By early spring we were invited to Seton Hall for an interview. I went first. My mother drove me to South Orange, a suburb about a half-hour from downtown Newark. We knew immediately when we crossed the border. On one side, houses were boarded up, the streets were full of litter, and people were hanging on the corner in the middle of the day. On the other, houses and lawns were magazine-cover beautiful, the streets were clean, and the air was quiet.
For the entire ride, I kept wondering whether I could really make it in college. I thought I’d have to be a genius to get in, and I was scared to death. My mother and I found our way to the campus, past the old buildings and perfectly primped lawn, to the basement office of Carla Dickson, the student development specialist for the program. Her smile seemed genuine as she greeted us. My heart started racing like Carl Lewis when she began the questions.
She asked why I wanted to become a doctor. I tried to look calm as I shared with her the story of the dentist who had first sparked my interest in dentistry. She asked questions about my family and background. When she asked where I wanted to work after graduation, I figured she was trying to gauge whether I would be interested in returning to work in a community like the one where I grew up. My dream has always been to open a dental clinic in Newark someday, and that’s what I told her. Later I discovered that I had been right: one of the goals of the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus Program is to train medical professionals to staff hospitals and clinics in urban areas.
Carla met Rameck and Sam in later interviews. I had told her they were my friends and that we wanted to go to college together. When it was Sam’s turn to be interviewed, ever the analyst, he showed up with a list of questions: Would he have to change to fit in at Seton Hall? How would he be able to afford it? What kind of support could he expect from the university?
It was important to all three of us that, no matter where we went to college, we didn’t forget where we came from or change our hip-hop style. Carla tried to reassure Sam that he wouldn’t have to change to succeed at Seton Hall and that, if accepted, he would receive financial aid and counseling from the university. The reassuring tone of the interviews gave us all confidence that we would be accepted.
A few weeks later, I returned home from school and found a letter to me from Seton Hall on the table. I had been accepted to the program. I called Sam and Rameck. They, too, had received acceptance letters.
In the meantime, Rameck had also been accepted to Howard University. The university had even assigned him a room. But when he received a letter asking for a deposit to secure the room, he couldn’t come up with the money before the deadline, and it occurred to him that he would not be able to afford Howard without financial aid. Finally, Rameck and Sam decided that the program at Seton Hall was too good to pass up. We didn’t say anything more to solidify our pact, but from then on our commitment to one another became stronger. We began to plan our future together.
For me, getting accepted into Seton Hall relieved the pressure of not knowing for sure what would happen next. I could finally relax and enjoy my senior year.
In our final days of school, Rameck, Sam, and I did the kinds of things that seniors everywhere do to make memories of their last year.
I took my girlfriend to the prom. Sam and Rameck brought dates, too. Shahid and I put our money together, rented a limousine, and double-dated. The cost of the limo and tuxedo hit my pockets pretty hard, and I didn’t enjoy myself. I didn’t even dance.
My girlfriend and I had been dating for about seven months. I really liked her, and I was a faithful kind of guy. But I was about to embark on the greatest challenge of my life, and I didn’t want any distractions. About a month later, we broke up.
Breaking up with my girlfriend whenever I started a new phase of my life would become a pattern.
And finally, there was graduation.
It was one of few times that I saw my father, who joined the rest of my family in the auditorium at University High. Sam’s and Rameck’s families were there, too. They snapped photos and cheered as we marched into the auditorium in our burgundy caps and gowns. The day was a scorcher, at least ninety degrees, and some of the guys rebelled by wearing shorts, instead of the traditional dress slacks, under their gowns. The three of us played by the rules and wore the traditional attire.
For our parents, this was a historic event. Their sons were not only headed to college, but were planning to become doctors. We had survived the streets of Newark, and that was no small reason to be grateful. Boys our age were dying every day.
Our friend Ahi Baraka had barely survived the year before. A man who had robbed Ahi’s older brother of $3 spotted the brothers riding through the neighborhood about one A.M. the next morning and fired into their car. Ahi, sitting in the passenger seat, ducked when he heard gunshots but was wounded in the head.
Amazingly, Ahi recovered and made it back to school in time to graduate with the rest of us.
I don’t remember much of the pomp and circumstance of our graduation day. But I remember the emotion of it. We all knew our lives were about to change big-time. We all had dreams, but who really knew whether those dreams would materialize? Until that moment, our paths had been set. Elementary school. Junior high. High school.
Now we were on our own.
As I sat in the auditorium as a student at University High for the last moments, I was sad about leaving my classmates. But I also felt calm.
I knew I wouldn’t have to face the uncertainty of the future alone.
George on
PEER PRESSURE
People often ask me how I avoided getting caught up in some of the negative things that many of the guys in my neighborhood were doing when I was growing up. I’ve often thought about that question myself. There wasn’t anything special about me. But I’d have to say that the kinds of friends I chose—positive guys who wanted to do the right thing—made a huge difference in how my life turned out.
In my experience, friends have more influence on one another’s lives than almost anyone else does, especially in those teenage years when kids are trying to discover who they really are. So hooking up with the wrong crowd can really drag you down.
Think about it. Most kids, rich or poor, spend more time with their friends than with their parents. They’re together all day at school. They’re together in the neighborhood after school. And they’re together on the weekends. Maybe they even spend their summers together at summer camp. Their friends define what is acceptable and cool. I’ve never known a kid who doesn’t want to be accepted, myself included. That can be particularly dangerous among boys because something about our makeup or upbringing suggests that to be macho is to be cool. And the wrong set of friends can persuade us that to prove how tough we are, we have to do crazy things, from small acts of defiance or bravado—like shoplifting, daring kids to do things we’d never do ourselves, or bullying—to more serious behavior, like using or selling drugs, getting into fights, stealing cars, robbing people, or worse. That’s why it’s so important to hang with the right people.
As a kid, I aligned myself with guys who thought like me; guys who did their work in school and avoided the negative stuff. And many of the friends I chose in my neighborhood were younger. I guess in some ways that satisfied my need to be accepted, because they looked up to me. I was pretty much winging it back then, just doing what felt right to me. But with hindsight, I realize that avoiding the older, more intimidating boys, and even becoming a big brother to my friends, was an excellent strategy. It allowed me to set the standard in my group for what was cool. I wasn’t into drug dealing, stealing, or scheming, so my friends weren’t, either. There were always other guys doing other things, but they didn’t bother me, and I didn’t bother them.
In high school, I followed the same pattern and chose friends who did well in school but still liked to have fun. That’s what drew me to Rameck and Sam. We had the same core desire to make something of our lives, and we brought out the best in one another. We wer
en’t exactly alike, but that was okay. They never tried to pressure me to indulge. In fact, they never even drank in front of me, so we were cool. I had to put up with some good-natured ribbing every now and then from some of our friends, but I knew it was all in fun. I suppose those were the times when my own confidence came into play. I didn’t like the taste of alcohol, and that was that.
Even though Rameck and Sam would eventually follow neighborhood friends into trouble, I admire them for also having the good sense to recognize that those friends were no good for them, and for having the guts to break away.
I’m not foolish enough to believe that I was able to avoid negative peer pressure alone. In the kind of neighborhood where I grew up, it would have been easy to believe that what I saw was all there was to life. But I had a third-grade teacher who taught me how to dream and to think for myself. I had a friend whose father spent good time with me and made me feel I was worthy of a father’s love. And most of all, I had a mother who worked hard and managed to keep things straight at home.
When I look back over my life and the lives of my friends, I also see that involvement in school and community activities helped us to avoid the negative pull of our peers. I joined the Shakespeare Club in elementary school and the Police Athletic League in elementary and junior high, and I played baseball in high school. Sam took karate lessons from grade school through his early years in high school and also played on our high-school baseball team. And Rameck took drama lessons in junior high school, and in high school he joined the drama club and helped start the United Students Organization. Those activities gave us fun things with which to occupy our minds and our time. But perhaps even more valuable, they provided safe places for us to meet other kids who shared the same interests.
It’s hard to have the confidence, especially in the teen years, to stand up for what you believe is right when people all around you are pulled in another direction. That’s where having positive friendships can really help. If you find the right guys to hang with—guys you trust, who share your values and your friendship—you’ll find that you can stand up to almost anything.
You may even be surprised how much you can accomplish together. I certainly was.
8
SUMMER ODYSSEY
Rameck
I WAS AS EXCITED as a kid going away to summer camp for the first time when Sam, George, and I left home for Seton Hall in June before our freshman year.
We were among the ten students accepted into the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus program that year. All of us had been recruited from urban New Jersey high schools, and we had to spend six weeks of the summer on campus to get some remediation. The goal was to bring us up to par academically with students who would be sitting next to us in class in the fall.
For the first time in years, life would be stable for me, with no more moving from one relative’s house to another. And that felt good. I was finally over my disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to attend Howard University with Ahi and Hasaan. Ahi was a student activist at University High respected by students and teachers. And he was also one of my closest friends.
My uncles, who belonged to the Nation of Islam, and Bill, the barbershop owner, had taught me that I had a responsibility to help my community. Ahi believed that, too. We had the same ideas. That’s what had attracted me to him.
The two of us had grown even closer when we helped plan the student protest against the Board of Education. Ahi and I would sit in his room and talk, like young intellectuals, about the condition of our people. We were pissed that the school system didn’t offer a single class in African-American or Hispanic history, though African-American and Hispanic students made up the bulk of the population in the schools.
On the day of the protest, we felt like civil-rights activists, fighting for something we truly believed in. Some school officials and other detractors suspected that Ahi’s father had put us up to it. But they were wrong.
I knew Mr. Baraka was a poet. Sometimes when I was at his house, he would have functions in the basement, a meeting on some issue or a party with friends reciting poetry to the beat of jazz music. But I didn’t realize until much later that he was one of the nation’s most prominent black intellectuals.
Ahi never mentioned it. I should have figured it out by the way people responded to him. “That’s Amiri Baraka’s son,” they would say.
I saw Amiri Baraka as my friend’s father, who, unlike so many other of my friends’ fathers, was at home with his family, there to give his sons guidance, advice, and, of course,money. It was Mr. Baraka who paid for the limousine when Ahi, Hasaan, and I triple-dated for the prom.
A child quite naturally is influenced by a parent’s philosophies and beliefs, but Mr. Baraka never preached to us or interjected himself into our business. He let us find our own way.
When I heard that Ahi had been shot at the end of our junior year in high school, I had never been so scared. I hadn’t heard anything when I showed up at school that morning, but I noticed an unusual crowd of teachers and students standing outside the school. Some of them were crying.
“What’s going on?” I asked the first person I saw.
When they told me, all I could do was run. I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. My heart beat faster than it ever had. Hasaan and some of Ahi’s other good friends were already standing outside the Baraka home, waiting to hear if he was okay.
Ahi survived, and he would attend Howard University in the fall, when I would begin my freshman year at Seton Hall.
On campus that summer, I was excited to have my own twin bed, a telephone, and a desk. Each room had central air and heat, carpeting, and a bathroom shared with two other suitemates.
Sam and I were roommates, and George shared the same suite with another guy. I tacked oversized posters of rappers to the wall on my side of the room and set up my radio and a small refrigerator that I had bought from my uncle’s swap shop. We kept the radio tuned to a station that woke us each morning to the same song: “As long as you keep your head to the sky, be optimistic….”
Sam said it motivated him.
I needed some inspiration, because my fantasy of a fun-filled summer camp met reality the first week. The program was more like boot camp, requiring more discipline, hard work, and effort than I had ever given anything before.
We rose each day by seven A.M. for breakfast and then headed to the lecture halls for eight A.M. classes. Assessment tests determined the levels of math we took. Sam and I tested into pre-calculus, and George took intermediate algebra. He knew he was just as smart as the two of us, so he would enroll in summer school the following year to catch up. We also took chemistry, chemistry lab, computer skills, and critical-thinking courses that summer.
We were among the 110 EOP students attending summer school that year. The ten students in our group got to mingle with the other students during lunch and dinner and in a couple of large classes, like English. Sam, George, and I walked to class together and usually sat right next to one another. Most of the classes were small, no more than the ten people in the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus program. The professors pushed me to use my brain, which had been in the snooze mode practically all four years of high school. I couldn’t get away with cheating or just skipping homework. I was learning something new every day and found I was eager to learn more. I realized I didn’t mind school, as long as I wasn’t bored.
We studied together in the evenings and compared grades, and we each competed to do as well as the others. When one of us made an A on a test, the other two were like, “Yo, man, I’m gonna get me an A, too.” The three of us managed to keep up with our peers and, eventually, outperform them. When classes ended each day at five P.M., all of the students in the program had to attend a one-hour tutoring session. A team of four tutors, one for each subject, milled around the room and worked with us in the areas where we needed help. The tutors were a mix of professors and upperclassmen, and they covered basic lessons the three of us had missed i
n high school. I loved those sessions. Those guys made even calculus seem simple. Our test scores began rising from the 70s to the 90s.
Our group would take a short dinner break at six P.M., then head for our rooms to study until nine P.M. We weren’t allowed to watch television while we were studying, and we had to keep the doors to our dorm rooms open while our counselors, Maria, Ron, and Tawana, walked the halls to make sure we weren’t goofing off. We even had a mandatory bedtime: ten P.M. The counselors visited our rooms to make sure the lights were out.
They were treating us like babies, and I couldn’t stand it. In time, I would lead a mini-rebellion.
But Sam and I often stayed up talking long after the lights went out, sometimes until two or three o’clock the next morning, a ritual that would continue throughout college and medical school. We spent much of the time just reflecting on how our lives were changing. We also used that time to settle our differences.
“Man, you really pissed me off today,” one of us would say.
Then the conversation would bounce from one side of the room to the other in the dark until we were both satisfied that the issue had been resolved. After that, we were cool again, and I was ready to move the conversation on to more serious stuff, like girls.
Unlike in high school, Sam, George, and I attended every class, did all of the assigned homework, studied together, and made good grades in every subject. I was determined to prove to myself that I belonged here. But I couldn’t look too far ahead. I had trouble believing I would actually become a doctor someday.
Carla Dickson, the counselor who had interviewed us and recommended us for the program, seemed to know intuitively that many of her students felt that way. She offered encouragement the first day of class.
The Pact Page 9
