“Julius will be my son,” Louie says. “Do you hear me, Mrs. Lindsay? My son!”
I sit quietly, sip my tea, watch, and nod.
One evening he picks me up in his Cadillac, and sitting in the passenger seat is Willis Reed, all-star center for the Knicks and a friend of Louie’s. They take me to a steak house, the first I’ve ever been to. I don’t know what to order so I order the same thing as Louie.
“Man, Julius, Louie is a great coach.” Willis lives in Queens, not far from Louie.
“I know that,” I say.
“And a great guy,” Willis says.
“I know that, too.”
They bring us steak, baked potato, creamed spinach, sour cream. I don’t know what to do with the sour cream. Do I put it on the steak? I’m watching Willis and he puts it on his potatoes. So I copy him. And there is this brown sauce?
“What do I do with the sauce?” I ask Louie.
He looks at me and smiles. He’s always wearing these cardigan sweaters and a checked shirt—that’s like his signature look. He tells me the sauce is for the steak.
“Try it, Julius, you’ll like it.”
So I’m looking around the table, watching these guys, to see what goes with what. Every recruiting dinner is like that. The first time I go to a restaurant with proper place settings, the different forks and spoons, I don’t know what to do with them. This time coach Jack Leaman of the University of Massachusetts shows me to start from the outside, with the salad fork, and then move in.
I fly out to Ames, Iowa, with a Connecticut player named Bob Nash. The place is literally in the middle of cornfields and I’m thinking this isn’t really what I have in mind for my college experience. They have one of the few black students at Iowa State show us around and he even takes us to a Temptations concert in Des Moines, definitely a highlight of that trip. I am thinking if Nash and I both come here, then this will really put the program on the map. But I can’t see spending the next four years in the middle of a cornfield. And Nash, he’s telling me about Hawaii. It’s beautiful out there, he says, palm trees, ocean, and it’s warm. Man, Ames, Iowa, is cold.
Nash ends up playing for Hawaii before his eight-year NBA career with Detroit and Kansas City.
For me, Hawaii is too far away. I’m recruited primarily by northeastern and Atlantic schools. The national powers, UCLA, North Carolina, Kentucky, they seem to have never heard of me. It becomes a familiar pattern: the powers that be underestimating me.
I narrow my choices down to two: St. John’s and Louie or UMass and Jack Leaman.
Now, UMass may have become a front-runner because Mr. Wilson and Mr. Leaman played together at Boston University, but what really convinces me is a campus visit that fall. I have always envisioned myself on a mall among ivy-covered buildings, immaculate paths through kept lawns, all the clichés of campus life that have come to represent for me a kind of escape. If I can find myself on those paths, in those buildings, then I will have ascended, risen, to join a certain class of American society, the educated class. This is what my mother has wished for me all along, whether it be St. John’s or the University of Massachusetts, and what I desire, too. But I want it to look and feel the way it is supposed to feel, and that means a proper campus with proper-looking buildings and dormitories.
The appeal of St. John’s is its proximity to Mom, and to Marky, who has lately been more sickly than usual. If I’m over in Queens, in the next county, I’ll be so close to home, it will be as if I never left. Louie stresses that.
“Family, Julius, how can you leave your family?” He’s telling us how I’ll be playing at Madison Square Garden. About the prep stars who are also coming to St. John’s: Sonny Dove, Joe Depre, Mel Davis, Billy Paultz (all future NBA players).
But St. John’s is a commuter college, with the athletes living in these rented apartments that, while pleasant enough, don’t really make for a campus life. I see myself as more than an athlete. I’m actually going to try to be a student. I want a real campus.
There is another issue about Coach Carnesecca and St. John’s that troubles me. Louie plays a more conservative, half-court-focused offense where the guards handle the ball the majority of the time. Louie likes to keep games in the 40s and 50s. I’m not sure I can thrive in that offense. Jack’s offense is more open; the ball moves more freely. He likes to get out on the break, look for easy transition hoops. I don’t verbalize this at the time, but it is a feeling I have about which system will allow me to bring my playground game indoors. Also, because of Mr. Wilson’s relationship with Jack, I feel comfortable that between them, they will make sure that I get a chance to succeed.
But it’s that visit to UMass that does it for me. Driving up Highway 91, coming through those mountains, then seeing the different colleges, Science, Liberal Arts, the Old Chapel, Memorial Hall, the campus pond: it just looks like how I imagine a college should look. It is orderly, neat, everything where it should be. There is the Boyden Athletic Center, where there are a half-dozen indoor practice courts, and then the Curry Hicks Cage, that old four-thousand-seat gym that gets louder than the Garden. And academically, UMass’s business program is among the best on the East Coast, just a notch below the Ivy League. That’s a meaningful degree that would forever lift me out of the jewelry store mailroom.
“You have to make the decision,” Mom tells me. “I’m not gonna make it for you. Whatever you do, I’ll stand by you.”
Mr. Wilson tells me the same thing, but after getting in his pitch for Jack Leaman and UMass.
My mind is made up, and I tell my mom and Marky, who are disappointed I’ll be out of state but say they understand my choice. I call Louie and tell him, and I break down while we’re talking and for the first time in a long, long time, I start crying.
“You’re a good kid, Julius, and a fine player,” Louie is telling me. “I wish you nothing but the best.”
I know what I’m crying about: this means I’ll be leaving home, leaving Mom and Marky—and Freda and my nephews, Keith and Barry, and Mr. Dan—in just a few months.
34.
Some of my classmates are talking about the draft, about the injustice of the war in Vietnam, about how they can avoid going to fight. We have friends from previous classes who have already been drafted and stationed in foreign countries. Some of my friends, like Leon, believe the African-American has no obligation to serve a country that has exploited him, from slavery all the way up through the discrimination that we are still experiencing. He echoes Muhammad Ali in his insistence that he has no beef with the Vietcong. I’m torn by this issue. Nonviolence, as preached by Dr. Martin Luther King, would seem to argue against taking up arms, even on behalf of one’s country. Yet I also believe that the United States of America, for all its flaws, is the land of opportunity. Look at the opportunity I am being given: a full scholarship to a great university, a chance to get an education. Even Leon, who has been offered an academic scholarship to UMass, is benefiting from what is right about the United States.
We’re red-blooded Americans, my mom tells me, we’re patriotic. “But this war,” she says, “this war doesn’t make sense.”
But my father served in Korea. I have uncles who have been in the service. And while that doesn’t appeal to me, I believe that if I am drafted, I will go. Of course, I already know I’m going to college, so that puts it off for a few years.
This represents a larger idea, however. I am firmly in the camp of those who believe in the American dream. I’m not flag waving or crying at the sight of a parade, but America, in my view, works. It is a force for good. It is the greatest nation. And if I work to the best of my abilities, then I will be rewarded.
And I like order, neatness. The protests and burning of draft cards and renouncing of citizenship, it all seems messy and unorganized. I shy from chaos.
Leon accuses me, “You’re going to end up working for the Man.”
I disagree. “I want to work for myself. That’s all.”
But
all around us, this debate, over who we are, over the kind of society we want to live in, over the nature of that society and our relative freedom within it, has become suddenly vital and real. What is our obligation? How can we force change? And what, exactly, is the athlete’s responsibility in all this? Do we have a special role? We hear that Lew Alcindor, the greatest New York City basketball player of them all, has not only changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, but that he will also be boycotting the 1968 Olympics, refusing to play for his country. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his championship for refusing to serve in the Army. Soon, in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos will both medal in the 200-meter dash and, on the podium, raise their fists in the black power salute. We all watch this and some of my teammates and classmates are thrilled by this show of defiance, but I am troubled. It is actually shameful to me that they are escorted from the podium.
I love America. I’m buying the American dream.
We should solve our problems through negotiation, arbitration, mediation. Not with a raised fist. What does that solve?
These times will challenge that dream, however, as each assassination and protest and evening news clip of napalmed villages causes me to wonder at what price this dream is protected.
The world is upside down, yet we have made progress. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. It’s illegal to discriminate. So there are programs in place that address the most grievous of our issues. Yet Leon and others are demanding restitution. They want to blow up the system, and I’m not buying that. They talk about the midnight plane to Africa. I’m not getting on that plane.
They want to destroy the system.
I am a product of that system.
Yet my views are tested; my belief in that system will be challenged on a warm April morning.
35.
The spring air moves with the first flies and gnats hatching from the dark, wet places in the shadows of our school. The holly tree branches are still heavy with moisture, the boughs barely swaying under the footfalls of squirrels still skinny from the long winter. Sun pours down on me, on us, on graduating seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who can sense the potential and promise—and the anxiety—of impending freedom. I appreciate the beauty of the world, of our little suburb, and I have eased into the warm familiarity of my peers, of boys and girls (now young men and young women) I’ve spent four years with and who I know by sight and name and temperament and personality. The surety of my lope, the familiarity of my smile, the confidence that any greeting I extend will be returned, and as warmly, I move through the halls of Roosevelt High as pleased and content as a child surveying his stamp collection. Why does this ever have to end?
Yet our teachers interrupt us, in calculus, in trig, in humanities, in French, they are stopped short, this time by a message sent from the principal through the school by runners, and a school full of graduating seniors now is told that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been assassinated in Memphis.
The man who spoke for me, who embodied the beliefs that allowed me to be me, who espoused nonviolence. He has been taken by a rifle shot?
It is inconceivable to me.
A dark mood settles over the school. Many of the white students immediately gather their books and depart. The black students are stunned, slumped over at our desks. For the first time, I understand that urge to rage, to exact revenge, and momentarily I think about seeking out someone, anyone, a white face perhaps, to punish for this awful crime. It is a flicker of emotion rather than a thought, and one I instantly dismiss as wrong and inappropriate, for my white classmates have as little to do with this as my black peers. This is a crime against all of us, white and black, Ray Wilson tells me when I find him in the guidance counseling office to talk about what has happened to our world.
We don’t harbor anger, nor do we seek revenge. We must do the best we can, that’s all. But as Mr. Wilson is telling me this, he, too, appears heartbroken, his eyes sagging, his cheeks fluttering, his lips parting and closing as he seeks the words. He gives me a handshake and reminds me that I have to stay on track, not let this change my thinking, my plan.
I walk the main hall and then out the double-door entrance to the school. Ahead of me, her form silhouetted in shadow, walks Stephanie Cardone, a cheerleader and our class valedictorian, a white girl with whom I am friendly. We are in homeroom together and I know Stephanie to be a quiet girl, a good student. She is carrying a half-dozen books held in both arms against her blue-sweatered chest. Now in the last semester of my senior year, and in no contention for valedictorian, I am carrying just one textbook. It doesn’t even occur to me that Steph is white and I am black, but as I am out the door and my eyes adjust to the sunlight, I see Stephanie surrounded by seven black kids. They are from the middle school, eighth and ninth graders. The classes behind ours, I know, are 90 percent black, as more and more white children are being pulled from the public schools or white parents are moving from our suburb to whiter ones farther out on Long Island. My class, and the one just below mine, will be the last racially balanced classes at Roosevelt High.
But these kids are sneering. They are enraged by the news of Dr. King’s murder, and like many young men that day, they seek to exact revenge arbitrarily, on any white person they see. Their faces surprise me in how they are contorted with malevolence and disgust. And for Stephanie, of all people, who I know to be a good, gentle person, and very liberal as well. I’m taken aback by the anger I see in these boys. It is similar in its hatred and disdain to what we have seen in southern white sheriffs and Klansmen on the evening news.
These boys want to harm somebody.
“Honky bitch,” a boy says.
“Fuckin’ white bitch.”
They are spitting at her, and perhaps too young to understand the implications of a gang of males surrounding a female, and I am not sure I can comprehend all the villainous nuances of this scene. I drop my books and push aside the boys.
I am unafraid.
The boys size me up. They know who I am.
“That’s Julius Erving,” one of the boys says.
“Don’t care,” says one, the tallest, perhaps the bravest, perhaps the angriest.
“Leave her alone,” I say. “Go find trouble somewhere else. You’re not gonna mess with her.”
What could I really do against them? But the boys seem suddenly unsure. What had been a menacing pack shot through with the adrenaline of rage and bitterness is now suddenly softened by their doubt. Not about the righteousness of their cause but by their fear of me.
They shrink. They retreat. “Let’s go over to Baldwin and beat up some kids over there.”
Stephanie and I collect her books. She smiles at me.
“Will you walk me home, Julius?”
I nod. “Of course.”
And on that cursed day, perhaps the darkest day of my high school career, certainly one of our darkest moments as a nation, we—a black boy and a white girl—walk home together. She tells me about looking forward to college, how bad she wants to go and study business. I’m going to college, I tell her. I want to study business, too.
“I didn’t want to get beat up today,” Stephanie tells me. “I have homework to do and I’m, I mean, we’re all getting ready to graduate.”
“We. That’s right.”
This is our hope, as a nation, I think, that two kids—the little black boys and little white girls of Dr. King’s speech—can just walk together, and share their dreams, and in sharing somehow give strength and validity to each other’s dreams. Teachers, our parents, Ray Wilson, Earl Mosley, Don Ryan, they keep telling us we are America’s future. Adults repeat the sentiment so much it becomes a platitude, as meaningless as a car advertising jingle, but now, at this moment, as Stephanie thanks me for walking her home, it becomes real.
1.
In the summer heat, we pack up the car, my two suitcases and eight-track player fitting neatly in the capacious Oldsmobile trunk, the heavy door swinging shut with a creak and a thu
nk, and Marky climbs in the back and Mom and I sit up front for the long drive on the Southern State Parkway to the Whitestone Bridge to I-95 to 91 all the way up to Amherst. It’s a cloudy morning and as we pass through sudden rain showers, we roll up the windows and then roll them back down when it’s dry again.
“June,” Marky asks, “you excited?”
Of course I’m excited.
Mom looks at me and smiles. “He’s nervous! That’s what he is.”
But I can also see in her stern expression, the way she leans into the wheel, that she is also concerned, perhaps even holding back tears. I think she must be feeling both pride at my going to college and sadness at my leaving home.
Freda and Mr. Dan and my nephews, Barry and Keith—Freda has two sons now—said their good-byes at the house. The team said their good-byes the night before, after a game at Roosevelt Park. And Leon will be meeting me up on campus.
“June,” Marky asks, “can I have your records?”
“You can borrow them, Marky.”
When we finally arrive at Hills North, the athletic dorm just down Pleasant Street from the campus pond, I move my suitcases up into my dorm room where my mom makes my bed for me and puts away my clothes in the careful, precise, sharply folded manner that I like. Marky points out that we live on Pleasant Avenue in Roosevelt. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
I tell him that we’re on Thatcher, off Pleasant, but still, I can see that Marky finds the parallel reassuring.
Mom insists that I show her the athletic dining hall where I’ll be having my meals. And when we return we meet my new roommate, a fellow I’ll call Tim, a stocky, bearded white guy from rural Massachusetts who is standing straight up in the middle of the room.
He’s begun to unpack since we’ve been gone, and I notice on his desk an array of hunting knives, shining in the fluorescent white light of our dorm room.
“I’m Julius,” I say, also introducing him to my mother and brother.
Dr. J Page 11
