by Casey Gerald
You learn this lesson so consistently, so painfully, that by the time you arrive at the end of your career, though you may be sad or ashamed, you are not angry after losing a game or anything else that you did not deserve to win, on account of your talent and effort and execution. You accept your fate because it’s the one that you earned. This is why I was not upset about the Rhodes.
Before I left Houston, before my interview even ended, I had a solid inkling of what the outcome might be. I was sitting at the head of a long conference table. Seven other judges sat on either side (one sat at the tail, a former senator). The ostrich briefcase judge sat to my left. He asked a question: Casey, what is the last book you read that didn’t have anything to do with race?
Now, there are two problems with this question.
The first might be obvious: The question is either strange, racist, or lazy. Or all three. It reminds me of a story Toni Morrison told about reading a passage in which Hemingway wrote: Two men walked toward me. One was Cuban, and one was black.
What?!? Toni asks, rhetorically and annoyed. They both could be Cuban. They both could be black.
Hemingway’s sloppy use of language revealed how little, if anything, he knew about race. And here, the judge’s question revealed how little, if anything, he knew about not only race, or me, but about books—otherwise he would have known that every book ever written, at least in this country, has something to do with race.
The second problem with the judge’s question is far more interesting. It reveals why the white supremacist mind—by that I only mean the mind that is conditioned to see a book that does not have white characters in it as an inferior book, a café with no white patrons in it as an inferior café, a school with no white children in it as an inferior school, a company with no white employees in it as an inferior company, etc. etc.—why this mind is at once and always a half-formed mind. Why its owner is, ultimately, doomed to miss many points, much of the truth, and a few great opportunities—like this one, when the whole story could have been about my problem, not his.
If the judge had only asked: Casey, what was the last book you read?
I would have given him the same answer: You know, I would say A Testament of Hope. It’s a collection of writings by Martin Luther King, and it’s really not about race per se—it’s about human rights, about all of us, the whole country.
But he would have been off the hook with me and you and all of history, because the truth was more damning than even the Klan’s Grand Wizard could have hoped: I had not read a book at all, at least in full, in all my time at Yale. Just had that copy of Invisible Man for a prop . . . found the quote I recited online.
In fact, the last book I know that I finished before this Rhodes interview was either Black Like Me or James and the Giant Peach, in Ms. Davis’s fifth-grade class, both of which I’d read because we had mandatory reading time each day.
Some teacher in middle school had told us to read Great Expectations, but you could not have paid me to do that. Or, rather, only paying could have convinced me.
After that, in the eleventh grade, I’m pretty sure I read some of Animal Farm—my friends and I loved shouting Manor Farm!!! in the hallway. I was going to read The Scarlet Letter, but we watched the movie, so there was no need for the book (I felt). The Bluest Eye was on the syllabus, but that little girl seemed so sad I just couldn’t get through the first bit. At the end of junior year, I passed some special national English test just fine.
Then there was senior year, when I thought I had read enough Joseph Conrad to talk about it in public. But recently I realized that my favorite line, We’re all savages, more or less, was not in Heart of Darkness, as I’d thought, but in Pygmalion. So now I have to wonder whether I opened the books or just read the CliffsNotes. At the end of senior year, I passed another national English test and got into Yale.
Once at Yale, I quickly realized that I could either read the assigned books and flunk out, or read just enough to get the point and do my work. I am not even talking about reading for pleasure. Who had time to do extra reading? Or time for pleasure, for that matter. Besides, even though I enjoyed some snippets that I read, nothing in any of those books—at eleven, or sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one—seemed to have anything inside that I needed to get through life. My days were filled with surviving, then doing, then supplemented with listening and watching and, when feasible, a little sneaking away. And all this took a great deal of time and energy, taught me more than I could have asked for. I would be nearly twenty-three years old before I discovered, after exhausting my other methods, that books held many keys to my kingdom and, in time, my life. But as of November 22, they were little more than expensive burdens that I had to acquire each semester.
So the judge missed one of the more unbelievable facts he could have learned that day. He still had enough to deem me unworthy of the Rhodes. I did not disagree.
But it seemed that I had reached that stratum of American life where, even when I lost, regardless of why I lost, people treated me like I won. Instead of introducing me as a Rhodes Scholar, they introduced me as a Rhodes Scholar Finalist. Thanks to the then-president of Yale, I learned that this was just as well.
Dear Casey,
I know that it must be a deep disappointment to lose both The Game and the Rhodes on the same day. But just think about it: it is an amazing accomplishment to be both playing in The Game and interviewing for the Rhodes on the same weekend!! And I want to assure you that it is no disgrace being a losing Rhodes finalist. I was one myself, in a cohort of losing finalists that included, among others, Dick Brodhead (former dean of Yale College, now president of Duke), Jeff Garten (former dean of the Yale School of Management), Dan Yergin (Pulitzer Prize winning author and the world’s leading expert on the energy industries), and Michael Mandelbaum (one of the nation’s leading foreign policy scholars).
You have a brilliant future ahead of you.
With admiration,
Rick Levin
I suppose I did have a bright future in front of me, at least for another month. There was still, as the News reported on November 5, the Draddy Trophy. After the Rhodes/Game saga, the National Football Foundation decided that I should speak on behalf of the fifteen boys who had been chosen as the best student-athletes in American football, at the College Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
That early December night at the Waldorf Astoria—a hotel that was a lot crappier than I had expected, based on the hoopla—many of my heroes, or folks I had long histories with, sat before me. Tom Beckett had flown Granny and Clarice and Tashia up from Texas. Coach Reno was there. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys was there. Archie Griffith, who played with my daddy at Ohio State and who remains the only person to win the Heisman Trophy twice, was there. My favorite Yale football captain—one of my closest college friends, a Jewish All-American defensive lineman whom Clarice forced to pray—was there. He came to the hotel early to help me practice my speech, which I had finished on the train down from New Haven, inspired by Lincoln’s train ride to deliver the Gettysburg Address. If I had read Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg before then, I would have known that Mr. Lincoln did not, in fact, write his speech on the train. But even without reading, I knew that Lincoln had (purportedly) looked to Pericles’s funeral oration as a model, so I tried my best to rip off Pericles and Lincoln in these last words that I would speak about the game of football, for many years. Spoke of dreams, and sacrifice, triumph, peril, the whole lot, all in less than three minutes.
So, I closed, while I cannot do justice to the honor it has been to be a man of Yale football, to play this great game that has given me a chance to rise above any obstacles and dare to be somebody, or to speak in the presence of this august body, I say on behalf of the fourteen other phenomenal men behind me: thank you and God bless.
And boy, it sure did seem that God had blessed us all. Blessed the people in t
hat Waldorf Astoria ballroom with money and awards. Blessed me, as He blessed His own Son, to walk the earth as a self-same god: Jesus, the lord of light . . . me, the lord of darkness. Both of us to be reviled. One for good reason, and soon.
chapter NINETEEN
Osiris.
That’s what they called me. God of the dead and lord of the underworld. Fitting, since I spent so much time in a tomb.
Its proper name was the Hall—not all the secret societies at Yale built or borrowed tombs in which to live. Of the seven oldest, the landed societies, two took a different approach: Elihu owned a house with a white picket fence across from the New Haven Green, and Wolf’s Head hid itself on York Street, behind that stay-out stone wall with its ivy rash, inside a castle-like compound, shingled and copper-trimmed, with iron bars over most of its narrow windows and a dungeon basement where, some nights, you could hear the seniors howl. At least I could hear them, because I was inside.
I had been inside on the night of initiation, junior spring, though I can’t tell you what I saw—there is a reason to keep some of this stuff secret, mainly the same reason we want (I want) little kids to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa for as long as possible. I don’t know when we got so hostile to the idea of magic, you know? So since there will be sixteen juniors initiated this year who will see what I saw that night, and sixteen the next and the next, on up to the end of the society, I will leave it to them to see it and tell it if they want.
I had also been inside throughout the summer, once my time at Lehman Brothers ended. I slept there, in the basement, until I had that dream I told you about, after which I stayed awake nights there until the dorms opened in the fall. Then, just like members of every other Yale society, I spent my Thursday nights and Sunday nights there, and many days and nights besides. Wrote my senior essay there. Got drunk there. Saw a mummy there. Told my life story for the first time there—it took about seven hours to tell it, the same amount of time it took to learn that you can tell people a lot of stuff without telling them much of anything. I still don’t understand why the societies make twenty-one-year-old boys and girls tell their personal histories to each other. Nobody at that age knows hardly anything about their lives, and all of them are going to lie about much of what they do know, anyway. Maybe that was just me.
I say all this to say that I spent a hell of a lot of time at the Hall my senior year—so much time that I must have lost touch with my responsibilities, since I was the last or nearly last person to know that the Black Men’s Union was about to collapse. I assume nobody told me because they could not find me, locked away in my tomb. It’s also possible they just wanted to wait until they were sure.
Whatever the case, a week or two after I gave that speech at the Waldorf, the two most important people in the Union were at war with one another. It was much like the conflict that broke out between Jefferson and Hamilton in the later stage of Washington’s administration. You read some of that back-and-forth and you’d think the country was founded by a bunch of queens. Probably would have been a better country, if it had. In any event, the Union was facing a Jefferson-Hamilton-style conflict, and one of the other reasons I was the last to know, I bet, was that instead of states’ rights and the national bank, the Union’s founding fathers were fighting over what every other boy in college seemed to fight over: on the surface, a woman; at the root, pride and honor. So they might have told me last because despite all my meddling in their lives, I had never asked a thing about their romantic situations. Nor did they ask about mine, to my face.
I won’t get into the sordid details because it’s not even about that. Not about what Daniel did or did not do, not about how Elijah should or should not have responded to what Daniel did or did not do. The central question—which I’d really like your help in answering—is this: What matters most, your cause or your friend?
I did not realize that was the question at first.
From what I have on record, around mid-December, the only question on my mind was: Why can’t they leave me out of it? That’s what I asked the rest of the board and our friends, though I did not ask Elijah or Daniel because I had no interest in talking to either of them about it. In addition to enjoying time down in my tomb, I also liked to stay above the fray. Could have stayed there, too, if it had not been for Elijah, who’d become like a little brother, the one who has done everything right—who is, in many ways, you but better, with a cleaner heart and a righter spirit. It was this heart and this spirit that made Elijah so committed to the kids we mentored, to the rest of us on the football team, to everyone he did not have a vendetta against. It was also this heart and this spirit that made him see most personal interactions as life-and-death, which explains why, by the time I was informed of the matter, he was a few thoughts away from kicking Daniel’s ass. So I had to, finally, intervene.
Now, ever since I had to find a way around believing the Bible word for word, around 1999, I have never believed 100 percent of any story anyone has ever told me. So all I knew after talking to Daniel and Elijah separately was that this situation was much worse than I’d imagined. The one wanted justice. The other wanted . . . I’m still not sure.
And it was no longer a personal feud. Many members of the Union, fifty strong by then, began to fear that if these two elders could come to such a bitter pass, then the Union itself was doomed. Many men and women across the campus, aside from soaking up the scandal of it all, shook their heads at such an early demise of such a hopeful institution. The house was divided and could not stand.
I read somewhere, years later, that the slow questioning of alternatives before decision is the inner quality of leadership. If that is true, then I spent six weeks—fall exam period, winter break in Dallas, most of January—leading, which also resembled kicking a giant can down the road. By the third week of the new year—right after Dr. King’s birthday and Mr. Obama’s inauguration, no less—things had only deteriorated. It was time to decide. And since this was the twenty-first century, I did not even have to look anyone in the face when I decided. I simply sent an email. The gist of my message: Get over it or you’re fired. It was much gentler than that, actually. I said they would be asked to resign, if that makes any difference.
Daniel responded the following morning, in a way only he could:
I agree that Elijah and I should talk . . . Should that not happen for whatever reason, I will not be forced into a hasty, and what I deem wholly unjust, decision to resign.
Elijah responded the next day:
I know the mentoring program will not work in the current state if the Union asked me not to be a part of it. Those kids, my kids, listen to me in a way that they will not even do for their parents. I have worked tirelessly on building those relationships so they can trust that I will be there for them. I have never violated that trust. It would then not be in the best interest of the Union to carry on that initiative without me—with those kids without me.
Before either could have a second thought, I declared victory for the Union and wrote to all, three minutes after Elijah’s email:
Men,
Elijah and Daniel have agreed to continue doing their jobs. I am disappointed that this situation happened and hope we have all learned something from it. We must immediately get back on track.
Casey
We did just that. Elijah grew the mentoring program, gave even more to the kids, implored all Union men to give more, too. Daniel helped prepare the Union for our departure in May, when Riley would become the new president. The only thing I learned was summed up in Penny’s message to me: You did EXACTLY the right thing she wrote when I shared my message to the Union with her. Some believe that everything a god does is just. But since I ruled in darkness, there was much I did not see.
I did not see the part of Elijah’s email that read:
I am forever in debt to those of you who value our relationships outside of this great organization w
hich we have all worked diligently to build and protect. Respect, honesty, loyalty, trust, and sacrifice are things that I will continue to display to you all in our continued friendships.
If I did see it, I did not understand what it meant. Otherwise I might have understood why Elijah stopped speaking to me. He never slacked from his work, never let those kids down. But for the rest of my time at Yale it was as if he had let a river run between us and walked away from the other side.
Or did he stand there, waiting to see if I would swim across?
I ask because there is a memory, hazy, that lingers stubbornly enough to believe it is real: I am leaving the Hall after dark . . . pulling, slowly, the iron handle of the wooden gate, trying not to draw attention. The lock clicks, still loud against the silence on York Street. I turn away from the gate and walk along the high stone wall, toward the empty intersection at York and Elm, watching my feet. It is that time of night when the campus stands desolate, and small sounds echo against the Gothic cliffs, and you feel eerily alone, watched from some high place.
I hear a voice. That’s Mena. I think of crossing the street before she sees me. I hear a laugh, not hers. I look up. It’s Elijah. He is walking at her side, grinning. He turns his head from her and sees me. It looks as if, at once, his mouth loses all power in the muscles that make smiles. Mena looks to where Elijah is looking.
Hey Case! she calls out. I get the sense she’s more excited to see what’s about to happen than to see me.
Hey!
We begin a game of chicken. A single building between us . . . now a parked car. Elijah slows, falls behind her, stops. He pulls out his phone.
Hey man how you doing? I ask. We’re close enough for almost-inside voices.