Читать книгу The Education of an Idealist - Samantha Power, Samantha Power - Страница 11

I started at Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1983, about a year before my father died. Once again, I was showing up at a new school in a new city where people spoke differently than I did—this time with Southern drawls. When Mum dropped me off, however, I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only new kid arriving that day.

Reporters hovered in the vicinity, waiting to see whether angry white parents would try to impede the arrival of hundreds of new African-American students. As I approached the main entrance, these students—who ranged in age from twelve to seventeen—were filing off a long row of school buses.

Some walked into the school seemingly determined to ignore the uproar that their arrival at Lakeside was causing. A few wore headphones and swayed to music as they disembarked, perhaps shielding themselves from the commotion. Others, less bold or armored, looked like they wished they could retreat back onto the buses.

When Mum and Eddie had moved to Atlanta, they had chosen our suburban neighborhood based on the reputed quality of this two-story public high school, known to be one of Georgia’s best in both academics and athletics. They hadn’t realized, however, that Lakeside was caught up in a long-running fight between black and white Atlantans about the area’s public education system. Just as we made Georgia our home, this conflict erupted into a racially charged firestorm.

While the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had found racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, the DeKalb County School System, like many school districts in the South, had remained largely segregated in practice. After a 1972 lawsuit challenging the district’s practices, DeKalb launched what it called the “majority-to-minority” (M-to-M) transfer program. The program allowed African Americans who were a racial majority in their local schools to transfer to schools outside of their neighborhoods, where they would be in the minority. Because DeKalb school officials had initially done little to encourage black students to participate in the program, there were few takers, and the student body of Lakeside remained more than 80 percent white.

Not long before we moved to Georgia, however, the district court ordered DeKalb schools to begin providing free busing across the county. This transportation made participating in M-to-M more viable, and hundreds of African-American students applied to transfer out of lower-performing schools. Black parents sought out Lakeside for the same reason my mother had: they wanted their children to have the opportunity to thrive in a school with a stellar reputation.

In 1983, when more than three hundred African-American families signed up to send their children to Lakeside, the school district turned most of them down. The district’s rationale—backed by vocal, impassioned white parents—was that Lakeside needed to maintain its student/teacher ratio of 26 to 1. To our newly arrived family, however, it seemed clear that the opponents wanted to prevent Lakeside from being more racially integrated.

Several hundred white parents mobilized to create a group they called Parents Demand Quality, which supported the district’s decision to turn away a substantial number of the African-American transfers to Lakeside. In turn, their parents filed a motion with the district court, claiming that blocking their children from transferring was “based on race, not space.” The DeKalb NAACP raised the case with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which agreed to investigate. In the end, the African-American parents won their appeal; my class, Lakeside High School’s class of 1988, became the first in the school’s history in which black students outnumbered whites.

While Lakeside offered my African-American classmates more experienced teachers and better-maintained facilities, getting to know the students in the M-to-M program offered a lesson in the denial and assertion of dignity. I had heard priests talk about dignity at Mass: the Catechism insisted that the “dignity of the human person is rooted in his or her creation in the image and likeness of God.” And my years in Ireland, complemented by Eddie’s history lessons, had taught me plenty about British occupiers’ attempts to trample Irish dignity.

While the M-to-M program gave my black classmates great opportunities, it also placed heavy burdens on their dignity. By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when I would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying before nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home, which meant navigating a complex Atlanta public transportation system that would have daunted most teenagers.

To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program.

During the eighth grade, when the dramatic shift in Lakeside’s demographics occurred, I occasionally heard my white classmates complain about “grease” they claimed to have found on their desks—a dig at African-American students who wore Jheri curls. A friend of mine overheard a group of teachers crudely joking that the English department should begin teaching Ebonics, “so that we can properly communicate in their language.”

As the school’s black population expanded, the court ordered more black teachers to be hired, a decision that prompted a number of white parents to complain that they did not want their kids taught by African Americans. Others went so far as to pull their children out of Lakeside entirely, transferring them to the private, largely white Catholic schools in the area. Some members of the faculty embraced the changes; those entrenched in their views did not budge. One defiant white teacher, who had been open about her opposition to the large number of African-American transfers, was overheard in the faculty lounge saying that it was impossible to get through to her black students. “They say prejudice is learned,” she griped to her colleagues. “Well, trying to teach blacks here, I have certainly learned it.”

Mum and Eddie saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” At the kidney dialysis unit, the same senior physician replaced a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., with that of a Ku Klux Klan leader. My brother became friends with an African-American boy named Dorian who often came over to our home after school. On one occasion, a neighbor called my mother at work to warn her that she had seen a “darky” at our house. Both Mum and Eddie made clear to Stephen and me how horrified they were by the prejudice they encountered, and they encouraged us to speak up when we heard such racist barbs.

I did not discuss with my black friends the more entrenched symbols of racism around us. Some Lakeside students thought nothing of affixing Confederate flag bumper stickers to their cars. School field trips made their way to Stone Mountain, Georgia’s 1,600-foot-tall granite behemoth, into which the Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson had been carved. Only decades later did I learn that the monument had been commissioned by segregationists and was the scene of numerous Klan gatherings over the years. Georgia’s history of lynching and violent racism was routinely ignored or minimized in our school history lessons.

For all of high school, I sat next to Preston Price in homeroom. Preston, who became a good friend, was black and gay, a rough combination in a staunchly conservative school in a white, suburban, evangelical neighborhood. By our junior year, my best friend, Sally Brooks, and another dear friend, Nathan Taylor, had also come out, meaning that three of my closest high school friends were gay. From today’s more progressive vantage point, it is hard to convey just how unusual these revelations seemed at the time—and how brave my friends were. I saw how each of them agonized as they tried to figure out how to tell their family members and classmates; and I saw the excitement and heartbreak of their crushes and romantic foibles as they lived them, just as they witnessed and coached me through my own.

These early exposures didn’t dim my wonderment at the United States, but they opened my eyes to my new country’s struggle to manage difference.

WHATEVER THE CLASHES OF IDENTITY going on around me, I generally did what my life had taught me to do up to that point: I rolled with events and did my best to adapt. I was a conscientious student, doing homework on time and performing reasonably well on tests. I knew that getting into a top-tier university would require high standardized test scores, so I threw myself into expanding my vocabulary, preparing flash cards with unfamiliar “SAT words,” and eventually getting a score high enough to give me a chance in selective admissions processes. Although I later developed into a strong student, my drive was then more evident when playing sports. Lakeside was an athletic powerhouse, sending prospects to Division I college teams and occasionally even to the pros. As the starting shooting guard on the basketball team, I spent entire afternoons and weekends shooting thousands of baskets.

I juggled my immersion in school and sports with part-time jobs, starting at the fast-food chain Del Taco, followed by stints at Sizzler and Frëshens yogurt. Lakeside also had an avid party scene. A few basketball teammates introduced me to 7-Eleven Big Gulps of Fanta soda spiked with vodka, which I consumed with enthusiasm, although I let nothing jeopardize my game-time performance.

Luckily, my high school antics never got me into any lasting trouble. Mum, however, incessantly reminded Stephen and me that alcoholism was “in our genes.” And although I never came close to developing a drinking problem, my dad’s excessive consumption had so warped my frame of reference that I viewed myself as a teetotaler by comparison.

What it meant to be an alcoholic was also no longer solely defined by my father’s destructive habit. Eddie, too, was afflicted with the “good man’s curse.” Back in Pittsburgh, my mother had tried to rationalize his drinking as being very different from my father’s. “He just has pathetically low tolerance,” she would say. While my dad had drunk far larger quantities, Eddie’s inebriation was more demonstrative. He loudly recited Irish poetry and sometimes passed out after just a couple glasses of wine (“Oh no,” my mother would mutter, “the head is going down!”). The worst smell of my childhood—which to this day I associate with the pungency of my disappointment at his relapses—was Eddie’s breath on nights when he tried to cover up the odor of spirits with Listerine.

My dad never really admitted he had a problem, but Eddie recognized his. He made repeated efforts to stop drinking. For years, he climbed on and off the proverbial wagon. After my dad’s death, and because of Eddie’s challenges in staying sober during those years, I became hawkishly vigilant for signs that “the drink” might be acquiring power over me too.

Although Stephen had spent only five years in Dublin, he had inherited many of our dad’s traits and habits. He was growing up to be strikingly handsome, with ocean-blue eyes, dark hair, a lanky, athletic build, and a wide—and selective—smile that melted hearts. In 1988, after I graduated from high school, Mum and Eddie moved with my brother to Brooklyn, where they had found new jobs. There, Stephen would occasionally get stopped on the street and asked whether he had considered modeling.

Although Stephen did not start drinking or using drugs until after I left for college, he began to withdraw from Mum and me while I was still at Lakeside. If I was a joiner, like my mother, embracing new challenges and people, Stephen had just two great passions: dogs, which he said were more reliable than people, and fishing, which he did for hours by himself. He had long ago declared to me, “I’m not like you,” and, despite his probing mind, never studied much in school. Despite this, he cheered me at my basketball games and never seemed to resent Mum’s and Eddie’s celebration of my academic successes.

After basketball practice one day during my senior year, I arrived home to find Stephen, then thirteen, beaming at our dining room table. He had laid out the half dozen response letters from the colleges to which I had applied. I could see in an instant that the letters from Stanford and Princeton were thin, but I was focused on the much thicker, ivory envelope with the navy “Y” and a New Haven return address. I had unexpectedly gotten into Yale University, a dream destination. “Congrats, sis!” Stephen said, grinning, as I jumped up and down and stole a rare, if awkward, hug.

Despite coming at a heavy cost, Mum’s decision to move to America had opened up a whole new world for me. I knew that attending Yale would do the same. But almost as soon as I ripped open the envelope and confirmed my acceptance, I began to imagine all that could go wrong. While I could adapt to any new environment, I did so with the latent conviction that nothing great could last.