by Paul Theroux
George and I were on the Medford High soccer team and track team. I was a second-stringer. George started and was a brilliant, deft, almost balletic soccer player. Few public schools offered soccer, and so we played Andover and Exeter, the exclusive private schools. We envied and hated most of those players—they were privileged, they had money. We figured their parents had gotten them into these schools to save them the embarrassment and challenge of public schools. We played Tufts freshmen and MIT freshmen. They always had foreign students, good at soccer, but even so, with George's great playing we often won. On the team bus back from one of the Andover matches we recounted with exquisite joy how one Medford player or another had kicked the ball straight into an Andover boy's face, sending him bruised and weeping off the field. But strangely one year, one of the Andover boys had been black. George, curious to see this black boy at such an affluent place, had talked with him.
I ran the 220. I was slow, I never won, I hardly ever placed. In those days, and perhaps now, no time was set aside in any practice to help someone learn a sport or even a skill. If you had it you were on the team, and if you didn't you were merely tolerated. There was no training. The emphasis on winning meant that it was a waste of any coach's time to teach technique to a poor athlete.
George had trained on his own. He wanted to run cross-country, but the coach insisted George was a sprinter and put him into the 220. George had an intensity in his running that I had seen before only in someone solving an intellectual problem; it was silence and concentrated thought and total absorption—strange, almost shocking in someone who was usually so outgoing and relaxed. It was a sort of controlled fury that had made him a superior athlete.
The passage from boyhood to adulthood was made emphatic on the sports field. An average boy who proved himself an athlete became someone to be reckoned with. George became a man, and was respected by the rest of us. I was a poor athlete—no team wanted me. George gave me advice— "Turn your foot this way," "Lean more," that sort of thing—but I knew that I was hopeless.
He was the fastest boy in the school, everyone knew that; and one of the happiest, the brightest, the most accomplished. He could sing—sometimes a small group would form in a corridor and I would hear George singing in a falsetto, "Oh, yeeahh."
Singing got George into trouble one time. And it was characteristic of George that he could get out of trouble as quickly as he got into it. The singing incident was typical. He was in a corridor with two other students, extemporizing—doo-wop was in vogue. A teacher nearby objected and, more than that, spoke crudely to the students, using abusive language. When the teacher tried to grab him, George said, "This is it," and hit back. There was a fight, and later all three students were brought to the headmaster, Henry Hormel.
Hitting a teacher was grounds for expulsion. But George's case involved the sort of paradox that compelled me to admire him. About a month earlier George had become a local hero by rescuing a boy from drowning. The boy had fallen into a water-filled hole near the excavation for Route 93, the interstate that accounted for Medford's eventual division and decline, and George had happened by and saved the boy. The rescue was an item in the Medford Mercury—the boy was the son of a policeman. For his bravery and quick thinking, George was to be awarded a medal. George the brawler was George the hero. Mr. Hormel expelled the other two boys and allowed George to stay in school.
George joked about his survival. He could be a clown. Studying lenses in physics, we learned the meaning of the word "concave." Turning to a huge Italian boy, George said, "Mess with me and I will concave your chest."
George and I took our girlfriends to the prom together. We both worked in the library. In spite of our different abilities, we were friends on the teams—the fall soccer, the spring field sports. I lived in North Medford, at the edge of the Fellsway, the woods. George lived near the Mystic River in West Medford, three houses from where my mother had grown up. George and my mother had gone through the same schools, thirty years apart, but the neighborhood had not changed, nor had the schools. That was another link. And my widowed grandmother still lived in George's neighborhood. I stayed with her on Friday nights when I worked late at the Stop & Shop supermarket.
At graduation, George looked dapper, as ever, and proud. He went off to a prep school and was confident of winning a full scholarship to the University of Rhode Island. I was pleased to be leaving Medford High, not realizing that I was starting what would prove a two-semester stay at the University of Maine.
After the ceremony my Italian teacher, Miss Pietrangelo, said, "I saw you and George Davis walking down the steps. You looked like you owned the world."
That was 1959. In the three long years of high school, we had never discussed or even remarked on the fact that George was black and I was white.
Thirty-two years passed. In that time I did not see George, though I often thought of him. In high school we had done everything together, and so it seemed natural to think: Where is George while I am here? I had the feeling that I would run into him, not in Medford but in the places where I lived or traveled—Uganda, Singapore, Europe, Mexico, South America. I looked for him at our twentieth high school reunion. He was not there. I never went to another one. I thought about him a great deal, because no one I had grown up with had seemed more alive, more eager for experience.
One day, out of the blue, George wrote me a letter. He said he had read some of my books and that he had thought about me over the years. He suggested we meet. I've been on a hellified trip, he wrote. George seldom exaggerated.
2
I called him that same day, and I understood that when George said that he had been on a hellified trip he did not mean a recent trip or any single journey. He meant his life since high school, all those years.
Soon after, we met at his house—the old family house on Jerome Street in West Medford, where we had met on high school afternoons and weekends. George was back home. He even looked his old self. Apart from his hair, which was profoundly white and as dense as a ball of cotton—the startling whiteness that comes from the shock of experience rather than age—he was exactly as he had been in high school. The same smile, the same weight, the same build, the slightness so deceiving, because he was an athlete, a whip. He had begun running cross-country again, two miles around the Tufts track.
He said, "I'm training for a seniors' meet in January."
"You look the same," I said.
"That's good and that's bad," he said, and hardly parting his lips to laugh, a heh-heh scraping deep in his throat, the George Davis laugh.
We went up the road and found a spot under the trees on the rocky shore of the Upper Mystic Lake and talked.
After graduation from Medford High, while I passed a futile year in Orono, Maine, George attended Huntington Prep in Boston. The next year I switched to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst—it cost $100 a semester—and George won a full scholarship to the University of Rhode Island, a track scholarship. There were seven black men in the university, hardly enough to form a fraternity. George was rushed by Tau Epsilon Pi and considered joining.
This mainly Jewish fraternity employed two black women who cooked and cleaned the frat house. George was insulted by the way the fraternity brothers treated the older women with casual rudeness, or demeaned them in an offhand way when their backs were turned. Actively offensive, they seemed oblivious of the fact that George was black—or perhaps they didn't care? George got to know the women. They were sisters whose roots in Providence went back to before the Civil War, when their families had been smuggled north by abolitionists on the Underground Railroad.
These sisters, unknown to the members of this fraternity—who had clearly not inquired—were also members of the Nation of Islam. They were scrupulous in their dress and their demeanor. They studied the Koran. They observed the Muslim diet. George moved in with them as a lodger and discovered them to be energetic proselytizers. They told him about Elijah Muhammad; they preached to him
the doctrine that whites cannot offer salvation to blacks, that blacks have to find their own way. George was fascinated, but he was uncomfortable at the university.
One day as a freshman runner at Rhode Island, George ran past the track coach, who urged him to pick up speed and, comparing his times with another teammate's, said, "Come on, George, you can run faster than that Jew."
Afterwards, George began pacing. "When I get really agitated I walk." He spent hours pondering the coach's remark. His first thought was, "If he said that to me, what's he saying to the guy behind me?" The man behind him was white.
"Something in me broke that day—confidence in the school, in the team, in the coach. Field sports are great for having no rah-rah. Everyone's running for himself and interested in what the other guys are doing. There's real spirit in running." He guessed what was being said behind his back in Rhode Island. And he felt lost in the sea of white students. "I knew I had to go."
He quit and went home, back to Medford, and applied for jobs through an employment agency. While George sat in front of the desk at the agency, the middle-aged white clerk made a phone call to a Boston bank.
The clerk said, "I have a Negro here." There was a pause. Then the clerk added, "He is not hard to look at."
George got the job, at the First National Bank of Boston, and was the only black person employed there. It was 1962. In his spare time he went to the Boston Public Library—to meet girls—and to jazz clubs. He bought expensive clothes. His job as a credit adjuster paid well enough. Promotions were hinted at. George was clever and personable, and good with numbers. He made plans, one of which was to buy an Austin-Healey 3000 using a bank loan. He saw himself in this very cool car, tooling through Medford, into Boston, with the top down.
In the spring of that year, I helped organize a student protest, picketing in front of the White House. We had a convoy of buses from Amherst to Washington. But although we were aware that civil rights was an issue, the protest was about nuclear disarmament. It was the early antiwar movement, and the next month, back in Amherst, we vandalized a Sherman tank that had been parked in front of the Student Union for the ROTC Military Ball. I alone was arrested, held for six hours and released. It continued to be a great thrill recalling how my group had shouted, "They got Paul!"
George had paid no attention to the antiwar pickets. The notion of race had been on his mind, but it puzzled him rather than vexed him. As a bank clerk in Boston in 1962, earning a good salary, "I couldn't go to some places—certain clubs. They don't let you in. They don't say why."
"Didn't that make you militant?"
"At that time I wasn't thinking. I didn't give a shit about it. All I wanted to do was go in there."
He had a girlfriend by now—she was not black. It annoyed him that he could not follow her into the club.
"I came up with the idea of starting school all over again, so I contacted my friend who had been to Tuskegee. Tom Poole."
And he explained that Tom Poole had been the black boy, the only one on the soccer team at Andover, whom he had chatted with after one of our matches at the school. Unknown to me, they had become friends.
"He was from a respected Tuskegee family. I got hold of him and some other people. It was kind of a rushed thing. I got accepted and went to Tuskegee."
When George wanted something badly he always got it.
"My plane landed in Birmingham. I took a taxi to the bus station. It was segregated, and I went into the wrong waiting room. I saw all the white people and said to myself, 'This is testing, I'm testing them,' but nothing happened. Then I went into the other side, the black waiting room. That side, the black side, was fantastic. It was a party!"
In the black waiting room people were talking and singing and circulating, and they greeted George with warmth. George, from the North, was won over.
"I took the long bus ride to Tuskegee. I arrived in the rain. Going to the cafeteria, I saw a pretty girl walk off the porch with an umbrella. She held it over my head and walked me all the way. She was smiling. I was smiling. That was a great moment. I said to myself, 'I belong here.'"
In that same month, September 1963, newly graduated from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, I was being told that as I had been disruptive and discrepancies had been found in my record, I could not join the Peace Corps. In desperation, I wrote a long letter to the selection board and said in effect: Give me a chance and I will be a model Peace Corps volunteer. When I got word that I was being sent to central Africa, I wanted to tell George, but I'd heard he was in Tuskegee, in Alabama. I thought: George is still in school?
George got into the student movement and immediately became an activist. After a demonstration insisting on freedom of speech, he invited Malcolm X to Tuskegee to speak. By the time Malcolm X arrived, George was in jail in Selma with Martin Luther King. "We called Dr. King the Lord—The Lord says we've got to do this or that." The Tuskegee students brought Malcolm to meet Dr. King in Selma. In the jail George and others formed the Tuskegee Institute of Advancement League.
This was 1964 and 1965. This whole time I was in Malawi, central Africa, teaching English.
George was in Alabama, organizing. "We went out into the country and helped people with reading and writing and voter registration—we were like infiltrating, right? That was my word for it."
I lived in a hut in Kanjedza, an African location outside Limbe, and rode my bike up to Soche Hill every morning at dawn to teach my students. During school vacations I worked in the bush, and for one period at Moyo leprosarium, near the lake shore.
George, in farmer's overalls, was in the Alabama countryside, "blending in." His group was wary of the movement's prominent leaders. "We were against suits. Jesse Jackson was a suit. We always thought he was CIA—we never trusted him. We didn't trust suits."
Tuskegee was still home for him. Built on a hill to protect it from the Klan, it was solitary and safe. George was admitted as a brother in Omega Psi Phi, regarded as the most powerful of the black fraternities in the United States. He was tattooed with the Omega horseshoe. One of the pledge rituals of Omega was learning "The Pearls" (of wisdom). Unfamiliar with the George Davis smile and the deep-throated heh-heh, and feeling that George did not take The Pearls seriously, one of the fraternity brothers said to him solemnly, "Someday you will need these Pearls."
At Omega his nickname was "Vulture."
There were more marches, more arrests. George and some others, trying to present a petition to George Wallace, the governor, were arrested in Montgomery for refusing to obey police officers—they had been protesting the beatings of marchers by state troopers. For the next several days the protesters filled the jails. "That meant Wallace couldn't put Dr. King and the marchers in them." Wallace had no choice but to allow Dr. King and the marchers, who had been waiting with him after their trek from Selma, to enter Montgomery, where by then George was locked up, charged with obstruction.
At that time, late in 1965, I agreed to do a favor for an African friend who had been an official of the Malawi government. I passed a message, I drove his car out of the country. I did not know that it was the intention of his group to assassinate the prime minister, Dr. Hastings Banda. I was found out and deported from the country and—after almost two years of bush living—kicked out of the Peace Corps. "Terminated early," "deselected" were the expressions.
Fearful of being drafted to fight in Vietnam, I immediately went back to Africa, as a lecturer in English at Makerere University in Uganda. Makerere was one of the great universities in Africa, and many American blacks paid visits. Several said they had heard of George Davis, but I gathered that George, while being active in the civil rights movement, was also elusive, working behind the scenes, a furious shadow in Alabama.
George told me, "In January 1966, Sammy was killed. That was terrible."
Sammy Young, a charismatic activist, was shot in Tuskegee by white racists, who put a golf club in his hand when he was on the ground, dead, claiming he
had attacked them with it. When the killers got off in 1967, "we burned downtown Tuskegee. It wasn't spontaneous, it was carefully planned. We burned down gas stations, we tore down some buildings. Tuskegee was a black town, but all the money was made by white folks."
In Uganda, we had riots and demonstrations—students against Rhodesia, Vietnam, and whites generally. I was caught in a demonstration that turned into a riot. I was beaten and my car demolished, a frightening experience. I realized that for most Africans, even ones I knew well, I had no name, no identity. I was a bwana, a white man. That made me feel deeply insecure in Uganda.
George got married in the town hall in Tuskegee in 1967. So did I, in the registry office in Kampala, Uganda. George's wife, Tunie, was the same age as Alison.
By the time George graduated from Tuskegee in 1967, there was a lot of infighting in the movement. All these civil rights years he had been breaking the law, and was regarded as an outlaw. Prison held no terror for him. He had contempt for the police. He had already been arrested and imprisoned four times in Alabama.
"I got more and more with the renegade crowd," George said. He and what he called his "core group" had some reefer with them at the famous SNCC convention in Atlanta, where Stokely Carmichael became chairman. Whites (and "northern-educated college Negroes"—white-influenced blacks) were disallowed from holding office. "I had mixed feelings about it, but it made a profound impression on me," George said. "I remembered what I had been told by those women from Providence who were in the Nation of Islam, about the lie that our salvation could come from white people and not ourselves."
My African students in Uganda had reached a similar conclusion, and the feeling against whites and Indians, any non-Africans, was strong. Like George, I now had a wife and child. I had published my first novel and had finished another and was writing a third. I applied for a job at the University of Singapore. At first there was a problem. A security check was done on me by the Singapore government. They used FBI files, where my record showed that I had been a student activist and had been arrested in Amherst, that I had initially been refused entry to the Peace Corps for these transgressions, and at last had been kicked out for covert political acts that placed the Peace Corps in jeopardy. All this was relayed to me by my brother in Washington, who had been phoned by a friend at the FBI. My brother assured him that I was not dangerous or a security risk, and I got the Singapore job.