The Measure of a Man Read online

  But when I was just present and available and waited for it to happen, the good stuff could start with the most innocuous question.

  “How far is it now?”

  “Oh, it’s not too far.”

  “Well, what are we going to do when we get there?”

  They would begin to wonder about something, and somehow they would open up a little bit, you know? It’s really crazy.

  My daughter Sydney came home from school one day and sat at the table writing. I said, “What are you doing there? What are you writing?”

  She said with great earnestness, “I’m going to write a novel.” She said, a “no-vel I’m going to write,” and I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  “I’m going to write a no-vel, and I’m working on it now,” she repeated.

  And like a fool I got it in my head to encourage her. But parents don’t know how much weight a simple word can carry. I started encouraging her, and she started pulling back, and within a year she had given up the whole idea. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was write a no-vel.

  With my daughter Beverly, communication was sometimes even harder. She was the oldest, only thirteen or so when Juanita and I separated. The daughter of an outsider and a maverick, she hungered for the insider’s state of being, yet I was tearing her world apart.

  Once she said to me, “Why do I have to do well in school?”

  I said, “Because it’s essential to your adult life.”

  And she said, “Well, I don’t want to be a standout. I don’t want to be better than anybody else. Why do I have to be better?”

  “A good education is a necessity for whatever lifestyle you decide to create for yourself,” I replied.

  “Well, why can’t I be like everybody else? I’d like to be like my friends. I don’t want to be different!” she screamed, hardening her protest against the list of unpleasant circumstances threatening her sense of safety. Even before the unraveling of her parents’ marriage, the social status that my success had brought to the family had begun to be a difficult issue for her with friends at school. She didn’t want the responsibility of having to negotiate a compromise between friends, self, and family for fear of forcing all her troubles into open view. For her, being looked upon as different, as not belonging, would be disastrous. She feared being an awkward, self-conscious misfit among regulars, an outsider where she had always found harmony and comfort.

  Mainstream society, meanwhile, was sending her negative signals loaded with racial and class overtones, causing her to question her identity and her worth. She, and many like her, faced a worldview so pervasive, so subtly demeaning, so blithely insensitive that even those who were able to evade it would forever carry scars of one kind or another. A few hid their scars in shame; others wore them as merit badges (or so it’s hoped).

  The net effect on Beverly of my leaving her mother was huge. She stopped speaking to me for two years, dropped out of school, got married at too early an age, and moved to Africa.

  One could more than double the number of disappointments and regrets I would be reasonably expected to haul around under the circumstances. The truth of the matter is Beverly’s reluctance to finish her education had the most disastrous effect on me. Next to that was the silent treatment she laid on me during the two years of estrangement. While I was always pressing to reestablish and maintain a relationship, she was pressing to have it minimized to a punishing extent. (Alas! Parents, too, must be brought to judgment for their sins.)

  By the time she was in her mid-twenties we had made a few encouraging steps toward reconciliation and were doing rather well, as a matter of fact, given the circumstances. Then one day my phone rang. It was Beverly. She said to me, “I looked for a job for months. The only one I found for which I had matching skills was making sandwiches in a delicatessen. I’ve now been at that job for two weeks. I’m a grown, married lady with two children, and my husband’s job doesn’t cover the nut. I’ve had to reexamine my whole life. The reason I’m calling is this: I wondered if you would be willing to give me a little financial help to go back to school?” I said, “Of course.” She went back to school, obtained a degree from Southern Methodist University, and is today a writer making a living at her craft.

  Looking back on how it must have been for her, I’ve come to the realization that being an insider among friends must have seemed like a heaven-sent guarantee of comfort and support at what was, for her, the most critical of times, When she was terrified, at thirteen or fourteen years of age, that her family was about to be dismantled by her wayward father—precisely when other pillars underneath her life were showing signs of disintegration—she turned away from me and let her instincts for survival lead her toward the familiar. Comfort and support embraced her, delaying for a time those hard, lonely, personal, but necessary survival struggles through which she would, one day, arrive at being her own person.

  WHEN I WAS a boy there was a schoolhouse, and it was one room. Sometimes we went and sometimes we didn’t, because we were in the fields most of the time.

  I got to Nassau at ten and a half, and I quit school at twelve, so what I picked up between Cat Island and Nassau was just enough to read the basics.

  But I had a great teacher in Nassau. His name was Mr. Fox, William Fox. We called him Bill, Mr. Bill Fox, and he was magical. I learned more from him than virtually anyone. I drew heavily on him as a model for my character in To Sir, with Love.

  That was a film that touched many lives. It told of a teacher in a rough-and-tumble section of London, a teacher who stepped into a situation where there was depravity, where there was lack of opportunity, where there was lack of stability, where there was lack of family cohesion, and where there were too many other anxieties and frustrations for kids to be able to learn; and that teacher showed his students other, more meaningful, values and suggested what those values could mean in their lives.

  He taught manners to kids who hadn’t understood what manners were. In their distorted view, they had considered good manners hoity-toity, an affected way of being for people who walked around with their noses in the air. But this teacher taught them otherwise. He also taught about self-respect, dignity, integrity, and honesty, using their own lives as examples.

  By the end of the film he had transformed his class into a group of interesting people, most of whom were thinking about going further in education, most of whom were feeling much, much better about themselves and were willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt, who were able to offer respect and to receive respect quite openly. He did all this for them, but he also showed them that they were still the same people that they had been—only better. You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.

  He also taught them integrity, largely by showing them integrity. He offered himself as a friend, and until they were able to understand the offer and accept it, he endured an awful lot. He was driven to anger. He was humiliated. He was threatened with bodily harm. He was dismissed and persecuted.

  In the end, though, he succeeded in helping his students to see themselves in this new life as valuable, useful human beings with impressive potential. Just as this transformation came about, a new opportunity opened up for him. He had been applying for engineering jobs throughout the year—in fact, engineering, not teaching, was really his field—and finally a job opened up for him. By now, though, he had developed such a connection to these troubled kids, and to this idea of helping them and transmitting these values, that he decided to stay on. He said no to the dream he had hoped for and stayed to help the next class of disadvantaged students.

  I see that decision as showing great courage and great integrity—the kind of courage and integrity that my father had, and that enabled him to say, in effect, “This house may be a shack with no toilet, but in my house these are the rules.” The greatest part of that legacy from my father is the knowledge that in discipline and commitment lies hope.

  It takes great c
ourage for anyone to raise children properly, and I’m full of respect for those who do it well. When I arrived in Miami at the age of fifteen, my brother Cyril was holding down three jobs to support his family. The man used to get up at four o’clock in the morning and didn’t get home until ten o’clock at night. That wasn’t for a season; that was all the time. My brother wasn’t an educated person. His primary job was at the airport, where he was a porter; and my sister-in-law was a nurse’s aide. He was making maybe fifty dollars a week, and she was probably making thirty-five. So that’s eighty-five dollars for two people, black, in Miami, Florida, in 1942. Eighty-five dollars a week. And guess what they did? They put nine kids through college and they bought a house. On eighty-five dollars a week! And it was a nice house. It had electricity. It had two toilets, one and a half baths. It had a kitchen. It had a backyard.

  They could do it because they had made a commitment to each other, to those children, and to a certain set of values, and they stayed the course. I admire them tremendously for what they were and what they did.

  But can we expect others to do the same thing? Despite all the hardships my brother and sister-in-law endured, and all the racial indignities of Florida at the time, they still had a community and a culture that sustained their hope for something better in days to come—if not for themselves, then for their kids. But what of the poorly skilled and not well educated workers of today? What of the one-fifth of the American public for whom the problem isn’t abundance and instant gratification but no gratification, and consequently no hope?

  Could we expect a young man and a young woman coming of age today to reasonably make the kind of commitment my brother and his wife made? What’s the earning power in today’s dollars of a man such as my brother who must work with his hands? What are his prospects? And where today is the stable community that would sustain such a couple, where one can be both poor and dignified and raise one’s children with decency and hope?

  Does our society support that kind of courageous commitment? If the answer is education, does our society adequately provide that tool of self-improvement to the less well off? Between the American mythology of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and the orthodoxy of entitlements, where’s the enduring commitment for the long haul, the consistent vision of how to weave the less fortunate into a decent and humane society?

  I must ask myself what I’ve done to support that vision of the future. I know that one can never do enough. “To whom much is given, much is required” the Bible says, and I give money to this and to that and lend my name to certain causes. But where I’ve invested most in the future of this planet—unreservedly, and from the deep heart’s core—is through the lives of six talented and intelligent young women, truly beautiful human beings, whom I burst with pride to call my daughters.

  NINE

  STARGAZING

  ON CAT ISLAND, when I was six or seven, I walked the beaches constantly because they weren’t that far from my house. One of the things I always heard on those walks, mixed with the chirping and singing of birds, was the sound of an insect we called a singer (because its screeches sounded like a song). These musical insects were fairly common on the island. You could walk for miles and miles inland or on the beach, and you would hear only the birds and the singers, because there are so few people—just the birds and the singer insects. I remember often walking alone along the beach, listening to the singer insects and searching the nearby coral reefs for stingrays—those great big wonderful, beautiful creatures, so wide it seems as if they have wings.

  One day, doing that, I looked upward toward the sky—it was a bright, clear, sunny day—and I saw what looked like something falling into the ocean. I kept looking and there were more somethings—and these things kept falling. It looked like a series of objects, and they seemed round, and clear, and quite large, and quite far away. As I followed them down, they landed in the ocean, one by one. Well, after some months, this became a ritual. Whenever I was walking on the beach, I would just look up, and sure as hell there would be these things falling into the ocean. I thought, of course, that they were coming out of the sky, inexplicably, and I wondered what part of the sky they were coming out of and why they were falling into the sea.

  When we left Cat Island and went to Nassau, I was no longer near the water all that much, you know? I mean, we were near the water in Nassau, but on Cat Island I had gotten up in the morning and there was the water. In Nassau things were different, life was different, and I had friends and lots of people. I didn’t have time for that kind of contemplative thing, strolling on a beach and looking up at a blue sky and seeing objects fall.

  Anyway, it would be years before I realized what those things were. I later discovered that what appeared to be objects falling into the sea were really spots in a film over my eyeballs. When I look against a blue sky now, I know that as the film rolls down, any spots in the film—little cells—look as if they’re far away and falling as they come across my cornea into the pupil.

  But by the time I learned this, I had already learned other things. I somehow had been introduced to the stars, though I hadn’t heard the word galaxy yet. I hadn’t heard the word cosmos yet. I hadn’t even heard the word astronomy yet. Still, I had the sense that there was something out there.

  When I learned to read fairly well, I started coming across these words frequently, and every time I came upon something about the stars, I would read it. Much of it, of course, was incomprehensible to me, because I didn’t understand the scientific terminology. Somehow, though, I stumbled on the information that a star is a sun, and that there are lots and lots of suns, and that the star we see at night isn’t just a star, and that the sun we see in the daytime isn’t just a sun, but that both are one and the same. Well, it took me a while to figure that one out. But the fascination grew—the fascination that had started because of the film rolling over my cornea, creating the impression of crystalline globes falling into the sea.

  Years later I had the privilege of getting to know Carl Sagan, even being a guest on his television show. We met and we became kind of friendly, and I saw him at the homes of other people after we had met, and he invited me to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.

  One evening we had dinner at the home of the director of the lab, and from there we went to the facility. Because they were about to begin receiving the first data from the probe around Neptune, there was a large collection of guests, journalists, and scientists, all gathered in this fabulous room. As the information began to come in, it was processed and then put up on a big screen, and then this chap who was the head of things, he would describe it to the press and to the invited guests, and then Carl would make comments.

  Despite his background as a serious scientist, despite all the physics and math he knew, Sagan still had the great capacity to wonder. He was mesmerized by the Saturn discoveries, just as you would have been, or just as I was as a little boy on the beach looking up at the stars. He maintained that sense of wonder throughout his life.

  For a long while after he became ill he was still able to move about, he was still on his feet, and they were working and struggling to reverse his illness. Then the time came when they knew that they weren’t going to be able to. He went on Nightline, I remember, and he talked about his work and, of course, his physical condition. And a question came up about illness and hope. It was phrased as delicately as possible, but the gist of it was, “What are the thoughts of a dying man, and what exactly comes to mind in terms of religion and the afterlife?”

  Carl was a scientist to the end (not that there aren’t scientists who believe in God). He let it be known that his faith was firmly in science, that he believed science would eventually explain much, much more than we know now, and that those forthcoming technical details would be the only answers we’re ever going to have. In other words, he wasn’t looking for a hedge in his time of need. He wasn’t covering his bets.

  Well, I’m no scientist, and certainly I don’
t have Carl Sagan’s technical understanding of the universe and our position within it. I simply believe that there’s a very organic, immeasurable consciousness of which we’re a part. I believe that this consciousness is a force so powerful that I’m incapable of comprehending its power through the puny instrument of my human mind. And yet I believe that this consciousness is so unimaginably calibrated in its sensitivity that not one leaf falls in the deepest of forests on the darkest of nights unnoticed.

  Now, given the immensity of this immeasurable power that I’m talking about, and given its pervasiveness through the universe (extending from distant galaxies to the tip of my nose), I choose not to engage in what I consider to be the useless effort of giving it a name, and by naming it, suggesting that I in any way understand it, though I’m enriched by the language and imagery of both traditional Christianity and old island culture. Many of my fellow human beings do give it a name, and do purport to understand it in a more precise way than I would ever attempt. I just give it respect, and I think of it as living in me as well as everywhere else.

  The grand consciousness I perceive allows me great breadth and scope of choices, none of which are correct or incorrect except on the basis of my own perception. This means that the responsibility for me rests with me.

  I have obligations to be in service to this me, to shape it, to encourage its growth, to nurture it toward becoming a better and better me day by day, to be conversant with all its good qualities, such as they are, and to be aware of all its bad qualities, such as they are. When the living space between the two sets of qualities becomes so uncomfortable that choices have to be made, I try to come down on the side of what I feel is right.

  I’ll say that I believe in God, if you press me to the wall, but then I’m going to come right back at you and give you the above definition of God. You follow? And that’s the only definition of God that I’ll defend, because I don’t think it’s possible for me to embrace any other.