There Will Be No Miracles Here

by Casey Gerald

  Professor Amar was a small man. Reminded you a bit of Gandhi, if Gandhi had long black hair, wore blue blazers, and was an expert on the US constitution instead of nonviolent resistance. But much like Gandhi, much like nearly everyone on the campus and in the country on the morning of November 5, Akhil Amar displayed a surplus of intensity, of energy, of hope, in his face and in his hands—which kept clutching the long black locks and covering his mouth—and in his voice, which went from silent to whisper to tremble to shout as he explained what we had just witnessed.

  If my class notes can be trusted, the 2008 election was the fifth turning point in presidential history. The first came alongside Jefferson in 1800, when the Federalist Party was swept away; the second in 1860, when Lincoln, with only 40 percent of the popular vote, brought Republicans to power and the country to civil war; the third in 1932, when what was left of Mr. Lincoln’s Republican regime was undermined by its response to the Great Depression and overthrown by Franklin D. Roosevelt; and the fourth in 1968, which was a turning point in large part because the office of the presidency, and the country itself, seemed to be on the verge of collapse.

  Our situation today is not as bad as the Great Depression or the Alien and Sedition Acts, Professor Amar clarified, but it is quite serious.

  And so, he explained, what we had witnessed and ordained was not just the election of one man, however historic, but the ushering in of a moment that would decide the future of the country—a future that was bright because of the epic turnout this man had generated (probably the greatest percentage in history, with more people motivated by hope than by fear), and the technology this man employed (the internet has finally been married to political action), and the generation this man had inspired (pivot points are often generational elections, and yours will be around for a long time), and the new coalition this man created (like Lincoln, Obama has brought the Midwest into his party’s fold).

  It was hard to resist the euphoria of that morning, as it had been the night before, when thousands of students gathered on the Old Campus like they hadn’t since perhaps May Day 1970, this time not to protest but to hug and cry and toast each other with beers, and to sing for hours all those patriotic songs we sang in elementary school before patriotism went out of style. It was hard to turn away from that scene on the television, the mass of bodies packed into Grant Park—middle-aged white men crying, hundred-year-old black women crying, children crying, Oprah Winfrey crying; some in the crowd unable to speak, able only to stand there in the chilly Chicago night and lean on the shoulder of the stranger beside them and look up at the stage, waiting, waiting for him, for the history that they had helped to make, waiting to see the handsome man who walked out on stage with that broad smile of his, and stood before his people, and spoke to them and to the world:

  It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

  It was hard to resist this message, this man. But it was not impossible. I watched the Grant Park spectacular on television. I listened to the singing outside. I had enough sense and joy to write in my notebook the night of November 4:

  BARACK OBAMA

  President of the USA

  WOW

  But I did not go to the Old Campus or shed any tears. And though I did not get much sleep, that had little to do with the election. You could say that I resisted for much the same reason Gore Vidal said Every time a friend succeeds, a piece of me dies.

  Now imagine what happens when it is not a friend but a stranger, and he has not simply succeeded, has not only been chosen to be the most important person on earth, but he has also become the most powerful black person in the history of the human race (depending on where you slot the Egyptians). I voted for the man, I was excited by his election, I grew, in time, to care somewhat deeply for him and to respect him even more. My initial feeling, though, aside from skepticism, was that he had become, just as my father had once been, a considerable inconvenience.

  For on the morning of November 5, the Dallas Morning News, like every other paper in America, put the new president on its front cover. Headline: It’s History. It was, of course. This would have been all well and good if the story had not overshadowed, for all time, another story on the front page of the sports section of that morning’s paper: mine.

  * * *

  —

  When he left South Oak Cliff for Yale in the fall of 2005, Casey Gerald took with him a valedictorian’s standing, a thick coat, his father’s genes and the expectations of a community.

  An interesting lede, no doubt, since I had taken a relatively thin coat and also had my mother’s genes when I left. But the reporter was doing his thing and went on to recount how those expectations—from some, that I would fail; from others, that I would do something special for us all—had nearly overwhelmed me.

  But Casey couldn’t quit, he wrote.

  It is fitting, looking back at that Wednesday paper, that Mr. Obama and I were both there, as stories like ours have been so masterfully employed, by us and others, to show that there is never an excuse for anything—for crime, for failure, for sadness, etc. etc. Here was a flawless new president from god knows where, and here was a magical boy from Oak Cliff, Texas.

  Casey Gerald didn’t drop out, he didn’t transfer, he didn’t come home. He’s started three seasons at cornerback for Yale. He’ll graduate in May with a 3.69 grade point average and a degree in political science. A Rhodes Scholar semifinalist, he’s been accepted into Harvard’s business school. Last week, he found out that . . . he’s one of 15 finalists for the Draddy Trophy, presented by the National Football Foundation to college football’s top scholar athletes.

  None of this was a lie. The whole truth would have been helpful, though, if I had told it then.

  I had been accepted to Harvard Business School, which, seeing as I knew nothing about business schools when I went to college, was not entirely my idea. And in the years since 2008, I’ve told so many stories about my motives for applying that I have a hard time seeing through my own propaganda. But I am almost sure it happened this way:

  Once I decided that I wanted to be an investment banker, I joined one of the many programs that exist to prepare young black and brown boys and girls—underrepresented minorities, they call us—for successful corporate careers. I am not being snarky when I say that the main thrust of these programs is to rid us of any trace of our natural personality. Imagine some combination of Pygmalion and A Clockwork Orange: boys chastised for wearing the wrong color shirt, forced to cut their braids or afros; girls advised to buy a different shade of lipstick, told to raise their hands at a particular angle, erect. All trained like white-collar circus elephants: format your résumés the same way, use this utensil at that time, mention this topic at the water cooler, sell that ambition in your interview, show the right perspective on whatever hardship you’ve endured: I’m very thankful, it made me resilient. For all my cowardice and complicity, I take some pride in the fact that, though I joined these programs, I was always on the brink of expulsion.

  I believe it was someone in such a program who told me about Harvard Business School—that business school was a great place to go, not just to learn about business, but to create options for my future; that, of all the business schools, Harvard’s was the best. I liked options as much as anybody, and had gone to Yale because everyone said it was the best college to attend and that had worked out fine. So when I arrived at Lehman Brothers and was taken to lunch by a Yale alum who had also gone to Harvard Business School, I listened when she suggested that I consider applying myself, through a special application made just for college juniors. I studied a few hours for the entrance exam, wrote my essays while I was at work and asked Penny to review them—which she not only did but went so far as to send them to a friend for further feedback. This friend, I later discovered, was the top busin
ess school admissions consultant in the world. So, not long after I gave my Invisible Man speech to the Union, I was accepted to the Harvard Business School, thanks, in part, to Penny’s tireless, invisible work on my behalf.

  But in this new era, it was not enough to attend Harvard Business School, which is why it mattered that the News mentioned that I was also a semifinalist for the Rhodes Scholarship.

  This had not been my idea, either, but that of the one person perhaps most responsible for the peace that held on May Day 1970: Kurt Schmoke. Mr. Schmoke was a junior on that day, a varsity athlete, a serious scholar, a community leader—and because of these facts and his soothing personality, he was the only student allowed to speak at the official May Day rally, right before Kingman Brewster.

  There are a great number of students on campus who are confused and many who are frightened. They don’t know what to think. You are our teachers. You are the people we respect. We look to you for guidance and moral leadership. On behalf of my fellow students, I beg you to give it to us.

  That mind and mouth earned Mr. Schmoke a Rhodes Scholarship, got him into Harvard Law School, got him elected as the first black mayor of Baltimore, got him a seat on the Yale Corporation, and got him invited to the lunch where I met him, my junior year. He and I and Noah Lockhart had been brought, by Penny, to a closed dining hall, to convince a seventeen-year-old to choose Yale over Harvard.

  This wasn’t just any seventeen-year-old, I was told. He was the son of the most powerful black executive in America (this was before the Obama situation). Noah was there because of his connection to Harvard and, since he was from Baltimore, to Mr. Schmoke. Mr. Schmoke was there because the seventeen-year-old’s father was a longtime friend, from their days together at Harvard Law School. And I was there because Penny had asked me to come, and for the food, and because Kurt Schmoke was something of a legend.

  At some point during the conversation, he turned to me: If you haven’t considered Rhodes, you should.

  Six months or so before this lunch, I would not have known what he meant. But I had been watching and listening, and had learned some of the shorthand of this world—The Hill, The Street, The College, The City, The Acela; that any number, if it referred to compensation, stood for thousands, so that 150 or 60 meant $150,000 or $60,000, not, as had long been the case, 150 or 60—so I knew what Mr. Schmoke meant when he said Rhodes. I knew, for sure, that the Rhodes had very little to do, at least explicitly, with the aspirations of its namesake, Cecil Rhodes: to form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.

  No, the Rhodes, as the most prestigious postgraduate fellowship in the world, was the premier means to separate college wheat from chaff; this is why it mattered so much more than Harvard or Yale alone. Of nearly 20,000 applicants to the Yale College class of 2009, 9.7 percent were accepted. Of nearly 9,000 applicants to the Harvard Business School class of 2014, 13 percent were accepted. By the time you have made it through three years at Yale, these percentages seem depressingly high—after all, there are years when it seems that no one who applies to Harvard Law School is turned away.

  And now we had to deal with this new, pure man who had won the most selective fellowship of all: the presidency. There were thirty-four candidates who ran in 2008 under a major party banner and thirty-seven more who appeared on a ballot in at least one state (including Santa Claus, who was a write-in candidate in West Virginia), which meant that the White House had admitted roughly 1.4 percent of people who sought to occupy it. With more than eight hundred American applicants and only thirty-two scholars chosen, the Rhodes was not the narrowest gate, but it was close at 3.7 percent. Those eight hundred, by the way, represented a smaller cohort than the thousands who had been seeking the Rhodes for the past year—they had already been screened and selected by committees at the nation’s universities, officially endorsed by a college president or equal, and sent for near-last judgment to sixteen regional committees across the country. These eight hundred were the semifinalists.

  Some of those eight hundred boys and girls had been dreaming of the Rhodes since secondary school. Many had pasted Rhodes on goal boards in their freshman dorms or, less openly, taken careful steps from their first days on campus, steps that would make them strong candidates. All had spent the past year, at least since fall, securing the best recommenders (past Rhodes Scholars, governors, senators, Nobel laureates, perhaps a beneficiary of foreign aid)—eight letters in total. They had crammed every noble and harrowing detail about their lives into a two-thousand-word personal statement, crafting that statement for months, months during which every course taken needed to produce an A, A– at worst, months during which they worked incredibly hard yet told very few about the work because, as one of the eight hundred, the Rhodes would likely be the first time they attempted something they had a decent chance of failing at.

  I was late to the Rhodes train but found no obvious reason why I should not apply, so I hopped on anyhow. And the day after the News reported that I was among the eight hundred, I received word that I had advanced to the final round—that I was one of another twelve, boys and girls from Texas and Oklahoma (district VIII). Two would be chosen on November 22 at the end of a two-day interview process, and would join pairs from fifteen other districts, marching two-by-two up into the ark of excellence where thirty-two would live forever.

  But that was not all I would have to do to be chosen. I would also have to betray my teammates.

  Casey, that is the day of the Harvard game so what happens do you miss it or what??

  Penny sent this short panicked question via email on the night of November 6, just after hearing the good news. The Rhodes interview was November 21 and 22, in Houston. The Game was November 22, in Boston. I could not do both.

  By the morning of November 7, this choice became the greatest non-spiritual dilemma of my first twenty-one years. It became one of the few pieces of evidence that there was still some good in my heart at that time. And it became the best parable I have to share with anyone who wonders why this bitter earth turns just as it does.

  * * *

  —

  As the News reported, I was in my third year as a starter and had not missed a game. I was a member of the most successful class in a generation, a championship team born out of a coup that we led as eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys—boys who had played through broken bones for each other, who had been there for each other when that was about all any of us had on campus. Then there was Tony Reno, who had become the closest thing to a father that I had in my adult life. When I woke up from surgery with those pins in my hand, Coach Reno was the one at the hospital to pick me up, the one who pulled off to the side of the road when I needed to vomit from the anesthesia, who drove me to his home in Massachusetts, where his wife cooked a big pot of pasta and made sure I took my pain medication. In the rush to decry the silly and dangerous aspects of this sport, the critics miss a vital fact: these boys, these coaches, are often not just brutes in tights and screaming maniacs, but family—and family does not come easy in America. Or anywhere else, I imagine. So I wanted to play in The Game with my brothers, for the last time.

  But I also wanted, though much less, to win the Rhodes. I cannot say that I was eager to go to Oxford or to leave the country at all. Can’t say that there were many Rhodes Scholars, aside from William J. Clinton, whom I considered good role models. (Career role models, I mean.) I was fond of the idea that I would always be called a Rhodes Scholar, just like when you win a Super Bowl or an Academy Award and you’re forever introduced as Super Bowl champion Yada Yada or Academy Award winner Whoopdee Whoo. I wanted, and suppose I still do, to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. But even if my hunger for praise was nearly as great as my hunger for revenge, that would not hav
e been enough to make me betray my teammates.

  The Rhodes was not simply a personal honor, though. That was the problem.

  If I am fortunate enough to be selected, it would not just be some personal accolade, I told USA Today at the time. Symbolically . . . it would be an opportunity for my life to serve as an example for those who don’t have a sense of hope to try and to dream for something like this.

  When I read this quote and remember that my high school coach told another reporter that there would be a ticker tape parade through the streets of Oak Cliff if I won the Rhodes, I realize that there was yet another reason the News put me and Mr. Obama in that same November 5 edition—the same reason Nelson Mandela, who had a decent amount of credibility on the matter, said to the new president: Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world.

  And the same reason it has been said that the presidency is the loneliest job on the planet.

  I’ve never been president, so don’t know for sure, but I bet it has less to do with the particulars of the job and a lot more to do with the fact that any president, especially that president, is not just a person but a symbol—and symbol is truly the world’s loneliest job.

  You arrive, by force, as a baby and become a little boy or girl and without much thought, because children don’t think about these things, you do something that leads somebody—your mother, your teacher, the lady who runs the candy house—to say That kid is special. You pick up, along the way, some honest basic virtues: you get a little angry when something seems unfair; you get a little sad when a dog dies or a friend falls off his bike; you get a little excited when somebody gives you a new task, a new challenge, and you work very hard to do it well, to please them and to see what you can do. If you, like me, are indoctrinated into a religion, you take the religion at its word, enough to adopt some of its mandates as the mandates of your life: feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, help somebody. This goes on. Perhaps some tragedy befalls you and you wind up wandering around, meeting lots of strangers. You come to depend on their kindness. You come to like them more than many people you already know. At some point, a stranger shows up from another world and finds you, minding your business being special and all, and they say Why don’t you come with me? And you will go, for the same reasons I have mentioned re: journeys, and you will also go because your people want you to go—for you and for them. So you go. You go off to the new world and realize pretty soon—or you feel and don’t realize until many years later—that you are in limbo: you can never fully be a part of this new world, but you can’t go back to the old world, to your people, because you are now, for them, a symbol of what they can be. If you go back that defeats the whole purpose. So you stay. You accept this calling and you try to live up to it. You try to earn the respect of the new world, play by its rules. You try to do some good for the old world, for your people. You may very well do both. But along the way you notice—just like a pebble in your shoe—that though you have won the race, many races, you have lost the people, your people, because you are not a person anymore, but a symbol. Therefore, you are an illusion. And you are a liar, if only by omission: you have learned so much on your journey that you can’t tell the people anything. If you told them what you’ve seen, how little of it makes any sense, how sad the whole thing is, my lord, a third of the people might revolt, a third might try to kill you, and another third might fall apart, instead of just you. Your silence holds the world together.