by Lisa Fenn
“I’ll be fine,” I replied.
“It is not safe for little girls like you to be over there by yourself,” he contended. At scarcely five-one, I am indeed slight, but I knew my father was speaking to me as someone even smaller: his five-year-old pigtailed, freckle-faced girl, whom he had nobly protected from crude urban life. Technically, I was a city kid too—raised in Cleveland eight miles and half a world away from Leroy and Dartanyon’s high school. In 1978 I entered kindergarten two blocks from my west Cleveland home. My father liked to reminisce about how he walked me to my first day of school. He said I squeezed his hand nervously, and that when we reached the classroom, I refused to release my grip from his. “It was the first time I had to let you go for your own good,” he said. “And even though I had to let you go a hundred times more throughout your life, it never got easier.”
My public school career lasted one month. That year, Ohio appellate court judge Frank Battisti upheld a previous ruling to desegregate the Cleveland public schools and drafted a sixteen-point plan to ensure that black students and white students would receive equal educations. Of greatest concern to citizens on my side of town was that the predominantly African American schools on the east side of the city and the white schools on the west side of the city would have to exchange enough students to achieve racial balance. This plan, commonly known as busing, was met with great resistance among white residents. Judge Battisti received death threats, and the Cleveland public school teachers went on strike in the fall of my kindergarten year. Like most parents in our neighborhood, and in cities enacting similar desegregation plans, my father grew concerned. His protective instincts could not allow his blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter to ride a public school bus to the hood each day once the strike ended, yet he knew that his income as a greeting card salesman could neither fund a private education nor afford a suburban mortgage.
My father, a shrewd card player, scrambled to up his weekend poker participation. My mother soon returned to the workforce. Together they took on odd jobs. Their extra earnings enabled me to attend the private Lutheran elementary school five miles over the city line, where I went years without seeing a black person. My mother chauffeured me to after-school piano and ballet lessons alongside the other suburban children. A few times during high school, I volunteered at an inner-city soup kitchen as part of a service assignment. I also accompanied my aunt, an attorney, downtown to Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court to watch her prosecute parents accused of neglecting or abusing their children. My sole exposures to black people during my formative years involved worst-case scenarios, as I was either handing them a Styrofoam plate of slop or seeing them prosecuted for unspeakable crimes. I was ignorant of the paths that had delivered them to those points. And though I was grateful for the risks my parents took to shield me from life’s rougher edges, I was now curious to see what was on the other side.
“You don’t need to worry,” I assured my father. His right hand began to twitch, reflexively, down next to his thigh, as it did when an uncomfortable situation closed in on him.
“You just don’t understand how this world works, Lisa,” he said, turning back to scrub dishes in the sink. We stood gridlocked for an uncomfortably long time before my father handed me his car keys.
I drove toward Lincoln-West down potholed roads that grew quickly dreary as I passed storefronts such as Dollar Loans, Payday Furniture Rental, and Cash Smart Check Cashing. Cleveland’s push for desegregation had inadvertently impacted the city’s economy, for as white families fled to the west side of town and to suburbs, local businesses went with them. The result was that the remaining children were bused from a predominantly black school on the east side of town to a now predominantly black school on the west side of town. Racial balance became impossible to achieve. And rather than investing in updated textbooks, upgraded facilities, or better technology, more than half a billion dollars had been poured into transporting students, often an hour away from their homes. Cleveland wearily ended its desegregation efforts in 1996, with the court crediting school officials for doing their best to carry out a flawed experiment that united few and left the city’s education system in shambles.
Outside Lincoln’s main entrance, half a dozen kids congregated and smoked cigarettes. Their nicotine clouds drifted up the brick wall toward metallic letters spelling “Lincoln-West High School.” The L had loosened and hung carelessly at an angle. Inside the door, I joined a shuffling line of black and Hispanic teens, herded by a uniformed police officer. “Bags open so we can see what’s inside!” he shouted. The boy in front of me, wearing no coat on this blustery morning, was turned away. “You were expelled last week, but since you didn’t show up, they couldn’t tell you,” the officer informed him.
I passed through the metal detector—the ominous gate into Leroy and Dartanyon’s daily world—and into my first immersive encounter with American poverty. My inner alarms sounded. I hated that my father’s beliefs seemed woven into my fabric. I was, in fact, afraid.
I had planned to meet Dartanyon outside the school office, although when I called him the day before to confirm, his phone number was no longer in service. The school had not responded to my request to shadow Dartanyon through his classes. As I waited uneasily, watching students trudge past me in sleepy indifference, I suddenly wished I had chosen a more casual ensemble. I was dressed in gray polyester slacks, a powder-blue button-down blouse, and spool-heeled boots. It would be difficult to meld with urban teen culture while inadvertently masquerading as a preppy flight attendant.
Dartanyon emerged from a pack. “Good morning, Lisa,” he said, from about fifteen feet away.
“Hi, wow, how did you know it was me?” I asked. “I mean, it’s just, I thought you couldn’t see so well.”
“I just remembered that’s how your shadow stands. And you had a pony tail at sectionals too.” His mind had seemingly photographed my outline and committed it to memory. “You ready?”
Dartanyon was one of just three students in his first-period computer skills class. Impressed, I commented to the teacher on this wonderfully small class size. My naïveté amused her.
“We started the year with twenty-three,” she said. “This is all that’s left.” One of the last three standing; his mother would be proud, I thought. Students worked independently, and Dartanyon positioned himself mere inches from the outdated computer monitor, his eyes ricocheting through the lesson.
“The font is small for you, no?” I asked, peeking over his shoulder. “Can you see it?”
“Yah, I just get close to it. And I can figure out a lot of words by the shape of them. Like the word the—the tops of the first two letters are taller, and then it goes flat for the e. Or like the word and is short, with two flat parts and a sticky-uppy thing at the end.”
My attempts at conversation with Dartanyon were forced as I followed him through the rest of his day.
“How is your knee feeling?” I asked.
“Fine, thank you.”
“How do you like Lincoln-West?”
“It’s good. It’s a school.”
“Are you going to miss wrestling?”
“Yes, ma’am, I will.”
“Do you do any other sports?”
“Powerlifting starts this week.”
His answers to my questions, though brief, were respectful, and he insisted that I pass through each door ahead of him, as a gentleman would. When his mother was dying, she’d told her boys to treat girls like queens, and Dartanyon never disrespected his mother. His chivalry stood out as almost peculiar in a day marked by irreverent students. In English class, a group of girls formed a circle with their chairs to page through back issues of Shape magazine while their instructor tried to facilitate a discussion. Security broke up a fight after fourth period. Teachers collected books after each class, as they couldn’t be sure that either the book or the student would return. And all the while Dartanyon moved through the pandemonium with poise.
Thirty-thre
e languages were spoken throughout the Lincoln-West student population, representing fifty countries. Despite the challenges of teaching a student body so diverse, and in spite of its 40 percent graduation rate, Lincoln-West was considered the country club of the Cleveland public school district. Although skirmishes broke out in the parking lot from time to time—typically forewarned when a midday fire alarm was pulled—violence was largely absent from the hallways and classrooms. Teachers battled perpetual mischief but were safe from the more dangerous episodes that plagued other Cleveland public schools.
Lincoln-West also housed the city’s program for the visually impaired. When Dartanyon entered Lincoln-West as a tenth-grader, he took all of his classes in the same cramped room alongside twenty-four other visually impaired students. The rest of the school knew them by their glass dome magnifiers and the large-print books they carried through the halls.
“Large-print books weren’t just bigger words,” explained Dartanyon. “The whole book was huge, like a giant magazine. They didn’t even fit in a backpack. You don’t know the torture.”
“To hear Dartanyon tell it, he could see everything,” said Val Barkley, Lincoln’s lead teacher for the visually impaired. “But in reality, he needed at least twenty-point font, and he needed to sit in the front of the room to have any chance at following along.”
By his junior year, Dartanyon was sick of being lumped with the “blind kids.” He began resisting aides and adaptive devices. He swore up and down that he could see the chalkboard, that he had no limitations. Barkley sensed the program’s approach grating on Dartanyon and approved his transition into mainstream classes during his junior year, along with an assistant to guide his note taking. But Dartanyon ducked the assistant as well, hiding in the back of the room or coming in late to avoid being seen with her. He remembered his mama’s words: You don’t need special help. You can do anything anyone else can do.
The spirit of Juanita’s counsel was pure; the practicality of it caused Dartanyon’s grades to plummet. Only sports forced him to accept the help he needed, as he could only fake it for so long before his eligibility caught up with him. He and Leroy became regulars at Coach Hons’s after-school tutoring club, where they sat side by side. Dartanyon would get up to sharpen Leroy’s pencils; Leroy ensured that Dartanyon could understand directions in small print. Yet each time I allowed myself to revel in their gentleness, they reverted to a teenage humor with a twist that only they could share.
“Did you guys do your homework?” asked Coach Hons.
“Dartanyon tried,” said Leroy, “but he couldn’t see it.”
“So Leroy ran over and read it to me last night,” Dartanyon said. He played it so smoothly that it felt like an old joke, yet their classmates laughed heartily, signaling that this was new, improv material. Afterward, the pair barreled down the halls together, their echoing laughter the brightest light in those dreary halls. Still, I could not coax a smile from Leroy in my direction. He suspected that I had come to probe his heart, and that was a place he had locked up eight years before.
I ASKED COACH Robinson to accompany me to Leroy’s house later that night, hoping he could help me break the ice. Leroy lived with his grandmother on the east side of Cleveland, a predominantly African American community that had been hit hard by the city’s economic decline. Robinson led me off the highway, through blocks of boarded-up homes. Many of the stop signs had been painted blue by the Crips. Farther along, Leroy’s neighborhood was Bloods territory, so its stop signs remained red. Perhaps the street’s most eye-catching sign had been hung by Leroy’s grandmother in her front porch window:
THIS HOUSE IS GUARDED BY SHOTGUN
THREE NIGHTS PER WEEK.
YOU GUESS WHICH THREE.
“Don’t worry, this neighborhood isn’t as bad as the one off the highway,” Robinson assured me. “No one gets shot around here unless they need to be.” He hadn’t called ahead to say we were coming, yet Patricia Sutton greeted us warmly. “Big Ma, this is Lisa from ESPN,” he said. “We’re here to see Leroy.”
“All right, then,” she replied. “He just downstairs doin’ whatever and stuff. Go on through the kitchen there.” Big Ma was preoccupied, watching Wheel of Fortune on a wide-screen television; artificial plants, ceramic elephants, and decorative crosses filled in the remaining space. The air hung heavy, saturated with cooking oil.
In the musty cinder-block basement, Leroy was hunkered down on a stained carpet with his Xbox controller in hand. He was uninterested in our arrival. “Hey, kid, Lisa’s here,” Robinson said.
“Hey,” Leroy grunted, without looking away from the television. Robinson cleared a pile of crumpled T-shirts and dishes crusted with old food from a floral crushed-velvet sofa behind Leroy, motioning for me to take a seat. Dampness permeated my pants.
Coach Robinson and I made small talk about the wrestling season and what it’s like to work at ESPN. I didn’t lob any questions to Leroy. I had not touched a video game since Q*bert debuted on my Atari 5200 twenty-five years earlier, and any conversation I faked would have simply exposed me. My hope was that if he simply observed his coach’s acceptance of me, Leroy would find permission to do the same. After an hour, I asked Leroy if it would be okay to stop by again the next night. He grunted in a way that communicated neither a yes nor a no.
“He’ll come around,” Robinson said on our way out. “He just doesn’t trust you yet. Probably thinks you’re a turkey lady.”
“A what?” I asked.
“You know, a turkey lady,” he repeated. “One of them white people who only come into the hood to drop off Thanksgiving dinner. That’s their good deed for the year, and then they go back to their side of town.”
I ARRIVED THE next night on my own to find Leroy squared up to his console, still refusing to greet me. This time I opted for the floor to show him that he could not scare me away, that I was not here on a service project. If he wanted me to leave, he would have to say so. Until he did, I would play along. After an hour of silence, I thanked Leroy for having me and said I would see him tomorrow.
Upstairs I found Big Ma calling out letters to Vanna White. Curiously, in two visits, she had yet to ask my purpose. So during a commercial, I took the liberty of telling her. I told her that I found her grandson to be an admirable wrestler. I told her that I wanted to learn more about him and his family. And I told her that I was interested in featuring him on television. “All right then, sounds good,” she said, nodding approvingly. “Now here come round two. These boards are tough today.”
After Big Ma beat out the contestant from Oklahoma in the bonus round, I asked her if she had any photos of Leroy as a child that I might see. She dug a stack out of a china cabinet drawer in the dining room. “Ooohhh! These here are good. These are from my retirement party. Forty years I worked for the board of education. I worked and saved up and got me this house. Mmmm, I love my house.”
“You worked as a security guard?” I asked, noticing her blue uniform and shiny gold badge in one of the photos.
“No, I was a security officer,” she corrected. “Guards are for buildings. Officers are for people. I looked after people.” She shuffled through photos from the retirement celebration, reminiscing about the party, the cake, and the nice things people wrote in cards. This period of Big Ma’s life served as a source of great pride.
“Mrs. Sutton, do you think there might be photos of Leroy in there?” I asked.
“I probably got some somewhere,” she said. “I gotta dig around. You comin’ back tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ll be back.”
BIG MA STOOD waiting with a handful of Leroy’s baby pictures the next night. Unlike my childhood milestones, which are lovingly held in albums resistant to ultraviolet rays, Leroy’s had not been preserved with any degree of care—torn corners, creased edges, melded together by hot summers and clumped food. She told me how Leroy was born as chubby as a baby walrus and that his nickname was Redd due to his ruddy coloring at birth. “He
got a cousin a few years younger we call Smurf cuz he blue when he came out.” She chuckled, sliding her glasses back up with her index finger.
I came to a photo of Leroy in a hospital bed, hooked up to a pale blue ventilator tube. “Tell me about his accident,” I said.
“Oh, that was bad. Real bad. But I was there every day by his bed, praying,” Big Ma said. “I never left, every day, all day. I was so tired, but I stayed with him even when his mama went home.” Propped up on the large hospital bed, little Leroy looked like a doll, eyes wide and scared.
“How would you describe Leroy’s state of mind in those first few weeks?”
“Oh, he was fine, cuz I just prayed and prayed,” she said. “I left work that morning when the call came, and I said ‘I don’t know when I’m comin’ back because my grandson been hit by a train.’”
“Did he have counseling in the hospital or when he left?”
“Oh, no, he didn’t need that. He did real good, cuz he knew I was with him. The nurses said ‘Pat, you go home and get some sleep,’ but I said, ‘No, no, I’m stayin’ right here.’ Never left, not even when I got hungry.” Pat clearly loved her grandson, but at times it seemed she leaned toward framing his suffering as a tale of her own virtue.
“But losing one’s legs is traumatic at any age. It must have been confusing for an eleven-year-old boy,” I pressed. “What types of things did he say to you as you sat together all of those days in the hospital?”
“He didn’t say nothing. He knew he was gonna be just fine ’cuz I was right there,” she said.
