I Beat the Odds (13 page)

But it was also clear to everyone that I was trying, that I was getting up every morning and working with Tony (who was also teaching me how to drive). I was also trying to apply myself to Gateway lessons for the weekly test. I hated it, but I kept at it.

You don’t go through that if you’re stupid and you don’t work that hard if you’re just a lump. I think the people around me could tell that I was driven by something and they decided that I must have wanted that education badly enough to do everything I could to try to get it, even if it looked hopeless.

Several months into the school year, after watching me fight my way through the workbooks and tests with Gateway, Tony called Briarcrest and asked them to reconsider admitting me right away. Not all of the teachers and administrators were enthusiastic about it, but they finally looked at the effort I was making and the rut I was stuck in, and they agreed on the condition that I get extra study-skills help and that I not play any sports until my grades improved. The school has a program called ESS (Educational Support System), which is for students like me with a weak foundation in academic skills. ESS was a good resource for me while I also learned things like note-taking, study skills, and time management.

And so about halfway through the school year, I suddenly found myself standing in a crowded hallway at Briarcrest, head and shoulders above all the other students who were filing past me in the hallway. All I could wonder, though, as I looked around, was if
I
was the one in over my head.

M
y first day at Briarcrest was overwhelming. It was already almost halfway through the school year, so there wasn’t anyone else with the first-day-of-school nerves that I had.

It wouldn’t be until the next year that the high school would move over to the huge new campus I’d seen when Tony took Steve and me there over the summer. As I looked around, I couldn’t believe that the “old” campus was so clean and well-maintained. Everyone apologized for how crowded it was because all the grades were using the same building until the high school’s big move coming up that summer. But compared to the schools I’d attended all my life, it was amazing.

Memphis has some beautiful public schools. East High School looks like some kind of a palace. It’s really incredible. That wasn’t the kind of city school I’d known, though. Almost all of mine were nearly identical, big, tired-looking brick buildings with tall windows that opened in five or six horizontal panels all the way down, a sure sign they’d been built before air-conditioning was standard. A teacher could tilt the panels open to catch a breeze when the classroom got too hot, which was anytime from April on. The windows only let in a dirty brown light. Whether they looked so cloudy because they were old or just needed to be washed, I don’t know. I just remember that no matter which school I was in, the whole building—the classrooms and hallways and offices—all seemed to have that same kind of dull, hazy light from all of those old windows.

Looking around the hallways at Briarcrest, I noticed that everyone seemed happy. The students were happy, the teachers were happy, the administrators were happy. People seemed like they were glad to be there, and that they were glad you were there, too. It might sound nice, but it actually felt a little weird.

I am a creature of habit. I like things to be set a certain way, and I like to stick to that routine. I don’t like a lot of adventure or change or to do anything that goes against the grain. I’m naturally kind of shy, at least at first, and even after I get to know someone I’m still usually pretty quiet. Especially when I’m in a new situation, I like to hang back and evaluate everything, to see how people connect with one another and react, just to get a feel for the flow of things. I would have liked to just blend in the first couple weeks at Briarcrest so I could watch and learn about how to fit in there. But from the time the teachers introduced me to the class to the time the bell rang, I stuck out. I was a giant black kid surrounded by a bunch of shiny pink kids. Not standing out was
not
an option for me.

There were a couple of other black students at the school, and they pretty much all played sports, so Steve had gotten to know some of them. Not all of them were rich, either. That helped me to feel as if I wasn’t a hundred percent out of place, but the school was definitely almost all white and definitely a whole lot better off money-wise than my family. The schools of my experience had always been pretty much all minority students, and the percentage receiving free or reduced-price lunches was about the same.

Briarcrest opened in 1973, and since the Memphis schools were still struggling with integration at that time, I think it probably was established at least partly as a place for wealthy white families to send their kids. Since then, though, they’d done a great job of getting more diverse and enrolling kids of all different colors. Steve had told me that everyone was very friendly and didn’t seem to have an issue with his skin color, so that made me feel a little more comfortable as I tried to figure out how I was ever going to fit in.

I soon found out that as much as I tried to blend in (pointless as it was), people were actually really nice to me. I don’t think the other kids knew what to make of me at first, but soon I think they saw that I was a pretty gentle guy who was scared to death, and they started waving to me in the mornings as we walked in, or saying hi to me in class. I still didn’t say much at all, but I at least knew some names and could smile back.

The dress code at Briarcrest was pretty relaxed then: Shirts had to be tucked in, pants had to belted, and boys had to be clean-shaven. It’s probably good that there was no uniform because I seriously doubt there would have been anything that would have fit me; I was well over six feet tall by then, and almost three hundred pounds. Every Wednesday was a dress-up day because of chapel. The girls had to wear dresses or nice pants and the boys had to be in shirts and ties. Thankfully, Tony let me borrow some of his church clothes because I definitely didn’t have any that would work.

Chapel was about forty-five minutes or an hour long, and would start after second period. Everyone in school met together in the big auditorium and we basically had a church service with singing and a lesson and then some announcements. It was a little weird for me at first because I’d never gone to church regularly except when I lived with Velma. When I was living at home we would go every now and then, but then it was usually to ask for food or money afterward. It was nice to see so many people come together for no other reason than to worship, and I was a part of it. The service style was very different from what I had known going to church with Velma, which was a little looser and had some different music, but I enjoyed it once I got used to it. It was a nice way to pause for a little bit and feel focused on something other than the rush of school or pressures of grades.

And that pressure was building up for me. As nice as everyone was in trying to make me feel welcome, I had a much harder time trying to fit in with my studies. Getting into Briarcrest was a huge win for me, because I knew that it was the first of a lot of steps to get me to college, on to the pros, and most important, out of the ghetto.

But the going was rough. It was very difficult at first, and my biology teacher, Mrs. Beasley, was the first one who caught on that I did know the material. She noticed that I seemed to do okay answering questions she asked in class, but when it came to reading and answering questions on a test, I was stuck. She tried reading the test out loud to me, and when she found I could answer the questions that way, she realized that I wasn’t slow at all—I just had never been in a caring classroom long enough to learn how to study and test effectively.

As soon as that became clear, all the teachers and administrators snapped into action to help figure out the best way to help me catch up and strengthen my study skills. The biggest challenge for me wasn’t learning the material—it was having to break old habits and get away from comfortable behaviors that I had slipped into over the past ten years. I couldn’t coast anymore; I had to really put my brain to work! I had to learn a whole new way of thinking and living—and I just needed people around me who cared enough to show me how to do that.

Sometimes I was pulled out of class to do extra work, and sometimes the teacher would stay after class and do some one-on-one tutoring with me. And the more I learned, the more I wanted to learn. Some of my teachers told me later that I was one of the most eager students they’d ever had. I looked forward to school and was excited to study because it was such a thrill for me to be learning so much so quickly.

The hardest part at first was not grasping the material; it was grasping the idea that the teachers actually cared about my progress. Except for one year in Ms. Logan’s class and at Ida B. Wells, I had never known that kind of concern. Everyone seemed to care about improving my study skills so I could improve my grades, and I felt like I was starting to move forward.

I also realized that I couldn’t get away with my old standby trick from the public schools anymore: copying directly from the textbook. If we had an assignment, I would open up the book and just write down a page or two, exactly as it appeared in the book. I figured that the right answer had to be on the page somewhere. The first time I did it in public school and got back a B on the assignment, I knew that there was no way the teacher was even looking at what I was doing because otherwise it would have been obvious that I’d taken the easy way out. But at Briarcrest I realized I was going to have to work for every grade I earned—and the crazy thing was, I was happy to do it.

Ms. Linda Toombs, the guidance counselor in charge of scheduling, worked closely with me each semester to help me arrange a schedule that would meet all of the requirements, and also allow me to take advantage of the ESS program in a way that was better suited for my needs. She was a huge help to me in understanding what classes I needed to take and then making sure that I would have someone help me learn the study skills to succeed in them. Ms. Macki Lavender was my ESS teacher all three years, and she did wonders in helping me crack the code on how to learn.

Everyone has a different way of learning, and my teachers began to try out different styles to find mine. We quickly realized that the more I was involved with the material—like acting it out or reading it out loud or talking through it—the better I did. Things were sticking and I was able to build on them with new material. It was a huge rush.

Ms. Lavender would help me work on my assignments, especially for my English classes, as I learned how to do things like write research papers, which was totally foreign to me. We did a lot of memorization work my senior year, too. Students were supposed to learn important passages from famous books and recite them in front of the class. I was so excited when I learned mine by heart that the second I saw my English teacher, I begged to say my piece. It didn’t matter that we were in the middle of the lunch line; I just rattled the whole thing off because I was so proud of what I’d accomplished.

I wasn’t always so enthusiastic about memory work, though. In fact, I remember how happy I was when I finished writing my first paper—and then Ms. Lavender told me I needed to cite it.

I panicked. “I have to recite it? I can’t learn this whole thing by memory!”

Ms. Lavender explained that citing the paper just meant that I have to record where I got the information. That made me laugh hard because I was so relieved, but it also made me realize that I was starting to turn a corner in my confidence.

I think that a lot of times students who come from rough backgrounds struggle to learn because they are afraid to embarrass themselves by asking questions about what they don’t understand. Ms. Lavender did a good job of making my learning time with her very relaxed, which meant that it felt like a safe place to ask questions. I didn’t have to be afraid that she would be annoyed or frustrated or think I was dumb. She made me feel comfortable so that I could feel confident enough to ask for explanations on what I was still trying to learn. That was something I had never done before and I think it was a huge obstacle in my schoolwork.

 

 

AS MY STUDY PLAN DEVELOPED and my performance in class improved, I was able to bring my grades up to the point that the principal approved me to play the very end of the basketball season that first year at Briarcrest. I can’t tell you what a huge victory that was for me to know that my hard work in the classroom was going to pay off for me on the court. I spent plenty of time on the bleachers that winter, watching the team practice and wanting so badly to be down there playing with them. That was my motivator. If I ever found I was thinking about giving up, I would go down to the gym and watch the team. That helped remind me why I was going through all the extra work. It would be worth it to get a shot to play ball, and maybe get noticed by a junior college scout.

I ran track that spring after basketball ended, and surprised everyone with my speed in the 40-meter dash. I also tried discus-throwing because a coach suggested it. I’d never even heard of such a thing, but he seemed to think I might be good at it. So I took the discus, watched a couple of other people take their turns to study their stance—and then I threw. Apparently, I did pretty well because my coach started laughing like a maniac when they measured where it hit, and after that discus became part of my training and competition list for the rest of my high school track career. (In fact, in 2005, I was the state runner-up in discus at the Tennessee high school track and field finals.)

By the time the summer before my junior year rolled around, I was ready for football to start. The stadium was at the new campus and that was where we met to kick off the football season.