A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [13]
It appeared that the work in his class had no connection whatsoever to life outside that classroom, save for the ability to translate the inscriptions on the crests of other elite schools. Strange indeed. But the cadences were similar to those in the King James Bible, which was standard reading at home. Studying Shakespeare for the first time was a similar experience: exotic and inscrutable at first until I stumbled across swear words that I thought my grandmother had invented. When I heard her call someone a “son of a mongrel bitch,” it seemed like such an original putdown until I read it in Shakespeare. At least Gram was profane in a learned way.
Beyond the classroom lay a class-conscious minefield. I tried to befriend other students, but their worldliness, their aura of entitlement, reinforced my own insecurities. One boy commuted from home in an antique Rolls-Royce. Another took ski vacations to Switzerland. Some bore the same surnames as the buildings. Many had traveled or lived on multiple continents. They all seemed to know the code of dress, language, and manners.
The very confidence I lacked seemed to come naturally to everyone else. It was at Milton that I first observed how self-assured the rich so often appear about everything and everyone else, as if wealth were a substitute for experience. I cannot count the number of times I sat at the dinner table of a classmate and listened respectfully to a parent’s dissertation on the causes of black poverty or family breakdown, only to be asked by that parent if he or she could touch my hair, wondering what it felt like.
Race, of course, was its own complex dynamic. Back home, we would make fun of the way white people spoke, with their distinctive nasal sounds and their use of such words as guy and pal, terms we would never use. Now I was outnumbered. I was the one who spoke funny, and I was often on the defensive.
Some of the slights were relatively harmless. I was called “nigger” once by an English teacher who thought he was just being familiar. The larger problem was how Milton actually interpreted racial integration: More often than not, it was a one-way street. I was expected to absorb and display the ways and habits of this monochromatic culture, to adapt until I fit in, but I was not expected to contribute to that culture, to enrich it by sharing my own experience. I was welcome in that new world, it seemed, so long as I did not bring too much of my old world along.
It was impossible to explain any of this to my family back home. In early, infrequent phone calls, after the initial excitement of hearing my mother’s voice, I would lapse into an awkward silence. “How are you?” was followed by an obligatory “Fine” and little more. As a parent, I have come to know how natural that is. But at the time it seemed I had a lot to say without the vocabulary to express it.
When I returned to the South Side for my first Christmas break, I began to realize how difficult it would be to balance my two worlds. As I was greeted by my family in our front hall, Rhonda looked me over and deadpanned, “He talks like a white boy.” Gram shot her a look and replied, “He speaks like an educated boy.”
My mother and grandparents had had no real idea what they were sending me off to, beyond a vague notion that it was a better opportunity in safer surroundings. Their eyes glazed over when I tried to tell them details about my experiences back East. My friends were variously indifferent and resentful. “What’s an ambassador?” one of them asked with a sneer, as I tried to describe the foreign service family of an eighth-grader at Milton. I had to confess that I didn’t really know. The truth is, I could no more explain Milton to my family and friends on the South Side than I could explain the South Side to my peers at Milton. Understanding the difference required more effort than either side wanted to give.
My father hated the very idea of prep school. Milton was only a few hours