The train was racketing along one morning about 2 a.m. when the porter’s buzz sounded. Dad sprang up, jerked on his white jacket and made his way to the passenger berths. There a distinguished-looking man said he and his wife were having trouble sleeping and they both wanted glasses of warm milk. Dad brought milk and napkins on a silver tray. The man handed one glass through the lower-berth curtains to his wife and, sipping from his own glass, began to engage Dad in conversation.
Pullman Company rules strictly prohibited any conversation beyond “Yes, sir” or “No, ma’am,” but this passenger kept asking questions. He even followed Dad back into the porter’s cubicle.
“Where are you from?”
“Savannah, Tennessee, sir.”
“You speak quite well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What work did you do before this?”
“I’m a student at A & T College in Greensboro, sir.” Dad felt no need to add that he was considering returning home to sharecrop.
The man looked at him keenly, finally wished him well and returned to his bunk.
The next morning, the train reached Pittsburgh. At a time when 50 cents was a good tip, the man gave five dollars to Simon Haley, who was profusely grateful. All summer, he had been saving every tip he received, and when the job finally ended, he had accumulated enough to buy his own mule and plow. But he realized his savings could also pay for one full semester at A & T without his having to work a single odd job.
Dad decided he deserved at least one semester free of outside work. Only that way would he know what grades he could truly achieve.
He returned to Greensboro. But no sooner did he arrive on campus than he was summoned by the college president. Dad was full of apprehension as he seated himself before the great man.
“I have a letter here, Simon,” the president said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You were a porter for Pullman this summer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you meet a certain man one night and bring him warm milk?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, his name is Mr. R. S. M. Boyce, and he’s a retired executive of the Curtis Publishing Company, which publishes The Saturday Evening Post. He has donated $500 for your board, tuition and books for the entire school year.”
My father was astonished.
The surprise grant not only enabled Dad to finish A & T, but to graduate first in his class. And that achievement earned him a full scholarship to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
In 1920, Dad, then a newlywed, moved to Ithaca with his bride, Bertha. He entered Cornell to pursue his Master’s degree, and my mother enrolled at the Ithaca Conservatory of Music to study piano. I was born the following year.
One day decades later, editors of The Saturday Evening Post invited me to their editorial offices in New York to discuss the condensation of my first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was so proud, so happy, to be sitting in those wood-paneled offices on Lexington Avenue. Suddenly I remembered Mr. Boyce, and how it was his generosity that enabled me to be there amid those editors, as a writer. And then I began to cry. I just couldn’t help it.
We children of Simon Haley often reflect on Mr. Boyce and his investment in a less fortunate human being. By the ripple effect of his generosity, we also benefited. Instead of being raised on a sharecrop farm, we grew up in a home with educated parents, shelves full of books, and with pride in ourselves. My brother George is chairman of the U.S. Postal Rate Commission, Julius is an architect, Lois a music teacher and I’m a writer.
Mr. R. S. M. Boyce dropped like a blessing into my father’s life. What some may see as a chance encounter, I see as the working of a mysterious power for good.
And I believe that each person blessed with success has an obligation to return part of that blessing. We must all live and act like the man on the train.
Ferragamo’s Gift
By Susan Shreve
August 2003
From More
Wandering along the streets of New York City, my daughters and I stop at shoe stores from the Village to the Upper West Side—wherever we happen to be. This is their choice, these women who as little girls teetered around the house balancing like cranes in my mother’s high heels. I sit on a bench and wait while they try on shoe after shoe, readjusting their positions in the mirror, eyes downcast, considering their feet.
“So?” one of them will ask me. “What do you think of these?”
“I love them.” I say this about every pair, of course. Which isn’t true. I have a complicated relationship with shoes. Given a choice—which a mother of two daughters on a shopping spree doesn’t necessarily have—I’d never go into a shoe store at all.
But my mother would be ecstatic. In the romance of shoes, they are my mother’s daughters.
I am her true daughter—and growing up I was her full-time job, one she took on with grace. I’d had polio as a baby, and learned to walk in braces wearing heavy, brown orthopedic oxfords. The fact that they were not the black patent Mary Janes the other little girls were wearing concerned me less than it did my mother, who was in love with shoes.
There was an element of boot camp to my early childhood: posture exercises, ballet school run by a French dancer who wasn’t enthusiastic at the arrival of a hopeful ballerina wearing oxfords and a metal brace. My mother bought me ballet slippers. I couldn’t walk in them. But I held tight to the barre, pretending I could leap, my legs in perfect half-moons, my pink slippers pointed.
By the time I was seven, my mother had moved on to tennis, which she decided I could play while wearing black rain rubbers over my oxfords. And long before anyone in my class had heard of ballroom dancing, my mother played swing music on the phonograph in the living room, took me in her arms and taught me how.
By age 12, after a series of operations, I could walk unaided. When I turned 15, she signed me up for dancing school with boys. She took me shopping at the Washington’s Birthday sales, buying me a sliplike dress with a deep V and a strapless satiny thing. But shoes were a dilemma: I wore two sizes, one 5½, the other 3.
“I can’t wear these to dancing school,” I said of my orthopedics.
“Of course not,” my mother agreed. “We’ll buy you heels.”
So we went to G. C. Murphy’s Five and Ten and bought a pair of size 5½, stuffing one shoe with toilet paper so it would fit my smaller foot.
I wore the satiny formal to the first dance. I managed to take a turn with a boy so tall I couldn’t see his face—which was just as well, since the toilet paper began to trail in a long ribbon across the dance floor. I fled the studio and hid in the ladies’ room—my feet up on the toilet seat so no one could see I was there—until dancing school was over. I never went back.
“We’ll find you shoes,” my mother promised me that night.
“I don’t need to go to dances,” I said.
“Maybe not,” she answered. “But you need to have the shoes, in case you change your mind.”
Someplace in my mother’s fashion-magazine reading, she recalled that Salvatore Ferragamo had a child with polio. She wrote to him, saying that she, too, had such a child, telling him the story of the dance. Would he consider making my shoes?
By this time, Ferragamo was well known as a shoemaker, with rich clients all over the world. But my mother was certain he would write back. And he did, inviting us to Florence, offering to make a “last”—a model of my foot—at no cost.
Ferragamo died before we could get to Florence. As it turned out, he did not have a child with polio. But he was a sympathetic man, and his wife and daughters honored his letter.
And so it was that as an awkward, self-conscious teenager, I sat at the Palazzo Spini Feroni headquarters next to my lovely mother and was measu
red. What I remember about that afternoon—besides the slender models walking the marble floors and the elegant women sampling the wares—is the sense I had of my mother. She commanded the room in her quiet way, as if she had brought to Florence a precious treasure, a jewel of such particularity that for a moment I lost myself and believed her.
For the next ten years—until the building where the lasts were housed burned down—I’d scan magazines with my mother, looking for shoes. I’d send the pictures to Ferragamo’s and, for $35 a pair, I’d receive the most amazing creations: olive-green suede with an orange leaf, gray leather with a black heel like an umbrella, my wedding shoes, with seed pearls in the shape of a butterfly. They were not exactly right for a young woman in the shoeless ’60s. But they were beautiful.
My mother was a quiet, mysterious woman of understated elegance. When she died, I discovered in her closet shelves of shoes, the price tags still attached. Suddenly I could see her in the shoe department; arthritis had made it impossible for her to wear the slender high heels and strappy sandals she adored. But she would buy them anyway, pretending she was going to a dance.
She believed that anything is possible in life, and that she should always be ready for surprises—a philosophy she had taught me with the full measure of her love.
Life in These United States
As a mother of five, I’d like to think my “labors” do not go unappreciated. However, one evening as I was preparing dinner, my 13-year-old son told me about a movie he’d seen in health class of a woman giving birth, and how painful and scary the whole thing looked. Just as I was thinking maybe now he’ll have a little more empathy for me, he said, “I feel sorry for Dad having to watch that five times.” Rita Henkel
Letting Go
By Litty Mathew
December 2009/January 2010
The table turned out to be the hardest to give away. My husband, Melkon, and I had made it when we were dating—our very first woodworking project. Melkon had drawn a high, slim-legged sideboard on the back of a napkin at our favorite sushi joint; I’d added design touches of my own. Together, we’d shopped for streaked poplar the color of honey, chosen hand-painted Mexican tiles for the top, and set up a mini-workshop in the breakfast nook of my suburban Los Angeles apartment.
It had taken us a week to finish the thing, and its value was more than sentimental: We used it whenever we had company. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that Melkon objected—loudly—when I proposed passing it on to someone else.
To be honest, though, I hadn’t thought much about how he would react. I was in the middle of an experiment aimed at remaking my relationship with stuff—one that involved parting with some of the objects I cared about most. If my actions seemed selfless, my motives were anything but.
A few months back, I’d fallen into a funk brought on by simultaneous downturns in the national economy, my household income, and, not coincidentally, the joy quotient of my seven-year-old marriage. Vaguely ashamed of my troubles, I kept mum about them. I was feeling cut off from almost everyone I knew, including myself.
Like millions of other Americans, I had come to rely on an all-purpose remedy for the blues—a trip to the mall. But now, when I got home and clipped the price tags off a bagful of blouses, I felt worse than before. In a recession, retail therapy somehow loses its restorative power.
Still, I needed some way to escape the sense of constriction that had settled over my life. So I called my pal Gloria, who’s a few degrees more free-spirited than I am, a decade older and several centuries wiser.
“I’ve got to find a substitute for shopping,” I told her. “I want the high without the credit card hangover. Or the feeling of self-loathing whenever I open my closet.”
Gloria suggested I do the opposite of shopping. “And I don’t mean just giving to Goodwill, honey. You should try holding a Giveaway.”
The Giveaway, or Wopila, is a tradition of the Lakota Sioux, whom Gloria had gotten to know while working as a journalist on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. On important occasions—birthdays, weddings, funerals—the Lakota pass out gifts rather than receive them. Often, they spend months making or collecting items that will be useful or delightful to the recipients.
Gloria’s Lakota friends had given her everything from new gym socks to hand-beaded earrings to sheaves of aromatic sage. In turn, she’d become a champion giver, lavishing those close to her with bounty. Gloria’s special twist was to give away her own favorite possessions. Over the years, I’d ended up with mosaics she’d crafted by hand, stylish sweaters she’d barely worn, a brand-new pair of boots and a selection of her mother’s vintage dresses. For Gloria, no special occasion was necessary. “Hey,” she’d say, in her child-of-the-’60s way, “there’ll always be new things, so pass on the ones you have.” But her motivation was clearly the same as the Lakota’s: to strengthen relationships, to revel in the pleasure of generosity, and to keep from feeling that her stuff owned her.
As it happened, Gloria wasn’t the first person to tell me about the Giveaway. My father had worked on the same reservation, as a doctor; once, before leaving on a long trip, he gave me a rainbow-striped blanket that a Lakota friend had given him as a token of appreciation.
He also pointed out that my own family had a similar tradition. We’re the other kind of Indian, with roots in India itself. When my parents were kids there, newlyweds rarely received blenders. Instead, they invited passersby to share in the wedding banquet.
But I grew up mostly in the United States, and I’d never been to Rosebud. I wasn’t sure I had what it would take to throw a Giveaway of my own.
I decided to start with something small. Gloria’s sister, Marina, a fashion editor in Italy, was bedridden after a stroke. It occurred to me that my favorite earrings—petite gold hoops with tiny diamonds—might help her feel more stylish and would be comfortable to wear while propped on a pillow.
Relinquishing them wasn’t easy; it took a week to work up the courage. But finally, I handed them to Gloria while we browsed the sale rack at the Gap. Feeling a bit embarrassed, I didn’t mention that I was following her advice. She didn’t ask, either, but simply thanked me and went on examining jeans.
Neither of us bought anything, even on sale. Yet I glided out of the store on a cloud of euphoria, as jazzed as I’d ever been after a successful shopping expedition. In the ensuing weeks, whenever I thought of Marina wearing my earrings (“She says they look beautiful on her,” Gloria reported), the sensation returned full force. No purchase I’d ever made for myself had ever had such a lasting effect.
Next, I gave a green silk shawl to my friend Judy, a graphic artist who loves lush fabrics, and a heavy copper saucepan to Kaumudi, a caterer friend with a new business. Leaving the post office, I gave a book of stamps to a guy outside the door. I could tell he thought I was running a scam. “Really, it’s on me,” I insisted. “You don’t want to go in there today.” When he saw the line, he nodded and shook my hand.
With each Giveaway, I felt lighter, as if the weight of the past months’ worries were lifting. Though my finances hadn’t improved appreciably, my anxiety level sure had. And I felt a new closeness with my giftees. My sense of isolation was dissolving.
Then I came up with my boldest challenge yet, and perhaps my most foolhardy: to give away the table Melkon and I had made together. The recipient would be his just-married cousin Guillermo. “Let’s surprise him, sweetie,” I suggested over dinner one evening. Guillermo had always admired the piece, I said, and would be thrilled to own it.
My husband looked at me as if I’d suddenly begun speaking Esperanto. “And where do you suggest we put the food at our next party?”
“We’ll work something out.”
Until then, Melkon had silently watched my Giveaways, weighing whether they were just an annoying new hobby or a sign of impending mental break
down. Now I was asking him to participate. I knew it seemed unfair, but something told me that it might be good for both of us.
“But it’s the only thing we’ve made together,” he protested.
“That’s what will make it so special for Guillermo and Arus.”
“It’s not even that nice, Litty,” Melkon said, rubbing at the tabletop. “The grout is starting to crumble.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Like most people, Melkon was accustomed to giving away only items he no longer needed—a trash bag of castoffs on the doorstep of a nonprofit, for instance. “Let me think about it,” he said.
He thought about it for a week. Actually, we argued about it for a week, in a series of emotional exchanges that touched on other issues we’d been avoiding—the burnout that came from starting up a business together, our frustrations with ourselves, each other and the world. How could each of us grow without leaving the other behind? What could we let go?
By the end, it felt like we had cleared up more than just the pile of clutter that usually accumulated on the table. And Melkon was ready to part with our precious piece of furniture.
We heaved it into the back of our SUV and drove to Guillermo’s place. He was waiting outside.
“You’re giving us the table?” he cried. “Wow! It’ll be the first piece of furniture in our living room!”
Melkon grinned—something I hadn’t seen him do for days. “Yeah,” he said. “It’ll look great in your new house.” We were both smiling as we drove home.
Now when we have dinner parties, we lay out the buffet on any handy surface. When someone asks where the table went, Melkon will say, glancing at me from the corner of his eye, “There’s this fascinating Lakota tradition called the Giveaway. It involves not having a place for the hors d’oeuvres—and getting to know your wife a little better.”
Treasury of Joy & Inspiration Page 10