The Last Holiday (12 page)

The principal’s voice droned to a close and I saw Mr. Worthman stare with energy and focus at me. He had been waiting for this moment, and now he was speaking too loudly with certain
emphasis as though it was a prepared speech that he had rehearsed. He talked about how valuable the Steinway was and how he had caught me playing it before and how the rule had been put in place to
prevent students from playing “boogie woogie.”

I didn’t notice the transition when Mr. Worthman had finished and suddenly collapsed in his seat as the principal started speaking again. He said something about how it would be easy for
the committee to mete out the punishment but that at Fieldston they thought it was important for the parents to be involved and that what they wanted was my mother’s recommendation.

The pause between the principal’s question and my mother’s response fell on each member of the committee like a guillotine. She took a long breath before turning in my direction.

“Expel him,” she said crisply and clearly. “I understand that you don’t suspend students and I understand why. I agree with you. I don’t believe in suspending
students either. So if you believe playing the piano is high on your list of offenses, expel him.”

She was dominating the room now. Her voice was clear and her diction was perfect.

“I’m going to work now. If you expel him, he’ll tell me when I get home.”

It was an amazing piece of business. There hadn’t been a second when she seemed shaken or awkward or the least bit uncomfortable. She looked every bit the well-dressed businesswoman
perfectly at ease, and as she gathered her bag and scarf, she could easily have been heading out to a waiting limousine instead of to the subway, as was actually the case.

Finally she turned to the committee members as we were leaving. “When he told me what this was all about, I didn’t believe him. I thought he had finally done something that he was
too embarrassed to tell me about, that he had lost this wonderful opportunity and we would both be humiliated to sit here when I heard the truth. He told me the truth. He said he had been playing a
piano. I will only add this: when something goes wrong on Seventeenth Street, I don’t call you. Because that’s my responsibility. And this is your school. If he has done something that
merits punishment, don’t call me. Send him home. We’ll understand. I need to have him show me the way back down that hill. You can tell him whatever you decide.”

I resisted the urge to look back at Mr. Worthman.

We walked down the hill without saying much. That was another thing I appreciated about my mother. She wasn’t afraid of silence. By the time we’d arrived at the base of the stairs
that led up to the subway, she had come back to herself.

“I want you to leave those people’s things alone,” she said. “You’re up here to get an education. Get it and come on home. I’m sorry I didn’t believe
you. I learned something today, too.”

I think she and I got a lot closer that day.

I am extremely pleased to report that I only had one session with the Fieldston disciplinary committee. That does not mean that I committed only one infraction. That would be
ridiculous. I guess it’s a little like being charged with a first offense even if it’s the tenth time you’ve done something. It’s the first time you got caught.

In that respect, I can never accuse the people of Fieldston, neither the students nor the faculty, of being racist. I can accuse the students of knowing each other for years and preferring to
hang out with each other instead of some guy who just got there. I can accuse the teachers of having taught my classmates for ten years and me for ten minutes. But I can’t say they never took
the time to tell me that I was doing as little work as I did.

So there were students and faculty members and executives who did not like me. But to their credit, I honestly believe that they just
didn’t like me
. What’s wrong with that?
There were a lot of Black folks who felt the same way over the years. They were just less anxious to let me know it.

Most of this wisdom was acquired over my three years there. As a tenth-grade rookie, my first year there, I was working overtime at Jackson’s or wherever the hell I could to make ends meet
and stay afloat in Spanish class. I felt more comfortable as the years went on. It was just a school, after all. I had probably set some sort of poverty precedent by receiving a scholarship to
cover books as well as tuition. The books at public school were free, but at Fieldston I found the cost beyond my legal reach, and mentioned the possibility of a heist, which inspired Professor
Heller to get me a voucher that I used for sixty-four dollars’ worth of knowledge.

My mother and I didn’t have enough money for it to be one of my issues. I took every opportunity that showed up on Seventeenth Street. I managed to catch a run at the A&P supermarket
on Eighth Avenue three nights a week, and since I had improved a great deal on piano and still kept up with the top tunes on the radio, I looked for jobs as keyboard player with some rhythm and
blues or rock and roll bands in the city. I managed to hook up with a few groups for weekend jobs at schools, in hotel bars, and at birthday parties. There was a whole culture then a few levels
down from the bands we were imitating. The bread was short, twenty or twenty-five dollars a night, but it beat the hell out of nothing.

Every summer from the time I was sixteen I took a job as a seasonal worker for the Housing Authority. I spent one summer at the St. Nicholas Houses on 135th Street in Harlem, one at the Dykeman
Houses on the Upper West Side, and one at the Housing Authority’s central office at 250 Broadway. That turned out to be a very good summer. Aside from the nine to five I was doing, Monday
through Friday, I signed up as a referee for four or five games of basketball every weekend. The New York City Housing Authority had a summer basketball league and furnished uniforms, score books,
time clocks, and balls for two teams in every set of projects. The Authority also made up a schedule, made sure the court was available, and assigned a referee to officiate the game and turn in a
report to the central office at 250 Broadway.

That’s where I came in. Refs were paid ten bucks a game, so I could make an extra forty or fifty dollars per weekend. My shelf work at A&P started at 7 p.m. and ended between midnight
and 2 a.m. I would send inventory upstairs from the basement, or stand upstairs with a hand truck snatching crates of canned goods, bottles, and cans. Dairy products and meats needed to be stacked
weekend deep before the Saturday deluge. All the weekend sales specials and new product displays had to be stacked and stamped. All the summer work ended up paying for college tuition.

I had decided to attend Lincoln University after my 1967 graduation from Fieldston. I wanted to go to Lincoln because it seemed to be a place where Black writers had come to national prominence.
Perhaps because of its location: if not exactly the middle of nowhere, at least on one side or the other. It was outside of Oxford, Pennsylvania, about forty-five miles from Philadelphia,
fifty-five miles from Baltimore, and thirty miles from Wilmington, Delaware. Perhaps that isolation and absence of urban distractions had allowed the creativity and intellect of Langston Hughes,
Melvin Tolson, Ron Welburn, and others to flourish. Whatever the reason, I thought the place was extraordinary. Its students had made noteworthy accomplishments in a number of areas. Kwame Nkrumah
got his degree there in the 1930s and went on to become the leader of independent Ghana. Cab Calloway had gone there. And my candidate for Man of the Century, NAACP lawyer and first Black on the
Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, went to Lincoln, too.

The school was founded as the Ashmun Theological Institute in 1854 at the insistence of the Quakers, who formed a powerful political force in Pennsylvania. In an era when it was still illegal to
teach Blacks to read and write unless they were ministers, Ashmun was not only a tool of political appeasement for the Quakers, it was a double blessing for Blacks who now had both an institution
of higher education—a first—and a safe house across the Maryland line that could be used as a rest stop and hiding place on the Underground Railroad.

In 1869, four years after the “war between the states” and four years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, the small school for aspiring Black
theologians in Southeastern Pennsylvania was renamed Lincoln University. Abraham Lincoln was not a factor in my decision to go there, though I obviously knew the place had not been named for a
luxury automobile. Black Americans have always held to the idea that Honest Abe was a friend of the downtrodden and mistreated slaves in spite of his Kentucky birthplace and pragmatism on the
slavery issue—as in, “If I could save the Union and allow the institution of slavery to continue . . .” The fact was, he couldn’t have allowed slavery and still hung on to
abolitionist support, so he authored a document that was politically expedient, the Emancipation Proclamation, that is credited with “Jubilee” as the news slowly spread through the
South causing the celebrations Blacks refer to as “Juneteenth.”

The Lincoln of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall was not the place it had been when I got off the bus in September of 1967. School leadership had jettisoned a 112-year tradition as a male
institution the year before. There were a large number of coeds unloading their trunks and bags from family station wagons. The general attitude of Lincoln’s executives was notably animated;
their conversations centered around how necessary it was for Black schools to be open to change, and how good it was that in spite of diminishing funds and contributions to Black schools because of
the disturbances on college campuses across the nation, Lincoln was growing; that in spite of the destruction of a century of traditions, Lincoln would be a stronger institution in the end.

Certain old-schoolers seemed unsettled by all the change. Juniors and seniors as well as veterans returning from service in the armed services found the rapid expansion and coeducational system
distasteful because of new restrictions and rules of conduct at odds with their lives before the admission of women. A lot of the upperclassmen grumbled that they were glad they’d be leaving,
and the vets that they were sorry they had returned. I felt fortunate to have arrived when, through these older students, there was still a shadow of the tradition that had been so much of an
influence on the Lincoln men who helped shape Black America, but the place felt like a campus in flux.

I was not immediately sorry to be at Lincoln. I spent a lot of time from the day I reached Lincoln’s campus becoming familiar with the outstanding collection of Black
American literature.

It took a few days to organize my class schedule and find out where the holes were in my week that would permit extra time among the “Black stacks” in the ancient library. Lincoln
had a collection of Black books and special editions of literature that were exceeded only by the tremendous amount of material available at the Schomberg on 135th Street in Harlem. In becoming a
state-related school, Lincoln had opened itself up to a larger proportion of area students whose fields of interest were a far cry from the course load Thurgood Marshall found to be such a strong
foundation for his career as a lawyer. But that material was exactly what I was after.