A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [10]
Though getting to DuSable and home again was hazardous, the school, like Terrell before it, was a refuge. There, in the seventh grade, I met another teacher who would radically broaden my vision of what was possible. Darla Weissenberg was a twenty-two-year-old idealist who was committed to improving the world and making sure those of us on the South Side had a place in it. She was also my first white teacher. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had attended schools with black children in Rockford, Illinois, and had been deeply influenced by a sixth-grade African-American teacher who had told her students about the indignities of growing up in segregated Baltimore. So when Mrs. Weissenberg received her teaching certificate and was initially assigned to a white high school, she requested the inner city and landed at DuSable.
She was in only her second year of teaching when I had her for Language Arts and Social Studies. The students were discovering how easily they could intimidate whites, and they badgered her on a regular basis. In the confines of so much free-floating hate, she was very brave to come to DuSable every day with such compassion and commitment.
Hers was my favorite class, and I opened up to her in my writing assignments. In an essay grandly titled “The Story of My Life,” in which we were asked to describe our short lives to date and also our future, I recounted my rather harrowing birth and boasted of my academic and extracurricular achievements. I then envisioned a future for myself that was far removed from DuSable and the South Side. “Thinking about my life, from being born in the morning, to almost death, to outstanding student, I think about my life 10 years from now. I should be out of UCLA and in to real estate with a home and a family. I thank God that He has thought enough of me to take me this far.” I had a clear notion of what middle-class direction I wanted to take—though Lord knows where the UCLA came from!
My aspirations and interests caught the attention of Mrs. Weissenberg. Middle-class ambitions were not what she had come to expect from DuSable students. The following year, she noticed—either on a bulletin board or in a teacher’s journal—a message about a foundation called A Better Chance. Its mission was to identify kids from non-traditional prep school backgrounds, as the euphemism of the day went, for placement in Eastern prep schools. She thought about me and asked to meet my mother.
I was by then in eighth grade, the last year of junior high, which meant there were choices to be made about high school. In those days, students had three: I could go to a vocational school, a technical school, or the high school in my district. None of these options was very good.
Vocational school was the least appealing because, at that time, it did not have a college track. Though no one in my family had gone beyond the eleventh grade, I was determined to go to college, and I was blessed beyond measure to live in a household where no one discouraged that notion. So, while vocational schools taught things I now wish I knew—like auto mechanics and tailoring—that option was not for me.
The technical school made more sense because it taught mechanical drawing, and at the time I wanted to be an architect. My drum teacher, a family friend, was both a timpanist with the Chicago Symphony and an architect, the first black professional I can remember who was not a teacher. He had given me a three-edged ruler so I could draw room layouts and buildings to scale, and I spent hours with the Sunday newspaper real estate section evaluating designs and creating my own. The city had only two technical schools, with the far better one on the North Side. Though I was graduating first in my class at DuSable, our guidance counselor could not persuade the North Side school to take a South Side student. The North Side was for white, middle-class people. The South Side