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By Root 532 0

’ train ride from New York, so I saw more of him when I was there. But during those visits he would make clear his disapproval of my attending Milton. He thought the school would “make me white.” He himself was widely read in the Black Power literature of the late 1960s and feared that I would forget that ours was a heritage of struggle and pain for which whites were to blame. He was concerned that I would lose a sense of who I was. In his view, my identity as a young black man was defined by white oppression. America was profoundly and irredeemably racist, he would say, so pain was inevitable. He worried that I would let my guard down at Milton and open myself to hurt.

He had reason to believe I was naive about race. He knew how hard Gram and Poppy tried to shield us from racism and how my mother had urged us to take people as they come. She had been moved by Martin Luther King Jr. and his message of love and reconciliation. So my father could hardly have been faulted for his wariness. He had seen the way popular black musicians could not patronize the clubs where they performed. He knew the indignities of the road trip. He believed every white record producer exploited the talents of black artists. But I was just a kid hoping to experience the best of the great, wide world without limits, and I was determined to figure out the ways of the world on my own terms.

These were the tensions in my life. My father wanted me to reject the school, and all that it represented, that my mother so desperately and indiscriminately wanted me to embrace, and the school where I wanted to excel didn’t seem to have a comfortable place for me. I continued on this wobbly ground, straddling these two worlds, trying not to let the one know much about the other. I was conflicted, worried, and confused. Not every kid survived this dissonance. Once again, I was saved by the love of adults.

My freshman English teacher, Albert Oliver Smith, was extraordinary. The other teachers called him “A.O.” or “Toby.” Students, current and former, simply called him “Mr. Smith.” He was right out of central casting: wizened and bent, with a crew cut that seemed last in fashion in the 1940s and was especially out of place amid the wayward manes of the 1970s. He wore a musty, ill-fitting tweed jacket that smelled of the lit cigarette that was often wedged in the corner of his mouth when he was not in class. With his white Oxford button-down shirt, the collar almost always frayed, he wore plaid knit ties or ones with tiny school seals. With his family’s roots dating back to the beginnings of the Bay State in the late seventeenth century, he bore the look of old money. He also had the right résumé. He had attended St. Paul’s School and Harvard College, served—for reasons I never understood—in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and then, in a telling flash of independence, married Aubrey, a spicy and voluptuous Texan who spoke and taught Spanish.

With only fourteen of us in his class, we could not escape Mr. Smith’s demands. (Neither could his pet, which lounged under the table, an old black standard poodle that had evidently never been washed.) If he thought you were dithering in response to his question, he would make the sign of two horns with his pointing and pinkie fingers, indicating “bullshit.” He only needed to say the word once or twice at the beginning of the semester. After that, the gesture was enough. His other tactic was to make you stand, face the class, and recite, “I am ignorant, Mr. Smith.” He believed that no one learned until they acknowledged what they didn’t know.

I struggled in the class, yet it was magic. Mr. Smith spoke musically, with total command of the language. He remains the most fluent English speaker I have ever heard. He insisted that one’s writing and speech be energetic and precise. Find just the right word. Shun pretense and ambiguity. Simple sentences are best, and when you finish writing them, read them aloud—which we did when we read Shakespeare, then other plays or prose. He taught us that written language,