After the duel, I couldn’t shake off their smirks when we shook hands. As they’d left the room, exchanging laughs and high fives, I thought I overheard one say to the other, “That was easy.”
Those were fighting words, and the repressed gangsta had started to rise up in me. I wasn’t a good debater, but there was no way in hell that I would be disrespected by a book-toting white boy and a Black kid who wore dress shoes with white ankle socks. The version of me that had been tamed by years of counseling and a return to college abruptly gave way to the real nigga who still lived deep down inside. The Ivy League debaters suddenly seemed like shit-talking streetballers from the block, and I knew how to handle that.
For the first time in years, I could feel myself losing control. I felt pressure building and steam coming off me. I tried to convince myself that I was a reformed and changed man. But the debaters’ laughter had triggered a primal anger and they looked no different from Trey and his friends, laughing at me when I was fourteen after he’d had sex with my girlfriend. The Ivy League boys were in my crosshairs, and I’d tossed chairs aside as I charged toward them.
On the tip of my tongue was “Aye! Yo bitch ass got something to say to me?” I was ready for a street brawl. But before I could reach them, Connor had grabbed a handful of my suit jacket and yanked me from behind.
“Dude, what are you doing?” he’d said, clearly shaken.
The judge had still been at his table, observing my outburst and looking on with what seemed like disgust. He said nothing. He passed me a look of disapproval, grabbed his folders, and walked out of the room.
Hours into the evening drive, the bus fell silent. The jubilation and clinking of medallions quieted as my tired teammates fell asleep. I sat in self-imposed isolation in the back row, with winter’s cold hand bracing my face pressed against the window. Insecurity settled over me like darkness on the passing countryside, and I thought, Who am I kidding? I ain’t nobody’s scholar. All it took was one tournament, a losing record, and a damning display of unsportsmanlike conduct to expose me as an impostor in the world of debate: nothing but a displaced hoodlum who had traded in my hoodie for an ill-fitting suit.
I felt like I was right back at square one—a person whose ambition would not be able to overwhelm incompetence. Months earlier, Professor Nelson had challenged me out of my rut of self-pity by asking what I would do about my own disadvantages. In the wake of defeat, I was pouting like a petulant child. And her charge pricked me like a mother’s pinch. Then I heard Coach’s voice echo, We don’t complain, son. We compensate.
I knew what I had to do: I would have to teach myself about international politics. I went to the bookstore to see what books I could find on the subject. I discovered the For Dummies series and browsed discreetly, hoping no one would spot me searching for a manual on how to get smart quick. While plucking titles from the politics section, I stumbled upon a book about the Renaissance period. I immediately got excited because I thought it was another book about Harlem in the 1920s. But it wasn’t. Strangely, the book featured old white men draped in colorful robes, sitting on the steps of what I later learned was the fictional School of Athens. The book was dense and looked painful to read.
I sat on the floor and riffled through the pages, searching for the chapter about the Harlem Renaissance. But I couldn’t find it. Frustrated, I had almost given up on the book when my eyes landed on a section explaining the concept of a renaissance. It turns out that Harlem was not the only place to experience one. I was shocked to learn that throughout history the world has been changed by thinkers who were philosophically enlightened and brave enough to challenge the conventional social order. For the first time, I realized that what happened in Harlem—the pursuit of freedom, equality, and justice, transfigured through artistic expression—had happened in other places, too. The renaissance in Harlem—and the renaissance in me—happened in other places and people around the world.
My worldview started to expand. I learned that philosophy, the study of wisdom, was the impetus of revolutionary movements in the Eastern and Western world. I read about every renaissance that I could find: the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China; the classical, Socratic era in Athens; the Italian Renaissance in Florence; the Age of Enlightenment in England; the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church; the American Revolution; and, of course, the Harlem Renaissance at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
This lightning bolt of revelation illuminated a new landscape beyond Black studies. I now knew that political theory existed, and I immersed myself in Plato and Nietzsche and Rousseau, learning to trace the evolution of political ideology from the classical era to modernity. The deeper I read, the larger my world became.
I realized that my approach to debate was wrong. My approach to education in general was wrong. I had been debating with facts and information that I could regurgitate but did not understand. Like a child trying to walk before he crawls, I was trying to argue before I learned how to question. Philosophy was a tool I could use to dig deep beneath the surface of what was obvious, so I could reach in and extract ideas by the root. I realized that traditional education focuses mainly on the status quo, on the surface of the soil—which allows the seeds of injustice to lie quiescent, until they sprout into weeds of social and political inequality. The aphorism attributed to Socrates started to make sense: weak minds discuss people; average minds discuss events; but strong minds discuss ideas. My mind was getting more than strong. It started to feel like a superpower.
Reading philosophy was an aspiring debater’s version of weight training. When I started out as an athlete, I wasn’t very strong. So I began with low weight and high repetition to condition my muscles. But over time, I became lean, ripped, and resilient. When I spotted the faint bulge of a small, newly visible vein on my forearm, it inspired me to keep going. My abdomen hardened, creased, and compartmentalized. My chest grew chiseled and cupped at its base. When I looked in the mirror and saw results, my brain flooded with a rush of adrenaline, dopamine, and most of all: confidence. Over time, my drive increased—and so did the weights, and so did my strength.
As a budding academic, I was training my mind the same way that I used to train my body. When I left the weight room, with my testosterone pumping and muscles swollen, I was convinced that I could take on anyone, even if it wasn’t true. Likewise, when I emerged from my bedroom after hours under the tutelage of Plato, Aristotle, and the Enlightenment philosophers, I was ready to question anybody about anything, picking fights and poking holes in arguments. Claude Levi-Strauss once said, “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” And this principle became the bedrock of my intellectual constitution. Philosophy taught me how to win debates—because the best debater is the best questioner, and the best questioner is the best thinker. I saw what Plato described in his Theory of Forms, and my consciousness elevated beyond the forms of concepts you can see in the perceptible realm, to the truths that only exist in the imperceptible realm of abstractions.
The plot twist is that not everyone appreciated my new persona. I did not always wear it well. Especially when I picked fights with people, wanting to spar for intellectual sport. You can alienate a lot of people by casting yourself as the Sherlock Holmes of logic. I became the annoying person who takes pride in correcting people when they are wrong. Some of my friends and classmates probably wished I would drink hemlock, join Socrates in the afterlife, and leave them the hell alone.
Religion is the leading industry of Lynchburg and Liberty University is its engine, generating more than one billion dollars of economic activity every year. Liberty is the biggest and best known of eight local colleges and trade schools, and the largest employer in this city of about seventy-five thousand. Search online for “bars in Lynchburg, VA” and you’ll only come up with two dozen. Look up churches and you’ll find eighty evangelical Protestant congregations and nearly forty mainline Protestant churches. School and church were
the two institutions that my upbringing taught me to loathe, yet here I was at Liberty, a church-school chimera.
Liberty University is the spawn of Thomas Road Baptist Church, made famous by Jerry Falwell’s televised preaching, and students were encouraged to worship there on Sundays. Some did, but white students in Lynchburg had many other choices. For students from a Black church tradition, however, the pickings were slim. The white evangelical churches seemed very stale to a lot of Black students: there was no hand-clapping and foot-stomping to gospel music, no emotional outbursts and Holy Ghost fits, no preacher whooping and hollering, “Turn to your neighbor!” There were only bright smiles, soft singing, and a preacher who sounded like Joel Osteen.
The options changed when Sean Gilbert came to town. He grew up in Gretna, Virginia, a town with one stoplight, a Dairy Queen, and about one thousand residents. Kids raised there were considered highly successful if they learned a trade or became a postal carrier or a schoolteacher. Only the exceptional ones, like Gilbert, went off to the college thirty minutes up the road.
He was twenty-seven years old when he enrolled at Liberty: old enough to be taken seriously as a leader, yet youthful enough for students to fawn over him. He had a narrow face and light brown eyes. He was clean-cut with a perfectly symmetrical hairline and a manicured beard. He stood six feet tall and always walked like he was important or headed somewhere important, even if he was just walking to class. When Gilbert entered a classroom, toting a Bible and wearing a three-piece suit, it was impossible for the students to stay focused on the professor. He commanded the room. If they didn’t already know who he was, they soon found out. Each time a professor said anything that Gilbert perceived as racially insensitive or biblically inconsistent, his hand shot up and when called on he set them straight. He was a thorn in the side for professors, but a hero for Black students—speaking truth to power and saying what they thought but were afraid to voice.
Several years before I arrived at the university, Gilbert set out to fill the need for a more Black, more charismatic form of worship on campus. By the time I was readmitted to Liberty in 2010, his congregation had grown from twenty students meeting in a classroom to an actual church with over two hundred members, blossoming at the foot of Liberty Mountain. Gilbert’s church was growing so fast that he had to drop out of college to manage the influx of people drawn to his theatrical style of singing and preaching.
Lynchburg was a social desert. I began attending Gilbert’s church because that’s what many Black students at Liberty University did. And it’s where you could find all of the beautiful Black sistas from campus. We did not have the Greek life or Black Student Unions that flourish on other campuses. For students not interested in organized religion, the church was more of an affinity group than a ministry. And if you grew up in a churchgoing Black family, Gilbert’s church was a familiar experience kicked up to another level. At that time, he was only in his early thirties, people found him easy to like, and his preaching was passionate and rousing. His church was rare because it was almost entirely led by college students and millennials—most of them, like me, had been either turned off by religion or raised without it. He specialized in reaching young men like myself and Walter and others who were roughnecks. He kept us by his side. He groomed us. He taught us how to carry ourselves like distinguished gentlemen.
Sitting in the back of the congregation, I watched Gilbert move the crowd in ways that I had never seen. His performance was riveting—a confluence of Martin’s savvy syntax, Malcolm’s rousing impenitence, and Cornel West’s prophetic fire. I wondered how he could stimulate the crowd in so many ways at once. His preaching made people cry, chant, and cheer so loud that it could match the decibel level of a Coachella concert.
I wasn’t sure how he worked this magic and I was intrigued. The pews were filled with college students who might have been dragged to church as children, but who actually knew very little, if anything, about religion. Yet at the end of the service, millennials swarmed the altar in droves to receive whatever Pastor Gilbert promised: a prophecy, healing, salvation. Either we were highly impressionable, or Gilbert was irresistible—maybe both. In a socially vacant town, this church was the highlight of every week.
My life took a turn during a one-on-one conversation with Pastor Gilbert. I told him that my heart’s desire was to become a powerful orator, keeping quiet about my miserable debate experience. I asked if he could train me to be an orator and a leader like him. He was obviously flattered, he smiled and laughed, and then he said: “Teachers begin as students, and leaders begin as servants.” He continued, “You want to lead? Well, here you go.” He gave me a bucket and a mop, inviting me to clean the church. I figured he’d missed my point entirely.
My demon stepfather had made me hate preachers, and now I was working for one. This was proof that attending a Christian college in the middle of nowhere precipitates strange and ironic decisions. But I had a purpose: I was going to study a man who embodied at least one aspect of what I hoped to become. After classes and on weekends, I drove Pastor Gilbert to all of his speaking engagements. I sat on the stage with him and occasionally forgot to pour his water because I was caught up analyzing how he used gestures to complement changes of tone and voice. He never told me his strategy, but I could see it: the parallels he’d set up to emphasize a point, the pauses he’d take after each punch line, how his cadence rose to a crescendo, and how his voice softened when heavenly music played and he beckoned listeners toward salvation. It was Rhetoric 101. The more I watched, the more impatient I became to do it myself. I felt like a freshman ball player idling on the varsity bench. In my mind, I was ready. I asked repeatedly if I could give it a try, if I could speak in front of the congregation. But Pastor Gilbert would continually say things like “Keep serving” and “Your time will come.”
Impatient, I exhorted an imaginary audience in my bedroom. Having confirmed that my roommates were out, I would pretend that my tiny bedroom was a grand stage. Pacing back and forth, leaping up and down, and pointing at invisible but rapt listeners, I did passionate imitations of orators I admired. The topic didn’t matter. I pretended to be a politician leading a huge rally. I recited Shakespearean soliloquies. I impersonated a professor giving a lecture in an auditorium. I just wanted to be in front of people. I wanted to experience the euphoria that comes from using your voice to set a room ablaze. I wanted to see inspiration open people’s eyes, see hope fill their hearts, and watch the lightbulb of discovery glow above their heads. I wanted to empower people, to share with them my experience when I found Socrates and the Renaissance. Pastor Gilbert was wrong. I was ready. I was eager for my turn. And then, it came. Unexpectedly.
My class schedule made it impossible for me to join Gilbert on a speaking trip to Washington, DC, but I was scheduled to meet him at a church in Danville, about an hour outside of Lynchburg. When we spoke, he was only a few hours away. I had plenty of time to grab a bite at Hardee’s, then I went over to the office to pick up a freshly pressed suit for him. Suddenly, my cell phone rang.
“Brandon, where are you?” Gilbert asked, his voice sounding tense.
“I’m at the office grabbing your things right now. I’m about to jump on the road to meet you.”
He didn’t respond immediately, and I knew something was wrong.
“About that,” he said, “I don’t think I’m gonna make it. It’s too much traffic. There’s no way that I will get there on time.”
I started to tell him not to worry, that I would phone the church and let them know that he needed to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances. But he cut me off.
“No,” he said, “we can’t cancel. They’ve planned this conference for months and are expecting nearly five hundred people.”
I was confused. Not because he sounded concerned, but because he didn’t sound concerned. He sounded calm. Like he had a plan.
My next words came slowly. “Sooo, what do you want to do?” I asked.
He
said that there was only one thing to do. This calculation was odd, because I could think of at least five different things that we could, and should, do. So I couldn’t imagine what his one viable option was. But whatever he was going to say, intuition told me it would not be good.
“You have to speak in my place,” he said, so calmly his words didn’t seem real.
“Yeah, right. That’s funny,” I said, cackling at his joke. But I realized after a couple of seconds that he wasn’t laughing with me.
“Brandon, this isn’t a joke,” he said.
My insides immediately shriveled like a raisin.
“Come again?” I asked, incredulous.
I argued with him for several minutes, suggesting alternatives and grasping for reasons why this was a ridiculous idea. And in the end, I lost my second debate.
“Call me when it’s over,” he said, and the line went dead before I could offer my final rebuttal.
I broke into a sweat and my heart pounded like it was breaking through my chest. I had a full-on panic attack. I dropped his suit on the floor and grabbed for the chair closest to me. This didn’t make any sense. I wasn’t a preacher. He had assistant clergy who could easily take his place, just as they had on earlier occasions. He hadn’t offered me any tips, advice, or guidance—he had thrown me overboard with no life vest. I didn’t know what to do.
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