Teacher (22 page)

Many white kids took style cues from the blacks (though none of them would have put William’s bows on their shoes), affected the pimp roll, and listened, as I did, for a while almost exclusively, to music from Motown. For three or so months, I abandoned Arnie “the Woo” Ginsberg and his Night Train Show, where he spun hits by Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys and Herman’s Hermits, and listened strictly to WILD, to catch the Temptations and the Four Tops. What many of us white kids knew about love and loss, albeit at second hand, was in the idiom of blacks. We sang Temps songs to ourselves as we walked down the halls. I never heard a black kid whistling anything by Lennon and McCartney.

The Elvis phenomenon was everywhere. The King had, without ever saying as much, probably without knowing as much, repackaged himself as a black man, or, as some would say, a White Negro. And a considerable proportion of the white guys at Medford High were involved in a similar reprocessing job, talking black talk, walking the walk, wearing some of the clothes, laughing the boisterous seen-the-world, done-the-world Afro-Am laugh, sometimes with a sense of self-parody, most often not. At the same time, of course, they sustained themselves as dutiful Irish or Italian racists, who would no more use the word
Negro
than the word
phenomenology.

Some days, when the atmosphere on the bus was low-static, I’d plunk myself down beside Jackie Lane or one of the Bronson twins and yack about one thing and another. Jackie was a cornerback on the football team, a barracuda-style hitter. But he had a beatific smile and was easy and blithe about all things under the sun. Sometimes we sat on the bus and talked about the sorrows of wind sprints and of Alabama Quick-Cals, those exercises that our semi-cracked backfield coach enforced on us, where we made synchronized robotic motions and chanted little war chants about ruining the opposition. Often we sat in the middle of the black section—the back—and I felt like a cool enough white guy indeed. But at other times the smog was too heavy, and Jackie would indicate that this simply wasn’t a good time for me to sit myself down in the midst of what could erupt into mild to moderate ugliness.

Why did the Medford racial weather shift so mysteriously? Like the questions about why William went around with a German shepherd or why, as the white kids often averred, “When you fight one of ’em, you fight ’em all,” any white guy could have answered in a trice: because the blacks were touchy and oversensitive and flew off over nothing. It never occurred to us that the only way they could survive was by getting collectively pissed when the South Medford Bears stomped one of them. Or that being hard-assed was the only way they could sustain their dignity when they looked at TV and saw white people throwing rocks at tiny black kids as they made their way into school in Alabama or Arkansas, or when they saw that the guys doing the fighting in Vietnam and coming home dead were disproportionately black. Nah—they were just touchy, those people.

Across from me in history class sat a black girl named Karen Davis. Karen was fine-featured, pretty, a terrific student, dutiful, scrupulously turned out, a little prim. But she also had a fine, raunchy sense of humor and smiled in a telling way when Mr. Johnson made one of his speeches about truth or facts or about why you need to know history (because, of course, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it). She was, for reasons best known to the gods, extremely fond of me, and we yammered away companionably at any chance we got. Karen was deeply respected by the other black girls, and even on the bus could break off a conversation with her friends, stroll over, and talk a little with me about the history homework or some other such thing. No other black girl could leave the group and approach a white guy in this way. But the idea that a friendship with Karen would develop in any form outside of class or off the bus was simply one I was not in a position to have. It would have been like a cave dweller making a breakthrough in quantum physics.

SO THE interchange between the groups, even before the year I’m describing, 1969–1970, was far from simple. And in that year, when things were bursting open all over the place in America, the racial scene changed in Medford, for both better and worse—mostly for better, I think. The change for me began in Frank Lears’ class.

After the snowball fight, things had begun to go pretty well. No miracle took place—I don’t want to idealize the process. Still, virtually no one but Sandra would read a book at home. We simply sat in a circle and read the pages aloud in turn. Periodically, Lears would ask a question and sometimes, even then, in February or thereabouts, he would offer a teasing, partial answer to it or stay silent until it was clear that nothing was going to come, and then he would move on to the next query. But sometimes we’d get an actual discussion moving, too. There’d be all-ins about politics, beauty, truth, the good—in short, about all the things Lears probably imagined we’d be talking about on the day he first walked up the sad front steps of Medford High. Even a few mean frog-blurps from Buller couldn’t stop the flow.

By then Lears had begun to cast his spell on us; he was starting to bewitch us the way Socrates did beautiful Alcibiades, who compared the great teacher’s painful, galvanizing effects on him to the bite of a serpent. Outside of class, we speculated about Lears constantly. What kind of family did he come from? Was he rich? Did Mom and Dad have bundles of dough? (Not if Lears’ wardrobe and car were any indication.) Was he in SDS? Did he smoke weed? What kind of music did he really like? Did he have a girlfriend? Was Sandra in love with him? Did he, maybe, reciprocate? And whatever in the hell did he wear that paper clip in his lapel for?

These questions were unanswerable. For, without being at all cold, Lears was somehow opaque. With the exception of Buller, whom he clearly disliked, he seemed about equally affectionate to us all. His look was always kind. By now there was only a tinge of irony in his tone, just enough so that if Henry James were to walk in, Lears wouldn’t have to apologize for being a complete flatbrained I-see-the-world-as-it-truly-is-and-must-be American.

And if anything, Lears had become a yet better listener. When he listened to you, the quality of his attention was so easygoing and tolerant, yet so intense, that you felt like no one had ever really paid attention to you before.

But as open as he was and seemed to be—for in his manner he was lighter and more approachable than any other teacher—there was still something impersonal and removed about the man. His pedagogy wasn’t about himself and his ideas per se. He didn’t, I believe, want you to think the way he did, to love Thoreau, say, as he loved him. (We gleaned this love from a hint here and there.) He wanted you simply to be able to ask yourself the kinds of questions about what you believed, and why, that he himself might ask. He was like a mirror who gave you back to yourself. When we asked and answered questions about Lears’ origins, preferences, and desires, we were revealing much more about ourselves than we possibly could about him.

We wanted to find a psychology for Lears, a set of discernible, private motives for what he did. But once you find someone’s psychology—once you’re able to say that for such and such a one, it all owes to a will to power or an Oedipal fixation or compensatory guilt or what have you—then you can write off their effect. You’re superior then to the teacher; you know him better than he knows himself. Lears had a pedagogy, a way of teaching, but he wouldn’t undermine himself by letting a clear psychology show through.

And he spared no one (except Buller) his hard-edged questions. Most teachers would early on have seen Sandra as an ally amidst the barbarian hordes, a potential teacher’s pet, someone to look to and share some eye-rolling with when Buller said something prizewinningly stupid, when he brought off a sledgehammer blow that sent the little weight flying up the test-your-strength scale to ring the idiot bell. But no, Sandra got the same sort of interrogation we all did.

Sandra, for instance, couldn’t connect with Camus’
The Stranger,
the story of the man who feels nothing at his mother’s funeral, who conducts an empty, loveless affair with a woman named Marie, and who finally murders an Arab, for no apparent reason. Sandra thought the book irrelevant. Off-the-wall. People weren’t like that—that is, they didn’t contain, just beneath the deadened skin, the potential for horrid violence. Sandra was, it seems, a Rousseauian, and generally felt that all evil comes from corrupt society. And she could be astute and articulate in defense of the doctrine.

And maybe Lears concurred; he was certainly the gentlest man I had ever met. He touched everything—a pen, the desk, your back when he needed to tap your shoulder—as if it were made of the most precious china. But he wouldn’t let Sandra off the hook with her innate-goodness theories. She had a lot of bloody history to account for. What about the wars and pogroms, the massacres, the gleeful bloodlust that simply
was
a major quotient of the human chronicle? And what about Darwin and his theory of the survival of the fittest? Were we humans
total
exceptions to the Darwinian laws, which he sketched in for us (though at Medford High, where the big fish habitually gorged on the small, the theory didn’t take much explaining) with a seeming conviction? If so, what accounted for that difference? Did we have immortal souls, disposed to good and bequeathed to us by some god? If so, what god? What particular evidence was there for the innate-goodness doctrine?

There was not a hint of meanness or aggression in any of this. Clearly, he respected Sandra a great deal. And as I say, Lears may have agreed with her. Still, he would not let her, or himself, off the hook.

A few days later, when we were still on
The Stranger,
Lears asked us about solitude. What does it mean to be alone? Is it possible? What would it mean to be genuinely by oneself? Sandra raised her hand, perhaps ready to treat us to a description of Zen meditation and its capacity to melt the ego beyond solitude into pure nothing-ness. But Lears must have seen something ripple across Nora Balakian’s usually serene face. He gestured in her direction, though she hadn’t volunteered.

Nora was a high school princess, a sorority girl. Her autobiography, I’d have guessed, could have been translated into a graph peaking from prom to prom—she was probably invited to them all over the Greater Boston area—with soft valleys of preparation in between. She sometimes affected a teasing nasal voice acquired from Kelly Hunt, vitally alive in my memory for having given a thirty-minute talk on the subject of the pencil in the English class of Miss Cullen—she of the supply-closet imprisonment, etc.

What Nora did was to run through a litany of defenses against being alone. She mentioned listening to the radio and talking on the phone, then playing the songs and the conversations over in her mind. She cited a span of other strategies, ending, perceptively enough, with expectation, our habit of blocking out the present by waiting for things to happen in the future. “Waiting,” she said. “Waiting for things to happen to you is a way of not being alone.”

“Not half-bad,” Lears said.

But Nora did not express herself with detachment. She said
I
—“This is how
I
keep from being alone.”

“And why,” asked Lears, “is it hard to be alone?”

“Because,” Nora answered, “I might start to think about things. I might start to think about my life.”

Nora had been, up to this point, one of the Elect (as Blake liked to call them, satirizing Calvinist ideas about predestination), meant for all happiness. Suddenly she had gone over to the side of the terminally Lost. One of the great sources of grief for those who suffer inwardly is their conviction that others exist who are always happy. From the ranks of the local happy few, Nora had just checked out, leaving some hints about those she’d left behind.

But she’d done more than that. She’d been honest. She’d told us unapologetically how it was with her. And who had more to lose by such a revelation than Nora, who—beautiful, poised, intelligent—really did seem to embody perfection? If she could do such a thing—talk candidly, self-critically, without pretense—perhaps the rest of us could too.

It was one of those February days when the class was on something of a roll that a group of black guys came banging into the room. This was not standard operating procedure at Medford High. Periodically one, or sometimes two or three students, would stand and bolt for the door, fed up, probably, by what was going on in class. But the idea of an invasion, a sudden influx
into
a classroom, that was something going on in universities at the time, where students were forever disrupting classes to protest the war, but not at MHS.

At the head of the group was a kid named Thurston White, with whom—no surprise—I had some bad history. He was a big, heavy-set guy, with regular features and an appealing baby-face. On his head today he had an African pillbox cap, small and red, with tiny mirrors decorating it. With it he wore a dashiki, mismatched, most anyone then would say, with the hat. There were maybe six or seven guys in the posse, but Thurston was clearly in charge.

“Do you know what today is?” he bellowed at us.

I looked over at Lears immediately, to see how he was taking it. Did I expect that he’d become fatally upset, hop and holler at the interlopers to get themselves out of his classroom? To him, this had to be a strange reversal. He was part of the generation that had burst into offices and classrooms and stopped business as usual at Harvard and Columbia and the rest. His contemporaries had taken over deans’ offices, shredded their records in the paper shredder, kicked back in their plush leather armchairs, and puffed their cigars. Now suddenly the tables were turned. Lears was, give or take, the establishment. What would he do with that? Would he fall apart and sputter and rage? Do a Leo Repucci routine?

Lears simply looked a little more melancholy and a little more bemused than usual and replied, “Why don’t you tell us.”

“Today,” Thurston roared, “is the anniversary of the death of Malcolm X.”