Step Out on Nothing

by Byron Pitts

  “Byron, your vocabulary sucks. Sometimes you talk like you’re in grade school. And sometimes you use big words that make no sense. What’s your problem?”

  By then, I thought I was pretty good at masking my remaining shortcomings. I was an incredibly slow reader, but I studied alone so no one really knew how long it took me to read and comprehend my schoolwork. In a new environment, without the comfort of people who knew me well, I slipped back into my pattern of silence to avoid the shame of stammering and stuttering. I generally limited myself to one-or two-word answers. I was never comfortable speaking outside my very limited range. Hiding my deficiencies was a very comfortable state for me. And now, in a matter of weeks, this wise guy from Minnetonka had penetrated my carefully crafted façade.

  When Pete was done verbally undressing me, I wanted to punch him in the mouth.

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” I barked.

  Pete’s reply. “I’m talking to you, my friend. Clearly you have a problem communicating, and I want to help.”

  I was embarrassed and angry. “What gives you the right to t-t-talk down to me?” I sputtered again.

  “I’m not talking down to you. I’m sitting, you’re standing, so I can’t be talking down to you,” Pete said with a smile and the clipped laugh I came to appreciate. “Look,” he went on, “I’m your friend, and if I didn’t care about you, I wouldn’t say anything. I know you’re not stupid, though sometimes you sound like it. Be honest, what’s wrong? You can trust me.”

  I had spent so many years hiding behind a curtain of lies and secrecy, it wasn’t easy for me to tell the truth. But I did. I confided in Pete, told him how long it had taken me to learn to read, told him about the fear I faced every day in class. How overwhelmed I felt before the mountain of reading that was required. Any freshman year in college is tough, but I felt as if I was starting a race and everyone else had already run the first few laps. Being a slow reader was not my only issue. My inability to communicate in class and speak with my professors in a meaningful way was really slowing me down. I rarely spoke in my classes because I didn’t have the confidence to express myself.

  Pete was not judgmental; nor did he express any shock or surprise. His response was simple. “If I can help, I will. If I can’t, I’ll help you find someone who will.” And he did help. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Pete said with confidence. “Every day I will give you a new word from the dictionary. I want you to study it. Then, the next day, say it, spell it, define it, and use it in a sentence—deal?”

  “What do you want in return?” I asked.

  “Nothing. You’ll be my first great college experiment. Let’s see how we do.” That’s pure Pete. He was helping me but wanted it to seem as if I was helping him (though I convinced myself that being friends with a football player probably wasn’t the worst thing for Pete’s social life). That was our secret. We kept the arrangement to ourselves through a few years of different roommates and a few different girlfriends.

  Before long, I was coming up with words, and that always made Pete laugh. Like so many of the wonderful people God brought into my life, Pete taught me more by his actions than he did by his words.

  When I struggled in a class, Pete devised a study routine for me. It was his idea for me to take all my notes from class and type them out at night in a separate notebook. “Redundancy is good for you,” he said. “Plus, your handwriting sucks.”

  For the remainder of college, I kept two notebooks for every class. One I took with me to the classroom; the other I kept with its neatly typed pages in my dorm room over my desk, and that’s the one I would use for studying. As hard as I worked, though, I couldn’t match his ferocious and disciplined study habits. Pete studied every night except Fridays. That was his drinking night. Pete knew his way around a chemistry lab and a beer bottle. It was the one area I could keep him in check.

  “Pete, what’s our limit on beer tonight?” As a nondrinker, by “our” I actually meant “his.” Always loyal and always honest, whatever number of beers we’d agree to, that’s how many Pete would drink. By Saturday he was back to his books, and on Sundays he read the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover. (The only time I ever saw Pete angry was when someone touched the Times before he got through reading it.) I just marveled at this guy, my age, taking such enjoyment out of reading everything from textbooks to magazines and newspapers. Not to mention the effort. Since The New York Times wasn’t delivered on campus, Pete had to walk at least a mile to the store and buy it. Though he was never a fan of exercise, Pete’s devotion to making that walk in rain, sleet, or snow on Sundays was impressive. I was never able to convince him to go with me to church on Sunday, and he never got me to read the Sunday New York Times either.

  Our freshman year in college he was already talking about graduate school and his career, and not in broad terms. He already knew the best schools in the country for his particular discipline, the grades required to get in, and the names of the department heads. Grad school was still three or more years away, but Pete already had a plan. Perhaps Pete was actually Catholic and had a Father Bart back in Minnesota, I often thought to myself. I was already considering my career, too—journalism, believe it or not. Having written for my high school newspaper, I somehow had fooled myself into thinking I might be a pretty good writer. Despite my limited vocabulary, I enjoyed words and expressing myself. So much had been bottled up inside me for the years I couldn’t read that I welcomed any chance to read and write. My English teacher in freshman year was Dr. Paul Lucas, who had been at OWU for decades. He was both a brilliant English professor and an unforgiving taskmaster. A tall, thin, balding, pipe smoker, who seemed fond of sweater vests in and out of season, he carried himself like a man who got lost on his way to teach class at Harvard. I had heard Dr. Lucas was tough. I was on a first-name basis with tough, but I still wasn’t ready for him. Perhaps he had his favorites, but I seemed to play the role of his whipping post.

  He kept his classroom as he carried himself, neat and orderly. He had us working out of small blue notebooks. He didn’t want black or gray or brown. He wanted blue. He was meticulous about grammar and proper punctuation. My classmates and I were told early on how he wanted assignments written; the details included which side of the page for our names and the date. No exceptions. I was used to order. Many of my teachers back at Curley insisted a student stand up before giving an answer. We walked on the right side of the hallway and the staircase. I understood order. College was far different from high school. More reading. More freedom. More was expected. I got all that. Dr. Lucas I never got.

  “Fine work, Mr. Pitts,” he’d say as he handed me an assignment in class marked with a D, if I was lucky, or an F, quite often. Visits to his office were humiliating and often painful. Dr. Lucas pulling on his pipe, puffing smoke as he critiqued my work: lousy grammar, terrible spelling, poor sentence structure, and poor composition. I was befuddled by little things. Because I didn’t know how to type and couldn’t afford to pay anyone to type my papers, it would take a painstaking amount of time to finish my work. That sometimes meant the essays were not well thought out or corrected. Sometimes papers were simply turned in late. There was no extra credit, and unlike high school, there was no acknowledgment for effort. The sessions went quickly. Dr. Lucas never offered suggestions on how to improve, only criticism. It was clear that he expected my baseline of understanding to be higher than it was. Because I wasn’t very verbal, I wasn’t equipped to say what I needed. My only response was that “I’m doing the best I can.” It got so bad Clarice tried to intervene, eight hundred miles away, from back in Baltimore. Tired of my tearful phone calls home, she called Dr. Lucas directly. I don’t think he was accustomed to getting phone calls from parents. Certainly not someone like Clarice Pitts. Her counsel to me, just keep praying and working hard, didn’t seem to work. Despite my mother’s encouraging words and prayers and Pete’s study tips, I failed Dr. Lucas’s class and did poorly in several
others.

  At the end of my first semester in college, I was on academic probation. Another poor showing next semester and I might be kicked out of school. Perhaps as testament to my stubbornness or stupidity, I signed up for Dr. Lucas again. I thought if I was more disciplined with my time and worked harder, I could pass the class. There was no guarantee that another professor was going to be any easier. I believed that the problem was my effort, not his teaching.

  After a wonderful Christmas break of home-cooked meals, visits to my church, and time with Kim Taylor, I came back to OWU refueled and ready to conquer the world. I had been down before, but Dr. Lucas seemed to be waiting to take me down another notch every day. So I prayed harder, typed longer, and studied more notes.

  When a crucial midterm exam was approaching, Pete worked with me, and my mother made more than her routine phone calls. More nerve-wracking than the actual exam was the day when Dr. Lucas would pass out the results. Nervously waiting near the back of class, my palms sweating, my academic future on the line, I watched and listened as Dr. Lucas passed out papers and puffed on his pipe. Finally, he came to me. Instead of continuing on with the rhythm of passing out papers and moving along, Dr. Lucas stopped at my desk. With a big smile, he placed my test results on my desk and announced to the class, “Congratulations, Mr. Pitts, your best work thus far. D plus. Bravo!”

  He proceeded to pass out the remaining few papers to my other classmates. As for me, I was back in my father’s car: silent, warm, staring straight ahead, expressionless. I put my hands under my chin and refused to cry or get angry. I never heard another sound the rest of the class. I didn’t even realize class was over until my classmates started to leave.

  On my way out, Dr. Lucas asked me to follow him to his office. Raised to always respect authority, I gave the only response I knew to give, “Yes, sir.” Once I was in his office, Dr. Lucas said what he had to say quickly. At the time it seemed almost kind.

  “Mr. Pitts, I’ll make this quick. No need to sit down.” Rarely did Dr. Lucas ever look directly at me when he spoke, but this time he made an exception. “Mr. Pitts, you are wasting my time and the government’s money. You are not Ohio Wesleyan University material. I think you should leave.” I had no reaction. He continued. “You’re excused. Nothing further. Please tell your mother what I said. Good luck to both of you. Now excuse me.”

  That’s it. Game over. I was done. Hard work and prayer had taken me as far as it could. This professor in a position to know had declared my fate.

  What did he mean by “the government’s money”? I had received a few grants and scholarships, but he made it sound as if I was on some college welfare program. More than anything else, I wanted to simply be able to walk out of his office with my head still up. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. But, at that moment, in the mind of an eighteen-year-old kid, my pursuit of a college education was over. My dreams, my family’s dreams, were just that. Perhaps I wasn’t retarded or mentally ill, but I was far from college material.

  All of our work—the village that pulled me through—those who cheered for me and mentored me and tutored me, for whom I was the hope of a college success story. I had failed them all. This man said I wasn’t good enough, and I had to believe that he was right.

  At this moment, I was alone and frightened. To this point in life, through every hardship and obstacle, I had had someone who cared about me close by to pick me up, dust me off, and lead me on my way. Always in the past, my mother was in the next room, or there would be an inspiring sermon from Reverend Carter at New Shiloh or an encouraging word from Coach Mack or Father Bart that would lighten my burden and I could push through. This time none of them was in sight. The shame inside me grew. All those demons of insecurity and uncertainty waiting just below the surface of my life were pushing their way to the top. I was ashamed that I had failed, ashamed even more that I was thinking about giving up, quitting.

  SIX

  Letters from Home

  To get where you want to go, you must keep on keeping on.

  —Norman Vincent Peale

  FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS CLARICE Pitts seamlessly raised me by combining a fierce demand for discipline and an equal measure of love. With the balance of a high-wire acrobat, she would dish out punishment with the same hand she used to hold her children when they needed comfort. Clarice was born with long limbs, but they could not stretch easily from East Baltimore to Delaware, Ohio. The miles between us now created distance and difficulties. My grades were suffering, and I was on the verge of flunking out. In her own way, she still needed to wage the fight for me, just the way she did when I was a kid. She had appealed to Dr. Lucas by phone and was left frustrated. She was not in the habit of being ignored. So perhaps in order to stay connected and still yield a high level of influence, she resorted to writing letters. She is not a casual woman; thus, these would not be casual letters. School was tough. Clarice was tougher. It was her way of being supportive. To her, support meant brutal honesty. But now the opponent was my own lethargy and intellectual paralysis. If she had to punch through my soul to knock out the enemy, she’d do it.

  While it may be hard for my children or many of their generation to believe, long before e-mails, text messages, or cell phones, people communicated regularly by handwritten letters. During my four years in college in the late 1970s, my family and I rarely talked by phone. It was too expensive. There was a pay phone at the end of the hallway in my freshman dormitory, but phone calls were sporadic. A roll of quarters would give me a few minutes on the phone with my mom, a call to my grandmother, and maybe a few minutes on the phone with my sister or girlfriend, Kim. But I could always count on at least one letter per week from my home. Between my freshman year and graduation, my mother must have written me at least 152 letters, one for every week I was in school. Included with each letter, in every envelope, would be a Bible verse typed on an index card. Occasionally, a second index card would hold some encouraging quotation she’d picked up somewhere. Things like: “It is not your aptitude, but your attitude that determines your altitude.” She got a lot of these pithy self-help bromides from her new collection of books. Her dozens and dozens of letters became a minor sensation among many of my friends. Especially Pete. He jokingly began referring to my mother as Mother Clarice (as in Mother Teresa) and Colonel Clarice. He found it amusing that this black woman hundreds of miles away seemed to have so much influence over my life. A small circle of friends who were estranged from their own parents seemed to take real joy in her words. Her typed index cards often wound up tacked to the corkboard wall in someone else’s room. I’ve kept many of them. I wish I’d kept them all.

  Of all her letters to me and my siblings, the one that’s taken on near-legendary status in our family was the one that came in the midst of my struggles with my freshman English professor, Dr. Lucas. My confidence had slipped as much as my grades, and in a few of my phone calls I started dropping hints that maybe OWU wasn’t right for me. My mother was not a quitter. She wasn’t having it.

  Clarice had a unique system for identifying the purpose of her letters even before you read them. Black ink meant all was fine with the world, and there might even be some humor in her correspondence. Blue ink meant she wanted to discuss some difficulty in her own life, which she was more likely to share as her children got older. But if a letter from home came in red ink, that meant the recipient was in serious trouble. Red meant anger. So when the envelope arrived in my dormitory mailbox with my name and address written in red, I knew I was in for a verbal assault, a linguistic beat down. Her first line cleared up any doubt. Clarice Pitts has loved the Lord nearly all of her life, but she’s always had great affection for profanity when it served her, especially when it came to making a point to her children.

  Dear Mr. Brain Dead,

  Have you lost your fucking mind? You went to Ohio Wesleyan with the expressed goal of graduating, going on to live your dreams and God’s purpose for your life. At the first s
ign of trouble you want to give up. Fine! Bring your ass back to Baltimore and get a job. Maybe if you think you’re up for it, enroll in Bay College. There are plenty of places in the city for dummies. Yep, come home with your tail between your legs and get some half-ass job and spend the rest of your life crying about what you could have been. Maybe all you’re cut out to be is a meat-cutting, cab-driving underachiever. Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you have worked as hard as you can, as you claim, and your best isn’t good enough. Is that what you think? Here’s what I know.

  You are a gift from God. The Lord I serve does not make mistakes. You did not get to Ohio Wesleyan because you are so smart or worked so hard. You got there because of prayer and faith and God’s grace. Yes, you worked hard in high school. But you only did part of the work. Every time you took one step, God took two. Is college harder than high school? It better be, as much as it cost. So what’s that mean for you? Work harder than you think you are even capable of working. Pray longer than you’ve ever prayed. That’s what I’m doing. That is what we always do. What has your grandmother told you? You can’t climb that mountain without some rough spots. Maybe you’re in a cave on the other side of your mountain. Don’t get scared or lazy. Don’t just cry. Figure out what God is teaching you, then get your ass back on that mountain and keep pulling hard and looking forward.