A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [11]
That left DuSable High, which would mean returning to the very environment I was trying to leave. Knowing what I faced, my mother and I met with Mrs. Weissenberg about A Better Chance. We applied, and I was accepted, sight unseen, by Milton Academy in Massachusetts. I was apprehensive, of course. My mother was wary but fatalistic. “You can always come home,” she said.
I am hardly the only product of Chicago’s South Side to have gone on to better things or the only kid from a hardscrabble background to have had a measure of success. That “rags to riches” story is distinctly American, and though it is not told often enough, it is still told more often in this country than anywhere else on earth. In my own case, I knew that my circumstances, however difficult, need not be permanent; I could shape my own destiny. That was the true gift of my childhood. The power of that gift is that I was surrounded by adults who had every reason to curb my dreams. My grandparents had grown up with Jim Crow. My mother knew all too well the humiliation of poverty and betrayal. Mrs. Threet, Mrs. Quaintance, and Mrs. Weissenberg knew the constraints of Chicago’s public schools. Yet in different ways, they all taught me to reject the cycle of despair that had trapped so many others and to pursue opportunities that I could barely imagine. It was as if they had been schooled in that famous admonition of the late great president of Morehouse College, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, who said, “Not failure, but low aim, is sin.”
Gram tended to roses in a little garden right behind our tenement. Early in the morning, when the weather was warm, she would go into our backyard, pick up the trash that had blown in, brush away any broken glass, and work that soil. Believe me, that soil had things in it that God would never put in dirt.
But she brought forth her roses. With one cutting she had brought north from my great-grandfather’s house in Kentucky, she grew a climber that reached nearly all the way up the side of our two-story building. It was magnificent. And it was improbable. In that place, in that soil, it defied all reason and expectation. Still, Gram believed.
The adults in my early life, in the teeth of their struggles and setbacks, believed in me as well. Just as Texaco needed a vision many years later, I needed one as a child, and they provided it. I did not know then which path to take or even what I was looking for. To this day I’m still not sure if we were poor or broke. But I learned to think big and to brew in my own imagination a vision of a better life. I just had to go out and pursue it.
Chapter 2
Milton Academy was not just a different place. It was a different planet. I was suddenly around people who had second and third homes and household staffs, who traveled frequently to remote countries, and who poured tea with gloved hands. The language was foreign: summer was used as a verb. My family’s middle-class aspirations had certainly not prepared me for Milton. It seemed we just skipped that passage. These people were rich.
I thought I had been sent to Milton by mistake, as if some clerical error had dispatched me accidentally to an enchanted land, and I lived in dread that someone would discover the lapse. What I didn’t appreciate at first was that all the boys were trying to find their own path. In my case, I had to learn to bridge two starkly different worlds. Each had a claim on me and insisted that, to be authentic, I had to choose one over the other. I learned, like everyone, that life is full of choices, but I came to suspect that most of them were false. Authenticity is a matter of values. Know those and be true to them, and you can comfortably navigate the uneven terrain of life.
I arrived in Boston on a sun-kissed September afternoon in 1970, one of those soft, still New England days when the autumn colors are just beginning to appear. A blue van, with an orange M on its side, collected me and a few other kids from Logan Airport and drove us through the city toward our new home. I said nothing as I stared