Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  I was never for a moment cowed by these books, by their grandeur or sophistication. I didn’t need—and wouldn’t, until I went to graduate school—to hear Emerson’s lines about young scholars reading Bacon and Locke in libraries and sitting in awe, frozen, afraid that they would never amount to anything by comparison, forgetful that once Bacon and Locke were merely young scholars sitting in libraries. No, the line that would have done duty for me, had I known it, was Keats’s about connecting with the “immortal freemasonry of intellect.” Emphasis on free. As soon as I walked into the library during schooltime, taking my chances with the authorities, I was in—part of the crew. All the books had been written and placed there for me. I was grateful, but I also knew that without me, and others like me, poor scholars as Thoreau calls us, needful but not ready to prostrate ourselves in thanks, the books would molder and turn gray; they’d become substantially less.

  I also read to learn a language. My own, English. Because the truth is that I could not use it until then. I wanted to be able to talk somewhat the way Lears did when he was on a roll—though I wasn’t ready to go all the way with him; I wasn’t quite set to become someone who would plunk words like ersatz, propinquitous, and mendacious into conversation. But I did want to command words, and I wanted to infuse them with my own inflections, to speak my piece as my grandmother was fond of saying, and doing. I liked what Lears had done to Jingles, and I resolved to stop smacking people in the head (and getting smacked back by them) and to use words to put myself across. But do not think me too virtuous—I had seen how much longer words can hurt than the best-thrown punch.

  I had not become a pacifist, by any means. I would still be happy to fight to defend myself; I would fight to defend my country, though I resolved that defending my country couldn’t entail traveling halfway around the world to have it out with Asian kids. I was by then very fond of Muhammad Ali’s line, issued when the government was preparing to pounce on him and order him into the army in his country’s supposed defense: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” If the summons came, and it might, there was no way I was going. Let Jonesy and the rest of the defensive line say what they would: This was not my fight.

  The Buddhists believe that when you are reincarnated, you forget all of your past lives. But when you are young, every book you truly fall in love with is a life of yours, one that you have, as it were, lived in the past and now can remember in full. It is a blessing of remarkable proportion, for through books one is incarnated many times—not only, say, as a questing sailor aboard a whaling ship, a mortally ill heiress, a woman taken in adultery, but also as the mind who conceives and renders these things and experiences the world in a certain manner. Those aghast at having only one life on earth are drawn inexorably to books, and in them find the deep and true illusion of living not just their own too short life but of inhabiting many existences, many modes of being, and so of cheating fate a little.

  Mostly what I read for, I have to admit, was to find out who I myself might be. I was perpetually in hope of hearing my own inarticulate thoughts and feelings put into words by someone who had gone deeper into life, and into language, than I had done. Many years later, I would read words from an author who felt that he was trying to do precisely this for his readers, and I would feel that, from what I supposed to be the other side of the mirror, he had crystallized the terms of my early quest almost perfectly. “It seemed to me,” he observes, that readers “would not be ‘my’ readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book but with it I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or censure me, but simply to tell me whether ‘it really is like that,’ I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written.”

  What I did not know is that, in all probability, one can acquire one’s own voice—which is to say the evidence of one’s own freely formed character—from no other individual. It is only the incessant labor of combining your own experience, taken in and metabolized by intense feeling and thought, with what you have acquired in books that actually creates and re-creates a freeflowing identity. At seventeen, I was looking for an easy way—a voice to adopt, a self to put on, as though it were a tailor-made suit of clothes commissioned especially for me. We think that an author can provide answers, when all that he or she can actually do is provide incitements, inspirations, goads. “Reading,” Proust says in a more circumspect mood, “is the threshold to the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”

  The book I am reading on this slightly chilly spring morning is none other than The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Lears was right about it. (Thurston White, though it hurt to admit it, was, too.) It is some piece of work. Already, it has gotten me into trouble.

  I HAD begun the book on Saturday night, while waiting for a couple of friends to pick me up for an evening of beer and light conversation. They are, predictably, late. And by the time they arrive, eight-thirty or so, I am far gone in the pages.

  The car horn honks outside. My father, who is for some reason known best to the gods actually at home on a Saturday night, hollers out immediately, “I’ll be right out!” He says this whenever friends of mine honk outside, just as, whenever the garbage truck pulls up, he hollers, “Thanks. We don’t need any more.” But in the former phrase—the “I’ll be right out”—there’s more than a little longing.

  Soon I am lying down in the backseat of the car, a Chevy Nova, property of my friend’s mother, who, if she knew the use to which it was now being put, would need to repair to the nearest sanatorium that would allow her to continue making her own marinara sauce, since she can bear no other. I’m swigging merrily from a quart bottle of Schlitz Malt Liquor, the bull rampant on the label, totem animal for the night, and reading on in the volume that my friends in the front seat refer to as “the coon book.” Whenever they pop this phrase, I say something fetching about their sisters or mothers, or both. Mostly, they’re annoyed because I’m completely absorbed and not joining in the cruise-and-booze festivities, which include, but aren’t limited to, shrieking out the window, flipping cans at pedestrians, urinating gleefully in each other’s direction during pit stops, and slamming the roof with a flat palm when a pretty girl materializes (when any girl materializes) on the sidewalk or in a passing car. I have also demanded that the interior light stay on so that I can read. This annoys the driver to no end.

  The Malcolm X book was, I believe, the first one that I had ever bought freely with my own money. I actually went to a bookstore, a sort of establishment I had never entered, in order to make the purchase. It was probably BDI money, come to think of it. Having done what he could for my erotic enlightenment, the Walrus, of whose stories I was now so dead weary that I wouldn’t even turn up for work (“C’mon, Mark, five balloons an hour for Chrissake”), was now sponsoring my literary education.

  I tried to get my friends interested in Malcolm by talking about his criminal past and what a hard guy he used to be. I told them what I took to be an amusing story from the book. When they were being sentenced for a sequence of crimes they’d committed around Boston, Malcolm, then still Malcolm Little, and his partner, Shorty, heard the judge pronounce a string of sentences: five years for this, three for that, six for something else. Then the judge added that they’d be served concurrently. Shorty, who had no idea what concurrently meant, thought that a few petty crimes were adding up to life in prison. The anecdote fell flat, probably because my pals didn’t know what concurrently meant, either.

  But really, I myself wasn’t all that intrigued by Malcolm’s criminal past; I’d heard that kind of story before, about a dozen small-time Medford hoods. No, what I, who, living as I did in West Medford, had an almost visceral fear of blacks, learned from Malcolm X first of all was that he went through h
alf of his life terrified—terrified of white people. And why not? By his account, whites did outrageous things to him and other blacks on a devoted, ongoing basis. It was our racial sport and pastime. In an autobiographical sketch by James Baldwin, whom I’d been reading the week before at the library, while down on High Street my Latin class groaned on without me, I’d learned about how, when he was about ten years old, a couple of white cops pulled him into an alley and began beating him up, whaling the shit out of him, as we’d say in Medford, and calling him a little nigger and all the rest. For what? For nothing. Just to put the fear of God, that is to say the fear of white people, in him. It was also the cops’ idea of a good time, something diverting to fill the afternoon. Had I read a newspaper with any intensity or looked hard at the TV news, I could have sensed that as much was going on every day in America still. But this I had not the imagination to do.

  William Billings, as a side note, looked a little different now, too. That whole bit with the dog was about nothing so much as protection—protection from me and the likes of me, really. He was scared, too; it’s simply that if he showed it, he’d be making himself yet more vulnerable.

  I couldn’t believe, along with Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, that whites were devils, but when I got to the point where the Muslims unfolded their doctrine, I could see why a half-reasonable black person could easily think so. If you looked through the history of rapes and lynchings and slavery and general abuse, it seemed at least a viable explanation.

  The people who said, like the SDS Hawk, that we were a war-crazed nation because of what we were doing in Asia weren’t easy to take in stride. But when I heard what I did from Malcolm X about the way black people generally were treated, I saw why some of them were as enraged as they were. (And it blew me away that any of them could take the nonviolent route.) I also had to begin forging a new take on America, the place I’d been an unthinking booster of since about inception, a bespectacled classroom Cold Warrior. It was clear to me that you couldn’t really say you knew much about the country until you’d at least made an effort to see it from the point of view of blacks.

  It would be foolish for me to take credit for a moral breakthrough that I ought never to have needed to make in the first place. But all over America such things were happening. Spurred on by Malcolm X and James Baldwin—and people like Frank Lears, who asked you to take these matters seriously—white people were starting to try to see the world through the eyes of the slaves’ grandchildren.

  What mattered to me personally about Malcolm was that he was a reader and that he had an absolute conviction that knowledge could get you a better life and let you help the people who were around you. There are rhapsodic passages in the book about the reading he did in jail and the way he worked to write legibly. He saw that by doing this, he was getting back at white people. I myself had been of the school of Dubby. I believed that I was showing the authorities at Medford High what a true rebel I was by never doing my homework and staying disaffected. In fact, that was just what Medford High expected and wanted of me: I should stay ignorant, the better to become a good factory hand, a stand-up guy on the city crew, a sterling clerk-typist with an honorable discharge. What Malcolm showed me was that you could shift your destiny by acquiring knowledge, by reading, learning things. I had never heard anyone describe the process in such stirring terms before. But I knew better than to get too loud and moist on such matters when I was driving around sloshing Schlitz Malt Liquor with the duo up front, so I shut up and read.

  You can’t lie down in the backseat of the car and have much control over the navigation, or much awareness about it either. And it wasn’t long before my friends had brought me under the awning of a very familiar oak tree, just beginning now to bud. There they stopped. I looked up at the tree in sweet, drunken puzzlement—Malcolm was going on about the joy of reading and we were, momentarily, one—from where I lay in the Nova’s backseat.

  “Last fuckin’ stop, Mark [Mahhhk]. You gotta go.”

  “Yup, time for you to get outta here.”

  The budding oak tree was the tree that brushed against my bedroom window at 58 Clewley Road, the sound taking my dreams down various strange paths. My friends, tired of my nonsense, had brought me back home and dumped me. It couldn’t have been later than ten-thirty—way too early for a Saturday night. Still, time for me to get outta here.

  I heaved myself up, said good-bye without protest, and took leave of the Nova. It wasn’t until I was halfway up our hall stairs that I realized I still had the quart of Schlitz Malt in one hand; in the other hand, my right, the one I was attending to, was Malcolm X’s book. I hustled downstairs to the street, took a long, slow chug, and tossed the half-empty bottle, rampant bull and all, into our trash bin.

  HAPPINESS, SOMEONE said, is complete absorption. If so, that morning, reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in the Medford Library, I must have been in bliss. The whole world simply disappeared, as though the genie who had let reality pour forth out of a cracked magic lamp had called it all back in, leaving just me and that book alone. When I looked up at the normal, non–frog hopping clock that presided in the library, I saw that if I was going to get to Lears’ class on time, I would have to hustle. It was hot outside by now, so I left my football jacket—who really wants to swipe someone else’s football coat, embossed with another’s number, in my case 66, two-thirds of the number of the beast in Revelation?—there on my seat and began to sprint for the school building, about half a mile away.

  I was wearing track shoes, not the ones with the metal bottoms, fortunately; I was in fine shape from beer drinking and weight lifting and putting the shot (or throwing the shot, as the coach said) and occasionally even running the quarter-mile with the track team, and I could fly. I tore down into Medford Square, past Brigham’s, where the Medford High boys and girls came together, site, for me, of multiple social snafus and idiocies, then down past the entrance to Stag’s poolroom. The cave was just opening up for the day; a few of the customary dwellers—the local hustlers, Hank the Hat and Paulie, who spun the Blind Girl—were grumbling down the stairs; they seemed disconsolate, as though they were on a payroll and headed for mandatory labor in the mines. As I cut the corner onto High Street, I glanced toward Papa Gino’s, forbidden territory for me, the place where the South Medford Bears gathered in their gang jackets, surrounded by their girl-friends and female admirers, all in leather, luring and dangerous, like gorgeous black spiders.

  Then into the side door of the school, up one flight of stairs, and then turning to another, where, still on the fly, I encounter the form of Mace Johnson, former coach of the Medford Mustangs and still, nominally, my teacher of American history. In the mirror today, before taking off for school, he must have looked particularly formidable to himself. He was spiffed up, wearing a blue suit and a gregarious yellow tie.

  Mace Johnson, I could tell, wanted me to stop, wanted me to explain myself and my absences from class and my flying hair and crazed shirttails, but some kind of momentum seemed to be on my side.

  “Hello, Mark,” he says in the basso profundo, stop-’em-where-they-are voice. I’m sure that in the back of Johnson’s mind, pushing relentlessly forward, is the view that there are three things he hates: small dogs, women who smoke in public, and half-promising former linebackers who let their hair grow wild (or, as wild as the Beatles had it in, say, A Hard Day’s Night —not very) and read all the time and never come to class, and, and, and . . .

  But I haven’t got time for the homily. I’m hardly touching the stairs. I’m on my way.

  “Hello, Coach,” I pant. (I still gave him that, the title—would give him that today, if I saw him.) Then I was gone.

  I am faster than I imagined—or maybe the clock at the library is a little aggressive, a bit brisk—for a librarian’s idea of paradise, I sometimes think, is everyone out of the library (but himself) and all books restored to their rightful place on the shelves. So when I get to Frank Lears’ room, he is sitting th
ere, alone, hunched over the sad gray desk, thumbing through a book, making notes in his insects-on-a-spree script.

  And this, reader, ought to be the climax of the book. In a film version of this story or in a novel, this would be the moment when I had my major encounter with Frank Lears. It would be the final dramatic turning point, the end that was, in effect, a beginning. (Raise the music level a little; sail the point home.) In light of my new passion for learning, my unassigned assiduous reading, my subversive class-cutting for higher purposes, and my repeated quotations of Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg, he recognizes me as part of his tribe and we go through a short ceremony of investiture. It would be a little like the day Mace Johnson ushered me into the cult of gridiron manhood for sending poor Tom Sullivan ignominiously to the dust and humiliating Frank Ball. At the end of our discussion, mine and Frank Lears’, a hug might even ensue. He would be tentative, unsure, but eventually he’d succumb to my bearish, football McMurphy–style joie de vivre, and neither of us would hold back.