Distance Learning
By Bob Levin
In 1963, before my senior year at Brandeis, I worked as a summer substitute mailman out of a station near 52nd & Market, ten blocks from my West Philadelphia home.
I was consumed that summer by the desire to find my way toward a meaningful life. I had a girl in Boston who was the first with whom I had wanted to forge a real relationship. (I knew this because I preferred spending time with her to shooting baskets with my buddies.) I had turned on becoming a lawyer because it seemed so drearily conformist, and was daring to hope I might write. To ease toward that goal’s attainment, I had begun a journal; and, to find experiences with which to fill it, in August, I would join a childhood friend, Davey Peters, already the author of a Henry Miller-inspired novel, which he had abandoned because it had not met his standards, on a cross-country automobile trip. (Davey planned for us to camp out, rather than sleep in bourgeoise motels, pay our respects to City Lights Books, and grow beards. Beyond that our itinerary was open.) Tapping my inner Bohemian, I had bought my first folk album (“The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”). And I had smoked what another friend had assured me was marijuana, a judgment about which, later study convinced me, he had been mistaken.
My temporary employment provided little fodder for my literary career. No hired killer entered any luncheonette where I was dining. No bored housewife decided my charms were required to sweep the soaps from her afternoons. The only moment to make my journal was the delivery of a thick envelope to a row house in the upper fifties. The sender was the San Francisco Warriors and the recipient Wayne Hightower, a 6'8" center/forward, who had followed Wilt Chamberlain from Overbrook High School to the University of Kansas, been the Warriors first round draft pick in 1962, and while sharing the forecourt with Wilt, averaged seven points and five rebounds a game as a rookie.
A pink card advised the carrier to forward all mail. Mr. Hightower no longer lived among these houses with ripped screens and broken porch railings. He had left these half-naked, children running up and down, these grown men on corners, drinking from bottles in paper bags.
That summer, I also volunteered for the Northern Student Movement’s Philadelphia Tutorial Project. Through it, the NSM, which aspired to equal the impact of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee in the south, matched college students (mostly white) with teenagers (mostly black) to sharpen their knowledge of courses they had already studied or prepare them for those they would face.
My primary credential was good will. My parents had filled my childhood record shelf with .78s about equality and brotherhood, as well as determined little engines, and told me that the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was a momentous event. I firmly believed that the rednecks trying to bar Negroes from schools in Little Rock and Birmingham were evil, but I had never considered the implications of there being only one among my seventy classmates at Friends’ Central, and it had taken a Larry Merchant column in the Daily News to make me aware that it was not coincidence that no Negro managed or umpired in the major leagues and that every NBA roster was over half white. My senior year at FCS, I had spent a weekend at a Quaker work camp, renovating sub-standard housing in North Philly, but the Saturday I was to join a group picketing a Center City Woolworth’s in protest of its segregated lunch counters to our south, I got lost and missed the bus,
At Brandeis – two Negroes in my class of 340 – the activists, who picketed the Watertown arsenal and demanded fair play for Cuba were of the black turtleneck, Levis and sandals persuasion, while I, if not a jock, a jock symp, stood sartorially square in crew neck, khakis, and desert boots. But I went to lectures by James Baldwin and Roy Wilkins and James Farmer. When SNCC workers were jailed in Greenwood, Mississippi for efforts to register voters, I joined those writing impassioned protest letters to their Unites States senators. (Joe Clark ignored me.) And when Bill Higgs, the only white civil rights lawyer in the Magnolia State, who was spending a restorative term on campus, offered to show students his home turf over spring break, I was among the half-dozen who signed up. We met Medgar Evers and visited William Faulkner’s plantation. We obtained literature from White Citizens’ Council bookstores and received cards from Governor Ross Barnett extending to us “the courtesies of the state.” (Two summers later, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman would lack them.) We flinched when elderly Negroes stepped off sidewalks so we could pass, and, invited to address a church congregation, embarrassedly assured those assembled on the worn, wooden pews that, throughout the north, people were with them.
The trip was unforgettable. But I left early to visit a classmate in New Orleans. The strippers in the rock’n’roll bars, the beignets and chicory coffee, the shadowy club where, rumor had it, one could purchase drugs smuggled in from the Carribean were unforgettable too. The experiences, collected from Delta church to Bourbon Street, layered one upon another like liqueurs in a pousse café, awaiting time and fortune straw to deliver their final, defining kick.
My students were Clifford (small and light) and Willie (tall and dark), cousins entering eighth grade at Sulzberger Junior High. Two nights a week I tutored them in English in a musty church basement off Belmont Avenue; two nights someone else tutored them in math. Both came regularly. Both did their homework. They were fourteen, on summer vacation, and this is how they were spending that. I was proud to be working with them.
I had planned what my students would read and write and the discussions we would have. Hemingway, I had thought. Baldwin. “They’ll be learning grammar,” my Uncle Bernie, principal at Furness Junior High, had said, handing me two books. “See where they stand.”
Neither Clifford nor Willie knew what a noun was.
Clifford believed “nice” a pronoun.
“‘Sprinter’?” Willie said. “That like shooting water around?”
After six sessions, they split on whether the verb in “The books, pen and paper are on the table” was “are” or “on.” As to the subject, they were unanimous. “Ain’t none.”
Both Clifford’s mother and Willie’s father came to confirm their sons were not spending evenings in the schoolyard. He was an auto mechanic with forearms that bulged from his cut-off sweatshirt like Virginia hams. She was a domestic, whose speaking pace might have allowed me to complete a chapter of A Walk on the Wild Side before she did a sentence. They were surprised to learn I worked unpaid. They thought it nice of me to help their sons.
“What do you want to be?” I asked the boys one evening. It had been in the nineties. The walls dripped with sweat. The framed Jesus plead for a seersucker robe. “Doctor,” Clifford said. He got “C”s and had not read a book all summer. Willie had read two and could not remember either, but in one Venus had invaded Earth. “Me too,” he said. “I want college. I know that.”
A sense of “Ask-not-what-America-can-do-for-you...” filled many of us then. A sense of “To-whom-much-is-given...” The belief, as clear and strong as Arctic ice, was that progress was inevitable. We would sing out justice. We would sing out freedom. We would sing out love between the brothers and the sisters. It was, we believed, blowing in the wind. But I knew pre-meds and, compared to Mark Polonkowitz and Michael Trigstein, the Venutians seemed a better bet than Willie and Clifford.
A week later, I asked if they played sports. “Basketball,” Willie said.
“You any good?”
“He on the team,” Clifford said.
We compared hands. Willie was fourteen and six feet tall, and I was twenty-one and six-three, and his was larger. “I do all right against the big boys,” he said. “I can stuff.”
When the tutoring ended, I gave each a book on grammar and another on basketball fundamentals. Maybe, I thought.
The most courageous members of my generation – those who spearheaded the most profound social change – those of whom we should be most proud and honor the most highly – were the young men and women who sat-in and freedom rode and voter registered across the south. Many of them, I imagine, first stepped in that direction with little more than the inclination I possessed. But their sense of right and wrong had been catalyzed by an inner agent that I lacked. It had charged them to ride through hatred and terror and the temptations of the more settled life, and its absence left me beside the road, awaiting another bus.
Soon after my six weeks of tutoring ended, I took off with Davey. When Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream speech” at the March on Washington, we were in La Jolla, in a room rented from oceanography students at Scripps, preparing for a night in Tijuana, where, for the price of a drink, bar patrons could attempt cunnilingus on the floor show. My journal records that Davey and I debated afterwards whether this evidenced unrepressed societal sexual health (his position) or an unfortunate lack of romance (mine), but what I thought of King’s words and my distance therefrom goes unremarked.
From July, 2010
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