The commute was challenging, but moments like these helped me build an understanding of how to navigate drastically different environments and communicate with people from those different backgrounds. I found that sometimes code switching was about fitting in and making myself seem more familiar and therefore more likable. Other times, it was about avoiding danger, concealing fear, and preventing confrontations from escalating and leaving me with a black eye. I saw that it was not enough merely to try to talk to people, no matter how genuine my desire to connect with them may have been. What mattered was my ability to understand the world they were coming from and the codes of behavior they lived by.
It would have been easy for me to think of this guy as a thug, a prime example of a big, scary, angry black man who spent most of his time on the streets contributing to the crime, violence, and fear in poor black communities. It would have been easy to assume that this guy probably had no job; was a poor father, if he was one; and called the women he slept around with “slim-thick bitches” and “hos with phat asses.” But when I thought about my experiences and all that I’d read, I realized that thinking about this guy as some sort of pathological menace was a convenient way of avoiding how all of us were implicated in the aspects of his experience that we distort.
All this happened just on the bus ride to my first stop, Anacostia station. After getting on the Metro at Anacostia, I switched lines twice before getting on another bus that took me to Bullis. That final leg of my journey could not have been any more different from the first ride of the day. Within the span of one daily commute, I’d gone from the worst part of the inner city to Potomac, Maryland, the town that CNN listed that same year as one of the most affluent in the country. I looked out of the bus window as we passed huge homes surrounded by acres of land and perfectly manicured lawns.
I’d seen big homes before, but the magnitude of these mansions blew my mind. Potomac was like Grosse Pointe on steroids. These weren’t houses; they were manors. Some of them had majestic fountains on their front lawns. Others looked like replicas of European castles that had been outfitted with every modern convenience. The one word that echoed through my mind as I looked out of the bus window was power.
By this time, I understood far more about the world of wealth and privilege than I did back when I was first exposed to it at GPA. Now I knew exactly whom I’d be going to school with—the children of real estate tycoons and magnates, representatives and senators, the country’s social and political elite. Of course, not every kid at Bullis came from that background. Some students were there on athletic scholarships. Others came from more modest families. But I was pretty sure that few if any of them had a background quite like mine. So I started at Bullis wanting to stand out and make a statement about who I was before they could form any preconceived notions about me.
Part of this was my natural competitive drive, but a piece of it came from not wanting to be lumped in with the black kids who were recruited to Bullis to play sports or who were just there to “add diversity.” I wanted to prove that I added something even more valuable.
But on my first day I didn’t have time to think about any of that. I was too busy trying to find my way. I’d gotten a list of school supplies that I was supposed to bring with me, but I hadn’t been able to get any of them. I hated asking my dad for money to buy that stuff. I’d seen how much just buying the school uniform had stretched our budget, and it was costing an additional $350 a month just for me to get to school on the Metro.
Even getting to the store to buy school supplies was a challenge. It wasn’t as if my mom or dad was going to just buy them for me. Like so many other responsibilities that were taken care of by the parents of most of my peers, getting school supplies fell to me. The CVS in Bellevue was poorly stocked, and the closest Kmart was three miles away. It was a big-time commitment to take the bus there or walk, and I had so much to keep tabs on at home. Every morning, I had to spray the furniture and appliances where there tended to be ant infestations, scour the floor for crumbs to avoid attracting rodents, and check the basement to make sure the kitchen sink hadn’t leaked down there.
The last thing I wanted to do was worry about traveling three miles by myself to buy school supplies. I thought I’d just figure it out. But the pens I’d grabbed at home before leaving for school that morning were mostly out of ink or didn’t write well, and I had only one notebook to use for all my classes. This wasn’t how I wanted to begin my first day at a new school—already behind. I tried to find the lost-and-found to see if there was anything there I could use, but I didn’t know where it was. Finally, I knocked on the door to a teacher’s office and asked her if I could borrow a few pens.
In class, I paid close attention to the class dynamic, feeling out the other students and teachers alike. Who were they? What mattered to them? And why? On the first day, I was so focused on learning the ropes socially that I couldn’t concentrate in class as much as I would have liked. I was distracted by other thoughts, too. In my English class, we went around and shared thoughts about the summer reading, and when it was my turn, I had lost focus because I was wondering if my mom knew where I was and if she was plotting her revenge against me.
I had decided to play football that year, so I stayed after school for practice. I had never played football before, but I felt a strong desire to throw myself completely into something new and challenging. I also thought it would be a good way to make friends, a way to find the sense of belonging I was looking for. On the football field, it felt good to push myself to the point of exhaustion, until it hurt, to get hit hard and have no choice but to get back up.
Before school started, my dad had asked me why I wanted to play football. I told him I thought it would be a cool challenge. But there was more to it than that. My dad was a good athlete in high school. His best sport was basketball, but he decided to play football his senior year, too. He had been tall, with broad shoulders and a muscular physique since middle school, and he’d always enjoyed playing sports far more than any of his classes. Though basketball was his favorite sport to play, football was his favorite sport to watch, he’d say. He watched football every Sunday. It was probably the only thing he ever did regularly for himself. And even though I wasn’t as interested in football as he was, I’d tried to watch games with him when I had time.
But I didn’t play football because I thought my dad would be able to come to most of my games. And I didn’t play because I thought I’d be a high school phenom. To me, my dad was like iron. Despite my mom’s efforts, when I looked at my father, I saw a man who buried emotion, resisted vulnerability, and did everything he could to provide for his family. I wanted to be as strong as he was. I wanted to endure without complaint, to prove to him that I could bleed without needing a Band-Aid. I wanted my dad to be proud of me. To see that I would put every fiber of my being into something that mattered to him far more than any book I was reading over the weekend.
I had always been athletic, but it turned out I wasn’t a good football player. I’d thought that my intellectual skills and natural athleticism would automatically translate to the football field, but that wasn’t happening. I’d been practicing with the team since the preseason had started late in the summer, but I was still having a hard time following the plays and understanding the terminology. That day, I didn’t get any playing time, and I was frustrated by my own lack of skill.
By the time football practice was over, it was evening, and I made my commute back home again in the dark. When I got home at nine o’clock, the house was empty. Both my dad and grandma were still at work, and Lee was probably at church. I dropped my backpack on the couch and made my way into the kitchen, carefully stepping over the plywood that covered the hole in the floor. The fridge was mostly empty. In a cabinet, I found a box of crackers, so I grabbed that and ate them as I gathered my grandmother’s dirty laundry, took off my uniform, and brought them downstairs.
We didn’t have a washing machine, so we washed our clothes by hand in the basement sink. My dad usually handled this for my grandma, but he’d be at work for most of the night and I wanted to help. My grandmother couldn’t safely get down the basement steps to do her own laundry anymore. It was cramped and musty down there as I stood by the sink and scrubbed. By the time I was done, it was almost eleven—time to meet my grandma at the bus stop and walk her home. Before I moved in, she walked home alone on nights when my dad was still at work. But she had told me about the times her purse had been stolen and I knew how unsafe that was, so I headed back out.
There was a completely different vibe out there than there had been early in the morning. Everyone was out—groups of girls and guys hanging out and playing music and kids running around in the street. I felt a little bit safer under the cover of the crowds, but I made sure to add a slight bounce to my walk, a little swagger. After my grandma got off the bus, we slowly walked home together. She held on to my arm and asked me about my day.
When we got home, I finally started on my homework and all the extra reading I was determined to do. Without a computer, I wrote out all my essays and homework by hand. I didn’t have a desk, so I sat at the kitchen table, but it was dark in there. There was a problem with the electrical current on the first floor of the house. We had one small table lamp that worked, but it was dim. I was still awake, reading in the faint light, when my dad got home just a couple of hours before my alarm went off again.
Pretty much every day was like this. About a month into the school year, my dad decided that I needed a space of my own where I could work and sleep and have a little privacy. Over the course of a weekend, we cleared out a section of the basement that was just big enough to fit a small desk and a couch for me to sleep on. Then, on Sunday night, Lee told me, “I’ll move down to the basement, Zach, and you can have my room.”
I was grateful to Lee for this. Now I had a bed to sleep in and a desk. We even got a laptop I could do my homework on. This was a huge improvement. But soon after I moved into the bedroom, there was a big storm, and the hole in the ceiling completely opened up. My bed was directly below the hole, and the room was so small that there was nowhere else to move the bed. I strategically placed several buckets in my room to collect the rainwater. One of them sat at the foot of my bed. Many times I woke up soaking wet because I had accidentally kicked the bucket over in my sleep.
But the hole in my ceiling didn’t just let in rain. Squirrels, raccoons, anything that could climb onto the roof, could make its way into my room. Sometimes mice literally fell out of the ceiling. My desk was old and didn’t stand up straight, so I propped it up on one side with a few books from my huge and ever-growing collection.
I showed up at school every day exhausted from the efforts it took for me to get there but excited about everything I was learning. Many of the teachers at Bullis were phenomenal educators. They were passionate about their jobs and always willing to put in extra time. I often stayed after school for hours when I didn’t have practice, talking to a teacher about a book I’d read, an idea I’d had, or how I could improve my writing. We developed close relationships, and I saw them as role models. Many of them contributed to my intellectual growth and development in ways that I had never experienced before and haven’t since.
My favorite teacher freshman year was my history teacher, Mr. Brock. He not only encouraged my questioning in class more than any other teacher but also taught me how to refine my questions. Whenever I asked him about current events before or after class, he would answer my questions thoughtfully and then explain how reframing certain questions could complicate or add nuance to any given answer.
Mr. Brock set the stage for the type of professor I hoped to find one day at college by teaching history in a way that was utterly captivating. I looked forward to his class; it was intellectually exhilarating. He made us laugh, hopped on top of the table to get our attention, and most of all he knew his stuff and how to get each student to fully engage with the material.
At the beginning of the year, I was having such a hard time with the transition to DC and to Bullis that my grades weren’t where I wanted them to be. My first trimester, I got a B+ in history. That wasn’t good enough for me. I went to Mr. Brock after school. “I want to get one hundred in your class,” I told him. “But it’s not just about the grade. I want to be able to use everything I learn in your class later on in life. I want to learn more and for that knowledge to be ingrained.”
From then on, Mr. Brock took me under his wing and taught me not just about history but how to be a better student and learner. After school, he taught me studying, note taking, and research techniques, how and why to reread material to gain a deeper understanding of the content. He helped me make the most of my own intelligence and ambition, and it showed in my grades and in my growing base of knowledge.
Mr. Brock pushed me, and I appreciated it. He encouraged all of his students to go above and beyond, and I took advantage of every opportunity I could. After handing in one essay I’d written as an extra assignment, he said, “I know you like to sweat,” and I did. By mid-year, I was writing extra papers or giving presentations on historical figures I’d researched almost every week.
Mr. Brock encouraged me to be friends with his son, Hollis, who was in my grade at Bullis. He knew that we had similar intellectual interests and thought we’d be positive influences on each other. Hollis was a top student and a terrific writer, and we quickly became friends. I learned a lot from observing Hollis. He was polished, astute, persistent, and meticulous. If a teacher said it, Hollis had it written down. His notes were gold: neatly organized, stylized, and color coded. His opinions were usually charitable, his answers always canny. No matter the question or conversation, Hollis would tell you precisely what he wanted you to know. Nothing more, nothing less. I’d never met someone that generous, who still managed to jealously guard his time.
I wanted to earn the respect of the top students at Bullis like Hollis, but it was also important to me to get along with the guys I knew from the football team. Some of them, like one guy named Devon, didn’t think that raising your hand in class was cool, so this wasn’t always easy.
It was still early in the academic year when I got to school one morning and saw Devon riding in the passenger seat of the Range Rover belonging to a popular white girl named Kelly. The top was down, and rap music was blasting from the stereo. Devon had his feet up on the dashboard, adorned in a pair of Gucci flip-flops that Kelly had given him as a gift the day before.
Devon was something else. He was from the projects and was at Bullis on an athletic scholarship. Because of his background and public school education before arriving at Bullis, his ability to communicate was affected at the most basic level. His speech was slurred and so full of slang that sometimes even I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
A lot of students just wrote off Devon as stupid, but talking to him made me recall a number of studies I’d read that demonstrated that verbal fluency and acuity have a lot to do with the amount of words babies and young children are exposed to. Owing to a lack of opportunity and education, Devon probably wasn’t exposed to nearly as many words as I was in my early years. It also made me realize how important it was for parents to read to their kids and encourage them to read. My mom made many mistakes, but when she got me my first library card, she made sure I understood that that card gave me access to a free education, one that could pay great dividends in the future.
Yet some of the white girls at Bullis flocked to Devon. Every couple of weeks, I’d see him walking down the hallway with a different girl on his arm. This was fairly common among some of the black athletes, and I noticed the subtly sour way some teachers looked at them when they saw this.
Intellectually, I was familiar with the history of black men and white women in America—the accusations of rape, the lynching, the myths about predatory black male
sexuality, and the stereotypes of black men that hold a fascination for white women and vice versa—but this was the first time I saw it all play out in a brief, slightly displeased expression on a teacher’s face. If I’d asked those teachers if they were thinking about that history when they looked at Devon and Kelly, of course they would have said no. And I believe they would have meant it. But I also knew that some things like this were so visceral and yet so taboo that they defied explanation.
As I walked past Devon and Kelly in the Range Rover that day, I wondered whether dating a white girl would complicate the way people at Bullis saw me. I was nothing like Devon, but I was still a young black man at a predominantly white school, and I had no interest in triggering any deep-seated feelings about black bodies that certain teachers or students may have had. It was something I’d have to be mindful of.
Soon after, I attended a freshman-year homecoming dinner at an upscale steak house. Besides me, Devon was the only other black guy at my table. Everyone began their four-course meals with exotic delicacies and hors d’oeuvres. This was normal for most of the other guys: lobster salad on endive spears, Russian caviar with crème fraîche, carrot roulades with radish, fried calamari, and prosciutto and melon. Unlike most of the other kids, I had to look at the menu. After a brief glance, I ordered olive straws and a focaccia cake with spinach dip because they were the only things on the menu that I recognized.
Devon asked the waiter if they had noodles. The waiter asked him what kind. “Like ramen, Cup O’ Noodles,” he said. Everyone looked at him askance.
“Unfortunately, sir, we don’t have ramen,” the waiter said. “I’m sorry. Is there anything else you would like?”
“Gimme a burger, with ketchup,” Devon replied. After ordering, he sat slumped over in his seat, bobbing his head to rap music that I could overhear from the other side of the table. He had his earphones on the entire time.
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