Becoming Kareem: Chapters 7–17

To see someone that caring in an atmosphere where most teachers seemed to be dispassionately doing their jobs was inspirational to me.

Power Memorial Academy was a ten-story brick building that had once been a children’s hospital, and it looked like a bleak institution.

When you spend so many hours at a gym practicing, walking into it smells like home, whatever that smell is to each person. To me, it was fresh-baked sourdough bread, the aroma of hard work and camaraderie.

I walked into school that first day resplendent in my blue blazer and slacks, the school uniform.

I would watch them during dinner with my mute parents as my insides filled with rage at the injustices against black people around the country—an injustice I felt only a small portion of by being snubbed by my white former friends.

I soon learned that my little problems were just a tiny bit of the mountainous upheaval pushing through the streets outside.

I’d been hurt enough times to be wary of people, and that icy wariness could have been as much a barrier as my skin color.

One question that bothered me was how so many people could claim to be devout Christians, yet still justify the brutality they committed against black people. Not only the physical violence, but the daily harassment, humiliation, and indifference.

I wondered whether the only people who truly followed Jesus were those who were oppressed, the way the Jews, including Rabbi Jesus, were oppressed by the Romans.

The Aztecs had made peanut butter in the 1400s, and the patent for peanut butter in the United States was given to a Canadian pharmacist in 1884, twelve years before Carver began his tenure as head of the agriculture department at Tuskegee Institute.

My refuge from the explosive turmoil outside, and the implosive turmoil I had started to feel inside, was basketball.

Every win was an endorsement of our character, our will, our worth, and every loss revealed our faults, our weaknesses, our lack of commitment.

That coaching style drove us to do everything in our power to get his approval and avoid his insults. Basking in his warmth was much better than shivering in his cold.

Coach Donahue would yell at me when I flubbed another rebound in practice.

Besides, we all knew that his personal jibes weren’t really personal—they came from a place of affection.

Interacting every day at the boarding school with tough kids looking to fight me, with white ex-friends at Power who blamed me for uppity black people demanding their civil rights, with white teachers ignorant of anything positive about black culture, had carved that stony Mount Rushmore game face.

Both men were acquitted of kidnapping and murder, and because they were now safe from prosecution, they admitted to the crimes in an interview with Look magazine.

I started to understand my father’s hard and crusty exterior.

Yet one day during practice, in a moment of spontaneous whimsy, I fired off a turnaround jump shot that banked smoothly through the hoop.

It was where wily street hustlers clashed with polished professionals, and the only language spoken fluently was trash talk.

When that final buzzer echoed through the gym and we were officially the best of the best, I expected to feel something like elation, or completion, or even the satisfaction of rubbing it in the noses of classmates and teachers who thought black people weren’t their equals.

The team was hugely popular at school. Teachers and students alike treated us with respect and pride. After all, we had elevated the name of the school to national prominence.

Basketball was no longer fun, but more like a tedious job scrubbing toilets that I had no choice but to keep doing.

I knew how to present an articulate and reasoned opinion, using facts and statistics.

He was cheerful and clearly had my best interests at heart, but there was still something missing. We were friendly without being friends. Still, when we did speak about race issues, he was sympathetic to our plight.

“I saw some bad stuff in the army,” he told me. “I was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Not exactly a state known for racial enlightenment.”

We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Despite Julio’s clear intelligence and basketball skills, he’d made up his mind he wanted to be a mobster, as in old movies about Al Capone. He was always looking for an opportunity to cross over into being a full-fledged gangster.

Every day was routine, with predictable basketball drills and lackluster games that weren’t very challenging or interesting.

The damage extended way beyond those crumbled church walls. The shock waves knocked all black Americans to their knees in tears of compassion for the families—and tears of outrage for the America where this kind of morally repugnant act could happen, over and over again.

Despite my small misgivings, I continued to work as hard as I could for him. After all, he held my future in his hands.

Even as we warmed up to play, we were really thinking about the game we would playing in two days in Maryland against DeMatha Catholic High School, one of the top high school teams in the country. They would be a real challenge, and if we hoped to beat them, we would have to muster all our skills and determination.

We had been smug and arrogant, and it showed in our lackluster performance.

We were used to his angry tirades at practice, but this was a whole new level of wrath.

The train ride to Maryland was subdued. The team had heard what Coach Donahue had said, and they didn’t know how to react.

For comic relief, they’d occasionally throw in a boisterous black character who dressed outrageously and spoke loudly and with poor grammar.

He had been born to sharecroppers in Alabama and traveled alone by freight train to Harlem when he was only eighteen.

The awakening that was churning in Harlem sent ripples throughout the country that had an effect on American culture ever since.

Eventually, some twenty men, including police officers who had handed the civil rights workers over to their murderers in the middle of the night, would be indicted.

He looked calm and happy, with a round face like a black cherub.