скачать книгу бесплатно
Eddie made Mum laugh—and laughing always seemed the most important part of their life together. During my childhood, I saw my mother’s face shine in two predictable circumstances: watching my father play the piano and Eddie winding up for a joke or story. She loved them both at different times, and they both drove her mad.
Eddie had been raised in a strict, staunchly nationalistic household, and had attended an Irish school where even calculus was taught in “the medium”—the Gaelic language. The Irish nationalism around him was so intense that, if a boy in his school mistakenly used his head on the Gaelic football field (as one does in the “English” sport of soccer), the match would be suspended, and the ball confiscated. Rugby and soccer were seen as sports for Protestants and Anglophiles. Despite his cerebral day job, Eddie could get choked up singing Irish rebel songs or reciting Irish insurgent Robert Emmet’s last words before he was hanged by the British in 1803.
Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well. Eddie was as far from boring as Pittsburgh was from Dublin.
When we passed through customs, I gave Eddie a huge hug—what he called a “Squasheroni”—and shouted hello in my pidgin Arabic, “Ahlan wa Sahlan!” “Ahlan bik, Alhamdulillah!” he answered, welcoming me.
Like many intellectuals, Eddie frequently had difficulty focusing on real-world tasks. But having lived in Pittsburgh for nearly a year before our arrival, he had made impressive preparations, drawing on the help of his close Irish friends in the area. He had found a two-story house for us to move into together, and purchased a yellow Renault Le Car for Mum—to complement the charcoal Le Car that he drove.
In Ireland I’d had little exposure to America. The three channels on our Dublin television had played mainly Irish and British programs, so the little I knew about the United States came mostly from American exports like The Incredible Hulk and Charlie’s Angels. The few Americans I had actually encountered were tourists in Ireland on their golf holidays, most of whom seemed to be tanned men with straight teeth and loud opinions.
I didn’t arrive in the US until after the local public elementary school year had already started. When Mum walked me inside and introduced me to my new teacher, I was wearing the outfit I had worn to my Catholic school in Ireland—a navy and green skirt, knee-high lace socks, black leather dress shoes, and a white golf shirt. Immediately, I felt out of place next to my classmates in their blue jeans and docksiders. Within a couple weeks, Mum took me shopping at Kaufman’s Department Store, and I chose what I saw around me: a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt, a #12 Terry Bradshaw Steelers’ jersey, a Steelers’ sweatshirt, a green Izod golf shirt, green Izod pants, and a pair of light tan corduroys. This selection would tide me over until our next shopping outing many months later—although I quickly learned from my classmates that if I wore my all-green Izod outfit on Thursdays, it obviously indicated that I was “horny.” While I had no idea what this meant, I did know melting into my surroundings necessitated avoiding green on Thursdays.
Relatively self-assured in Dublin, I now felt self-conscious in Pittsburgh. I had a thick Dublin accent, long red hair in a ponytail, and pale skin. My freckles suddenly seemed to stand out against the backdrop of a complexion that had seen more rain than sun. Unable to do much about my wardrobe or my Irish looks, I dedicated myself to changing my accent, rehearsing a new American way of speaking in the mirror.
I also acquired a new vocabulary. My Sunday “brekkie” of rashers, black and white pudding, and burnt sausages became an American “breakfast” of bacon and eggs. My “wellies” gave way to “snow boots.” The older kids weren’t smoking “fags” behind school, they were merely sneaking “cigarettes.” And if we needed medicine, we no longer got it from the local “chemist,” but from the “pharmacy.”
Quickly seeking to master the preferred profanity of the locals, I noted that a combative classmate was no longer a “right pain in the arse,” but a “royal pain in the ass.” I made a particular point of brandishing words and phrases that I was told were unique to the Pittsburgh dialect, like “yinz” (for “you all”), “pop” (for “soda”), and “jagoff” (for “jerk”).
Of course, other differences abounded. After years of bland cornflakes, I had infinite cereal choices, though I usually landed on Cocoa Krispies or Lucky Charms. The bus I took to school was no longer Irish green but mustard yellow. In Ireland, when I misbehaved (hiding out in the girl’s bathroom, for example, to avoid ballet class, which I detested), I had been asked to produce my hand and was given a lashing with a belt or ruler. In the United States, however, I soon saw that punishment merely consisted of sitting in a corner removed from one’s classmates.
Young boys lived in almost all of the houses on my street. For a tomboy like me who loved sports, the neighborhood was a dream. In Ireland, Mum had taught me to play tennis, soccer, and a bit of field hockey. But the boys on Hidden Pond Drive played—and talked about nothing but—baseball. The game seemed slow, as it does initially to foreigners. But once I mastered the rules and key statistics (batting averages, RBIs, and ERAs), every pitch thrown during every at-bat seemed like a vital part of my day.
Mum adapted to her new life, showing no discernible nostalgia for the country she left behind. Despite her deep empathy for others, she focused far less on exploring her own feelings. When I pointed out this inconsistency when I got older, she either changed the subject or just ended the conversation with a dismissive “Arragh sure, I can’t be bothered.”
Despite completing her medical residency back in Dublin, Mum was required to redo her training in the United States, a three-year ordeal. Yet during the same period, she somehow managed to master the new American sport of racquetball (quickly winning the local club championship). She also regularly took Steve and me to Three Rivers Stadium for the baseball games of our new hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Unlike most of my new friends’ parents, she never even considered leaving before the last out. And remarkably, she attended most of my school and sporting events.
But there was no mistaking the Irishness of our family. While our neighbors ate pizza and grilled hot dogs, we rarely went a night without “spuds,” and corned beef and cabbage were a staple. Eddie’s version of a date with Mum was a night spent at The Blarney Stone, a local pub owned by an Irish footballer from County Kerry. When they could, they sat among fellow immigrants, ate Irish stew or bangers and mash, and joined the traditional music sing-alongs, enjoying the “craic.”
THE MAIN CONSTANT between Ireland and the United States was God. In Dublin, though some of the nuns at school terrified me, being a Catholic was a source of comfort, and, I suppose, an affirmation of my Irishness. Given the unpredictability of my home life, I was soothed by the familiarity of the prayers and hymns. When Irish television and radio paused three times a day (at six a.m., noon, and six p.m.) to broadcast the slow and steady chimes of the Angelus bell, I had felt calm—not unlike the effect of the call to prayer I had heard five times a day in Kuwait. The United States was the first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect during the day.
Mum stuck with her promise to the judge, driving my brother and me to Catholic Sunday school and Mass. But my main religious practice was (and still remains) private prayer, appeals to God to look after the people who mattered to me, and—even without the reminder of the Angelus bells—prayers of gratitude. I prayed when I was tying my shoes, having a bowl of soup, or riding the bus to school. I ran through long lists of all the people and occurrences I was thankful for. I prayed that “my daddy and all my aunts and uncles and grannies and granddads and cousins are happy.” And I devoted inordinate prayer time to the fortunes of my new hometown baseball team.
My interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates quickly became fanatical. During the team’s magical 1979 playoff run, which began soon after our arrival in the United States, Mum, Eddie, and I would sit on the new couch in our den and watch Captain Willie “Pops” Stargell light up the field with his smile and reliable bat. I was distraught when, during the World Series, the Pirates lost three of their first four games to the Baltimore Orioles. As my new team faced elimination in each of their next three games, I ducked into the bathroom during tense moments, got down on my knees, and prayed for a change of fortune.
I remember telling God that I knew from television that the Pirates’ players did all kinds of work in the community for vulnerable people. I tried to bargain with Him, pledging to treat my five-year-old brother better in exchange for a late-inning double off the wall, each time rounding out my prayers by softly singing the Irish National Anthem. Why I viewed this song as relevant to the Pirates is unclear to me now, but when they ultimately won the Series four games to three, I was convinced that my well-leveraged negotiations and patriotic chorus were factors in convincing God to turn the contest around.
I began spending my weekly pocket money—now “allowance”—on Topps baseball cards. I was a skilled trader, doing complex multiparty deals with my neighbors, such that I ended up with the entire 1980 collection, minus two elusive cards. As a medical resident, Mum was earning little money, and because Eddie had bought the house and the cars, she was hesitant to impose her children’s expenses on him as well. Thus, when I nagged her to buy me baseball cards so that I might luck into one of the two players I was missing—for me the equivalent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s “golden tickets”—she usually turned me down.
Whenever I had saved up my allowance, I would ride my bike up the steep hill on Hidden Pond Drive and down a busy road to the convenience store a mile away. I would buy as many packs as I could afford, tearing open the waxy paper right there at the cash register, inhaling the smell of the pink gum, and checking to see whether I had landed a winner.
In my mind, Ireland was still my home. But this new place felt a bit like a wonderland. And while I was looking forward to my first trip back to Dublin, which I would take in December of 1979, I was going to gobble up all things American for as long as I could.
3
(#ulink_7f316f5a-cb56-56f9-b70e-285825ac816c)
LOSS (#ulink_7f316f5a-cb56-56f9-b70e-285825ac816c)
Few memories are more seared into my psyche than the moment my father told me he would not allow my mother to take Stephen and me back to America.
Returning to Dublin for the first time since we had moved away in September, Stephen and I were spending the Christmas holiday of 1979 in our old home. Mum had traveled with us and was staying nearby with her close friend Geraldine. I was lying in my pajamas next to my dad on the king-sized bed he had once shared with my mother. He was teasing me for “sounding like a Yank” and for adopting a boy’s haircut, which I had done to look as much like my Pittsburgh friends as possible. Stephen was asleep in the next room.
I was sucking on a peppermint I had raided from a stash in his nightstand when he informed me—as matter-of-factly as if offering up his golf tee time—that he planned to keep Stephen and me in Dublin.
He wanted us around, he explained, and thought it was a grave injustice that the courts had allowed Mum to take us so far away. He waited a few minutes and then telephoned my mother to inform her of his decision. In this short period of calm before I heard Mum’s reaction, I felt affirmed to my core by my dad’s willingness to defy the judge’s ruling. All children covet signs of their parents’ love, and I liked knowing that Stephen and I were worth a fight.
Once he had reached Mum, he handed me the phone so I could say hello first. Almost immediately, I blurted out the news. “Daddy’s keeping us!” I exclaimed, my heart beating madly as I found myself at the epicenter of a high drama.
“What?” Mum asked. When I repeated myself, she said she would be coming to collect us immediately and told me to pass the phone to Dad. Her fury was barely contained.
“Mum’s coming,” I announced, handing the phone over to him.
“No she’s not, pet,” my dad said.
In the ensuing minutes, I could hear Mum’s voice rising sharply through the receiver. Still, I figured they would have another argument—maybe even the fiercest of all their arguments—and then would sort things out.
When Mum didn’t show up that day or the next, I happily settled back into my father’s Hartigan’s routine, with my brother by my side. I loved being back home. For all the novelty that America offered, I had missed even the rain of Ireland.
On Christmas Eve, Stephen and I watched The Sound of Music on a small black-and-white television in the living room where my father and Susan had decorated a Christmas tree and hung our stockings (in Ireland we used our actual socks rather than the enormous red and white American stockings that were the size of Santa’s boots). My father had rented a keg from Hartigan’s and his pub friends were in a jovial mood.
Stephen and I ignored the revelry, happily tugging on Irish Christmas “crackers” until they snapped in two and revealed the small plastic toy. My dad cooked us steaks in a frying pan—his specialty—and took his place at the piano, playing Hoagy Carmichael numbers and our favorite Christmas carols.
At around ten p.m., the doorbell rang. Following my dad to the door and peering around him, I saw Mum and her friend Geraldine standing there. She would not allow Steve and me to stay in a den of booze, she told my father. She had come to take us.
I stood on the threshold, snuggled against my father’s leg. My brother and I watched the two people we loved most speak to each other in subdued tones, but their rage was unmaskable.
“Look at this,” my mother said, gesturing to the scene inside. “Do you really think this is an environment for children?”
When Mum insisted that we were leaving, I walked a few steps toward her. My dad told me to come back, and I froze. Stephen, who had followed me to the door, shuffled forward into Mum’s embrace. But I stood between my parents, paralyzed by the impossible choice.
My mother’s voice grew sterner as she told me to get into her nearby car, its engine running. I did as I was told. And before I had fully processed what was happening, we were driving away.
I turned to look out the back window—a scene I later saw reprised in Hollywood movies—and in the doorway I saw my dad, deflated, watching our car depart. He grew smaller and smaller until we turned the corner and he vanished from sight.
That night, we drove from Dublin to Mum’s hometown of Cork, where we stayed with her sister, Anne. Over the next few days, my father and a friend from Hartigan’s, a member of the Irish parliament, began calling my mother, threatening to secure an injunction to prevent us from leaving the country. As their warnings grew more convincing, Mum began to worry that another legal battle would delay our return to the United States, where she was expected the following week to resume work. In a panic, she asked my uncle Gary, her brother-in-law and the high-spirited family fixer, to drive us to Shannon Airport.
The nighttime drive was harrowing. Uncle Gary ran red lights and drove so far over the speed limit that I felt we were in a car chase. Mum’s constant checking of the passenger-side mirror was a telling sign that the grown-ups were worried. Only now—forty years later—do I realize the meaning of that frenzied drive: although she was in the right, my mother must have had no faith that the Irish courts would see the situation similarly. If my dad had appeared before a judge sober while we were still in the country, she could have lost us.
When we arrived at the airport, as the clock ticked slowly toward the hour of our departure, Uncle Gary bought Stephen and me heaping Irish breakfasts. But my mother neither ate nor took a proper breath until our flight was in the air.
Once we were back in our suburban Pittsburgh home, Mum telephoned Dad to tell him that he couldn’t be trusted to put our welfare first. Not only was he drinking too much, she said, but he had effectively threatened to kidnap us. She couldn’t take time away from work to chaperone our time together, she informed him, so if he wanted to see us, he would need to fly to America.
DURING THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I threw myself into my new American life and began to thrive in school. My baseball skills improved, and I started learning the basics of basketball. No longer the awkward new girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated skirts, I developed a fresh set of friends. Their families brought me to barbecues in the summer and skiing and ice-skating in the winter. Although Mum was working long hours as a doctor, she would get home most summer nights in time to grill us corn on the cob as Pirates games played on the radio. Gradually, as she was able to take vacations, she and Eddie took us white-water rafting and to American historical sites like Gettysburg.
Although she said my dad had forfeited the custody agreement, my mother fulfilled the rest of its terms by taking me to Mass and continuing to teach me Irish. Nothing was worse than being summoned on a sunny day to improve my Gaelic. “Mum,” I would declare, “this makes no sense. Even if I lived in Ireland, I wouldn’t speak this language. And in America it is even more useless.” This logic did not move her. She forced me to review flash cards and write out sentences as if I would soon be back at Mount Anville, taking an exam.
Although my dad and I exchanged letters, and I sent him my unimpressive color-by-numbers artwork, he did not visit. When Susan nudged him, he had a ready response: “I just need to get sorted.” But he was never able to admit he needed help to overcome his drinking, and he never did get sorted.
I have no conscious memories of pining for my father, but even as I lapped up the American experience, a large part of me was waiting. I was waiting for word that he would visit, waiting for him to telephone (which he did, but rarely, as he kept misplacing our number), and waiting for him to once again be my companion. Mum never spoke ill of him, instead describing his “brilliance” and athletic gifts; but she made clear that he was an alcoholic, a verdict I accepted. Slotting my dad in this category was tidy. The designation allowed me to blame the separation on something other than my father. And yet, because I couldn’t comprehend the true nature of addiction, I thought that if my dad simply tried harder, he could recover.
I believed that the magnetic bond between us would motivate him to get his act together—that I would motivate him. But as I waited, I did not feel anger at him for staying away. Instead, I began to mentally replay the Christmas Eve scene on the steps of our Dublin home. My dad hadn’t been the one to leave me, I reasoned. He had been willing to break the law to be with me. I was the one who had left. I had made a choice that night when I heeded my mother’s call.
Even as a feeling of regret and shame began to gnaw at me, I felt sure I would have the chance to set things right between us. So many Irish alcoholics lived well into old age that I never associated drinking with poor health. While four years had soon passed and my father still hadn’t come to visit, I was still positive that we would be reunited. My dad would make sure of it.
IN 1983, MUM AND EDDIE moved us from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, Georgia. After my mother was recertified as a nephrologist, they joined the faculty of Emory University School of Medicine. We packed up and made the move south, arriving at our new home a few days before I began eighth grade—which then marked the beginning of high school.
One afternoon, more than a year after our move, I lay sprawled out on the gray carpeted floor of my bedroom, doing my history homework. My walls were plastered in pictures of my idols—everyone from Mike Easler of the Pittsburgh Pirates to Jack Wagner, the hunky actor who played Frisco on the soap opera General Hospital. From the sound of footsteps in their bedroom, I realized that both Mum and Eddie had arrived home earlier than usual. Behind closed doors, Mum talked quietly on the phone and had hushed conversations with Eddie. Just the family was present—Eddie, Mum, Steve, and me—but the house seemed crowded with tension. I sensed that something bad had happened.
Finally, Mum knocked on my bedroom door and sat down beside me on the floor. Her voice tight, her eyes red, she said, “I have bad news.” I couldn’t conceive of what might be coming, but I didn’t have to wait long. “Your father has died.”
I did not react. I looked at her blankly, refusing, with my entire being, to process what she had said.
“The funeral is Monday,” she continued. “I don’t think you should go.”
I asked her how my father could have died—so suddenly, so inexplicably—at only forty-seven.
“The drink,” she said.
“But I didn’t know,” I said slowly.
“None of us knew the extent of it,” she said.
In recent years, my dad had apparently dramatically increased the amount of alcohol he was consuming, arriving at Hartigan’s as soon as it opened in the morning. By the end, he had amassed such large drinking debts that the owners had finally refused to serve him. The alcohol had so ravaged his body that he had stopped eating. He and Susan had broken up, but my mother told me that Susan had been the one to find his body.
I needed to be alone. Mum walked out, closing the door behind her. As she entered the adjoining room to tell my brother, I sat by myself, numb with shock, unable even to cry. I crawled into bed and prayed that what she had just told me was not true. If it was true, I told God, I needed to see my father again in heaven, where they would surely have pubs.
Now, in addition to mentally replaying the last time I had seen my dad, I was pierced with a new realization: for five years I had been waiting for him, but he had also been waiting for me. “He wanted me to come,” I thought. “And I never came.”
I could not understand why an inquisitive fourteen-year-old girl like me had not asked enough questions to learn that her father’s health was slipping. Why had I stupidly assumed the grown-ups would do what was best? Why hadn’t I insisted on flying over to see him? Why hadn’t I shown him that, despite the fact that I had gotten in the car with my mother that Christmas Eve, I was still his girl? Why hadn’t I found a way to help him? I seemed to have been thoroughly passive as my dad wasted away, by himself, across the wide Atlantic.
I buried myself under the covers—the duvet quilt from my old bedroom in Dublin—and shivered with a feeling of cold so deep that it felt as though my bones were being chilled from the inside.
I later learned that Susan had gone looking for my dad after she hadn’t heard from him in more than a month. When she opened his unlocked front door, she was overcome by the smell of what would turn out to be my dad’s decomposing body amid the stench of vomit and human waste. The derelict, filthy house—my former home—retained only the beds upstairs and the piano in the living room. The rest of the family belongings had been stolen or pawned off—even the kitchen cutlery and our toys.
Susan bravely made her way upstairs and found my deceased father, dressed in a suit as if ready to head out on the town.
He was lying not in his bed, but in mine.
I DID NOT TRAVEL back to Ireland for my father’s funeral in December of 1984. Mum was concerned that his friends and family would blame her—and me—for the downward spiral that ended in his death. She went alone, thinking that if I didn’t attend, I would be spared. This was a reasonable assumption: my dad’s younger sister did, in fact, verbally attack my mother just after the memorial service, screaming, “This is your fault!”
But by returning to school the day after I learned that my dad had died, I did not honor the pain that was tearing at me. By not flying back to Ireland, I took on another cause for regret. “You’re really not going to your father’s funeral?” one of my high school classmates asked me. Standing in front of my locker, holding a geometry textbook and a spiral notebook, I realized the mistake, but my mother had already departed.
My teenage brain had quickly established a clear, causal sequence. Nothing that a grieving family member yelled at me could have been worse than what I already believed. When I left Ireland, I left my dad; I didn’t visit my dad; and thus, he died. Had I not left, or had I at least returned to Dublin regularly, he would still be alive.
In my chain of logic—or responsibility—my mother didn’t really make an appearance. To this day, despite various therapists’ insistence that I must be repressing anger toward her, I don’t fault Mum for what happened. I have read widely on how children are quicker to blame themselves than to acknowledge their parents’ flaws and bad decisions. But for as long as I can remember reflecting on Mum’s actions, I have felt that several things were true at once. Yes, she should have actively sought out information about Dad’s health, and she should have brought my brother and me back to Ireland to see our father. But at the same time, she made her decisions with our well-being in mind. It wasn’t until I had my own family that I began to appreciate how young Stephen and I actually were when we had loitered in Hartigan’s, and how dangerous that environment would have seemed to my mother.
Mum knew our father—his virtues and his vices—as only one who had loved him deeply could. It had taken her years to reach the point where she was able to disentangle herself from him and their marriage. She knew that children can almost never give up on their parents, and she did not want Stephen’s and my image of Jim Power—large and luminous—to be replaced by something diminished. Years later, Susan would tell me about my dad’s emaciated condition in the final two years before he died. “Jim was no longer staring at the abyss,” she recalled. “He was in the abyss.”
Carrying around the grief from my father’s death made me more appreciative of the fact that Mum was healthy. I may have suffered a terrible loss in a terrible way, but I gave thanks to God for my good fortune—even though I now feared losing her too, I still had a mother I adored.
During the summer following my dad’s death, I traveled back to Ireland for the first time since that Christmas of 1979. I visited my paternal grandfather, “Bam Bam,” who was living with my aunt. Bam Bam had just turned ninety, but was still mentally and physically agile, driving a car and following sports and politics.
Not wanting to upset him, I rarely raised the subject of my dad’s absence from our lives. But over the years that followed, without any conscious decision on my part, I built the relationship with him I had wanted with my father. I would faithfully visit him for several weeks each summer; we would watch Irish football together and hurl complaints at the TV. And because he gave me the gift of living until the age of 101, I would share the ups and downs of my life with him in an exchange of letters that lasted for eleven years.
On the same visit that I laid this new foundation with my granddad, however, I got a jolt from my seventeen-year-old cousin, who had revered my father. She described how lonely he had been the last few times he had come to visit her mother. “You and Stephen were all he talked about,” she said. “The doctors won’t ever say it, but he died of a broken heart.”
It never dawned on me at fourteen to ask my cousin why, if my dad missed my brother and me so much, he had so rarely called, or why he had never gotten on a plane to visit.
He meant to. I was certain of it.
4
(#ulink_41a77887-4e99-5ebb-989f-de11668304e8)
DIGNITY (#ulink_41a77887-4e99-5ebb-989f-de11668304e8)
I started at Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983, about a year before my father died. Once again, I was showing up at a new school in a new city where people spoke differently than I did—this time with Southern drawls. When Mum dropped me off, however, I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only new kid arriving that day.
Reporters hovered in the vicinity, waiting to see whether angry white parents would try to impede the arrival of hundreds of new African-American students. As I approached the main entrance, these students—who ranged in age from twelve to seventeen—were filing off a long row of school buses.
Some walked into the school seemingly determined to ignore the uproar that their arrival at Lakeside was causing. A few wore headphones and swayed to music as they disembarked, perhaps shielding themselves from the commotion. Others, less bold or armored, looked like they wished they could retreat back onto the buses.
When Mum and Eddie had moved to Atlanta, they had chosen our suburban neighborhood based on the reputed quality of this two-story public high school, known to be one of Georgia’s best in both academics and athletics. They hadn’t realized, however, that Lakeside was caught up in a long-running fight between black and white Atlantans about the area’s public education system. Just as we made Georgia our home, this conflict erupted into a racially charged firestorm.
While the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had found racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the DeKalb County School System, like many school districts in the South, had remained largely segregated in practice. After a 1972 lawsuit challenging the district’s practices, DeKalb launched what it called the “majority-to-minority” (M-to-M) transfer program. The program allowed African Americans who were a racial majority in their local schools to transfer to schools outside of their neighborhoods, where they would be in the minority. Because DeKalb school officials had initially done little to encourage black students to participate in the program, there were few takers, and the student body of Lakeside remained more than 80 percent white.
Not long before we moved to Georgia, however, the district court ordered DeKalb schools to begin providing free busing across the county. This transportation made participating in M-to-M more viable, and hundreds of African-American students applied to transfer out of lower-performing schools. Black parents sought out Lakeside for the same reason my mother had: they wanted their children to have the opportunity to thrive in a school with a stellar reputation.
In 1983, when more than three hundred African-American families signed up to send their children to Lakeside, the school district turned most of them down. The district’s rationale—backed by vocal, impassioned white parents—was that Lakeside needed to maintain its student/teacher ratio of 26 to 1. To our newly arrived family, however, it seemed clear that the opponents wanted to prevent Lakeside from being more racially integrated.
Several hundred white parents mobilized to create a group they called Parents Demand Quality, which supported the district’s decision to turn away a substantial number of the African-American transfers to Lakeside. In turn, their parents filed a motion with the district court, claiming that blocking their children from transferring was “based on race, not space.” The DeKalb NAACP raised the case with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to investigate. In the end, the African-American parents won their appeal; my class, Lakeside High School’s class of 1988, became the first in the school’s history in which black students outnumbered whites.
While Lakeside offered my African-American classmates more experienced teachers and better-maintained facilities, getting to know the students in the M-to-M program offered a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity. I had heard priests talk about dignity at Mass: the Catechism insisted that the “dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” And my years in Ireland, complemented by Eddie’s history lessons, had taught me plenty about British occupiers’ attempts to trample Irish dignity.
While the M-to-M program gave my black classmates great opportunities, it also placed heavy burdens on their dignity. By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when I would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying before nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home, which meant navigating a complex Atlanta public transportation system that would have daunted most teenagers.
To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.
During the eighth grade, when the dramatic shift in Lakeside’s demographics occurred, I occasionally heard my white classmates complain about “grease” they claimed to have found on their desks—a dig at African-American students who wore Jheri curls. A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”
As the school’s black population expanded, the court ordered more black teachers to be hired, a decision that prompted a number of white parents to complain that they did not want their kids taught by African Americans. Others went so far as to pull their children out of Lakeside entirely, transferring them to the private, largely white Catholic schools in the area. Some members of the faculty embraced the changes; those entrenched in their views did not budge. One defiant white teacher, who had been open about her opposition to the large number of African-American transfers, was overheard in the faculty lounge saying that it was impossible to get through to her black students. “They say prejudice is learned,” she griped to her colleagues. “Well, trying to teach blacks here, I have certainly learned it.”
Mum and Eddie saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” At the kidney dialysis unit, the same senior physician replaced a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., with that of a Ku Klux Klan leader. My brother became friends with an African-American boy named Dorian who often came over to our home after school. On one occasion, a neighbor called my mother at work to warn her that she had seen a “darky” at our house. Both Mum and Eddie made clear to Stephen and me how horrified they were by the prejudice they encountered, and they encouraged us to speak up when we heard such racist barbs.
I did not discuss with my black friends the more entrenched symbols of racism around us. Some Lakeside students thought nothing of affixing Confederate flag bumper stickers to their cars. School field trips made their way to Stone Mountain, Georgia’s 1,600-foot-tall granite behemoth, into which the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson had been carved. Only decades later did I learn that the monument had been commissioned by segregationists and was the scene of numerous Klan gatherings over the years. Georgia’s history of lynching and violent racism was routinely ignored or minimized in our school history lessons.
For all of high school, I sat next to Preston Price in homeroom. Preston, who became a good friend, was black and gay, a rough combination in a staunchly conservative school in a white, suburban, evangelical neighborhood. By our junior year, my best friend, Sally Brooks, and another dear friend, Nathan Taylor, had also come out, meaning that three of my closest high school friends were gay. From today’s more progressive vantage point, it is hard to convey just how unusual these revelations seemed at the time—and how brave my friends were. I saw how each of them agonized as they tried to figure out how to tell their family members and classmates; and I saw the excitement and heartbreak of their crushes and romantic foibles as they lived them, just as they witnessed and coached me through my own.
