Chasing Space

by Leland Melvin

  I never told my parents, especially my dad. He would have killed those boys. He would have ruined his own life to avenge mine. I had friends without fathers, and I was not willing to risk losing mine. So, I stayed quiet. My form of self-preservation was to act as if the incident didn’t happen. My family and I continued to live in the neighborhood, and I would see both boys often enough until I left for college. One of them still lives in Lynchburg, and a few years back I ran into him. We talked, but the afternoon in the garage never came up. Maybe he had forgotten about the encounter, or perhaps, like me, he’s repressed it to overcome any lingering feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame.

  Many people tend to suppress bad things that happen in childhood. However, the incident did force me to take a harder look at my identity and my place in the world. I was a black nerdy kid who liked athletics but was still an inquisitive introvert who was a little goofy. What was I chasing and would I always be a victim of abuse? Looking back on it, I believe I survived that horrible ordeal because that’s what happens when you’re fortunate enough to have unwavering faith and the unconditional love of family and community. If nothing else, getting beyond the incident enabled me to continue to grow, believe, and dream, as everyone must do to flourish in life.

  My Father’s Vision

  Among the many lessons I received from my dad, I learned the importance of visualizing a goal and resolutely pursuing it until I achieved it. For example, one scorching hot morning when I was about eleven, my dad drove up to our house in a Merita bread truck and parked it in our driveway. He had worked extra jobs, but I had never seen him deliver bread. I knew he performed as a drummer in a band because I spent summers as his roadie, busing his speakers around town even though I was too young to be in the clubs and watch the shows. The six-foot-tall Peavey speakers towered over my small middle-school frame.

  A bread truck? I asked him what he planned to do with it. “It’s going to be our camper,” he said. But I couldn’t see it. I argued with him, telling him it was nothing but a bread truck without the bread and it would be a terrible place to sleep. It was cavernous inside, with only one seat for the driver and stacks of metal racks in the back. It even smelled like freshly baked bread. But within a few weeks, I began to understand his vision and believe in its potential.

  My dad was born in 1930 and grew up in Roseboro, North Carolina, where he learned the value of hard work. Necessity was truly the mother of invention for my father. As a kid, he made his first bicycle out of parts and scraps from other people’s used bicycles. As a teenager, he cut trees in the woods and then worked at the local plywood mill, processing the wood. Employees at the mill didn’t have power saws back then. My dad used a crosscut saw, which he said helped him to become “very strong” and created “a good work ethic.” Education was important, too. He graduated from high school and went to St. Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where he played football and ran track. He initially wanted to major in interior design, but after a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force, he changed his major to elementary education. He went on to teach in public schools for thirty years.

  In our family, whatever projects my father undertook became my projects. Such was the case with the bread truck. We installed two bunks for my sister and me and a pull-out couch for my parents—all bolted to the floor of the truck. A camping stove and table made up the kitchen. As campers go, it wasn’t elegant, but it was functional and had everything we needed to go on our habitual summer outings.

  Through the bread truck conversion and other projects I learned that with vision you could create something great. My father had a similar vision for our family that he orchestrated every day—at home, at school, and throughout Lynchburg. As a childhood friend recently told me, my parents weren’t just committed to building their family—they were building the whole community. I would often see my dad sitting with older boys, offering guidance or just listening. Everyone knew “Mr. Melvin,” and everyone my dad spoke with felt respected.

  Mr. Melvin’s House

  My dad’s compassion and civility extended even to neighborhood teenagers with difficult home lives. They were warmly received at our place. “There were houses in the area where parents wouldn’t let me in,” my friend Stan Hull told me. Stan and I had known each other since elementary school and played football together at Heritage High. “I came from a different part of town. But I knew I was always welcome in Mr. Melvin’s house. He saw promise in everyone.” Ralph Wilson, another childhood buddy who still goes by the nickname “Chopper,” expressed a similar reverence for my dad. “You always felt like he was looking out for you,” he said.

  One night one of my dad’s acquaintances came to our door while my sister and I were watching TV. He was homeless and in some sort of trouble, we learned later, and had come to my father for help. My sister and I flashed each other a skeptical look that failed to escape my father’s notice. Dad invited the man in and did what he could to help. The minute he was gone we got a harsh lecture about the importance of showing respect to everyone, regardless of their station in life.

  Robert Flood was another local man who knew my dad. As a kid, he lived with his grandmother, who doted on him and made him feel loved unconditionally, even when he started getting in trouble in middle school. He was exceptionally talented on the gridiron and the basketball court, but he was disruptive at school. He could have played basketball in college but he was drawn to the “fast” crowd, eventually getting kicked out of high school. When his grandmother died, there was no one. Except for my father. “Mr. Melvin never abandoned me,” Robert said to me not long ago. When Robert was arrested and jailed on a felony, my father was there to help him, even though he had a young family at home. On a recent afternoon, Robert tearfully described the impact my father had on him. “He took the time,” Robert said. “He listened and he treated me like I was his son.”

  Robert’s life took many turns, with multiple arrests, bouts of drug addiction, and a history of gambling and petty crime. On June 16, 1989, however, he walked out of a treatment center, ready to start fresh, and my dad was there. “It was like he was just waiting for me,” Robert said. “He was so happy that I had changed my life. I had somebody who really cared about me.” Robert eventually landed a job but needed transportation. My father found him a car—a 1976 Dodge, which he offered to Robert on the condition that he stay employed and out of trouble. He did. He graduated from college and started working on a master’s degree. Years later, when Robert spoke at my dad’s funeral, he said he felt like he’d lost his own father. Robert wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

  My father had a passion for the gospel, and he believed he was put on this Earth to serve others. When I was in college, he acquired a dilapidated 1954 Ford truck that looked like a cross between a moving van and an RV. In much the same way he converted that bread truck into a family camper when I was a kid, he turned that Ford into a mobile bandstand and pulpit. He and his buddies would park the truck next to the basketball court on Fourth and Federal Streets, set up a few dozen chairs, cook up some hot dogs and hamburgers, and play gospel music. My father played keyboard, trumpet, and drums. He sang, too. My father had a smooth voice that I loved to listen to. Boys from the neighborhood and around town would come to shoot hoops and listen to my father preach the gospel—before they were fed.

  My mother believed in God as devoutly as my father. Although my mother’s manner was more reserved than my dad’s, her impact was just as powerful. Their vision for my life and for my sister Cathy’s life came from their limitless Christian faith. I would never have made it to space without calling on deep reserves of spirit derived from their loving insights.

  Becoming an Athlete

  For some kids in Lynchburg who didn’t grow up in households like mine, sports provided a semblance of a family, and coaches gave them the closest thing they had to a father. My coaches at Heritage High took on such tasks with grace and dignity. Coaches Mark Storm and Jim Green focused
on building character as well as athletes. Few did so with as much commitment and enthusiasm as Rufus Knight.

  Coach Knight joined the coaching staff of Heritage High in 1976 and worked as a teacher, coach, and offensive coordinator in the football program. Even after Coach Knight retired, he continued to help coach the track team. A deeply religious man who had been a U.S. Army Ranger, he held killer workouts. But he never made us do any exercises he couldn’t do himself. He is still in perfect physical condition to this day.

  Like my father, Coach Knight lived his faith. If you played on his team he took care of you. Some of the players had no way to get home at night after a game or a late practice, and Coach Knight would drive all over town dropping students off at their houses. Lynchburg was still largely segregated, and the school district bused kids from one neighborhood to another to integrate the schools. Some of the boys at Heritage lived in the poorest parts of town. Years later, Coach Knight told me how he would wait in his truck as each boy went inside. He didn’t leave until the family turned on the porch light to signal that there was someone home. On many nights, Coach would go to the door or walk around to the back of the house to make sure the boys were safe.

  Coach Knight’s caution notwithstanding, I don’t recall growing up with much crime or violence in Lynchburg. Heritage High was a large, newly integrated public high school, but we had little friction. Everybody seemed to get along pretty well, as surprising as that seems to me now.

  Once football season ended, I moved right into basketball season and then tennis, with little time for anything else. I had a posse of five friends from childhood. We called ourselves “The Big Blue Crew,” after the second-team basketball squad at the University of North Carolina. Each of us had a nickname that stuck. Phil Scott was “Silky Blue.” Kip Hawkings had an easy nickname, “Gus.” Ernest Penn was known as “Fufu,” and we called Bryant Anderson “Boogie Bear.” My nickname? “Lil D” in honor of my dad, of course. We went through many grades together, played a lot of basketball, and learned a good deal about life. Our friendship taught me the value of trust and teamwork. I owe a lot of my success to my guys in The Big Blue Crew.

  My development as an athlete had also taken place outside school, on sandlots and playgrounds. One year my dad petitioned the Lynchburg Recreation Department to build a public basketball court and park up the hill from our house. He had a gift for persuading people to do things for the community and within a few months the park was built. The Fort Avenue Park became a basketball mecca on Sundays after church. Cars lined up and down Randolph Lane and even the firemen from Station 3 would abandon their post to observe the intense play and occasional fight. The small park was filled with so many ballers that if you lost your first game you wouldn’t play for the rest of the day.

  I first played there as a young kid competing against grown men, many of them high school standouts who didn’t make it to college due to poor grades, brushes with the law, and drugs. Some had earned scholarships but for whatever reason couldn’t adjust to college life and after a semester or two away from home found themselves back at the neighborhood basketball court trash-talking and showing their skills. While I waited between games I learned about life on the street and the undercurrent of what was going on outside of the idyllic image of Lynchburg. I learned from talking with the older guys about neighborhoods across town plagued by drugs and poverty. Those conversations made me realize that I had a naive image of Lynchburg, thanks to my parents shielding Cathy and me from negative influences. I am grateful for my parents’ efforts, but life lessons can come from anywhere, including the basketball court in between games.

  The court also gave me “cred,” especially when there were fifty-plus people watching and ten teams of five waiting to get their game on. Never did I think I would someday be looking down at my old neighborhood from the International Space Station, orbiting the planet with roughly 240 miles separating me from the basketball court and my perch in space. From up there, where the world is really small and there are no boundaries or borders, I imagined the court filling up after church. I remembered long days hustling across the asphalt, my eyes on the hoop.

  Basketball wasn’t my only passion back in high school. I had a girlfriend during my senior year, a young lady I had known for some time. We started off as friends and then we became study partners. At Heritage High School, we grew closer. On the night of our graduation, she and I drove to a parking lot behind an abandoned strip mall where we could be alone. We sat in the darkness, making out in the 1964 red Peugeot my dad bought me in the summer of my sophomore year. I had recently accepted a football scholarship at the University of Richmond. She was headed to the University of Virginia.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, a state trooper was standing at the side of the car shining his long-handled flashlight down on us. He had crept up behind my car in his cruiser with his headlights off. We’re screwed, I thought. My girlfriend and I exchanged worried glances. We both knew there were plenty of cops around Lynchburg who wouldn’t appreciate our being together as we were not of the same race.

  “Young lady, please get out of the car and join me in the patrol car,” the trooper said. Nervously, she opened the door and got out. She then walked over to the patrol car and sat next to the officer in the front of his cruiser.

  “Who is that you’re with? What are y’all doing?” the trooper demanded. “Young lady, that man was trying to rape you, wasn’t he? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to take you both down to the jail where your parents will have to pick you up.” I suspect that tactic worked more often than not, but luckily for me, my girlfriend didn’t take the bait.

  “That’s my boyfriend. He’s a good guy,” she said. “We just graduated. We’re about to go to college. He’s got a full scholarship.”

  My girlfriend later told me that the trooper had tried to pressure her to claim that I had assaulted her and that she was there against her will. Fortunately, she stood her ground and stuck to the truth. The trooper then got out and brought me into the patrol car too. He had me sit in the backseat. He asked me what I had been doing in my car. In that moment, surrounded by the flashing red and blue lights in the backseat of a police car, I became vividly aware of what was at stake. Going to Lynchburg City Jail on a trumped-up charge could be a game changer. I could kiss my scholarship goodbye and perhaps a college education, too. The state trooper had the power to change the course of my entire life—for the worse—just because he felt like it.

  For too many young black men, an encounter like this with the police ends badly. It was the norm for some guys I had grown up with in Lynchburg. Maybe their girlfriends panicked and buckled under the intimidation. Or maybe they mouthed off at the officer and things spiraled out of control. Once a young black man falls into the criminal justice system, he often keeps falling. The trooper seemed determined to add me to that number, but for some reason he changed his mind. “I could have taken you to jail,” he said, “but I’m doing you both a favor tonight. Get outta here. Don’t park here again.”

  My First Second Chance

  Graduation was the cap on a string of victories and advances that had begun to unfold earlier that school year. At our homecoming game the previous fall, we had been down by a touchdown with only minutes remaining in the game against the Rustburg Red Devils. Several college football scouts were in the stands looking for exceptional talent in a game we were favored to win.

  There were only minutes left to play in the game. I had played wide receiver on the varsity squad since my sophomore year. I flanked out wide on the 50-yard line and quickly looked at the defender, then back at the ball. Many alumni had returned from college eager for a win to start the homecoming festivities. The roar of the crowd made it impossible to hear the snap count that would set everything into motion.

  I saw the snap of the football and started down the field. The defender tried to jam me off the line of scrimmage but I countered and rushed past him. In my periphery, I saw the fans on th
eir feet as Stan Hull, our quarterback and my buddy since elementary school, launched a tight, perfect spiral that was on a trajectory to meet me in the end zone.

  At that moment, though, I was adjusting my speed to ensure a harmonious meeting of my hands and the ball for the win. Our fans were on their feet screaming. I think some were already celebrating. Then suddenly, silence. I had done the unthinkable. I dropped the pass in the end zone. As I looked to the stands I saw people shaking their heads in disbelief. Morgan Hout, a scout from the University of Richmond, had come to see a couple of my teammates, Leonard Dempsey and Daryl Parham. When I dropped the pass, he turned and headed for the exit.

  I expected to be benched for the rest of the game, but that’s not what happened. Coach Green grabbed me by the face-mask, looked me in the eye, and said, “Get back out there, run the same play, and catch the ball.”

  The coaches wanted to give me another chance. I was willing to let that dropped pass define my high school career but they were not having it. “You had worked so hard,” Coach Knight said to me years later. “We just believed in you.” I went back in the huddle, delivering instructions to run the same play. My teammates weren’t happy with the news. I had just let them down and now I was being given a second chance. “We all wondered,” Stan recalled, “if it didn’t work the first time, why would it work the second?” But, there was no time for debate about the play. We broke the huddle, lined up, and on the snap I took off for the end zone. Stan threw another perfect spiral to the same spot but this time I caught it. The crowd went wild. Hout heard the roar, turned around, and walked back toward the end zone where I was celebrating the victory with my teammates. We had won the game and that catch resulted in a full football scholarship to the University of Richmond. When I joined the team that fall, Hout was my receiver coach.