I leaned back and came to a decision: this man was not my father. I could see no resemblances between us, nothing concrete. Still, there was something compelling about him. I scrolled forward and found more. For most people, an obituary is the last thing a newspaper writes about them. But Kenny’s story continued.
The next day brought another story speculating how and why he had been killed. And a few days after that, another story appeared, this time when someone broke into the funeral home, doused his body with lighter fluid, and set it on fire—a horrific and barbaric act that defied reason. What could he have done that was so terrible that killing him was not vengeance enough? Whoever he was and whatever he had done, he had paid a terrible and brutal price.
I became defiantly certain that my real father was alive. I just don’t know who he is yet. And not knowing gave me what I needed most: the possibility that he would come back for me. I let out a deep sigh of relief and turned off the machine.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” the librarian asked, causing me to jump.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you.”
She said I was welcome and wished me luck. I smiled at her, marveling again at her kindness.
Whatever hope I had about the possibility of my father’s return evaporated minutes later when I spied a familiar yellow and brown station wagon driving slowly up Pleasant Street. It was Willie and Reggie. They were looking for me, and even in that distance of a hundred or so yards, I could see the anger on their faces. Despite my best efforts, I had let time get away from me; I was at least an hour late.
I scanned the plaza, sidewalks, and trees around the library for a place to hide. Nothing! Then, in front of the library, I saw the large statue of a man carrying a harpoon. In desperation I dashed under its shadow. I watched Willie and Reggie drive by. Seconds later, I stepped out of my little shadowed recess, glanced at the statue, and ran home.
New Bedford had long maintained its ties to its history as the whaling capital of the world. The city’s well-kept cobblestone streets, Seaman’s Chapel where Herman Melville sat while researching Moby Dick, and widow lookouts—so-named for wives who waited for their husbands to return from the sea—were all reminders of a time long since passed.
The Whalemen’s Memorial is another remembrance, a tribute to the brave men who sailed the seas in search of whales. It is a large bronze statue of a bare-chested whaler poised in the bow of a whaleboat, a long, sharp harpoon in his raised, muscular arms. A granite plaque is inscribed: “A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat.” On sunny days, the protruding bow and its sculpted wake cast a small shadow on the sidewalk, and it was in that sea of dark that I hid that day.
I knew none of this history then, of course. Nevertheless, I briefly felt a kindred connection to the man in the bow, whose piercing eyes were so keenly focused on something off in the distance. He was searching—and so was I.
CHAPTER 13
The games of cat and mouse continued with the Robinsons for the next several years. The boy in me who believed that one day his parents were going to come for him gave way to the man who sensed that, in fact, he was on his own. And so I turned my attention to the future and how I could get out of the Robinsons’ clutches.
As I saw it, my best hope for the future lay in attending college. I had my sights set on Boston College, largely because of a promotional brochure my seventh-grade guidance counselor had given me. I had no real sense as to how I would get there, but I knew that I needed to excel in middle school if I were to stand any real chance. Buoyed by my never-ending passion for reading and a quiet but fierce determination, I became a standout student, although the Robinsons never acknowledged any of my accomplishments.
Entering high school was the next step to getting away from the Robinsons. I had been looking forward to my first day of high school as much as I had looked forward to anything in my childhood. Little did I know that my first day as a freshman would be one of the most harrowing of my life.
New Bedford High School was about two miles from my house on Arnold, and I arranged to walk to school with my friend Duane Nelson. Along the way, I quizzed him on all the new things I would encounter, not the least of which was getting lost inside the building. He explained that even though New Bedford High School was one of the largest high schools in the state, it was really made up of four “houses”—green, gold, tan (my house), and blue. As long as you remembered what house you were in, you couldn’t get lost. As we got closer to the school, I was struck again by its sheer size, which dwarfed my junior high school. Duane and I agreed to meet at the end of the day and walk home together. I reminded him that I needed to be home by 2:15 or I was going to be in trouble.
All members of the freshman class had to attend a mandatory assembly in the main auditorium. We were told to go to our house where we would select our classes. When I walked into the guidance counselor’s office to choose my classes, I saw a small group of students huddled together with a guidance counselor, excitedly discussing what classes they were going to take.
I found a quiet corner and stared at the thick brochure, at a complete loss as to how I should choose my class schedule. My uncertainty was interrupted by Mr. Tabachinik, a cheerful gnome of a man. He wore a brown blazer and a tie that fell way short of his belt line. He had a bowlegged walk and a thick Yiddish accent. I liked him immediately. “Vell, young man, vhat classes are you going to take?” he asked.
“I really don’t know, sir.”
“No,” he said quizzically, leaning forward. His eyebrows were dark and bushy, a complete mismatch for the snow-white tufts of hair that adorned both sides of his balding head. I shook my head again, embarrassed that I did not know the answer to this simple question.
“Vell,” he said, rubbing his chin, “do you vant to go to college?” He had just said the magic words.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I am going to go to college.”
“Gud,” he said, the caterpillar eyebrows rising in approval. He pointed to the list of college-preparatory classes. “Then deez are zee classes you choose.”
The rest of the day was a wonderful blur of bells, new classes and faces, and jostling bodies. For a time I forgot all that awaited me back at the house on Arnold Street. Like the explorer who senses land through the fog, I was still not certain of the pathway, but I was more convinced than ever that I was going to survive. All I had to do was outlast and outthink the Robinsons—something I had been doing for the past several years.
At the end of the day, I went to where I thought Duane and I were supposed to meet. Not seeing him, I started walking, thinking that I could catch him. The problem was that I had walked out the northern entrance of the high school, away from the direction of Arnold Street. For the next two hours, I was lost, wandering the southern end of New Bedford, trying to find my way back home. I recognized some places from the many errands I had gone on with Willie, but I couldn’t connect the dots. And unfortunately I never stopped to ask anyone the way to the West End. Finally, I recognized the Little League field I had once played on with Eddie, and I ran home as fast as I could.
I wasn’t all that worried about showing up late. The Robinsons knew I would never openly defy one of their orders, and so I figured that I would simply tell the truth—that I had gotten lost coming home from school. As soon as I hit the door, Betty and Willie were on me, peppering me with questions about where I had been. I told them what happened, but they wouldn’t believe me. Willie pulled the strap off the wall, yelling, “You’re gonna tell me where you’ve been!”
I cannot fully explain where the emotion came from, but I told myself that I wasn’t going to let them win this time. I refused to cry, and the more I refused, the harder and longer Willie beat me. At some point he understood my resistance and yanked me over to the stove in the corner of the kitchen. He turned on the burner and placed the back of my hands over the flames.
The skin on the back of my hands rippled and bubbled, but I still refused to lie. I
screamed in pain, but he held my hands in place. Betty yelled at him, telling him that burning the back of my hands was going to leave marks. (And she was right, because I still have the scars.) Only then did he stop.
Willie turned off the flames, and I fell to one knee, my head bowed, holding my hands, trying to will away the searing pain.
He stood over me for what seemed like an eternity, catching his breath, exhausted from trying to keep me still. Then he devised a new plan. He told me to grab my coat and get in the car; he would be right out. I did as he said, and he came out of the house a short time later with his hunting gear. I noticed that he had two of everything, including orange vests and rifles. This made no sense. He had taken me hunting before, but I was never allowed to carry a gun, let alone shoot it. And why was he now taking me hunting when he just spent the better part of an hour torturing me?
He opened the trunk of the station wagon, slid the rifles in, and slammed the trunk shut. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat and told me to put on the orange vest. I put it on as delicately as I could to avoid scraping my burned hands. He sat there in silence, deliberately giving me time to try to figure out what he was going to do. After what seemed like forever, he turned to me and asked, “You remember what happened to that dog, a couple of weeks back?”
I did remember. He was referring to a hunting dog he had bought and then brought out to the woods and shot because it wouldn’t hunt. And now I realized what he intended to do to me. “So, I’m going to ask you again, where did you go after school?”
I said nothing and simply looked out the window, defying him yet again, largely because I didn’t think he was really going to shoot me.
“Still not going to tell me where you were, huh? I know what–cha thinking. You think I can’t get away with it, huh?” Another long moment of silence. “I’ll say it was an accident, tell ’em that it was your first time huntin’, ya finger slipped off the gun.” He chuckled to himself, a low sinister laugh. “Everybody knows huntin’ accidents happen all the time.”
He started the car and slid it into drive. “Now, I’m going to ask you one last time, where did you go after school?”
He wasn’t bluffing. And now my defiance turned to fear. If I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, he was going to shoot me, and I firmly believed that he would indeed get away with it. Except for Nurse Nancy, no one had ever believed me, and in this case I wouldn’t be around to tell my side of the story.
The problem was that I really had been lost. How do you lie to get out of the truth? What was I supposed to say? And then he gave me the answer. “You were over at a girl’s house, weren’t you?”
Slowly and reluctantly, I nodded my head yes.
He climbed out of the car, content that he had finally gotten the “truth” out of me.
A new realization came to me: I am going to die here, at the hands of these people. And no one will know. The tears that I held in for the last hour finally poured out of me. I sat in the passenger seat, my hands trembling and my back still stinging from the earlier beating. As I look back on my years with the Robinsons, this was the closest I had come to breaking. I had called on God many times before but never as fervently as I did that Monday afternoon in 1982.
“God, please,” I said. “Please help me.”
CHAPTER 14
He might not come when you call, but He’s right on time.
—AUTHOR UNKNOWN
Early in my sophomore year, Ray Hernandez, a high school classmate told me about a college preparatory program. “It’s the perfect thing for you, Steve,” Ray said, barely containing his excitement. And it was. The Upward Bound Program’s purpose was to provide under-resourced students with the support necessary to further their education. Weekly tutoring sessions that were focused largely on college planning gave me the tools I needed to chart my future—and my path away from the Robinsons.
But the program gave me something else too. The director of the program was Margery Dottin, better known as “Ruby,” a member of the school board and a titan in the New Bedford community. She was a petite, African American woman with an incredibly sharp mind, a devout Christian faith, and a tireless passion for education and young people, and her name was synonymous with respect, honesty, and integrity. If you had a problem with Ruby Dottin, there was a really good chance the problem was you. Some confused her gentleness with weakness and paid the price. Many a budget-cutting councilman learned not to cross swords with this community legend, armed with a warrior’s spirit and a servant’s heart.
I had first met her several years prior, in elementary school, when she served as a judge for a citywide spelling bee. I had won the spelling bee that morning, and to this day I can remember the tremendous look of pride she gave me each time I spelled a word correctly. No one had ever looked at me quite like that. She had continued with her passion for young people, now as director of the Upward Bound Program.
To her the program was far more than a college preparatory exercise; it was a family, and she treated all her students as she would her own children. Her passion for your future was so great that you never wanted to disappoint her. She understood that hope was not enough—that you needed someone who believed in you. Ruby Dottin thought the Spirit had put her here to do exactly that.
The Robinsons initially denied my request to join the program— that is, until Ruby Dottin telephoned the house and questioned Betty as to why I had not yet completed the application. With bated breath, I listened in the background as Betty tried every conceivable trick she knew, from not having transportation to her belief that I was not college material. As Mrs. Dottin shot down her objections, I detected in her tone something I’d never sensed in Betty before: fear. She well knew Ruby Dottin’s reputation and she also knew if she didn’t relent, Ruby would ask different questions entirely. By the time Betty hung up the phone, I was a member of the Upward Bound Program at Southeastern Massachusetts University.
Had Betty known how much the program would further embolden me, she would have fought even harder to keep me out of it. The program’s mission was to prepare students for entrance to college, which was perfect for someone who had set his sights on Boston College, the Jesuit Catholic university in the suburbs of Boston. Yet I had no idea what the steps were to apply to college and was even less certain as to how in the world I would pay for it. I would express these concerns to the Upward Bound staff, and each time they provided a plan.
What the program had no plan for were the Robinsons. One afternoon in my sophomore year, I came home with the PSAT registration form. I presented it to Betty, who promptly threw the paper in my face.
“No way I’m telling people my business,” she barked, settling comfortably into her corner seat on the couch. The paper fluttered to the floor, landing right next to an open coffee can that had become Willie’s spittoon.
“But if I don’t take these tests, I can’t go to college,” I responded, in a rare moment of open challenge to her authority.
“Who said you were going to college?” she said. “You might as well put that thought right outta your head. Now go get me a can of Tab.”
I gave Betty my usual poker face, but inside I was in great distress. College had always been the next step in my escape plan, so much so that I kept the number of days in my geometry notebook. They would never be able to touch me there, I had reasoned. But now Betty had made it abundantly clear that she was going to stand in my way.
Looking back, this was a galvanizing moment. The Robinsons had taken away any semblance of my childhood, something I could never get back. But now this new edict, vile and ignorant, threatened my future. At some point in our lives, we all have to make a decision to take a stand, knowing full well the potential harmful consequences. For me that decision came in the fall of 1982, at the age of fifteen.
High school now took on even greater significance. As I progressed in high school, I became even more determined to fight back against the Robinsons by working the syste
m that had so far failed me. In January 1983, when I was a high school sophomore, I met with the social worker who had taken over my case, Jose Botelho. He had had my case for four years, and this was the first time we were meeting. The only reason he came to see me was because I telephoned him, a call I placed secretly from my guidance counselor’s office. My complaint was very specific: I wanted to leave the Robinsons because they forced me to quit any school activity as soon as I started to have any success. What I was really doing was testing him. If he was willing to listen to that part, then he might be willing to hear more.
But he was not. Jose Botelho did not share my urgency; he was more interested in discussing how I could be more accommodating in the Robinson home. He tried to further dissuade me by suggesting that even if I found another family, which he doubted given my age, I would always have “little” difficulties. As soon as I sensed that he was not going to help me, I redirected the conversation and said that perhaps this was really my fault, that what I needed to do was work on being more cooperative. And I told him I would try and see if things got better.
But, of course, I knew they wouldn’t. The Robinsons feared no god, and they had no mercy to which I could appeal. I thought that if I let a little time pass, I could convince Botelho. A month later, I met with him again and told him that the Robinsons’ refusal to let me participate in extracurricular activities was jeopardizing my college chances. I told him that the Robinsons had made me quit the track team even though I had shown signs of promise. They had also forced me to quit the varsity debate team because I was required to bring money along to purchase a meal at the end of each day. He said he would look into this for me, but he still tried to convince me that staying in the Robinson home was the best option.
A Chance in the World Page 7