Composing a Further Life

mourned the lack.
    When Dick and I, at his suggestion, wrote a book together about the social implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we chose a double dedication: he proposed a dedication to a high school biology teacher of his, Luke Ponder, in Kansas, where schools were still segregated, and I proposed a dedication to a math teacher, Josephine Horner Belknap, at my all girls’ high school. 1
    Dick had described his public high school education as superb, partly because teaching was one of the few jobs open to highly educated African Americans. “Not a tough upbringing,” he said. “But Luke Ponder was exceptional. He was a biology teacher with a master’s in zoology from the University of Kansas. He made an enormous amount of difference, not just because he was a good teacher but because of what he was willing to do over and above his teaching duties.
    “He started something called the Guide Right High School Fraternity. He was a Kappa. That’s one of the black fraternities. Kappas and Alphas, another black fraternity, some of them have chapters in high schools, where they will take kids in who are fifteen, sixteen years old, and they will be sort of junior fraternity members for a period of time. Which means that you have people kind of looking after you and urging you on, complementing what your own family is doing. And in addition to that you have twenty other boys who are doing the same kind of thing, so you’re not out of step if you’re trying to achieve, you’re very much in step. There’s a great deal of social pressure and a great deal of social cohesion in terms of a group of young men trying to make it and being encouraged to do so.” Dick and I had spoken about the fact that in many schools today the effort to succeed academically is nonconformist and isolating behavior for minorities.
    Luke Ponder’s influence and guidance continued after graduation, when he arranged for Dick and some of his peers to be dining car waiters during their summers as college students, and Dick counted off their names and later careers. “All of us who got on that dining car had very good lives afterwards. And we made a lot of money. We’re talking about the fifties. I would live off my tips, and still I could save fifteen hundred dollars in a summer, and I am not a particularly thrifty person.”
    Dick’s father ran an insurance agency, and his mother had been a schoolteacher. “He had asked her to retire from that,” Dick told me, “because he didn’t think it was proper for a woman to work—a man ought to support his household. Like many middle-class blacks, he tried to emulate what he saw as the way whites behaved. Terrible mistake for my mother, because even though he got off to a good start, he was ungracious enough to die when he was forty-three, and even though he did leave insurance for her, it was really very tough for her to raise two boys and put them through college. She reconfigured the house, and we rented rooms and there was a social security check and also a veteran’s check, and she was an extraordinarily good manager.”
    Even in high school, Dick had jobs in which he was encouraged in useful ways, including a summer job as a maintenance man at a swimming pool. “We all wanted jobs working for the city,” he explained, “so you got a city check
and
you were at the swimming pool, and all your friends would come and swim. As a maintenance man, I would get my work done very quickly in the morning, just had to mop floors and clean things up. So I could bring my chemistry books, and study some before the pool opened at ten. I remember one morning the supervisor of the city pools, who was a teacher in the white high school system, came, and there I was reading my chemistry book, and he wondered if I had done my work. After I told him I had gotten everything done, he looked at my book. ‘What are you reading?’ he asked. And I said, ‘I’m reading chemistry.’ He came over and he looked at it, and he said, ‘If I can get you anything else to read, let me know.’ So again, a situation of encouragement, essentially every way I turned. No one tried to hold me back or anything. Just everybody participating and helping me go forward.”
    This was true at home and with relatives as well. “I barely remember my father,” Dick told me, “but I missed having a father around as I grew up, and I envied the boys who had fathers.” His father and grandparents had died, but he had a maternal