A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [16]
If A. O. Smith became my surrogate father, then June Elam was my surrogate mother. In the early 1970s, June was an upper-middle-class black resident of Milton, a rarity. All three of her children were students at the school. I now joke that I started out dating her elder daughter and ended up in love with her mother, but that’s not much of an exaggeration. Tall, with sharp features and a small, intimate voice, June is the most giving individual I have ever known. The first time I met her, late in my sophomore year, in 1972, she asked for my mother’s telephone number. She promptly called and told my mother to take comfort in knowing that another black family lived only a mile from Deval’s dormitory and he would always be welcome in their home. My mother said that call was the answer to her prayers.
June was that for me, as well, in ways large and small. I had trouble finding a barber nearby, so she drove me to Roxbury, a largely black neighborhood in Boston. I delivered newspapers on and near the campus, and during one brutal snowstorm she drove me to all my customers. I did what I could to reciprocate. Using oversized poster boards, I created a Mother’s Day card for her with a sentimental inscription. Once I saved enough money to hire a limousine to take us to a famous seafood restaurant in Cohasset. She made a point of amicably protesting these actions, but I took great pride in showing my gratitude.
June seemed undeterred by the same racial contradictions that initially bedeviled me at Milton. She was married to a politically connected lawyer from a prominent Roxbury family and lived in a sprawling ranch house on a landscaped acre. In Milton, she attended parents’ meetings, teas, and dinner parties; in Roxbury, she participated in church and community gatherings. Her personality seemed to transcend place. She was exactly the same giving, open soul wherever she happened to be.
She seemed to treat race as other people’s problem. If I walked through town to her home, I would almost invariably be stopped by the police and asked for identification. It was humiliating to have to explain that I was just walking to a friend’s house or to the convenience store and was not the thief they presumed I was, casing the neighborhood. It helped a little when the school issued identification cards. Once a cruiser pulled up behind another student and me when we were strolling on Randolph Avenue and put on his blue lights. A young, gruff officer with sunglasses swaggered over to us, asking what business we had in the neighborhood. “We’re just walking up to the Curtiss Compact,” I said. When he asked for identification, I took unnatural pride in displaying my card, showing I was in fact a resident. After many months of this ritual, however, my pride turned into resentment at having to show identification at all. June seemed to take it all in stride. “That’s their problem,” she’d say. “You know who you are, don’t you?”
At that moment, I’m not certain I did know exactly who I was or where I belonged, but I was feeling more comfortable with myself and the different worlds I was straddling.
June herself was working her way through an unhappy divorce. She was worried about the impact on her own kids, so we spent hours talking about what my parents’ separation was like for Rhonda and me. It helped her, but it also helped me recall and retire many feelings. Like A. O. and Aubrey Smith, June was conspicuous with her love. What I had been missing! I drank it in.
In my senior year, I was sitting in trigonometry class one morning when one of my classmates walked in with a hangdog look and sat down next to me as the teacher began his calculations at the board. Will Speers was a year behind me, and I didn’t know him well, but I saw he was hurting. Motioning with my hands, I asked what was wrong. Will picked up a tall Styrofoam cup left over from midmorning coffee and wrote on it: “She doesn’t like me anymore.