despite the prejudices they knew they might well face in their adopted countries—in other words, they had come for economic opportunity, racial and ethnic bias notwithstanding, much as Africans sometimes do now—seems to escape us.
That one place may be preferable to another in terms of opportunity says little about whether that first place is as equitable as it should be. But for many white Americans, like those teachers at Stokes, the presence of someone like Rudo confirmed everything they needed to believe about their nation. She was like a soothing balm, allowing them not only to push away concerns about institutional racism, but also to avoid confronting their own biases, which played out against the other black students in their classes every day.
MIDDLE PASSAGE
1980 WAS A horrible year for a lot of reasons, only one of which had to do with the election of Ronald Reagan that November—itself a cause for sincere political mourning in the Wise home.
Only twelve days into the year, my mom’s father died at the relatively young age of sixty five, ending a life that had been of miserable quality for the past half-decade thanks to several strokes that had rendered him unable to care for himself. A few months later, one of my dad’s old theatre colleagues died on stage, the victim of a massive heart attack. The next month, another family friend was killed in a car accident, and one of my classmates, Roger Zimmerman, was killed when a drunk driver plowed into him while Roger had been riding his bike.
And then there was life with my father. In May, dad and I started working on a few scenes from the play “A Thousand Clowns,” which we would perform during my school’s spring theatre showcase. Ultimately the show went well, but he had shown up to dress rehearsal so blindrunning drunk that I had a complete emotional breakdown on stage. Even as I glared at him through a literal cascade of tears, he failed to comprehend the meaning behind the melancholy, incoherently mumbling something about how brilliant I was for being able to make myself cry, just like the character in the scene was supposed to. I guess he also thought my silent seething on the ride home was just a matter of staying in character, rather than what it really had been: the expression of profound embarrassment that he had exposed his illness for so many of my friends to see. Needless to say, as sixth grade came to a close, the combination of my tenuous connection to my father, my parents’ combative relationship, and all the deaths in our little corner of the universe had left me far more exhausted than any eleven-year-old should be.
Summer made things a bit better. Although my baseball team had muddled through another miserable year, I had enjoyed a fantastic season individually, making the city’s all-star team. My dad had been out of town for much of the summer, doing a play in Atlanta, which meant not only that he wouldn’t be showing up to my games loaded (as he had for much of the previous season), but that evenings at home with my mom would be blessedly quiet. We would get together on many of those evenings to watch old Alfred Hitchcock movies, or Twilight Zone reruns, the latter of which were among my favorite things to watch on TV.
By July, baseball season was over (this was long before the days of traveling teams and forty-game summer schedules), and I was enjoying doing nothing. I’d sleep in late, go swimming in the apartment’s pool most of the day, and then spend the rest of my time reading, adding to my baseball card collection, or hanging out at the local game room, trying to master Pac-Man, which had been released just two months earlier.
There were exactly eight weeks left before the start of Junior High School, that morning of July 6, when I was woken by the sound of my mother opening the apartment door to retrieve the Sunday paper from the hallway. Though I’d heard the door open, I tried not to wake up, preferring to
That one place may be preferable to another in terms of opportunity says little about whether that first place is as equitable as it should be. But for many white Americans, like those teachers at Stokes, the presence of someone like Rudo confirmed everything they needed to believe about their nation. She was like a soothing balm, allowing them not only to push away concerns about institutional racism, but also to avoid confronting their own biases, which played out against the other black students in their classes every day.
MIDDLE PASSAGE
1980 WAS A horrible year for a lot of reasons, only one of which had to do with the election of Ronald Reagan that November—itself a cause for sincere political mourning in the Wise home.
Only twelve days into the year, my mom’s father died at the relatively young age of sixty five, ending a life that had been of miserable quality for the past half-decade thanks to several strokes that had rendered him unable to care for himself. A few months later, one of my dad’s old theatre colleagues died on stage, the victim of a massive heart attack. The next month, another family friend was killed in a car accident, and one of my classmates, Roger Zimmerman, was killed when a drunk driver plowed into him while Roger had been riding his bike.
And then there was life with my father. In May, dad and I started working on a few scenes from the play “A Thousand Clowns,” which we would perform during my school’s spring theatre showcase. Ultimately the show went well, but he had shown up to dress rehearsal so blindrunning drunk that I had a complete emotional breakdown on stage. Even as I glared at him through a literal cascade of tears, he failed to comprehend the meaning behind the melancholy, incoherently mumbling something about how brilliant I was for being able to make myself cry, just like the character in the scene was supposed to. I guess he also thought my silent seething on the ride home was just a matter of staying in character, rather than what it really had been: the expression of profound embarrassment that he had exposed his illness for so many of my friends to see. Needless to say, as sixth grade came to a close, the combination of my tenuous connection to my father, my parents’ combative relationship, and all the deaths in our little corner of the universe had left me far more exhausted than any eleven-year-old should be.
Summer made things a bit better. Although my baseball team had muddled through another miserable year, I had enjoyed a fantastic season individually, making the city’s all-star team. My dad had been out of town for much of the summer, doing a play in Atlanta, which meant not only that he wouldn’t be showing up to my games loaded (as he had for much of the previous season), but that evenings at home with my mom would be blessedly quiet. We would get together on many of those evenings to watch old Alfred Hitchcock movies, or Twilight Zone reruns, the latter of which were among my favorite things to watch on TV.
By July, baseball season was over (this was long before the days of traveling teams and forty-game summer schedules), and I was enjoying doing nothing. I’d sleep in late, go swimming in the apartment’s pool most of the day, and then spend the rest of my time reading, adding to my baseball card collection, or hanging out at the local game room, trying to master Pac-Man, which had been released just two months earlier.
There were exactly eight weeks left before the start of Junior High School, that morning of July 6, when I was woken by the sound of my mother opening the apartment door to retrieve the Sunday paper from the hallway. Though I’d heard the door open, I tried not to wake up, preferring to
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