‘Yes, Mum,’ he replied in a tired, unenthusiastic tone.
‘Oh, and Russel,’ I added, ‘it’s alright to raise your voice. You hear me?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ he again replied, sounding a little more encouraged.
A few minutes later the phone rang again. ‘Mum, I’m calling you from the phone on their desk. They’re going to take care of everything for me, make sure I get where I’m supposed to be, and I’ll be arriving at eight o’clock.’
Relieved at the resolution of this drama, I went to the dorm kitchen, made a coffee, took a shower, then rang Kenton. He had promised to accompany me to the airport and drive Russel and his suitcases back to Child Hall.
At the airport, as we stood waiting for the passengers to disembark, Kenton asked, ‘How will I know him?’
‘Oh, he’ll be the one wearing no coat,’ I replied. I had advised Russel to dress warmly but, knowing he had little concept of the bitterly cold climate of Boston in December, I had a good idea what ‘warmly’ would consist of in his mind. As well, he didn’t own an overcoat.
Russel’s face split into an enormous grin and his eyes lit up when he saw me through the crowd. We embraced, a warm hug, before Kenton handed him a scarf, beanie and mittens he had brought to lend him for the duration of his stay.
‘What are these for?’ Russel inquired as we gathered up his luggage and walked the short distance to the car. ‘I won’t need these.’
‘Keep them anyway, just in case, okay?’ I cajoled him.
Kenton delivered us to Child Hall and went on to work. I had earlier approached every student on my floor and asked if they had any objection to my son staying in our dorm. They were clearly delighted at the prospect of the additional security of a young man living amongst us, as we had all read of a spate of on-campus murders that had taken place in women’s dorms in universities in Florida and other states in the south. More than one woman, going home for the festive season, had offered her room for his use.
Russel used the bathroom on the floor below, which was one of the men’s dorms, to shower and dress, after he had given me the small gifts he had brought me from home. ‘Breakfast, a bit of a walk around part of the campus to show you where I’ll be, then into bed for a rest, get over your jet lag, okay?’
I took him to a tiny corner diner nearby, where customers sit up to the counter and can get breakfast all day, two eggs, any way, toast and coffee, for little over a dollar. It was his first taste of the life he’d seen portrayed in Hollywood movies, and he was plainly pleased.
The short walk to the diner, however, was also his first real exposure to the cold. As we had to backtrack to go to the Harvard campus, he said he wanted to go by the dorm so he could pick up the beanie and scarf. He brought the mittens, too, ‘just in case’. Although he said he felt awkward, clumsy and ‘goofy’ in them, he soon discovered, as we all do in that climate, that warmth precedes glamour any day.
Recovered from his jet lag, he began to come to classes with me. Sitting attentively throughout, he said he was surprised to find he already had a basic understanding of almost every subject discussed. I introduced him to my friends on campus. The Dean, Paul Ylvasakir, spoke to him in his office and later caught up with me. ‘He is so bright,’ he told me, ‘we could easily find a place for him here.’
‘You mean graduate school? He hasn’t finished his undergraduate course yet.’
‘He has a maturity beyond his years. Have you ever listened to him?’
My mind flashed to the ‘did/did not’ arguments he had had with his sister, and I replied, ‘Yeah. Many times.’ I brushed those thoughts aside, recognising that he had come a long way since those years. Besides, I was his mother and in my company Russel always felt safe to voice his uncertainties. That, I realised, was more a reflection on the closeness of our relationship than on his development. The problem of seeing him as others saw him was peculiarly my own.
I passed on Paul’s comments, but Russel assured me that he would prefer to finish the studies he was undertaking in Australia. After that, he’d see.
At the dorm, he was a big hit with the young women on the floor. Raucous twittering always told me when he was in the kitchen, being plied with cups of tea and treats by these women who competed with each other for his polite attention.
He began to venture further afield, going out to different places with friends to whom I had introduced him. We went one morning to have breakfast with Kenton and his son at his apartment, both of whom stood around six and a half feet tall. We had the full American works of ham and eggs, orange juice, followed by enormous stacks of pancakes with cream and maple syrup. On our way home, Russel told me that he had felt dwarfed in their company. ‘Mum, I’d be tall too, if you’re fed me properly when I was younger.’ This turned into a blazing, though brief, row. I had done everything humanly possible to keep that child fed, without help, all those years, and his reproach was like a red flag to me.
Did he think Americans ate like that all the time? ‘No, it was a special occasion, you were coming to breakfast.’ Kenton had done everything to turn his invitation into an event Russel would remember.
On another occasion, we were talking with friends when one of them, in passing, asked Russel where he was staying. ‘With Mum,’ he replied, matter-of-factly.
‘In the women’s dorm?’ she had continued, a tone of incredulity in her slightly raised voice. Russel looked at me, his face frozen in anger.
We were barely outside the building when he turned to me. ‘How come you didn’t tell me it was a women’s dorm?’
I had assumed he would know. But I realised that he had spent his entire life in the company of women, his mother, his sister, his grandmother, Mrs Owen, and all my adult women friends, so he thought nothing of being the only man in a large company of women. Therefore he had completely overlooked all the clues which might have told him something about where he was staying.
His displeasure didn’t last long, as the treats continued and the dorm-mates continued to vie for his company. He no doubt realised there were benefits after all, and he never brought the matter up again or demanded to be moved.
We were invited to Christmas parties, New Year parties, and family get-togethers all over town. We even went to New York where, at a fellow student’s family house where we arrived unannounced, two more seats were cheerfully added to the already brimming table. We were made to feel extraordinarily welcome, as though we were doing them a favour to attend. Later, in an enormous basement especially decked out, there was dancing and even a hired barmen to attend to the thirst of the guests. Russel drew me aside. ‘Mum, this is so inspiring. Each one a professional,’ he said, waving his hand towards the beautifully attired bunch of Black doctors, medical specialists, lawyers and others so obviously successful in their fields, ‘and not one white person in sight.’
We had, of course, been to all-Black parties in Australia, but poverty and unemployment were the norm, the common factor. I thought, God, I wish every Black child in Australia could see this, feel up close the possibility of pursuing a successful career, and be inspired and heartened enough to shake off their despair and chase their dreams.
Too quickly Russel’s time with me passed. As I put him back on the plane, this time to Los Angeles where he had arranged to spend a few days with Ande, sadness descended upon me. Fortunately it did not stay too long. Russel had experienced the reality—the cold, hard work and personal sacrifice—of my time in America. That made his visit worthwhile and, as well, I had passed the ‘hump’. I visualised each of my study periods as mountains to be climbed over, the first few months being the hard slog of loneliness, settling in for the long haul, and marked my calendar with the halfway mark. Once I reached that date, I was over the hump, and from there on, life was a downhill slide towards the airport and home.
11
Back home once again in June 1982. Confident now of completing the required coursework during the following academic year, I took up my du
ties with the Health Commission. A new Director had taken over, Dr Tommy Gow, and he asked me how best I felt I could use the skills I had acquired while I was away. I reflected on this and put together a training program in mental health and counselling techniques, assembling the most relevant pieces from all the courses I had attended on these subjects, to share this information with the Aboriginal Health Workers.
The program was to be run through weekly sessions held in the Redfern Health Commission building in George Street. Its success, I felt, could be measured largely by the response from the Aboriginal Health Workers in attendance, who had been turfed into the work of helping people without any real training.
I gave a session on non-directive counselling—enabling the clients to work through their own problems, come to their own decisions and assisting them to go in whichever directions they chose—with practical demonstrations and exercises in how to go about this. During the session several Health Workers broke down and cried. Muriel Hamilton was amongst those women who came to a sudden and painful realisation of her predicament. ‘I’ve been doing things wrong all these years,’ she told me. ‘No wonder clients run away from the women’s refuge—they didn’t make the decision for themselves to go there. I did. I see it now.’
Elaine Walker, who was an exception and had been encouraged to take a number of training courses at mental health venues including Callan Park Mental Hospital, came up to me later to tell me that of all the courses she had attended, mine was the one most culturally relevant. It had hit all the big issues and addressed the differences between the needs of the mainstream and those of the Black community, and given practical and down-to-earth advice as well as supervision in using the information. I was mightily pleased.
It was time, now to put into motion my own special agenda, that of ensuring a line of Black Harvard graduates.
I considered people I knew whom I could approach, and who I thought would have the stuff it took to get through the study program. There was not just academic ability to consider, but also determination, guts, and the likelihood of their being able to maintain their enthusiasm through the long period of cultural and geographic isolation.
Finally I thought about Norma Ingram, or Norma Williams as she was at that time known. I visited her when I learned that she had left Murawina, the Aboriginal preschool which she had founded. Here was a woman of substance, who had put her nose to the grindstone of work and survived immeasurable setbacks. She had taken the fledgling ‘feed the children’ program from its makeshift mobile home in a park, through to the Shepherd Street premises in Chippendale, made available by Leon Fink. She had weathered the political jungle, red tape and runaround until the Black childcare program was finally established in its own premises and became renowned as one the best of its kind in the whole country.
When I spoke to her, Norma was without direction for her future, and listless in a way that affected her domestically so that when I knocked on her door, I found that her house was in chaos. She lived in a tiny cottage in Eveleigh Street, Chippendale, the street outside her door littered with broken glass and debris. Since I had left to go to Harvard, she told me, she had been assaulted. Some fellow had climbed over her back fence and struck her on the head with a lump of wood, smashing her spectacles.
Norma felt the same way about her work at Murawina as I had about the Health Commission before I’d embarked on my studies: that she had done a good job but exhausted the extent of her personal knowledge. Each year had become an unsatisfying copy of the previous one, so she had resigned. Her marriage to Gary Williams was over and she didn’t know what to do next to get on with her life.
Emotionally, Norma was stuck in a rut, and not a very nice rut at that, and did not seem to be coping well. Her accommodation was less than salubrious, she felt in danger in her own house with just her children for company, and her prospects for improving her situation, she suspected, were low, probably non-existent. I talked about what I had been doing at Harvard, how much I felt I had learned, and about the courses that would be available to her if she thought she would like to have a go.
The more I spoke, the more animated Norma became. She found tea, borrowed milk from a neighbour, and we settled down to yarn. ‘You really think I could do it, eh?’ she asked me a dozen times.
‘Norma,’ I replied, ‘you could do it, you could get into the Master’s program at Harvard and succeed. But you’ve got to be sure this is what you want, because it will be very hard to get there, and even harder to get through. But yes, if you set your mind to it, I think you certainly can. Look at all the things you’ve already done, setting up the preschool from nothing, and turning it into the great program it has become. Don’t underrate yourself just because everyone else in this country does. When you get to Harvard and tell other people what you’ve already done, they’ll be blown away. True.’
‘But—it’s very expensive, isn’t it?’ she asked, with a gesture around the room to indicate how little she had.
‘If you make up your mind you want to go, and you do everything you need to do to get ready, I promise you I will raise the money. And when you come back you can help me raise the money for the next one. What we want here is a chain, a lot of people all helping each other to get through, until we have so many degrees under our belts that success becomes a norm for the Black community’
Norma smiled, the seed of the idea already taking root in her mind. She would enrol in teacher training here, upgrade her study skills, get a bit of essay writing behind her. There was no hurry, I told her, I’d be back in a year to check out how she was going.
I had made a commitment which I intended to keep. If Norma turned out not to have what it took, including the support network to have her young children cared for in her absence, I would keep looking until I found someone who did. The money? Well, I had proven, through my fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Aboriginal Medical Service and with my own studies, that there was goodwill out there. People were willing to assist when they saw someone trying to have a go. I realised fund-raising to send ‘Blacks to Harvard’ might end up being a much higher barrier to have to jump, because educating people to understand that there must be equality at the top of the ladder as well as at the bottom was not something that had been attempted in Australia before.
Evan Sutton, my contact of old at the Education Department, rang to say he had someone he wanted me to meet. Peter McKenzie had been a successful applicant for the Aboriginal Study Awards and would be studying art at a university not too far from me. I met Peter and was surprised to learn that it was only after he had been successful in his funding application that he looked for a university to attend. He obtained a book of American universities which ran courses corresponding with his needs. Starting at the top of the list making applications for admission, he had struck it lucky early in the alphabet and would be attending Clark University, which was not too far from Boston. Could he contact me upon arrival?
Russel and Naomi had fared wonderfully in my absence, with Russel hardly allowing his sister out of his sight. So many of my friends told me that ‘whenever you see one of them, you see two.’ Russel had taken her everywhere with him, even sitting her up between himself and his current ladyfriend when they went to drive-in movies.
Still, she remained unhappy at school. Shockingly, she told me she was again repeating a year, and again at her own request. I was deeply concerned about this internalisation of the attitudes of her teachers, reflecting back at her their belief that Blacks could not achieve scholastically. As well, I learned that the eruption between Russel and Pat Laird, with whom I had left her the previous year, had not been merely a minor struggle for authority. Pat said she had been completely unable to cope with Naomi and had felt relieved when Russel had whisked her away.
I decided then that the burden of responsibility for Naomi’s care should rightly be upon me, and that I’d take her back to Cambridge with me. It was never a possibility that her father, though he had re-marri
ed to a woman with children of her own, might care for Naomi, even for a short period. He had neglected his only blood child for so long that we had never felt him to be there for her. Russel was moving towards his final study years, his work load heavier, and he needed a bit of peace and quiet. If it took me any longer than I anticipated to finish my own studies, I told him, we’d rotate the responsibility for Naomi between us, year about, a suggestion to which he readily agreed.
Although an irregular correspondent, I received word from Beverly that her baby, a girl, had been born, and she and Robert had named her Dana. This was happy news, which I shared with Joe Croft when I went to visit him at the arts and culture store. Joe smiled, a little smugly I thought, before passing completely over the subject and leaping ahead of me. ‘When are you leaving to go back? I’ll have you another parcel for you when you’re ready to go.’ Joe was a real sweety.
The Dean had made sure that all the papers required for my student visa were prepared in advance, and that I carried them with me this time rather than risk that they might, once again, be sent by seamail. Ken Shivers at the US Consul’s office was beginning to feel like an old friend, and he came around the counter to greet me warmly. I had arranged for him to be invited to MumShirl’s book launch, and bless my soul if he hadn’t gone and had a wonderful time.
He told me about his reception immediately. ‘MummaShirl; as he called her, ‘came right up to me with her arms outstretched. She grabbed me in a bear bug, and said, “you’re the nice guy who made it possible for my baby to go to America.” Then she took me all over, introducing me to folks, and I was made mighty welcome, felt right at home.’ He seemed very pleased to have made this connection into the local Black community, and I really liked hearing how he had been made to feel appreciated even though I wasn’t there.
Naomi and I were soon on the plane, winging our way back to Boston. I had decided to return a few weeks early, to settle in before school began. Kenton had suggested before my departure that I’d be more comfortable in an apartment, the bathroom next door instead of down the hall, and the refrigerator a secure place to leave food. Aware that I didn’t have the necessary documents to be able to rent off-campus, such as a Social Security number and local references, he had said he would be happy to share-rent with me and would look for a place in my absence. So we arrived to find we had somewhere to live, a fair way out, at Fresh Pond. It was a little bare, although he had already moved some of his own furniture in.
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