The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  The nighttime drive was harrowing. Uncle Gary ran red lights and drove so far over the speed limit that I felt we were in a car chase. Mum’s constant checking of the passenger-side mirror was a telling sign that the grown-ups were worried. Only now—forty years later—do I realize the meaning of that frenzied drive: although she was in the right, my mother must have had no faith that the Irish courts would see the situation similarly. If my dad had appeared before a judge sober while we were still in the country, she could have lost us.

  When we arrived at the airport, as the clock ticked slowly toward the hour of our departure, Uncle Gary bought Stephen and me heaping Irish breakfasts. But my mother neither ate nor took a proper breath until our flight was in the air.

  Once we were back in our suburban Pittsburgh home, Mum telephoned Dad to tell him that he couldn’t be trusted to put our welfare first. Not only was he drinking too much, she said, but he had effectively threatened to kidnap us. She couldn’t take time away from work to chaperone our time together, she informed him, so if he wanted to see us, he would need to fly to America.

  DURING THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I threw myself into my new American life and began to thrive in school. My baseball skills improved, and I started learning the basics of basketball. No longer the awkward new girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated skirts, I developed a fresh set of friends. Their families brought me to barbecues in the summer and skiing and ice-skating in the winter. Although Mum was working long hours as a doctor, she would get home most summer nights in time to grill us corn on the cob as Pirates games played on the radio. Gradually, as she was able to take vacations, she and Eddie took us white-water rafting and to American historical sites like Gettysburg.

  Although she said my dad had forfeited the custody agreement, my mother fulfilled the rest of its terms by taking me to Mass and continuing to teach me Irish. Nothing was worse than being summoned on a sunny day to improve my Gaelic. “Mum,” I would declare, “this makes no sense. Even if I lived in Ireland, I wouldn’t speak this language. And in America it is even more useless.” This logic did not move her. She forced me to review flash cards and write out sentences as if I would soon be back at Mount Anville, taking an exam.

  Although my dad and I exchanged letters, and I sent him my unimpressive color-by-numbers artwork, he did not visit. When Susan nudged him, he had a ready response: “I just need to get sorted.” But he was never able to admit he needed help to overcome his drinking, and he never did get sorted.

  I have no conscious memories of pining for my father, but even as I lapped up the American experience, a large part of me was waiting. I was waiting for word that he would visit, waiting for him to telephone (which he did, but rarely, as he kept misplacing our number), and waiting for him to once again be my companion. Mum never spoke ill of him, instead describing his “brilliance” and athletic gifts; but she made clear that he was an alcoholic, a verdict I accepted. Slotting my dad in this category was tidy. The designation allowed me to blame the separation on something other than my father. And yet, because I couldn’t comprehend the true nature of addiction, I thought that if my dad simply tried harder, he could recover.

  I believed that the magnetic bond between us would motivate him to get his act together—that I would motivate him. But as I waited, I did not feel anger at him for staying away. Instead, I began to mentally replay the Christmas Eve scene on the steps of our Dublin home. My dad hadn’t been the one to leave me, I reasoned. He had been willing to break the law to be with me. I was the one who had left. I had made a choice that night when I heeded my mother’s call.

  Even as a feeling of regret and shame began to gnaw at me, I felt sure I would have the chance to set things right between us. So many Irish alcoholics lived well into old age that I never associated drinking with poor health. While four years had soon passed and my father still hadn’t come to visit, I was still positive that we would be reunited. My dad would make sure of it.

  IN 1983, MUM AND EDDIE moved us from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, Georgia. After my mother was recertified as a nephrologist, they joined the faculty of Emory University School of Medicine. We packed up and made the move south, arriving at our new home a few days before I began eighth grade—which then marked the beginning of high school.

  One afternoon, more than a year after our move, I lay sprawled out on the gray carpeted floor of my bedroom, doing my history homework. My walls were plastered in pictures of my idols—everyone from Mike Easler of the Pittsburgh Pirates to Jack Wagner, the hunky actor who played Frisco on the soap opera General Hospital. From the sound of footsteps in their bedroom, I realized that both Mum and Eddie had arrived home earlier than usual. Behind closed doors, Mum talked quietly on the phone and had hushed conversations with Eddie. Just the family was present—Eddie, Mum, Steve, and me—but the house seemed crowded with tension. I sensed that something bad had happened.

  Finally, Mum knocked on my bedroom door and sat down beside me on the floor. Her voice tight, her eyes red, she said, “I have bad news.” I couldn’t conceive of what might be coming, but I didn’t have to wait long. “Your father has died.”

  I did not react. I looked at her blankly, refusing, with my entire being, to process what she had said.

  “The funeral is Monday,” she continued. “I don’t think you should go.”

  I asked her how my father could have died—so suddenly, so inexplicably—at only forty-seven.

  “The drink,” she said.

  “But I didn’t know,” I said slowly.

  “None of us knew the extent of it,” she said.

  In recent years, my dad had apparently dramatically increased the amount of alcohol he was consuming, arriving at Hartigan’s as soon as it opened in the morning. By the end, he had amassed such large drinking debts that the owners had finally refused to serve him. The alcohol had so ravaged his body that he had stopped eating. He and Susan had broken up, but my mother told me that Susan had been the one to find his body.

  I needed to be alone. Mum walked out, closing the door behind her. As she entered the adjoining room to tell my brother, I sat by myself, numb with shock, unable even to cry. I crawled into bed and prayed that what she had just told me was not true. If it was true, I told God, I needed to see my father again in heaven, where they would surely have pubs.

  Now, in addition to mentally replaying the last time I had seen my dad, I was pierced with a new realization: for five years I had been waiting for him, but he had also been waiting for me. “He wanted me to come,” I thought. “And I never came.”

  I could not understand why an inquisitive fourteen-year-old girl like me had not asked enough questions to learn that her father’s health was slipping. Why had I stupidly assumed the grown-ups would do what was best? Why hadn’t I insisted on flying over to see him? Why hadn’t I shown him that, despite the fact that I had gotten in the car with my mother that Christmas Eve, I was still his girl? Why hadn’t I found a way to help him? I seemed to have been thoroughly passive as my dad wasted away, by himself, across the wide Atlantic.

  I buried myself under the covers—the duvet quilt from my old bedroom in Dublin—and shivered with a feeling of cold so deep that it felt as though my bones were being chilled from the inside.

  I later learned that Susan had gone looking for my dad after she hadn’t heard from him in more than a month. When she opened his unlocked front door, she was overcome by the smell of what would turn out to be my dad’s decomposing body amid the stench of vomit and human waste. The derelict, filthy house—my former home—retained only the beds upstairs and the piano in the living room. The rest of the family belongings had been stolen or pawned off—even the kitchen cutlery and our toys.

  Susan bravely made her way upstairs and found my deceased father, dressed in a suit as if ready to head out on the town.

  He was lying not in his bed, but in mine.

  I DID NOT TRAVEL back to Ireland for my father’s funeral in December of 1984. Mum was concerne
d that his friends and family would blame her—and me—for the downward spiral that ended in his death. She went alone, thinking that if I didn’t attend, I would be spared. This was a reasonable assumption: my dad’s younger sister did, in fact, verbally attack my mother just after the memorial service, screaming, “This is your fault!”

  But by returning to school the day after I learned that my dad had died, I did not honor the pain that was tearing at me. By not flying back to Ireland, I took on another cause for regret. “You’re really not going to your father’s funeral?” one of my high school classmates asked me. Standing in front of my locker, holding a geometry textbook and a spiral notebook, I realized the mistake, but my mother had already departed.

  My teenage brain had quickly established a clear, causal sequence. Nothing that a grieving family member yelled at me could have been worse than what I already believed. When I left Ireland, I left my dad; I didn’t visit my dad; and thus, he died. Had I not left, or had I at least returned to Dublin regularly, he would still be alive.

  In my chain of logic—or responsibility—my mother didn’t really make an appearance. To this day, despite various therapists’ insistence that I must be repressing anger toward her, I don’t fault Mum for what happened. I have read widely on how children are quicker to blame themselves than to acknowledge their parents’ flaws and bad decisions. But for as long as I can remember reflecting on Mum’s actions, I have felt that several things were true at once. Yes, she should have actively sought out information about Dad’s health, and she should have brought my brother and me back to Ireland to see our father. But at the same time, she made her decisions with our well-being in mind. It wasn’t until I had my own family that I began to appreciate how young Stephen and I actually were when we had loitered in Hartigan’s, and how dangerous that environment would have seemed to my mother.

  Mum knew our father—his virtues and his vices—as only one who had loved him deeply could. It had taken her years to reach the point where she was able to disentangle herself from him and their marriage. She knew that children can almost never give up on their parents, and she did not want Stephen’s and my image of Jim Power—large and luminous—to be replaced by something diminished. Years later, Susan would tell me about my dad’s emaciated condition in the final two years before he died. “Jim was no longer staring at the abyss,” she recalled. “He was in the abyss.”

  Carrying around the grief from my father’s death made me more appreciative of the fact that Mum was healthy. I may have suffered a terrible loss in a terrible way, but I gave thanks to God for my good fortune—even though I now feared losing her too, I still had a mother I adored.

  During the summer following my dad’s death, I traveled back to Ireland for the first time since that Christmas of 1979. I visited my paternal grandfather, “Bam Bam,” who was living with my aunt. Bam Bam had just turned ninety, but was still mentally and physically agile, driving a car and following sports and politics.

  Not wanting to upset him, I rarely raised the subject of my dad’s absence from our lives. But over the years that followed, without any conscious decision on my part, I built the relationship with him I had wanted with my father. I would faithfully visit him for several weeks each summer; we would watch Irish football together and hurl complaints at the TV. And because he gave me the gift of living until the age of 101, I would share the ups and downs of my life with him in an exchange of letters that lasted for eleven years.

  On the same visit that I laid this new foundation with my granddad, however, I got a jolt from my seventeen-year-old cousin, who had revered my father. She described how lonely he had been the last few times he had come to visit her mother. “You and Stephen were all he talked about,” she said. “The doctors won’t ever say it, but he died of a broken heart.”

  It never dawned on me at fourteen to ask my cousin why, if my dad missed my brother and me so much, he had so rarely called, or why he had never gotten on a plane to visit.

  He meant to. I was certain of it.

  — 4 —

  Dignity

  I started at Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983, about a year before my father died. Once again, I was showing up at a new school in a new city where people spoke differently than I did—this time with Southern drawls. When Mum dropped me off, however, I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only new kid arriving that day.

  Reporters hovered in the vicinity, waiting to see whether angry white parents would try to impede the arrival of hundreds of new African-American students. As I approached the main entrance, these students—who ranged in age from twelve to seventeen—were filing off a long row of school buses.

  Some walked into the school seemingly determined to ignore the uproar that their arrival at Lakeside was causing. A few wore headphones and swayed to music as they disembarked, perhaps shielding themselves from the commotion. Others, less bold or armored, looked like they wished they could retreat back onto the buses.

  When Mum and Eddie had moved to Atlanta, they had chosen our suburban neighborhood based on the reputed quality of this two-story public high school, known to be one of Georgia’s best in both academics and athletics. They hadn’t realized, however, that Lakeside was caught up in a long-running fight between black and white Atlantans about the area’s public education system. Just as we made Georgia our home, this conflict erupted into a racially charged firestorm.

  While the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had found racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the DeKalb County School System, like many school districts in the South, had remained largely segregated in practice. After a 1972 lawsuit challenging the district’s practices, DeKalb launched what it called the “majority-to-minority” (M-to-M) transfer program. The program allowed African Americans who were a racial majority in their local schools to transfer to schools outside of their neighborhoods, where they would be in the minority. Because DeKalb school officials had initially done little to encourage black students to participate in the program, there were few takers, and the student body of Lakeside remained more than 80 percent white.

  Not long before we moved to Georgia, however, the district court ordered DeKalb schools to begin providing free busing across the county. This transportation made participating in M-to-M more viable, and hundreds of African-American students applied to transfer out of lower-performing schools. Black parents sought out Lakeside for the same reason my mother had: they wanted their children to have the opportunity to thrive in a school with a stellar reputation.

  In 1983, when more than three hundred African-American families signed up to send their children to Lakeside, the school district turned most of them down. The district’s rationale—backed by vocal, impassioned white parents—was that Lakeside needed to maintain its student/teacher ratio of 26 to 1. To our newly arrived family, however, it seemed clear that the opponents wanted to prevent Lakeside from being more racially integrated.

  Several hundred white parents mobilized to create a group they called Parents Demand Quality, which supported the district’s decision to turn away a substantial number of the African-American transfers to Lakeside. In turn, their parents filed a motion with the district court, claiming that blocking their children from transferring was “based on race, not space.” The DeKalb NAACP raised the case with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to investigate. In the end, the African-American parents won their appeal; my class, Lakeside High School’s class of 1988, became the first in the school’s history in which black students outnumbered whites.

  While Lakeside offered my African-American classmates more experienced teachers and better-maintained facilities, getting to know the students in the M-to-M program offered a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity. I had heard priests talk about dignity at Mass: the Catechism insisted that the “dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” And my years in Irela
nd, complemented by Eddie’s history lessons, had taught me plenty about British occupiers’ attempts to trample Irish dignity.

  While the M-to-M program gave my black classmates great opportunities, it also placed heavy burdens on their dignity. By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when I would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying before nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home, which meant navigating a complex Atlanta public transportation system that would have daunted most teenagers.

  To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

  During the eighth grade, when the dramatic shift in Lakeside’s demographics occurred, I occasionally heard my white classmates complain about “grease” they claimed to have found on their desks—a dig at African-American students who wore Jheri curls. A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”