Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Lisa cherished Pat Greatorex and pined for Dick Glennon, but she revered Jerry Sullivan, widely regarded as the school’s best teacher. Jerry had unusual credentials for a public high school. His father, an executive in Joseph P. Kennedy’s film empire, sometimes ran movies down to Hyannis Port, where he established cordial relations with the future President. Jerry grew up in suburban Wellesley, went to private school, then on to Harvard. Arriving at Charlestown High in 1970, he quickly displayed formidable teaching skills and, after a year off for a master’s at Harvard’s School of Education, returned to become chairman of the Social Studies Department as well as president of the short-lived Faculty Senate. A dedicated liberal, he hung out with the faculty’s other social activists, who regularly gathered for “Thank God It’s Friday” sessions at the Warren Tavern.

  But through the early seventies, Jerry forged a close friendship with that quintessential Townie, John Brennan. At first, the improbable pair confronted each other across a chasm of class and culture. Yet each was huge—John six feet three and 240 pounds, Jerry six feet six and 290 pounds—generating that special affinity of men who tower over the rest of the world. Somehow even their polarities—Wellesley vs. Charlestown, Harvard vs. Boston College, suburban liberal vs. ethnic conservative—drew them together, each strangely attracted by the world he didn’t know. If Jerry taught John to acknowledge the saving graces of the two-toilet Irish, so John gave Jerry a quick course in Charlestown’s festering resentments. The first year of busing brought them even closer together, as Jerry came to question some of his most cherished assumptions about schools and race.

  His teaching career had been grounded in an old-fashioned American faith in the efficacy of education. He had chosen the public schools because he wanted to bring the blessings of knowledge to the poor and disadvantaged. And he shared the liberal conviction that if only blacks could be guaranteed an equal—which meant integrated—education, they could claim their share of the American Dream.

  But recent years had shaken these assumptions. Charlestown High had always been a school of last resort, but the buses had brought blacks who were even less prepared than Charlestown’s whites. What benefit, Jerry wondered, could possibly derive from mixing the poor with the impoverished, the disadvantaged with the handicapped?

  When the students were asked to write capsule autobiographies, it was often difficult to tell whether the authors were white or black.

  “I live in a wore-down, dilapidated neighborhood,” wrote a kid from Lower Roxbury. “Run-down houses, run-down streets in a run-down neighborhood, full of a lot of run-down people. So obviously, if the people are run-down, they’re the ones who run down the neighborhood. You see, my community at one time was junkie-infested. But it isn’t now. The junkie population has decreased and the wino and reefer addicts have increased and now all we have is a bunch of delinquent juveniles in the neighborhood…. The neighborhood is messed up or degrading to me and others with morals…. Urban living stinks.”

  “I got up late,” wrote a white youth. “I’d been late six times already and didn’t want to get suspended, so I just stayed out of school and fooled around all day. Me and my friend snuck on the train and went over to the [Boston] Garden. We tried to sneak into the movie theaters, but they kept chasing us out…. So we went back to Charlestown and just hung around, and then we got a ride over to the junkie to sell the copper piping we lifted last night. We stopped at McDonald’s, stayed there for a while, and then we came back up the corner and hanged around until it got dark…. Everyone had money, so we got loaded. We brought all our stuff behind the V.F.W. and we stayed there all night. I left to go down to the store and the kid I was with stole a cassette player out of a car. He was loaded and the cops came and we had to dig. I wasn’t even in on it, but they still would of pinched me….”

  Once brimming with enthusiasm, Jerry was now overcome by the futility of it all. It was hard to get his students—white or black—to read a book. The school’s library held 3,000 volumes and was hung with inspirational signs like “Knowledge is the key to the future” and “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good minds to do nothing.” But the librarian complained that few students ever took her wares home. The only book checked out five times over the past year was Orr on Ice, by Bruins star Bobby Orr. If Jerry Sullivan assigned his students to write a book report, they often did little more than plagiarize the blurbs on the cover. If he called on them to discuss their reading in class, they would say, “It was boring,” or simply sit there tonguetied. How did you teach kids like that?

  But even a dispirited Jerry Sullivan was a better teacher than most of his colleagues. In his senior elective on twentieth-century world history, he searched for new ways to make Fascism, the cold war, the atom bomb, and the United Nations relevant to kids who’d never been twenty miles from their doorsteps.

  One morning, as Lisa and her classmates settled behind the scarred wooden desks of Room 438, Jerry said, “I assume you’ve all read the selection from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Can you give me some examples of the problems which will affect you in the years ahead?”

  “Kids smoking dope?” a white kid suggested.

  “Okay,” said Jerry. “Drugs are a problem.”

  “Houses that are falling down,” offered a Puerto Rican girl.

  “Sure,” said Jerry. “Shelter is a problem for all of us.”

  Soon the blackboard was filled with an extensive catalogue of contemporary social problems: drugs, shelter, pollution, food supply, declining family life, the crisis of religion, unemployment, threats to world peace, racial tensions, energy shortage, crime, disasters, disease.

  “That’s quite a string of predicaments,” Jerry said. “But many of them have been with us since the beginning. Which is really new?”

  “Racial tensions,” suggested a white youth.

  “Really?” said Jerry. “Haven’t we always had tensions between groups?”

  “Not in the early days, when whites were superior and the colored were inferior.”

  “You mean before the Civil War?”

  “Yeh, like in slavery days.”

  “Well,” Jerry said. “Now that slavery has been abolished, we’re trying to sort out legal rights and obligations. Of course, not everyone agrees on things like busing and affirmative action.”

  Lisa raised her hand. “The racial stuff isn’t that new,” she said. “We’ve always had it. What’s new is the governmental interference. Governments are getting more power.”

  “More than Hitler and Stalin?” Jerry asked.

  “Well, no,” said Lisa, “but in its own way it’s worse, because it pretends to be democratic. Democracy is slipping away. The federal government is taking over the power of the states, the state is taking over what the city should have, the city is taking what the family should have.”

  Jerry smiled, recognizing the rhetoric from Powder Keg’s literature. But he had to admit that Lisa delivered it well. She was nimble, alert, never afraid to speak her mind, though she tended to exaggerate.

  “Would you say you’re suffering from Present Shock?” he asked.

  “Yeh, Mr. Sullivan,” Lisa said, “I got it bad.”

  But that shock was beginning—very slowly—to recede. One bit of evidence was the pleasure she got from her psychology course, presided over by her only black teacher, Steve Grace. The former football coach at Roxbury High, Grace had transferred to Charlestown the previous summer, becoming one of four blacks on its faculty of fifty-two. He wasn’t altogether happy there. To compensate for his football job, Charlestown offered to make him assistant basketball coach, an insufficient recompense which he ruefully declined. He’d been assigned the school’s smallest classroom, a narrow space barely large enough for its twelve desks and chairs. And from the beginning several white teachers and many white kids made it clear that he wasn’t welcome.

  Gradually Steve overcame such resentment by simply ignoring it. Instead of bristling at th
e slights, he displayed an aggressive friendliness which first astonished, then beguiled the Townies. In the hallways he greeted even the most hostile whites with a cheery “Good morning, Tommy,” “How you doing, Sharon?” In class, he went out of his way to show he wasn’t favoring blacks. Once when he stopped a black boy from hassling a white girl, the boy shouted, “Hey, Mr. Grace, you’re black. How come you’re on my case?”

  “You think just because you’ve got a black teacher you can do anything you want?” snapped Steve. “Well, there isn’t any Black Power in this room. And there isn’t any White Power. There’s only the power of Amazin’ Grace.”

  On St. Patrick’s Day, Steve bought fifty stickum shamrocks to paste all over his classroom, even sticking one on his collar. The Townies were astonished. “Hey, Mr. Grace,” one boy said, “are you Irish?”

  “Do I look Irish?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Like you don’t have to be black to appreciate Abdul Jabbar or Aretha Franklin.”

  Soon, white kids he’d never seen before were poking their heads through the door to ask for a shamrock, and several blacks used them to decorate their school books.

  White teachers warned him that he mustn’t, under any circumstances, discuss racial issues in class. That struck him as ridiculous. Surely race was the one subject uppermost in everybody’s mind. Why not bring it out in the open?

  One day a Townie hockey player complained that suburban teams thought everybody from Charlestown carried a knife in his back pocket. Steve explained that that was what psychologists called a stereotype; everybody was afflicted with them, particularly on subjects and people they didn’t know much about. In his junior and senior classes, he asked each race for their stereotypes of one another. In Lisa’s class, some of the answers were surprising.

  “Blacks can’t dance,” one white kid said. “When they try to rock ’n’ roll, they look silly.”

  “That’s a relief!” quipped Steve. “All these years I’ve been told I had rhythm.”

  “White folks smell,” said a black.

  “That’s interesting,” said Steve. “How many of you white folks think blacks smell?”

  When a forest of white hands reached for the ceiling, the classroom erupted in nervous laughter. It was the first time Lisa could remember whites and blacks at Charlestown High laughing together.

  Such moments were rare indeed. The school was largely free of the brawls and boycotts which had kept it in constant turmoil the year before, but blacks and whites held rigidly aloof from one another. In class they sat separately—whites generally in front, blacks in the rear. At lunch hour the division was still more pronounced, whites holding center stage around the teacher’s desk while blacks clustered in a corner. Hurrying through the hallways or up and down the crowded stairwells, they bumped and jostled, rarely exchanging more than a careless epithet.

  Lisa still felt uncomfortable with most blacks. Two boys made her particularly nervous because they wouldn’t leave her alone. When they passed in the hallways they held their hands over their hearts and crooned, “Look how fine!” or “Isn’t she foxy!” She realized that those were supposed to be compliments, but she refused to acknowledge them for fear the boys would take further liberties. She felt equally estranged from most black girls in her class, especially those, like Cassandra Twymon and Anita Anderson, whom she found loud and aggressive. Most blacks still seemed alien creatures from another world.

  In years gone by, the two races might have encountered each other in the Glee Club, Chess Club, Science Club, Camera Club, or Candy Stripers. But with teachers and students now unwilling to stay at school any longer than necessary, most extracurricular activities had atrophied during the busing era. The third-floor auditorium, once humming with assemblies, rallies, and theatricals, now stood vacant because Bob Murphy regarded such gatherings as a foolhardy invitation to further disorders.

  Though blacks and whites didn’t traffic with each other, a few mavericks moved uneasily between the two camps. Among them were Janeth and Enrique Rivas, who had emigrated to the South End in 1975, just in time to board the first buses for Charlestown. Now seniors, they were light-skinned, middle-class Colombians easily distinguished from the school’s working-class Puerto Ricans, who were often regarded as black. The Rivases occupied a no-man’s-land which afforded them an unusual vantage point for observing the opposing forces.

  An avid reader of novels and poetry, sixteen-year-old Janeth kept a diary which recorded her bemusement at both whites and blacks.

  She examined the Townies: “Since I haven’t made many friends, I have a lot of time to analyze them and sure feel sorry for them. They might have a great deal going, you know, but they don’t seem to take advantage of this…. They don’t push, they don’t get out of their own town. They are born, raised and die without knowing that there are thousands of people that would give them a helping hand.”

  Black behavior: “In the area designated for lockers, this morning there was a group of black girls yelling at each other so loud that the building seemed to disintegrate…. ‘Individualized behavior,’ perhaps!”

  Dropouts: “A guy in my homeroom who is eighteen or nineteen and wasted a year already because he ‘hates niggers way down to his guts,’ decided to leave school again.”

  The final bell: “It’s incredible how in tenths of a second the school is empty. But it’s a sad feeling, though, to see a lot of empty heads and pea-sized brains walking out, with an even smaller future ahead.”

  Lisa McGoff wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but she too was dismayed by the sluggishness that seemed to beset the school that year. As autumn descended into winter, Lisa sought some means of rallying her classmates. A teacher suggested that the class of ’77 sponsor a Christmas tree in the school’s front lobby. Lisa loved the idea—Christmas was her favorite time of year, standing as it did for warmth, closeness, and good cheer, all the traditional Townie virtues which she hoped to restore at Charlestown High. But Bob Murphy was dubious: it seemed extraneous to his central task of keeping blacks and whites from each other’s throats. When Lisa persisted, he relented, but with one condition: she must try to involve black students, so nobody could claim the Townies had expropriated Christmas.

  Lisa readily agreed, but when she approached several blacks on the Senior Activities Committee—Cassandra Twymon among them—they weren’t interested. To decorate and light the tree meant staying several hours after school, then returning home after dark through hostile Charlestown. It seemed more trouble—perhaps more danger—than it was worth.

  Even so, Lisa pressed ahead. Her next problem was finding a tree. Pat Greatorex was reluctant to take money allocated for the senior prom or banquet, so several security aides took matters into their own hands. Downtown in the Haymarket shopping district, where Italian merchants had a huge selection of trees, they picked out a towering fir with graceful boughs. While one of them distracted the vendor with football talk, two others hustled the tree into their pickup and made for Charlestown. Creaking up Breed’s Hill, they were dismayed to see a police car nudging them to the curb. But it was only a friend who exclaimed, “That’s the biggest damn tree I ever saw! I been looking for one like that.” He seemed disappointed when they told him they’d chopped it in the New Hampshire woods.

  They installed the tree in the marble lobby, embraced by the curving stairways where the winter before Charlestown whites had staged so many bitter demonstrations. One evening, a half dozen senior girls joined Lisa for the tree-dressing ceremony. For hours they draped the boughs with red, blue, and yellow bulbs, golden balls, shimmering spangles, peppermint canes, artificial snow, and, at the very pinnacle, a dazzling silver star. When their work was done and the tree lit up with dozens of winking lights, the girls sang a chorus of “Silent Night.”

  The response to the tree was electric. As students filed through the metal detectors the next morning, they exclaimed o
ver the first touch of gaiety the school had permitted itself in more than sixteen months. Soon there was a clamor for more—anything—to break the dismal routine. With the basketball team about to play its traditional rival, South Boston High, and the hockey squad entering a critical tournament, someone suggested a pep rally.

  Like many of the school’s extracurricular activities, pep rallies had been allowed to lapse. Once busing began they had fallen under Bob Murphy’s strict prohibition on any gathering that might provoke violence. Now Lisa implored the headmaster to show some confidence in the class of ’77. Murphy was reluctant—pep rallies were notoriously raucous affairs, designed to stir not only school pride but a territorial chauvinism which could easily slip into racial hostility. Nevertheless, he consented.

  For sports was the one arena in which whites and blacks had managed to collaborate at Charlestown High. The few blacks who gained anything but grudging toleration were invariably those who displayed prowess on court or field. One was Sandra Payne, a high-scoring forward on the girls’ basketball team. At first she encountered only distrust from her white teammates, but soon her one-handed jump shot claimed their applause, her kooky merriment their affection, and she became known to one and all as “Spacey.” Another was Joe Strickland, an acknowledged star at both football and basketball, now rewarded with a co-captaincy of the basketball team. His uncanny grace, the sheer ebullience with which he played, reminded several white teachers of a young Willie Mays. Those coltish good spirits proved irresistible to his teammates and captivating to many of the senior girls (among them a blond cheerleader named Diane Nadeau, with whom Joe joked—but only joked—about going to the prom). Lisa and her friends loved to kid around with Joe because he never took offense at their gibes, invariably responding in kind. “A real good nigger,” his classmates called him, or “the only good nigger I ever met.”