A Song in the Night (6 page)

While standing by the university pool, I thought about Jamie and about the Harvard men. I realized that the Harvard men would probably feel nothing but pity for Jamie, and Jamie would have trouble understanding the swimming team at all. And I realized that I belonged to both of their worlds—and to neither.

From then on, whenever I was in the pool myself, or taking on some other hard challenge, I returned to this core dream of bridging the gap between worlds. Whether in the swimming pool or during the daily challenges of life, I try to take a deep breath, drop my head below the surface, and push off toward the other side.

S
everal years ago I received a Christmas gift in the mail from my father: a framed photograph dated June 13, 1966. In the picture I am sitting in my lightweight aluminum wheelchair on the white porch of our old house in Irvington, New York. I look disheveled but happy. My white socks stick out of my khaki pants, and I can see, even across the years, that my left knee is swollen. I am wearing my absolute favorite piece of clothing, a buckskin jacket with fringe on the shoulders—a style that I, along with millions of other little boys, had adopted because of our enthusiasm for the Kentucky frontiersman Davy Crockett. My right hand is raised to make an enthusiastic point, and I am talking.

The person to whom my words are addressed is a tall, powerful African-American man who is balancing his massive body on a delicate wicker chair. We are only a few inches apart. He is leaning forward quietly, his arms resting on his knees, his right hand holding a glass of water. His head is turned sideways. His eyes reveal both curiosity and wariness as he studies my face. More than anything else, his expression says, “
I am listening to you
.” And looking at this moment frozen in time forty-five years ago, I feel a flush of pride, because he was so clearly honoring me with his attention and his respect.

The photograph now hangs in a hallway in my home in Massachusetts, and people are inevitably drawn to it. They look at it at first because they see that it is a picture of a young me during a hard time. Then they realize who the man beside me is. And they always turn to me and ask in astonishment, “Is that really Muhammad Ali?”

For me the picture captures a moment of deep change. Whenever I faced a lengthy period of recovery, my parents put out an appeal to their adult friends to come visit. Many thoughtful people stopped by. The person who brought the most energy and laughter, the person who swept aside any sadness that might be clinging to my heart, was our close friend Liz Parks. Born Elizabeth Campbell, the daughter of a well-known and successful cartoonist for
Esquire
, Liz had grown up largely in Switzerland, where her father had taken her to shield her from the tensions that they faced in the United States as a prosperous
African-American family. Liz was a spectacular beauty, with the tall physique of a model and the sparkling eyes and elegant face of a princess. As a young adult she was drawn into the world of international high fashion. In her early twenties she met and married one of America’s most famous photographers, Gordon Parks.

Gordon was in his fifties and had already lived a life of enormous challenge. He had started with a small camera and a fellowship from the Farm Security Administration to record the lives of African-Americans at work and at home in the ghetto. One of his most famous was a photograph of a maid with a broom and a mop standing in front of an American flag, which he called
American Gothic: Washington, D.C
. In 1948 a photo essay about a gang leader in Harlem won him a permanent position as a photographer and writer at
Life
magazine. Years later, speaking to a curator of an exhibit of his photos, Gordon explained the origin of his career. The camera, he said, “was my choice of weapon against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.”

Liz visited frequently, and she always brought a typhoon of joy. I also loved visiting her house in White Plains during their many parties. They had a large swimming pool in the back. Gordon’s twelve-cylinder dark green XK-E Jaguar crouched in the driveway, almost visibly breathing. In the living room, radiant light pulsed through huge plate-glass windows and a skylight to illuminate their paintings and pieces of sculpture. When they held a party, the whole house throbbed with enthusiasm and warmth. Music of all kinds, from classical
to jazz, flowed continuously from speakers in every room. In warm weather—particularly during Fourth of July parties—children would come darting through the living room, dash into the backyard, and cannonball straight into the pool.

At their home we met musicians and journalists and painters and writers and rabble-rousers who discussed art and politics and told wonderful jokes. I thus grew up with a strange inversion of many young white Americans’ experiences of race. Some white families feared African-Americans; most simply had little contact. Through Liz and Gordon, I obtained, within the limits of childhood, a new window into their particular American life, and I loved what I saw. Everything about my family—our clothes, our humor, our artwork, our car, our music—seemed pedestrian compared to Liz and Gordon’s. I wanted to connect to their world—to
belong
.

In 1966
Life
gave Gordon the assignment of photographing Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer in the world, who was still known to many at the time as Cassius Clay. Gordon traveled everywhere with the charismatic Ali—to the gym for his workouts, to nightclubs for evening outings, to meals with his friends, and to meetings with advisers. After a week of taking pictures, it suddenly struck Gordon that in every one of these settings Ali had been surrounded entirely by a large entourage of black people. Gordon wondered what Ali’s demeanor would be like—and what photographs might reveal—if he were to spend a few hours talking to a middle-class white family from the suburbs.

He and Liz conferred secretly with my parents. One spring evening my parents casually mentioned that Ali would be visiting
the next day. I couldn’t believe it. Throughout the evening they drilled me on how to address him.

“When he gets here,” they said, “you say, ‘How do you do, Mr. Ali?’ ”

“Right,” I said.

“Mr.
Ali
,” they insisted, “not Mr. Clay. You must not call him Mr. Clay.”

“Mr. Ali,” I repeated.

The next day I waited nervously on our porch, rolling aimlessly around in my wheelchair. Just about the time I couldn’t stand it anymore, a huge eight-cylinder car came roaring up the driveway.

Mr. Ali, Mr. Ali
, I repeated to myself silently.

The car pulled to a dramatic stop in front of our house. The twenty-four-year-old boxer, dressed in dark pants, a short-sleeved shirt, and elegant leather shoes, leapt out of the front passenger seat. He took our front steps two at a time; within a flash he was standing next to me with his hand out in a warm gesture of greeting.

“Hello, Mr.—” I started. That was as far as he let me get.

“Hello, kid!” he shouted exuberantly. “Do you know who I am?” Before I could answer he shouted, “I am the heavyweight champion of the world!”

I looked up at him, struck silent by his immense energy and mass. My parents invited him to move to the part of our porch that looked out over the river. He plunked down on our swing, but his 210-pound physique proved too much for the chains the chair was suspended from. As soon as he sat down, one of the chains snapped and sent him hurtling toward
the ground. With instant reflexes he caught himself. We all erupted into elaborate apologies.

Gordon quickly smoothed over the situation and sat us all in a circle. The temperature was perfect; the sun glowed brightly through the leaves of our large elms and copper beech. My parents brought out tea and lemonade, and soon we were conversing while Gordon walked around silently, shooting photos from different angles while helping to move the conversation along. And somewhere in the midst of all of this, I opened up to Ali and began babbling away. It was at that second that Gordon caught the image.

When the time came for Ali to depart, I felt flooded with uncertainty about how to say goodbye. Before his arrival I had thought that I might ask him for his autograph, but when he stood up and reached out his hand to shake mine, I said the first thing that came into my mind.

“Mr. Ali, before you go, would you mind showing me your arm muscle?”

He smiled and crouched down beside me. He carefully pulled up the sleeve of his shirt and rolled it back over his shoulder. He slowly brought his entire arm to within inches of my face. And then, with a gleam of amusement, he flexed. I will never forget what it looked like. His arm seemed enormous, like the piston of a locomotive. And it was beautiful. His dark skin glistened in the light; his muscles curved magnificently into a sculpture that radiated power. I marveled that one human being could have that much force coiled in his body, ready for instantaneous use through a simple act of the mind.

“Wow,” I said in a choked voice. “Thank you.”

“That’s okay, kid.” He grinned and stood up. “You stay strong, all right? ”

“All right,” I said.

And then the scene reversed itself—the flurry of goodbyes, the bounding down the steps, the spray of gravel as the car thundered out of the driveway. After he left I stared at the road for a long time.

A few weeks later my father and I were driving in a town near our home, past the local country club. It seemed lovely—it had a swimming pool, tennis courts, a pampered golf course, and an elegant clubhouse. Some of my friends from school had told me about this remarkable place, where people came together and ate lunch and played games and swam all afternoon. I envied them. We didn’t have a swimming pool. I wondered if I could go there to meet other kids.

“So, Dad,” I said enthusiastically, “why don’t we join the country club? ”

“No,” he said emphatically.

“But why not? It looks great. Is it too expensive?”

“It is expensive, but that’s not the reason,” he said grimly.

I pressed on. “So what is the reason?”

He brought the car to a stop and turned to face me.

“Because I refuse to join a place that would never allow Liz and Gordon Parks to be members.”

I was floored. What was he talking about?

“They can’t be members because they live in another town?” I asked.

“No, Bobby,” he said. “They cannot be members because they are black, and the country club does not admit black people.”

“Because they are black?” I said stupidly.

“Yes,” he said, “exactly.”

This was not the first time I had heard of racism, but it stands out in my mind because it was so strikingly local and ordinary. My parents were journalists; we subscribed to many newspapers and magazines, and I had read about the stirrings in the South, the Freedom Rides, and the remarkable courage of Martin Luther King, Jr. We also had a family tie to these struggles. For decades my father’s mother had been a ferocious activist in Nashville, Tennessee, fighting for a woman’s right to vote and to choose. In her midfifties GrandMolly, as we called her, had become intensely involved in racial justice, so much so that the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her front yard. She was unafraid. When she examined the site the next day, she poked her toe in the ground. “Look at what they did to my petunias,” she commented.