There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

This, you see, is why I say that these days were perhaps the most important in my life: once I ended them, I had no doubt that I could do anything, no matter how vicious, how hard, how painful or implausible. So although the Apostle Paul wrote in that same letter to the church at Corinth—Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing—he did not tell it all. Paul should have added what I came to learn: that without love, you are something. You are a danger to yourself and others.

To network: a word that, having hardly heard it before going to Yale, and having heard it over and over again ever since, I have come to believe defines today the way repent defined the days of my youth and discover defined the days of Columbus and Cortés and Drake, with the same promise of glory for some, of ruin for others, and of a new world, like it or not, for all.

From roughly ages eight to eighteen, I had understood my people to mean black people. There was little reason not to. We had in my corner of Oak Cliff something close to what sociologists call institutional completeness: The condition of a group within a larger society where the major institutions—economy, politics, family, schooling—are reproduced, thus enabling the smaller group to have little social connection with the larger group. In practice this meant that the teachers were black, the bank tellers were black, the tax man and the trash man and the mailwoman were black, and even (until recently) the yard workers were black. The dope fiends were black, the dope dealers were black, and (for the most part) the cops who arrested them were black. My best friends and sworn enemies were black, all. There was a great gift in this: it never occurred to me that I was inferior because I was black.

All I knew was that I was not white and that I would have been heartbroken if I had been born white. But this institutional completeness was a bit too complete, since it wasn’t until I arrived at Yale that it dawned on me that the defining trait of my people was not only that we had so much pigment in our skin but that we had so little money in our bank accounts, so little food on our tables, so few books in our classrooms, that we did not take family vacations, that we did not go to the museum, that we did not pay for our lunch at school, did not buy our toys at Toys’R’Us, did not order steak in restaurants, if we ever went, did not go to the dentist for our six-month cleaning, if for anything, did not have vision exams to know we needed glasses, which we could not afford anyway. And we did not add all this up and call ourselves poor—perhaps because it was so obvious that it did not need to be said, or because it was so common that we found more interesting language for each other, or because we were ashamed. I’m not sure. Whatever the case, the black students at Yale were a mighty rich discovery—not only because they had so much more or had lived so differently than I had, but also and especially because they looked at me as though they were itching to pose Du Bois’s question: How does it feel to be a problem? Quickly and surely I began to suspect, as perhaps the coolie suspects when he first encounters the Brahmin, that these elect were invested in the distinction betwe...

Above all, Che Guevara wrote to his children not long before he was executed, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

Two years of night was all it took for my eyes to adjust to total darkness, enough to see the outline of my hand, to reach and grab whatever was in front of me or knock down any fool who needed light. And that first coup had taught me well that sometimes all one has to do to conquer is to try. So I did.

Remember that God made Adam only because He was alone, then made Eve because Adam was alone, then told them to multiply so that they would not be alone. And all these millions of years later we are still creating most of the good and evil things that we do because we are, so often, alone.

But it was also why I loved when Maya Angelou quoted the Roman slave-turned-playwright Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. And for those who, like me, don’t know more than a lick of Latin: I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.

That most people do not want to lead, we knew. That most who want to lead are not willing to work, we knew. That most who are willing to work cannot endure the suffering that work requires, we knew. What we did not know was how much of their energy and our time people would waste lying about this: that a steady drip of Let me think about its and I’ll get back to yous and I’m not sures would prove that no is one of the hardest words in the English language to say—this, especially, we did not know. We learned, that summer. And so the cause depended on the few too blind to have any doubt—me and Daniel—and our friends. Perhaps it has always been this way. Those friends, to be clear, do not commit themselves to the cause. They commit themselves to you. If you are lucky, one of them may be a true believer, a zealot. May be an Elijah. But you’ll have to work for it. When I asked Elijah to join the Union, asked him to create and lead its mentoring program, he said no. Many times. Got other things to do, Case. It wasn’t because he was afraid to lead or work or suffer. No, he was one who had known suffering, though it’s not your business to know it all and not my place to tell it all.

While we still have time, let the siblings, real and imagined, find a way to speak to one another.

I have always believed that groups must choose their leaders and that naked grasps for power make folks look bad.

Aside from taking me and Daniel for a meal every now and then (he was the only elder to ever feed us; didn’t these rich black people know we were hungry?) and buying me a suit for graduation without me even telling him I needed one, Dr. Joyner also gave me the most important advice that I did not listen to: Fellas—sitting across from me and Daniel in Mama Mary’s, his favorite diner, he unfolded a white napkin and started writing out a few principles—all this work you’re doing, all this work we got to do, is liberation work. Got to be about liberation. And he gave me the most dangerous advice, which I sopped up like gravy: You fellas remember this. I tell my son all the time. I say, “Son, the best revenge is excellence.”

Always go above and beyond the call of duty. Be first. Be bold. Be perfect. Give your last full measure of devotion. Then give some more.

As a member of the Yale Black Men’s Union, I pledge to uphold the standards of the organization: unity, service, and support. I will commit myself to fostering a true bond with my brothers. I will commit myself to enhancing the lives of those beyond Yale’s campus through my service to the community. I will commit myself to providing a helping hand in my brother’s time of need and to accepting one in my own.

Organizations, he explained, especially black organizations—are like jazz. If you don’t know shit about jazz and you went down to New Orleans and saw a bum playing the trumpet on one corner and Louis Armstrong on another, you wouldn’t know the difference. Know what I’m saying? People don’t know shit, Casey, so they can’t tell serious organizations apart from unserious organizations. You have to be serious. You have to use every opportunity to show others you are serious. Don’t nobody wanna do that, man.

there were three principles I had to keep in mind if I was going to be a real leader: Manufacture the Momentum: Always convince others that something big is happening, even if nothing at all has happened yet. The Illusion of Inclusion: Make everyone feel like they are helping to decide things, even if you have already decided, which should be the case. Shame and Fame: These are the leader’s most important tools of coercion, absent money or guns.

My life had been so often saved by women and so often disturbed or at least made uncomfortable by men that I had never been convinced that men should be in charge of anything, let alone the universe or a woman or a child, especially if the child was me.

We measure success by the lives that we change. But love, of course, can’t pay for living—so I was eager to give something else a try, like money.

So we all became like those adults I knew as a child who, instead of saying Texas Electric cut my lights off, protested The devil is busy. Disaster never strikes in such abstract terms as the devil or Wall Street, unfortunately. It comes from places we fail to look, from things we fail to name, from people we fail to admit look much like us—are us. Me, at least.

In the land of the blind, he said at the end of one morning meeting, the one-eyed man is king.

I say all that to say: The American Dream is real. Not that foolishness you hear from politicians—If you work hard and play by the rules you can do anything, be anybody, in this country. I’m talking about the real American Dream, the way the country actually works: If you know the right people, they can help you do anything, be anybody, rules and hard work be damned—as long as they like you. They do have to like you, and that takes a good deal of work. This dream, of course, cannot be extended to three hundred million people and, therefore, cannot be confessed to any. So despite the fact that America is designed from rooter to tooter for most of its citizens—especially those in places like Oak Cliff—to have nothing and achieve nothing, the political version of the American Dream is essential, kids like me are essential: something and/or someone has to keep the steam down.

Maybe they knew that sometimes a lie is all that holds a life together. All it takes to tear one down, too. For in the end, there is an extraordinary cost for fraud—personal and otherwise. It may be paid this evening, this lifetime, or the next and next, but it must be paid, with dollars or with blood. We don’t need evil to destroy the world, after all. A simple lie will do.

Now I know what I did not know when the dream first came: that my dreams are part of me, even the nightmares—and all the waking hours of work in the world cannot erase them.

You could say that I resisted for much the same reason Gore Vidal said Every time a friend succeeds, a piece of me dies.

I’ve never been president, so don’t know for sure, but I bet it has less to do with the particulars of the job and a lot more to do with the fact that any president, especially that president, is not just a person but a symbol—and symbol is truly the world’s loneliest job.

You arrive, by force, as a baby and become a little boy or girl and without much thought, because children don’t think about these things, you do something that leads somebody—your mother, your teacher, the lady who runs the candy house—to say That kid is special. You pick up, along the way, some honest basic virtues: you get a little angry when something seems unfair; you get a little sad when a dog dies or a friend falls off his bike; you get a little excited when somebody gives you a new task, a new challenge, and you work very hard to do it well, to please them and to see what you can do. If you, like me, are indoctrinated into a religion, you take the religion at its word, enough to adopt some of its mandates as the mandates of your life: feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, help somebody. This goes on. Perhaps some tragedy befalls you and you wind up wandering around, meeting lots of strangers. You come to depend on their kindness. You come to like them more than many people you already know. At some point, a stranger shows up from another world and finds you, minding your business being special and all, and they say Why don’t you come with me? And you will go, for the same reasons I have mentioned re: journeys, and you will also go because your people want you to go—for you and for them. So you go. You go off to the new world and realize pretty soon—or you feel and don’t realize until many years later—that you are in limbo: you can never fully be a par...

The crisis was over. But a crisis loses much of its power if it is seen only as a single event, as a string of this-and-that-happeneds, with narrow causes and personal effects. If it is not also seen as a symbol. For however dangerous they may be, symbols—as it has been since the caves—help us to explain ourselves and our world, allow a mortal boy to reach his hand into the distant future and deliver a message: This is what I saw, what I learned, what you’ve got to know.

You don’t work, you don’t eat. You learn this lesson so consistently, so painfully, that by the time you arrive at the end of your career, though you may be sad or ashamed, you are not angry after losing a game or anything else that you did not deserve to win, on account of your talent and effort and execution. You accept your fate because it’s the one that you earned.

The central question—which I’d really like your help in answering—is this: What matters most, your cause or your friend? I did not realize that was the question at first. From what I have on record, around mid-December, the only question on my mind was: Why can’t they leave me out of it?

Now, ever since I had to find a way around believing the Bible word for word, around 1999, I have never believed 100 percent of any story anyone has ever told me.

I read somewhere, years later, that the slow questioning of alternatives before decision is the inner quality of leadership. If that is true, then I spent six weeks—fall exam period, winter break in Dallas, most of January—leading, which also resembled kicking a giant can down the road.

But for the rest of my time at Yale it was as if he had let a river run between us and walked away from the other side. Or did he stand there, waiting to see if I would swim across?

Did I ever truly notice him, my supposed little brother? Did I take him, absentmindedly, selfish-mindedly, for granted? Or did he, all that time, simply not mean much to me? I don’t know, if that’s the case, why I miss him like I do. Why I wish I’d swum across that river, which I’ve never, when I think about it, done for anyone. I just don’t know.

I remember all this and think of my question—What matters most, your friend or your cause?—and know that I answered it wrong, all wrong. Your friend is your cause. Choose him. Every time. I had not read Forster’s “What I Believe,” where he writes: I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

whenever somebody says Things have always been this way, they’re lying.

But it sure seemed that this woman’s message had touched them in a special way. Touched me, too: in less than fifteen minutes, this speech, along with the proceedings that preceded it, had convinced me that there was a roughly zero percent chance that I would ever be a Republican. Between an open mind and a fool, the line is thin. I have not crossed it. Liberals might have been hypocrites, might have been out of touch. But conservatives—at least those ten thousand I encountered—seemed terrifying, even deranged.

It took me just a little while to discover why anyone who’s ever wanted to keep the people deaf dumb and blind kept them first and most importantly from the written word. My lord.

How, exactly, do you crush the people in power? In Caesar’s day you could throw them in jail or kill them. We had, for better or worse, come a long way since then. So I learned—was forced to learn—another lesson from the 1960 presidential campaign and accepted that only the people, voting at the polls, give a man true power in American government. Only the people could give me the power that I needed.

He sent a homework assignment: I would love to see from you what the THREE BIG IDEAS are that you want EVERYONE who thinks of YOU to remember WITHIN TEN SECONDS.

Seems to me the key issue in his District is going to be easy: convincing people that he’s a leader they can trust. Especially given the recent scandals . . . He basically needs to have people say they trust him over, and over, and over again. That he’s honest over and over again.

It’s a bit like that last stanza of dover beach, huh? For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night

I simply did not want to live. I did not want to be here, in this world. That, too, was odd. I had done so much to earn this world, to win this world and fit into it.

Everything was good, all good. I took it all in stride, or silence, whatever. I saved my tears for bathroom faucets. I worked the muscles of my face so it looked as if I smiled. I was good to the program. Whatever the program was, I was good to it. Tried to be, at least. I kept my ass low and kept my eyes open and ran for my life, I really did, just kept on running, threw my hats away and switched my jeans and changed my voice again so nobody needed a translator on the practice field. Fixed my résumé and bought new dress shirts and acted like a lawyer, like a banker, did that well enough, learned my story, told my story, got the right perspective on it all, I was grateful, I moved on, I got over it—stayed up late, ran away from men in nightmares, worked to be the best and brightest, be the president, be somebody AT THE TOP. It had taken nearly every day to turn the boy that I had been into the man that I became, a dead man. That, in the final analysis, or my best analysis now, is what I realized that night: I had strived to win this world and won my death instead.

The way we were taught to be men, to be human beings even, was a dead end.

All I know is that Elijah was the bravest boy I ever met, and he deserved a better world, a better path, than the one he was given. The one that I helped give to him. I drove him, drove them all, to be first, be bold, be perfect—be the greatest. What I did not do was drive them to be whole, to be free. Did not teach them that the best revenge was freedom. Did not know it for myself, in time.

For now I will just share the most important thing I learned: You can’t stay on the road forever. Can’t keep fleeing. Turns out that even if you never find the courage to look back, the stuff you fled comes looking after you.

I have a radio. It picks up only two stations: Life and Death. I turn the death off, now that I know the sound. The diddy bop of death. I sit in silence if I have to.

Time heals no wounds, but you do start missing people after a while. Besides, only God has the wild card of destruction in His deck. The rest of us are stuck with the same old cards.