by Eboo Patel
I wanted to say, “Screw her. Why does she get to tell you what to do?” And then I realized something: Sarah wanted that. She had come to Israel to connect with her community, her tradition. What is a community but a group of people who have some claim over you, and what is a tradition but a set of stories and principles and rules handed down over hundreds or thousands of years that each new generation has to wrestle with?
I started sobbing. The cabdriver must have thought we were crazy. Sarah, warm and sweet, moved over to me and put her hand on my back. I had totally lost it by this point, weeping uncontrollably, as if a loved one had died.
“What is it, my love?” Sarah asked.
I finally pulled myself together. “It’s just that you feel like you have something to live up to, this Judaism thing. You have these principles you talk about, and this community that watches out for you, and even when it feels suffocating, at least you know they care for you. I have none of that. I just have some things that I’m interested in and a bunch of groups I come in and out of. But I could leave them at any time, and they wouldn’t know I was gone.”
It was a harsh truth I was telling. For all my talk of identity politics, I had yet to develop much of an identity.
4
Real World Activism
We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it.
JANE ADDAMS
Brother Wayne Teasdale had two great hopes for me: that I would start an interfaith youth movement and that I would take mushrooms with him. He got one.
I met Brother Wayne in the spring of 1997. In addition to being a Catholic monk, Brother Wayne had a PhD in philosophy and had spent years at an ashram in India, where he took vows in a Hindu monastic tradition. He was also on the board of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, an international interfaith organization based in Chicago.
Brother Wayne fascinated me. He had a head of gray hair but the spirit of an idealistic teenager, easily thrilled and totally devoid of cynicism. He seemed a cross between Don Quixote, Zorba the Greek, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the mad scientist from the Back to the Future movies. “Come see me in Hyde Park,” he said when we met. I jumped at the chance.
He lived in a small apartment in the Catholic Theological Union complex. Books on Christian theology, pictures of Hindu deities, and CDs of Indian classical music were strewn everywhere. Brother Wayne cleared a small place near the window and announced that it was time to meditate. A ticking clock bothered him. I heard him get up to put it away. When we were done meditating, I saw him retrieve it from the freezer.
“Time for a walk,” he said. We pulled on our sweaters and headed south down Cornell Avenue. We passed a dog. Brother Wayne bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. The dog wagged its tail and barked. “That is a very spiritual dog,” Brother Wayne told me as we ambled on. “I know most of the dogs in this neighborhood,” he added.
We continued our walk until we came to a man wearing a heavy winter coat and carrying a black garbage bag with aluminum cans. “Hey, Wayne,” he said. “Ralph, it’s so nice to see you,” Brother Wayne replied. They caught up. Brother Wayne took out his wallet and handed Ralph a twenty. “Ralph is a very spiritual man,” he said. “I know most of the homeless people in this neighborhood.”
We entered a café, ordered, and sat down. A man from outside saw Brother Wayne, waved frantically, and bounded in. “I’ve told you before,” scolded the girl at the counter, “no public restroom.”
He looked at Brother Wayne. Brother Wayne nodded. “Coffee,” the man said triumphantly. “Large,” he said with glee. The man sat down at our table. The girl brought the coffee. Brother Wayne handed over $2. The man launched into a screeching rant about how Mayor Richard Daley was putting poison in the water supply. Brother Wayne listened. “Now, Harold, perhaps you should—” Harold cut him off and started in on the Clinton administration.
I grabbed a newspaper from the next table. Brother Wayne listened some more. We finished our coffee. Brother Wayne and Harold hugged. I offered a polite, somewhat standoffish hand. Harold pumped it. Brother Wayne and I headed back to his apartment. “Harold has a spiritual side, but sometimes it’s hard to see,” Brother Wayne explained. I half expected him to add that he knew most of the raving lunatics in the neighborhood.
Somehow, in between these various encounters, I got the story of why Brother Wayne was interested in me. He was convinced that we were experiencing the interspiritual moment in human history, a time when the great religions of the world would come together to affirm their common values. He wanted more action from the interfaith movement, particularly around environmental issues and freeing Tibet. But after more than a decade of involvement with interfaith organizations, Brother Wayne had lost hope that the existing leaders of the interfaith movement would take bold steps. “They are all very spiritual people,” he explained to me, “but they are afraid of exercising their prophetic voice.” So he had set out to find new blood.
Then he turned to me and said with utter seriousness, “I think you can play a leadership role in the global interfaith youth movement. I can tell you are a very spiritual person.”
“Sure,” I told him. Who can say no to that?
I had been in Chicago for about six months. I had spent the summer after graduating from college traveling around the United States with Sarah. We drove from New York City across to Seattle, down to San Francisco, and then back to Chicago, hiking in national parks, hanging out in the bohemian areas of cities, and volunteering at Catholic Worker houses along the way. Unlike my friends, who despite their radical politics had all locked up jobs before graduating or been accepted to graduate school, I came back to Chicago in mid-August 1996 with a firm commitment to do something good but no concrete plans. I discovered the St. Francis Catholic Worker House on the North Side of the city. All the rooms were taken, but I was welcome to the couch in the front area. Be warned, Ruthie told me, the cats have a proprietary interest in it; the window is drafty; and Jimmy, one of the residents, gets phone calls from his imaginary friends in the middle of the night and argues loudly with them until dawn. It sounded like home to me. I moved in and started looking for a job.
I found exactly what I was looking for: a teaching position at an alternative education program for urban minority high school dropouts on the near northwest side of Chicago. A friend of mine who knew a departing teacher at the school told me they were hiring. I showed up on graduation day, stayed through the ceremony, and sat in a chair outside the school director’s office until she returned. She looked at my résumé, noticed that I had no teaching experience, and pointed out that, at twenty, I would be younger than many of my students. “I will do everything in my power to be an effective teacher here,” I told her. Only one teacher was staying at the school. The school director was desperate, and I guess I was convincing enough to take a chance on.
The school was a program of the Association House of Chicago, a large social service agency inspired by Jane Addams’s Hull House. We were located on North Avenue in between Damen and Western, right on the border between the two gang nations that define growing up in Chicago for too many urban teenagers. The neighborhood, Wicker Park, was fast gentrifying. Streetlights, coffee shops, and vegetarian restaurants were moving in, and working-class people of color were heading west in search of affordable rents.
Called El Cuarto Año, or “the fourth year,” the school was expected to take high school dropouts who read at a fifth-grade level and prepare them to pass the general equivalency diploma, or GED, exam within six months. That would have been an impossible task if our students had an ideal support system. Most didn’t. Many of our male students were involved in gangs, and some had already done stints in the juvenile detention facility. Most of our female students had at least one baby. The vast majority were poor, many were in the process of being uprooted by Wicker Park’s gentrification, and none of them had had good experiences in school. Safety, baby-sitting, basic nutrition,
and self-confidence were all issues that had to be addressed along with education.
I was absolutely confident. Had I not read radical education theory? Did I not have deep insights into urban poverty and youth development based on my advanced sociology classes? Was I not the founder of several tutoring programs for elementary school children in my college town? I barely paid attention to any of the discussion in the faculty meetings. I planned to run my classroom my way. When the students started complaining that other teachers were boring and ineffective compared to me, my colleagues would be prepared for me to show them how to be a real ghetto teacher. I figured it would happen by October.
As part of its retention strategy, El Cuarto Año required each student to identify a support person—a parent, an older sibling, a romantic partner. In the meetings I held with prospective students and their support people prior to the beginning of the school year, I spent a good chunk of time explaining that I understood why they had been unsuccessful in school. I emphasized that the system had been designed to fail them. I cited Jonathan Kozol and William Ryan on the chronic underfunding of urban schools due to unfair tax policy. I talked about bell hooks’s theory that the legacy of racism and the odor of colonialism deeply impact the attitude of students of color toward school, which they associate with white supremacy. I assured them that I would be taking a Freireian approach to teaching, using the knowledge base that my students brought into the classroom. And just to put their minds at ease, I confirmed that Ebonics was not only allowed but encouraged in my classroom.
After hearing my lecture, one parent asked, “You’re going to teach my daughter how to read, right?”
I realized that I had skipped that part. In fact, I had hardly thought about it at all. My liberal arts education had provided me with ways to understand what was wrong with the world but few skills to help put it right. My own arrogance had prevented me from seeking effective practical methods of helping urban minority high school dropouts get an education. In a week, I would face a classroom full of challenging students, and I had no idea how to teach them. My confidence quickly gave way to fear.
I became a teacher the hard way: by designing ineffective lesson plans, having my students sneer when I taught them, and working until midnight to adjust the next day’s plan so that I didn’t make the same mistakes as I had the day before. I learned how important it is to start class on time, to demand that all assignments be completed in neat penmanship, and to assign books that both challenged and appealed to my students.
Sometimes I took a break during my midnight lesson-planning sessions and imagined one of my college professors teaching my class. I couldn’t help but laugh at the vision of some of the nation’s leading experts on minority education and urban sociology faced with teaching the students about whom they theorized. Nearly every course I took in college had begun with the professor saying that his or her main goal was to make us “critical thinkers.” I brought that same view to my classroom and spent a lot of time explaining structural racism and the legacy of colonialism.
But my students at El Cuarto Año were experts on inequality. They didn’t need to hear from me that the hand they got dealt was unfair. What they needed was somebody who could teach them basic, useful skills: algebra, reading comprehension, essay composition. Then they would have what my suburban education gave me: the tools to make up my own mind about the world around me. I began wishing that my professors had spent a little more time lecturing on how to constructively engage the world as it is and a little less time teaching me how to criticize it.
More than anything else, I was amazed by how extensively gang violence pervaded my students’ lives. Some of them couldn’t ride the bus or train to school for fear of encountering rival gang members. Others wouldn’t come to school for days at a time because of a gang obligation. “I had an operation,” they would say when they showed up a week later. That was code for being called on by a gang leader to join an organized battle with another gang, sometimes across the street, sometimes across the city.
I remember tutoring Jose after school one day and noticing a perfectly round hole in his jeans. “What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s where I got shot, dog,” he said, pride filling his voice. “It was a battle at Leavitt and LeMoyne, when the Kings used to own that corner.” He showed me the pitchfork he had tattooed on his arm, the sign of the Latin Kings.
“I don’t get it,” I told him. “Are you telling me the same guy who is sitting here reading poetry by William Blake stands on street corners with a gun because of that little sign?”
“You think the school I went to had teachers that stayed after for tutoring sessions? Man, the teachers at that school didn’t even show up half the time. We’d have some stupid sub up there in the front of the room yelling at us to do a worksheet, same damn worksheet yesterday’s sub gave us to do. Since I was six years old, everybody around me be asking ‘What gang you ride? What gang you ride?’ Nobody asked, ‘What poetry you read? What level of math you at?’ One day, you decide you might as well ride something, or else you nobody to no one. So you choose one. Then you hated by half and loved by half. But at least you somebody.”
In early November, I left the St. Francis Catholic Worker House. I had a constant cold as a result of the drafty window, a bunch of scratches on my arm from the cat, and continual sleep deprivation thanks to Jimmy’s late-night conversations with his imaginary friends, which had gotten louder and louder as Jimmy had gotten deafer and deafer. I had met another recent college graduate through activist circles in Chicago, and the two of us found an apartment together.
I was making progress as a teacher. School no longer felt like a battle. My students’ reading and writing skills were improving dramatically. Many did earn their GEDs, several continued their education at local community colleges, and a couple even went directly on to DePaul University. But it was a lonely existence. I felt as if I was bursting with stories from school and had nobody to tell them to. My $12,000 salary prevented me from being a regular part of the dinner-and-a-show social scene that some of my friends with higher-paying jobs were in. What I really missed was a community, a setup where sharing a story or asking a question was just a walk down the hall away.
On New Year’s Day 1997, I resolved to address the problem directly. I suggested to my roommate that we host a potluck for our generation of activists in Chicago—teachers, social workers, environmentalists, community organizers, whatever. Six people showed up on the first Tuesday in February. I cooked masala potatoes, the only dish I knew how to make (a fact that is, sadly, still true). We talked about typical activist stuff—the gentrification happening in the city, the centrist mode of the Democratic Party—but mostly we exchanged stories and had laughs. We had all gone through the experience of taking a set of ideals we had gathered as undergraduates and trying to apply them in this postcollege life.
“When are we going to do this again?” asked my friend Jeff from Allen Hall, who was working as a community organizer in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago.
“Next week,” I offered.
And so it became a ritual. Every Tuesday I would wake up excited, get home early, cook my potatoes, and wait for my activist friends to start showing up around 7:00 p.m. The numbers grew, from the original six, to their immediate circle of friends, to those people’s circles, and on and on. People on the South Side of Chicago heard about the Tuesday night potlucks and started coming up to the North Side for the vegetarian food and conversation. People had friends at universities in the Midwest, at Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin, and they dropped by during their spring breaks. By the time the weather got warm, we were spilling out into the front yard. At one point, there must have been eighty people there. They brought poems to share, instruments to play, and news from activists organizing students and workers in out-of-the-way places.
While washing dishes around ten one night, I overheard a conversation behind me. “I live for Tuesday nights,” one person
said.
“Me, too,” another said. “This is the only place where I feel people get what I’m about. I wish we could have this energy on a 24-7 basis.”
“You mean live together?” a third asked. “This ain’t the sixties, man. That doesn’t happen anymore.”
I turned around. “Sure it does. Ever heard of the Catholic Worker movement? Their whole thing is based on the idea of people with social justice values living together in community and serving others.”
Our conversation was beginning to attract attention. A couple of people who had graduated from the University of Wisconsin piped in. “It happens in Madison, too. There’s a whole system of cooperatives up there where students and local activists live together, buy food in bulk, share chores, and generally energize each other to do good in the world.” The idea started taking shape.
We decided to ask a senior Chicago activist, Kathy Kelly, founder of an organization called Voices in the Wilderness that opposed sanctions and war on Iraq, to come by the following week and give us some advice on making this idea a reality. Kathy was overjoyed to hear a group of young activists in Chicago talk about forming a social justice community. She told us about a Catholic parish in the Uptown neighborhood with an almost empty convent. Most of the nuns had left, and the priest was considering renting it. We better hurry, Kathy warned us; other people were interested in the building as well.
About six of us were committed to the idea of forming a community. We started meeting every Sunday night to figure out the shape of the project. We put together a mission statement, decided that community decisions would be made by consensus, and crafted a process for admitting new members.