smiles and finishes the list. I am in a zone between jet and taxi. I have landed, but on a different planet. The planet of official territory. These beings speak English out of manufactured gadgets stuck down inside their synthetic throats. They are the U.S. Customs.
“Put your hands over your head. Lean up against that wall.” The cop gives me a real television detective search. He finds nothing and I can drop my hands. He goes to my rucksack, empties it on the floor, and pokes around with his toe. Nothing there either. So he goes back and sits on the top of the desk.
“Tell me, kid, you see a lot of pot in Europe?”
Can you be arrested for having smoked pot in a foreign country? “No. I didn’t see any.”
“You smoke pot, kid?”
“No.”
“You’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey!” He picks up the pills. “What are you doing with these antibiotics?”
“I told you.” He shakes his head, tosses them up and down in his hand. Then he starts to stare at me as if he’s running a movie in his mind of punching me in the face. He stares very hard.
“Okay. Get your stuff and get out of here.” He tosses the pills. I catch them on the rebound off my chest. Turns his back and says to his partner, “What kind of a father has this kid got?”
I’ll let my father’s own words introduce him:
In the last week of May 1963, I attended a meeting in the Harlem YMCA that lasted most of the night. This was a week following the occasion when James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Kenneth Clark, and a number of other Negro leaders from various professions and jobs met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy—and both the Attorney General and this group came out of the meeting filled with dismay. The Attorney General was dumbfounded to discover the depth of hostility in that group, particularly on the part of some who said that if the government of the United States would not protect them in Mississippi, then they had no intention of ever trying to protect the government of the United States in Cuba or anywhere else. The Attorney General was very upset by this. On the other hand, the group that met with him was dismayed and disheartened by what seemed to them to be a complete lack of appreciation for the intensity of feeling that existed in the Negro community at that time. This was just at the end of the Birmingham demonstrations when hundreds of people had gone to jail.
A week later, this same group of people, largely gathered around James Baldwin, met with a group of us who were leaders of various denominations and ecumenical agencies, to see what kind of communication might possibly exist with that group of people. They had been so really disheartened by their conversation with the Attorney General that they were now beginning to explore what other segments of the Establishment in this country really were feeling during this period. Through some mutual friends, we arranged the meeting.
Nearly all the people in the room that night have been in positions of leadership in various denominations and in the National Council of Churches, some for a number of years and some only recently. All of us who were there felt that we were clean as far as our lack of prejudice was concerned. We had good records on race relations; we had fought for the right resolutions in church assemblies; we were against evil in this area. But somehow it had never come to us quite the way it came on that night. We left there about 3 in the morning, after the most intense kind of conversation that you can imagine, with a feeling that we had been on the other end of Nathan’s finger—that is, that Baldwin and others had said to us for the first time, ‘You are the man!’ We felt a sense of personal guilt, of personal responsibility for the denial of full justice to Negro citizens, resulting in the deterioration of relationships between the races to the place it was in the spring of 1963.
Those of us who left that place that night decided that we had to do something. Individual ministers had gone on Freedom Rides and had been involved in all kinds of other things—but this was of a different nature. We had to begin somehow to mobilize what there was of power and strength in the Protestant community, and direct that power toward positive action.
As it happened, the General Board of the National Council of Churches was meeting the following week, so we immediately took this concern to the president of the Council, Mr. Irwin Miller, a distinguished Disciples layman from Indiana. He appointed a special committee which came up with a resolution to establish a special commission with power for direct action. This went to the Council’s General Board and was adopted on the 7th of June, thus establishing the Commission on Religion and Race. The Commission, to be appointed by the president of the Council, was charged with the responsibility of moving directly into the heart of the civil rights struggle, to take risks if necessary, to move ahead of the constituency if necessary, to involve the power and resources and personnel of the member churches in a twofold ministry: a ministry of reconciliation and a ministry of action on the side of achieving justice.
A staff was gathered, and I was asked to be the director of the Commission. We set about to try and develop an action agency tied to a body accustomed to planning and consultation rather than action.
We did not know where to begin, so we decided to start at points of most stress and tragedy in the life of the nation. Three days after the Commission was established, Medgar Evers was shot in the back. The first act of the Commission was to send a representative group of Protestant leaders to Medgar Evers’ funeral. And at that funeral came the first invitation—no, that is too mild a word—entreaty from Negro Christians in Mississippi, in the name of God, to come into that situation where there was the kind of terror symbolized by Medgar Evers’ murder.
I am lying down in the suburbs. My room is on the top floor of our split-level house. Just outside my window a maple tree is shooting green sprouts. Spring has come to Tenafly, New Jersey. With it comes a slow tug. The season makes me unhappy. I am fifteen in 1963. My father and mother, my younger brother and I have been living in this small, upper-middle-class town, a few minutes from Manhattan, for only two years. We live on the West Hill, the “wrong” hill. Across the little valley, on the back slopes of the Palisades, is the exclusive wealthy East Hill of Tenafly. The East Hill is a mixture of doctors and businessmen, stately mansions and $100,000 homes. For example, almost two hundred psychiatrists live in Tenafly. We live in an almost-new, comfortable (but modest by East Hill standards) house which my parents bought at a bargain price. (The original owner sold suddenly—soon after the first Negro family in Tenafly’s history moved in across the street in an almost identical house.
Why am I unhappy this spring? Perhaps because I am in love with a Tenafly girl who doesn’t pay much attention. Or, more likely, perhaps because I am doing poorly in the high school. Since seventh grade I have been stuck in brick and glass corridors lined with metal lockers, days divided into seven or eight periods by electric buzzers, life a series of special forms that must be completed before one can leave for the bathroom, gym class, health class, drivers’ and sex education. I have been working my way up through the grades of junior and senior high school. We moved from Teaneck, a nearby suburb, to Tenafly but nothing much changed. The teachers in both school systems are still a mixture of old and young graduates of state teachers’ colleges, taught how to teach before they learn what they are teaching. I do not mesh with suburban public schools. My family is too open and free. I am encouraged to read books at home that they won’t let me bring to school. I have been raised in a liberal tradition while the public schools are outfitted in a phony progressivism. New math, student council, sex education: it all adds up to the same rigid day, sliced into seven periods, punctuated by the same electric buzzer they use when they open the cages in prison.
Besides, kids at school turn me off. There is a crowd I could join. But I’m not a great athlete, my parents aren’t rich, my looks are average, and I refuse to adopt the blandness necessary to make the grade as a good guy among a rash of good guys. Instead, I hang around on the edge of the crowd with a couple of other self-styled teenage outsiders.
My room is my refuge from Tenafly. The walls are lined with