ANEW: B.C.Y.: A Novel -- Chapter 7 (working draft)
Episode #7
Once again, it’s time for Episode #7 of B.C.Y.:A Novel. Read from the beginning, or keep it right here. If you read from the start of the novel, you’ll get to see the arc of the story and the main character’s picaresque perambulations. But feel free to jump in wherever you want.
Preface: This is a serialization of B.C.Y.: A Novel (working title). If you missed the earlier Chapters, you can find them here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6.
Chapter 7
“Everything is everything.”
When our folks moved up from the South – Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the like – they weren’t so much leaving behind disappointment, but they were carving out a new way of thinking and being in the world – something original. They had to leave behind to survive. Yes, they would remind themselves of the sweet memories by streams, rivers, and some of the sweetest fruit you ever ate because you grew it or picked it yourself, but the bitter memories were also important. The bitter memories of short-shrifted paychecks, jilted lovers with knives, poison, or hot scalding water, and the sad, true tale of missing uncles or nephews who didn’t come home. Those memories took you by the hand and guided you up North. Sometimes, that way of thinking – that disappointment – and way of being, doing what you had to do, just meant you accepted what it was, as what it is. Not a defeat but a resignation. Resigning yourself to “what was” did not mean that you settled. It meant that you survived to find and fight another day. Maybe it was a new way of seeing and being. What they said to themselves after they arrived, mostly, but loud enough for other people to hear it as they looked down from their third- and fourth-floor walk-up apartments that they shared a bathroom with the other five or six families – like my mother did, like her mother did – was, “Everything is everything.” All of that resignation trickled down to me.
“It’s time to get up.” That’s what I told myself, which drove me as I had to motivate and encourage myself to get going.
How did I get here? It came in the form of a letter:
From the Office of the Interim Dean
Dear Scaheffer,
When we last spoke in mid-May, you claimed to have lost your grandfather to a stroke. If that was the case, I am / we are deeply sorry for your loss. You also told us that you needed a little more “time” to recover from what later proved to be an illness that resulted in your time away from school. Of course, we empathize with you and have supported you, but all of the time away from your studies have made it necessary to place you on our academic watch list preparing you for and hopefully ensuring your eventual success at the College. As of this writing, and until May 30 of the following school year, we have placed you on Academic Probation, pending a review by the new incoming Dean of the Residential College – to be named shortly. We know that you can and will find success, but you must take strides to not play fast and loose with the truth, and you must take a least one summer course, pending our approval telephonically.
Warmly,
Dean Dunham
“Claimed.” “Academic Probation.” “Fast and loose with the truth.” As if I didn’t need another damned sword hanging over my head, but there it was. There was more than a little snark in the letter, but, all in all, it was straightforward: get your crap together, brother man. I had to change my ways, or that idea of completion would be just a chimera. I don’t remember being so soft before. After my second year, I felt like I was soft, and couldn’t do anything. The spigot I used to turn on at will had run dry, it seemed. So my Dean, outgoing as he was, thought I was a liar. I could not catch a break. Well, my dad’s father had died at some point last year. I don’t remember as well when because we weren’t all that close, but I had been pretty debilitated by my own looping brain, which landed me in the Y.P.I. and on my haunches near the Pierson Buttery.
Plus, Summer School. Never in my life did I ever have to attend summer school until this year. It was insane. I hated the notion of “commencing” school in the summer, but it was my own damned fault. That’s what I get for failing theater. Twice. I certainly wasn’t going to take a theater class. I had decided that I would be a history major towards the end of sophomore year. Yet, in true Schaeffer fashion, I would take English. I’d see what was available downtown at Roosevelt or Columbia College. I went to pick up the Roosevelt course guide, and I was not able to navigate the labyrinthine mess that was their bureaucracy. That’s okay. I didn’t know much about Columbia, except that it was a film and TV school. That was enough for me to have some interest in looking at their summer course catalogue.
“I’m trying to get ahead a little bit,” I lied to Mama to make the sting of “have to” more bearable if I accepted it as the truth.
Luckily, I was able to register in time, but I was having trouble feeling like my old self. Who was that?! I couldn’t concentrate much or well in school, but perhaps I could do something else to get myself to the Promiseland, which was graduation in two years. I started summer school at Columbia College in Chicago during the third week of June.
I was also motivated to get a job back at Time-Life. This time, being an “operator standing by” to take orders over the phone for magazines that everybody wanted was definitely the ticket. I would not kill myself by overworking as I had done the year before, making myself so depleted that it would end up costing me a year.
I had to know better, as my grandmother would say. “Boy, you oughtta know better than to get yourself mixed up in that kind of mess.” That kind of mess, whenever Mymama talked about it, was anything that you could have gotten yourself out of. In this case, it was a situation of being human. I felt alone because I was alone. I had no people. They were all killed off in the opening episodes of the show, like Bambi’s mother. Who the hell needed her when you had Thumper or Sneezy or Jimniy around.
Perhaps it was a personal failing of some kind. My personal failing was not handling my business, as in getting myself mixed up with doing the things that had me having to take a summer school class. I felt stupid and like the lowest of the low. Black folks’ philosophy all came down to “have a little common sense and self-respect.” Apparently, both, at times, fled me.
Abso-frickin-lutely, summers were nice. So, so nice because I was learning how to be more self-sufficient, to lose my taste for the things I thought meant the world to me, like running the streets of Chicago. I mean, in reality, I had no friends when I returned. Well, maybe one. Sort of. Not many of my friends from high school were around. Plus, they had lives of their own. Nobody was throwing parties and whatnot. They were either working jobs at their downstate colleges or on some lake somewhere up north. I even thought about trying to call Vivian. Like Abner, she just disappeared from the face of the earth. Besides, what the hell would I say to her when I found her again? “Um, why did you abandon me?” It didn’t matter that I was alone and forced to be self-sufficient, reinventing who I was once again without distractions. For me, I was in purgatory anyway. Summer was doing one job and taking one class. That was heaven. This summer was about equanimity.
I would often sleep or doze on those long train rides, conjuring up the strangest things:
Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable: What is this place called?
Kithawa’s father: It is skunk-weed, what we say “Chee-caw-gau,” stinks to high heaven when the rains come at planting.
Du Sable: Makes for good hunting and coureur des boisto to sell at the headwaters, north.
Kithawa’s father: Take only what the land gives and not more. There’ll be no saving you and your descendants, my descendants, if you do.
I used the time on the train, waking and dreaming, walking the daytime streets of “Chee-caw-gau,’ the Potawatomi term for the land, Du Sable’s wife and father-in-law’s people. These different brown people, like Du Sable, whose tribes hunted along the river, said the land smelled like skunk onions.
As I trudged along the same path, now concrete but still held the unsettling whiff of stew meat with onions, garlic, and ramps that had turned, sitting out on the counter in somebody’s kitchen for too many days. Turned as in the smell of sour death mixed with the same resignation that had afflicted those earlier people and ancestors before us who came from the South. That resignation is what needed to be dealt with, not eradicated, as I got myself up to do the work that should have been completed the year before.
Getting myself up and going downtown, I registered and paid for the class myself. I got myself to the train every day, trudging about a mile down 147th Street to catch the Illinois Central to go to either Columbia College or the Time-Life Building. This time, going to the Time-Life Building meant the cushiest job I ever had or ever would have. All I had to do was wait for people to call me so that I could process their orders. How could anyone muck that up?
On the other hand, I told myself I would live as a monastic until I got myself under control. I would not date. In fact, two years out of college, the friends you once had were no longer calling you to hang out or go out in the evenings. The drinking age in Illinois was now back to 21. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one making bad decisions, according to the legislature. I also told myself that I would swear off any kind of outside influences for the summer. If there was a cute girl at Time-Life or in my classes, maybe we could grab lunch or coffee, but I was going to try to be sharp as it concerned my focus. I had to do things differently.
“That’s how you got yourself into this mess in the first place,” I could hear Mymama’s voice in my head.
So, I got up and out the door by 7:30. I walked to the train station. That was my penance for living the life before, like Tantalus; it was all that good living and not doing as I was told or the lack of common sense that got me into the grade predicament that I was in. My own damned failings!
Mama just glossed over my time at the Y.P.I. like it didn’t happen. She never asked, and I never told. Mama was worried about everything and anything all at the same time every day. She watched way too much of the nightly news. In fact, when she was home, the news or “the stories,” her soap operas, were on until it was time to turn them off, which was the beginning of Johnny Carson, or at least something was on whenever she was home from work. She invented trouble in her mind.
“I’ll come pick you up down at the train. What time will you be home?”
“I’ll be fine. Really. I’ll be fine. You do not have to pick me up.”
“You got some quarters to call me when you get there and then when you get back?”
She wasn’t wrong not to worry, but I wasn’t too worried about those hardheaded little Negroes running the streets. It seemed more like they liked messing with each other rather than some random-ass college boy. They were too busy playing Godfather games with each other to worry about me. Mama didn’t like me walking down to the train all by myself.
The walk was past my friend Tico’s dad's truck business, which had at one point been a gas station. Tico’s dad only had two trucks. I guess he thought T. would go into the family business after he graduated from Carbondale, but like me, T. wanted nothing to do with the Southside when he graduated; he didn’t even come home like I did.
Right directly across the street from Tico’s dad’s shop was the boarded-up Walt’s Grocery Store. Next to that, the shuttered Oldsmobile dealership, and just a few yards farther, Bryant School, marked with new graffiti I hadn’t seen before. On the corner on Halstead was a new chicken chain and about four liquor stores in the ¾ miles it took me to get to the Illinois Central. We called it the IC, but it was nothing like the IC that brought Mymama up from Jackson when she was a young woman in the 1930s. Now, it was a local commuter railroad that had double-decker train cars. I couldn’t believe how things had seemed to change overnight in our little town as I headed towards the viaduct to the train platform.
As I shoved my money into the machine to get my ticket, the money I used to count at the local bank when I worked there before heading to New Haven, I recalled the terrible train crash with the brand spanking new highliner cars back in 1972. We had recently moved from Robbins to our own home out of the Projects. The crash killed so many people, something like 45, one of the worst train disasters in the nation’s history. That was ten years before, which the news channels would commemorate the tragic loss of life in a few months. Funny, we weren’t worried about that stuff that summer. At least, I didn’t worry about that kind of stuff. All I did was go to work, and on some days, go to school and come home. No anxiety and nice Texas-Connecticut pearl-twirling girls to make it alright.
The teacher I had at Columbia College was this ex-radical guy who reminded me of some of my teachers at South Suburban. Many of my teachers in high school were ex-hippies, too. They knew so much. Many of them were experts in their fields like Mr. Z. Mr. Z. had gone to law school at one point, he wrote a novel, which was surprisingly good, and he was the funniest dude who ever laced them up in the classroom. I loved him. The stories he told about the law or Chicago politicians, like Daley and even Bilandic, had me riveted and, on most occasions, cracking up. I wanted to be Mr. Z. when I grew up.
“Now, what was Faulkner indicating in the first scene?” Silence. “Anybody else besides Schaeffer?” More silence. “Okay, Schaeffer, take it again.”
This teacher I had, and the ones that I saw at Columbia College, were like Mr. Z. Phil Bautista, who was an Americanist. I think that meant he was an English teacher who liked American Literature, especially those of the mid-twentieth century. We read novels by Faulkner, Morrison, Ellison, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, and a bunch of short stories. It was great to dive in. The students ranged the gambit, but there were no preps, but some smart, smart kids nonetheless. Mostly from all over the City or from one of the surrounding suburbs like me. One kid and I went back and forth talking about Vardaman in As I Lay Dying. It was thrilling to be back in a class where I was not only in the mix but one of the cleverest in the room. And it wasn’t just about being clever. It was about rebuilding that muscle in the backbone I once had.
“Old people say they have this moment before they die, a sudden clarity, like a lightening/lifting, or lightning in a dark storm. That’s what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet. Such clarity before you go – like spraddling two worlds, it seems.” I could also have been talking about going to college. “The lightening/lightning before dying.
That summer, I realized that I had lost the confidence that had taken me to the doorstep of college in the first place and landed me on that Trailways bus to New Haven. After two years, I was a shadow of my former self. I knew that I didn’t want to go on to law school as I had planned. After the theater class debacle, I didn’t know much about any kind of school after college. The Columbia College course gave me the idea of doing something more applied. What could I apply? How might I be more real and less in my head? Less guilty and apologetic? Du Sable knew. You land among people who could, if they wanted to, kill you. Or, you might marry their daughter and integrate seamlessly among them, be absorbed by the tribe, lose yourself, and gain a new you. Be a founder.
In the afternoons, I would head to Time-Life and sell magazines. People would call in, and I would take their orders. “Judy, the operator, was standing by.” I was Judy. We would sell Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and an assortment of other lesser Time-Life products. I mean, it was like shooting fish in a barrel because all you had to do was wait.
The typical transaction had to last less than two minutes without hustling the customer off the phone. The encounters went something like this:
Short tone—
“Time-Life, may I help you?”
“Yeah, I want to buy that there People Magazine as a gift for my wife.”
“Sure sir, we have a couple of deals today. The first is 12, 24, and 52 weeks. Of course, if you buy the 52 week package you save an entire 40% off the cover price.”
“So, how much that goin’ to set me back?”
“Just 89 cents an issue for a full year, or 52 issues, and if you buy the the entire year, we’ll throw in that handsome digital alarm clock.”
“Okay, I guess. That’s a good deal though?”
“Sure is. You save so much off the cover price that you’ll be able to buy her a second present, too.”
That’s what I did all day. The Time-Life Building and Columbia College, back and forth, north to south, making my way into the world.
Every once in a while, I’d get a wild hair. After work, I’d trudge the eight blocks or so to go to Water Tower Place. I would marvel at all of the shops and sights that most Chicagoans also browsed. I didn’t do it all that much because I wanted to save my little money for school. I was thinking ahead for once. And boy, oh boy, Water Tower Place was THE place to be. The central escalator that took you up, up, up, leveling off at the eateries and movie theaters on the uppermost floor. It was a brilliant concept for bored Chicagoans with no money who just wanted to window shop. Or, for people from the Gold Coast who had money to burn but wanted to make a show of what they would spend. Or, for people like me, who had very little money and would make splurge-y kinds of purchases on pants or ties or Romare Bearden art prints. The great thing about a recession is that it made people want even more, save up all of that pent-up anxiety and eventually unleash a torrent of spending on crap they didn’t need and soon would forget about it.
Occasionally, I would meet my one friend left from South Suburban High School at Water Tower Place at the foot of the escalator on the first floor. My friend Ranney would come hang out with me. She was working at a television studio at the Sears Tower as a Kiron generator operator. I think that meant that she made the titles under people when they spoke on camera. She looked a little more disheveled than she did in high school, saying more of the wrong things.
“Hey, man. What they feeding you at that fancy-pants school of yours, potatoes and bread? You gained a few!” I had gained some of my weight back once I got home, and maybe a little more.
“Wow, Ranney. Tell me how you really feel. Just come out and say I’m fat.”
“Now, I didn’t say that. Compared to last winter, you were a stick figure.”
“Maybe I’m just filling out a bit. You know, finally becoming a man.”
“I’m not sure if that’s in your future, Schaeff.”
We would go into the Limited or Carson’s or Field’s to window shop but act like we had the money to buy stuff, which we didn’t. I loved just ogling at the watches. I fancied myself at times a kind of Edwardian fop. But Ranney had me in check.
“That Hamilton just doesn’t look good on you?”
“Too dark?”
“The watch isn’t too dark. You’re too dark.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I think a lighter-colored watch would be better. That chocolate-colored watch just gets taken over by your dark skin.”
“Well, thanks, Rain. I do not understand why we have stayed friends all these years.” And I didn’t. But Ranney was the kind of person to whom I could say that to. “What a bitch.”
That effectively ended my attempt at salvaging my last friend from South Suburban. Other than the four Johnson girls across the street, I was done with pretending that I liked any of these people.
That made me think hard at the end of the summer. Maybe I was the asshole. They were just doing their thing, being their regular Chicago selves. Maybe I was the one who had too much of the East Coast Enlightenment. I had just finished the Allegory of the Cave, and those in the shadows were definitely killing me off. Was it elitism? Had I shifted again? I remember when we moved from the Projects in Robbins to our very own home in a “good neighborhood” two towns away, how the White folks couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Dodge. And I couldn’t go back to Robbins without somebody accusing me that I was “acting” and “sounding” White. Perhaps I was feeling the same way, too. Could that level of loathing be a typical thing where I would marry a White girl, live in a White neighborhood, and come back to my own neighborhood rarely? What if generations and generations of us did that? What would become of our old neighborhoods? What would happen to the ideas that we had of our own selves? Who would get out, and who would stay in the old places?
All I knew was I was not digging Ranney or any of my other friends when I did end up seeing them. To top it off, Ranney wasn’t even Black; these encounters with her also made the trek home powerfully bleak. I resolved that next summer would be my last summer. Once I graduated from college, I was done with this place, too. I would be one of THOSE people.
That fall, I flew back to the East Coast on a direct flight to LaGuardia and took the Connecticut Limousine up to Phelps Gate. Move-in day had commenced, and I was navigating this world better. I had plucked an A I know I earned in the Columbia College course, saved enough money to buy all of my own books, and even paid for a little bit of my bursar bill tuition. That was what I wanted to do all along, to declare my independence — from Mama, Mylie, South Suburban, and everybody else. When I first got accepted at Yale, we had our first real fight, Mama and me. She said she didn’t want me going all the way to New Haven. Why did I have to go to a school that was so far away? What if I got sick? What if I did this, that, or the other? What would happen if blahdee blahdee blahdee blah happened? Who would take care of my blahdee blahdee blahdee blah blah ass when I got into trouble?
Trouble? What kind of trouble was I going to get into? If Abner or Vivian were here, or if I had someone like them as a stand-in, I could possibly locate the gumption to persevere, to act, to assuage the guilt. It was about leaving, I knew. It was about doing something no one else in my family had done. Like, not a one. Well, maybe Mylie. But we were doing it at the same time, sort of. What was I trying to prove? Who was I trying to prove it to? If I was an unreliable narrator, a kind of “grow’d up” and “loose with the truth” Huck Finn, then who the hell was I talking to or trying to prove myself to?
I was mostly sure that I might not have been all that equipped to come all this way. Perhaps my confidence and sense of self were locked up in a place like home that I was beginning to loathe, as I did myself sometimes. No man’s land. The best of the best from my high school were going to decent schools, too. The University of Illinois, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and many other schools that we visited while we were on the speech and debate circuit would be the places where we were most prepared to swim. There was even somebody at UPenn and Stanford. I wonder how the hell they were hanging? It wasn’t the intellectual preparation that I was lacking. It was that guide. That one figure who could help me navigate the rocky shoals between garbage dumps and steam tunnels. I just figured that I would figure it out. Up until this point, I hadn’t. I was wondering if I ever would. When I stared deep, deep into the dark, I couldn’t see who was staring back at me.
“Who are you?”
This was the year that I would sit fully in my major. I would be a history major focusing on some aspect of the Civil War, or I’d study the Black folks coming up from the South migrating North, or both. I knew I loved that broad swath of history up to this point. I would take courses from some of the best minds that the University had to offer, this time in smaller seminar-style classes. One class I got a lot from was on the presidency of George Washington. Of course, much scholarship was written about the Washington presidency, but we would debate the nuances of those years and what was set into motion at the beginning of the Republic. I wanted to take another course from Skip Gates, but my roommate Ethan ended up with him. They bonded well, going out to lunch a ton during those years. Who the hell went to a teacher when they didn’t have to? I had no idea what, how, or why the butt-kissing boot-lickers were ponying up to their teachers to grade grub. Other than the people who made you do stuff, I didn’t want any of it. It felt kind of weak to me.
But maybe I was wrong. These were the years when I couldn’t do a damn thing right anyway. Maybe that’s how it was done. It was less about the content of the class and more about trying to get into the head of the scholar. Sitting down to lunch with a professor was still as far from my own conception of what I thought was normal or even right. Why would Skip Gates want to have lunch with me? Or, Gaddis Smith? Or, Vincent Sculley? Or, John Hersey? I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. What could I possibly offer them by way of ideas? I had nothing.
Yet, all around me, I saw it: undergraduates having dinner and lunch with professors. Some of those same professors even had apartments in the residential colleges. Perhaps they lived in other far-off places, like Madison, Connecticut, or Stowe, Vermont, during the week. Whatever it was, I was not there yet. I was not ready to commit. Maybe I would never fit into the concept of what this school was all about.
In high school, I had a very good relationship with my teachers. It was respectful and reverential even. They seemed to know more about me than I did them. I liked it that way. Yet at Yale, the fraternizing seemed to be part and parcel of the place.
We got a new Dean at Pierson. She was a very genteel woman who did engage us. She went out of her way to say, “Hello.” I imagined the Dean’s lodging to be pretty Spartan, like a monk’s cell. In reality I’m sure that it was nothing like the Elwood Blues’ SRO at eye level of the ‘L’ tracks in Chicago. I’m not sure what it took to actually become the dean of a college, but I’m sure it had something to do with wanting to be with undergraduates day in and day out. We were overgrown high school kids. Well, that’s how I felt. Overgrown and under-prepared.
I never believed in the exceptionality of any of us, really. Some of us came from moneyed families, and some of us didn’t. Some of us had very good preparation going into college, and some of us didn’t. Some of us were questioning the very nature of our existence in this world, and… Okay, probably all of us were. And yet, the same could be said about someone who was a junior at Tennessee State University. We were all in this morass of emotions, study, and hormones. We weren’t the only ones figuring it out. We had a good many adult-adults around who wanted to help us out with the very nature of who the hell we actually were. Or, at least they were there to police it when we went off the rails a bit. They just didn’t identify themselves to me.
That first semester back, I went to my first Shabbat dinner. I had heard a good deal about Jewish culture from Ethan and the rest of my friends. Some folks’ families even fought in the war in 1949. Except for me and the two dudes from Oregon who started hanging with us, many of my friends were Jews from the East Coast. Many of the girls I saw and the people that I hung with also shared that in common. It just was.
I didn’t have to prove my Blackness to me. It stared me in the mirror every time I got up in the morning. I was raised by Black people on the very south side of Chicago who seemed like they transplanted their town, blade by blade, from the Mississippi Delta. When I missed that first week of the opening of school as a first-year because I had to work at the South Suburban First National Bank, I was already behind. I made money because I had to while the Black folks at Yale bonded with each other, took care of each other, and made their way into the serpentine elements of what it meant to be at College. Seemed like, they had a head start on some of these questions of what it meant to be at the school. I had come across the country to this “august” place that was a question on Jeopardy: “The school that created a President and a Supreme Court Justice.” “At this U.S. college, they applied electric shock to people to make them prove anybody could be brainwashed to follow orders.” “For God, for Country, and for…” I would never be one of those questions in the form of a statement. I felt so far removed from the actual function and even the form of this place than I had ever been. Summertime confidence boost aside, I don’t know if it was really about connecting with the humans, as it was just getting the hell out as fast as I could. That was my drumbeat. Did I have regrets? Absolutely. I wanted in like crazy, but I wanted to be invited in.
I started attending some of the functions at the Afro-American Culture Center that year. I read the tiff between Skip and Amiri Baraka in the New York Times, which I found very amusing. It seemed to split down my very soul. It was like the fight for the supremacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Black Arts vs. the Incog-Negroes. I’m sure that back then, in the ‘30s and ‘40s, everyone knew that Richard Wright was the titular head of that cultural movement, killing off the works of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and marginalizing Zora Neale Hurston, who wanted to represent the people as the people. I’m not quite sure how people thought that this whole debate would break. Baraka was the Black Arts Movement. As an outsider and without a connection to any intellectual tradition myself, I was enamoured of the debate, like airing a family’s dirty laundry for the entire world to see, which went against the notion of ‘don’t tell them people none of our business, you hear?!’ I know that Toni Morrison had been in New Haven and at Yale before, as was Gloria Naylor. It was a heady time to be on the periphery of “those Arts and them Letters,” even as sidelined as I was.
None of this made sense, of course, because I was still trying to make my way into new Yale even as old Yale didn’t know what to make of me and us. We were separate, apart from, not in the main. That’s when I discovered Bart Giamatti.
Giamatti was what I aspired to be: young, brilliant, dynamic, erudite, accomplished, and a man among men. And he was everything that I was not. His dad was a professor of Italian literature at Mt. Holyoke. Bart went to Andover and then Yale. As a graduate student, Bart was an expert in Medieval literature, especially Spenser's The Fairy Queen. I had never read The Fairy Queen or Spenser, but to have someone who was leading the University and a man of the people, as it were, talking about some rarified smack like The Fairy Queen was quite something in my book. Other than the lions of the Civil Rights Movement, King, Young, Shuttlesworth, Bond, and even Jackson, Bart was the best speaker that I had ever heard—live. I wasn’t around in that church in Memphis before King was killed, but Bart had that same muscular soaring oratory as King. The ability to inspire. Inspiration, perhaps that was what I was looking for when I marched off to college. That Baccalaureate address Bart gave when we were freshmen still gives me goosebumps when I think about it. All I could remember was something about naysayers or dooms-dayers and the Apocalyptic Style, ‘Don’t be like these mean hard-edged end-of-times-dumbasses who want to blow everything up,’ he seemed to say, ‘be your own damned person.’
Maybe that crack-up voice in the back of my own head was bucking against everything I knew or thought that I knew. Maybe I had to die a death of who I thought I was to become something new. Inspiration, like what we got from Bart, would have been freely given at Morehouse, I assume. Plus, there, everybody looked like you. South Suburban, the high school and not the Bank, were preparing us as much for that world. But did I want to be a preacher in the classical sense? Did I want to be an actor? Sophomore year’s theater class would probably say otherwise. Yet, I knew that it was a very long life. We could be anything if we wanted.
I still had problems studying. I just didn’t have the concentration or stamina that I had pre-Mononucleosis. I could not focus on a piece of text for more than forty-five minutes without my brain slowing to molasses, like a medium-sized city whose main thoroughfare to its center just crawled or stopped for a time for no reason. All I was sure of at this point was that I needed to figure out a way to be in the world at Yale and beyond that would work for me. Completion was more than just a buzzword at this point. It was a battle cry.
A few more of my friends dropped out or were kicked out, including Ben Mays. I kid you not; that was the dude’s name. He got into that Vietnam play the previous year. He was like me, or so I thought he was, resilient and full of bromides and pieties, like me at times. He and I hung out together during our freshmen and sophomore year. I had to have people in my life that would pick me up.
After performing in two plays the year before, Shakespeare and Molière, I quit acting at Yale until I could graduate. “Completion!” I played supporting roles in the previous year, which made me think I was less Fred Astaire or even Ginger Rogers, but more Rerun from What’s Happening!! I would have to figure out a different way of being and behaving in the world as a student and as an artist to work my ass off without thinking of the accolades that may or may not come with it. The Anti-South Suburban. The two were mutually exclusive in my mind. I wouldn’t be happy spending all that time working hard at something that was once again gnawing at me. And not be recognized.
Those years of going back home and seeing fewer and fewer people that I knew made me starkly aware of the ideas that formed in my mind even before I took off for college. It was pleasing those people, or at the very least having them understand that I could make it in the world that was beyond us. For instance, it seemed like every time I went home for vacation, people would be going to and being at church. I realized early on, as a seven- or eight-year-old, that the minister I grew up hearing just recycled the same sermon year after year, or that’s what it sounded like to me. As soon as I peeped that, I stopped going. I still wanted to be liked by them, meaning the friends, the mothers, the aunties, and the uncles, who I saw less and less. Grounded in something bigger than I was – without the fiery furnace effect.
In my cosmology, it was either/or. Come do the mundane, drab thing like everybody did. Go to college. Get a job. Marry that church-going sister around the corner. That movie was the end-times scenario. But how was that going to get me to be what I wanted to be in the world? Not in a most likely to succeed, become President-, Mayor-, or Principal-kind of way, but in a respect with gravitas-thing. Earned and not seized.
After meeting Bilandic and deciding that this was going to be it for me with regards to school and schooling, at least for a while, a career in politics was out. Certainly, meeting Sargent Shriver at a Master’s Tea would shift that focus. Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver came to Pierson, but, again, there weren’t many people who joined us. I knew that Shriver had been the driving force behind Head Start, and I was in one of the initial years of Head Start. I don’t remember much about that tea, who was there, or what we said to each other; I do remember how I felt being a part of this great big community that had chance encounters and wanting to do something special and important in the world.
‘People talk a great deal about things that don’t matter, but coming as far as you have come, especially considering the great psychic distance you have traveled, means a great deal and will for generations to come. For a lot of people.’ That is what I imagined, Sargent Shriver said to me during that brief encounter at the Master’s house. In fact, I have no idea what he said to me or what I said to him. My memory certainly doesn’t work like that, which is why this book is one of fiction rather than one of fact. It is all that I have imagined. I changed most of the names to protect the innocent and ward off the litigious, but I kept the true spirit of the encounters alive. Yet, that day with Shriver, something opened. Nothing inspired me more than that visit. It was also the promise from Bart’s first speech to us in his Baccalaureate address, which was in the opening days of our tenure. What the hell was the opposite of the Apocalyptic Style? Maybe I would do that? Maybe I would be that? Yet, I had no flippin’ clue who the hell I was. I had come all this way, and I was still some kind of cipher.
So, completion was not the only thing on my mind. There was another drumbeat. It was doing something big and grand, to be a part of something bigger than we were, doing something that mattered in the world, to the world, not hiding behind fiction but stating the facts clearly. The truth of the matter is that unless you could do something grand that helped other people, then what was life really about? Therefore, I would double my efforts to see what could be accomplished.
[The next Chapter of B.C.Y.: A Novel drops on February 21, 2025, in two weeks, which is serialized at ANEW every other Friday. Spread the word and (re-)read from the beginning: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, and Chapter 6. Tell a friend. Drink some water. Take your meds. Pet a dog. See you soon.]