The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  He said he’d been relieved when I openly discredited this group and others like it. But I think he worried nonetheless that I was at risk of being drawn, not into destructive or irrational activities, but into incendiary writings that would marginalize me in a manner that would undermine my possible effectiveness and also (I am sure that this was in his mind) might endanger my ability to earn a living as an author.

  If my father had not been so knowledgeable about the ways that people, at destabilizing moments in their lives, often fall into behavior that intensifies their instability, I might have found it easier to write off his anxieties, as I’d done before. But this time I think I knew my father was correct. In subsequent years, I found that I was grateful for the sobering effect his good advice had had. I think it helped me understand my situation more realistically.

  —

  In the early 1980s, after Ronald Reagan became president and the shift in the political terrain that had begun during the Nixon years was crystallized in the revanchist policies not only of severe conservatives but also of some very smart and bitter former radicals and liberals who seemed to look with horror at their earlier ideals and with contempt for those who still adhered to them, I underwent a second crisis of self-questioning. Once again, I spoke about this with my father. This time, it was I who opened up the conversation.

  At some point in 1983, I had brought a book proposal to my literary agent that described a work I had begun about the many adults I was meeting, most of them in very poor communities, who could barely read, if they could read at all, and therefore couldn’t help their children in their preschool years or when they entered public school. I had started working with some literacy groups and had written a preliminary paper, a battle plan of sorts, for programs that would be designed to teach these parents and their children simultaneously—a plan that was adopted by the California system of state libraries. The book that I proposed would build upon this work, but carry it much further.

  My agent, however, recognizing that this project, because of its inner-city emphasis, represented a continuation of my writings about race and the effects of systematic inequality, told me that he didn’t think there would be much interest from a publisher. “Times have changed. The readership for books like this is disappearing quickly. If I were you, I’d start to think of moving on to something new.”

  I was stunned when he rejected my proposal. But his statement—“times have changed”—left me with the fear that he might have a better sense than I of what the market possibilities were like. I became so shaken in my confidence that I worked myself into a state of mind in which I worried that the books I had already published might be going out of print and heading for remainder bins.

  By this date, many of my leftist friends who could see the way the pendulum was swinging were trying to secure positions in the academic world, typically at universities or colleges of a progressive bent. When I spoke about this with my father, his first reaction was to say that this “might not be such a bad idea” for me to think about as well.

  I think he knew that I’d been given academic invitations in the past and had rather blithely turned them down. But not long after we had had that conversation, I received an inquiry that held some real appeal for me. It was a position in a subject area that crossed department boundaries—“social ethics,” “social justice,” something of that sort—at one of the more exclusive academic institutions in New England. The invitation followed soon after a lecture I had given there; and in my first burst of relief, and expecting that my father would be pleased, I drove directly into Boston to regale him with this news.

  By the time I got to the apartment, however, and started to describe this to my father, I had begun to think about it with conflicted feelings. On the one hand, the invitation had been tendered to me by a socially committed man who, I knew, was not expecting me, and did not want me, to submit to any cooling down of my beliefs, which, at first sight, I had thought the social milieu in which I’d be working might require. “This old institution could use some shaking up,” he said. “To be quite honest, I think you could help me….”

  On the other hand, because I’d visited classes like the ones that I presumably would teach, I told my father that I wasn’t wholly comfortable with the idea of spending the next twenty years of my career teaching very fortunate young people instead of working, as I’d done in the preceding years, with kids who never had these opportunities.

  My father held back from reacting for a while. His hands were clasped. He was looking at me thoughtfully. I reminded him of one of the kids I’d taught in Roxbury, whom I knew he would remember, a terribly unhappy boy named Stephen who mumbled to himself in class and was routinely beaten with a bamboo whip, after it was dipped in vinegar, which was an accepted form of discipline in the city’s “negro schools” in 1965. He grew into his teenage years with a sense of rage and vengefulness and my father tried to intervene on his behalf after he committed an atrocious crime that led to his imprisonment.

  I told my father that I didn’t like the thought of marching out a little boy like Stephen, and the many other inner-city children I had come to know, as if they were so many social specimens to touch the edges of the conscience of those who were more privileged than they and whose advantages, at least to some degree, depended on the inequalities I’d seen. It was true, of course, that I had written about Stephen and his classmates and others in his neighborhood, but I was also living in the black community, and working among families there, and I thought my writing was affected by that vantage point. Living and teaching in an affluent environment would be a major change in course for me. I said I was convinced that others with experience akin to mine could cross that line between the two extremes in our society with loyalties intact and do it in a graceful way that would not compromise their feelings of integrity. But I wasn’t sure that I could make that crossing–or whether it would be a good idea for me even to try.

  This was one of the moments for which I’ll always be most grateful to my father. He had listened to me patiently. But when he spoke at last, he utterly surprised me.

  “Don’t do it!” he said. “It’s not for you. I’ve had a chance to think about this since you talked about those friends of yours looking for positions in the academic world.” He told me that he now regretted the hasty way he had reacted at the time. The invitation I’d described to him was “flattering,” he said, and he could see why it initially appealed to me. But he added that he found my second thoughts about it more in keeping with his own.

  “It would, in a sense, be ‘cashing in your chips.’ I don’t think you’ll be at peace if you agree to do this.”

  He said that, since our earlier talk, he had discussed the issue of my publication worries and my possible return to academia with my mother and that I should talk about this with her if I wanted and I’d find that she agreed with him. “We don’t think you need to run for safety. We think you’ll survive these next few years just fine.” Even with Mr. Reagan in the White House, he went on, “there’s got to be a vast number of people who rebel against the shallowness and meanness of his policies. Every decent instinct in this nation didn’t die when he came into office.” And, he said, no matter what my agent told me, he was convinced that there were many publishers who would take an interest in the book I had in mind. “I’m also certain that you’ll find your readers are still there—maybe scattered, maybe very quiet now, maybe somewhat hidden in the crevices….I’m confident that they’re still there.”

  He got up from his chair. He’d been sitting at his desk but now he walked across the room and took an ashtray from the sideboard in the dining area. I believe I’ve mentioned that my father liked to smoke a pipe. On the sideboard there was a leather-covered humidor. He packed his pipe and lighted it.

  “The very nice position you described would be a throwback for you. Something in you turned against that kind of life when you gave up your Rhodes and decided to leave Oxford, and you k
now I was unhappy with you at the time. I wanted to fly over there and drag you back, but your mother wouldn’t let me. I didn’t think you knew what you were doing. Or, if you did, I didn’t think you could sustain it. I was wrong….”

  Standing near one of the windows as he drew upon his pipe, the smoke from the expensive blend he liked drifting up about him, and gazing out across the river at the skyline of the universities on the Cambridge side, he allowed himself another pause before he spoke again.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever said this to you in so many words, but I’m glad you went the way you did. And now, after you’ve staked so much, I don’t want to see you turning back. I want you to keep on.”

  At the door when I was putting on my coat, he said again, with all the old authority his voice commanded for me still, “You’re going to be fine!” He tapped me on the shoulder then. “By the way, get rid of that agent if you can. It doesn’t sound as if he’s been much of a friend to you.”

  I followed his advice. A few weeks later, I telephoned a better and far more respected agent, named Lynn Nesbit, who has been my agent ever since. A month later, she sent me a contract for the book I had proposed. When it was published, in 1985, it reached a good-size audience and, I’d like to think, helped to bring attention to the needs of men and women whose shabby education, or lack of education, had denied them the ability to read. It also earned enough to keep me going for two years. Then I settled down once more into the writing of those books about our children and their schools that matter most to me.

  —

  Less than seven years went by between the night my father gave me that advice and the time when he began to lose his line of thought in the course of conversation and started having trouble with his memory of people’s names or the names of places he was trying to describe. Before long, there was also a perceptible decline in his sense of confidence about decisions he was making for my mother and himself.

  From that point on, the balance of power between us started shifting. Now it was he who began to ask for my suggestions on occasion and to look to me for reassurance when he fell into uncertainties about the papers he was writing—even though the pieces he was showing me continued to be skillfully developed, and some of them, I thought, were strikingly original. He wasn’t simply reconfiguring arguments he’d made and conclusions he’d arrived at in the past, as thoughtful people, intellectuals and others, often tend to do when they get into later years. Indeed, in several of these pieces, there was an unquestioned evolution in his thinking and a new emboldenment in giving voice to points of view that were more provocative than anything he’d written up to now.

  One of the most compelling of these papers was an effort to refine positions he had taken earlier in his career on ethical considerations to be brought to bear, on the part of a psychiatrist, in evaluation of a dissident behavior that might be regarded by conventional opinion as an unacceptable offense to civic order. In the beginning of the paper, he drew a sharp distinction between pathological behavior or irrational destructiveness and what he termed “a principled resistance” to societal injustice. “Rage at oppression,” he observed, “has been considered righteous from time immemorial.” Even actions of explicit violence, he said, have been “tolerated, even welcomed,” when “the absence of alternatives has engendered desperation….”

  He went on to say that he did not equate criminally dangerous behavior “with contemporary patterns of societal remonstrance” in the United States or elsewhere, “although the remonstrants may be perceived as dangerous by targeted establishments.” He spoke respectfully of those whose motivation “is essentially altruistic (based on compassionate identification with others),” as opposed to those whose motivation must be seen as “egoistic” and originating from unhealthy rage in a disordered personality. The empathetic way in which he spoke of “principled resistance” struck me, when I read this, not as a rejection of his earlier beliefs but certainly as a rather daring emendation of anything I’d known him to express before.

  A week or so after he had shown this paper to me, he sent me a photocopy of a piece of writing by an Italian philosopher of the eighteenth century, with a commentary written by Voltaire, entitled “Crimes and Punishments,” which he had found at the medical school, where he had been spending many hours in the famous Countway Library while he’d been working on his paper. He said it wasn’t relevant to the points that he was making, but he’d marked a passage that he thought I’d find of interest.

  The passage began, “Finally, the most certain method of preventing crimes is to perfect the system of education. But this is…an object, if I may venture to declare it, which is so intimately connected with the nature of government that it will always remain a barren spot….” My father said, “I thought perhaps you might like to quote this in one of your lectures.” He had circled the words “will always remain a barren spot.” This enjoyable collegiality between us would continue for a while longer.

  Within another year, however, I was forced to recognize a heightened sense of insecurity, reflected, for example, in the disproportionate degree of gratitude he would express for the small amounts of help I had been giving him. I had begun to do my best to mediate between him and my mother as their tensions with each other were increasing. I was also doing what I could to help him keep his notes and papers organized. I noticed that his desk was cluttered with a lot of semi-finished pages and suggested that he paper-clip related items and sequence them thematically, so he wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed when he went back to writing the next morning.

  “Dear Jonathan,” he wrote to me soon after that, “your visit has done more for me and mother than only you can know. Your directness [this was in reference to his quarrels with my mother] and your good suggestion that I organize my workplace and clean up the mess you noticed on my desk encouraged me to make a start at this, and I did, and have already made considerable progress. I am encouraged. I shall go on with this and keep you informed….”

  But that feeling of encouragement was obviously fragile. In the fall of 1991, when he was invited to address a convocation on terrorist activities, which was to take place in Rome in the first week of December, his growing recognition of the failings of his memory led him into several weeks of painful indecision.

  “My anxiety is dreadful,” he reported in a letter that he sent me in October. I notice now that, on the envelope, he had placed twice the number of postage stamps needed for so short a letter and had written my address in very large block letters with my street and zip code underlined with a thick black marker.

  The letter makes it evident that he had gone into a tailspin of self-doubt about the lecture he would be presenting at this convocation, at which, he knew, a number of his European colleagues would be present. As soon as I read this, I got on the phone and asked if he would like to let me see a copy of the paper. When he said he thought that it might give him some perspective if we could sit down and read it through together, I got in my car and headed down to Boston. He had the paper waiting for me in the living room when I arrived.

  The paper focused on the psychiatric disposition of an individual who was prepared to put his life at risk, and perhaps the lives of others, by participating in an act of violence—the hijack of an aircraft, for example—in pursuit of a political agenda. “Acts of antisocial violence,” he had begun, “frequently involve an identificational blurring between the self and others, the aggressor and his victims.” In such acts, as he surmised, “the aggressor’s behavior appears to have a wraithlike quality of self-immolation.” He expanded on his reference to “self-immolation” by hypothesizing that this might at times take on “a self-enhancing quality” or “some kind of theological dimension.”

  Again, as in the previous paper he had shown me, he distinguished such behavior from those acts of violence that might be regarded from some points of view as rational responses to oppressive situations. And while he made it more than clear that he was not condoning terroris
t activities, he gave a nuanced recognition of the fact that violent behavior cannot always be perceived as pathological and that historians—“as in the instance,” he suggested, “of the slave revolts in the United States”—have frequently regarded such behavior as courageous and heroic, even though this point of view is almost always angrily contested.

  When I finished reading this, I told my father right away that I thought it was terrific. If only for the line about “a wraithlike quality of self-immolation,” I said that I was certain the conferees in Rome would find this of great interest. At his request, I marked some repetitions, added three or four transitions, and suggested some resequencing of passages.

  Six weeks after that, he flew to Italy with my mother for the convocation. If he had to struggle now and then with lapses in his memory—and I assume he did—I imagine that he managed to glide over them or otherwise disguise them with his usual agility. On the basis of notations that he made after his presentation, the reaction from the other conferees left him with the sense of satisfaction he had hoped for and I had expected.

  After the conference, he and my mother extended their stay, the last such trip they’d ever make, by traveling to Florence and Assisi. Then, as a special treat to celebrate my mother’s birthday—she was eighty-eight on the fifteenth of the month—they went on to Venice, which they’d never visited before, and spent part of a week there with one of his colleagues from Toronto and a young Italian doctor they had met in Rome.

  A tender note he’d written to my mother on the stationery of the Gritti Palace, the hotel in which they stayed in Venice, gave me the impression that the extra weeks in Italy had been my father’s late-in-life attempt to make amends, as insufficient as I’m sure he knew they were, for the many times of grief and worry he had caused her in their years of marriage. “I want you to know that I have always loved you and am grateful for the patience you have shown me. It was you who recognized my hunger to become a doctor at a time when others had discouraged me. I am so thankful for the many years in which you have guided me and cared for me….”