Special 2020 Issue

It’s been four years, but it feels like it all happened yesterday. The first week of July 2016 was tumultuous. The nation was rocked by two killings of Black men at the hands of law-enforcement officials. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling died in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after an altercation with police officers. Philando Castile was shot and killed the next day after alerting a police officer that he was legally carrying a gun.

It was the end of sophomore year in college, and I was looking for an interesting way to spend the summer and earn a little money. I stumbled across an ad for a summer job at the Ontario Science Center in Toronto that sounded fascinating—reconstructing the skeleton of a sixty-foot fin whale that had stranded the previous summer in Nova Scotia. I knew nothing about whales, but the concept of marine biology sounded pretty good to a kid who grew up in the middle of Canada.

On October 3, 2009, more than 300 Taliban fighters overran Combat Outpost Keating, the outpost held by my reconnaissance troop of seventy-six cavalry scouts. During the eighteen-hour battle, the Taliban killed eight soldiers, wounded nineteen more, and burned our base to the ground. Describing my unit’s mission, President Obama asserted we had to “defend the indefensible.” This was the longest day of my life, but it only prefaced a struggle that has lasted for years.

A COVID paradox: I haven’t stepped foot on Duke’s campus since March 6. Yet, in the months between the start of remote learning, this past spring, in the face of COVID-19 and the start of the fall semester, I have felt more meaningfully connected to the Duke community than at any other time during my thirty-seven years as a member of its faculty. After spring break, I looked through my laptop screen at eighteen first-year students in my Education seminar “What Now? Why Are We Here: The Purposes of College.”

This past May, as my immediate family gathered in my backyard to have a virtual high-school graduation for my middle son, eighteen years of memories rushed through my mind. It was at that moment that I realized my son had beat the odds and exceeded all the expectations that were made of him. When he was two, we were told by several doctors that, after years of developmental and speech delays, my son would have special needs and would experience challenges and difficulties his entire life.

Turning points in life aren’t always recognizable. Sometimes they are a series of events, like mine, that last a year. The year I graduated from high school was a year of mini-revelations that were in fact harbingers of the life that lay ahead.

I can’t exactly pinpoint the day I realized I could no longer plan for my future, but it wasn’t long after I received an e-mail informing me that I could not return to campus. I was alone in New Orleans on spring break—a trip I’d planned months in advance. I had bought my plane tickets seven weeks ahead of my departure to ensure the cheapest prices, and I researched places to stay. I knew exactly when I’d brave the crowds to get beignets from Café du Monde, and where I would sit during Mass at St. Louis Cathedral, and I had a weeklong pass for buses and streetcars.

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the over-wrought heart and bids it break.” Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 4, scene 3 The first time that I missed it, and it mattered, was as an intern on call in 1987. I was admitting a delightful woman to the hospital for a non-life-threatening illness and was wearing something with “Duke” on it, as I did every call night, for good luck. She quickly pointed it out to me, and we began a conversation about Duke. She shared that her son had gone to Duke and had died shortly after graduation in Vietnam.

I grew up in the house my grandparents built in 1923. It sat on 31st Street and 12th Avenue South in the D7 section of the town of St. Petersburg, Florida, also known as “the Gas Plant,” according to the city’s redline map. I was four months old when they found Emmett Till’s body in Mississippi. A Jet magazine, with the photos of his mangled, tortured body, was always on the living-room coffee table. Some families had an open Bible on display; we had Ebony and Jet.

Facebook Statuses Monday, August 22, 2011, at 1:28 AM:  “in pain. :-(”   Monday, August 22, 2011, at 8:31 PM:  “tylenol pm means i’ll be out in 3-2-zzzzzzZZzzzzZzzzzzzz...seeyall tomorrow…lol”   Tuesday, August 23, 2011, at 2:19 AM:

When I walked out of my law job for the last time onto bustling Madison Avenue in 2011, I knew I was taking a risk. The 80 percent pay cut didn’t fully capture it; I was giving up a set salary for the precarious, gig-to-gig life of a tutor, the same one I had lived in my twenties before law school. I would be without health insurance; I still had six figures of student loan debt; my Visa was maxed out from re-furnishing my entire apartment because of a bed-bug scare.

I was studying in my freshman dorm, Gilbert-Addoms on East Campus.  A table away, a guy sat, also glancing occasionally at the TV, so we struck up a tentative conversation. He had on a worn T-shirt of pastel greens, blues, and pinks with an unfamiliar name in script. I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it, and since we were having a pleasant talk, I asked, “What’s that mean?” He looked down at his chest, then up, and said, “It’s ‘Maui.’ ” Tossing his hair, he added, “It’s where we have our second home.”

The sun has barely risen over the tree line by the time I’m on the road, sweat in my eyes and gasping for breath. The sound of my footsteps echoes through the empty streets. My heart pounds in my chest as I finish the last section of my run, giving it everything I have left. As I round the corner in front of my house, the wind howling in my ears, I know something is very wrong. My left calf feels like it has been ripped apart. 

It was one of the lowest moments in my childhood. Our fifth-grade class had been marched down to the school nurse’s office for routine eye examinations, and I was standing in front of the wall chart with a hand over one eye. I could only make out a single, big E at the top—the rest of the letters were blurred into a whirl of grayish shadow below, and all I could do was string together random guesses as to what they might be. For a kid who generally did well on tests, I knew I was failing this one badly.

A few of our stories of realization came to us as spoken words, not as writing or images. We’re sharing them here as part of our podcast "The Devils' Share."

An art professor from the local college, having seen my kindergarten drawings, sought out my mother at a PTA meeting. The professor told her I had an innate talent that should be nurtured. We didn’t have the resources for art classes, and by the time we did, I had filled my days with other things, including a degree from Duke’s School of Nursing and a family of my own.

He appeared on East Campus one tobacco-scented September morning in 1998, his reportorial concentration rendering him as inconspicuous as a man in a bright white suit and spats can be. At the front of the sun-drenched, wood-floored classroom, history professor Ronald Witt (1932-2017) taught Petrarch and Bruni to a few dozen rapt undergraduates. At the back sat Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), scribbling away in a steno pad.