Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  Voter registration was one of the SNCC’s main goals in the 1960s. One of the unforeseen benefits of the vote is being able to take part in another essential part of democracy: selection for jury duty. All-white male juries dominated this country for a long time. When you register to vote, you give yourself another chance to play a role in the judicial system by becoming a juror.

  In the twenty-first century, Mr. Moses has focused his lens on algebra as the key to unlocking inequality. Numeracy is one of the deciding factors that determine what kind of career someone can have. But it can also prevent children from graduating college, and even high school. Mr. Moses said, “Algebra is gatekeeper.” If you want to participate in a modern economy and go to college, you should have the choice of studying whatever a university offers you. Math is the sentinel that prevents children from studying economics, physics, or engineering. Just as SNCC was a political tool to help black Americans gain political access, he views algebra as the instrument to help fix economic and education inequalities, especially for poor minority students. Now he runs the Algebra Project, of which Fannie Lou has been a member for a long time.

  Mr. Moses’s questions were heartfelt. His words were edifying. His work was inspiring. He was forming bridges to connect the school’s namesake, the civil rights movement, the current political mess, and mathematics.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Moses spoke of incarceration rates. “Why are there so many men of color in prisons? Why were freed black men arrested after the Civil War?” The answer he offered was that black men could be arrested or fined for almost anything. After the abolition of slavery, southern states started using chain gangs to fill the void left by families migrating north to work the fields. Unable to pay their debts, they soon went to prison. There they worked as if they were slaves in subhuman conditions. Prisons would lease prisoners to farms and plantations.

  About thirty minutes into the conversation, Frankie Williams, the sophomore starting point guard, raises his hand. “You know, we are the basketball team.” Mr. Moses may have interpreted this statement to mean, “Hey, we are just a bunch of kids, what can we do?” Mr. Moses didn’t blink.

  “Good. What are you going to do about your school? Your community?”

  Mr. Moses had long ago perfected brinkmanship with large crowds. He had us thinking about the country. He had us thinking about history. He had us thinking about the future. Shamar Carpenter, a senior, and Tyree Morris, a sophomore, were our best three-point shooters. They quietly agreed that something needed to be done. This is how we played. Charles and Walfri, our best rebounders, would catch the fish, and Tyree and Shamar, the ultrafast guards, would fry it.

  “I think we have to take care of ourselves, first and foremost,” Frankie said.

  Frankie, on the other hand, has a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude that directly conflicts with Mr. Moses’s call for us to act for the community collectively. Frankie wants to improve himself, and then he will help others; he sees it as quite dangerous and maybe even a little naive to think you could change someone. Frankie has a conservative streak in him that reminds me of another Bronxite, Colin Powell. Frankie’s love for himself was not selfish; it was for his own preservation. This is how kids like Frankie succeed. They take care of themselves, get good grades, stay away from the gangs and drugs, go to college, and find careers.

  I don’t find Frankie’s unwillingness to help out at all strange, because in general Americans work hard, but we don’t work hard collectively. Mr. Moses was challenging us to ask tough questions about that. How can we work together in a school? In a community? In the classroom and on the court?

  I stepped out of the room, leaving the team with Mr. Moses and a few other teachers. These are the moments when I love to coach. I love it when I am surrounded by my basketball team and basketball has faded into the ether. Mr. Moses was convinced algebra would open doors for children. I’m convinced basketball forces them to sit and pay attention in their algebra and physics classes. They work hard in their history and literature classes so they can play. I felt we were doing similar work: providing children with a quality public education. That night in February, with the playoffs knocking on the door, we were talking about something meaningful, not out-of-bounds plays, not shot selection, and not Friday’s game. The team was engaged with a man who knows firsthand the dark history of this country, a country where men have been murdered and women beaten and families destroyed and jobs lost simply because they wanted to register to vote and be first-class citizens.

  We would win on Friday night. Later, when I asked Walfri what he thought about Mr. Moses, he said, “The first thing that popped up in my mind was that he is quite fit for eighty-two years old.” It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. Walfri had just met one of the titans of the civil rights movement, a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, and he was most impressed with his fitness. Still, it made sense to me. That’s the blessing of life: to be active and interacting with people, trying to fix wrongs, even in the winter of one’s life.

  PART ONE

  THE PRESEASON

  WALFRI

  Walfri Restitullo has a white towel around his neck and securely tucked into his red practice jersey, and he’s bent over, madly pounding the rock against the wood floor. The towel is wet. He’s in his fourth year of high school and he’s working toward his first championship in his final season. Two years ago, if you had asked me what the likelihood was of Walfri being a starter or the captain, I’m not sure I would have said anything. He had a lot of work to do. And he has done that work, the necessary work, to become a very good player. He was cut his freshman year. His sophomore year he played in only a handful of games. His junior year he displayed a brief but dominating excellence that faded right before the playoffs. All these ups and downs seemed to drive him to show everyone that he was a very good basketball player and he was determined to play consistently. He was the player who learned more in a loss than a victory. He was at times outwardly resistant. But inwardly he was disciplined and self-critical. He was always searching for ways to improve himself. As a six-foot-two-inch power forward, Walfri used his intelligence to gather rebounds. He wasn’t able to inhale rebounds off the rim like Charles. Instead he was physical. He wore guys down. He loved to play chess, and he played basketball with a grandmaster’s mind. There’s no doubt in my mind that when Walfri is in his forties, he will be the best player in the Over 40 League. He has a toolbox full of gambits and post moves.

  When I think about Walfri’s improvement, he may be like no other player I have ever coached. He is now working on his post moves. Up and under. Baby hook. Reverse layup. Now he was averaging close to double digits in points and rebounds. The towel now resembles a yoke.

  At this point Walfri looks like a character in Ilya Repin’s painting Barge Haulers on the Volga. Walfri starts at the baseline dribbling two basketballs. Charles is behind him, holding on to Walfri’s hips for added resistance. Charles gets dragged as if he’s in an invisible sled past the free-throw line all the way to half-court. They switch roles. Now Charles has to dribble two balls simultaneously while Walfri crouches down and pretends to be an anchor.

  At seventeen, sometime next season Charles will leave Fannie Lou as the all-time leader in points, rebounds, blocks, and games played. He’s known for his dunks and quiet demeanor. If you were going to go to the beach, you would want to invite Charles. He would carry the coolers, the pails and shovels, inflatable rafts, chaise longues if necessary. Without a doubt, he is the foundation of our defense and offense. Now he is getting a lesson about hard work from Walfri. It seems Walfri carries the success of the team on his back like the towel around his neck. He is his own biggest critic. He works like this all season.

  Fatigue has set in. They do this at least a dozen times. Their toil in this gym is laudable. They enjoy the hard work. After the practice was over, Walfri said, “We have
a lot of work to do.” Only then did I know he could lead us to a championship. He somehow knew that even after a grueling two-hour practice, there was more work to be done. He was like Mr. Bob Moses in that sense. Just because you had gone down to Mississippi and forced the Democrats to include the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the convention as delegates, the work was not done.

  Walfri was impeccably cool. Sometimes too cool for school. More than once he had been seen playing cards or dice in school. He retained some habits he had picked up from his block. “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” he would always declare. “I finished my work.”

  He was right. He always finished his work. He had an above-90 average. Walfri would stop by my room when he felt stressed-out by another teacher. One time he clearly wanted to see if he could tell me his side of the story before an email or phone call could be made. He’d rushed into my room and said, “Coach, you wouldn’t believe what happened.” It was always something minor. He cajoled his teachers or used his phone in class. Never anything sordid, but his responses were defensive, not offensive.

  Usually it was a case of Walfri wanting to see what boundaries he could push. He felt like he was always respectful until someone disrespected him. Then a verbal confrontation might happen. He was a gentleman until he was pushed, poked, and prodded into something he didn’t want to do, like fight. Yet he liked to argue. He was competitive. He wanted to know what you were thinking.

  His first two years on the team were about Walfri pushing boundaries with me. Once, when he was a sophomore, he kept asking me why he didn’t play. I explained to him he practiced slow, so games would be like if he was on a tricycle at the Indy 500. While he had a smooth jumper, it took him some time to release it, and I said it would be something we could work on in the off-season. He didn’t buy it. Therefore he continued to sit on the bench during games.

  In the second quarter of a close game during his sophomore year, he went into a game.

  We were on the road and it was a lively crowd. On the first possession, Walfri caught the ball near half-court and, before he could turn around, was jumped by two defenders who ripped the ball from him and scored a layup. We made eye contact after the play. He knew I was right. After that moment, Walfri and I had a better understanding of each other. He needed to trust me, and I also needed him to play through mistakes.

  “I took strides every day to get better—I practiced any chance I could, morning, noon, and night,” Walfri once told me his senior year. I believed him. He became an essential part of the team. I didn’t intentionally minimize his playing time his sophomore year to maximize his desire to improve and reap the benefits of his heady play his senior year, but it did seem to work out that way.

  He lives with his older brother, younger sister, and mother. His mom is from the Dominican Republic. I never asked about his dad, and Walfri never told me anything about him. He never revealed much of his hardscrabble life in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. He did share an essay with me that he had written. In it were the things he wanted me to know: how much his mom valued education, how much basketball gave him discipline and a drive to improve himself. But it was the first line that stuck me like a pin. “Have you ever had negative influences everywhere you go?” The second line was even more illuminating. “Or having to be worried that there are dangerous people almost everywhere you go?” I was moved by the absolutes in his questions. Everywhere? In the second line he qualifies it with the adverb “almost,” and I would like to think that school, home, and basketball are where he can feel safe.

  “You see and hear things you aren’t supposed to at a young age,” Walfri declared in a text once. The Bronx makes you grow up faster. Fifteen-year-olds mask their real age. Seventeen-year-olds act and function better than most adults I know; they have jobs, cars, some even have children. By nineteen some are ready to retire, having lived a tumultuous life. When you regularly hear about twenty-one-year-olds being murdered, you cannot take your teenage life for granted. Why should it surprise me that when Walfri sees an eighty-two-year-old Bob Moses, he is most impressed that he’s eighty-two? He has seen too many young lives cut short.

  Walfri plays through pain. His knees hurt after practice, but he never complains. During his junior year he caught an elbow at practice that left a large gash near his left eyebrow. He wears a scar there now. He wore a facemask to practice the next day. In the three years he played for me, he didn’t miss one practice. He played sick. He played when things weren’t going right at home. He showed the younger kids what it meant to be dedicated. Basketball is where Walfri went to escape the streets and to avoid trouble. The team all followed his lead and worked hard in practice because of him. Every championship team needs a leader like Walfri.

  LET’S GO!

  Walfri talked a lot about going away to college, about getting out of the Bronx. Without basketball he would need something else to protect him from the streets. College would give him a chance not to stick around the block. As a kid I remember thinking about traveling too. My boyhood dreams were always Melvillean. I wanted a voyage like Darwin, Ulysses, Gagarin, and Melville. I always wanted to be a cosmonaut when I grew up. Since Yuri Gagarin launched into space on April 12, 1961, and my birthday is April 13, 1974, I always thought there was some cosmic connection between us. Right before Yuri was launched into space, he said “Poyekhali,” meaning “Let’s go” in Russian. Interestingly, while Boston remains my birthplace, it is Derry, New Hampshire, that I have to call my adoptive home. Derry is the birthplace of Alan Shepard, the first American in space.

  When we moved there, I thought it was another sign that I was going to go to space. My mother said I was always talking about it. The idea almost got me killed once.

  Dressed in a snowsuit two sizes too big, I sat unbridled in the front seat of my family’s 1975 Dodge Charger, aching with the boredom only a five-year-old knows. My eyes were fixed on the blood-orange flame of the radio, glowing like a fireplace. The danger mesmerized me, even though I knew I would be burned if I touched it. Then the glove compartment stole my attention for a few moments. I turned the bulky silver knob. Open. Close. Open. Close.

  Taking her eyes off the road and peering down at me, my mother warned, “Leave that alone, we are almost home.”

  My attention turned back to the nuclear glow from the radio. My mother had strict rules about touching the radio. When she drove the car, she steered the dials of the FM too. I knew if I touched it, I would get slapped.

  I rested my head on the console and let my mind drift like the floating thighbone in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I pushed the door with my feet. The instrument panel was broken. My mother never knew how fast we were going or how much fuel we had or whether the door was fully closed. I kept pushing the door, although I believed it was locked. What would happen if the door opened? The idea grew in my mind like space. How far would I fly if I opened the door? I sat upright and timed my premature departure. I grabbed the metallic handle, took a deep breath, and pulled. Poyekhali! Immediately I was ejected into space. It is difficult to say how far I traveled; my eyes were closed. When I opened them I was either in orbit or in a snowbank. It was the first time I remember being alone and excited. I escaped and I survived. I was proud of my feeble attempt to be an asteroid or meteor, whichever one rockets across the sky. I can never remember which one is which.

  My mother’s voice pierced the snow mound. Sound can’t travel in space. I was still on earth.

  “Marc! Marc!” my mom was screaming, louder than the time I hid in the clothes rack at Kmart. Her hot, panicked voice was coming closer, and I could feel other people, like satellites, surrounding me.

  My frozen voice couldn’t escape my mouth, never mind the snow cave. I lay silently, listening to the panic in my mother’s voice grow stronger. The snow had swallowed me up. I was shoeless too. I was trapped in the belly of a whale, like Jonah, with wet socks.
The red lights turned the billions of snow crystals the color of blood. But I’m cool staying where I am because I know when she finds me I will be banished to the backseat. There were more people and more lights. Sound doesn’t travel in space.

  My mother found my moon boots, and my first thought was I should have changed the radio station instead.

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  She whacked me on top of my head with the heel of the snow boot. The snowsuit wouldn’t let my arms above my shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” I heard.

  Another gravity-induced smack was applied to the exact same spot. I raised my arms to protect my head, but the snowsuit limited my range of motion.

  The interrogation continued, and it was brutal. I couldn’t even answer the questions before I was leveled. My mom was roughing me up more than jumping out of a moving car did. She continued to hit me in the black night with my snow boot, canceling my career as a cosmonaut. My feet were getting cold. One of the Good Samaritans who’d gathered suggested she take me to the hospital to see if I’d broken anything in the fall. Blind old bat, couldn’t she see I had my snowsuit on?

  “He’s fine.”

  I was fine.

  Mom swatted my head again. “Get in the car,” she said.

  I knew fireflies didn’t fly in the winter. Yet they are everywhere. The stars in orbit made me even dizzier. That was the first time I tried to escape. I owe my life to the person who invented snowsuits.