A Reason to Believe, Lessons from an Improbable Life

On a brilliant sunny autumn Saturday in Boston that everyone hopes for, especially in the backwash of prolonged fog and rain, Governor Deval Patrick quipped he was surprised at the size of the crowd in the Hancock Auditorium. They had come to hear him discuss his recent memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life.

"Why isn’t everyone outside?" asked the Governor.

Dressed casually and relaxed, Guy Raz asked the Governor how it felt to write about his South Side Chicago childhood and how it felt to be poor.

“Broke, not poor,” Patrick corrected Raz. “Broke is temporary.”

By which Patrick went on to elaborate that his had been very much of a community, that close-knit ties and self-respecting attitudes had combined not so much as to deny everyone’s material status as to be thankful for what they had, work hard to do better the next day, or next week. Poor was not in their collective vocabulary.

“Some of us were on welfare,” said Patrick, “and the schools were a mess but,” he added, “I also had some of the best teachers in those public schools I ever had in my life.” Asked about what he remembered most, Patrick had one word “Hunger.”

Yet the continuing response to questions by Raz and, later, the audience, recounted in A Reason to Believe, showed Patrick a man who sees the glass half full, sometimes even when the glass is empty. Which is a good occasion to give the book many bought to be signed a closer look.

Let’s say, Horatio Algier was black.

Actually he wasn’t, the author of uplifting kid’s books whose basic theme of rising from poverty through hard work, honesty, discipline and sheer pluck which became part of America’s myth foundational myth, was actually a white Harvard graduate from Chelsea.

But Horatio Algier certainly lives on through African-American lives: from Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Claude Brown and Malcolm X, and now, Massachusetts’ first black governor, Deval Laurdine Patrick.

Patrick’s measured and illuminating memoir brings the very American narrative of adversity confronted and adversity overcome, into the 21^st century. It is written with expected reflections on his South Side, Chicago, jumpstarted into elite education at Milton Academy, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School. Rocket man.

Quite unexpected reflections, too—given his particular and admirable reserve—reflections on his parents and their failed marriage, his touching and complex relationship with his lover/wife/partner, teacher become accomplished lawyer, Diane.

And his impressive ability to remain level-headed and react decently in the too often indecent and chaotic swirl of political and personal contradictions that would, like an F5 tornado, lay waste to most of us. 

Like other memoirs by Black men who overcame their backgrounds, Up From Slavery and Manchild in the Promised Land, these “domestic” explorations might appear not just out of character but rather irrelevant to the larger story of a “public man” on the move and on the rise.

Following our New England Emerson, however, they are entirely congruent with that still older tradition in which the “lives” and the “moments” of Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth teach invaluable life long “lessons.”

In his all too-brief account, virtually every page has one or the other, examples resonate from a crisis meeting with the wavering Texaco CEO and his wavering executives to the hypocritical Reagan Justice Department bringing a prominent but aging Alabama Civil Rights advocate to trial on “bogus” voter registration fraud charges. From Milton Academy charging Patrick with theft from the school’s soda concession to the old ladies of his threadbare childhood church in their faded clothing yet dressed in dignified manners teaching him the value of “faith in action.”

Patrick opens with a story many of us have heard and taken to heart with his running to catch Chicago’s 54^th and Wabash bus, jumping aboard and discovering he’s short on change. The cranky driver, what will he do? Kick him off, give a tongue-lashing, humiliate him before the other passengers? Nah, the driver makes up the difference, nods sternly—Just pass it on.

An obvious lesson and with the words memorable, it is a lesson Patrick has been taking to heart ever since. This has been internalized by Patrick’s intelligence, learning, articulateness, caring, energy and ability to inspire around very American ideals: passing it on.

There is a sub-text of course, one that, like the story opens and closes, bookends Patrick’s memoir.

Pass on what?

Hand along the vision, the idealistic secular scripture Roosevelt, Kennedy and now Obama have transformed from clichés into reality by what they said and what they did. What Lincoln said was all in the Declaration of Independence, and which constitutes our American civic creed; "all men are created equal; equality of opportunity; people have a right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives; rule by law not wo/men; fair play;  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Although organized as a rough chronology, Patrick’s memoir laces through his late 20^th and early 21^st century account themes of place, family, learning, diversity, faith, personal responsibility and social justice.

Born in Chicago (1956) with no doctor in attendance, a tiny apartment. It was an apartment that Patrick, characteristically, reframes as “multigenerational” but which in fact was also borrowed space his abandoned mother with older sister only shared, having moved back into her parents’ cramped 79^th and Calumet tenement. As a writer Patrick engages all of our senses.

We get the high velocity arguments of the neighbors, the smells of the infamous stockyards, his grandmother’s roses, a life centered on [scarce] food, and not least cornbread.

The TV is “always on, FULL volume,” and Patrick also remembers every stick (and there aren’t many) of furniture as well as the kitchen lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

We meet a stern not much present father, Pat, of considerable musical ability (jazz sax, and everything else breath goes through) and a brooding and sensitive mother, perceptive, self-aware but brooding over the bad cards Fate has dealt her. His grandfather is taciturn, hard working (50 straight years as a bank janitor), and Gram is deeply religious but voluble and swears like a sailor, and characteristic understatement again, "She collected the gossip…a job that occupied a good deal of her time."

Squeezed half a dozen ways, including a sleeping rotation that has Patrick on the floor every third night, it is a home life incoherent from the outside, yet focused by an interior shared consciousness. All of his family members aspire to a “middle class” life, and one gotten fair and square.

Patrick’s mother keeps her two children clean, ordered and motivated despite nonstop distractions. This includes generosity, this or that random kid randomly coming to dinner and thus depleting already slim rations. His mother’s brother (a heroin addict) joined by his own daughter and/or his addicted wife. This largesse went out to Bully Richard perhaps trouncing little Duval again and again. Did Richard steal his bike?

There was one Sears school clothes trip a year, period. Mother completes a GED, gets and keeps a small post office job, then, somehow, gets Patrick and his sister to summer Bible Camp in Michigan. Here, black and white kids together, they share an experience which will resonate with each well into their futures.

No question from the memoir that Patrick’s South Side is as much resource as deprivation, and that his diligence in school or “loner” reading less an escape than gaining perspective. Patrick’s not running away so much as running towards books, school and teachers.

Teachers really matter, and as he makes clear from beginning to end, he is eager and open to learn from anyone who will teach him, whether at the Fly Club at Harvard (negative) or through the post grad Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship which he finagles into a marginal U.N. job in of all places Sudan (more positive).

He applauds what all great teachers do—expand your mind, your vision, and your world. And because father is playing gigs in Manhattan and with this or that woman, and mother and Gram are usually arguing, “What I craved most, love and encouragement, I got from teachers,” he admits.

He sees things in the teachers, and they in turn see something in him, beyond an eager responsiveness. He’s on the move, not on the make. Like the discussion about faith later on, learning is not just about which wine to drink with fish or how to “outWASP the WASPs.” Learning isn’t disinterested. Instead, learning is to make a difference for the most vulnerable, the least privileged and resourced. This is what the old ladies at his church taught him early,

"Thanks to them social justice has been at the core of my professional life," Patrick states.

The memoir makes little distinction between the beggars and stall sellers in Khartoum who teach a post-Harvard Patrick how to haggle in a chaotic marketplace or recover from an overturned and overloaded lorry in the desert.

Interestingly, A.O. Smith, Milton’s version of a Mr. Chips, who attended St. Paul’s and Harvard, flew with the R.A.F., and taught younger Patrick the value of using words precisely.  

“This old Yankee [who] also loved jazz,” Patrick writes, also took him along with his own children to the Cape, there and elsewhere, Smith taught the youthful Patrick the value of finding fathers and fatherly love, and passing that along, too.

Learning prep dress, manners and discourse (“the code”) of very white Milton Academy in the 1970s is yet another reframing for a kid from black South Side. “It wasn’t another world,” he says, “it was a different planet.” Despite the importance of learning about white diversity, Pat Patrick the savvy musician who plays with Ellington and Monk, wants his son to be more wary. “He was worried,” he writes, “I would let my guard down.” Fat chance.

Without malice, but with what seems total recall, Patrick even-handedly totes up one offensive and arrogant gaffe after another visited upon him by insensitive, self-entitled white folks. At one particular dinner, a certain knowing parent lectures him on the problems of the black family, while another (several in fact) “want to touch my hair.”

White and black are an American dilemma but aside from Patrick’s own knowing discriminations within the complex black community, of shading and locale, dialect and custom, are the still more complex levels of global diversity he learns and appreciates in Sudan and then, also, in Cairo, down the Nile, in Cameroon, Lagos and Kenya.

Despite the African continent’s  disorganization, the smells, power failures, and poverty, a poverty he had “never seen before,” there is not only a richness of encounter but, again and again he writes, “the simple kindness of strangers.” Lessons, which “have served me well,” he  remembers three decades later, “in the increasingly rich gumbo that is America.”

Between personal and public, there is an enabling reciprocity which may have begun during that travel year, sparked by his mother’s astounding visit to see him in Kenya and what became an opening, years later, to a very special walk along the Lake Michigan shore where mother and son close distance. They become, as with his estranged father, after Patrick’s marriage to Diane and the birth of daughters, adults who simply share a common time and place—all well aware the clock is running.

Political leaders (men) have not done well recently with their partners this past decade. Campaign trails and legislative workplaces seem littered with the debris of estrangements, betrayals, infidelities, divorce and the inevitable and disedifying instant books and talk show “revelations.”

Patrick doesn’t go there. He also has little to say about his Harvard undergraduate experience, significantly nothing about his dorm Dunster House, roommates, classes taken in History and Lit, or books read, professors who were mentors or monsters or even projects begun. The women during Harvard and Harvard Law years he knew, dated or was more deeply involved with, are entirely absent.

Nothing confessional or personal until Diane and Dubal Patrick’s West Coast clerkship. This kindergarten and 3^rd grade teacher who became a skillful labor and employment lawyer came on the scene in Los Angeles.

Her Queens and Brooklyn background, her West Indian school teacher mother and former Navy electrician father, her discipline, energy, empathy and engaging attractiveness were a mature complement to him, making for a true partnership.

"In addition to seeing a beautiful, capable woman, I sensed there was something deep underneath: a tender heart, a beautiful soul."

Except, this soul has been damaged but the immediate effects emerge as a wracking loss of self-confidence. Moreover, Diane, he learns, is coming off a bad marriage. As more details unfold, it’s not just bad but ugly and the abusive about-to-be ex-husband, who later succumbs to Leukemia, is a serious barrier to their mutual future.

We all have families. Patrick and Diane work it out,and they marry. We learn, their houses in California, later New York and Boston, fill up with family, friends, friends-of-friends and children-of-friends. Katherine and Sarah are born, Patrick’s mother (never a fan of Diane) falls ill, becomes “disfigured” and ends up twenty (!) years with her son, and cared for by Diane.

Patrick’s father, the “accomplished professional musician” who once castigated his son for a “lifestyle he considered the final surrender to capitalism,” also spends time with them, also becomes close, as he underscored at the BookFest Q&A.

If he doesn’t dismiss his father’s radical critique outright, he also doesn’t take it quite as seriously as he might. This is especially true in light of  the Governor’s personal visit that morning to and discussion with Occupy Boston.

Nor does Patrick wonder why his father spent the time and energy to pursue him, more than once, with this analysis he admits emerged from wide and carefully considered reading. This has been a political concern less about style than substance, less about race than class.

Why a privilege set of experiences over others? And why, save James Vorenberg, no mention of other Harvard Law professors from this eager student who values good teachers? Nor are there references to fellow law students, nor issues other than the Legal Aid group?

On a personal note, he failed the L.A. bar not once but twice, did it help him appreciate why systemic reliance on testing, much less high stakes tests might not help those kids just over, say, the Milton line on Blue Hill Ave in Boston?

Busy, busy, Patrick has worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, countering rednecks like (now) Senator Jeff Sessions and their FBI enablers. He’s was council for corporate Coca-Cola in Atlanta when the Iraq war began, and, interestingly, “that’s when the seed was planted that I wanted to run [for elective office].”

The word “improbably” occurs early and late, lonely underappreciated kid in Chicago meet chief executive recently blackballed by the Brookline, Massachusetts, Country Club. With so many similar slings and arrows unmentioned shouldn’t “impossible” be the operative word?

Discouraged many times, Patrick never seems to give in to what at Harvard was only a distilled version of a more generally distributed classic cynicism, the pin always ready to pop the balloon of idealism. Something has him resist. He believes it’s idealism that built America, not language or religion or culture but “a common set of civic ideals,” and he sees his life purpose as acting them out.

“Idealism must not be a casualty of reality,” he insists. 

He is someone who can write so candidly and with such empathy of his wife’s tragic depression and of his Justice Department boss, Bill Clinton, who lambastes the Boston Hyatt Hotel’s sleazy dismissal of elderly maids as “market fundamentalists.”

In meeting the guy with the funny ears and name, Barack Obama, just once, Patrick says to himself, ‘Here’s a guy to watch,” and who, (Thank You, Ms Tactless Healey) “gives a good speech,” the riff, “just words,” a potent national reminder, is at once a surprise and a kind of treasure, a democratic (small ‘d’) gift to the Republic.

One can only hope it’s the gift that keeps on giving, and this small book only the first of many such future accounts of our common future.