Character Driven (15 page)

Larry and I got along after that as if nothing had happened and he hadn’t played any part in what could have been a serious accident. The next time I saw him he did ask how my knee was, and I said I was okay, and that was that. No grudges held. No banishment of Larry from the house. I can see a lot of positives from that incident and our response to it. We kept things in perspective, and despite my hysterical crying, I think my mother knew that nothing was seriously wrong with me, that I had only a nasty bit of what I’ve learned cyclists call road rash. While we didn’t just rub some dirt on it and send me back in the game, we did keep moving forward. My mother did say that she offered up some prayers of thanks at Sunday services and also asked God to keep His eye out for me.

The only time I can recall testing that protection, but not realizing it at the time, was when a few years later during winter I was out with my cousin Byron and my friend Todd. My grandmother lived in an area of Little Rock that we all called Granny Mountain. We didn’t know its official name was Granite Mountain, because of a granite quarry that bordered the area. We loved to play there because of all its mounds and hills of dirt that had been scooped out and piled up. It was a little bit of kid heaven on earth, a great place for hide-and-seek and war games, with a steady supply of rocks and pebbles as ammunition. Part of the quarry had flooded, forming a lake. After we had been out messing around for a few hours, we decided to head back inside. None of us felt like taking the long way around, so we walked across the ice on the quarry’s lake. Didn’t give it a thought. We made it safely home, but having been back there as an adult and seen that lake, I get the shivers.

We’d get a bit of snow each winter in Little Rock, but it never stays very, very cold for long—not long enough for a solid sheet of ice to have formed on that quarry lake. I also realize now how deep that lake was. If any of us had fallen through what had to have been thin ice, we wouldn’t have survived. There’s the old statement about ignorance being bliss, and I guess that someone was watching out for us that day since we made it across safely. But I was thinking about that walk across that lake the other day in light of this idea of protection. Obviously we all want to keep our loved ones free from harm. One of the things that I wonder about with my stepson Marshall and with Tatum and Drew and Chloe is how much to warn them about the dangers in the world. As I sit here writing, a gunman in Alabama opened fire and killed ten people—some family members and others—before ending his own life. The headlines in the papers also told of a school in Germany where a former student opened fire in several classrooms and later in town. He killed fifteen others before he was shot and killed by police.

I wonder how you balance keeping your kids safe, letting them be kids, and making them alert to the possible dangers lurking out there. I grew up in Little Rock at a time when we could play outside and our parents didn’t worry about our being kidnapped, wounded, or killed in a drive-by gang-related shooting. We were pretty free to just roam around, and just as I crossed that quarry lake without thinking that something bad could happen, I went about my business every day kind of carefree. Only now when I look back do I realize that some of those dangers were lurking in the Little Rock of my era, and probably in every other community. The media have made us more aware of those dangers, and you can’t turn on any news program without being warned about the potential dangers of something, whether it’s the lead in toys, some cancer-causing agent in plastic, or some food. We as parents can make all kinds of rules and guidelines, but just as with that car door, something unexpected can come along when you think you’ve got things in control and it can all still go wrong.

I know that my parents did their best to protect us from some of the harsher realities of life. As I got older, I sometimes wondered if maybe we were too sheltered. As I said, we weren’t the most openly emotional and communicative of families, but we had one another’s back.

Neither of my parents grew up in Little Rock, which may explain why they never talked to me or my siblings about race and the history of Little Rock and desegregation and the civil rights struggle. I don’t know if my parents struggled against any kind of discrimination as they grew up. Not until I was in school and we studied the civil rights movement and later at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, when I took some African-American studies classes did I really learn about the role my hometown played. One of the first things we all learned about was the 1954 Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education
, which ruled that separate but equal facilities and in particular segregation in public schools was illegal. We lived in a fairly racially mixed area, my high school had about the same number of black students as white students, and even at UALR the students were almost one-third black, so the idea that at one time schools were legally all-white and all-black seemed almost unthinkable and definitely outside my experience.

I can’t say that I was outraged to learn that Little Rock Central High’s decision to desegregate voluntarily (as if they really had a choice) was so contentious and divisive in the community, but it definitely made me think. That it took three years after
Brown v. Board of Education
for this to happen surprised me. I also wondered why the Little Rock Nine wasn’t a group that I had heard of and been told about in great detail somewhere along the line. Thanks to the efforts of the Little Rock Nine Foundation, the contributions of those nine individuals who braved angry mobs in September of 1957, who were turned back by Arkansas National Guardsmen under the order of Governor Orval Faubus (under the guise of protecting them), and who ultimately entered the school escorted by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division on September 25 won’t be forgotten.

It took until 2005, but a memorial statue was finally dedicated to the Little Rock Nine, who withstood ongoing harassment, with the governor ordering all Little Rock schools shut down in 1958 (only to be reopened following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1959). The Little Rock Nine Civil Rights Memorial stands on the grounds of the state capitol. Nine life-size figures are accompanied by inscriptions of inspirational words they provided. Only when I read some of their statements did I realize that without coming out and stating it, my parents had been telling me about the Little Rock Nine and what they represented. Carlotta Walls was very much speaking for me when she wrote, “Hard work, determination, persistence, and faith in God were lessons learned from my parents, Cartelyou and Juanita Walls. I was only doing what was right.”

The words Melba Patillo provided pretty much sum up my parents’, and in particular my mother’s, message regarding race: “The task that remains is to embrace our interdependence—to see ourselves reflected in every other human being, and to respect & honor differences.” That was communicated to me loud and clear, but at times static interfered and the message was lost.

I inherited one other thing from my parents along with my penchant for basketball—a tendency to internalize things too much. I wish that I knew more about my parents’ experiences, particularly my dad’s experiences, because I think that they had a direct effect on me and my family. When I was in high school, my father stopped going to work at the post office. I never knew exactly why, but my mother did tell me that he hadn’t been fired. He quit. Every now and then after that, I’d hear my dad make some passing and vague reference to being passed over. He had worked there for twelve or thirteen years, and from what I could piece together, he hadn’t been promoted and, with the exception of a cost-of-living increase, hadn’t even received a raise. I guess he just got fed up with that and quit.

Being out of work did not agree with my dad—he was the driving force in our have-to-be-occupied, have-to-be-productive lives. So, when he left his job with the post office, we all figured that he’d get on somewhere else as soon as possible. That didn’t happen. In some ways fortunately and in other ways unfortunately, I was getting older and more involved in school activities, so I was able to distance myself from the home front a bit more. But it was sad to see my dad just hanging out at home, looking defeated. I didn’t want to think about it, but on those rare occasions when I did, I wondered what had happened to the guy who’d preached to me and who’d demonstrated to me all the value of hard work and who had once embodied the idea that you don’t give up. I think that was the hardest thing for me to deal with, but even in seeming to give up, my dad was teaching me a lesson.

My mom stepped up and did the best she could. We had gone from being a two-income family doing fairly well financially to a family with two incomes but only one person employed. My mom shouldered the burden and got another job part-time in the evenings to supplement her bank income. Through it all, she never complained, at least not to me, and though some of the extras we’d once enjoyed became a little more scarce, we definitely never went hungry, and my parents definitely never stopped supporting my siblings and me. If my parents didn’t always sit right next to each other during my games, they were both very much a presence in my life, and continue to be, and for that I’m grateful.

My dad stuck around for my sister and me—Duane was long since gone and on his own—until she graduated from high school. My parents split up officially and divorced many years down the line. They clearly weren’t in a productive relationship while I was in high school and college, but I still believe that I wouldn’t be where I am today without them both. My dad has always been a presence in my life. On more than one occasion, as I was walking to class while at UALR, I heard footsteps coming up behind me. There was my dad. What I didn’t know was that he had talked to the coaches at UALR and told them, “Anything going on with Derek, you call me.” So if I had a semester when my grades weren’t as good as they should have been, or if I was spending too much time socializing or chasing girls or whatever, he’d show up. His “Look here, man, you need to straighten this out” talks always had the desired effect on me.

Like any man, I want to have my father’s respect, and I believe I do and that I’ve earned it. Still, neither of us seems all that willing or capable of ending that bit of disconnect between us. Candace encourages me to reach out to him, and my dad and I do talk, but something is still between us, this unspoken lack of understanding, because we haven’t talked about the breakup of my parents’ marriage and what went on with his job. I don’t mean to trivialize this, but sometimes I wish that this whole thing were as easy as going to a zone defense and forcing the other team to beat us from the outside. I think my dad and I are wired that way—see a problem, fix it. Focus on a solution. Unfortunately the kinds of defenses we put up as humans when it comes to relationships and emotions aren’t that easy to master.

I only hope that I’m able to provide my kids with more and better access to me and the truth about who I am and how I got to be this way. My stepson is at the age now that I was when my parents became estranged. I’ve become very conscious of my interactions with him. Again, I give my dad a lot of credit for helping me become the man I am today, but he did a lot of things to help me without really explaining what he was doing or why. I told you the flak jacket story earlier, and working out with it certainly helped me, but my father basically said, “Here. Put this on. Run up and down this hill.” I felt that I couldn’t really ask questions, and as irritating as it can be as a parent to hear “Why?” all the time, understanding life requires asking questions.

I sometimes wonder if my dad had some master plan for me, if he saw in me the potential to be an NBA player and worked out a blueprint for my success. If he had, it would have been great to know that he had that kind of belief in me. Eventually he showed me that he did, but that was after the fact. A flak jacket’s purpose is to provide the wearer with protection. Problem is, as much as it can keep things from getting in, it can prevent things from getting out. I need to keep working at this, but with my kids, my wife, and in my other relationships, I want to let my guard down, let them know that they are welcome to score in my house, and that I’m not going to block their shot and not isolate so much of my life from them.

I also want them to know that I really do have my parents to thank in so many ways for my achievements. I know that they struggled with some issues and that they didn’t always let me in on what was going on or why, but if they didn’t talk about these things, it was because they were trying to protect us. In other cases, I’m grateful for what they did to keep us safe from all kinds of harm—emotional and physical.

I don’t know if it was a result of their plan to keep us busy, but I avoided many of the pitfalls that plague young people whether they live in the city, the suburbs, or the country. As much as I thought growing up that Little Rock was a tight-knit, little community, it wasn’t immune to some of the troubles that affect bigger cities. Candace, who grew up in Los Angeles, lived in a very different world from mine, in some ways because I wasn’t aware of what was going on. As an athlete and a kid with involved parents, I lived in a kind of protective bubble. Sometimes that bubble got burst—one time in the most violent of ways.

In eighth grade I was attending Henderson Junior High, which was pretty calm and peaceful. A few guys got into fights on the playground when a game got a little out of control or when rumor had it that somebody had disrespected someone else. I got into a few of those little fights myself in elementary school, but they were generally broken up by the time any of the faculty came along, and no one got in any serious trouble. Something started to change while I was at Henderson, though I was too busy with basketball and my studies to pay that much attention to it. One signal was that we were locked out of the building until ten minutes before the first class at eight o’clock. Prior to that, we’d been able to congregate inside the building. None of us really minded having to wait outside, except on cold or rainy days, and we’d get a game going.