Teacher (23 page)

“Yes,” Lears replied, “that’s right. And when was he born, Malcolm Little?” Was he using Malcolm’s given name—what Malcolm X would call his slave name—to diminish the man? Or simply to show Thurston that he was on top of the game, that he knew something about Malcolm too?

I suspect it was just Lears doing what he almost inevitably did as a teacher, feeding your own emotion back to you in a slightly understated way, so that you’d be aware of the feeling you were putting out. Gently, surely, he was always holding up the mirror, and if you were interested in having a look, well then, go ahead. If not, fine. Maybe later on.

Thurston gave a date; perhaps it was even the right one. But now his tone was subdued, a tinge respectful. I was pleased to see him even slightly diminished. We were anything but friends.

In the ninth grade he and I had gone out for football together. He was a big, soft kid. It was pretty clear that his wish to be there was minimal. I was a kid from another city, unprepossessing in appearance (let us say, generously), with thick goggles and the wrong way of approaching everything. When Thurston and I squared off on the football field, the whole team, along with a number of his friends from Dugger Park, was watching. He was easy to beat up on. Timid. No sweat to humiliate.

And I, to be candid, was simply thrilled. I couldn’t have liked it better. Blacks were supposed to be invincible athletes and here was one, quick and strong and with some good skills, that I could toss around like a big stuffed toy. I rubbed it in, pushed him where I wanted him to be and laughed at him a little. Very satisfying. Thurston quit the team two days later and thereafter hated me vividly. And now here he was, a paragon of political dissent, busting into our discussion of
The Stranger
to lay down the word.

But Lears, for his part, would make use of whatever came his way. To him, teaching could turn into a sort of performance art. If a truck went blasting down High Street and blew its whistle on the road, loud and whining, he was capable of breaking into a new riff to tell us, say, how Seneca had believed that the degree to which some grating noise bothered us was a reflection of how much we were full of irritation at the world for not conforming to our wishes, not being perfect and perfectly under our control. Noise sensitivity was an index of egotism. What did people think?

Schopenhauer, on the other hand, thought that noise sensitivity demonstrated intelligence. The ability to be annoyed showed that you were aware, alert, not living the humdrum, tedious way that most people did. Seneca? Schopenhauer? Did either of them seem right to us? Lears was continually giving us means to measure who we were, ways that let us sneak up on our habitual selves from a new angle and see what we could see. For this task, he would use anything that came to hand.

Say that it’s Valentine’s Day and there are chocolates in class. Some of the girls are mooning at cards they’ve gotten their boyfriends to send. Well, let’s use it. What do you think love is? Is it the soul’s longing for the beautiful, as Plato said? Is it a search for the soul’s lost mate, as Aristophanes claims in
The Symposium
? Is it a quest for the parent of the opposite sex, as Freud said? (Gross!) Is it the urge to create the best possible members of the next generation without regard to one’s own future happiness, thus the proliferation of unhappy marriages (Schopenhauer again)? Ideas? Guesses? Hopes? Lears was infinitely sensitive to our responses, even when they were dim, and he would never rub it in, except of course in the case of Buller, who had decided to go the idiot route regardless of rain or snow or miracle from on high.

Lears now took in Thurston’s change of tone and immediately shifted his own gears. He became welcoming, warm, though in his own quirky way.

“Sit down, sit anywhere you like. Perhaps we can talk about Malcolm some.”

And the group did, and suddenly they were no longer a gang but part of a seminar. They were here with something to teach. “Now tell us,” Lears said softly, “what we need to know about Malcolm X. He lived here in Boston for a while, didn’t he? He worked at a dance hall in Roxbury. He went to jail in Massachusetts.”

I never had heard of Malcolm X, and I listened as Thurston, with occasional help from his friends, began the story of Malcolm X’s life. He told how Malcolm—Malcolm Little—had been born in Omaha, Nebraska, and how Malcolm’s father had been killed by white men for being proud and standing up for himself. Then he talked about Malcolm’s living in New York and Boston, where he’d been a drug dealer and a thief. Malcolm had gone to jail, as Lears said, in Massachusetts, and in jail he’d made his first contact with the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims.

What was the teaching about? Thurston and company were a little vague on the question, but it had a lot to do with the fact that white people were devils, who had enslaved the highly civilized black people of the world. Malcolm had preached this gospel and become famous among blacks across America. Then he had broken with Elijah Muhammad because of something Malcolm had said after Kennedy’s assassination.

I found myself, as I rarely did, with my hand in the air. What, exactly, had he said? Thurston scowled, but there was nothing especially vituperative in his answer. “He said that it was a matter of chickens coming home to roost.” What that meant, Thurston went on to explain, was that white people had lived by violence—especially violence against black people—and now it was coming back home to them.

“And then?” Lears asked.

Thurston had nothing to say. He was finished with his story.

So Lears continued it for him. Malcolm had broken with Elijah Muhammad and started his own church. He had made a pilgrimage, a hegira, to Mecca, and he had come back preaching brotherhood between white people and black.

Lears didn’t say these things superciliously so as to trump Thurston and his crew, but to add to the story. When Lears was finished, he made it clear that to think about Malcolm X, you couldn’t simply assume that his last theory about race was his best one. You had to listen to the stories Malcolm had acquired from Elijah Muhammad, too, and see if you thought they provided a good metaphor—in the way that, say, parts of the Bible you couldn’t take literally provided some good metaphors to some people—about the way it was in the world.

When Lears was done, Thurston added a few words about Malcolm’s greatness and, as the clock hopped its last significant hop of the day and the bell rang, rose, thanked Lears and the class for listening, and walked out. He seemed to be blown away—proud and astonished at once—that white people (and the class was all white) would take something like this so seriously. But of course
we
probably wouldn’t have, at least on our own. Lears had shown us what it was to disarm someone’s aggression and then, rather than gloating at your little rhetorical win, listen—genuinely listen—to what he had to say.

But there was a more striking aspect of the way that Lears had behaved. It was not only his receptivity; nor was it what he had said per se, though his knowledge about Malcolm X was impressive. It was something about his overall demeanor. He acted—there is no better way to put this—like himself. When he talked, he stroked his little mustache and consulted the gunboats and swung his wrist in the baseball card–tossing way. His voice was mellifluous, a tinge ironic, and highly, highly cultivated.

He didn’t, in other words, do what every other white guy that I knew generally did when he was in the presence of blacks. He didn’t retool himself, get louder or more macho, or try to find a black timbre for his voice. He wasn’t on the verge of offering to slap five; he wasn’t bobbing his head in a Motown rhythm. He simply acted like what he was: a singular, complex, unapologetically intellectual, non- and anti-macho man with a Harvard degree. This blacking up in the presence of actual blacks is a phenomenon one sees to this day as white guys vie with each other to act as black, to talk and move as black, as the blacks around them.

The moment in Lears’ class might even have had some broadly cultural resonance, I suppose. Because when a lot of the Ivy League–educated left-wing guys had their first up-close meetings with the Black Panthers and their ilk, what the Ivy League guys did was to swoon. They fell in love. They were mesmerized by the leather jackets, by the rifles, by the parade-ground drills, by the salutes, and by the rhetoric that took no prisoners. And these intelligent, often brave war resisters began wanting one thing above all else: to be accepted by the black men as true, hard-core fellow revolutionaries. They wanted to be tough, uncompromising dudes. Real men, not pussies.

And weren’t the Panthers, with their close-order drills and their uniforms and their discipline and their group solidarity, just a little bit like the football teams that the swooning SDSers had so despised in high school? I don’t know, but I’d be willing to bet a little that our friend the Peace Hawk, who so hated militarism in its every form, could go a little gaga in the face of hard-ass black machismo.

But the Panthers weren’t to be swooned over; they were to be engaged and talked to, one person to another, as Lears did with Thurston and would do with anyone who came along whose mind wasn’t completely under lock and key. Surely there was no part of Lears, no matter how sequestered or far-flung, that desired to wear a uniform, join a club, or perform the equivalent, physical or mental, of an Alabama Quick-Cal or two.

As I left class that day, I was curious—a feeling that at the time I had little experience with. What did this Malcolm character mean by saying that whites were devils and that blacks ought to form their own nation, get rid of us once and for all? I was annoyed by it, by the general denunciation. But the outrageousness of the whole thing made me sit up and take notice.

On the way out the door, Lears stopped me. “You know,” he said, “I think you might want to look at Malcolm X’s autobiography. I think that you would get a lot out of that book.”

This took me by surprise, this business about myself. Because though Lears was consistently benevolent, there was a kind of gently programmatic quality to his attitude. For quite some time it wasn’t clear that he really went a long way in distinguishing us one from another. Who we were and who we might become was our business. He’d give us the necessary goad, send us flying, or dragging, out of the gate, but where we headed was our own concern. But clearly he had some notion of who I was and what I might need. And it touched me greatly, this observation. It reminded me of my father saying that there was something coming up on Carson that I was bound to like. That someone viewed me as more than a shirt and shoes, a walking destination for TV shows and Wonder Bread—this was a singular thing.

But, really, I didn’t read books (though by this time I didn’t mind hearing them read aloud and discussed in class). And although I had been curious for an instant about Malcolm—he seemed like a badass character from a movie, and something more than that, too—it was all quickly tamped down beneath thoughts of the pool hall and track practice and listening to the pop Top Twenty on WMEX. Race and books and politics and Thurston White: What did all this have to do with me?

MORE THAN a little, it would turn out. For as to politics, well, a sentiment of Saul Bellow’s Charlie Citrine applied well enough then to me: I never know what I think until I hear what I say. About a week after Thurston’s visit—and maybe in some oblique way because of it, and because of the visit of the Peace Hawk and because of Lears and all that was stirring in me there in that class without my fully knowing it—I heard what I said, and found out what I thought about the war in Asia.

My father and I were alone, watching television, the eleven o’clock news, prelude to Johnny’s monologue. War and war protests were on the box. We were silent through the combat footage, where kids in black-rimmed glasses not unlike my father’s and carrying weapons often nearly as heavy as they were returned fire from a ditch. Then came the other kids. The Harvard types made their way onto the shadowy screen, black and white and grainy, with their posters and NVA flags and their chants (“Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!”) and their headbands and their camp followers, with peasant dresses and lolling, liberated breasts.

My father went apoplectic. He fell into a fury. His face turned bloodred. He snorted from out of the great misshapen nose. They were spoiled brats. Lazy! Morons! He cried out: “Get back home. Get home and do what you’re told.” Then a blast that might have sent 58 Clewley Road up and into orbit, and that got the landlords discharging the small-scale cannonade on their ceiling. “Do what YOU ARE TOLD!”

That last,
Do what you are told,
was a standing disciplinary slogan in our house. We heard it often. It was a mainstay, along with “Snap It Up!”, “Chuck It In!”, “Get a Move On!” (And, of course, “Relax!”) What it meant was that the house in which we lived was not a democracy, nothing close. It was a monarchy, with one king, who would rule forever, who was never wrong and never to be gainsaid. It was as though, suddenly, he was talking to the protesters and to me at once (and maybe to Frank Lears, too, about whose subversive ways he had now heard enough, thank you). Do what you are told!

Do what you’re told! Even now, rarely, rarely, I say it to my own children, and when I do, I feel a shiver through my body, as though I’m momentarily possessed, as though I’ve been grabbed by a demon that was not my father per se but a devilish rage for order that possessed him also, though given my advantages, given what has so far been an absurdly lucky life, its visitations to me are far less frequent. Who dares to say that there are no such things as ghosts?

Suddenly, for no reason that I could understand, my eyes were hot with tears, and I hollered at him, “How would you like it if Philip and I went over there, to Vietnam, and came back dead? Would you like that?”

My father looked at me like someone had hit him across the head with a two-by-four. For a moment he was speechless, the mental screen gone completely blank. Not, for Wright Edmundson, a common event.