An American Story (37 page)

“Another mineral water, please,” she asked sweetly, and indicated the wheelchair-bound old lady.

I was in evening clothes. The waiters were in uniforms. I had a drink in my hand. The waiters had trays in theirs. I was doing nothing. They were working hard. I pointed to them as the polite young woman waited politely.

“
That's
a waiter,” I said. I pointed to myself. “
This
is a Harvard Law School student.”

I never heard the end of Jackson's speech. I went off to law school and never looked back.

CHAPTER SEVEN

———

BREAKING RANKS

This was the frame of mind in which I arrived at Harvard Law School: militant and distrusting. Of my putative allies. The official enemy I understood quite well.

Washing up on the shore of the Ivy League was a surreal experience. Wonderful. But surreal. Something amazing happened every day of my first semester there, like finding out that one needn't work very hard at Harvard Law School.

Many students never work another day over the next three years once admitted to HLS. As the saying there goes, “Times passes and so will you,” or “The hardest thing about HLS is getting in.” Gentlemen's B's and C's were de rigueur.

To my surprise, it was a fairly unintellectual environment. People cut class for weeks on end but they didn't do anything interesting instead; they watched
Melrose Place,
slept a lot, and bitched about how much they hated HLS. They read schlock books, when they read, and the men were the least manly I'd yet encountered. The typical uniform for my average male classmate was rumpled Harvard sweats straining over a beer belly. The women put a hell of a lot more effort into their appearance and constantly bemoaned the lack of male interest. The male classmate who fit this description was also very likely to be catching the “fuck bus” from Harvard to Wellesley so he could date teenage undergrads who listened in rapt silence when he spoke. Watching a group of barely shaving, barely tall-enough-to-ride-the-teacups-at-Disneyland Lords of the Universe swagger around the Hark (our student union), one friend of mine remarked, “Screw perfect LSATs. What this place needs is a height requirement.”

Having worked hard throughout prep school, high school, and college, many of my classmates considered graduate school their chance to relax and reap the benefits of their neurotic-compulsive, overachieving youth. Most of my classmates were just there to get drone jobs in mega–law firms, which is what gave HLS a “vo-tech” air not unlike that at O'Fallon Tech, where I'd prepared for a secretarial career. It was confounding to me to hear twenty-year-olds planning to be unhappy, scheduling it in on their day runners like a doctor's appointment. They'd say the most amazing things, like “You're going to be miserable anyway, so you gotta make sure you get the most money.” Even more didn't know why they were there at all, just that it was the only item remaining unchecked on their external-validation to-do list. To be sure, HLS had its hard-charging social reformers, rabid conservative activists, and serious scholars, but it was the sad sacks I was unprepared for. The twelve years since kindergarten spent unimaginatively grades-focused robbed too many of them of the ability to
feel
their educations anymore. But how could anyone take Harvard for granted?

My classmates threw the school newspaper and the weekly admin newsletter we got on the Hark floor, never mind that the cleaning staff—most our parents' age—always placed huge bins strategically. The floor was white with discarded paper on Thursdays and Fridays. They openly read newspapers in class, carried on pointless conversations at full volume, and drowned out the last five minutes of every class snapping their binders open and shut putting their things away. Professor Meltzer, our criminal law professor, kept us late one day to finish a point. One of my young classmates stormed dramatically out, furious. He was waiting right outside the door to fume with his friends. A professor would be teaching his heart out, trying desperately to get people to participate—they'd just let him twist in the wind. I'd be thinking, Hey, the guy's working up there, and raise my hand. I only got called on Socratically twice in three years because I readily participated. One of the most dedicated teachers at HLS, Professor Rakof, was walking backwards while making a point once and tripped. The class tittered. These, my betters?

Most professors called on students randomly in their assigned seats, so the cowards “backbenched,” i.e., sat in the unassigned back row of our huge classrooms. This though most professors were perfectly pleasant and helped you arrive at a passable answer. God forbid they should have just looked the professor in the eye and said, “I don't know.” Some profs picked a row at the beginning of class and cut a swath down it. Twice, I saw women in the chosen row scurry red-faced out of class rather than be called on. How many of them had perfect LSATs? Twelve years of real-world contingencies and briefing senior officers who'd rather bite your head off than let you take a breath took the starch out of Arthur Miller and Alan Dershowitz for me. I respected them but I had no fear of them (Miller is the tyrant; Dershowitz is beloved by students).

I was very serious about my studies at HLS (as were many of my classmates), especially the first semester of the first year, which pretty much decides your entrée into fast-track law. Many at HLS affect to hate the place; that's immaturity and upper-class “cool pose,” I think. They would have kidnapped the dean's mother to get in, yet they acted as if they'd been shanghaied by a press gang once they got there. I had the time of my life. I knew exactly how fortunate I was. As well, I was blown away by the luxury of time and resources that faced me. Never before had I had only one thing to do—I had more free time in law school than I've ever had before in my life. I'd been helping out at home, working, and going to night school for so long that, faced now with a few hours of classes and studying each day, I was dancing in the streets. Also, being older, I knew how to organize my time and I knew how to stay cool under the pressure of HLS's dreaded Socratic method. Every day, I was whispering grateful prayers of thanks to my parents and to the United States Air Force—I'll never face tougher standards.

——

The first thing I did was join BLSA (the Black Law Students' Association). It did not go well. I hate working in groups (they're never serious enough) and I hate meetings (ditto); the Air Force is the only organization I had ever joined voluntarily. Second, I was eleven years, on average, older than everyone else. Most of them were at least middle class, and, of course, there was an in crowd that put all other in crowds to shame because so many had (or claimed to have) important connections. From one moment to the next, BLSA was a fashion show, a politburo meeting, a hotbed of revolution, a social club, and a refuge from the white world we'd chosen. In short, it was a typical association of pampered twenty-somethings who couldn't decide whether or how to take themselves seriously.

From my crochety point of view, it was all very undergraduate. I'm critical of them, but I actually felt maternal toward them. I could see them trying on different personae (which, after all, is what college is for) and trying to gauge others' perceptions of them. One minute they were upper class and blasé about Gstaad, the next they were ghetto-fied and “down with the peeps, know what ahm sayin?” I understood that. I certainly wasn't the same person at thirty-three as I'd been at twenty-two and I'd certainly tried on and discarded several mutually exclusive personae; it didn't seem fair for me to assert myself (something told me they didn't crave my leadership the way my OTS flight mates had). Also, I was pretty sure I'd be blown off if I tried since I rarely saw things the way they did.

BLSA, by charter, exists for the benefit of its members and God knows they didn't need my help looking out for their own best interests. Anyway, I was always putting my foot in my mouth with them. Once, I was talking to a black classmate who is the son of a judge. I liked John; he never pretended to be a ghetto boy and never troubled himself much with what other blacks thought of him. We were so far apart in life experience, though. He'd come from California and was bemoaning the expense of relocating his things. I suggested he do what I'd done—get rid of all his possessions except for the bare necessities—and replace dishes, furniture, and such at thrift stores. He stopped mid-step and looked at me like I was recommending we eat from garbage cans. I withdrew the suggestion.

As always, I was clueless as to how to navigate the social shoals of large groups. By the end of the first few weeks, the social doors were shut. There'd been a black admittees' weekend in April which I'd thought extravagant. Most everyone else had come, though; the cliques had clicked before I knew what was happening. Since cliques have personalities, the window of opportunity quickly shut on establishing an atmosphere of open dialogue at BLSA. In the end, my high tolerance for solitude was my biggest impediment to social mobility; I voluntarily spent 90 percent of my time alone happily reading, renting foreign films, and working out. But when Bobby visited, I barely saw him. I was terrified the campus cops had him on lockdown for being big, black, and obviously non-Harvard. Instead, he'd melded right in with my classmates. For days after his visit, my phone rang with people looking for him. He simply expects to fit in, and so does.

Also, Bobby was exotically “authentic” and I wasn't, even though we're siblings, raised in the same household. Knowing he was a huge rap fan, I took him to a panel on the significance of hip-hop held at the beginning of his visit, before anyone knew he was my brother. Wide-eyed with stunned disbelief at the pomposity and postmodern gobbledygook he was hearing, I couldn't help laughing at him.

“Welcome to my new world,” I said.

“You need to think about moving,” he joked back, shaking his head.

I finally persuaded him to offer his own comments. Even the rappers on the panel hung on his every word. People tripped over themselves trying to draw him out, “down” as he was with street lingo, the bona fides of a waiter, and a rough-hewn “street” exterior. I, indeed anyone who criticized them (especially women), was routinely cut off, ignored, and generally dismissed. I got the back of the hand several times as “not understanding the typical black's reality” from millionaire rap stars and Exeter grads, presumably because I both spoke mainstream English
and
disagreed with them. To our great amusement, Bobby and I were specifically contrasted (him: relevant; me: irrelevant) several times, with comments such as those recommending I spend more time with “real brothers” like him.

I forced myself to go to BLSA meetings for my first year, though I dreaded them more and more as time passed. They were typical students—no meeting ever started or ended on time. No one had ever accomplished the task he'd agreed to perform. No one could disagree with the party line without having his Négritude questioned. Why is it always that the biggest oaf has the loudest mouth, the most forceful personality, and is so persuasive to people who are perfectly reasonable away from the group?

At one meeting, we were debating our response to both Colin Powell's speaking at graduation and the gay students' group's plan to protest. He was still chairman of the JCS then, and his opposition to gays in the military was a hot topic. The gay students' group had sent us what is one of the most diplomatic, neighborly, and reasonable letters I've ever seen explaining why they'd be protesting his visit and assuring us that it had nothing to do with race, only that one slice of his politics. Whoever penned that letter has my admiration, writer to writer.

A consensus seemed to be forming that we could take the protesters at their word and stay out of it while we formulated our own response to his visit. One of the Beautiful People changed before our very eyes from suave party boy to Malcolm X lite. Spittle flew as he lapsed into field-hand-speak and fulminated about how “the white man come up in here and we house niggers s'pozed to run do what he tell us.” It went on and on. Any minute, I expected him to break character and lead us in laughter at his joke. He finished his spiel and turned back to the Beautiful Woman he'd been romancing before he took the floor.

It was unhelpful, it was an act, and it was silly. Part of me wanted to laugh and part of me wanted to cry, because it's forceful personalities like his that dominate the discourse in the black community and signal the rest of us to conduct ourselves in this defensive, self-conscious, dishonest, and ultimately masturbatory manner. To our credit, even though he wasn't the only person who saw it this way, we published a letter supporting Powell in glowing terms but also supporting homosexuals' right to serve their country. Many more of us disagreed with the Head Negroes than made a point of it, obviously.

At BLSA meetings, I'd sit with two older friends (one ex-Army) who were also doing their best to go along with the program. Afterward, we'd go for drinks and try to make sense of the ridiculous things we'd just heard. Except for sporadic appearances, none of us stuck it out much into spring semester. As another friend put it, “For them, there's only one way to be black and it aint
my
way.”

Blacks at HLS were in a difficult spot and I felt the strain as much as anyone else. We knew we were in a high-visibility situation and we all fluctuated between being representatives of the race and being selfish individuals. This led to some silly and some harrowing situations. More than anything else, though, Harvard is a silly place and the politics often reflect that.

Here's a typical scenario: in our first year crim class, one of the least impressive black women who ever lived objected on racist grounds to Professor Meltzer's hypothetical involving unopened crates of stereo equipment in a tenement apartment and the likelihood of their being stolen. Being both dumb and a bad loser, she wouldn't let it go, so the class ended up having to vote as to whether we thought it more likely that said boxes in a mansion or in a tenement were stolen. I could have strangled her.

In a housing law and policy class, Professors Jean Charn and Duncan Kennedy were detailing the history of ethnic housing patterns in the Boston area in the pre–Civil War period and how government policies affected them. This same woman accused them of racial insensitivity because they failed to account for the housing patterns of the large numbers of blacks she claimed lived there then. The next class, the professors (two of the most activist leftists at HLS) distributed information detailing how less than 2 percent of the area's population was black during the relevant period, and therefore insignificant in our discussions. This woman and her all too numerous ilk were excellent arguments against affirmative action.