When we finally got back to the house it was noon. We headed upstairs to James’s room. “Want to work for a bit?” I asked him.
“Ah, we can work later tonight; it’s Saturday,” he replied. “Let’s just hang for a while.” He sat on the leather couch on one side of his room and started playing a video game.
I wasn’t mad at James. Why would he want to do so much extra work when just being smart and putting in a modicum of effort had always been enough for him? But that wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t let up for one minute and allow him or anyone else to think that I was lazy or content just sitting on my ass and being good when I could be great instead. When friends waved away my desire to keep pushing further and told me to just relax and have fun, I remembered that I would have never gotten into Bullis if it hadn’t been for my extreme work ethic and what some called my perfectionism. Without those things, I wouldn’t have been there at James’s house, either. He certainly wasn’t inviting any other kids from my neighborhood to sleep over.
Ultimately, I realized that my insistence on overpreparing was the reason people like James and his family took an interest in me in the first place. I wasn’t a family member or a part of their community. So I worked as hard as I could to avoid the feeling of missed opportunity, which is really just another way of saying that I overprepared when I couldn’t prove that my life had been about more than pain and my efforts to overcome it.
As James played, I went downstairs to the kitchen, where his thirteen-year-old sister, Anna, was sitting at the large island in the center of the room, working on some history homework. “Do you need any help?” I asked her.
She nodded shyly. “Yeah, I don’t understand the Cold War,” she said. I hopped onto the high-backed barstool next to her and started working with Anna, patiently explaining how the Cold War didn’t involve military combat. After a little while, their mom came in and saw me helping her.
“Oh, Zach, you’re such a nice young man,” she told me with a warm smile. “Would you like something to eat? How about a grilled cheese sandwich?” I nodded, and she walked over to the double range and quickly made the sandwich, cutting it in half on the diagonal before bringing it over to me.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No, thank you, Zach,” she told me, putting a hand on my shoulder. Then as she walked away, she said, “If you keep helping Anna with her homework, I’ll bring you another sandwich.” I was happy to help. It felt good to be able to. But the idea of being rewarded with food was off-putting. Despite her mom’s comment, I continued helping Anna anyway.
My visits to friends’ houses were often problematic in one way or another. The next time I was at James’s house for dinner, I told his family about my commute. My intention was just to explain to them how difficult and long a trip it was, and how mad and confrontational some of the people I encountered were. But they were fascinated, and they wanted more.
“Zach, do an impersonation of a thug,” James told me as we sat in his family’s formal dining room. The burgundy chairs accentuated the natural red tones in the rich wood that flanked the room, from the wide columns that divided it from the adjoining living room to the sixteen-seat table. “Come on, man, do it.”
I hesitated. I had seen other black kids in situations like this so many times, and I always hated it when they capitulated and acted like a clown. I’d managed to avoid doing it myself by strategically shifting the conversation in one direction or another. But this time, all eyes were on me, demanding a performance.
The brave thing to do would have been to say, “No, I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” and to explain why. But as I sat there at their table eating their food, I wondered how warmly I would be welcomed back next time if I said no. As complicated as some of my friendships could be at times, I needed them. I didn’t have a family that sat around the table together like this—our small kitchen table didn’t even fit all five of us around it—or even a comfortable place at home to read or do my work. I gained a lot from these friendships and felt obligated to give and give and give in return.
So, for a moment, I did it. I assumed an entirely different demeanor and talked to them like a guy I had seen on the bus that morning. I impersonated his slang, his slur, and his aggressive inflection. James and his family roared with laughter and begged me to do it again and again.
On the long bus ride home later, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t a big deal. Black comedians did stuff like that all the time, and there was value in humor. Plenty of my friends made jokes about race, and I often laughed at those jokes and made my own. Why? Because I found them funny. But in this case, I knew I hadn’t lived up to my own ideal. In my own way, I had contributed to perpetuating stereotypes of black people—the one thing I worked tirelessly, gave up sleep, and went out of my way to avoid doing.
The next time I was at James’s house they begged me to do the impersonation again. This time I was prepared. Instead of hesitating or showing how much this bothered me, I responded with a warm smile and a quick shift in the conversation to the Model UN conference we had coming up. Once again, I thought of my mom. She had always told me that showing too much emotion, like indecision, gave smart people power over you, so it was important to know how to keep it cool. The dispassionate response, she said, was always even-keeled, never too high, never too low, almost cold-blooded, but with a smile warm enough to lend the impression of goodwill.
My mom was almost always right about these things, and changing the subject worked, mostly. But I sensed the energy in the room shift along with the conversation. James and his family were miffed and caught off guard, unused to not getting their way. Suddenly, they seemed a little less enthusiastic about having me there, slightly less effusive than usual when praising my explanation of whatever issue we were discussing.
After dinner I spent an hour helping Anna with her English essay. I had my own ways of avoiding their displeasure without demeaning myself.
* * *
—
In school, my academic focus was mostly on writing. That year, the author Reginald Dwayne Betts came to Bullis as a writer in residence. Dwayne had just published his memoir, A Question of Freedom, about spending eight years in prison after his first offense, committed at age sixteen. In prison, Dwayne graduated from high school and began reading and writing poetry.
Dwayne’s visit was truly inspiring. His message was at once challenging and uplifting, universal and yet unique. What struck me most was the lack of shame he seemed to carry about his past. I wanted to follow his example, to unabashedly own the fact that my experiences had indeed informed some of my strongest beliefs and opinions. The freedom, confidence, and authenticity with which he shared his message were things I aspired to. Most of all, meeting him compelled me to imagine what it would mean for me to tell my story one day.
My English teacher that year, Ms. Heninger, was a disarmingly genuine, brilliant educator who helped me improve my writing probably more than anyone else. I spent hours with her in the classroom after school, going through my essays sentence by sentence and analyzing the impact of every word choice. “Let’s find le bon mot,” she told me—the right word. She took what I said and made it stronger by framing it slightly differently, a technique that allowed me to refine my own arguments by improving the clarity of my writing.
But perhaps the best thing Ms. Heninger did for me was recommend that I share some of my poems with another English teacher, Ms. Chehak, who ran Bullis’s National Poetry Month activities. Ms. Chehak read all my poems and gave me extensive feedback on each of them. Then she encouraged me to read my work at the Jazz Café, a nighttime event held twice a year when students performed at Bullis’s Blair Family Center for the Arts, a vast building on campus that held studio spaces for visual and performing arts students and a state-of-the-art 750-seat theater.
We selected a poem I had written that I called “A Bluesman in the Life
of the Mind, a Jazzman in the World of Ideas,” which was a line Cornel West used to describe himself in his memoir. It was a poem about spiritual and literal poverty, a call for moral courage and a stronger fiber of resilience. The content was good, but on the night of the performance I was entirely focused on my delivery.
I didn’t want just to recite the poem well; I wanted parents in the audience who didn’t know me to ask the person beside them who I was. I wanted my performance to resonate, affirm, and illuminate my determination to matter more, to be of greater value in the hearts and minds of every person I had ever made eye contact with. When I heard the applause echo throughout the proscenium theater and saw the expressions on the audience members’ faces when I was done, I knew I had achieved my goal.
Another goal I had during sophomore year was to broaden my knowledge of literature and philosophy beyond the Western canon. One teacher who had a big impact on me that year was my history teacher, Dr. Sun. He introduced me to Chinese moral philosophy and the whole idea of comparative philosophy—that our culture greatly determines what we view as right or wrong. This challenged me to acknowledge that I viewed my own principles through a lens of Western moral values and made me wonder if there was such a thing as a universal right and wrong.
Dr. Sun and I also spent a lot of time discussing the differences between activism and intellectualism. I had a passion for social justice and was beginning to question what I felt called to do with my life. For a long time, I had felt a call to public service, to ask the most difficult questions and find answers that would help address those questions. Dr. Sun explained that intellectuals must prioritize evidence when looking at solutions, while activists push for radical change, sometimes pushing politicians to do more than they otherwise would. He made me think that with my natural hunger for learning and probing, the world of academia and politics was ultimately where I belonged.
Like Dr. Sun and many of my teachers, Ms. Chehak gave me book recommendations and often sent me home with a stack of books to read. Ms. Chehak knew African American history extremely well and recommended books by black feminist scholars such as bell hooks and Hortense Spillers that stretched and complicated my own thoughts and beliefs about race.
Reading these works, I saw how frequently black women had been left out of the picture, while scholars, often black men, discussed issues of race and class. Many black intellectuals spoke about the experience of racism mainly, and sometimes exclusively, from a black male perspective, highlighting the various ways their humanity had been degraded and denied. While this discussion was something I cared about deeply, it was rarely balanced with one about all the unique ways in which black women have suffered. Even the scholars who spoke about race without focusing so much on the particular experience of black men still failed to fully capture and dissect the compounded challenges black women faced as they dealt with racism and sexism.
The result of discussions of race being unfairly tilted toward the male point of view is that the experiences of black women have taken a backseat to those of black men, although they’ve suffered in ways that black men haven’t. Racism and sexism were stacked against them. And too often they’ve borne the brunt of the very masculinity that has been historically debased in black men when black men asserted their power over the only people they could—black women.
Once I started reading about this, I couldn’t stop. I tore through book after book, and then went back to the works of some of the black intellectuals I admired most to see if I’d missed anything they’d said. There were some heartening exceptions, such as W. E. B. DuBois, who devoted an entire chapter of his book Darkwater to the experience of black women in America—not only their suffering but also their agency, resistance, and strength. Still, I was disappointed to find that even some of the most admirable figures in our history, such as Martin Luther King Jr., did not attend to the unique struggles of black women. In the history of civil rights, men have largely dominated the story line and taken up space instead of leaving equal room beside them for black women.
The hard truth is that black men have contributed to these struggles both subtly and overtly. When black men talk about being stepped on by the world or all the ways in which their opportunities have been constrained and their humanity devalued, they rarely follow with, “and black women have it even worse than we do.” More obviously, we contribute to the degradation of black women by glorifying the kind of common rap that reduces them to bitches, hos, and body parts. As a result of all the things we say or don’t say, we are complicit.
This forced me to look again at the women in my family and see their experiences in a new light. Years before, Lola had told me that there was a time when she wanted to become a school principal, but there was a black man at her school who had discouraged her. Now I saw that this was likely because of competition within the race and black men’s tendency to put themselves first in a patriarchal society. If there was room at the top for one black person, it was going to be a black man, not a woman. This dates back to the fight for black suffrage, when leaders such as Frederick Douglass supported black women’s suffrage but for various reasons put black men’s suffrage first.
My grandma Pearl had also suffered at the hands of black men. Her husband was abusive and did little to help raise their three kids. She was a working-class black woman with few opportunities, but she almost never talked about the things she’d lived through. It was as if she’d been led to believe that the pain of her experiences was not worth discussing.
I realized that reading these books by black feminist scholars also provided a new lens through which to see my own mother. Was it possible that my mom looked at me and saw all the black men who had hurt her or put their own pain above her own? Was that why she so badly wanted to control me?
Once again, I saw my dad trying to break this pattern. In the middle of my sophomore year, he got a car. Whenever he had a car, it was usually so old and beat-up that it didn’t last long, but while it was still running he drove us down to Lynchburg, Virginia, to visit my grandma’s brother Ray and his wife, Annette. When we got in the car, my dad made a point of opening the door for Nicole and my grandmother. Nicole was getting older and starting to get embarrassed by things like this. “Dad, stop it,” she said as he held the door open.
My dad shook his head. “I want you to know what you should expect when you start dating one day,” he told her.
As we made the long drive to Virginia, we listened to the radio. A Drake song came on, and Nicole started singing along. “Stop it,” my dad said, reaching over to turn off the radio. “Think about what you’re singing. That song is degrading women.”
At Ray and Annette’s house, I got to see a type of relationship between a black man and a black woman that was different from most of the ones I’d been exposed to. Ray and Annette had played an active role in helping to raise my dad when he was living with his grandmother. They also raised four kids of their own. They are an example of a black family functioning the way it should. Ray and Annette have an equal balance of power. They shared the responsibilities of raising their kids, and that night, Annette cooked dinner and then Ray cleaned all the dishes. They were a team, and I saw that black families could be stronger if they stood together, working and fighting and loving and resisting side by side.
We were about halfway home that night when we heard a horrible hissing sound coming from the car. Smoke started billowing from the hood. I was in the backseat with Nicole, and our grandmother was asleep in the passenger seat. “Um, Dad,” I said, “I think there’s something wrong with the car.”
I was only trying to help, but it was clearly the worst thing I could have said. In response, my dad just turned around and looked at me. I could barely return his gaze. There was so much pain in his eyes. All the years of hard work, of worry and struggle, of taking one step forward and two steps back, of always trying to do the right thing just to get knocked back down again—
it was all there in his eyes.
Without saying a word, my dad pulled the car over to the side of the road, leaned forward, and put his head in his hands. It was a desolate place with nothing but more road as far as I could see. My dad got out and tried tinkering under the hood. I got in the driver’s seat and tried to restart the car when he gave the signal, but it kept stalling.
Eventually we called Ray, and he came to pick us up. We had no way of getting home, so he brought us back to their house in Virginia. My dad didn’t have enough money for a rental car. A cab ride would cost even more.
“Dad, I have some money I can give you,” I said. I was saving the money I had earned from writing competitions and odd jobs I did for Mrs. Brown and some other seniors in the neighborhood. Sitting in Ray and Annette’s modest living room, my dad shook his head. I knew how badly he didn’t want to take money from me. But what choice did he have? “Are you sure?” I asked him.
My dad shook his head again, but this time he said, “Yeah, I may have to borrow a little bit.”
After we got home, I used the rest of that money to buy tickets for my dad and me to attend a lecture by Cornel West, who was going to be speaking in DC soon after. This was a chance to meet one of my heroes, and I was excited. I had already read almost all of West’s work, but I made it my mission to reread all twenty-two of his books before the lecture, which was only a couple of weeks away. It wasn’t enough for me just to attend the lecture. I needed to be able to stand out, to say something clear-sighted and discerning to West about his work to make an impression that would prove I mattered.
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