A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  As the years progressed, I came to realize that the most profound question posed by a place like Harvard Business School is one common to every human endeavor: What greater goal or God are we individually and collectively called to serve in life? I found myself wondering constantly what the school was really teaching. Some might argue that it communicates a useful and value-free body of knowledge, in the same way that a school for auto mechanics communicates certain functional skills. But an alternative view occurred to me when I returned to a gathering of the members of Grace Church and someone welcomed me back as “one of our three seminarians who have gone off to study.” Another speaker commented, “I know we live in Orwellian times and war is peace, but I never thought I would hear Harvard Business School described as a seminary. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s true.”

  Though the hours were long and demanding, I did my best for my congregation, for my family, and for the doctoral program I was in. My mind and intellect were learning volumes of valuable information from Harvard University, while my heart and soul were growing at Christ Church. For one thing, I realized that no matter how hard we worked to provide for one another as a congregation, there were certain physical problems that a small community could not solve by itself. We could provide support and comfort and companionship, but not medical care and housing and a decent job. We could help people through their personal crises, but we could not educate their children, clean their streets, protect them from crime, or offer them a park in which to play. The voluntary commitment and extra effort made possible by a loving community was an important piece for some of our members, but the line between health and disease, education and deprivation, homes and homelessness, unemployment and a job, was not drawn by us. It was drawn by the government, as part of a basic promise to the American people that each person would receive the elementary requirements to build his or her own version of the American Dream. Government might seem like an abstraction to people who can provide everything from their own abundance, but to people in a city like Somerville, access to the building blocks of a decent middle-class life meant the difference between poverty and prosperity, misery and joy.

  Second, I learned that no matter how good people’s intentions might be, we are all stretched and easily overwhelmed. Being the part-time pastor of a church that had no resources required me to make hundreds of phone calls to terribly busy, pressed people who had virtually no money and asking them to take on some responsibility for the church—serving on the vestry, reading the lessons, teaching Sunday school, visiting the sick, leading the stewardship campaign. At first I thought they would jump at the opportunity, but I didn’t fully appreciate how complicated and stressful most people’s lives were in trying to make ends meet. I learned to ask the question and wait for a polite and somewhat embarrassed no. What was amazing to me in retrospect is how many people said yes.

  Most churches have leadership retreats during which a small group of involved individuals, including the clergy, go away for a day or two to discuss the direction and priorities of the church. Christ Church had never done such a thing, at least within living memory. I called a friend of mine at a church about ten miles away, and he offered to provide meeting space and to prepare lunch for us.

  “How many people will you be?” he asked.

  I did some quick tabulations in my head.

  “I would say between twelve and fourteen,” I answered.

  We agreed on the date and I publicized the event. I phoned every person and I was delighted that my numbers seemed about right—I had twelve people who were planning to come.

  I made a list of passages we could discuss and of challenges facing the church. I wanted to urge us to move past our worship together and into offering more services for the people in the community. I wanted to develop more leadership skills among my small but talented group of committed participants. I was excited about everything that was about to happen.

  We were to meet on Saturday morning at the church and then drive together to our host. The night before, I got two phone calls at home. One person had been called away to work. Another couple gave me some sketchy reason that they couldn’t attend, which I didn’t push too hard to explore. Well, I was down to nine people plus me—still a good showing.

  When I arrived the next morning, there were two notes on the door from people in the neighborhood who said that for various reasons they could not come. Now I was down to six. I unlocked the door and saw the light beeping on the church answering machine, indicating two messages. My heart sank. Sure enough, two more people had discovered urgent reasons—at this point I no longer cared what they were—why they couldn’t come. They were, of course, very sorry. Very, very sorry. Would love to do it next time. Hope that you have a great time and look forward to hearing about it.

  At this point I blew my stack. Four people. Twelve had said they would come, and now I was down to four. How could I plan for the future of the church with four people? I stomped out into our tiny little garden and marched in a circle around our single scrawny rosebush.

  At that point Tony Cucinotta, a hardworking plumber who undoubtedly would have preferred to rest after a long week, showed up. I couldn’t hide my anger and disappointment with the others.

  “They told me that they would do it!” I shouted. “They said that they would come and then they backed out. They committed to being here for each other and to help build the community for all of us, and they dropped the ball. I am upset for myself, because I worked hard to put this together. I am embarrassed in relation to the church that has prepared twelve lunches for us. But more than anything, I can’t believe that all these people couldn’t stick with their own commitments.”

  Tony watched me carefully and stroked his chin.

  “You’re upset because they are not doing something they promised,” he said.

  “Yes!” I replied.

  “Well, Bob,” he said with a wry smile, “now you know how God must feel.”

  And with his words, my anger evaporated and we laughed long and hard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Force AND Freedom

  We may wish to abolish conflict, but we cannot get rid of diversity. We must face life as it is and understand that diversity is its most essential feature. Fear of difference is dread of life itself.

  —MARY PARKER FOLLETT

  Every morning when we awake and look at the news, we see almost everything through a single powerful belief. The institutions and arrangements of the world are fixed, we think, and we must operate within their boundaries. All the normal structures of life in America—the limits set by our Constitution, the laws constructed by our legislatures, the rules and practices established by our most powerful institutions, including our corporations, and the social standards and practices reinforced by daily life—seem to be made of steel.

  These structures of society represent a body of received wisdom that developed over many years and that we now silently accept. They function as the rules of the road for our collective behavior. Only rarely, within a few communities or at key historical moments, are our practices ever fully debated from first principles.

  Yet clinging to old answers is not always the right solution for difficult problems. By doing so we face the danger that our institutions will slowly slide away from our aspirations, that they will grow in rigidity without reason. We can become so accustomed to everything around us that we find ourselves increasingly trapped by the past and by forms perpetuated without function. It is as though we started off swimming in a pool of water into which time pours a slow stream of powdered cement. Without being aware, we find ourselves swimming against a thicker and thicker liquid, which gradually slows us down, dries out, and imprisons us forever.

  Though we may firmly believe that we are stuck, the truth is that European and American society has been changing constantly for centuries. Every generation has faced a new social and political reality with new problems, new rules, and often new freedoms. For many peopl
e, such questions seem abstract, far removed from the demands of daily life, but every now and then the opportunity arises for people to design from scratch a new organization, or perhaps an entirely new social system. In the United States, this happened over the fourteen-year period from 1775, when Americans began armed resistance to British authority, to 1789, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights. In those rare historical moments, people get to step back and ask: What is the best way to organize our lives? To achieve our goals?

  One of the greatest experiences of my life was the opportunity to observe at close hand the complete transformation of a whole country—South Africa—as it remade itself from a nation driven by force and fear into one that now embraces the goals of liberty, justice, and equality. The transformation was not without difficulty, and the result has not been perfect. Yet seeing the complete reconfiguration of a nation unfold before my own eyes without widespread violence permanently changed my view of what is possible. I saw that the goals and structures of society can be controlled by the values and dreams of its citizens, and not the other way around.

  In the late 1980s I finished my doctorate at Harvard Business School, which included a long technical dissertation that examined how some of America’s largest investors—pension funds, church and university endowments, and foundations—made decisions about their investments in South Africa. While working on this project I read hundreds of articles on every aspect of this debate, and I pored through archives in different institutions and libraries around the country. Oddly, though everyone I interviewed told me that it was an extremely important topic, no one seemed to be working on a single comprehensive book on the subject.

  One afternoon as I was nearing the end of my dissertation, I stopped by the office of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, one of the business school’s most creative and distinguished faculty members. She asked me where I was in my studies, and I told her that I was nearly finished. I then shared with her the mystery of the missing book. It was peculiar, she admitted, but maybe the comprehensive book could only be written by a person with the right background. I thought about my own training—as a historian and an economist, as a minister who understood the passion for justice, and as a business school graduate who understood the mechanics of foreign investment—and I found myself wondering if perhaps this wasn’t the perfect opportunity for me. I mentioned this to her.

  “Well,” she commented, “I have always felt that life is too short for small projects.”

  And that’s all it took. As I walked out of her office, I knew what I was going to be doing for the next few years: writing a full account of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and South Africa in the era of apartheid.

  After a valuable stint at the Kennedy School of Government in a new and creative program on ethics, I was hired by Harvard Divinity School to teach a range of crossover courses (the kinds of courses I’d dreamed of at Yale Divinity School) on the divestment movement, on how to create social change, on how communities in conflict could be reconciled. The dean encouraged me to establish a new venture called the Project on Business, Values, and the Economy. I settled into a small office on the second floor of an old carriage house on a back street in Cambridge. I organized monthly lunch discussions for faculty from across the whole university to discuss everything from the decision to close a major auto plant in Michigan (taught by an associate dean at the business school) to the pope’s encyclical on capitalism (taught by a leading professor at the divinity school). Soon I had a flood of passionate and brilliant students, mostly from the divinity school but also from across the university and the region.

  I set out to assemble a project of research on South Africa. I began collecting information across many topics: foreign investment, American politics, civil rights, and African history. I developed files on U.S. presidential policy toward Africa from the time of Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan. Because many South Africans passed through Boston and Cambridge, I made a point of asking to meet them and interview them. One of the couples, André and Maretha du Toit, became dear friends. André was one of the most prominent political philosophers in South Africa, an Afrikaner who had left a post at the University of Stellenbosch because of his fierce opposition to apartheid and was now teaching at the University of Cape Town. His wife, Maretha, the daughter of an Afrikaner minister, had also rejected the entire system of racial injustice, and she radiated enthusiasm and affection toward everyone around her, including me. The two of them took me under their wing, and soon I was regularly eating dinner in their small sublet apartment with South Africa’s most distinguished leaders, white and black, as they stopped in Cambridge for a few days.

  After a few years Dana and I realized that we would both benefit from a research year in another country, and we picked South Africa. I had already been there several times for research, and it seemed an ideal time to go as a family. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison two years before, and the exiled members of the African National Congress had returned to South Africa to begin the arduous process of negotiating a new constitution and a transition of power. Dana and I each applied for a senior Fulbright scholarship, which would give us just enough money to move there for six months with our young boys. In 1992 we received the award, and we scheduled our departure for early January 1993, a few weeks before Bill Clinton was to be sworn in as the new president of the United States.

  The day arrived in late December, we handed over our keys to our house sitters, and we boarded a series of flights that would take us to the southern tip of Africa. When we arrived in Johannesburg, we traveled to the home of a gentle Afrikaner couple, Jacques and Carol Kriel, whom I had met on an earlier visit. It had been in their kitchen that I first encountered South African gastronomic peculiarities like rooibos tea, made from the red leaves of a South African bush, and the strangely delicious yeast spread imported from England known as Marmite. They also fed me mielie pap, a cornmeal porridge, and rusks, which are slightly sweet hunks of dry raisin bread served and dunked at teatime. It was in their home that I first noticed that though South Africans never have screens on their windows, there are remarkably few bugs at night. It was in their garden that I first saw great African birds sweep through the sky and watched monkeys pick through a compost heap. Flanking their driveway stood two six-foot-tall jade plants, magnificent tropical plants that had taken decades to reach that height.

  As we were driving along their street I noticed the tight security around most of the homes. Every residence was surrounded by a tall fence, and every gate announced that a security company known as “Armed Response” or some other frightening name was protecting the premises. Everyone had added two or three feet of stones or fencing or razor wire on top of their walls—a physical barometer of the fear rising among Johannesburg’s white elite. The one exception to this neighborhood trend was the Kriel home, which had such a low wall that a child could have hopped over it in a flash.

  I asked Jacques about his wall, and he said that he did not want to make it any higher, even though they had already experienced a theft. Several months before, a group of thieves had entered their home while the Kriels were asleep and stolen the only two pieces of electronic equipment they owned, their television and stereo. Their immense dog, Bassie, a mixture of Great Dane and Rhodesian ridgeback who stood as tall as a pony and normally emitted a giant bark that struck terror into newcomers, had slept through the whole incident.

  I asked Jacques whether things were becoming better or worse. Crime was definitely worse, Jacques replied, but on the whole this was a better South Africa than I had seen on my earlier trips. “You turn on the television and you see the neo-Nazis and the Communists debating each other,” he said. “That was inconceivable a few years ago. So we are seeing an improvement.”

  Though our eventual destination was Cape Town, a thousand miles to the southwest, where we had rented a home, we took a few days to drive around the area, including a visit to the nation’s capital, Pretoria. Th
e great irony of South Africa was that its discriminatory structure had arisen because of the ardent desire of a particular ethnic group for freedom. The Afrikaner people, who numbered barely more than a million, were descendants of the original Dutch settlers who had built their homes in the Cape Province. After a hundred and fifty years, as part of the wars with Napoleon, the British navy sailed into Table Bay and took control. The British quickly established their own language, laws, and customs as the rule of the land, and they treated the Afrikaners as second-class citizens with regard to land and political rights. Afrikaners had a long history of importing slaves and subjugating local African groups, and the British insisted that they could not punish or kill their workers without proper judicial review. Eventually the Afrikaners decided that they had had enough, and they organized the “Great Trek,” an enormous wagon train in which thousands of people moved all their portable belongings across the huge desert to find a home outside British rule.

  These “Fore-Travelers”—Voortrekkers—settled in Pretoria, nearly a thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Town, only to find, to their horror, that within a generation the discovery of gold in nearby Johannesburg prompted the British to come rushing into their new republic in search of new wealth. The Afrikaners wanted freedom; the British responded by conquering them with force. At the end of the nineteenth century, they sent an imperial army to crush the resistance of these farmers, or Boers, in a brutal war of attrition aimed partly at the civilian population.