High Price

school.
    And, as I would do repeatedly during my childhood, at first I chose my friends. I happily accompanied them to the trailer, always hoping that this would be the time when we would get to play with those enticing toys. Sadly, it never happened: it was always drill, drill, drill. Soon the boredom proved unbearable. For the first few days, I told Miss Rose I was going to the trailer. When I got out into the hallway, however, I found that I couldn’t make myself go. I wasn’t going to sit through another second of that deadening repetition, not if I could find a way around it. So, I wandered around the halls, cautious not to get caught.
    I discovered that the classroom next door to Miss Rose’s was empty. I ducked in there. I stared at the walls. I counted the ceiling tiles. I looked out the window and searched the desks. However, that, too, got old really fast. When I found myself listening to Miss Rose teaching through the wall, I decided that I might as well just stay in class. That’s what I did the next day—and kept doing. My grades were all either S for satisfactory or O for outstanding. I didn’t get any U’s.
    My grades would fall over the years, particularly because I refused to do homework. Unfortunately, in my family and in most of the neighborhoods where I grew up, school was seen as a burden to be borne, just like work was for my parents. At home, doing homework wasn’t reinforced. Academics and book learning weren’t seen as a source of meaning and purpose and future growth. School was just a set of tedious tasks to be endured and got round and through, ideally with the least effort possible. It was an arena for covert resistance.
    Today, of course, like other academics, I bring work home because I enjoy the challenge and want to stay ahead of the game—and so do my children. They know they have to do homework to please their parents and do well in school. They get rewarded for doing it and punished for avoiding it. Like I did as a kid, they see school as their job—but for them it’s not a meaningless burden, but rather a path to a desirable future.
    Of course, they also know that they still face far greater challenges than their white classmates. And they see the downside that comes from bringing too much work home and not being able to truly participate in family life. Nonetheless, they’ve seen education pay off for their parents and they don’t live in a world where all the adults they know who look like them have been thoroughly beaten down by a world that doesn’t want them.
    D espite all of this, there was a place where black people were allowed—indeed expected—to excel. That was athletics. In my neighborhood, we’d often have impromptu races down the streets or in yards. From early on, I could always outrun all the boys my age and sometimes a few of the older boys, too. Once I started playing organized sports, I most enjoyed football practice. There, for the first time in my life, I felt a real sense of mastery and dominance. I could do virtually all of the drills better than my teammates, especially speed drills. I knew I would be a star, with that cocky certainty that sustains millions of black kids across the United States, facing improbable odds.
    Sometimes, not surprisingly, I came across kids who were better than me. But even when I couldn’t initially outperform them, I knew I could outwork them. It was written in my name: I had heart. Moreover, up until junior high, desegregation gave me the odd advantage of being just one of only two or three black kids on my teams. I was virtually always the most driven.
    Football was my first love. It is Florida’s religion, and has probably never been more so than when I was coming up during the Miami Dolphins’ perfect season of 1972. I remember becoming a Dolphins fan the year before that, while listening to the games on the radio with my father. Later, I’d watch them on TV with my brothers, cousins, and uncles. Everyone crowded round the huge color Magnavox as the excitement rose with each victory and the tantalizing prospect of an undefeated run to the Super Bowl came closer and closer to reality.
    My idol was Eugene “Mercury” Morris. He was the running back who rushed for a thousand yards that year. He ultimately played in three Super Bowls and was selected for the same number of Pro Bowls. Mercury was quick, fast, and sharp—just the way I wanted to be, like his elemental namesake, quicksilver. Unfortunately,