The Hustle (6 page)

The Hampton family lived in the “middle class” Madrona neighborhood in the Central Area, an area southeast of William Grose's property. When he was nine years old, Eric started to play on Willie McClain's CAYA basketball team. On days when they weren't over at the McClain's, it was more than likely that Damian and JT were at the Hamptons. “They spent almost as much time at my house as they did at their own, eating, sleeping, and everything else,” says Charlie Hampton, a compact, energetic man with a thick mustache and a boisterous laugh. “We were the quote ‘rich folks on the block.' ”

Eric went to the public elementary school down the street, where he'd been tracked into the “gifted” program. After Charlie Hampton went out to have a look at Lakeside, he figured there was no reason not to try to get his son the best education Seattle had to offer, telling Eric, “These same snotty-nosed rich kids you see around here will be the same people running this country in thirty years. Maybe it's your break in life, or maybe it's not your break in life, but you'll know how the rest of the world lives. You won't have to fear anybody, you know what you got is as good as what they got, you know that you're just as smart as anybody.”

Eric had other ideas. “In the morning, I used to cry, ‘I don't want to go to this school!' ” he says. “I remember just feeling isolated. I was the only little black kid. I didn't know anybody, really. So I kind of isolated myself, just on the assumption that I didn't know these people and they weren't going to be nice to me.” Eric was a skinny kid who said very little. When he spoke, it was in a voice so subdued that it was hard to hear what he was saying. If a teacher called on him in class, he tended to look down at his desk and mumble his answers. One day not long after the school year started, he refused to return to Lakeside.

The school administration scrambled to get him back, conferencing with his parents. One of our more amiable classmates was dispatched to go to the Hampton house and play with Eric. Eric heard his mom and dad shouting at each other—his dad wanted him to go back, while his mom said he should be allowed to make his own choice about where he wanted to go to school. Finally, it was agreed that Eric would give Lakeside another try.

No one among the students at Lakeside said anything about Eric's absence. Our English teacher, Mr. Bayley, finally broke the silence, telling us at the end of a class period that there was something he wanted to talk about. Our small class sat around the perimeter of four long oak tables that had been arranged to make a square as Mr. Bayley—who, like every single teacher at the school that year, was white—stood up in his brown cardigan sweater with a look of disappointment on his face. He sucked in a long, deep breath and began to speak very deliberately.

“I'm sure that you've noticed that Eric Hampton has not been in school,” he said. “We've been talking to his parents, and he'll be coming back tomorrow. He's had a hard time adjusting here. You should treat him like you treat anyone else. Just because he's black doesn't mean that there is anything different about him. Please make an effort to make him feel comfortable. I want you to go home tonight and think about it.”

We collected our books and filed out silently, hanging our heads in the exaggerated way kids do when they're expected to look contrite. I felt guilty but didn't really know why. The first few weeks had been a disorienting battle to be accepted. Eric's isolation came largely from his own shyness, which was compounded by his one obvious difference from everyone else. You wanted to be friends with him but didn't know what to say—his race was something you registered but also tried to ignore. The easiest thing to do was to stay quiet.

To get to school throughout his years at Lakeside, Eric caught the bus and rode downtown, where he usually met up with “the other little black kids from Lakeside.” They transferred to another bus that took them up to the North End. They were, both literally and figuratively, traveling away from a public school system that had been in disarray for years.

As Seattle's black population grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s, its public schools became increasingly segregated. Garfield High School, for example, went from 4 percent black enrollment in 1940 to 75 percent in 1972, the year Willie McClain graduated. By then, black and Asian kids also made up the majority enrollments of several elementary and middle schools in the Central Area; schools in the North End were almost entirely white.

In the 1970s, school desegregation became a civil rights battleground across the country. Activists, looking for ways to implement the legislative and legal victories of the previous decades, began to file lawsuits against school districts that had not integrated. In Boston, where a federal judge in 1974 ordered a mandatory busing plan, whites rioted and threw bottles and rocks at buses full of black students. Seattle by then had already tried voluntary desegregation, which had failed after too few families took up the offer. With civil rights groups threatening litigation, the city had to take action. It came up with its own mandatory busing plan, which went into effect at the start of the 1978 school year.

As you would expect in a town that takes pride in its politeness, the implementation of the program was orderly. That didn't mean it was popular. “No one should be lulled into believing that because schools opened peacefully, without violence, that there is support for this crazy busing nonsense,” the president of a group working to overturn the plan told the
Seattle Times
in 1978. “This only means that Seattleites are law-abiding and have faith in our democratic system.” A referendum the group put on the city ballot to end mandatory busing passed with 61 percent of the vote but was ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

Instead, whites simply deserted the Seattle public schools. In 1976 there were 41,600 white students in the Seattle public schools and 10,800 African-American students. Four years later, the number of black students in the system was nearly unchanged; white enrollment had plummeted 34 percent, to 27,300.

When I was one year old, my family moved from Seattle to a suburb five miles north of the city's boundary. Later, when I asked my mom why we left Seattle proper, she said, “For the schools. I didn't want you to be bused.” According to statistics kept by the state, my public elementary school had 327 students when I began fourth grade in 1981. Of those, 315 were white, 9 were Asian, 1 was Native American, and 2 were black.

By 1986, when our team played together, a major issue in the Seattle schools was “disproportionality”—African-American and other minority students were getting lower grades than white students and getting kicked out of school at much higher rates. For example, in the 1984–1985 school year, 56 percent of African-American high school students in Seattle had a D average or below, compared to 24 percent of white students. In the same year, 35 percent of black middle and high school students were suspended or expelled, opposed to 15 percent of white students.

Though busing had taken some of the edge off the dramatic segregation of the early 1970s, there were still huge imbalances between schools in the northern and southern parts of the city. As a kid, Damian saw them firsthand when he was bused to an elementary school in the North End, where he was one of a few black students in his classes. “The schools were way better,” Damian says, looking back at the experience. He saw the difference not only in obvious things such as the North End schools having art supplies and other extras, but also in the standards the teachers set for the students.

The contrast really struck Damian a few years later, when he was assigned to middle school in the South End. In the mornings, the seventh- and eighth-grade kids rode the bus with high school students. Some of the older kids openly smoked pot during the ride, but the drivers never disciplined them—Damian thinks they were afraid to say anything. Students were issued books with the covers torn off, and the bathroom stalls were missing doors. Expectations were minimal. As long as you didn't do anything egregious, you would sail right through. “Teachers weren't there half the time, kids fighting, people skipping class, people shooting dice at lunchtime, getting high, messing with girls and boys in the bathroom, oh man, it was crazy,” Damian says. For guys like Damian, Willie Jr., and Tyrell, it meant that school was fun. Without any homework, there was a lot of time just to fool around. Myran had a harder time. He would get by for a while, but then—displaying a troubling moodiness that he tried and failed to contain—he would get in a fight or otherwise act out. He was kicked out of one school after another.

At Lakeside, parents—usually moms—prowled the halls every day, buttonholing teachers and administrators. If they were not happy with something, they raised hell. During my time from fifth to eighth grade, parents mobilized to get three teachers they considered not up to standards fired. There was no formal review, teachers' union to lodge a protest with, or even a process of appeal. The headmaster made the decision and, at the end of the year, the contracts of the teachers in question were not renewed. Lakeside parents expected to be heard and obeyed. With only the father working in most cases, they had more time to pay attention to everything that happened at the school.

After school and on weekends, my Lakeside classmates participated in structured activities that almost always cost money: tennis, violin, soccer, skiing, summer camp, gymnastics, ballroom dancing, French. My mom subscribed to the Seattle Children's Theatre, which she clawed my younger brother and me away from our Saturday morning cartoon regimen to attend. Each time we went, I sat resentfully until about fifteen minutes into the play, when I started to enjoy the story despite myself. After the play, the actors came back out on the stage to talk to the kids about their characters and how they played them, which intrigued me.

Damian and the other kids from Willie McClain's team often headed to a local playground, where they scrapped in games with other kids, older boys, and even men, the winners staying on the court to take next game, losers sitting out. I would have traded the theater for the basketball court in a second, but, of course, all of us were already being socialized to operate in very different spheres.

My performance in my first few years at Lakeside was completely erratic: I sailed through some classes and bombed others. In sixth grade I got in a couple of playground fights—won one, lost one—with a popular preppie from Madison Park (with his pink Oxford shirts and bouncy blond hair, he looked like he had walked off the screen from a John Hughes movie). In the summer before seventh grade, the school headmaster threatened me with expulsion and instructed me to write an essay explaining how I planned on doing better in the coming year.

Most of my capricious behavior flowed from a fault line between my parents that Lakeside exposed. My dad, at best, was ambivalent about my attendance at the school. He had gone to Catholic schools and didn't see the need for Lakeside. He'd taken over our family business leasing coin-operated washers and dryers to apartment building owners, which was financially lucrative if not especially glamorous. He still hung out with the same friends from high school and college, and showed no interest in joining a golf club or anything else that might indicate social climbing. At one parent meeting he went to right after I started at Lakeside, every other father was wearing a tie; he felt that they looked down on him when they heard what he did for a living.

My mom was the daughter of an engineer who had moved west during World War II to work on the Manhattan Project at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington—the same place where Charlie Hampton took a job twenty-five years later. Richland, the town where my mom was born, was essentially built by the government to house the nuclear workers; those with higher social standing, such as engineers, got better housing. From this, my mom grew up with an ingrained—and not unfounded—belief in the role of education as the engine of upward class mobility. She was proud that I was going to the best school in Seattle.

In contrast to my experience at public school, classes at Lakeside generally allowed for creative problem solving and student initiative, and I enjoyed them. But another part of me felt that if I did too well, I would be selling out to the snobs. All that mixed with a begrudging fascination I had with some of my classmates, especially the poised self-assurance that many of them projected. I made efforts to fit in, adopting fashion symbols such as Stan Smith tennis shoes; but I also got deeply into heavy metal—from Metallica to Ratt to Iron Maiden, the more bombast the better—which was far from the music of choice at Lakeside.

In the meantime, Eric Hampton had a separate struggle to fit in, which he sums up succinctly: “I wasn't wealthy and I was a minority.”

After his brief disappearance at the start of fifth grade, Eric—who was quiet but had a gently scathing sense of humor—had become an accepted, if not overwhelmingly popular, part of the class. He tried to dress like everyone else and to evince enthusiasm for bands like the Police and Men at Work. At times it flipped, and he became the school's representative of everything “black.” For example, after the show
That's Incredible
ran a segment on break dancing just as it was coming into national style, the consensus at Lakeside was that it was “stupid,” an opinion Eric pretended to agree with. The next year, though, after break dancing became genuinely popular, Eric was naturally seen as the guy who would know all about it. “Everybody's asking me, ‘Can you show me how to break-dance?' ” he says with a laugh. “Everybody assumed I could break-dance. I couldn't.”

Eric noticed that before school vacations kids would talk about Sun Valley, and he always wondered what they meant. He didn't realize it was a ski resort in Idaho until years later. “You feel inferior because of the simple fact that you're different, but also because you're poor, and that's the biggest thing,” he says. “If you have the resources, it makes life easier—you can at least maintain your self-esteem, your self-respect.”