Losing My Cool (24 page)

As I read and thought about all this, I was haunted by one especially poetic sentence in Heidegger: “Overnight . . . Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. . . . Every secret loses its force.” The more the individual feels a need to keep it real, the more he is pushed toward “averageness” and a “leveling down” of all possibilities and varieties of being. The They separates the individual from himself. For Heidegger and Steele, the stifling of individual freedom by the collective will of the group poses a grave existential threat in itself. It is not a threat that is restricted to the black community by any means. Quite the opposite, it is characteristic of all communities and herds.

For Heidegger all Others represented a kind of leveling down and loss of self, but for me, some Others seemed
better
than other Others. As I thought of James Baldwin and Eddie and of my own parents' commitment to the Civil Rights movement, as black-and-white stills of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Selma and Central High flitted through my mind's eye, I couldn't help but feel that it was one thing to give yourself over to the service of a worthy and moral cause, to lose yourself in your group when your group is engaged, against all odds, in a battle for its very survival. It was one thing to keep it real with your group when your group's reality is that their children are being firebombed in church and hosed down in the streets, torn apart by German shepherds and broken up by billy clubs. That was a sacrifice of personal freedom that I could understand. But it was something else entirely to realize that you have lost yourself for absolutely nothing, that you have been manipulated and dictated by a posture, an attitude, a pose, by BET, Trick Daddy, Puff Daddy, and the Junior Mafia.

As I thought of myself and my friends, all I could see was that the They into which we had been folded growing up had no dignity to it, no honor; it was shameful and misguided, an empty promise at best, a cruel hoax at worst. I sat for a while just staring at the magazine spread on the table before me, unable to take in anything else, lost in thought. Josh finally broke the silence, said he needed to leave, to go get dinner. We put our magazines back on the shelves and made our way out onto M Street and into the cold late-autumn air.

When I had opened Steele's article that afternoon, James Baldwin, like Ernest J. Gaines and Edward P. Jones and so many others I am reluctant to admit, was only a name to me, someone Pappy had told me I ought to read, and someone I had yet to sit down with and spend time getting to know. By the time I closed the magazine, it was clear to me that James Baldwin was someone I would eventually have to cross paths and come to terms with, and I would need to prepare myself for the day that I would do that. And even though I had no idea how this might come about, it was also clear to me that France was somewhere I would need to return to. My devils, whatever they were, were not the same as Eddie's or James's, not the same at all, but I did have devils of my own and it was obvious to me that I would have to shed them if I was ever going to become myself and learn to be free.

What I had only begun to suspect in my gut over the previous summer in Tours I was now certain of that afternoon in Barnes & Noble: Being serious about realizing myself as an individual required nothing less than my leaving for an extended period of time the black culture I had grown up in, severing myself completely from the miasmic influence of my group. I had to cease “being-with” my culture in order to become unaccountable to it. This was something I had already begun to do in fits and starts but couldn't do more than halfway while remaining at home.

At the same time, my long-distance relationship with Betrys, for two years an oasis in a desert of incoherence and distraction and the source of so much calm and inspiration, was beginning to fail. Absence, though it makes the heart grow fonder, can also turn two people into strangers. To my horror, the latter was now happening to us. Or, more likely, I was becoming a stranger to Betrys. I do not know precisely when everything began to change, but I do know that I was certainly too self-involved and too young to be able to give back to her all that she was giving me. When we saw each other now, we fought—something we never used to do—and when I came home for Christmas that year I rashly broke up with her. Our relationship had fallen apart and neither of us was taking it very well. I was riddled with guilt but unable to take back what I had let myself say. The whole thing seemed like a very bad dream I kept thinking I would wake from.What made it more difficult was the fact that we did not have a clean split: There remained too many tortured phone calls and tearful visits and framed pictures that never came down from the desk. Still, a barrier had been crossed. Even as I stressed over Betrys, I knew that I was no longer tethered to New York City or obligated to move there when I graduated, and this, I realized, was my chance. I began to research jobs in France and prepare my parents for the reality that, against their hopes, I would not be getting an advanced degree anytime soon.

 

 

 

 

As the weather turned warm and Copley Lawn filled again with freshly tanned bodies spread out on colorful blankets, I published an article in the black-run campus newspaper,
The Fire This Time
.I had never written an article before, but one of the paper's editors asked me for a submission and after a lot of thought, I decided to write something honest about an experience that had frustrated me. Earlier in the year, after having searched in vain for a chess club to join, Bryan and I, along with Ted and later Josh, decided to found our own.We collected about seventy signatures and some donations for pieces, boards, and clocks, secured classroom space, and began to meet every week and play round-robin tournaments. We became the Georgetown University Chess Club. I was glad to be able to do this, to find a good number of like-minded students and bring them all together over chess, the game that bonded me to Pappy.

All my satisfaction notwithstanding, though, I couldn't help but notice week in and week out that, of all the students who expressed even a fleeting interest in the club, only one happened to be black (and I'm almost positive that he was in fact Haitian). Why, I began to wonder to myself at these meetings, were so many Caucasians, Asians, Arabs, Indians, Muslims, gentiles, and Jews—boys and girls of all kinds of ethnic, economic, and racial makeup—interested in our club but black students were not? Was it because there were so few black students on campus to draw from? I wondered. Blacks were a minority at Georgetown as they are at most schools, but the correct white/black ratio was not 69:1. It couldn't be that, I realized. Then was it because chess somehow wasn't “real” and couldn't possibly appeal to “real” blacks? I didn't think that could be it, either. I had put in lots of hours lurking at the public tables over in Dupont Circle, which are dominated by black men, many of whom appear to come from the 'hood and are self-schooled and, for a few dollars, capable of taking out the occasional Russian master who wanders over in search of some action. I had also seen black men run outdoor chess from Washington Square Park in New York City all the way to the concrete tables outside Magic Johnson's Starbucks in Englewood, California. It may not be dominoes or spades, but chess is plenty appealing to blacks, at least in certain environments. Besides, I knew other black students right here who had a working knowledge of the game and played it on occasion. Why didn't they ever come out? The answer, I was sure, lay elsewhere.

In my article I decided to make the case that what I was seeing in my experience with the chess club was really just another example of the same larger phenomenon I had been involved with and observing over and over again since I was a child: Wherever there is a group of blacks that is surrounded by a group of non-blacks, there can also be found a profound unawareness and incuriosity—even an antagonism—toward anything not deemed authentically black, the definition of which, of course, is always shrinking. The problem here, as far as I could see, was more complex than chess simply not being a black game or my black classmates being uninterested in joining student organizations and clubs. Neither was the case. Black students came out in droves to join organizations like the Black Student Association, the Caribbean Culture Club, and the black dance troupes, but they did not join in any real numbers, if at all, the Skeptics Society or any of the non-black campus newspapers—or the chess club.

By my lights, this was evidence of the group, of Heidegger's They, partitioning what was black from what was white and of individual black students intuiting the boundaries and obediently staying inside them. Which was why in other environments, environments where most if not all people are black, like that corner of the park at Dupont Circle or even Pappy's segregated South, chess could be played out in the open and no one would think twice about it. This is what I argued. I made my case and called on my black classmates to integrate themselves more forcefully into the broader campus community and to stop self-segregating in the same old all-black groups and clubs. To do so would be the only way that we would cease being what we always complained of being: outsiders.

When I finished writing the piece, I read it and reread it several times over. I felt confident in my positions, but also a little nervous about the reception the work would receive. I sensed that I was again saying something I wasn't allowed or supposed to say. Before submitting the article, I asked Josh to take a look and tell me what he thought.“This column,” he said,“is going to ruffle some feathers, man!”

“Good,” I said, and I hoped that he was right. I let the editor publish my personal e-mail address beneath my byline, that was how badly I wanted to spark the debate. The editor, when she read the column, told me it was good and that she was even tempted to agree with me, here and there. In any event, she accepted it without making any changes, and it was out of my hands.

Several weeks passed, the article was published, I readied myself for the backlash I was sure would come. I waited and I waited. The silence, ultimately, was deafening.“Well, the thing is,” the editor told me when I asked her about it, “the thing is that not so many black students actually read this newspaper.”

 

 

 

 

By then, I was very much ready to leave Georgetown. One afternoon I was walking with a friend into Wisemiller's to get some food when I ran into the short-haired girl I had danced with at that track party all the way back at the beginning of my freshman year. That seemed like eons ago now, and without wishing to be impolite, I felt that the last thing I wanted when I saw her approach was to have to talk to her and possibly even explain myself while I was at it. “Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Well, are you going to be graduating?”

“Am I going to be graduating—what do you mean?”

“You know, are you graduating or are you coming back next year?”

“Uh, I'm graduating, of course,” I said, not wanting to ask her the same. I didn't really understand the question, though. I wasn't about to receive any summa cum laude honors for my performance or anything like that, but the truth is that, outside of the singular case of Playboy (who was deemed a failure and an unfortunate waste of talent), I had never asked or heard any of my non-black friends ask each other such a question as this, and the naturalness, the ingenuousness, with which she posed it astonished me, as if failing to earn a bachelor's degree within four years could be normal. Who was she hanging with? I wondered. It had been so long since I kept up with her and her friends.What were they thinking? How could that be OK? I thought about the fact that, for a long time, I had not been very welcome in her scene and I wasn't bitter, I appreciated that. I ordered myself a sandwich, forced a smile, and said good-bye.

 

 

 

 

When graduation day finally did come, Josh's family and mine had a dinner together, along with my maternal aunt and uncle, Sam and his mother and sister, and Betrys, who came down with my parents for the occasion.The dinner was long and happy and I have forgotten a lot of it, but I do have two loosely related memories from this night: The first and most vivid is the restrained pride that played across and lit up Pappy's face as he rose to his feet and toasted Josh and me, speaking off-the-cuff and employing rhetoric, beseeching us in English and then in Latin to go and seize the day, to venture into the world and to realize ourselves now as men, to remain on vigilant guard against the temptation to grow so narrowly ambitious that we forget the wisdom of Cicero and our duty to the good:
Non nobis solum nati sumus
(“We are not born for ourselves alone”).

The other thing I remember from that night is the flickering, candlelit image of my uncle—a big, strong, good-hearted, God-fearing Southern white man—glimpsed through champagne-blurred eyes, taking me by the arm after coffee and dessert, guiding me to a corner of the room, and stating, man-to-man, that I was something like a fool if I did not marry the beautiful girl who had come down here with my parents for me.

I agreed with my uncle that he was right, I probably was a fool, but I could not marry that girl, not then. In a couple of months, I would be moving to the north of France, where I had accepted a yearlong post to teach English in secondary schools. Betrys hadn't tried to stop me from going, and I was as grateful to her for that as I was for all she had done over the years to help me recalibrate my thinking about both women and myself. She was in a period of transition now, too, scrapping plans to go to law school and enrolling in culinary school instead. I was proud of her for that, for having the courage to create her own path. I looked over my uncle's shoulder at her; she smiled at me, and right then everything felt good.