A Whiter Shade of Pale (Part 2)

I used to teach high school math a few years back. It was just a part-time gig and didn’t pay much, but I thrived on the student interaction. I mostly taught at a private high school, located in one of the wealthiest counties in America. I also tutored the kids of some celebrities, and was relieved to find that they were not spoiled brats or pampered princesses. Just real kids with real teenage issues, even if they were growing up “in a bubble” of sorts.

All of my students were unique and had amazing stories. Some of these kids were virtual geniuses, others struggled with drug addiction, some dealt with autism, dyslexia, ADD, lack of motivation, major childhood trauma, and some… well, let’s just call them “special in their own way.” In the South, I think they just call them “touched”.

But I also tutored another clientele…. children in state custody. These kids (in foster care) had lived in numerous homes over the years. At some point in their lives, they were taken away from their negligent or abusive parents, lived in group homes, split up from their siblings, moved around to various foster homes in the region, and often abused by those to whom they were entrusted. As I helped them with their studies, my heart would break as I heard their stories unfold. Between learning trigonometry and solving algebraic inequalities, it was obvious that the child in front of me was living an “inequality” of life.

One young man, we’ll just call him Bryon, was very hurt and angry. He was forced to live with strangers, hadn’t seen his little brother or sister for nearly a year, and had switched school districts 3 times in 4 years. He didn’t care about his foster parents, social worker, or some white guy trying to help him get through Algebra 2. He was trying to survive the day.

Bryon was almost 16, and all he seemed to care about was football. Apparently he was very fast and was recruited to play on varsity as a sophomore. Bright prospects as an athlete, for sure… but beneath his hardened exterior, I knew he was much more than a star receiver. He was brilliant and strong, but he was also in a deep mode of isolation and self-protection mode.

It took weeks before Bryon would actually respond to my overtures of friendship, understand that I really believed in him, that he was smart, that he had a future and a hope, that his life would not always be like this, and that he could laugh at my stupid jokes.

Bryon finally started to open up. He began excelling in all of his classes. He told me he enjoyed his English class most, and we would discuss literature and history between all the graphing functions and matrices. Bryon was doing great in football, he got his driver’s license and a job at the mall. Things were looking up for this kid, despite his horrible childhood. Then the trials came: he got in a big fight with his foster parents, lost some privileges due to trust issues, and about a month later broke his femur in a football game… the one thing he had put his hope and identity in (football) was now gone.

So here he was…. a young black man in a rich white neighborhood, living with virtual strangers, rejected and discarded by his own parents, isolated from any real family, in a new school, in the care of “the state” administered by a social worker he didn’t like, feeling like a prisoner in his foster home, living with a potentially career-ending football injury, not to mention his mid-terms coming up at school. Within a couple of weeks, it was agreed that he would be moved to another foster home about 40 miles away, and I would probably never see him again.

I had come to care deeply for Bryon. It seemed that no one else had room in their heart for him in this entire world. So I did what I thought best… I gave him my only copy of “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois during our last tutoring session. I told him to read this book, written by a man who happened to be the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard. He went to Fisk University just down the road here in TN. “His words are like poetry for the heart,” I told him, “but his message is steel for the soul. It is a difficult book, but you excel in literature and it was written for men like you – smart, driven, strong, and full of character. This book changed my life, and I know it will change yours.”

We hugged and said goodbye. I hoped to hear from him when he got settled in his new foster home, and I stopped by his work several times… but he was gone. I still pray for him, wondering how he’s doing, whether he ever started or finished that book I put in his hand. Even now, I think I might see him in a crowd. He would be about 20 years old. Maybe he’s at Fisk.

So why this long personal story? Because that is what makes up our lives – stories.

Bryon changed my life, whether he realizes it or not. When he finally smiled at one of my puns, when he opened up his heart just a little, when his face brightened up talking about English… when I saw a shell of a man shine with a spark of joy and the light of life, that was my life being changed, as well. Sure, he was black and I was white and all that, but really, that had little to do with anything.

Or did it? I don’t know. He was just a hurting kid and I was a goofy tutor.

We became friends and the black/white barrier was made irrelevant, at least in our own lives through that experience. He still had his cornrows and saggy pants, big rhinestone earring and a swagger to his gait (until he was on crutches, that is). But who really cares? Bryon was a friend, and for a moment in history we both found a way to remove the painful history and heritage that our differing skin colors represented.

If Bryon did eventually crack open that book, he would have read these opening words of Chapter 1:

“BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

“Hey, I have this black friend…” (Sound familiar, my friends of color? Ha!)

If Bryon asked me for another good read, I would have gladly pointed him to a book I consumed when I was 17….written by a man once described as “the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one.” He wrote these words:

“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” – Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Again, if Bryon wanted to hear the words a man who burned with anger over the inequities of the “system” set up against Black America, I would not send him to the eloquence and prose of Martin Luther King, Jr., but rather to the raw honest language of Eldridge Cleaver when he spoke of the ongoing struggle for black empowerment and dignity in a white supremacist society. He said things like:

“We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it.”- Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice (1965)

I knew Bryon was smart enough listen to their stories, identify the truths of their experiences, and discover his own way to respond to the ugly world in which he found himself – hopefully with beauty and wisdom, helping others overcome as he would.

All three of these authors wrote powerfully, imparted strength and dignity through their words, and they refused to be ignored. They lived in an unjust time, and their words speak truth to us today. Their works validate the underlying anger and indignation that have fueled street protests and race riots, and they should be read by every American – black and white – who cares to know their nation’s honest history.

As mentioned in my previous post, those who are a whiter shade of pale will not ever fully relate to the journey of our darker friends. We all have our own road to walk, but that doesn’t mean we just sit quietly on the sidelines in confusion over all the turmoil. We can learn and better appreciate this outpouring of anger – it is not new.

And we can spend “real time” with our neighbors of color, not just some greeting at the store, but a real relationship… and not just a bunch of black/white discourse, either. Just hang out and play.

Until that play date happens, hit the books. I know three guys you need to meet.