Aubrey Smith, June was conspicuous with her love. What I had been missing! I drank it in.

In my senior year, I was sitting in trigonometry class one morning when one of my classmates walked in with a hangdog look and sat down next to me as the teacher began his calculations at the board. Will Speers was a year behind me, and I didn’t know him well, but I saw he was hurting. Motioning with my hands, I asked what was wrong. Will picked up a tall Styrofoam cup left over from
midmorning coffee and wrote on it: “She doesn’t like me anymore.” I then took the cup and wrote something back. He responded with another message. The cup went back and forth, and by the time the class was over, the woes of Will’s entire love life had been etched across that Styrofoam.

Thus began a friendship that became a defining experience for me at Milton. We became, and are to this day, close friends, even though we’re from polar opposite worlds. Will could trace his roots to the earliest English settlers; grew up in affluent New Canaan, Connecticut; and would soon be the third generation of his family to attend Princeton. Despite our very different backgrounds, we both had open minds. We shared an interest in books (American and British). We were both enchanted and intimidated by pretty girls. We just connected.

That winter, we decided to take a Greyhound bus to his family’s one-room cabin on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. Will told his parents about our plan and got their permission.
Deval
is a gender-neutral name, so several days before we were to leave, Will’s parents called him and asked, “You
are
going with a guy, aren’t you?”

Left unsaid was that I was black. His parents are strong liberals, so Will did not expect a problem. It just never occurred to him to mention my race. But he was hypersensitive nonetheless. When the bus dropped us off in front of the bowling alley in the tiny, snow-covered hamlet of
Holderness, at the foothills of the White Mountains, “Uncle Erk” White, an old friend of Will’s family, was there to pick us up. “Hello, boy,” he greeted me warmly as I stepped off the bus. Will was mortified.

“He calls everybody ‘boy,’ ” Will told me nervously. “Don’t worry.”

I smiled and told him to relax. I was learning to shrug off slights, real or perceived, and in this case none was taken. I was just glad Uncle Erk could meet us on that frigid winter evening and take us to the cabin.

I was not quite eighteen, not old enough to buy alcohol legally, but I prevailed on an older student to purchase a six-pack of beer and a few bottles of wine for our trip. They were snug in our backpacks with our other supplies as we piled into Uncle Erk’s truck. With Will in the front seat next to Uncle Erk and me in the back, we bounced along rutted roads for miles, and the bottles in my backpack started to clink guiltily against each other.

“You gotta lotta glass back there,” Uncle Erk observed.

Will, in a panic, searched for an explanation. “Yeah,” he said. “We’re bringing a lot of mayonnaise on our trip.”

I did all I could to stifle my laughter.

My good humor ended when we reached the end of our ride. Uncle Erk let us out at the end of an unplowed road that led a mile or more down to the lakeside fishing cabin where we would stay. We faced at least two feet of snow. We strapped on snowshoes, hoisted our packs, and started to hike down by moonlight. It was unspeakably
cold and a little unnerving. What was a city kid from the South Side doing in the deep woods at night on snowshoes with a heavy backpack? But I got into the rhythm of the walk, and soon enough we arrived at the cabin, found the key, and settled in. We lit a roaring fire, which would blaze for most of our stay; in my sleeping bag I would snuggle up as close to it as possible on those frigid nights. The next morning, we used a pickax to cut a hole in the frozen lake for water to drink and cook with.

Squam Lake and its people meant a lot to Will, and still do. He had known the place all his life and felt a special bond that he wanted to share. During the day, we hiked around the woods and explored some of his favorite spots. We slogged up to Uncle Erk’s house and drank cocoa with him and his wife. The landscape was glorious. The experience of the snowshoes, cross-country skiing across the frozen cove, cooking steaks over a fireplace, reading silently by candlelight, not washing for days, being cold at night—it was all so new. I could not even pretend to be a woodsman. Will was clearly in charge.

We spent much of our time talking about girls and our failed or hoped-for romances, though we also talked about books, family, friends, and whatever dreams we had for the future. His father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministers, and there was a spirituality about Squam Lake that he had come to revere. Mostly I listened. I received a lot more than I gave that weekend. I was still not quite ready to describe my life before Milton, and I wasn’t sure
Will was ready to hear about it. We were two boys trying to figure out how to become men, and we had just enough “mayonnaise” to get us through.

Ultimately, the more time I spent at Milton—at tea parties after football games, at alumni council gatherings—the more comfortable I became. I was never popular or much of an athlete. I was just a good citizen, a patient listener, and a sharp observer. I figured out the blue blazer and the rep tie, the difference between the old money destinations and the new. Though I had never actually been to most of these places or even owned a rep tie, I had broken the code. I could out-WASP the WASPs. I could even use
summer
as a verb.

As I learned the code, people grew more comfortable with me. They opened up and allowed me to see how universal the human condition really is. Despite their venerable names and magnificent homes and important art collections, the men and women of privilege bore struggles hardly different from those I had seen at home. They told me about their bad marriages, their estranged children, their family traumas. There was alcoholism, addiction, infidelity, suicide, ruin, and loss. One student got pregnant during her senior year and decided to keep the baby. The father of another could not keep a job and spent most of his days in his pajamas, staring out his bedroom
window at the garden. Money may have helped some of these people cope with calamity, but it did not immunize anyone from it.

Though I was largely accepted at Milton, true assimilation was not possible. It was as if I was encouraged to forget my past and embrace a community that would not actually let me surrender that past. Sometimes, as my father feared, I let my guard down.

In my junior year, I was the student manager of the soda machines in the dorms and the candy concession at the Canteen, which was open at morning break for students. The money went to the scholarship fund, with a small cut to the student manager (who was always a scholarship student). I collected the money and paid for the sales stock in arrears. But in one instance, the funds did not cover the soda bill. When I told the deliveryman that I was short, he took the matter to the dean of students, who took it to the housemaster and ultimately the headmaster. We had a round of questioning, and the authorities insinuated that I had stolen the money. I had not taken a dime, of course, nor had I even been paid what I was owed, as a thorough review of the books made clear. I explained, however, that I had heard the boys boast of being able to reach into the vending machines to pull a can out and had actually seen a few do it. The masters dropped the issue when one of the boys blithely demonstrated that it could be done quite easily, and no evidence could be found that
I had enriched myself. But there were no apologies. “Boys will be boys” was the reaction to the white kids stealing sodas from the machine. “Watch yourself” was the message to me.

It was the first time I’d felt the helplessness and hurt of false accusation. I knew that such an accusation could jeopardize my standing at Milton. The presumption that the actual thieves—the rich white boys who were helping themselves to sodas—were innocent pranksters while I—the black kid on scholarship—was up to no good stung me deeply. When I tried to explain why I was so upset to a young and caring white teacher, he explained a rationale that had nothing to do with race—in effect, why I was the logical suspect. I had control of the money, so it was natural to question me closely, even if I was otherwise beyond reproach. He was trying to comfort me, to keep me from being bitter. But I then appreciated that the curse of being black is always having to wonder whether the things that go wrong in your life are on account of your race.

That was part of the burden, the insecurity, of straddling these two worlds, and I could only do it by being true to myself. I was part of both communities, and they were part of me. I certainly did not give up on the people at Milton whom I had come to love. I became a loyal graduate, a trustee, a benefactor, eventually a parent of two students, and a mentor to many other scholarship students. But somehow I knew back then, even during the stirring
lectures and quiet revelations, that I would get a great education at the risk of a broken heart.

By the time I went on to Harvard, it was easier to find my bearings in a place that I once would not have been able to contemplate. I knew the basic geography, of course; Harvard Square was at the opposite end of the Red Line from Milton and a frequent destination on weekend excursions with other students. And I was a Milton man at Harvard, after all, surprisingly but indisputably part of a long tradition, so I thought I had a leg up. My freshman roommates were eager young men from Alabama, Iowa, New Jersey, and Belmont, a wealthy suburb of Boston. All of us were afraid of failing or being outed as admissions mistakes, so we worked hard. On the weekends, we dated Wellesley women and went to movies and drank too much. I was trying to belong, to forge an identity, but even at Harvard I could not escape the temptation of false choices.

As a sophomore I was “punched,” or recruited, for one of the Finals Clubs, all-male relics from the days when the campus had no dining facilities. These private social clubs were filled mainly by the wealthy legacy students who had attended private schools. Apparently, one once joined the Hasty Pudding Club as a freshman and took one’s meals there. Then you moved on to your “final” club, where you dined with other members, presumably of the same social set. After a tortured period of being courted at fancy
lunches and dinners and rejecting invitations, I finally joined the Fly Club. Roosevelts and Kennedys had passed through the wide door into those cool, dark rooms, so why not me? Even so, except for an occasional black-tie dinner or garden party with the graduates, a cast of marvelous New England characters, I hardly ever went near the place. It was just too expensive and too weird: servants older than my father dressed in livery waiting on nineteen-year-olds, refreshing our drinks and serving us lunch. I should have known something was wrong when I felt embarrassed and apologetic about going into the building. At the time, I just wanted to be validated by one world or the other. In fact, I seemed eligible for neither.

Still, my experience at Harvard was far more positive than not. I made some close friends, and through them, through professors who opened more new worlds for us, and through mentors who inspired us, we burrowed ahead in our effort to be considered part of the elite, which pleased my mother as much as it appalled my father.

I graduated on an overcast day, but I was elated. I was about to join a storied group. My grandparents, mother, and sister came, as did Mrs. Quaintance, my sixth-grade teacher. Their pride and enthusiasm reminded me why this journey mattered.

Later that evening, after graduation was over, we all went out to dinner at a restaurant on Boston Harbor. It was a fun but low-key evening: Everyone was pretty worn out from the abundant festivities Harvard offered to
soften us up to become grateful and generous lifelong donors. I caught Rhonda looking at me strangely throughout dinner, and I suspected she was again judging how far I was from what I was supposed to become. She had finished high school, lived in her own apartment, and was working on her cosmetology license. She was living on the South Side and making her way. I was graduating from a prestigious college with no certain plan except to travel overseas. We were clearly on different paths.

After dinner, Rhonda pulled me aside, looked me in the eye, and said softly, “I am so proud of you.” Then she burst into tears. We held each other, crying, for many minutes, heaving our sobs of joy and forgiveness, letting go of the years of judgment and jealousy, accepting each other for who and what we were. Much more would be said in endless conversations that summer and in subsequent years, but nothing else was really needed.

Some people will always believe that, but for Milton, I would be peddling drugs or gangbanging on the South Side of Chicago. I reject that. Even back home, others had high expectations for me, and I had them for myself. Milton was a launching pad, but I always had some spring in my legs. Like Milton, Harvard exposed me both to great privilege and to the folly of equating that with fulfillment or salvation.

For some time, I thought the lesson of my years at Milton or even Harvard was that you had to adapt to your new
environment, learn the code, if you were going to belong. But eventually I came to see that belonging has nothing to do with place. It has to do with purpose, with values. The expectations of the South Side and Milton Academy implied a choice: Be of one or the other, but not both, because they inherently conflict. That choice, however, was false and was totally unsuited for the world I wanted to experience and be part of.

I learned to focus less on where I was and more on who I am. Candor, compassion, generosity of spirit, curiosity, and learning to listen, as Louis Pasteur once wrote, “without losing your temper or your self-confidence”—these were the qualities I wanted and that I would always try to carry with me. These became the points on my compass.