by Rick Bragg
The telephone rang at about 7 A.M. It was Kovach. He asked me if I would come to Harvard, that he was proud it had come true for me.
It occurred to me then that I wasn’t wearing any britches—I wasn’t wearing anything—and here I was talking to a journalism icon in my birthday suit.
I hung up the phone, hugged my girlfriend, and felt the guilty relief wash over me. I tell myself now that it should not have been important, so important. I can almost make myself believe it.
I called my momma and told her that her middle son was going to the most prestigious college in America. We had talked about it, from time to time, but it meant nothing to her until it came true. Like I’ve said before, my momma is weary of broken promises.
“Thank God,” she said. Then, in a worried voice, “Where is that at?”
I told her it was in Cambridge, near Boston, in Massachusetts.
“Lord God,” she said, “you’ll freeze to death.”
Kovach, whether he is proud of it or not, would turn out to be a guiding force in my life. I learned later that he campaigned for me, whom he had never met until that day. I guess he did it because he thought I had earned a chance to be there. Or maybe it was because he was from Tennessee, from a place below the gentry, himself.
Either way, I was by God going. My girlfriend, Rachel, bought me a duck hunter’s coat for my birthday, the closest thing we could find in the mail-order catalogs to a freestanding shed. I bought a pair of insulated boots, and some long-handled drawers (long underwear), and gloves. I was ready.
I had a plan for leaving. I made a big payment into Momma’s house fund—and planned to take the four hundred dollars I had left in my checking account and head south, on a seaplane. I would listen to steel drum music and act a fool for a few days, till I was broke, then kiss Rachel good-bye—we were still friendly—and head north. A puff of wind off the coast of Africa messed everything up.
Hurricane Andrew punctuated my life and times in Miami with winds that blew 180 miles per hour. I had been invited over to St.
Pete for a going-away party, and hurried back to Miami across Alligator Alley into a wall of black clouds. Everyone else was going the other way.
I had sold my old Firebird, and as Andrew swirled offshore I roamed the mostly empty streets in a rented Thunderbird, searching for people who were stupid enough to stay. Among them, I saw a single homeless man who seemed not to have gotten the word, and was unimpressed when I told him to duck and run. It was as if, after what he had lived through, a hurricane would be nothing short of cleansing. Finally the winds blew the car around too much to safely drive, and a falling limb crashed down and sheared off the left taillight. I tried to go home to my little house near the bay, but the police said no, it was too close to the shore. So I went to our office, just a quarter-mile inland, to ride it out. I had a paper sack full of junk food—Oreos, Cheetos, pork rinds, I believe—and some bottled water. I got a futon and put it on the floor. Then, as the windows trembled and the giant storm bore down on south Florida like the wrath of God, I rolled up in the futon like some big ol’ burrito, and went to sleep.
I woke up to chaos, to sailboats in trees, to shredded houses and ruined lives. My own little rented house was wrecked, awash. The beautiful banyan trees that faced the office were in splinters. I had written a hundred stories, staring across at them, and for some reason the sight of them, in kindling, saddened me worse than any other structural harm.
Oddly, Andrew came to south Florida on precisely the day I had planned to leave it. I stayed on for three days, amazed at the power of it, and finally drove to the Miami airport with a ticket to Atlanta, then Boston.
As the plane lifted off, I took one good, last look at the city that had somehow suited my character, even though my Alabama drawl seemed so out of place in a city where the words were flavored with Cuba libres (rum and Coke), where English had long become a second language. From high up, it looked like someone had picked up one of those snow globes they sell in the tourist shops and smashed it on the floor.
I spent a day or two at home, in Alabama, before heading north again. I know my momma was proud of me for going back to college, even though she was not real sure what a “fellowship” was. Fellowship, to us, was what you did in church when the preacher told you to turn around in the pew and shake hands with your neighbor, which, in this case, was not far from accurate. Even though it was not “real Harvard,” as one Anniston Star buddy had felt compelled to point out to me—he had been to real Harvard—it was still a nice thing, I told her. I learned later that she told everybody who would listen that her son was going to Harvard.
She tried to give me some blackberry jelly and pickled peppers to take with me, and told me to dress warm. She said my blood was thin from all that time in Florida, so I would catch a lot of colds unless I wore long underwear and two coats, at all times.
I spent one last lazy evening down in Sam’s barn, just talking. I didn’t talk about Harvard. I felt sure that he, of all people, would be least impressed by this gift of free, fancy education. When two friends drove up, we walked outside to talk, to just stand around. It is something Southern men do, when they don’t have anything to say. They will just stand around, quiet, shifting their weight from foot to foot, until someone finally feels moved to talk. This time, it was Sam.
“Ricky’s goin’ to Harvard,” he said, and I swear to God he said it proud.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” one of the young men said, from under the bill of his cap. “That’s good.”
Then they started to talk about the mill, about layoffs and slowdowns, and, for reasons I am not quite sure of, I was ashamed.
29
Perfume on a hog
I had just one bad day at Harvard, but only because I lived up to my own stereotype. It was the night I let my temper push through my paper-thin veneer of respectability, and I threatened to whip a man’s ass during a white-tablecloth dinner in the Harvard Faculty Club, sometime between the chateaubriand and a stirring speech by a Native American newspaper publisher.
It was the dead of winter, which could have fallen anywhere from October to May. I had slipped into what I thought was a friendly argument with a man whose name I forgot as soon as we were introduced. I am bad with names. The argument had to do with President Clinton’s search for an attorney general, and I had merely shared with him an opinion; that selecting an attorney general from perhaps the most ineffective justice system in the nation, Dade County, might not be the brightest thing to do. He didn’t think much of my reasoning, and if he had just said so, things would have been fine. Instead, he insulted me. “You embarrass yourself,” he said.
He might as well have slapped me or spit in my face. It is a failing of pampered intellectuals that they assume everyone at their table is as civilized as they are. I had on a coat and tie and my socks even matched, but he had made a terrible mistake. My whole life I had wondered if I was as good, as smart, as clean as the people around me. Now this, this insult, hurt like salt flung in my eyes.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I’ll drag you out of here and whip your ass.”
He turned bright red—I have never seen a man light up like that—and said again, insultingly, “No one’s said that to me since elementary school.”
I just stared at him, and then I laughed in his face. It scared even me, that laugh. It sounded a little crazy, it sounded like someone I hadn’t heard from in a very, very long time.
He left not long after that, to an uneasy silence that made me feel like I had dragged my sleeve through the peach cobbler or committed some other terrible faux pas. Later, a very erudite journalist from South Africa, a young man named Tim DuPlesis, leaned over and said, “Excuse me, Rick. Did I hear you say you were going to whip that man’s arse?”
I told him, yes, and begged him to forgive me for my rudeness at table.
I expected to be defrocked after that, or whatever it is they do to you up there.
But when I told the curator, Kovach, about it, he only laughed.
But, to play it safe, I kept a low profile after that. It is easier that way. The pretension just slides right over you if you’re hunkered down.
It is a fact that I am hypersensitive to it. It may even be that I saw the disdain in places where it didn’t exist. It is more than possible, it is probably true.
But I had too much to learn, too much to do, anyway, to even think about it.
Harvard, to a man who had been in college precisely six months, was a gift, a glorious gift. I studied Latin and Afro-Caribbean history. I took every American history class I could. I studied diplomacy. I studied religion. I studied people. My whole career, I had been winging it. Here was a chance to know, to truly know something for a change.
I read all the books on the reading lists and went to class almost every day. In my spare time I rode the subway to Boston and took Spanish, building on the pitiful few phrases I could already speak. I soon learned that being able to say, “Señorita, qué linda tu eres,” would not get me through life.
I had an honest-to-God knapsack, full of books, and I walked everywhere I went. There was a peace in that place between those old buildings, in the stacks of books in the massive library, in the classrooms that smelled in the mornings of old polish and still-wet hair. Maybe for some people it was like going back in time, but I had never seen or done anything like this.
I lived on the third floor of a Colonial house, and invited friends over to do nothing except talk, and talk, and talk. I made friends. I ate pâté, which is a lot like the potted meat sandwiches my momma used to make, and met some pretty fancy people. I went to enough seminars to kill a normal man, and sat in the back, so I could slip out if it got slow. It usually did. If I got homesick, I called my momma, then went to Mrs. B’s—a place with real food—and got some meat loaf and mashed potatoes. I bought a Harvard sweatshirt, then bought thirty more to take home as Christmas presents. That year, you would have thought the whole population of Possum Trot, Roy Webb Road and Germania Springs had lodged at Kirkland House.
In December, I watched the Charles River freeze over. I will always remember that first, deep, lasting snow. I went running through the house, trying to get somebody to go play in the snow with me, and they all just looked at me like I was crazy. I hurried down to Harvard Yard, where the freshmen hung out, and found them flinging handfuls of snow at each other. I did not join in right away—I was twice their age—but then some young woman caught me square in the eyes with a ball of wet snow and for the next few minutes I was a kid again, slipping and sliding around like an idiot. I would come to despise it, as the snow piled up waist-high from the snowplows and turned the color and consistency of crumbled asphalt, but I think I loved it for a little while.
The cold, I never liked. Maybe my blood was a little thin, like my skin.
The other Nieman “fellows”—I’ve always thought that to be a twenty-dollar word and a little ridiculous—were ready-made friends, all journalists like me, and yet completely unlike me. Half were from this country, even Alaska, the rest from around the world: India, Albania, South Africa, China, Jordan, Vietnam. There was a fierce Russian woman who I am fairly certain could kick my ass. I loved to hear her talk, but now and then I couldn’t help but think of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s adversaries, Boris and Natasha. I would whisper to her, “So, vere is Moose and Squirrel?”
There was a mean woman from Italy who didn’t think much of American journalism, but she was nice to me and I liked her. She pinched me on the cheek once and said, “Ciao bello,” which even I knew was something nice.
The American Niemans, almost all of them, had already been to Ivy League schools. They were from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Swarthmore, almost all of them, so I was prepared to dislike them on sight. There was one jackass who actually believed that because I was from Alabama I was stupid—this is not paranoia, this was blatantly obvious and even bothered the other people in my class—but I did not knock his teeth down his throat because it would have cast a shadow over my Nieman experience. But the truth is that most of them were good people, and couldn’t help it that the worst day of their lives had involved wilted arugula.
I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you’re at your worst, that’s a friend. I hurt one of my bad knees, badly, while I was there, and for almost two months I couldn’t walk. Two Niemans, a Texan named Olive Talley and a New Yorker named Heidi Evans, hauled me back and forth to the doctor and demanded information about my condition that, as a boy from Alabama, I would never have asked. We just always figured doctors were too important to waste their time explaining things to us that we wouldn’t understand. Another Nieman Fellow, Terry Tang, cooked me duck and turnips—we spent a good part of an hour discussing the virtue of the lowly turnip and decided that it is greatly underappreciated—and once she even brought me a banana split. It was 12 degrees outside, so the ice cream didn’t even melt on the way home.
They, especially, taught me that you can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as you did. And who knows, maybe if I had bothered to get to know them better, maybe they had. Maybe they just didn’t wear it like some bullshit badge of honor, as I did. Olive was from Texas, anyway.
The students, the ones who actually paid tuition and had to study—didn’t quite know what to make of me. I was twice their size—Harvard students tend to run small—and some of them would walk all the way off the concrete paths in Harvard Yard to avoid walking close to me. I am not a scary-looking man, and I know I was better dressed than the homeless. A friend of mine told me that it is just the way most of them had been raised, that it wasn’t me, it was them. “Don’t make any sudden moves. If you throw up your hand and say, ‘Hey, how you doin’?’ you’ll scare ’em to death or at least into therapy, and they might hurt themselves getting away.”
In the classrooms, though, when I felt I had something to add or something to ask, it was different. It is a fact that some Harvard students will not ask questions in class because they are afraid they might appear as if they don’t already know everything, but time and time again I found myself answering questions from them after class, about the South, about race in the South, about politics and food and relationships between the sexes and … after a while I realized what they meant in the Nieman program about giving something back to the university. I was, by my very presence, a walking lab, a field trip. I had seen the meanness and killing that they read about in their texts on the Third World. I had seen George Wallace, big as life.
Most of the professors were glad to have us in their classes, because we were there because we wanted to be, not as one more credit. One professor seemed less than happy to have me. The professor spoke about the legacy of pain and prejudice, in that Yankee accent, and I could tell that the professor was speaking from insights gleaned on long-ago field trips, from old safaris through the rural South, and had formed petrified opinions that no amount of new information could change. There is plenty of new meanness and new racism in the South, but it is more complicated now. Some of the bad men have public cable access shows. Others are more prone to wear swastikas than burn crosses. The new racists blur their messages of hate with anti-government sentiment more than religion. Harvard was a little out of date, on racism.
But there were so many others who opened doors in my mind. I remember watching one old professor speak long and eloquently on U.S. diplomacy and the legacy of mistrust this country had sown in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, and as he would talk he would reach up to clutch the lapels of his robe, a robe that was not there. When he had begun, professors had worn such things, and he still reached for it as his mind whirled from fact to fact. I would just sit and listen.
It is a cliché to say I learned something about other people and other cultures, but it is true; I had begun that process with my first interview as
a reporter, of course, but Harvard was a Sam Walton Wholesale Warehouse of information and experiences. I will always loathe movies with subtitles, I will perhaps never own a pair of Birkenstocks, but I opened my head a little, in that place.
When I could, I talked about writing and living with Bill Kovach, one of those smart, decent men you would like to be like, if you had it in you. Through his intelligence and hard work and decency, he had proved himself. I did not have his arsenal, I couldn’t be like him, and I am even reluctant to claim him as a friend because I do not want to suppose anything. But few people have been as good a friend to me as him.
A silver-haired, dark-eyed man whose parents had emigrated from Albania to Tennessee, he never thought it particularly funny when I asked him if they still had a football program at the University of Tennessee. When I would try to avoid a question, or use my Southernness as a shield, or try to bullshit him, he would call me a “mush mouth.”
He told me I had a gift, which I guess anyone wants to hear even if it ain’t noways true, but he also told me, more or less gently, that I could use some work. He told me I crowded too many pretty lines into my stories, that I needed space between them. I tried to fix it. He told me he thought I was a decent man, and I almost cried, because somehow he had seen something in me that made him believe it.
As curator of the program, you have to listen to a lot of whining from journalists who have it made and are too dense to realize it. Maybe one of the reasons he could put up with me was I woke up every day grinning.
One day he asked what I was going to do with my life. I told him I loved my job and might stay, but that the idea of a bigger paper, of proving myself at some writer’s paper like the Los Angeles Times or one of the better magazines, tugged at me.
“How about the New York Times?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
“They wouldn’t look at somebody like me,” I said, and he looked at me like I had told him I couldn’t do one more push-up.
