I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [43]
Memphis has some beautiful public schools. East High School looks like some kind of a palace. It's really incredible. That wasn't the kind of city school I'd known, though. Almost all of mine were nearly identical, big, tired-looking brick buildings with tall windows that opened in five or six horizontal panels all the way down, a sure sign they'd been built before air-conditioning was standard. A teacher could tilt the panels open to catch a breeze when the classroom got too hot, which was anytime from April on. The windows only let in a dirty brown light. Whether they looked so cloudy because they were old or just needed to be washed, I don't know. I just remember that no matter which school I was in, the whole building--the classrooms and hallways and offices--all seemed to have that same kind of dull, hazy light from all of those old windows.
Looking around the hallways at Briarcrest, I noticed that everyone seemed happy. The students were happy, the teachers were happy, the administrators were happy. People seemed like they were glad to be there, and that they were glad you were there, too. It might sound nice, but it actually felt a little weird.
I am a creature of habit. I like things to be set a certain way, and I like to stick to that routine. I don't like a lot of adventure or change or to do anything that goes against the grain. I'm naturally kind of shy, at least at first, and even after I get to know someone I'm still usually pretty quiet. Especially when I'm in a new situation, I like to hang back and evaluate everything, to see how people connect with one another and react, just to get a feel for the flow of things. I would have liked to just blend in the first couple weeks at Briarcrest so I could watch and learn about how to fit in there. But from the time the teachers introduced me to the class to the time the bell rang, I stuck out. I was a giant black kid surrounded by a bunch of shiny pink kids. Not standing out was not an option for me.
There were a couple of other black students at the school, and they pretty much all played sports, so Steve had gotten to know some of them. Not all of them were rich, either. That helped me to feel as if I wasn't a hundred percent out of place, but the school was definitely almost all white and definitely a whole lot better off money-wise than my family. The schools of my experience had always been pretty much all minority students, and the percentage receiving free or reduced-price lunches was about the same.
Briarcrest opened in 1973, and since the Memphis schools were still struggling with integration at that time, I think it probably was established at least partly as a place for wealthy white families to send their kids. Since then, though, they'd done a great job of getting more diverse and enrolling kids of all different colors. Steve had told me that everyone was very friendly and didn't seem to have an issue with his skin color, so that made me feel a little more comfortable as I tried to figure out how I was ever going to fit in.
I soon found out that as much as I tried to blend in (pointless as it was), people were actually really nice to me. I don't think the other kids knew what to make of me at first, but soon I think they saw that I was a pretty gentle guy who was scared to death, and they started waving to me in the mornings as we walked in, or saying hi to me in class. I still didn't say much at all, but I at least knew some names and could smile back.
The dress code at Briarcrest was pretty relaxed then: Shirts had to be tucked in, pants had to belted, and boys had to be clean-shaven. It's probably good that there was no uniform because I seriously doubt there would have been anything that would have fit me; I was well over six feet