“Come home,” my parents said to him. “Just come home and rest.”
When Stacey returned to New Orleans to convalesce, we all entered family therapy together. This was a great thing about my parents. They didn’t care that seeking out therapy was taboo in the black community back then. They just wanted to do whatever they needed to do to help their son get better.
After he recovered, Stacey started working in research at the Louisiana State University medical school on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans. My uncles L.C. and L.H. were thrilled to discover that Stacey was working with a famous researcher who experimented on pigs. At the end of a research project, the school had to find some way to dispose of the pigs.
“Y’all got hogs?” my uncles asked Stacey. Indeed they did. Off my uncles went to the LSU medical school to pick up free pork. We had a couple of boucheries with LSU’s pigs. The folks up the bayou couldn’t believe their good fortune. “Stacey, this is brilliant,” they said. “You get to be a scientist, and we get free hogs.”
Later, after I had started at Juilliard, Stacey told us that he had been thinking about going to dental school. Daddy pushed back, telling him that he had a good job as a researcher at LSU. Why give that up?
“Because I’ve always wanted to be a doctor,” Stacey said. “Maybe I can be a dental doctor.”
“Man, do it,” I advised. By then, I had already been through the drama with my folks about convincing them that I should follow my dream and become an actor. Fortunately, I knew how to deal with that pushback. This was the first time for Stacey. I’m sure Tee said, “Good, son, whatever you want to be, you can be.” Daddy, as usual, wanted him to consider all the pros and cons.
Stacey was older than most of his classmates at the LSU School of Dentistry. Because of his med school background and extensive work on his Ph.D., he caught on so quickly that he was able to serve as a teaching assistant his first year. Yet he had trouble making models of teeth, which was a requirement for passing the course. Rather than give my brother a chance to work on his modeling over the summer, which was standard practice, the professor forced him to repeat his entire first year of dental school.
I had never liked LSU because, with the exception of a few graduate students, until federal courts ordered full integration of the university in 1964, black citizens of Louisiana could not attend the state’s flagship school. When they humiliated my brother Stacey, it got personal. Since then, LSU has been dead to me.
Stacey was deeply discouraged, but my parents, true to form, told him not to give in. You’ll be a doctor for a long time, they said. Play the long game.
And so he did. He graduated from dental school, married his beautiful wife, Debbie, and a short time later, in November 1994, was ready to celebrate his fortieth birthday. The family was throwing him a big party in New York. At the time, I was in London filming Hackers, and knowing what a tough journey Stacey had completed, I negotiated time off in advance to fly back for my brother’s birthday party. Producers pressured me to cancel at the last minute because of scheduling problems, but I wasn’t going to give in. My brother meant too much to me. The producers had to fly me to New York on the Concorde to get me there and back in time for shooting.
I wouldn’t have missed Stacey’s triumph for the world.
Soon thereafter, doctors found that Stacey had a serious congenital heart condition. They told him he would one day have to be on the transplant list. But that day seemed far off; he was as active and apparently as healthy as ever. He was living in Pomona, New York, teaching at New York University’s College of Dentistry and giving dental care to migrant workers.
Then one day, when he was forty-five, his heart just stopped beating.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning in Los Angeles when my mother called.
“Wendell?”
“Yeah?”
“Your brother Stacey Pierce died at home this morning in his sleep.” That’s just how she phrased it: a clear, deliberate declaration. Though I could hear the grief and pain in her voice, she suppressed it out of concern for me.
After answering lots of my questions, she said, “Wendell, are you all right?” That was Tee: taking care of me even though she had gone through something even more devastating.
I’LL NEVER FORGET STANDING at my brother’s wake, looking at my parents humbled by grief. I imagined them in that moment, staring with hollow, tear-soaked eyes at the body of their firstborn son in his coffin, as a young couple looking into the crib of their baby boy with eyes full of hope and wonder. The physical power of grief to work a transformation stunned me. They held on to each other, my father cradling my mother in his big arm.
They looked as if they had lost everything. And they had.
Ron didn’t really know what to do at Stacey’s funeral. He is the Pierce brother who is most like our mother in that he doesn’t want to cry or to show emotion. Keep the fire concentrated within. Never did I hear my mother cry. Oh, you would see tears flow when she was upset, but she wept silently. Like our mother, Ron is fierce in the privacy of his emotions.
IF STACEY was the scientist in the family, Ron was the athlete. He was good at sports and school, had lots of girlfriends, and never rocked the boat. Growing up, he was steady, gregarious, and loyal. Ron and I were born twenty-three months apart. My parents were honest with me, telling me, “Wendell, you were our surprise.” They never said “mistake,” only “surprise.” My brother was a string bean, like our mother; I was like our father, stout and barrel-chested. But whatever Ron did, I was going to do next. It was a friendly competition.
Daddy put up a basketball goal in the backyard. Ron and I played basketball so much that we wore all the grass away and hardened the ground with our footfalls. Ron told me I played too much, but the truth is, I couldn’t stop until I won a game. If Ron and I were wrestling or roughhousing, I wouldn’t stop till I won a match.
We would compete all the time, as brothers will, but in our case it was undertaken with love, and the desire to make each other better. Within the family, we constantly tested ourselves against each other, but outside the family, we supported each other without fail. “I think you can beat that guy” was our mantra to each other.
I learned from Ron the value of staying focused and steadfast. He’s unwavering when it comes to pursuing what he wants. He doesn’t have to talk it to death and wonder what others will think of it; he just does it.
Like Stacey, Ron went through his baptism by fire when he helped integrate Holy Cross, a Catholic high school. He came home crying because his white classmates were calling him nigger, and my folks built him back up, telling him that he could not let them win by quitting.
My brother had strong principles, and he stuck to them. When his high school classmates said that they weren’t planning to go to college, Ron said, “No, we’re all going to college. We are meant for that.”
When Ron finished high school and prepared to head off to further his education, he came to our father and said, “I’m leaving now. I don’t want you to work two jobs anymore. It’s just Wendell left at home, Daddy.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I knew my father did a little work at night, but it turned out that for years, Daddy had been working a night job as a janitor at the nearby University of New Orleans to provide for his family. He would come in from Kirschman’s, the furniture store, in the evening, have supper, put us to bed, and then leave. It never occurred to me to wonder where he was going. All I knew was that he was there for breakfast in the morning. Now, because of Ron’s disclosure, I learned that my father was sweeping and mopping floors while the rest of us slept, so his sons could have a better life than he had. I was just a teenager, but it was starting to dawn on me what a great man my father really was.
In high school, Ron resolved to apply to the United States Military Academy at West Point, a move that raised him in my father’s eyes to the hi
gh heavens. Uncle L.H., a proud military veteran, was tickled too, and swore that if Ron got in, he would be at his graduation.
In the end, Ron did so well at Holy Cross that U.S. senator J. Bennett Johnston nominated him for West Point, even though our family had no political influence. Ron spent a year at West Point Prep preparing for the academy, and then completed his four years. Sure enough, Daddy and Tee were at his graduation, as were Uncle L.H. and Aunt Tee Mae, who still lived in Brooklyn and was the mother of all of us who came through New York. I can still see my father and L.H. right now, at graduation: When the graduates threw their hats up into the air, the two old veterans’ eyes filled with tears of pride.
When Ron presented himself to them, Daddy and L.H. saluted him smartly, addressing him as “Lieutenant Pierce.” And following the West Point tradition, our parents were the first to pin their son’s lieutenant bars on his lapel. How poignant it was that almost twenty-five years later, Ron pinned Daddy’s long-delayed medals onto his lapel.
Family, God, and country. That’s what the Pierces are all about.
Lieutenant Pierce went on to work as a nuclear arms officer in the mid-1980s, in what turned out to be the final years of the Cold War. The Pentagon chose him for that critically important job because he had studied philosophy at West Point, and they trusted his steadiness. After he ended his military career, I asked Ron how he knew he had it within him to turn the key to launch nuclear missiles if the order came down.
“I knew that if that order was given, that you and the family had been attacked,” he said.
In the early 1990s, at the height of the first Gulf War, Ron pointed out on television a news story about a family protesting their soldier son’s death at his funeral. Ron said, “Wendell, if I’m ever killed in war, don’t do that. I made a choice to be in the military. If something happens to me, bury me with honors and go on, but don’t ever use that as an opportunity to protest. If you want to honor me, don’t do that.”
After leaving the military, Ron moved to San Francisco and went to work in telecommunications. He did well, but lost his job when his company downsized after the financial crash in 2008. His marriage ended. Ron was too proud to show emotion and reach out to any of us. We lost touch with him for months.
“I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone,” Ron says today. “Tee had raised me right, and I felt like a failure. I wanted to figure this out by myself.”
Finally, our worried mother took me aside and gave me marching orders. “Wendell, that’s your brother,” she said. “Go find him and bring him home.”
On the flight west, I wondered how in the world I was going to find my brother in a big city. I resolved that if I did locate Ron, I wasn’t going to ask his permission to bring him home: He was coming, whether he wanted to or not.
Finding him wasn’t as hard as I had expected. He was at home, but I could tell he wasn’t staying there much. He was unkempt and visibly depressed. The conversation we had was simple.
“Ron,” I said, leveling my gaze at my brother, “you are coming home. You are in trouble, and we aren’t going to watch you fall. This is what family is for. You are coming home for as long as it takes to get back on your feet.”
There was no protest left in him. He was exhausted.
“When are we leaving?” he murmured.
“Now!” I boomed. “We are family!”
Ron heard me. Soon, we were back on a plane to New Orleans, to our childhood home, in a place that welcomed him to heal in the care of those who knew and loved him.
Ron got back on his feet and went to work in Washington, D.C., for the Democratic National Committee, then on veterans’ outreach for the Obama administration. Today, he is a PBS executive overseeing public television’s Stories of Service initiative in support of veterans.
“I knew I could always go home,” Ron tells me today, “but without you showing up in San Francisco, I would not have taken the initiative to go home myself. You can be tough and stubborn, but you’re a very generous person who loves our family. That’s what I love so much about you.”
His time in self-imposed exile taught Ron how important it was to stay connected to family and never to let your pride prevent you from reaching out to your family for help.
“I’ve been able to share with my kids my whole story,” he says. “One thing I want to instill in them: Life is a roller coaster, and everyone you pass on the street has had ups and downs. There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that would make me not support you. It’s important to reach out to family, always.”
That’s a lesson we learned in Daddy and Tee’s home. That’s a lesson Tee learned around Mamo and Papo’s table. And that’s a lesson that my brother is passing on to his kids.
THERE WERE other important lessons to come from our childhood. Because Stacey was so much older than Ron and me, neither of us knew about the racist hazing he had been through at Capdau Junior High. When it came time for me to be bused to Mildred Osborne Elementary School to start the new gifted and talented program, the first time I would be in an integrated school, my parents sat me down and had The Talk—that sad but necessary ritual all black parents go through with their children, in which they pass on the hard-won wisdom of What to Do When Confronted by Racist White Folks.
“Wendell, you’re going to be going out to the school with white boys, and they’re going to come after you,” Daddy said. “They’re going to come after you in a group. There’s always going to be a group, and you’re going to get your ass kicked.”
I didn’t understand what he meant.
“You’re going to get your ass kicked,” he repeated. “But you look for the leader, or the biggest one, they’re usually the same guy, and while you’re getting your ass kicked, when they jump you, you make sure you grab him, and you kick his ass. You make sure you kick his ass, and he will always remember you. And they’ll never mess with you again, because he’ll come out of there, ‘All right, we took care of that nigger,’ and they’ll never mess with you again.”
“Dad, are you for real?”
“I’m telling you, that’s how white boys operate.”
I started school at Osborne hyped. I was in school with white kids for the first time in my life. I was on hair trigger. If a white kid had come up to me and said, “Hey, how you doin’, I’m Johnny,” I would have punched him in the mouth.
So I was waiting for the mob. And then, on the playground, it finally happened.
We were playing a game we made up called Kill the Man with the Ball. There was this one white boy, Chet. Crew cut, flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up. He looked like an extra in Mississippi Burning. He threw the ball up and screamed, “Niggers against the whites!”
There were only three black kids: me, Paul Jordan, and Alexander Brumfield. Alexander, who was also from Pontchartrain Park, was a gentle giant. He was so afraid. Paul, with his big Afro, looked like that era’s version of Michael Jackson. All the girls loved him, but now he had to be not a lover, but a fighter. And there I was, as if giant screw pumps were pushing a flood of adrenaline through my veins.
This was just like my father told me. The white boys circled us. And I was like, “Oh, yeah! Bring it!”
I had gone through training, the ambush had come, and I had recognized it. Paul was like, “What’s going on?”
“This is it, man! Get back-to-back! Get back-to-back!” I said, barking orders like a little general. The three of us got back-to-back, and I was like, “Come on, you bastards, this is it. Come on, Chet! I want you! Come on, Chet, I’m going to kill you! I can’t wait! I can’t wait!”
I was scared to death, but that’s what it was all about: facing your fears. Paul and Alexander looked at me as if to say, Wendell, what’s going on? and I was like, No, I’m ready for these bastards.
“Let’s get these niggers!” Chet said.
The showdown started wi
th twenty people surrounding us, but this crazy son of a bitch Wendell Pierce scared off about fifteen of them. They wanted no part of me. They were like, Chet, this is on you. Chet ran in and we had this big scrum. It ended up being just Chet and me going at it, and I whipped Chet’s ass up and down the playground.
By the time it ended, Chet staggered off the playground in ignominious defeat, muttering, “Yeah, that’s right, we got them niggers.” Just like my dad said he would. And he never bothered me again.
I don’t want to give the impression that our life was all about living under siege conditions. We had all the normal joys of an American childhood, just like my parents’ generation. Despite all the racism and poverty they lived with, whenever my mother and her siblings got together, all they would talk about was the good times they had growing up on the bayou. In my case, Pontchartrain Park was like the Garden of Eden. I played football in the park, and basketball on the courts, and Little League baseball on the two diamonds. Walking across the golf course after school was a delight. Sometimes I would throw the golfers’ balls into the lagoon, just to be mischievous. We went to concerts and festivals in the park. Life seemed so simple, so pure, and so beautiful.
“You and I didn’t realize it, but we were growing up in Mayberry,” Ron said to me once long after we were grown men. True.
The freedom we felt to play within the strict boundaries of the neighborhood was a great gift. The park at the center of our neighborhood was our wonderland, an enchanted landscape and a stage on which to act out our boyish adventures.
As much as we loved the park, not everything was idyllic. We kids were haunted by the Lady in White, a ghost who lived in the park’s bathrooms. After dark, the single bulb illuminating the golfers’ bathroom cast an eerie glow you could spot from far away. The echo of water running in the urinal made a sound we imagined as spectral.
If we gathered in the park at night, somebody would say, “I’ll give you a dollar if you go in there.”
The Wind in the Reeds Page 9