I didn’t love confrontation, and I had been frequently warned that Mr. Worthman really enjoyed confrontation, that at times he was known to say it was one of his most effective teaching tools. There were times I would have challenged the professor if I’d gotten caught, times when I was working on my own songs. I had adopted a New York attitude since starting at Fieldston, and I had certain spaces that I didn’t want rolled over anymore. But my scholarship also depended on being able not to react to personal injury, to getting pushed around, to personal restriction and harassment. Not that the scholarship was a big deal to me, but it was a big deal to someone who was a big deal to me: my mother.
Still, I was in a good writing groove and Mr. Worthman was in my way. He might snatch all the younger students sneaking in to play “Stand By Me,” but I planned to be the guerilla he missed. I was successful for a while. Months, in fact.
Then in April, I was sitting alone at the keyboard during a free period of mine that I often spent playing ping-pong. I’d had a sudden creative inspiration. I often heard tunes in my head. But this one arrived with words attached like bright bulbs on a Christmas tree. No sooner had I sat down to play than Mr. Worthman arrived with a short, pudgy gentleman in overalls with a handlebar mustache and a tool box.
The mustached man ignored me and slid a metal box beneath the Steinway, walked gingerly to the side, and pushed up the flat top. He propped it open at a forty-five-degree angle, exposing the mechanics of the piano’s wires and pads. There are few things more beautiful than the strings of a Steinway. I watched every little move the piano tuner made under the hood.
Mr. Worthman, meanwhile, was making sweeping motions with both hands, directing me toward the door, too distracted for a protracted lecture.
“Heron, you know the rule!” he barked.
He was also talking to the other man about what needed to be done. “Total A-440, with a pad that needs to be changed on the F-sharp in the third octave. It sounds like it got damp or something.”
Then again to me: “I’ll deal with you later.”
He was sweeping again, like “Out, out, damn Scott.”
I wanted to stay and watch the piano tuner, but I left—and forgot the song I had been just about to capture. If I was able to play a song once, I would have it; this one had gotten away.
Things were still cool for a while. I didn’t see Mr. Worthman at all for a few weeks, and his not seeing me kept anything from triggering his memory.
I should have left well enough alone. I should have left the piano alone. But not having been able to remember the song pushed me toward a point where I thought I wouldn’t mind a confrontation. So I did what I wanted to do. I had a plan. The choral group had their big spring recital coming up on the quadrangle, and there would be extra rehearsals after school; meetings during class time would be scuttled. The piano would be sitting there all day every day without anybody coming in to play it. That was almost obscene.
My strategy seemed to work. For the next three weeks I stopped by the Steinway every day for a few chords or a verse or two of my latest song. I was starting to get comfortable. One afternoon at the end of April, Mr. Worthman landed in the Steinway room as if he’d leapt from the tower in a parachute. I was too astonished even to show surprise.
When he caught his breath and his face started to regain its natural pallor, he said, “You’re in a lot of trouble this time, young man. I hope you know that. I’ve got a good mind to have them take you up before the disciplinary committee. We’ll have your parents in.”
When the letter arrived at home a few days later from the disciplinary committee at Fieldston, I had forgotten Mr. Worthman’s threat. I expected it to raise my mother’s blood pressure and her voice, but that wasn’t her way. When she called me into the kitchen, I didn’t know what to expect. But her flat tone of voice raised the hairs along the length of my arms.
“You want to tell me what this letter’s all about?” she asked, holding it in front of her face like a fan.
“What does it say?” I said, taking a seat at the kitchen table opposite her.
“It says that I need to appear with you in front of the discipline committee next Monday for a 9 a.m. meeting.”
I took a breath.
“I played a piano,” I said quietly.
“That’s what this is about? You played a piano and I’m supposed to come up to your school about it?”
“Yeah. This music teacher said they might call you up there but I swear I thought he was joking.”
She paused for a beat.
“So you played a piano and then what?”
“Then nothing. That’s all I did was play the piano.”
“You usually tell the truth,” she said, “but I don’t hear it.”
She sat for another moment.
“Did you hit someone—like the music teacher?”
“No, ma’am.”
I had heard from other students that Fieldston had a “no suspension” policy. They believed that suspension gave the students a vacation from classes. I had told my mother about that.
“We’ll see about this,” my mother finally said, as though she were really exhausted. “I don’t need to be going up there and getting a surprise. You may as well tell me the whole thing.”
The next Monday we trudged up the hill after the long subway journey I had told her about many times. She was surprised but pleased to see the cookies and tea service and coffee pot and the discipline folks engaged in pleasant conversation and sipping coffee from good china and munching on dainty cookies. I didn’t have much of an appetite.
The face-off was called to order and my mother and I sat side-by-side facing a similar semicircle to the one I’d met a year prior when she was ill and I left early.
“Mrs. Heron,” the principal began, “we’re facing something of a problem here and we need your input. You see, Mr. Worthman here caught Gil playing the piano.”
My mother’s reaction was almost imperceptible. She relaxed her shoulders and recrossed her legs. Her expression was pleasant enough, a little smile. And she looked critically from face to face as though waiting for the punch line of a joke.
The principal’s voice droned to a close and I saw Mr. Worthman stare with energy and focus at me. He had been waiting for this moment, and now he was speaking too loudly with certain emphasis as though it was a prepared speech that he had rehearsed. He talked about how valuable the Steinway was and how he had caught me playing it before and how the rule had been put in place to prevent students from playing “boogie woogie.”
I didn’t notice the transition when Mr. Worthman had finished and suddenly collapsed in his seat as the principal started speaking again. He said something about how it would be easy for the committee to mete out the punishment but that at Fieldston they thought it was important for the parents to be involved and that what they wanted was my mother’s recommendation.
The pause between the principal’s question and my mother’s response fell on each member of the committee like a guillotine. She took a long breath before turning in my direction.
“Expel him,” she said crisply and clearly. “I understand that you don’t suspend students and I understand why. I agree with you. I don’t believe in suspending students either. So if you believe playing the piano is high on your list of offenses, expel him.”
She was dominating the room now. Her voice was clear and her diction was perfect.
“I’m going to work now. If you expel him, he’ll tell me when I get home.”
It was an amazing piece of business. There hadn’t been a second when she seemed shaken or awkward or the least bit uncomfortable. She looked every bit the well-dressed businesswoman perfectly at ease, and as she gathered her bag and scarf, she could easily have been heading out to a waiting limousine instead of to the subway, as was actually the case.
Finally she turned to the committee members as we were leaving. “When he told me what this was all about, I didn’t believe him. I
thought he had finally done something that he was too embarrassed to tell me about, that he had lost this wonderful opportunity and we would both be humiliated to sit here when I heard the truth. He told me the truth. He said he had been playing a piano. I will only add this: when something goes wrong on Seventeenth Street, I don’t call you. Because that’s my responsibility. And this is your school. If he has done something that merits punishment, don’t call me. Send him home. We’ll understand. I need to have him show me the way back down that hill. You can tell him whatever you decide.”
I resisted the urge to look back at Mr. Worthman.
We walked down the hill without saying much. That was another thing I appreciated about my mother. She wasn’t afraid of silence. By the time we’d arrived at the base of the stairs that led up to the subway, she had come back to herself.
“I want you to leave those people’s things alone,” she said. “You’re up here to get an education. Get it and come on home. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I learned something today, too.”
I think she and I got a lot closer that day.
15
I am extremely pleased to report that I only had one session with the Fieldston disciplinary committee. That does not mean that I committed only one infraction. That would be ridiculous. I guess it’s a little like being charged with a first offense even if it’s the tenth time you’ve done something. It’s the first time you got caught.
In that respect, I can never accuse the people of Fieldston, neither the students nor the faculty, of being racist. I can accuse the students of knowing each other for years and preferring to hang out with each other instead of some guy who just got there. I can accuse the teachers of having taught my classmates for ten years and me for ten minutes. But I can’t say they never took the time to tell me that I was doing as little work as I did.
So there were students and faculty members and executives who did not like me. But to their credit, I honestly believe that they just didn’t like me. What’s wrong with that? There were a lot of Black folks who felt the same way over the years. They were just less anxious to let me know it.
Most of this wisdom was acquired over my three years there. As a tenth-grade rookie, my first year there, I was working overtime at Jackson’s or wherever the hell I could to make ends meet and stay afloat in Spanish class. I felt more comfortable as the years went on. It was just a school, after all. I had probably set some sort of poverty precedent by receiving a scholarship to cover books as well as tuition. The books at public school were free, but at Fieldston I found the cost beyond my legal reach, and mentioned the possibility of a heist, which inspired Professor Heller to get me a voucher that I used for sixty-four dollars’ worth of knowledge.
My mother and I didn’t have enough money for it to be one of my issues. I took every opportunity that showed up on Seventeenth Street. I managed to catch a run at the A&P supermarket on Eighth Avenue three nights a week, and since I had improved a great deal on piano and still kept up with the top tunes on the radio, I looked for jobs as keyboard player with some rhythm and blues or rock and roll bands in the city. I managed to hook up with a few groups for weekend jobs at schools, in hotel bars, and at birthday parties. There was a whole culture then a few levels down from the bands we were imitating. The bread was short, twenty or twenty-five dollars a night, but it beat the hell out of nothing.
Every summer from the time I was sixteen I took a job as a seasonal worker for the Housing Authority. I spent one summer at the St. Nicholas Houses on 135th Street in Harlem, one at the Dykeman Houses on the Upper West Side, and one at the Housing Authority’s central office at 250 Broadway. That turned out to be a very good summer. Aside from the nine to five I was doing, Monday through Friday, I signed up as a referee for four or five games of basketball every weekend. The New York City Housing Authority had a summer basketball league and furnished uniforms, score books, time clocks, and balls for two teams in every set of projects. The Authority also made up a schedule, made sure the court was available, and assigned a referee to officiate the game and turn in a report to the central office at 250 Broadway.
That’s where I came in. Refs were paid ten bucks a game, so I could make an extra forty or fifty dollars per weekend. My shelf work at A&P started at 7 p.m. and ended between midnight and 2 a.m. I would send inventory upstairs from the basement, or stand upstairs with a hand truck snatching crates of canned goods, bottles, and cans. Dairy products and meats needed to be stacked weekend deep before the Saturday deluge. All the weekend sales specials and new product displays had to be stacked and stamped. All the summer work ended up paying for college tuition.
I had decided to attend Lincoln University after my 1967 graduation from Fieldston. I wanted to go to Lincoln because it seemed to be a place where Black writers had come to national prominence. Perhaps because of its location: if not exactly the middle of nowhere, at least on one side or the other. It was outside of Oxford, Pennsylvania, about forty-five miles from Philadelphia, fifty-five miles from Baltimore, and thirty miles from Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps that isolation and absence of urban distractions had allowed the creativity and intellect of Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson, Ron Welburn, and others to flourish. Whatever the reason, I thought the place was extraordinary. Its students had made noteworthy accomplishments in a number of areas. Kwame Nkrumah got his degree there in the 1930s and went on to become the leader of independent Ghana. Cab Calloway had gone there. And my candidate for Man of the Century, NAACP lawyer and first Black on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, went to Lincoln, too.
The school was founded as the Ashmun Theological Institute in 1854 at the insistence of the Quakers, who formed a powerful political force in Pennsylvania. In an era when it was still illegal to teach Blacks to read and write unless they were ministers, Ashmun was not only a tool of political appeasement for the Quakers, it was a double blessing for Blacks who now had both an institution of higher education—a first—and a safe house across the Maryland line that could be used as a rest stop and hiding place on the Underground Railroad.
In 1869, four years after the “war between the states” and four years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, the small school for aspiring Black theologians in Southeastern Pennsylvania was renamed Lincoln University. Abraham Lincoln was not a factor in my decision to go there, though I obviously knew the place had not been named for a luxury automobile. Black Americans have always held to the idea that Honest Abe was a friend of the downtrodden and mistreated slaves in spite of his Kentucky birthplace and pragmatism on the slavery issue—as in, “If I could save the Union and allow the institution of slavery to continue . . .” The fact was, he couldn’t have allowed slavery and still hung on to abolitionist support, so he authored a document that was politically expedient, the Emancipation Proclamation, that is credited with “Jubilee” as the news slowly spread through the South causing the celebrations Blacks refer to as “Juneteenth.”
The Lincoln of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall was not the place it had been when I got off the bus in September of 1967. School leadership had jettisoned a 112-year tradition as a male institution the year before. There were a large number of coeds unloading their trunks and bags from family station wagons. The general attitude of Lincoln’s executives was notably animated; their conversations centered around how necessary it was for Black schools to be open to change, and how good it was that in spite of diminishing funds and contributions to Black schools because of the disturbances on college campuses across the nation, Lincoln was growing; that in spite of the destruction of a century of traditions, Lincoln would be a stronger institution in the end.
Certain old-schoolers seemed unsettled by all the change. Juniors and seniors as well as veterans returning from service in the armed services found the rapid expansion and coeducational system distasteful because of new restrictions and rules of conduct at odds with their lives before the admission of women. A lot of the upperclassmen grum
bled that they were glad they’d be leaving, and the vets that they were sorry they had returned. I felt fortunate to have arrived when, through these older students, there was still a shadow of the tradition that had been so much of an influence on the Lincoln men who helped shape Black America, but the place felt like a campus in flux.
The years before a conflict never receive the micro-scrutiny
But the fuses are lit then for future upheaval and mutiny
Because small events in corners no one cares to see as critical
Become defining moments, later underlined as pivotal.
Pennsylvania’s Quakers knew a lot about persecution
And to their credit tried to find acceptable solutions.
Speaking out about the Northerners who wallowed in hypocrisy
Continuing to discriminate from behind walls of bureaucracy
So few cared in 1854 when some religious dignitaries
Founded a school for “colored folks” called Ashmun Seminary.
Each state politician would congratulate himself
For preserving the reputation of the entire commonwealth.
They successfully stopped the Quakers from raising so much hell
And kept them from putting another crack in the Liberty Bell
“Off the beaten path” was nearby when compared to this school’s isolation
Overlooking how perfect a place it would be for an underground railroad station
To get back to Philadelphia back then took the best part of a day.
There was a small village called Oxford but that was more than three miles away.
There’s no one to disturb, no one to object, just farms and farmers out there
Fifteen miles from the “mushroom capital,” a marketing town, Kennett Square.
For one hundred years the school progressed in relative obscurity
Its distance from any place known as a place provided some both-way security
The Last Holiday Page 9