by Erik Tarloff
But what I’m saying is, in addition to that set of worries, I also…see, I understood it wasn’t Arkansas or Mississippi, I didn’t expect to be spat on or shouted at or threatened or something of that nature—I didn’t expect it, although I didn’t exactly discount the possibility either. There weren’t a lot of people of color at State, or in the state for that matter, back then it was almost 100 percent white, and you just never could be sure how people were going to react to you. I mean anywhere. As a kid, just going into town to shop, or to get a burger or to see a movie, never mind really living among people, it could be eye-opening. Sometimes it was fine, sometimes not so much. People would stare. They might mutter something. A couple of times, although to be fair only a couple of times, my mom and me were actually refused service. It was still the fifties, a different world in lots of ways. Like you know that book that starts out saying the past is a different country? America was a different country back then. You couldn’t even assume people knew it was a bad idea to admit they were racists. I’m not talking about being racists. Lots and lots of people are still racists, but they at least know better than to say so. Most people now, when they’re about to say something really racist, they start by saying, “I’m the least racist person in the world, but…” and then they say something disgusting and racist. But copping to it is a social taboo nowadays. Back then, though, it was almost legitimate, one point of view among many. Maybe not classy, but not a big no-no. The major civil rights legislation hadn’t been signed yet. Brown v. Board was still being litigated. The movement itself was barely underway. No one knew who Martin Luther King, Jr. was.
So you can see why, while I was really proud and excited to be going to college, to be the first person in my family to ever be going to college, you can see why I was also kind of scared shitless. I’d just spent two years doing my army stint, which is what made college possible. The GI Bill. But I’d spent the last two years in the army, and frankly, this was scarier. The orderliness in the army, the discipline, the structure, they suited me. Now, I hadn’t been in a combat zone, I lucked out in that regard, I wasn’t dodging bullets in Inchon or some other godforsaken Korean hellhole. Things were frankly pretty cushy in Trier. But still.
So of course college was an adventure, and obviously offered a big opportunity, but it was also terrifying. Like rock-climbing or whitewater rafting. For four years without interruption. I might be in for a really miserable stretch of time. The army wasn’t so bad after basic training—I’m not saying I loved it, and God knows there were hassles from time to time, but the way it was regimented, the way the rules and the hierarchy were so clear, it had a kind of stability to it. This was going to be different, looser, much more free-form, and it was going to be my life and I had no idea what it was going to be like.
I got to campus pretty early. To face down the demons before they paralyzed me. You know what I mean? If I’d hesitated too long before making my move, I might have found myself heading straight back home instead of going through with it. So I forced myself to get there early, I registered right away, I got my room assignment, I went up to my dorm room. Unpacked, sat on the bed for a couple of minutes wondering what I’d gotten myself into—I felt like crying all of a sudden, but knew that would be a big mistake so I managed to get control of myself—and then started putting the linen they’d given me on the bed when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around just as Chance was coming through the door carrying a suitcase, a couple of boxes, and his bed linen. Kind of weighed down. For a second or two I stared at him and he stared at me, and his eyes widened—he seemed almost frozen—and then he said, “You’re a colored guy!”
So…it was kind of hard to know how to take that. Was he just stating a fact—a fact he found surprising, but still, just a fact—or was there some kind of attitude behind it? It was a tricky situation, but I decided not to jump to any conclusions. Give him a little more rope, you know? See if he was going to hang himself. So I went over to help him unload his stuff, and as I took one of the boxes from him, I said, “You noticed.” And then, “And you seem to be a white guy.”
“It’s just, I’ve never met a colored guy before,” he said.
“Looks like your ship has finally come in.”
And that made him laugh, which led me to think there might be hope. Then he set the rest of the stuff down on his bed and stuck his hand out and said, “Howdy. I’m Chance.” Friendly, you know? Easy-going. Comfortable. That was encouraging too.
So I shook his hand and told him my name. And then I said, “Listen, are we going to have a problem? ’Cause if we are, let’s take care of it now, before classes start.”
“Problem?” he said. He gave me an odd look. “What kind of problem do you mean?”
And he wasn’t being cute, you know. Or like one of those phonies who say, “I don’t see color.” Maybe because he’d never met any black people before, or because he came from a place where absolutely everybody was white, he simply hadn’t been exposed to much racism. It may have been around, it must have been around, at least in people’s hearts, but the subject just hadn’t come up much. I mean, later, I learned that for example his uncle was pretty racist, but I think that came as news to Chance too. There’d been no reason for anyone to mention it. No occasion for it. So I guess what I’m saying is, it’s not that Chance was enlightened, he was just innocent.
George Berlin (English professor)
Chance took my freshman English class. English 1A it was called. A requirement. Basically an introduction to writing. These kids would arrive from the boonies without knowing how to construct a sentence let alone write a coherent essay. Most of them hadn’t read much either. So we had assigned reading each week—usually something not too challenging, but maybe a cut above what they might have encountered in high school—and then on Friday they had to write a paper in class about what they’d read. I’d put a question about the reading on the blackboard and they’d have to answer it within the allotted hour.
Chance could write. I mean quite well, better than most of the kids in the class. Well enough so that he didn’t really need what amounted to a remedial writing class. But that’s how he came to my attention, through his writing. At first, because it was a large class, I didn’t even know he was the good-looking, quiet kid who usually sat way in the back of the room. I didn’t put the face and the name together. But I noticed his essays. His written work was consistently good, invariably A or A-. And it wasn’t just that he could write decently. He had some interesting ideas.
But he was mostly kind of invisible that semester. Didn’t talk in class, didn’t…on Mondays, I used to hand out mimeos of some the essays that had been handed in—without identifying who’d written them, of course—and have the kids critique them. Chance never uttered a peep. Never raised his hand. If I’d call on him anyway, as I sometimes did, he’d just mumble something. “I think it’s pretty good,” he might say, or something vaguely, meaninglessly positive. He didn’t go in for specifics, and he seemed to make a point of not going in for criticism. Maybe he felt above it all, maybe it was a form of arrogance, but I swear it didn’t come across that way. Maybe he was just being kind, didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. If that was the case, it makes him almost unique. Those kids could be vicious!
But when it was one of his essays under discussion, he just looked down at his desk. It didn’t matter if someone was praising it or criticizing it, he wouldn’t take the bait. I don’t think any of the kids would even have been aware the essay was his.
I only saw him really come to life in class once, and that was almost scary. The class had been assigned “The Lottery” that week, the Shirley Jackson story, and a couple of the kids were complaining about its being totally unbelievable. And Chance suddenly spoke up from his perch at the back of the room. He said, “Unbelievable? Everyone in this room would behave exactly like the people in the town!” A couple of the kids took it personall
y—maybe they were meant to—and started arguing with him. He stood his ground, and maybe, as things heated up, crossed a line or two in terms of civil discourse. Implying they were easily manipulated, hadn’t ever learned to question things or think for themselves. Well, not implying it, saying it. Implying they were stupid.
I finally had to break things up. It was getting so intense I was afraid it might turn physical. But it was a surprise to see Chance show such fierce passion. He’d been so passive in class up to then, as I’ve indicated. I was even a little worried someone might jump him after class, but instead a bunch of the students gathered around him as he was leaving the room and started talking to him and arguing with him or agreeing with him. A couple of minutes later, when I happened to glance out the window while I was gathering up my notes and things, I saw them out there in the quad still talking. Lots of animation on display, but no fisticuffs, just clearly a very intense discussion. To my mind, that’s what college is supposed to be about, so I was pleased with how things turned out. Despite a couple of anxious moments.
The next semester, Chance asked if he could take my Dramatic Literature seminar. It was supposed to be limited to upper-division English majors, but I made an exception for Chance. I figured he was sufficiently prepared for it and would be an asset to the class. I was right on both counts.
Wilson Denny
One of the things I liked about Chance from the start…I mean, a lot of white liberals, they always want to talk to you about race. That’s like all they want to talk to you about. And it’s not that I’m saying their intentions are bad or that they’re hypocrites—necessarily—it may just be a way of dealing with their own discomfort, or they may think that by praising Sammy Davis Jr. or Ray Charles or Sidney Poitier or whoever, it will bring up something they might have in common with me. And don’t get me started about what it was like after Obama started running…sheesh!
But that stuff gets boring, you know? There are other things to talk about, other things to think about. I’m not saying it’s possible for a brother or sister not to think about race a lot of the time, because life is always shoving it in your face, but still, it’s not the only thing in the world. Grant us our humanity, okay? We have actual lives. We’re not just our race and we’re not just victims. Thinking that’s the whole story is another kind of racism.
But Chance, either out of a natural sense of tact or simply because he’d never given the matter any thought, mostly didn’t talk about it. Even to me. We talked all the time, we’d often be up past midnight talking, but we mostly talked about other stuff. We were young guys, young lusty guys, and there were other things that mattered to us. Movies and music and cars and our grades and our plans for the rest of our lives. I’d introduced him to jazz. I was into jazz in a big way and he didn’t have much taste in music at all, he just listened to whatever popular music was on the radio, what his uncle and aunt liked to listen to, and he’d never paid it a lot of attention. So he sort of followed my lead there, and he got pretty enthusiastic once he started listening closely, because he’d had no idea music could matter, you know? Up till then he thought it was just pleasant background noise. So we talked about different players and how they changed jazz and what set them apart, and that was a pretty big topic between us for a while. And we talked about girls, of course. Girls took up a major portion of our conversation. And Chance being Chance, he went on at great length about acting. I had to put up with a lot of that shit. Sometimes I even wished he’d talk about race, just for a change of pace. Just to get him off, I don’t know, someone like Paul Muni, who I’d never even heard of before I met Chance. He could spin epic prose poems about the genius of Paul Muni.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the civil rights movement was gathering steam while Chance and I were roomies, so it’s not like the subject never came up. We weren’t avoiding it. We couldn’t. It was unavoidable. And he was curious, humanly curious. He’d ask me about what it was like to be black, he asked me my opinion on various political developments. Which I appreciated, by the way, his asking rather than telling. ’Cause that’s another thing white liberals often do, tell you stuff rather than ask you stuff. They’re kind of anxious to establish their liberal bona fides, maybe. Want to lay their cards on the table before you can get a word in edgewise. And God knows it isn’t just white liberals who do that. White conservatives are even quicker off the mark. And when they do it, they say “you people.” At least most liberals know better than to do that.
In general, though, Chance just wasn’t at all political in those years. Politics wasn’t on his radar much. The red scare was still a pretty big deal in those days, but Chance was basically oblivious to it. Thought Communism was bad, I suppose, and maybe even believed domestic commies were a threat, since that what he’d been told, but I doubt he’d devoted more than five minutes’ thought to the subject in his entire life. Political obliviousness is a luxury that comes with being privileged, I guess; you can afford not to pay attention and not to care. I’m pretty sure all his people at home voted Republican, and he probably thought he was a Republican too, insofar as he thought about the matter at all. But politics—race and the Cold War and Korea and the H-bomb and all the other shit that was in the news in those days—was probably of even less interest to him than sports, and he had zero interest in sports. Trust me, I tried to talk baseball with him once or twice. Nada. But if he had any kind of political awakening in college at all, and I don’t think he had much of one, mind you, but if he had any, it would have come from having me as his roommate. I’m not saying I radicalized him, I wasn’t especially radical myself and I wasn’t a proselytizer in any case, but racial stuff hit close to home and it’s possible I might have opened his eyes to it a fraction of an inch.
Come to think of it, talk about race and talk about jazz are kind of related, aren’t they? They might, in a funny way, have opened his eyes to some of the same issues.
Nancy Hawkins (girlfriend)
When Chance became famous, I was like…I mean, like, holy cow! That was my boyfriend! The guy I used to go out with had become a movie star! It…this is probably silly, but it sort of makes you feel special. And besides—I mean, I always thought he was really great looking, don’t get me wrong, my friends used to envy me and so on—but it was only when I saw him up on the screen, that’s when I realized he wasn’t just the cutest guy in our class, he was totally gorgeous. Movie star gorgeous, a whole different category. It was one thing to be hanging out with him on a day-to-day basis and taking it for granted, but something completely different to look at him through the eyes of…you know, just some person in the dark of a movie theater, or flipping through the pages of a movie magazine. It suddenly hit me, this guy I used to go out with was like a world-class babe.
My husband at the time—he’s my ex now, we got divorced a long time ago—he wasn’t too thrilled about it. When he found out, I mean. I think one of my friends must have mentioned it to him, because I sure as heck didn’t. He got very…well, jealous, sure, but also, you know, competitive. Like, what’s he got that I haven’t got? I said, “Honey, calm down, it was a long time ago, I haven’t spoken to Chance in years and years. And anyway, me and him, we just had a kind of college romance. You’re the one I married.” And he said, “Right, maybe, but then again, Hardwick never proposed to you, did he? If he had, you probably would have…” and here he made a pun, although he didn’t mean to. He said, “You probably would have jumped at the chance.”
Which was almost surely wrong, by the way. We were just kids, me and Chance. Some of my girlfriends were getting married while they were still in college, or right after graduation. Their families kind of expected it of them, I guess, or they had no career plans and no reason to put it off. Or they’d stayed virgins all through college, for religious reasons or whatever, and just couldn’t stand to wait any longer. But none of that was true for me. No pressure from my folks, I’m proud to say, and I wasn’t ready for anythi
ng so serious myself. And I’m darned sure it wouldn’t have even occurred to Chance. He had dreams, you know? Ambitions. Neither of us ever so much as breathed a word about marriage while we were a couple.
We started spending time together toward the end of our freshman year. We met because we were in the same math class. Introduction to Calculus. There was a math requirement for everybody freshman year, and which class you were assigned to was based on how you did on the standardized tests you took in high school. I had done pretty good, I guess, so they put me in the intro-calc class, as we called it. And the same must have been true for Chance. And we were both totally at sea. I’d been pretty good at algebra and geometry, but once we got past that…holy cow, it was like a foreign language. Me and Chance were drowning. So one day as class was ending he suggested we might study together, see if we could put our heads together and try to figure out what the heck was going on.
It was completely out of the blue. I don’t think we’d even said hello to each other before that. I guess he could see I was struggling, and he made no secret of his own confusion. And…well, even if I’d been totally on top of the material, I would have said yes. Here was this great-looking guy suggesting we spend time together. I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time—well, there was my high school boyfriend back home, but that was already feeling like a fading memory, the official break-up was just a matter of time—and freshman year had so far been pretty lonely from that point of view—and…well, you can imagine. If he’d been funny-looking, I might have said yes anyway, because I needed the help. But because it was Chance…I mean, if he’d suggested we, I don’t know, tour a sewage plant or something, I probably still would have said yes.