Susan called Dad and began packing my things into the Samsonite. The high school principal arranged a liaison. Dad would pick me up and whisk me away. The question was, where? Nearing retirement, happily married to his third wife, the last thing he wanted was a teenager in his house. I didn’t want to return to Los Angeles, I think I told him, where I had been miserably lonely staring at the television or ambling through the apartment complex. California was a continent away from my friends. I wanted to stay where I was, finish high school, go to college, then maybe to law school. I would somehow end up successful, secure like all the other white middle-class kids I knew, far away from my New Orleans childhood.
My father and I flew south for the simple reason of figuring out where I should go. His goal was to dispose of me in some reasonably suitable way. I was too young to live on my own, so abandonment was not really possible. Ending up in foster care would mark us as white trash, violating some unwritten mythic rule of the lower middle class and its pretensions to familial fidelity. Something had to be arranged.
Mom never asked me to stay with her. I suspect she refused when Dad popped the question. Or my father, looking at the stack of dirty dishes and the roaches and general dishevelment, sought an alternative, realizing he’d be back on the plane within a few months trying to pick up the pieces the best way he could. The visit less than a year earlier hadn’t worked, so I guess moving to New Orleans wasn’t an option. Phone calls ensued, an arrangement was struck. The next day I boarded a plane to Houston, to my sister Kinta and her husband Mike. A few months later we moved to Dallas.
Kinta and Mike had met at the Playboy Club. She soon dropped out of college, married him, and landed a job working as a stewardess for Continental Airlines. Mike bounced from one job to the next, raging that the world had somehow served him poorly: traveling salesman, filling station owner, carting newspapers around in the early morning, jobs that never lasted very long. Abandoned by his father, Mike had changed his last name when he turned eighteen, choosing a popular writer of spy novels whose suave, solitary hero had the best girls and the fastest cars and was always in complete command.
I needed a roof over my head. Anything was preferable to ending up in foster care, or worse. Dad would redirect the child support check to Texas, and I would work to help pay my way. I was expected to leave just as soon as I turned eighteen, and I was fine with that.
Dad jetted back to Los Angeles. I wouldn’t hear from him again for nearly three years.
The late teens can be a particularly fragile period. This was certainly the case for me, as it is for many Americans. Usually things work out in the end, though as parents we often worry ourselves sick watching our children stepping into adulthood. But some really do go astray. Psychosis, for example, very often first appears in adolescence, especially schizophrenia, which most scientists believe is tied to abnormal levels of neurotransmitters inside the brain. Over 13,000 teenagers die each year in the United States, the vast majority of them violently: car crashes, murder, unintended injuries from reckless behavior, and especially suicide. Sometimes these tragedies are simply the consequence of one bad decision, or the horrible chance of being in the wrong place.
Some kids seem unable to create those stories of the self necessary for adulthood and the separation from childhood, stories that somehow help create the inner compass needed for discovering their future. They struggle finding out who they are. Adolescents with traumatic childhoods are especially vulnerable. Psychologists working with adolescents theorize that our childhood pasts—particularly our early attachments to parents—become an important if not always conscious part of the way we begin conjugating our lives. Somehow the past insinuates itself into the complicated work of becoming an adult. The developmental failures and weaknesses of childhood return, in many instances leading to mental anguish, even breakdown.
The psychological transformations of adolescence are related to changes within the brain, although the precise relationship is the subject of ongoing research and debate among psychologists and neuroscientists. The adolescent brain undergoes terrific alteration; it may well be that these changes are somehow tied to the onset of some mental diseases. Total cerebral matter peaks in the years between about ten and twenty, usually a bit later for boys than girls. Certain neurotransmitters flood the organ. Dopamine pathways, for example, spread from the middle of our brains toward the front of our heads. Studies have identified dopamine as important to brain functions relating to memory and mood. The chemical may also play a role in neural plasticity. Neural connections flourish within the adolescent brain. Dendritic forests appear in critical areas, creating the potential for more developed forms of consciousness and higher level reasoning. The brain also prunes redundant connections, while increased myelination enhances neural transmission. The frontal lobes mature. More generally, the brain attains a greater and more permanent and refined level of organization. Our brains become wired for adulthood.
New research suggests that the development and distribution of dopamine neurons likely is tied to the evolution of human cognition. A 2008 study showed that chimpanzees and humans, but not other apes, have certain dopamine neurons in select cortical areas important to cognition that also indicate plasticity. Scientists reconstructing the genetic history of our species have identified important changes in the periods around 300,000 to 500,000 and 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, eras associated with hominid and human migration. The more recent dates are especially intriguing, since this is the time anthropologists have identified with a revolution in human consciousness, what some have called the “big bang” or the “great leap forward” in our species history. We began burying our dead, fashioning jewelry, telling stories in paint laid upon the walls of caves.
Psychologists refer to the neurological changes inside the adolescent brain, particularly those unfolding in the prefrontal cortex, as the development of “cognitive complexity.” We can see this in the endless conversations adolescents have with their peers, in the constant pronouncements followed by indecision, and in the bumptious relations with adults. What begins emerging are narrative structures or “scripts” whereby abstract thinking allows the adolescent to develop not only a sense of self, but a sense that in important ways they “own” that self. This sense of ownership or agency, and its attendant declarations of independence and life in the present and future tenses, is central to the development of adulthood.
None of this is straightforward. Separating from the past, saying good-bye to childhood, also means some sort of engagement with it. Adolescence is a mess, a marvelous, often terrifyingly confusing mess. Identity is pretty much a work in progress. During adolescence the question of who one really is can seem remarkably unclear and subject to seemingly endless revision. Neuroscientists used to explain this mess by arguing that the ongoing growth of the prefrontal cortex meant that teenagers were not always capable of rational decision-making. At the anatomical level, however, the situation is far more complicated. There are, for example, important changes unfolding within the limbic system, which plays such a vital role in emotion and memory. One result of this is an increase in what neuroscientists describe as “emotional reactivity,” and particularly an attention to danger. Studies show that the amygdalae seem to be especially active in adolescents.
In other words, various areas of the brain are maturing, but not always at the same pace, and all of it in some sort of relation to the rest of our bodies and the surrounding world. This discordant symphony of neurological development may explain why teens sometimes engage in risky behavior even if they know better. This usually exasperates parents, who naturally worry about their child’s safety. Riskiness, however, may be absolutely important to becoming an adult and likely has an evolutionary component. Teens are, as nearly fully formed animals, descendants of those willing to take a risk to secure a source of food or desired mate. It may well be that we can only become autonomous selves by taking chances.
My recollection of the eleven
months in Texas feels as if it is a past that is not really my own, or that in some sort of hiatus I inhabited a disavowal, a life slightly removed from my self. Memories appear like Polaroid snapshots you discover at an estate sale drifting at the bottom of some box with the assorted bits and pieces of someone’s life. Nothing seems like me. A scrawny boy with a shag of dark hair pumps gas, changes oil, and plugs holes in tires at a Phillips 66 station in Houston’s sweltering heat. At the back of Spencer’s Gifts in a Dallas shopping mall stands a young man selling fiber-optic lamps and Day-Glo posters. He watches the lamps shift from one color to the next and then back again, punches his timecard, goes home. A student sits on a folding chair at assembly, speaking to no one as the cheerleaders in their pleated skirts bounce down the aisle.
Simple chronology determines that I graduated early, a decision I think I made myself. School in Tunisia, followed by California and Maryland, had accelerated my education. Texas standards were low. I just needed a few more classes. I have no a copy of my diploma, don’t even remember the name of the school. I just wanted out.
The months unfurled. My father’s legal commitment to provide child support ended once I turned eighteen. I would be on my own. I was hopelessly lost. Kinta mentioned Dallas Community College; others simply shrugged. I have the faint recollection of saying that I wanted to return to Maryland, where I could attend one of its public institutions as a state resident. Although we had not spoken, Susan had filled in the forms for the University of Maryland, College Park. And she had done something more, submitting my name for a state scholarship that would cover the costs of tuition. Estranged, she had nonetheless come to my rescue once again. I was going to college.
EIGHT
LESSONS
I SAT AT A LONG WOODEN TABLE, HUNCHED OVER BOXES of records stored in an old Edwardian building that leaked every time a storm rushed ashore. Drops of water fell from the domed ceiling into metal trash bins that dutiful attendants had placed around the reading room. One drop turned to three or four, each catching the light on its way down. The metallic pinging sounds turned sonorous, mournful even, as though the archives were weeping.
Outside people spoke of revolution, chaos, violence, civil war. In the closing months of 1984, South African troops had gone into the townships to restore order. Soon the government declared a national state of emergency. There were massacres, mass arrests, disappearances, plumes of smoke rising from South Africa’s war zones. The woman who lived in the apartment above me taught at the university and in the evenings helped plant bombs and distributed AK-47s to her comrades in the townships.
In the evenings I attended political meetings and during the weekends went to the funerals of people who died by government violence. But each morning I arrived in the archives with sharpened pencils and a stack of blank notecards, possessed by some need, even a feeling of obligation, to transcribe words penned centuries ago, sneaking in early until frustrated archivists bolted the door shut. I pored over the remains of the past believing I might grasp something that always, it seemed, lay just out of reach, the memories and traumatic experiences that might reside in words never intended to be housed in an archive or read by others.
The documents seemed endless: the correspondence of colonial officials stationed on the empire’s far-flung frontier, the proceedings of thousands of Africans brought before the Law, the pleadings of people made strangers in the land of their birth, the deaths of tens of thousands, the journals, diaries and letters of the dead. Sometimes the writing was nearly indecipherable. Clever merchants diluted their stores of ink. Words disappeared into the paper, faded beyond recognition. Silence and loss lived amidst the millions and millions of pages and billions of words, something always missing, some persistent emptiness. Dirt and dust spilled onto my hands and drifted into my lungs. Documents occasionally fell apart before me, as if time had eroded the past beyond recognition. A letter might end abruptly with a tear or with paper turned into charcoal that left one’s fingertips smudged black, its author unknown. For days my hands smelled of a fire a century or more ago.
I took my notes. There were lonely, feverish nights surrounded by fragments of the past mistakenly bequeathed to the present. What might these bits of paper hold? What secrets did they keep? What remained forever lost? I wanted to be able to explain the horrors that unfolded and were still unfolding at Africa’s southern tip. I wanted to give the dead another chance, another life even. In my Cape Town apartment I began assembling my notes into some logic of organization and argument, trying to figure out why things happened the way they did. Words followed, hypotheses were discovered, discarded, refined, until a dissertation emerged, and a degree, and a career teaching history.
“Come to New Orleans,” Sabrina had told me six years earlier. I had just turned eighteen. The scholarship wouldn’t put a roof over my head, or food, not even pay for books. I hadn’t filed any papers for the federal government’s Guaranteed Student Loan program. I just figured I would hitch up to Maryland, find a job, start classes, and somehow everything would work out. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. New Orleans’s restaurant industry offered a convenient way for young people to make money busing or waiting tables, or laboring in the kitchen. Sabrina earned enough money to take a few classes at the University of New Orleans. I would need to do the same thing.
I worked nights at Commander’s Palace in the Garden District, carrying heavy trays of food to well-heeled tourists and the New Orleans elite, then at a newly opened restaurant in Carrollton owned by two eccentric women, one of whom drank Chablis Cassis all day and danced across the dining room. During the lunch hour I waited tables. I worked the kitchen at night, helping prepare dishes like redfish meunière and shrimp creole, good classic New Orleans fare. Susan’s Tunisian parties came in handy—serve left, remove right, attend to the women first, silent, nondescript motions as if you weren’t even there. I learned how to chop properly, sauté, prepare complicated reductions.
The next summer I cooked and cleaned toilets on an oil rig twenty-six miles off the coast. I washed dishes watching gigantic fires draw lines of light against the Gulf’s still waters. The other workers mostly came from the gentle arc of land stretching from Houston to Florida’s panhandle. A few had drifted from up north, fleeing whatever troubled them, hanging out in the Big Easy living too hard before heading to one of the rigs. Good money was easily had if you were willing to work hard and long for a week or two with your body twitching and your eyes hungry for another line of speed or coke. You’d be back soon with money stuffed in your pocket, and the crazy would start all over again in some cheap dive off Canal, scoring in some back alley, hanging out with strippers and barflies, getting wasted just as soon as you woke late in the afternoon. You’d burn through all your money, and you’d be standing there again, hung over, a stubble across your face, drawing on a Camel or Marlboro between gulps of coffee from large Styrofoam cups, waiting for the boat’s diesel engines to pull you away.
Work kept me out of my mother’s apartment. Mom had tried killing herself again shortly after having to leave Chestnut Street. Benji, my sister Sabrina’s boyfriend, had found her by pure accident and carried her off to the Emergency Room. Mom tried tending to herself by putting a few flowers into the backyard and by painting geraniums she had potted in coffee cans. She checked out mysteries from the local library and stared at the nightly news. By the weekend, when it was time to buy milk, eggs, coffee, and cans of Campbell’s soup and Saltine crackers, it was impossible to avoid the quart bottles of beer cooling themselves behind sheets of glass dripping with condensation. Mom would buy a few, drink until she passed out, and stay in bed until the early afternoon. On Monday she stepped up to the streetcar on Carrollton, got her transfer ticket, and headed to work, gazing at the lead-glass doors of the stately homes along Saint Charles Avenue.
The University of Maryland campus seemed foreign, with its clean brick buildings and verdant lawns, its students carrying heavy textbooks or lolling about the
quad. I remember meeting with a graduate student in some noisy building, poring over a thick book of course descriptions printed on tissue-thin paper. We sat at a folding table. He had a round, gentle face. There were charts to complete, requirements to take—science, foreign language, writing composition—but room to experiment. The brief mention that I had lived in Africa led him to courses in international relations and African history. A schedule began emerging from my scarcely audible statement of interests.
In the late 1970s, full-time faculty still taught most of the classes at major public institutions. My biggest class was introductory biology, and even that course was not more than sixty students. At an institution of some thirty thousand, one could easily take lecture classes of thirty or forty students, and seminars as small as six or seven. I enrolled in the usual suspects: biology, botany, French, but I also took courses in international law and development, intellectual history, and the history of Africa. The library seemed an infinitely large refuge, one floor after another of books stacked on metal shelves offering the solitude of reading at a table next to windows coated with a thin grime. I purchased as few books as possible, which meant that I lived in Course Reserves, presenting my ID and walking away with a text with a band across it commanding I return it in two hours.
My scholarship stipulated that I had to maintain a certain grade point average. I lived with the certainty that I would fail, that this whole college idea was a fantasy. I might as well hitch back to New Orleans where I belonged and begin a life as a cook or learn some other manual trade, stoned most of the day. This was the truth of my existence, everything else an adolescent phantasm. I pulled myself from bed at six in the morning, poured grounds into a Mr. Coffee, walked to the library, struggled to understand the words drifting across the pages of books and articles: the concept of just war, the Geneva Convention, the law of the sea, the role of organelles, the spread of Bantu languages across the African continent, a bewildering torrent of concepts and facts. I didn’t know what was important. I felt hopelessly lost.
History Lessons Page 18
