The Blind Side (17 page)

Michael just sat there in silence. Leigh Anne begged the man to keep looking: did he have anything even close? He tried spelling Oher in various ways; he tried spelling Michael in various ways. Finally he said, “There’s a Michael Jerome Williams.”

“That’s me,” said Michael.

It is? thought Leigh Anne, but said nothing.

“You’ve been issued six Social Security cards in the last eighteen months,” said the man from Social Security. He wasn’t happy about it.

Leigh Anne had no idea what that was about—“someone was probably selling them on the Internet”—and neither did Michael. To the Social Security administrator she said, “I promise if you give us just one more, it’ll be the last time we ask.” Grudgingly, and a bit suspiciously, the man printed out a Social Security card. Only when they were outside did Leigh Anne stop to look at it: “Michael Jerome Williams Junior,” it read.

“Who the hell is Michael Jerome Williams?” she asked.

“That’s my dad,” said Michael. He didn’t find anything interesting about that fact, and so didn’t elaborate.

She now had a Social Security card that said his name was Michael Jerome Williams and a student I.D. that said his name was Michael Jerome Oher. Leigh Anne explained to Michael: No matter how nice the people at the Memphis DMV are, they aren’t going to accept these as two forms of legal identification for one boy. She told him that if he wanted a driver’s license she was going to have to visit his mother, and see if she had a birth certificate. “She doesn’t have any birth certificate,” said Michael. “She doesn’t have anything.” Since Michael had moved in, Leigh Anne had pestered Michael to go and visit his mother. Occasionally, and grudgingly, Michael went, or said he did; but as he had never let any of the Tuohys near his old inner-city home, they couldn’t be sure. The drawbridge might come down between white and black Memphis, but Michael insisted on crossing it alone. “Michael,” Leigh Anne would say. “She is your mother. She will always be your mother. And you are never going to be able to look at me and say, ‘You took me away from my mother.’” Now she said, “If you won’t go, I will.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll go.”

He left and returned a few hours later. It was tattered and smeared, and he held it like a piece of trash, crumpled up in a tight ball in his hand, but he’d found a birth certificate. A boy named Michael Jerome Williams was indeed born in Memphis, on May 26, 1986.

“You told me your birthday was May 28,” said Leigh Anne.

Michael looked at his birth certificate and frowned. “They must have got the date wrong,” he said.

“They don’t get the date wrong on birth certificates, Michael,” said Leigh Anne.

“No, they got it wrong,” he insisted.

She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins had herself just turned seventeen and so was eligible to have the restrictions removed from her license. The DMV was for some reason miles east, outside the Memphis beltway, on a road lined with anemic maples, porn shops, and churches. They passed a porn shop and then a church and then another porn shop and another church; it was as if the people of Memphis had chosen this place to fight the war between animal nature and the instinct to subdue it. The DMV was a blue wooden shack in the woods, but there wasn’t a trace of nature inside. It hummed with fluorescent lights and automated voices and the bells from the row of testing machines in the back. The walls were white cinder block, the floors speckled linoleum. At the front desk were four large black ladies. Leigh Anne handed all the documents over to one of them, who took one look at them and said in a slow drawl, “Uh-uh. This school letter is a copy. You got to have an original.”

And so they left Collins to become a fully authorized grown-up driver, and raced the fifteen miles out to the Briarcrest Christian School, where Mr. Simpson met them in the parking lot, with the original of his letter embossed with the Briarcrest seal. They went back to the DMV, and the large black lady looked at the paperwork again. “Uh-uh,” she said. “To apply for his license, he needs proof of residence, too.” A phone or electric bill addressed to him, or someone whose name might plausibly be associated with his, that placed him more precisely in the world.

This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael’s friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage. Leigh Anne had long ago quit counting the letters: more than a thousand, fewer than ten thousand. The trouble was they were all addressed to “Michael Oher,” who, legally, didn’t exist. The only thing to do was to drive west across the city and find Michael’s mother and, God willing, some piece of mail with an address and a more useful name on it. It was now 3:30 p.m. and the DMV didn’t let anyone through the door after four-thirty.

“Let’s just pick this up another day,” said Leigh Anne.

“No,” said Michael. “I want to get my driver’s license today.”

She’d never seen him so definite and purposeful. For the first time, when Leigh Anne said that she would accompany him to his mother’s house, Michael didn’t protest. Leaving Collins to stall the DMV, she and Michael took off for inner-city Memphis, at 90 miles per hour. Along the way Michael said, “No one in my whole family has ever had a driver’s license.” That’s why it was so important for him to get his driver’s license. It would make him different from his family.

At length, they roared up in front of the same redbrick public housing project where Leigh Anne had dropped him off after their day of shopping for clothes. Michael had phoned his mother en route to let her know they were on the way, and to ask her to find an old bill or something. Now the woman herself opened the door: she was very large and very black. Six foot one at least, with big bones and, Leigh Anne thought, a pretty face. Denise was her name but everyone called her “Dee Dee.”

“How y’all doin today?”

She was drunk, or high, and slurring her words. She wore a muu-muu and a garish wig that Leigh Anne assumed she had thrown on when they’d called to tell her they were on their way. She didn’t invite them in and Leigh Anne sensed that she didn’t want to, either. If she had, Leigh Anne would have found only a single trace of the childhood of Michael Oher: a sentimental photograph of a little boy hugging a big-eyed tabby cat that he had taped to the wall in the room where as a little boy he had, on occasion, slept. The sun was setting, and behind her the small apartment was dark. Michael just stood away from her, keeping his distance.

“You better come over here and hug your mama!” she shouted at Michael.

Michael just walked over and stood there. He offered no resistance when she threw her arms around him, but he didn’t respond in kind or, for that matter, utter a word. She hadn’t bothered to go looking for an envelope with an address on it, and they were in a mad rush, so they didn’t have time to talk. At Leigh Anne’s request, Dee Dee went and found the key to her mailbox. They walked down together to the row of surprisingly large metal boxes. Dee Dee found hers, but just before she opened it, she said, “Oh, there’s no telling what’s in here.” Then she yanked open the box and down came the avalanche: water bills, light bills, gas bills, phone bills, eviction notices. It looked to be about three months’ worth of stuff, and when it was done falling out, a moraine of future trouble rose from the pavement. Leigh Anne needed only a single bill; she was spoiled for choice. She reached down and grabbed the one on top, thanked Dee Dee for her trouble, and drove 90 miles per hour with Michael back to the DMV. On the way, neither she nor Michael said a thing about what they’d just seen.

By the time they arrived at the DMV the doors were shut, but Collins had persuaded the ladies to hold it open just a few minutes more. There wasn’t a soul in the place; when Michael walked to the testing area, he had it all to himself. Leigh Anne was now sufficiently exasperated to remind Michael what she had been telling him for weeks: “You have one chance to pass this test. I gave Collins one chance, and I’ll give you one chance. I’m not coming down here again.” Michael vanished behind the partition where Leigh Anne couldn’t see him. For a moment there was only the hum of the fluorescent lights. Then she heard Michael in conversation with the ladies. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was clearly chattering up a storm. Then he went silent.

Moments later, Leigh Anne heard the first ominous sound: Bing! That would be the bell on the testing terminal signaling that he’d made a mistake. He was allowed to miss four questions; five and he’d fail, and they’d have to return and do this all over again. Which, despite her threats, she knew she would have to do. She took a seat against the white cinder-block wall beside the large sign with red letters that said APPLICANTS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, and began to pray.

She was uncomfortable leaving Michael alone to solve a problem by himself. She already assumed that his problems were her problems, for if they weren’t, no problem ever would be solved. He was already, in this sense, her son. Her own extended family hadn’t liked the idea of them taking Michael in, at least initially. (“The only one who could never handle it was Daddy,” Leigh Anne said. “I truly think God took Daddy because He knew he couldn’t handle it.”) But then the more they came to know Michael, the less they fought it. Her mother, Virginia, was already playing the role of doting grandmother to Michael, and she and Michael clearly adored each other. Outside the family, the reaction was still mixed—“we knew people were going to have issues because we had a daughter exactly the same age,” said Leigh Anne. She often found herself greeted in the shops and restaurants and schools of East Memphis with the same leading line: “How have you handled it?”

What the woman—it was nearly always a woman—who asked Leigh Anne the question meant was, How have you handled having your gorgeous, nubile, seventeen-year-old daughter living under the same roof with a huge young black man the same age?

Leigh Anne explained about fifty times that Michael’s relationship to both Collins and Sean Junior was so much like that of a sibling that you’d never guess they hadn’t grown up together. Michael and Sean Junior would shut the door to Michael’s room for hours and compete: video games, miniature basketball, and whatever else they could find that leveled the playing field between a four-foot six-inch, 85-pound ten-year-old boy and a six-foot five-inch, 350-pound teenager. Michael and Collins would bicker and squabble just the way teen-aged brothers and sisters have since they were first created. As Leigh Anne’s feelings for Michael developed, the questions people asked became offensive to her. She’d been taking care of his material needs for a good year and a half, and his emotional ones, to the extent he wanted them taken care of, for almost as long. “I love him as if I birthed him,” she said. About the hundredth time someone asked her how she handled his sexual urges, Leigh Anne snapped. “You just need to mind your own business. You worry about your life and I’ll worry about mine,” she’d said. Word must have gotten around because after that no one asked.

Bing!

They now faced a problem far more difficult than mere social disapproval. At the end of Michael’s junior year, Leigh Anne had ordered up his Briarcrest transcripts. No one at Briarcrest had said anything to her about his grades, and so she assumed they must be at least barely acceptable. They weren’t. He had a cumulative GPA of 1.56 going into his senior year, and the NCAA required a 2.56. Out of a class of 161 students, he ranked 161st. The expensive private school was not much better than the worst sort of public one in filling the void: the empty space in the life of a child who had no one at home to take care of him. He was being described in the Memphis papers as the next great college football star, but to be the next great college football star you had to get to college, and there was little chance of that. Just to graduate from Briarcrest he needed eight more full credits—and there were only seven periods in the day! Most kids only took five classes, and had free periods for the other two. “The numbers don’t add up,” she said. “If he got an A in every class he still wouldn’t qualify.”

Bing!

When she saw Michael’s grades, steam came out of her ears. She marched into Briarcrest and hollered at a bunch of people, starting with the principal. The Briarcrest Christian School was just shuffling him along without ever intending for him to graduate. “This going-on-faith thing isn’t working,” she said. “They just kind of hoped it would happen. That’s bull. This isn’t a faith thing; this is a tangible thing.” She signed him up to take seven classes, plus before-school Bible Study—which counted toward graduation but not for the NCAA. She called every one of the teachers and told them that they were now to deal directly with her. He’d leave the house each morning at 6:00 a.m. and be in class straight through until 3:30 p.m. When she saw how many books he’d need, she realized he was going to need an industrial-strength backpack to carry them in. North Face, she thought, might do the trick (“It gets to the top of Everest,” she thought) and so she went out and bought him a North Face backpack. Michael had taken one look at it and said, “I don’t want to take that to school.”