by Casey Gerald
Six or so of us convened in the dim living room of a bulky brick high-rise at the northern edge of Manhattan, might as well go ahead and call it the Bronx. Through the tall windows we could look out at the tops of dark huddled trees and, beyond, at the skyline of the city, lit up then as it always is, to remind us all of what great things the human race can accomplish. I didn’t have any interest in looking at any trees or skyscrapers—I was watching the people in the room, which is what you better be doing if you find yourself in a group where something you care about will be decided.
Nobody sat for the few hours we were there, except the host, AJ Hawkins—a small boy, a man in fact (with glasses that gave him the look of a shorter, milk-dud Malcolm X), one of the few upperclassmen I had admired freshman year, not least because it was from him that I first heard the word diaspora.
Blackness is global, man, he told me, in a voice that made me believe that he had searched all over the planet to see where blackness was and had returned to tell me all about it—which he did, in the pages of a magazine he founded at Yale. And unlike many of his peers who said words like diaspora, AJ didn’t make a big fuss about it, didn’t walk around in dashikis or change his name or nothing, just wore slim black jeans and spoke softly and laughed like he had found some real joy, calm joy. Here he was—here we were, in his apartment—and as the elder, AJ would break any tie or override any bad decision in his gentle holy way.
Riley Edwards was there and didn’t sit, either. Riley was a freshman, a running back whom I had hosted on his visit to Yale—which had not been too far of a journey for him because he was from Mount Vernon, New York, and also because he already attended one of the best high schools in the country. I bet he did not sit for much the same reason he went on to Yale Divinity School and, soon after, launched a decent rap career. He was not yet a preacher or a rapper at that time, but the boy is always father to the man and so he stood and walked around and moved his hands a lot, and because of or despite all this, his classmates listened to what he said—which meant that we, in this room, had to listen.
There were a few others there, a black Greek chorus, not carrying much weight but offering a minor point or question, willing, in the end, to go whichever way the other boys went.
And then there was Daniel.
In our two years at Yale, Daniel had fashioned himself into the closest thing we had to a black and shining prince. He had the build for it and the bona fides (he was an Omega and also from the same town as the Jackson 5) and the brains: he knew the histories of the programs that had come before us, and many of the people, too. He introduced me to Ella Baker (or tried) and to Paul Robeson, who was his idol. Daniel took to the task of becoming Paul Robeson the way some boys I grew up with tried to be like Mike, but with much more success. He played on the varsity football team, of course. He was a star in the black theater ensemble, especially whenever the role called for Tired Respectable Pre–Civil Rights Negro Father. He tutored children in Bridgeport, you remember. He knew how to navigate the archives at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library before many of us knew they existed. When the idea of the Union first took shape, it was natural for Daniel to be at the helm. He knew this. Everybody else knew it. And though I knew it, too, that did not change the fact that I wanted desperately to be in charge.
I’m going to keep dragging my name through the mud, don’t you worry, but I will say that this one desire of mine was not sinister, even if part of it was due to my fear of being subject to anybody’s authority. I had come up with (or stolen) most of the ideas that had shaped the Union so far, had worked hard throughout the summer, even as I sabotaged my relationship with River by night, even harder than Daniel Blake himself—and despite the fact that I could be a mean petty queen under all the football pads, I had great respect for Mr. Blake and never stepped on his toes. Besides, he already had so much . . . Couldn’t I have this little thing that wasn’t even a thing yet and would not be a thing unless the leader, unless we, made it so? I could not make that case, though. So I stood and watched and waited.
At some point, Riley—pacing the floor, stabbing the air with his hands like he was fighting some invisible monster—spoke up.
Yo . . . so you’re gonna be president of this thing, right?
He was talking to Daniel.
Daniel leaned against the white wall with his long thick-knuckled fingers pressed to the side of his chin. Everyone turned to him like he was the goddamn Queen of Sheba. AJ floated into the living room without notice, before Daniel could respond.
Hey . . . what do you guys think about co-presidents?
He could not have known, poor holy fool, that asking football players what they thought of co-leaders was akin to asking the College of Cardinals whether it made sense to have two popes for a while. We all knew there could be only one, despite the trend at Yale and other colleges to have enough leaders to satisfy everybody’s parents and destroy all hope that anything would ever be accomplished.
The room had gone for Daniel, which meant that I would go for Daniel—I have always believed that groups must choose their leaders and that naked grasps for power make folks look bad. But still, I kept my mouth shut, because there is one other thing you must try to do in a group meeting: speak last. Daniel had not yet responded.
You know . . . Daniel let the words ooze out, stretched those giant hands, I actually think it should be Casey.
Really? Riley, knife tip at my back.
I mean . . . Casey pushed us not to do that Men of Color Council bullshit in the first place. I think he’s the best one to lead this.
That was enough.
Daniel must have known that you can trace most revolutions, even small ones, to a group that includes at least one boy or girl with a vengeful heart and an open mind. Must have known I was that boy. If he had not seen what I was willing to endure to play against Harvard, if he had not read my we should be America line, if he had not listened to my rants throughout the summer as we birthed the Union, then he would not have taken his power and put it in my hands. But he had and he did, though I did not know exactly what to do with it. No matter.
i made it up
here on this bridge between starshine and clay
I had no idols. I was not an intellectual. I was not an activist. History did not interest me much, hell it was hard enough to understand what was happening day to day. All I knew for sure was that I didn’t know much of nothing. So I watched people. I listened to them, actually listened to understand, listened to what they said and tried to hear what they did not say, too. I was willing to consider almost any notion as long as there was no obvious reason why I should not. (My obvious reasons: gut instinct, superstitions, prior experience, sometimes the law.) And I never forgot a thing because I wrote it all down.
You got to, Casey—you got to write it.
Dr. Edward Joyner speaking: a man who looked and sounded like the perfect person to have been Jesse Jackson’s press secretary, with the low afro and stadium-announcer voice and the proverbs and the need to touch everybody he met, to tell them something they’d remember. I reread Doc’s words more than any others, though I also am reminded of something my daddy used to say when I was a little boy and he was still telling me stuff: Opinions are like assholes, Scooter. Everybody’s got one and they all stink.
It wasn’t until I met with most of Yale’s black faculty, hoping to learn from them how to lead the Union, that I realized just how wise my daddy had been. It is also clear that father and son share a tendency to say things that are more extreme than the truth will allow, since some of the opinions I heard were helpful, especially Dr. Joyner’s.
Aside from taking me and Daniel for a meal every now and then (he was the only elder to ever feed us; didn’t these rich black people know we were hungry?) and buying me a suit for graduation without me even telling him I needed one, Dr. Joyner also gave me the most important advice that I d
id not listen to: Fellas—sitting across from me and Daniel in Mama Mary’s, his favorite diner, he unfolded a white napkin and started writing out a few principles—all this work you’re doing, all this work we got to do, is liberation work. Got to be about liberation. And he gave me the most dangerous advice, which I sopped up like gravy:
You fellas remember this. I tell my son all the time. I say, “Son, the best revenge is excellence.”
I had not told Doc how I hungered for revenge, revenge against so many people for so many reasons that I might even have wanted revenge against myself—the hunger was that unfocused. He must have seen it in my eyes or hands or something. Whatever it was, I took that as an endorsement, a green light, a voice that had cried out in the wilderness for years and years for me, and now was at hand. So I led the Union, led these boys who were the Union, the most excellent way I knew how: far and without mercy.
Exhibit A: my dear friend Quincy Strickland, the Union’s first secretary—well, the second, since the first was fired after two or three weeks. Boy thought he was going to sit up on his phone in our meetings, which apparently was what he did in architecture studio, too, since he was (at least I was told) the best student in the program. Uh-uh. Anyway, Quincy was a year behind me, a wiry high-yellow boy from Tulsa, where his family had been during the 1921 race riot led by a white mob that destroyed Negro Wall Street, in the Greenwood section, then the wealthiest black community in America. Judging from his skin and cheekbones, which were just like his mother’s, I figure some of his family had been in Oklahoma long before this.
Quincy and I became close, perhaps because we were both from that part of the country where every individual can choose to be either from the South or from the West, perhaps because not many other boys at Yale had the same sneakers he wore, perhaps because nobody else called him nigga. It could have also been because, winter break of his freshman year, I had a car and he needed a ride back to Oklahoma.
We hit the road minutes after he submitted his organic chemistry exam and just as a snowstorm slammed New England. Sometime after making it past New York but definitely before we were west of Scranton, Quincy announced that he either had an empty stomach or a full bladder. He asked to stop.
I only stop when the gas tank is empty, Quincy. That’s two more hours from now, so you’re just gonna have to wait.
What?!? Casey. What the fuck?
We gotta keep moving, man.
Nigga. You better stop this damn car.
I kept driving. Turned up the music.
He handled his bladder or belly business when we stopped for gas. We got back on the road without much more delay, driving through the night across Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana, arcing down through all that land I never wanted to see again, down through Saint Louis and the rest of Missouri, stopping only when we were right at fumes. It’s nearly twenty-two hours from New Haven to Tulsa, and by the ten-hour mark Quincy had either accepted his fate, grown delirious, or found some pride in his fortitude. He was in a good mood, behind the wheel. I reclined in the passenger seat to doze.
I woke up as we were passing through some unknown town, and spotted a fast food joint approaching on the service road. I had not eaten since we left New Haven.
Pull over at that Wendy’s, Quincy.
He signaled to switch lanes and slowed down as we neared the exit. Then at the last minute, he let out a wicked country laugh and slammed the accelerator.
Ha! Naw, bitch. We ain’t outta gas yet!
I was too impressed to be angry. He had come so far, so fast.
The next time I woke, it was morning. I was lying almost parallel to the floor of the car, and all I could see was the interior and the view outside the two passenger windows. I realized immediately that I was dead. The sky looked like it had smudged all the ash of the universe over its face, covering the clouds, blotting out the sun, blending in with the charred anorexic trees, which were dead, too, planted there on the banks of the Acheron. While I was sleeping (I told myself), Quincy had crashed the car and what I saw outside was hell. Perhaps you stay in hell forever just the way you died, or at least come in that way.
I looked over at Quincy, who was driving. Dead.
Where are we?
We’re almost in Tulsa. You wanna drive?
There had been a bad storm in Oklahoma before we rolled in, he said. It had massacred the landscape.
Nah, you can take us on in.
You should have seen that boy’s face when we walked into his mother’s house. Part of me wonders whether he was so happy to see her because he had worried through the night that he might never see her again.
Mama! Casey wouldn’t let us stop unless we needed gas. We didn’t even eat nothing! All that way. Crazy.
His mother looked genuinely horrified but she was so kind that she fixed a meal and let me have some, too.
Wow. Well I’m so glad you guys made it. Thank you for getting him home, Casey.
Glad to, ma’am.
And I was glad. Glad to get back on the road and head to Dallas to rest for a while, since it had been a long fall with the Union and with the 2007 Yale football campaign—the Bulldogs had been on track to have our first perfect season since 1960, to become the first ten-win Yale team since 1905, until we suffered such a shocking loss to Harvard (37–6) in front of 57,248 people in the Yale Bowl that I still have a hard time talking about it.
But more than this, I was glad to show Quincy just what was feasible when he threw out all prior notions of what was plausible. I wonder if our night ride helped him at all during his years in medical school—he became one of the top neurosurgery residents in the country, you know.
I tell you of that ride because an institution is only the shadow of human beings—in the beginning it is nothing but human beings—and my journey to Tulsa with Quincy is different only in form from the rest of my work with the Union in those early days, so that many of the men say to me, today, the same words I said to them again and again a decade ago: Always go above and beyond the call of duty. Be first. Be bold. Be perfect. Give your last full measure of devotion. Then give some more. They learned this commandment and kept it well. But it also seems that one of them snitched.
Not long after I returned to New Haven from winter break, Penny invited me to her office. I went gladly, no hat this time.
My dear. I’ve gotten some reports and I’m concerned. The boys . . . You’re just driving them too hard, Casey. Too hard.
I had my notebook but did not bother to open it. Just stared at Penny.
Now, listen, she continued. I understand. I can be like that sometimes. My way or the highway. Really, I can.
She flipped her hands over on her desk like she was playing patty-cake alone. Looked at them. Looked back up at me. Smiled.
You know what I’m saying?
Yes I get it . . . but what am I supposed to do?
Ha . . . I don’t know! Maybe, you know, try a little tenderness?
I assume that I laughed and agreed so the meeting could end. I know for sure that I didn’t take her advice. It’s not that I intended to be cruel, to drive them too hard. I just believed there should be someone in their corner always shouting and clapping for (or sometimes at) them, pushing them even when they did not want to be pushed—felt it my duty to be there and show them a way. I realize now, much too late, that my way was too hard, if only because I did not know a thing about tenderness and could only give what I had. No excuse, just a reason.
It did not help that my way seemed to work. I asked Riley many years later why any of them put up with me. Man, we all just wanted to be the greatest, he said. And they were. They truly were.
You should have seen them walking around campus in their ties, even the ones they had to borrow, meeting en masse in the nicest rooms on campus, in full view of skittish white students, learning Robert’s Rules of Order to ratify
the Union’s constitution, standing out in the cold to collect donations for the New Haven Children’s Hospital, raising their right hand to recite the Union’s pledge:
As a member of the Yale Black Men’s Union, I pledge to uphold the standards of the organization: unity, service, and support. I will commit myself to fostering a true bond with my brothers. I will commit myself to enhancing the lives of those beyond Yale’s campus through my service to the community. I will commit myself to providing a helping hand in my brother’s time of need and to accepting one in my own.
It was beautiful to see them live up to their commitments.
Even Noah Lockhart, a doctoral student who became my closest advisor, was proud. Organizations, he explained, especially black organizations—are like jazz. If you don’t know shit about jazz and you went down to New Orleans and saw a bum playing the trumpet on one corner and Louis Armstrong on another, you wouldn’t know the difference. Know what I’m saying? People don’t know shit, Casey, so they can’t tell serious organizations apart from unserious organizations. You have to be serious. You have to use every opportunity to show others you are serious. Don’t nobody wanna do that, man.
Noah had not wasted a single opportunity since he left Baltimore to enroll at Harvard, a journey that had been quite similar to mine from Dallas to Yale. In four years on the Charles River, he became the most quoted black person in the history of the Harvard Crimson and the most successful president of the Harvard Black Men’s Forum. Went on to Oxford for a masters, then to Yale for a doctorate (where I tracked him down), and the last time I saw him, one of the Rothschilds interrupted our meal to hug his neck and ask that he accept an offer to come back to Harvard as a professor. We sat in that dim restaurant and looked at each other with a nod and a smile—a nod and smile to all our ancestors, to let them know that we, the race, had produced this cold, cold boy from Baltimore. I didn’t need a Rothschild to tell me that, though. Knew it when I first sat with him in the Hall of Graduate Studies like it was his living room—him leisurely eating snacks, reclined in his seat with that smirk he always had on his face, telling me in a low voice but with no uncertainty that there were three principles I had to keep in mind if I was going to be a real leader: