Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  I glance at my fellow subfreshmen, slouched on posture-taxing backless seats. On the way to this assembly, we passed giants: cocky boys wearing athletic jackets and girls with breasts filling their tight sweaters. They looked at us diminutive newcomers with expressions of disdain.

  The principal drones on for a while about General John Brown Gordon, whose portrait adorns the school’s entrance. One of Robert E. Lee’s most trusted officers, he took three bullets at the Battle of Antietam and yet continued fighting. In his honor, our school’s sports teams bear the name Gordon Generals.

  After quoting a few lines of Shakespeare, Mr. Craig introduces his vice principal, a football coach with a big chest, a thick neck, and a crew cut. The assembly’s tenor changes as the coach reviews Gordon’s dress code and rules of behavior: no facial hair or blue jeans, no smoking, no chewing gum in class, no physical displays of affection. “I hope we don’t have to meet in my office,” he growls, “but, buddy, you better not cross me, or I personally guarantee you’ll be sorry.” The tough kids snicker.

  * * *

  —

  My first few weeks in high school, I have the sense of stepping into a wider, more dangerous world. Departing the church property for school each day, I cross a threshold to a place where troublemakers smoke cigarettes in the bathrooms and drop lighted M-80s and cherry bombs in the toilets. I try not to gawk at the Playboy pinups posted in some lockers, nor at the couples who flout the rules against public displays of affection.

  Marshall, who has already spent a year in high school, briefs me on the various cliques. Jocks rule at the top of the pecking order, along with their cheerleader girlfriends. The hoods, or punks, cause most of the trouble. They’re the ones who set off firecrackers in the bathrooms and who phone in bomb threats on the day of a big test. You can hear them coming by the click-CLICK of steel taps nailed to the heels and toes of their shoes, and I heed that signal like the rattle of a snake.

  The hoods love to torment wimpy subfreshmen like me. “Hey, what you starin’ at? Yeah, you—I’m talking to you! You don’t think so? You callin’ me a liar? You little queer, git over here, I’ll give you somethin’ to look at.” I learn to hurry from class to class, head down, trying to be invisible.

  Marshall advises me to find some friends among the nerds, bookworms who pose no threat. Yet he hangs out with Malcolm, a skinny little guy, barely five feet tall, who walks with a polio limp and wears the loudest taps in school. Malcolm dresses in black and greases his hair like the hoods, though they would never accept someone like him. Other students give him a wide berth, however, because he carries a switchblade and has proved his manhood by eating live grasshoppers. Also, he has an uncle high up in the Ku Klux Klan. It baffles me that he became Marshall’s favorite companion.

  Before long I witness a colossal clash when the number one hood takes on the number one jock, our school’s golden-boy quarterback. A throaty roar—“Fight! Fight!”—spreads through the hallways as I’m heading to my next class. A hundred students rush in and form a circle to keep teachers away as the two duel over a girlfriend. I watch as the hood grabs the quarterback and bashes his head against a sharp water-fountain nozzle—one, two, three times—and the school hero falls in a pool of blood. The pretty blonde who inspired the combat crumples to the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees, sobbing.

  I soon realize there are really only two groups in high school, winners and losers. I have no doubt which one I belong to. The high school yearbook runs large photos of the seniors dressed in tuxedos and formal wear. Slightly smaller photos show the juniors in sports jackets and dress-up clothes, and even smaller photos capture the sophomores and freshmen in school clothes. Subfreshmen are jammed together fifty-six to a page, as if pasted in by mistake from some elementary school.

  My clothes alone tag me as a loser. “Are you Pentecostal?” a classmate asks me one day. “I just wondered, because you sure dress like one.” Mother can’t understand why I want different colors of socks when white goes with everything. Most of my clothes come as hand-me-downs from Marshall, loose around the waist and short in the arms and legs. We’re both resigned to not fitting in, the price we pay for having a missionary mother. As far as I know, no one else at Gordon lives in a trailer.

  Gym class becomes my least favorite hour of the day. President Kennedy has just launched a fitness program to help us keep up with the Russians, and the coach seems to have mistaken us subfreshmen for Marine Corps recruits. We do calisthenics first for exercise and then for punishment: “Give me fifty push-ups, Yancey, and this time keep your butt out of the air!” Back in the mildewy locker room, seniors creep up behind the underclassmen and pop them with wet towels, hard enough to draw welts.

  Phys ed is also teaching me what it means to be a male. The guys talk about nothing but sports teams and body parts, both the girls’ and their own. If you don’t laugh at their bawdy jokes, they call you queer. When the coach doesn’t show up one day, the toughest hood takes over. “Watch this,” he says, and proceeds to push a straight pin through his hand so that it comes out the other side. We act duly impressed. Next, he attracts a circle of onlookers and charges them a dollar each to watch him stick the pin through his penis.

  At the end of the school day, the cool kids drive home, their cars squealing out of the parking lot. Music blares from the open windows, music unlike any I have heard. Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jimmy Dean, Frankie Valli—a generation gap of sound is opening up. To my ears, accustomed to classical piano, the new style seems wild and seductive. My church labels it satanic and ridicules its “jungle beat.”

  Along with other losers, I take the yellow bus to and from school. I sit on a cracked vinyl seat and hold the metal bar that makes my hands smell like rust. Bullies thrive on the bus. Stick your head out the window for air, and their spit comes flying back at you from a window farther ahead. Throughout the ride, they roam the aisle looking for prey. They are like dogs lunging at the end of a leash, and the bus driver, who holds the other end, doesn’t seem to care. Maybe he, too, is afraid.

  One afternoon the main bully sticks several straight pins through a pencil eraser and walks up and down the aisle whacking kids on the head. When he hits Marshall, my brother grabs the pencil from him and whacks him back. The bully stares at him, his dark eyes wide with shock, his mouth twisting into a wicked grin. “Now you done it,” he says at last. He turns to his friends. “Boys, we’re gittin’ off at a different stop today. This punk here’s made a serious mistake. He needs me to teach him a lesson.”

  At our stop the bully and six of his friends file out of the bus and surround my brother. Some of the neighbor kids stay to watch, and others run home. I race to the church grounds in search of adult reinforcements: “Come quick! They’re ganging up on Marshall!”

  When I run back to the bus stop, I expect to find my brother stretched out unconscious. Instead, I see the bully sitting on the ground nursing a bloody nose. Marshall stands to the side, looking more surprised than the bully, rubbing the knuckles on his right hand.

  The next morning, my brother and protector has his choice of seats on the bus.

  * * *

  —

  The year I enter high school, Georgia’s education system ranks forty-eighth out of fifty states. Our move to the church property, however, has put us in DeKalb County, a school district that belongs among the nation’s elite. The school offers a bewildering variety of courses, and I turn to Marshall for guidance.

  He insists that I sign up for at least two years of Latin. “It’ll teach you proper grammar,” he says. The teacher has us stand up and conjugate verbs—amo amas amat, amamus amatis amant—as a kind of calisthenics, stretching our hands out high and working our way down to our ankles. She is passionate and ridiculous all at once, but she loves Latin, and by the end of that first year, she has us doing free translations of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars.


  I also enroll in Spanish, figuring it’s a lot like Latin. At first we’re taught by a timid woman who speaks in a whisper and seems terrified of her students. She frequently leaves us unsupervised in a language lab, listening to inane conversations over headphones. “¿Dónde está su casa?” “Aquí está mi casa.” Those first weeks must scare the teacher into a new career, because halfway through the school year she quits. The new semester begins with us students sitting in the language lab and no sign of a teacher.

  Suddenly a young brunette with a perfect figure appears at the door. The guys make comments and wolf whistles, thinking a saucy new upperclassman has arrived. She lounges against the door frame for a moment, then she cracks a sly smile and steps to the podium to announce, “Hello, I’m Marta Baskin, your new Spanish teacher.” She tells us she learned the language in South America as a missionary kid—though she doesn’t look like any M. K. I’ve ever seen.

  Since I’m still trying to decide what subjects interest me, Marshall persuades me to take a history class from his favorite teacher, Cecil Pickens, the oddest character in the school. He has some syndrome that gives him an excess of collagen, like the India Rubber Man. He limps badly and looks deformed, with oversized lips and a face that twists into a perpetual squint. “Give him a chance,” Marshall says. “He’ll teach you to think outside the norm.”

  Mr. Pickens gives an assignment on the very first day: “Chapter one in your textbook is quite short. I want you to learn everything in it, and we’ll have a quiz tomorrow.” We practically memorize the chapter, and the next day’s quiz has only one question: Who is the photographer credited for the photo at the top of the chapter? Nobody knows. “I said learn everything,” Mr. Pickens chastises us. “Pay attention in this class.”

  Students either love or hate Mr. Pickens. One day, he disappears, and a rumor spreads that cops have picked him up drunk, with Communist literature in the back seat of his car. Mr. Pickens claimed he was simply exposing his students to other ideas, trying to get them to think for themselves. We never see him again.

  On the first day of biology, I wake up to science. A tall, skinny man with an angular face steps in front of the class and introduces himself as “Doc,” not Mr. Navarre. His classroom is a veritable zoo, with terrariums and aquariums lining the walls, watched over by a complete skeleton of the human body—in the jaws of which some impish student has placed a cigarette.

  Doc begins the class by taking off his shoe, strolling over to one of the terrariums, and holding it in front of a two-foot alligator. Chomp! The shoe is smashed flat.

  “Now, watch,” Doc says. He reaches in the terrarium and puts one finger on the top of the gator’s snout. “You see, this guy has muscles powerful enough to destroy my shoe, but those muscles only work in one direction. Biology teaches these things.” He pauses for two beats, then adds, “And that can be important if you live near a swamp.”

  I may not live near a swamp, but I’ve always lived near woods. From that first day, I feel something stir inside me. Science is not some abstract exercise, like philosophy. It’s a way for me to get better acquainted with the natural world I already love.

  Doc regularly invites students to his home, which doubles as a natural-history museum, and there he rekindles my interest in insects. “Never underestimate insects,” he says. “There are a thousand pounds of living termites—and roughly twenty million flies—for every person on earth.”

  I start carrying a butterfly net and a collection of small jars on my hikes in the fields and woods. In time I have enough specimens to fill two Styrofoam display boards. In the center of the butterfly board I place a spectacular luna moth, a pale green, luminous creature with large feathery antennae and sweeping tapered wings dotted with four eyespots. No one would believe that I plucked it alive off the screen door of our trailer.

  The other board includes several praying mantises (a devil to mount), a fearsome rhinoceros beetle, some water striders, stink bugs, and grasshoppers, as well as my prize, an Eyed Elater click beetle that I pried out of a decaying log. Beneath each specimen I attach a tag noting both its common and Latin names.

  I have a separate display of cicadas, my favorite insect. These creatures with bulgy red eyes have just made their appearance after thirteen years underground. They emerged by the thousands—no, millions—until the air vibrated with a clackety sound, something like the loose belt on a lawnmower. Then one day the sound ceased, and I collected the discarded cicada shells, almost transparent and flecked with gold. I marvel at these odd creatures, who waited longer than I have lived to make their entrance into the world, then laid their eggs and surrendered after barely a month aboveground.

  My enthusiasm for science leads Doc Navarre to recommend me for a summer fellowship at the Communicable Disease Center (CDC), a research complex near Emory University. I fill out forms and write an essay on why I want to pursue a career in science. To my astonishment, I win one of six coveted positions. I have never felt so proud, and so out of my league.

  On my first day at the CDC, I meet the other high school interns chosen from across Atlanta. “Tell us about your scientific experiments,” a senior scientist asks us. A girl from a private school describes the insecticide she developed from an English ivy plant, which won her third place in the national science fair competition. The guy sitting next to me says that in the process of identifying insect-borne diseases, he’s discovered an ingenious way to trap ticks.

  “Really?” asks the scientist. “Tell me more. I send out highly paid workers to collect ticks. It’s very labor-intensive. We drag a blanket through a meadow, and the ticks, who perch on the edge of a blade of grass with their claws out, grab hold. What’s your method?”

  The high school senior explains that ticks are attracted to carbon dioxide, which animals exhale when they breathe. “I leave a block of dry ice in a field,” he says. “The next day it’s melted to a much smaller size, and I can pick out scores of ticks preserved in the dry ice.”

  “That’s brilliant!” the scientist exclaims. “We’ll try it tomorrow.”

  When my turn comes, I mumble something about my insect collection and breeding experiments I’ve attempted with tropical fish and then slink down in my seat.

  That summer fellowship gives me my first experience in the professional working world. The CDC has collected thousands of mosquitoes from a region in Texas where encephalitis has broken out. Most days I sit at a microscope, sorting mosquitoes into trays based on stripe patterns on their wings. Once separated by species, the mosquitoes are ground up, combined with horse serum, and injected into the brains of baby mice. Nine days later the infected mice will show signs of the disease, and then field staff can devise an eradication program for that type of mosquito.

  The microscope assignment makes me feel important, though the sorting process itself gets tedious. Interns can also attend CDC seminars, which prove far more interesting. A rabies expert shows films of horses and dogs staggering around, foaming at the mouth, attacking a lamppost or a piece of lumber. After the film, another scientist etherizes a live rat infected with bubonic plague and dissects it right on the conference table.

  By the end of the summer, I have decided on my career path: to become a microbe hunter, or perhaps an entomologist.

  * * *

  —

  Something else happens to me that summer, and it involves race.

  Growing up in Georgia, I’ve heard all my life that Black people are not like us. They use worse grammar than whites. They think differently and act differently and always will. I’ve never had a Black classmate in school, and the churches I attend only reinforce my prejudice.

  The year I entered high school, nine students integrated Atlanta’s schools for the first time. Over the next few years, other schools in the area admitted Black students, yet not one has set foot on the Gordon campus. Although Black families have moved
into the neighborhood, no parents dare to enroll their children in our high school. Why? We all believe that my brother’s strange friend Malcolm, nephew of the Grand Dragon of the KKK, has single-handedly kept our school all-white.

  Malcolm put out the word that the first Black student to integrate Gordon High would go home in a box. Somehow he got a list of the names of thirteen Black students who applied for a transfer to Gordon, and a few weeks later the KKK burned crosses in their yards. All thirteen changed their plans.

  In the 1960s the Ku Klux Klan is still a force to fear. I remember as a child watching a funeral procession for an Exalted Cyclops or Grand Wizard or some such KKK bigwig. Needing to turn left across traffic, we had to wait until the entire motorcade passed. Dozens, scores, hundreds of cars slid past us, each one driven by a figure wearing a silky white or crimson robe and a pointed hood with slits cut out for eyes. “Don’t stare,” Mother said—but how could I not? The next day’s Atlanta Journal reported that the funeral procession was five miles long.

  I feel twinges of guilt about racism now and then. I wince when our pastor calls Martin Luther King Jr. “Martin Lucifer Coon.” I try not to repeat racist jokes, even though they always bring a laugh. The summer I work at the CDC, however, I feel much more than a twinge—something closer to an electric shock.

  A month before my fellowship, the mailman delivers a packet of materials designed to prepare us interns for the tasks we’ll be performing. I pay special attention to the paper on bacteria-staining techniques because it’s written by the man who will be my supervisor, Dr. Cherry. A timid high school kid, I have no idea how to act around a PhD in biochemistry from an Ivy League school. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

  Though I don’t know much chemistry, I want to sound halfway intelligent around Dr. Cherry. So I diligently study the various procedures involved in his specialty: the Ziehl-Neelson acid-fast stain, Loeffler’s alkaline methylene blue stain, the Wayson stain, and others way over my head.