“Let’s just pick this up another day,” said Leigh Anne.
“No,” said Michael. “I want to get my driver’s license today.”
She’d never seen him so definite and purposeful. For the first time, when Leigh Anne said that she would accompany him to his mother’s house, Michael didn’t protest. Leaving Collins to stall the DMV, she and Michael took off for inner-city Memphis, at 90 miles per hour. Along the way Michael said, “No one in my whole family has ever had a driver’s license.” That’s why it was so important for him to get his driver’s license. It would make him different from his family.
At length, they roared up in front of the same redbrick public housing project where Leigh Anne had dropped him off after their day of shopping for clothes. Michael had phoned his mother en route to let her know they were on the way, and to ask her to find an old bill or something. Now the woman herself opened the door: she was very large and very black. Six foot one at least, with big bones and, Leigh Anne thought, a pretty face. Denise was her name but everyone called her “Dee Dee.”
“How y’all doin today?”
She was drunk, or high, and slurring her words. She wore a muu-muu and a garish wig that Leigh Anne assumed she had thrown on when they’d called to tell her they were on their way. She didn’t invite them in and Leigh Anne sensed that she didn’t want to, either. If she had, Leigh Anne would have found only a single trace of the childhood of Michael Oher: a sentimental photograph of a little boy hugging a big-eyed tabby cat that he had taped to the wall in the room where as a little boy he had, on occasion, slept. The sun was setting, and behind her the small apartment was dark. Michael just stood away from her, keeping his distance.
“You better come over here and hug your mama!” she shouted at Michael.
Michael just walked over and stood there. He offered no resistance when she threw her arms around him, but he didn’t respond in kind or, for that matter, utter a word. She hadn’t bothered to go looking for an envelope with an address on it, and they were in a mad rush, so they didn’t have time to talk. At Leigh Anne’s request, Dee Dee went and found the key to her mailbox. They walked down together to the row of surprisingly large metal boxes. Dee Dee found hers, but just before she opened it, she said, “Oh, there’s no telling what’s in here.” Then she yanked open the box and down came the avalanche: water bills, light bills, gas bills, phone bills, eviction notices. It looked to be about three months’ worth of stuff, and when it was done falling out, a moraine of future trouble rose from the pavement. Leigh Anne needed only a single bill; she was spoiled for choice. She reached down and grabbed the one on top, thanked Dee Dee for her trouble, and drove 90 miles per hour with Michael back to the DMV. On the way, neither she nor Michael said a thing about what they’d just seen.
By the time they arrived at the DMV the doors were shut, but Collins had persuaded the ladies to hold it open just a few minutes more. There wasn’t a soul in the place; when Michael walked to the testing area, he had it all to himself. Leigh Anne was now sufficiently exasperated to remind Michael what she had been telling him for weeks: “You have one chance to pass this test. I gave Collins one chance, and I’ll give you one chance. I’m not coming down here again.” Michael vanished behind the partition where Leigh Anne couldn’t see him. For a moment there was only the hum of the fluorescent lights. Then she heard Michael in conversation with the ladies. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was clearly chattering up a storm. Then he went silent.
Moments later, Leigh Anne heard the first ominous sound: Bing! That would be the bell on the testing terminal signaling that he’d made a mistake. He was allowed to miss four questions; five and he’d fail, and they’d have to return and do this all over again. Which, despite her threats, she knew she would have to do. She took a seat against the white cinder-block wall beside the large sign with red letters that said APPLICANTS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT, and began to pray.
She was uncomfortable leaving Michael alone to solve a problem by himself. She already assumed that his problems were her problems, for if they weren’t, no problem ever would be solved. He was already, in this sense, her son. Her own extended family hadn’t liked the idea of them taking Michael in, at least initially. (“The only one who could never handle it was Daddy,” Leigh Anne said. “I truly think God took Daddy because He knew he couldn’t handle it.”) But then the more they came to know Michael, the less they fought it. Her mother, Virginia, was already playing the role of doting grandmother to Michael, and she and Michael clearly adored each other. Outside the family, the reaction was still mixed—“we knew people were going to have issues because we had a daughter exactly the same age,” said Leigh Anne. She often found herself greeted in the shops and restaurants and schools of East Memphis with the same leading line: “How have you handled it?”
What the woman—it was nearly always a woman—who asked Leigh Anne the question meant was, How have you handled having your gorgeous, nubile, seventeen-year-old daughter living under the same roof with a huge young black man the same age?
Leigh Anne explained about fifty times that Michael’s relationship to both Collins and Sean Junior was so much like that of a sibling that you’d never guess they hadn’t grown up together. Michael and Sean Junior would shut the door to Michael’s room for hours and compete: video games, miniature basketball, and whatever else they could find that leveled the playing field between a four-foot six-inch, 85-pound ten-year-old boy and a six-foot five-inch, 350-pound teenager. Michael and Collins would bicker and squabble just the way teen-aged brothers and sisters have since they were first created. As Leigh Anne’s feelings for Michael developed, the questions people asked became offensive to her. She’d been taking care of his material needs for a good year and a half, and his emotional ones, to the extent he wanted them taken care of, for almost as long. “I love him as if I birthed him,” she said. About the hundredth time someone asked her how she handled his sexual urges, Leigh Anne snapped. “You just need to mind your own business. You worry about your life and I’ll worry about mine,” she’d said. Word must have gotten around because after that no one asked.
Bing!
They now faced a problem far more difficult than mere social disapproval. At the end of Michael’s junior year, Leigh Anne had ordered up his Briarcrest transcripts. No one at Briarcrest had said anything to her about his grades, and so she assumed they must be at least barely acceptable. They weren’t. He had a cumulative GPA of 1.56 going into his senior year, and the NCAA required a 2.56. Out of a class of 161 students, he ranked 161st. The expensive private school was not much better than the worst sort of public one in filling the void: the empty space in the life of a child who had no one at home to take care of him. He was being described in the Memphis papers as the next great college football star, but to be the next great college football star you had to get to college, and there was little chance of that. Just to graduate from Briarcrest he needed eight more full credits—and there were only seven periods in the day! Most kids only took five classes, and had free periods for the other two. “The numbers don’t add up,” she said. “If he got an A in every class he still wouldn’t qualify.”
Bing!
When she saw Michael’s grades, steam came out of her ears. She marched into Briarcrest and hollered at a bunch of people, starting with the principal. The Briarcrest Christian School was just shuffling him along without ever intending for him to graduate. “This going-on-faith thing isn’t working,” she said. “They just kind of hoped it would happen. That’s bull. This isn’t a faith thing; this is a tangible thing.” She signed him up to take seven classes, plus before-school Bible Study—which counted toward graduation but not for the NCAA. She called every one of the teachers and told them that they were now to deal directly with her. He’d leave the house each morning at 6:00 a.m. and be in class straight through until 3:30 p.m. When she saw how many books he’d need, she realized he was going to need an industrial-strength backpack to
carry them in. North Face, she thought, might do the trick (“It gets to the top of Everest,” she thought) and so she went out and bought him a North Face backpack. Michael had taken one look at it and said, “I don’t want to take that to school.”
“Why not?” she’d asked.
“That’s the one all the little rich kids carry,” he’d said.
“Michael,” she’d said. “You are a little rich kid.”
And he’d taken the backpack to school.
Bing!
The first test of Michael’s senior year was a quiz on the summer reading. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress had been assigned. Michael was incapable of reading it himself. She and Sean had taken turns every night that summer reading it aloud to him. It took two months and nearly killed them both: Sean hadn’t read a book cover to cover since—well, possibly ever. John Grisham had been at Ole Miss Law School when Sean was dazzling people on the Ole Miss basketball court. Grisham was a Sean Tuohy fan and sent Sean signed copies of his thrillers. They just piled up in Sean’s clothes closet, unread. Now Sean was up half the night, every other night, reading The Pilgrim’s Progress…aloud. They had gone over every passage of the book with Michael before the test. Leigh Anne thought he’d score a perfect 100. He got a 59. After that first day of school he brought the test score home with him, along with a long reading list, and an assignment to write a term paper. At that point Leigh Anne had turned to Sean, and Sean said, “Don’t look at me. I majored in basketball.”
She took over Michael’s academic life. Every day, without fail, she went through his North Face backpack. He’d fail a quiz or get a D on a paper and never think it worth mentioning. He wouldn’t throw away his papers and test grades but he wouldn’t volunteer them, either. She’d find the paper balled up at the bottom of the backpack. That was their biggest problem at first: he wouldn’t tell you when there was a problem. He had the most intense desire to please, without the ability to do the things that pleased. He had spent his whole life treating his mind as a problem to be covered up. He had grown so accustomed to not sharing a thing about himself, or perhaps never being asked about himself, that he didn’t even know how to begin.
He now called her “Mama.” (Except when he was pissed off at her for making him do something he didn’t want to do, in which case he called her “Ms. Tuohy.”) When he felt vulnerable, he came to her. She was now, without a doubt, the person on earth in whom Michael was most likely to confide. And in the last thirty-six hours she had learned that she didn’t know either his name or his birthday! Information about himself he viewed either as so totally without value, or so very precious, that it shouldn’t be shared with others. In the Briarcrest locker room before and after his basketball games, he changed in a bathroom stall. He was the single most private person she had ever met. Every now and again when Michael suspected he might have revealed something about himself to her, or after Leigh Anne had made some observation about him, he’d smile and say, “You think you really know me, don’t you?”
All of which raised a question: what was he hiding? The thought had crossed Leigh Anne’s mind: maybe he’s gay.
She didn’t know a lot of gay people. White Evangelical Christian Memphis—which is to say most of East Memphis—wasn’t really designed to make black people feel comfortable in it, but if you had a choice of being black in East Memphis, or being gay in East Memphis, you’d think at least twice about it. White Memphis life was organized around the churches, and the churches, at any rate most of them, viewed homosexuality as either a sin to be expiated or a disease to be treated. The vast and fast-growing Grace Evangelical Church that the Tuohys had been instrumental in creating was no softer on homosexuality than any other. Black people were perfectly welcome at Grace Evan—it’s just that none but Michael Oher ever came. Gay people, unless they were looking to be cured, were not.
Bing!
When Leigh Anne heard the fifth and final mistake she stopped praying and started cursing. “Shit!” she said, and then she began to curse him: Why couldn’t he study? Why didn’t he learn? What more could she possibly do? Then she heard another sound—of the large black woman who’d stayed behind to administer the test.
“Congratulations, Michael!” said a cheery voice. “You’ve passed the test. You come on over here and have your picture made!”
A few minutes later Michael emerged with one of the ladies, climbed into Sean’s BMW 745, and zipped off for a fifteen-minute test drive. When he returned, they handed him the first driver’s license anyone in his family had ever owned. On the way out the door, one of the ladies shouted after him, “Don’t you forget, I’m gonna have that NFL sideline pass off you!”
THERE WAS A new force in Michael Oher’s life: a woman paying extremely close attention to him who had an eye for detail, a nose for trouble, the heart of a lion, and the will of a storm trooper. A mother. “When I moved in with Leigh Anne and Sean, I felt loved,” said Michael, “like part of a family. In the other houses I didn’t feel like part of the family. I didn’t feel like they wanted me there.” The feeling was good for Michael and it was also, oddly enough, good for the Briarcrest Christian School football team. The team came out for their first real game in early September 2004. The opponent was Melrose, a public school that would wind up in the state championship game in the division for Tennessee’s biggest schools. The game was in the Liberty Bowl, and it was, from the point of view of the Michael Oher fan club, deflating. At the half, Melrose led 8–0 and went on to win 16–6. Afterwards, Hugh came up to the suite where Leigh Anne and a few of the other mothers and coaches’ wives had watched the game. “So what’d you think?” he asked Leigh Anne, not actually expecting her to have a critical thought.
“I think you have the number one left tackle in America and you ran the ball right eighty percent of the time,” said Leigh Anne, sharply. “I don’t know a lot about football but that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
Hugh Freeze’s authority on football matters was seldom questioned. Hugh had his own style, and it was, by high school and even some college standards, extremely complicated. He ran flea-flickers and fumblerooskis and double reverses and a seemingly endless variety of passing plays involving as many receivers as possible. He had one play where the quarterback hit the running back with a little screen in the middle of the field, the running back pitched it back to a wide receiver looping through the backfield, and the wide receiver chucked it 30 yards downfield to the quarterback. Of course every pro and college and even high school team has a trick play or three they can go to from time to time. The difference was that Hugh went to them routinely.
He had all these elaborate plays, in part, to compensate for what he saw as Briarcrest’s systematic lack of brute force. From time to time he’d get a talented running back or quarterback, but he always found his team overmatched on the line of scrimmage. He couldn’t power his way to victory, so he set out to trick his way to victory, and he had done it, often. He’d led the Briarcrest Christian School Saints to five of the previous six Tennessee State Championship games and, in the bargain, raised the money for a brand-new million-dollar football complex ten miles outside of town, a thirty-thousand-dollar boom on which to place his end zone cameras, and not one but two sets of uniforms (120 green helmets and 120 gold helmets). He had six paid assistant coaches and three volunteers: a former NFL offensive lineman, a former All-SEC defensive end, and a former All-SEC point guard. The only reason he didn’t charter a jet to fly his team to their away games in Nashville is that Sean talked him out of it, on the grounds that it might upset some of the more academically inclined people at Briarcrest who wondered where the football program found all this money. Hugh had just turned thirty-five years old and Sean was willing to bet that by the time he was forty-five, he’d be the head football coach at a major college. Hugh would make that bet, too. “He’s so absolutely cocky,” said Sean, “that if you don’t love him like a brother, you absolutely hate him.”
Sean
and Leigh Anne both loved Hugh like a brother; on the other hand, Leigh Anne had watched the game and thought: Hugh doesn’t know how to use his most precious football asset. He had done all his fancy stuff and it hadn’t worked. Only toward the end of that game did he pound the ball over Michael’s side of the field where—lo and behold—huge holes opened up. After Leigh Anne said what she said, Hugh went silent, turned to Sean, and said, “Sean, I think it’s time for me to leave.” With that he walked out—and wouldn’t answer his cell phone when Sean called him. They’d played that game on a Saturday and so the next morning, of course, everyone went to church. After church, Hugh met in his million-dollar football field house with his ten assistant coaches to review film of the game. The lights went down; the room was solemn. For the first hour or so, Hugh didn’t say a word about the outrageous challenge to his authority. Then they came to a play where Michael missed a block. Hugh froze the film.
“Now look at that block Michael Oher just made,” he said. “Call Leigh Anne Tuohy about that one.”
“I can call her all you want, Hugh,” said Sean. “But she’s right.”
Leigh Anne had just fired the first shot in a war that was waiting to happen. After the film, Hugh got up and showed the coaches the game plan for the following week: a chalkboard that was already a blizzard of new formations and new plays. Tim Long sat in the front row and could no longer contain himself. Long had played in the NFL, and yet he had the classic lineman personality: he laid low, said little, followed orders, and insisted on his own relative unimportance. He was six five, 300 pounds, and yet had spent the past two years feeling intimidated by five-foot ten-inch Hugh Freeze, who had maybe played in high school. “He’s the sharpest football guy I’ve ever known, so I just got so I felt kinda inferior to him,” said Long. The night before, depressed after the loss to Melrose, Long had flipped on the TV. The movie Tin Cup was on, and he sat and watched the whole thing until one in the morning. Why weren’t they running the ball behind Michael Oher? He had never seen an offensive lineman who was such a force of nature that he might control an entire football game, if used properly. Now he had. In two years Long had never had the nerve to get up in front of the coaches and speak. Now he did.
The Blind Side Page 14