This propelled me forward and brought out my competitive instincts. I went from being a good student to going above and beyond. At one point, I had more than twice as many tickets as anyone else in the classroom. But the best part of being at GPA was how open the teachers were to listening to my ideas and answering my questions. Here my questions weren’t a burden; they were welcomed, even encouraged. Nothing was sacrosanct. This expanded my mind more than anything else I’d experienced, and even then I thought how unfair it was that my former classmates at the public school I’d attended didn’t have access to such an open and stimulating learning environment.
It didn’t take me long to prove myself there, but when I first started at GPA, a few of the teachers and parents I met took one look at me and asked if I played basketball. It seemed they assumed that my main contribution to the school would be in athletics. They surmised other things, too. Even when I was at the center of everything, I constantly felt as if I was on the outside looking in. In my first year there, I had plenty of friends, but I wasn’t really one of them. I didn’t come from their neighborhood. I wasn’t a part of their community. And many of their comments and jokes, impersonations of stereotypes about black people, and presumptions that my family loved fried chicken and Kool-Aid reminded me of this.
There was one other black boy in my entire grade, Derrick, and all the other kids loved him because he was the class clown. When they asked him to impersonate cartoon characters, comedians, or a stereotypical thug, he played along. I knew he was doing it just to fit in, not because he really wanted to, and I felt for him, but I hated to see him doing all that to get the other kids’ attention.
This was not my style. Instead of playing to stereotypes, I was determined to use the same resource that helped me escape my world at home to fit into this new world—my mind. I wanted to prove their assumptions wrong by showing them through my behavior and academic performance that I was more than they expected.
But when I saw these new friends outside of school, I felt like even more of an outsider. They didn’t just live in homes that were larger than mine. Many of them lived in lavish mansions with guesthouses and pool houses twice the size of my house, and full-length tennis and basketball courts in the backyard. When I looked through the last names in the student directory for the first time, I realized whom I was going to school with: students whose families had founded entire retail and automotive industries and owned major furniture companies, restaurant chains, and popular sports franchises like the Red Wings and the Tigers.
To my new friends, all this was normal. To me, eating dinner inside of palatial mansions with eight bedrooms and maid service was like being in a fantasyland. I knew that families of great wealth and privilege lived in Grosse Pointe Farms, but I never knew quite what their life was like until I experienced it myself.
When I went over to friends’ houses, the first thing I noticed was the convenience of it all. These kids could have whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it. And when they didn’t get it, they’d throw a fit, arguing with their parents and making demands. They even called their parents by their first names. This was a complete shock to me. I never would have dared to speak to my mom that way; plus I couldn’t imagine what these kids had to complain about. Their lives seemed so stable and comfortable. They knew what to expect from day to day. Everything was just so easy.
As much as my mom tried to prepare me for this, she didn’t like me spending too much time at friends’ houses. Sometimes she would make difficult demands—that I could go to their house but I was not allowed to eat their food or use their bathroom. This confounded me. If she didn’t want me to experience these things, why did she spend so much time coaching me on manners, etiquette, and how to speak to these people in a way that was eloquent and graceful?
The one thing she stressed more than anything else was the importance of never conveying anger. “You are a black man, Zachary,” she told me from a very young age. “You can be assertive, but you have to be composed and tread delicately, or you’ll become associated with things that will never help you.”
In her calmer moments, she explained the fear associated with black masculinity and self-assertion, that centuries of slavery and oppression had restrained the ways black men had been able to embody a sense of agency. Slave masters sought to destroy a black man’s manhood by beating and degrading him, calling him “nigger,” and taking away everything that mattered to him. In great detail, she explained how during slavery there was nothing black men could take pride in. Their lives were miserable and it may have made their blood boil, but they couldn’t assert themselves physically or verbally. They had to be totally submissive.
This was why, she told me, black people walked around feeling acted upon. It was their legacy that things would just happen to them and there was nothing they could do about it. She told me to never ask, “What’s going to happen?” or “What are you going to do?” This was too passive. She saw the people I was interacting with in this new world as the descendants of slave owners, and in some cases they were. It was important to her that when I was with them I not feel weak or intimidated. I didn’t have the money or resources they had, but I could be socially dominant. So she taught me to be witty, crisp, and sleek, with no hard edges and just the right amount of swagger.
Yet it was just as important to her that I could be a “real nigga” and fit in with the guys in our neighborhood. She brought me over to her friend Yeti’s apartment and told him, “Zachary’s soft. He’s a pussy.”
Yeti was intimidating and tough, and he told me, “You can’t let those niggas out there punk you, man.” I studied Yeti—the way he slouched, the way he leaned, the way he walked and talked and the slang he used. Later my mom made me practice. Then she dropped me off at a basketball court in a rough area close to where we lived. There, on the basketball court, everything my mom had taught me about black masculinity was manifest.
I already knew how important basketball was to most guys in my neighborhood. But now I realized why. These kids didn’t go to a school like GPA where curiosity was encouraged. They didn’t have music lessons and swimming lessons, but they did have basketball. Basketball was free and the court was their turf, the one place where they could fully express themselves and feel a certain amount of dignity and self-respect. So they had to go hard, and they did.
I was quiet at first. I tried to use some of what I’d learned from Yeti and act a little tough so that I’d blend in but not too tough that I’d stand out and make myself a target. I knew some of the other boys from around the neighborhood. They always saw me as a bit of an outsider. I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t talk or dress like them, and I was more interested in reading than in hanging out with them. So they treated me with a mix of skepticism and mild hostility.
I didn’t exactly blame them. Those kids were tough. For years, they’d been fighting to survive. During the basketball games, the kids my age were getting elbowed and knocked down by older boys, but they kept on getting up. They had no choice.
These were my first experiences with code switching—going back and forth between two distinct worlds. I got better and better at it, but I always felt that I was playing a role, presenting some kind of spin-off of who I actually was.
Papa, more than anyone, helped me navigate this. He’d often take me out to nice restaurants and teach me such things as which fork to use for which course. Papa had more life experiences than anyone I knew, so I asked him question after question about all sorts of things I had heard and observed at school. I remember asking him, “What’s it like in Aspen?” and “What is a stock?”
Papa had been to Aspen, so he told me about it, and then he patiently explained the stock market and how money grows over time. He told me that some of these families weren’t wealthy just because they had good jobs and earned a lot of money. These families had old money that had accrued over centuries; some of them had amassed we
alth from slavery. The picture Papa painted was that privilege was both self-sustaining and complicated.
“Wealth makes it easier for them to feel like they don’t have to be conscientious,” he told me. “They have the means and the resources to get their own way. The pressures are different for you.” He told me that I had to be conscientious and articulate, and then explained to me why people rarely describe a white person as articulate. He was right. I’ve never heard a white peer be referred to as articulate, but I’ve been described that way to my face a hundred times.
Papa did a good job of explaining to me subtle contours of the inner feelings of white people, the preconceptions they’re often not even aware of that lie beneath the surface. It was a contrast to the highly reactive way my mom handled these conversations. As soon as I’d started at Grosse Pointe, when I got home from school I had to give my mom an extremely detailed account of everything I had done throughout the day. If I left anything out, even something insignificant, she’d blow up at me. If my reports included a racially charged joke or comment, she grew furious, often blowing it out of proportion.
When a classmate imitated the way a black NBA player walked, and the art teacher, who was also my basketball coach, laughed, my mom called my dad and told him that he had to call the teacher and tell him off. After this incident, my mom told me to “man up” and whenever I saw the principal to tell him that I was displeased with how I was being treated at GPA. As with everything I had ever been told to do by my mother, these orders were nonnegotiable. Over similar incidents, she later confronted the principal and had one of the leading lawyers in Detroit write a letter to the headmaster, stating that the school was acting in a discriminatory fashion.
To me, all these incidents, while obnoxious sometimes, seemed more naive than malicious. Besides me and Derrick, most of the black people my classmates had been exposed to were either serving them food or on TV. So they often assumed that I was the exception that proved the rule. When I visited their homes, I saw exactly where these attitudes came from. I was shocked to see how frequently race came up at their dinner tables, whether it was to talk about how the test scores at colleges were going to go up if more Asian students enrolled, or the fact that Mexicans can never be trusted.
One time, I was at a friend’s house when a story came on the news about a black criminal who had killed two white people. It was an extreme and violent story—completely outside of my reality. But my friend’s father turned to me and said, “Zach, I’m so glad that you have a good head on your shoulders and understand appropriate decorum.” I didn’t understand. Was he comparing me to this murderer? Then he added, “A friend of mine is thinking of running for the school board; he should use you in his campaign.”
I didn’t have the words for it then, but I sensed that they were exceptionalizing me. They held on to the idea that black people were not meant to achieve. My achievements at GPA were so rare, such a contrast to the representations of black people they saw in the media. But the idea that my success should be lauded as an example for others to follow made me feel uncomfortable. To suggest that they were racist would be unfair, and I don’t believe many of them were, but they didn’t seem to understand that plenty of black kids would have been high achieving if they had had the same types of opportunities I’d found.
A few days later, I was playing outside in my neighborhood when one of the kids I knew from the basketball court came up to me. “What up, nigga?” he asked bitterly, with a hostile look on his face.
“Call me Zach, man,” I said, trying not to let him punk me.
“Nigga, I’ll call you whatever I want,” he said angrily, and then he came up and pushed me. We threw a few punches, and then he ran home and told his mom. Within minutes, his mother was in front of our house, cursing out my mom, who came outside and met her on the street.
“Fuck you, bitch! You better tell your boy not to put his hands on my son,” the other mother said threateningly.
“No, fuck you, bitch, your son should have never started it,” my mom responded.
As they continued screaming at each other, I looked around at the small crowd that was gathering and thought about my school friends’ parents. It was so clear to me what they would have thought if they saw this on the news. I could practically hear them saying, “It’s such a shame that these people don’t know any better.”
As I was learning to code-switch to fit into different environments, I began to understand how I could alter my behavior to appease my mom. I was always trying to find a way to quell her rage and increase the frequency of her happy-go-lucky days, so I started testing how my behavior affected her. What would happen if I gave her good news? What about if I complimented her?
The one thing that consistently worked to soften up my mom was for me to give her a warm hug and say that I loved her and wanted to spend more time with her. Then she was affectionate and more receptive to my questions. I was forcing myself to show her compassion in order to gain a small understanding for how she saw the world. Although it would have been very tough at times, now that I’m older, I wish I would have made that effort more often. Meanwhile, I began to research her disease to better understand the neurological components and the symptoms. I think “schizophrenia” was the first thing I typed into Google when I got my first computer. Then, whenever she lashed out at me, I tried to empathize by reminding myself of what was going on in her brain.
Mostly, I learned that her behavior was unpredictable. Yet there were times when her symptoms were well under control. GPA held a knowledge fair, where parents would come in and speak about different subjects. My mom volunteered to talk about health and nutrition because she wanted to disabuse my peers and their families of the notion that I came from a black family that ate only fast food and soul food. I was nervous beforehand, wondering if she would make a scene, but on the day of the event she was all smiles. She knew exactly how to talk to my friends and keep them engaged while showing a mother’s loving favoritism for me. Watching my friends responding so well to her, I felt proud that she was my mom. Throughout my time at GPA, there were several moments like this.
But there was one thing that I knew would always throw her into a rage, and that was when I asserted my desire to see my dad. I really missed my dad during these years. I was allowed to contact him by phone or e-mail only once every two weeks, and when he came up for a visit, my mom kept a tight rein on me. I could barely enjoy my time with him because I had to call her to check in so frequently.
One time, my dad drove all the way to Detroit to visit me and attend Dads’ Day at GPA, another annual event at the school. I was beyond excited to see my dad; it had been almost six months since his last visit. On our way to school, he glimpsed the extraordinary wealth and grandeur that I’d described in our phone conversations. Looking out the window as he drove, he saw gated communities populated with sprawling estates, the immaculate tracery of their manicured landscapes covered by a thin blanket of snow.
As we pulled into the main driveway of GPA’s campus, my dad was in awe of the campus’s French Gothic and Colonial architecture. “I’ve never seen an elementary school that looked like this,” he told me. But what stood out the most wasn’t the school’s range of ornate facades; it was the waterfront. The school’s main building was rectangular, made of red brick and stone blocks, and rested prominently atop a verdant slope, just yards away from the rippling currents of the Detroit River.
Throughout the day, my dad got to meet my friends and their fathers. He was from a very different background than most of the other dads and didn’t share the same wealth and status, but he didn’t seem intimidated or bothered by that at all. He was confident and gracious and happy to be there with me. Mostly, he was pleased to see firsthand what an excellent education I was receiving.
To give our dads a sense of what class was like on a daily basis, Mr. Lapadot had us run through a competitive series of acade
mic games. We covered everything from logic puzzles and long-division problems at the blackboard to spelling, grammar, and historical and geographical trivia. I loved Mr. Lapadot’s class, and I was glad that my dad got a chance to see me excel in the classroom.
My dad told me afterward that he was most surprised by how many capitals I’d memorized. By that point in the school year, I’d memorized the capitals and leaders of almost every country in Europe and Asia, and I could list the names of every United States president in order and note a fun fact about most of them. I explained to my dad that in Mr. Lapadot’s class, we were given maps of continents to study and then tested on our knowledge of geography, and because I had a good memory, I aced every map test. I told him that I wanted to learn more about the economies and histories of these different countries next.
As he listened to me go on and on about this, I could tell how proud he was that I was doing so well at GPA, especially considering how different my circumstances were from those of my classmates. When I finally stopped talking about my interest in geography, he shook his head ruefully. “It has not been easy making those payments,” he told me. “But it’s worth it, Main Man. I’m gonna do everything I can to keep you here.”
My mom had other ideas. Over time, her overreactions to perceived slights began to escalate. The winter I was in sixth grade, a few friends and I got into a snowball fight during recess. When I reported this to my mom after school, she asked me, “Did you win?”
I hesitated, knowing that if I admitted to not winning the snowball fight, she’d call me a punk. “Yeah, I won,” I said.
“No, you didn’t,” she told me sternly. “I was watching you from my car, and I saw the whole thing. Now, what did that white boy say when he hit you with the snowball?”
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