Citizen Akoy

by Steve Marantz

  Hired by Louisville in 2001, Pitino lost his brother-in-law and close friend, Billy Minardi, a bond trader, in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. He took the Cardinals to the Final Four in 2005 and again in the spring of 2012. He spoke of Louisville’s proud tradition and his optimism for the coming season. He hoped Akoy would choose Louisville and add to the tradition.

  That was it. Pitino and Richardson rose, thanked their hosts, and headed for the door. It was then that Akoy rose and followed Pitino to the door, with Leisha Hammer a step behind.

  “Coach, I know it was your birthday yesterday, and I have a late present for you,” Akoy said. Pitino stopped in his tracks.

  Leisha hissed, “Do not commit. You don’t have to make a decision tonight.” Akoy could not resist. He had seen too many films. This was his Gipper moment: “Next year I’ll be attending University of Louisville.”

  Pitino beamed and wrapped Akoy in a hug as the room lost its collective breath. As several who were there remembered it, Pitino said, “Wow, it’s a great year to be sixty.”

  A loud keening wail broke the silence. “All you could hear was this high-pitched ‘wooooo,’” Scott Hammer recalled.

  Lotte unleashed, as Akoy put it, “a flood of tears.” She had wanted Akoy to go to Nebraska, where she was headed to play softball. Pitino recognized the anguish of a broken heart and said to her, “You can come to Louisville, too. It’s a public school.”

  In fading September light Akoy had picked a college after he had served guests lasagna. Now he made one more decision: to put his arm around Lotte and comfort her.

  15

  Standing Bear and Brando

  Akoy was an insider now, with perks and benefits. As a senior the Central High Foundation (CHSF) hired him at ten dollars an hour to stuff envelopes and chat up alumni at the downtown office and at fundraisers. Executive director Michele Roberts recalled, “I got a call from Keith Bigsby and Eric Behrens asking me to find him work at our office. It was when he was looking at that [prep] school out east. They had promised him money to financially take care of his family. Obviously CHSF couldn’t do that, but we offered him a job so he could earn a paycheck to help with his family’s finances.”

  Adaw’s washing machine broke, Roberts recalled, and Akoy was set to replace it with his first paycheck when alum retail magnates Nelson and Linda Gordman gifted her one. “That way Akoy could use his money for other family necessities,” Roberts said. “It was a culture thing. His mom felt he should be helping to contribute to his family’s financial situation. . . . In the end he was a hard worker and worked well with our other student workers. There was more than one occasion when Eric kicked him out of practice and Akoy would show up at our office saying he was going to work.” He got himself kicked out, she recalled, “because he always wanted the last word or he went through the motions half-assed.” Roberts would drag him back to the gym and have him apologize to Behrens.

  The Jewish Community Center gave Akoy part-time work in its youth basketball program. He became co-president of his favorite club, FBLA. The Sjulins gave him the use of their eldest daughter’s Hyundai after she went abroad to study. The car enabled him to work late at CHSF (where he had his own key), help his mother transport his younger siblings, and navigate the city at his convenience, all with the assurance that a full scholarship awaited him upon graduation.

  Yet even as the system nurtured him, Akoy had doubts. America held out a hand to refugees, sure, but it was slippery, and the ground below was hard. On the day of the presidential election in November 2012, which would give Barack Obama a second term, he wrote, “Truthfully I’m just mad I can’t run for president cause I was born in Africa! #ConstitutionChange US ran by Akoy sounds pretty good! #real.”

  A year before Akoy had unleashed a sarcastic tweet at the Department of Motor Vehicles because its database did not list him as a citizen. The digital error was offensive, Akoy recalled, because “I felt like that just put me in a box: ‘Oh well, he’s not a citizen; he’s in this other category.’ I didn’t like being othered.”

  No surprise then that Akoy took special interest in two senior courses that spoke to his refugee experience. One was Holocaust Literature, taught by Jen Stastny, who had met Akoy as a freshman and knew him as well as any teacher. “I’m sure he pulled strings to get in my class,” Stastny recalled. “He could do that. He was charming, bright, a star. He could get people to do what he wanted.”

  Holocaust Literature examined primary source documents as well as memoirs, such as All but My Life, by Gerda Weissmann Klein, a Polish Jew who had survived six years in Nazi concentration and work camps with “positivity and imagination to keep hope alive.” Students were assigned to write about Holocaust rescuers or about rescuers in other historical events who showed moral courage.

  “Akoy loved that book—he related it to his time in Egypt; that’s what he remembered most,” Stastny recalled. “He talked about being treated badly there for being black. His immigrant experience of moving from place to place seemed to inform him of people who didn’t belong in their own place. That and also his religion made him think about how to live a good life and be an ethical person. His Catholicism was very conservative, very much the words of Jesus: Love thy neighbor.”

  Akoy’s cultural and religious backgrounds were evident in his classroom demeanor, Stastny recalled. “He was disgusted with kids who didn’t respect themselves or their elders and also [didn’t] respect the people in the stories we read,” Stastny said. “One boy was really negative and tried to show off, and Akoy didn’t put up with that kid being disrespectful to me. I had to tell Akoy I could fight my own fights, that I’d been around for a long time. He would treat me like a mom or sister, listen to me and respect me, but also want to take care of me. Part of it was culture—he definitely had to take care of his mom, and he was responsible for his siblings because his dad was away. Also his religion was key to how he believed he should treat women. He struggled with me because I’m not religious, and I’m super-independent and pretty defiant. He would say, ‘Miss Stastny you have to stop.’ I would say, ‘I don’t have to do anything. I can do what I want. I’m the teacher.’

  “As a senior Akoy was more mature than the other kids around him. Maybe that was a function of the roles he had at home and also of Lotte. When he started dating her, he really aspired to be stable and respectable and dignified. And yet he was still kind of a baby in many ways. He would stay after school and try to convince me to do his work for him. I would tell him, ‘Shut up and leave. You can have my time, but I won’t do your work for you.’”

  The other senior course Akoy favored was Omaha History, which introduced him to a nineteenth-century refugee whose quest for justice climaxed down the street from Central. Standing Bear was a Native American Ponca chief whose life, Akoy had to concede, was even more dramatic than his own. His story held up a distant mirror to Akoy’s people in South Sudan and to Akoy. Jay Ball, who taught Omaha History, said Standing Bear “resonates with many of my students on a personal level.”

  The Ponca were a peaceful tribe of about eight hundred who hunted and farmed in northeastern Nebraska. Standing Bear, known to the Ponca as Ma-chu-nah-zah, was born in 1829 and became a chief at an early age because of his leadership abilities. Legend held that his prayers once diverted a powerful storm that threatened to disrupt a sacred dance. In the 1850s the U.S. government began to pressure the Ponca to cede their land along the Niobrara River to accommodate white settlers. In 1875 the government manufactured an agreement to move the Ponca to Indian Territory in Oklahoma, though the Ponca had not agreed.

  In May 1877 the Ponca, then essentially refugees, were sent to Indian Territory, where harsh conditions and lack of basic supplies resulted in 158 deaths, or about one-fourth the tribe, within a year and a half. Early in 1879 Standing Bear resolved to return to the Niobrara to bury his teenage son’s remains. On their journey home, in the depth of winter, he and twenty-seven other Ponca were arrested
at the Omaha Reservation and jailed at Fort Omaha. Standing Bear’s plight aroused the sympathy of the commander of Fort Omaha, Gen. George Crook, and an Omaha newspaperman, Thomas Tibbles. They believed Standing Bear’s rights had been abridged under the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868 to prohibit slavery, and determined that Standing Bear should sue the federal government. They got a federal judge in Omaha, Elmer Dundy, to allow a lawsuit to proceed, which in itself set a precedent.

  Two prominent Omaha attorneys, John Lee Webster and Andrew Jackson Poppleton, agreed to represent Standing Bear pro bono. The two-day trial began on May 1, 1879, at the courthouse at Fifteenth and Dodge, five blocks from Central High, then known as Omaha High. On the first day Standing Bear testified, through a translator, and contrasted the plentiful life of the Ponca in Nebraska with their suffering in Indian Territory. On the second day plaintiff attorney Webster focused on the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment—to promote and protect individual liberties. The amendment, Webster argued, applied to Standing Bear and the Ponca, and it made “an Indian who was born in this country and who did not owe allegiance to any other form of government a citizen beyond all dispute.” In response the government attorney argued that “the Indian—as far as the law was concerned—was neither a citizen nor a person, and so he couldn’t bring a suit of any kind against the government of the United States.” The government argued that Judge Dundy had erred in permitting Standing Bear’s lawsuit.

  Rebuttal came from Standing Bear’s other attorney, Poppleton, who argued that U.S. laws must extend to Native American tribes, that they were not wards of the government, and that they most certainly had rights. To deny Standing Bear the right to sue, he argued, was to deny he was a human. Poppleton recounted Standing Bear’s vow to bury his son in his old home.

  “That man not a human being?” said Poppleton. “Who of all [of] us would have done it? Look around this city and State and find, if you can, the man who has gathered up the ashes of his dead, wandered for sixty days through a strange country without guide or compass, aided by the sun and stars only, that the bones of that kindred may be buried in the land of their birth. No! It is a libel upon religion; it is a libel upon missionaries who sacrifice so much and risk their lives in order to take to these Indians that gospel which Christ proclaimed to all the wide earth, to say that these are not human beings.”

  By the time Poppleton finished, court had been in session for twelve hours. Before adjournment Judge Dundy announced that Standing Bear wished to address the court. In a climactic moment, Standing Bear went to the front of the courtroom and faced the audience. He extended his right hand and held it for all to see and then turned to the judge and spoke, his words conveyed by a translator. “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain,” Standing Bear said. “If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both.”

  History does not say if Standing Bear knew of Shylock’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice—“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? . . . If you prick us do we not bleed?”—but he had delivered a Native American version. Many in the courtroom were brought to tears, and even the judge and General Crook were visibly moved.

  Judge Dundy gave his verdict ten days later. The Fourteenth Amendment, indeed, gave Standing Bear the right to expatriate himself from his tribe and from Indian Territory. The government had no legal right to send him back to Indian Territory. He concluded: “An Indian is a PERSON within the meaning of the laws of the United States, and has therefore the right to sue out a writ of habeas corpus in a federal court.” The Ponca had been illegally detained in violation of their constitutional rights and “must be discharged from custody, and it is so ordered.”

  Thus with a stroke of the judge’s pen, the Ponca were transformed from refugees into citizens. Standing Bear buried his son near his home on the Niobrara. He toured the East Coast as a lecturer on Native American rights, and after prolonged legalities over who owned what and how much, he lived next to the Niobrara until his death in 1908.

  More than 130 years later Standing Bear’s landmark case inspired Akoy in Central’s Omaha History class. “It’s a story of injustice, resolve, perseverance, love for family, and ultimately the recognition that we are all humans, and despite some external differences, we are similar in our pursuits,” Ball said. “I am sure Akoy was able to relate many of his own life experiences to the plight of the Ponca.”

  Standing Bear’s legacy had a special connection to Central, and oddly enough, to Hollywood. In the late 1890s Standing Bear’s attorney John Lee Webster hired as a secretary Bess Pennebaker, a young widow and mother. Webster’s progressive causes—civil rights for immigrants and blacks and voting rights for women—became Bess Pennebaker’s as well. She married an Omaha businessman, Frank Myers, and in 1912 enrolled her daughter, Dorothy “Dodie” Pennebaker Myers, at Central. As a fifteen-year-old Dodie Myers fell in love with seventeen-year-old Marlon Brando, who also may have attended Central, though he was not a graduate.

  Dodie graduated from Central in 1916, married Marlon in 1918, lived on the West Coast for a time, and returned to Omaha in 1922. Their third child, Marlon Brando Jr., was born in 1924. Dodie shared her mother’s passion for reform—of child labor laws, education of unwed mothers, health and safety standards, and working conditions for migrants—and when her pet issues were on the ballot, she handed out pamphlets and gave speeches.

  Dodie struggled with alcoholism, which stained Marlon Jr.’s childhood. But she handed down to him the social conscience of her mother, as well as the acting bug. Dodie Brando was a mainstay at the Omaha Community Playhouse, founded in 1924, where she starred in its first play, The Enchanted Cottage, in 1925. The cast included Jayne Fonda, whose brother Henry Fonda was a 1923 graduate of Central. Dodie recruited Henry to play the juvenile lead for You and I, to open the 1925–26 season; it helped launch him as one of the most iconic actors of the twentieth century. Fonda played opposite Dodie in Beyond the Horizon, for which she won rave reviews. When Dodie Brando and her family moved to Illinois in 1930, she left an indelible imprint on the playhouse. In 1930 Henry Fonda returned to guest star in A Kiss for Cinderella alongside thirteen-year-old Dorothy McGuire, who was a freshman at Central and who went on to a distinguished career on Broadway and in Hollywood.

  For his part, Marlon Brando Jr. went on to become one of the most influential and eccentric actors of the twentieth century. He won his first Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as dockworker Terry Malloy in the 1954 film On the Waterfront. In the drama about corruption in New York’s longshoremen’s union, Malloy is called upon to testify against the mob-connected union boss and wrestles with the decision to be a “rat.” Director Elia Kazan wrote the film as an allegory and critique of the “blacklist” that sought to root out alleged Communists from Hollywood in the postwar years and to expel writers, directors, and actors as refugees of a sort. The progenitor of the “blacklist,” the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), would come to be seen as an assault on the democratic values it claimed to represent.

  The role of Malloy was in Brando’s political wheelhouse, as he embraced the politics of tolerance and inclusion taught him by his mother and grandmother, and he was public about it. In 1963 he participated in a Freedom Ride in the Deep South and in the March on Washington, where he stood on the dais with Martin Luther King. In the late 1960s he gave money to the Black Panther Party.

  In the early 1970s Brando took up the cause of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in a karmic link to Standing Bear. When Brando won his second Academy Award for Best Actor in 1973 for his role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, he famously used the Academy Awards ceremony to protest the ongoing siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and Hollywood’s historical “defamation” of Native Americans. He sent as his proxy Sacheen Little Feather, an actress with
Native American lineage, to deliver a statement he wrote. The show’s producer prevented Little Feather, who appeared in traditional Apache attire, from reading the full four-page statement on camera. Instead, as Brando wrote in his autobiography, “Under great pressure she had to ad-lib a few words on behalf of the American Indian, and it made me proud of her. I don’t know what happened to that Oscar. The Motion Picture Academy may have sent it to me, but if it did I don’t know where it is now.” Brando’s autobiography, published in 1994, was titled Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me.

  Standing Bear’s and Brando’s legacy rolled forward. John Trudell, a Santee Sioux born in Omaha and raised near the Ponca ancestral lands, was an activist and national chairman of the AIM from 1973 to 1979. In the 1980s and 1990s Trudell was a poet, musician, actor, and eloquent voice for Native American identity and pride. Along the way he met actress Marcheline Bertrand, with whom he shared a relationship.

  In the late 1990s Bertrand’s daughter, Angelina Jolie, rose to stardom as an actress. Her career took off in 1999, when she won the Best Supporting Actress award for her role as a mental patient in Girl, Interrupted. In 2000, while filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia, she learned of the Khmer Rouge genocide of the late 1970s, and it sparked her concern for refugees. Early in 2001 Jolie approached UNHCR and expressed her desire to help. She paid for field trips to refugee camps in Chad, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Cambodia, and Pakistan, and in August 2001 UNHCR gave her the honorary title of Goodwill Ambassador.