There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

Well, March came and, with it, the News story on my father. Then I discovered the medical malpractice that the Facilities were passing off as care. Then the end of school approached and something had not come: my money. And I guess the string of events had convinced me that people suffer—children suffer—when those in power do not do their jobs. What I had not yet learned is that those in power always get away with it. And so I planned to mete out justice myself.

  Thanks to Granny, who never threw away any of my belongings or traded them for money or lost them in storage, I still have the letter to the senator that I composed. I present it to you, unedited (except for the senator’s name, because people are very litigious in America these days):

  May 13, 1999

  Dear Senator Blazzy Blah,

  Coming from a very religious family, it has always been instilled in me that a man with any honor is to keep his promise—especially to a child, and when they don’t, it is known as a lie. However, it has been brought to my attention from a very loving principal and teachers that you didn’t uphold your promise—a very disappointing discovery.

  Whatever happened to vows that are said to be kept? Not only am I preterbed , I am utterly disappointed at such a tawdry performance of disregard.

  Whatever happened to “It takes a village to raise a child,” when in my village, such so called “distinguished” authorities have showed that lies are their main priority. You know, I have had serious thoughts about being a politician, but after I’ve seen that you must lie to be the best on the voting ballot, I’ve now altered my decision.

  When I spoke at Paul Quinn College, the M.C. said that you paid for my trip, but my wonderful PTA, who stand by their promises with the utmost of respect, they might just want to give the Dallas Morning News a ring. Not only are you and your mouth a disgrace to this community, but to this state. Galatians 6:7,10 says, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap. As we have the opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially those of the household of faith.” I say to you, not only am I of the household of faith, but God is a close friend of mine, and of course, he will prevail. You don’t have to give me the money you promised, I don’t have to go on my trip, you don’t have to win the next election—nothing for you is carved in stone, for it is all up to you. Now I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I’m very appalled at the oblivion of your character. I know you might think this letter is nothing, but when the black community finds out that one of it’s prominent black “leaders” show less leadership qualities than a 12 year old child, you might just be convinced. Phillipians 2:3 quotes “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in the lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better themselves.” May god bless you and touch you much needed spirit

  Truly Disheartened,

  Casey D. Gerald

  6th Grader at R.L. Thornton Elementary School

  Ms. Davis had stopped her class to help me choose impressive words to attack the state senator. Stood at her desk, me on the other side of the room reading draft sentences aloud, and shouted back—Ooh! You are not mad you are perturbed! Yess—which sounded great to me, though I wasn’t a perfect speller, as you can see.

  Shortly after I wrote it, as preparations continued for its effectual release, my letter fell into the hands of another teacher who, of course, ran straightway to the principal, who then summoned me to her office. I strolled down to this meeting with hopes that Dr. Jones, who reminds me now a bit of Lena Horne, was going to offer a few suggestions and maybe a stamp.

  She sat calmly behind her principal desk. The Gestapo official who confiscated my letter sat on a couch. I sat on the couch, too.

  Now, Casey, Dr. Jones cooed. You know we cannot send this letter, right?

  I did not know that. Just sat there silent, eyes starting to burn.

  I sure do understand you being upset, she continued. Certainly. But I’m gonna tell you just what my mother always told me when I was a little girl. She’d say, “Aretha, you can catch more bees with honey than you can with vinegar.” You really can, darling. Just trust me. All right?

  Yes, ma’am.

  Dr. Jones was so wise and so good to me—she wrote two traveler’s checks to replace the politicians’ missing money—that I didn’t put up a fight, just filed the letter away and placed my grudge against the senator on the shelf with all the others I was collecting at that time. And it seems that, with much else on my mind, my gift went into hibernation as the new millennium began.

  But then I got to Yale and discovered that all (or at least some of) the hell my people and I had gone through was not an act of God but a highly sophisticated scheme, an okeydoke bang-bang, carried out by a whole chicken coop of Senator Blazzy Blahs. And there it was again, my righteous fury, untempered by time and unchecked at last. Granny was not there to chase me. Ms. McLemore was not there to bargain. Daddy was not there to whip me. Dr. Jones was not there to intervene. And if she had called to assure me once more—Casey, darling, remember . . . you can catch more bees with honey than with vinegar—I would have smiled and said (respectfully) Yes, ma’am, I remember . . . but I don’t wanna catch them. I plan to smash the whole nest this time.

  Thanks to Yale football, I knew how to do just that.

  If the game of football sat at the top of the social order in Texas, at Yale it scraped the very bottom—the closest thing the college had to a ghetto. But like every ghetto, Yale football gave me a great advantage, a hidden workshop where I could tinker with my inner man and outer appearance, where I could laugh and eat well and grow strong. So although some wise man said One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been, I’m here to tell you that it is in the evening, in the back of a bus from Philadelphia, in a cell-like dorm room all alone, in the darkness, where plans are made and the makers of plans become the saints and monsters that we witness or endure by day. Two years of night was all it took for my eyes to adjust to total darkness, enough to see the outline of my hand, to reach and grab whatever was in front of me or knock down any fool who needed light. And that first coup had taught me well that sometimes all one has to do to conquer is to try. So I did.

  Besides, I wrote to Daniel once we hung up, we shouldn’t be one of the thirteen colonies. We should be America.

  We would not join the Men of Color Council or anything like it. Daniel and I would found our own institution, not to network but to . . . We’d get to that.

  First, we needed a name.

  What about Association of Yale Negroes?

  Daniel, that’s the oldest-sounding shit I’ve ever heard. Is that what they call y’all in Gary . . . negroes??

  Ha . . . shutup, nigga. We gotta think of something fresh.

  Yeah. That ain’t it, though. You think we can call ourselves colored? Like, Yale Colored Men’s Forum?

  Hmm . . . I’ono if it’s okay to call black people colored no more. Let me ask my daddy. Daniel’s father was a civil rights lawyer. Yeah, man. I kinda liked “colored” but my daddy said it’s not okay.

  Damn.

  We spent at least half a week auditioning names for our new group. We knew Yale would be in it. But we needed a term for our race, our gender, and our structure. Of course all these things are social constructs, but we were twenty and it was a simpler time.

  The only term we nixed immediately was African-American.

  It had always seemed strange to me that an Irishman could show up at Ellis Island in 1912, or a Hungarian Jewish family could show up in 1940, or an Afrikaner could arrive in 2006, and before the next census was taken they could all just check white and the newspaper would call them, simply, Americans. But somehow, some relative of mine could be kidnapped from Africa four hundred years ago, kept in America for all that time, stripped of name and gods and family, forced to work and build the land, and I—who had hardly been to Oklahoma, let alone to Africa—was given
this hyphenated title, this other continental allegiance that I had not asked to have taken from me in the first place and had not asked to be branded with, either.

  I would not argue with someone who claimed that my pose was tinged with anti-African sentiments, but I would ask them to consider that any attempt to dilute my Americanness must be tinged with anti-blackness . . . anti-meness. Besides, my mother and father and sister had been the first somebodies—on the same day, no less—to stick a name on me that I did not choose myself and had to carry around for the rest of my life. They would be the last, if I had anything to do with it.

  Black. That’s what we would be.

  We would call ourselves black. We would call ourselves men, since boys was inappropriate as a title for serious people (in practice, I called most males, myself included, boy, and still do). We would call the group a union—forum was already taken by our counterparts at Harvard, and we had already stolen their constitution and one of their events.

  We had then to discuss

  Whither or where we might travel, with the second question being

  Should we have a purpose

  It makes sense that we spent more time choosing a name for this new institution than deciding its purpose, since every grand purpose grows from personal pain. It is not until some meaning is grafted onto the bone of the pain—sometimes not until centuries have passed and somebody makes up a nice story about those early days—that ideals and causes and manifestos are added to what was, at base, a simple human problem. Remember that God made Adam only because He was alone, then made Eve because Adam was alone, then told them to multiply so that they would not be alone. And all these millions of years later we are still creating most of the good and evil things that we do because we are, so often, alone. So it was with the Yale Black Men’s Union.

  Yale, for me, had been the loneliest place in the world. And though Daniel was not as theatrical about the ordeal, it had not been much better for him. Our friend Brian, whose family’s Great Migration had taken them to Lima, Ohio—which paid off, they thought, when their progeny migrated to Yale—had been miserable, too. We knew one boy—a math genius from Mississippi, if you can believe it—who dropped out after his sophomore year, not long after he recruited me to join the Kappas. Then somebody messed up and let me find a statistic: only 92 percent of black boys that enrolled in Yale College graduated, compared to 98 percent of everybody else. I was not sure where this statistic came from. I am not sure whether it was even true. But if Twain was right that there are three kinds of lies—lies, damn lies, and statistics—then he failed to mention how useful all three could be. There’s a goddamn plague around here. We would do something about this.

  We also knew, Daniel and I, that as bad as things may have been for us, they were much worse for boys outside the tall iron gates of Yale. Every week our first two years, or at least every month, or maybe it had only been three or four times, we went to Bridgeport, forty-five minutes south of New Haven, to mentor high school boys, at the invitation of the only upperclassman on the football team who made sure we earned good grades and did more than sit around staring at our navels. However many visits there were, each made me grateful to have grown up poor in the South, where at least we had some grass and the winter was not so harsh. It also made me—Daniel, too—angry at how comfortable and self-concerned so many of our classmates seemed to be. There were over two dozen groups headquartered at the Afro-American Cultural Center—“the House”—at that time, yet one of the most respected black upperclassmen lamented: The black community at Yale has failed because it doesn’t do anything serious. We would do something about this, too.

  The last piece of purpose became the most controversial. It made no sense to me that a black boy would come to Yale and spend four years at the House or, more to the point, only with people who were just like him. Some of this impulse was the toxic waste of my war with the black bourgeoisie, for sure. Some of it was a naive commitment to integration. But it was also why I loved when Maya Angelou quoted the Roman slave-turned-playwright Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. And for those who, like me, don’t know more than a lick of Latin: I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.

  If these boys were going to go through the trouble of living and studying and taking out loans to go to Yale, they needed to walk around like they owned the place, not like they were squatting on somebody’s back porch. We would bring them out of the shadows—which sounds rich coming from me, I bet.

  Anyway, that was the plan: we’d get these boys together, we’d get ’em in good shape, put ’em to work in service to somebody else, help ’em find the keys to the rest of the kingdom so they could rob the place blind instead of taking a couple sacks of quarters.

  Now we had to actually find them.

  Daniel and I took our nets and became fishers of boy-men: calling them over the phone, sitting with them at the same small table at the same crowded coffee shop on the corner of Chapel and College Streets, waving them down from the wide stone steps of Sterling Library. If a prospect was away, we sent him an email and offered a snippet of the Union’s mission, just enough to get him on the phone, then into the coffee shop when he was back in New Haven—somewhere close enough for the human element to have the greatest effect. We needed to see his eyes: Was he looking at us or at the floor; was he smiling or yawning; was he taking notes or checking his phone? We needed to mold the message to his untold needs, though it was the same always, as the Message has always been: follow me.

  That most people do not want to lead, we knew. That most who want to lead are not willing to work, we knew. That most who are willing to work cannot endure the suffering that work requires, we knew. What we did not know was how much of their energy and our time people would waste lying about this: that a steady drip of Let me think about its and I’ll get back to yous and I’m not sures would prove that no is one of the hardest words in the English language to say—this, especially, we did not know. We learned, that summer.

  And so the cause depended on the few too blind to have any doubt—me and Daniel—and our friends. Perhaps it has always been this way. Those friends, to be clear, do not commit themselves to the cause. They commit themselves to you. If you are lucky, one of them may be a true believer, a zealot. May be an Elijah. But you’ll have to work for it.

  When I asked Elijah to join the Union, asked him to create and lead its mentoring program, he said no. Many times. Got other things to do, Case. It wasn’t because he was afraid to lead or work or suffer. No, he was one who had known suffering, though it’s not your business to know it all and not my place to tell it all.

  I will say that of all the recruits I hosted in my four years, who visited Yale reluctant to ever come back, Elijah was the most serious. I remember how young he seemed—must have been seventeen then—how he kept close to a boy from Fort Lauderdale, Trevor, who looked to me like some members of the University of Miami football team, with the dreadlocks and strange dance moves, which I saw because I took him and Elijah to a party. Though I missed the recruits’ formal dinner, I heard, years later, that at that dinner Elijah’s guardian had told Penny If you all cannot give Elijah everything he needs, please tell us. He can’t be let down again. She had been assured, gave her blessing to the journey, and he came.

  I was in touch with Elijah over the summer before he arrived—the language of our messages from that time is so foreign to me now that I wonder where we hid those boys we were back then. And when he showed up in the fall, I watched over him (to the extent that a nineteen-year-old can watch over anybody) as I watched over my other recruits who matriculated, especially those, like Elijah and Trevor, who played my position and were, because of the norms of the sport and whatever ideas I had about being my brother’s keeper, in my care. That is why, when Trevor showed up to the first day of football camp with fake gold teeth in his mouth, stood there in broad daylight in the Vanderbilt College cou
rtyard with fake gold teeth in his mouth, surrounded by a horde of prep school boys oohing and aahing at the fake gold teeth in his mouth, I walked over and stood next to him as if I was just taking in the view of whatever he was looking at and said, almost without moving my lips, Nigga, if you don’t take those damn golds out your mouth. He waited until I walked away to curse me (and take the golds out), waited until I was about to graduate to admit how much he had hated me, how hard I had been on him, and waited until Elijah was gone and we were grown men to say that he loved me like a big brother. While we still have time, let the siblings, real and imagined, find a way to speak to one another.

  In the time that I’d been watching Elijah, as we became friends, I saw—or came to believe—that he was a bit like a stray cat who, sensing you near, freezes, back arched, kitten-roar ready. Don’t come any closer. But if you just stand there and watch him, and don’t make any sudden moves, the roar will become a purr, the back will relax. After a few days or months, you may find the cat on your porch every morning, roaring at the mailman. In this way, I suppose, I became a part of everything he needs because Elijah saw this same trait in me. Besides, there were few other places to turn. So I stood there, nice and easy, and did not get angry when he said no, like I often did. Just kept on asking and, in time, he joined.

  It did not matter, or at least was not discussed, that Elijah wasn’t even black. His parents, or their parents, or some other of his kin had come to America from Mexico before Elijah was born. While I have since learned that there are also black Mexicans, Elijah’s people were not among them as far as I know. They could have come from Pluto for all I cared—not that I was color-blind, I just felt that I had more in common with Elijah than almost anyone who would more obviously be part of the Union.

  By August 2007, we had a loose collection of eager boys, about a dozen, mostly athletes, and a name and good intentions. But if the Union was going to be an institution, it needed real structure, an official leader. And so, as it was with that first inauguration, we went to New York City to decide.