ON THE day after the US election last November, an Irish friend in France rang me up to share his unabashed delight at Barack Obama’s triumph. During our chat, I suddenly heard myself telling him about my high-school classmate Henry Cabarrus, who had moved up to Massachusetts after the public schools in Prince Edward County in Virginia closed in 1959, and private academies were established for white students only. This was the county’s response to the historic Brown vs. Education Board Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed racial segregation in schools.
I knew that much about Henry: that he was a reverse Freedom Rider, a teenage, civil-rights activist who’d hopped on a bus north instead of south - but I didn’t learn anything more of his personal story during our school years. It was only when another classmate sent me a 2006 Washington Post story on those disenfranchised black Prince Edward County students that I learned how Henry had tried to teach himself at home that first year after his blacks-only school was shut down, while simultaneously running a farm belonging to his grandfather who had injured himself. I also learned how he’d spent the next two years in an Ohio high school, as part of a Quaker-sponsored programme that placed Prince Edward students with families around the country. And how, when the Ohio programme ended, he’d been sent to my high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962 for his last two years of secondary schooling.
I didn’t know any of that back in the 1960s, but I knew Henry for an incredibly bright and wonderfully gentle soul, who also happened to be one of the finest athletes the high school had ever seen, and whose high-jumping and hurdling feats helped us to a Massachusetts state track title in 1963. Indeed, my three kids were all raised on the story of how Henry always kept his sweatsuit on during the first stages of the high-jump in an inter-school meet, only shedding the sweatpants when jumping against the last-standing competitor, and only taking off his sweatshirt to compete against himself in the final three jumps awarded to the winner to see if he could beat his personal best. But the best part of the story, as I always pointed out, was how Henry did all that by just being himself, with no shape-throwing, machismo, or braggadocio.
I got a postcard from Henry, back in Virginia the summer after we graduated, which touched me hugely, but that was the last I heard of him until the Post story three years ago. I found a phone number for him then, and tried ringing a couple of times, to no avail. But the election of a black American president, something most of our generation expected never to see, prompted me to dig out that number as soon as I’d finished talking to my friend in France, and ring it for several days until I finally raised Henry himself.
We talked for over half-an-hour, till the battery on his phone went beep, though hardly long enough to catch up entirely on the past four decades. Some of what I told Henry concerned our old alma mater – where I’d returned to teach in the turbulent early 1970s – and where the racial tensions that had largely stayed submerged during our own school years finally boiled over one day in February, 1971, bringing police with riot shields, batons, attack dogs and tear gas into the high-school corridors after fights between white and black students broke out both inside and outside the building.
Most of what Henry recounted in turn will appear in his forthcoming memoir, which he told me he’d posted off to his publisher on election day, just a few hours before he went out to vote for Barack Obama. It tells of how his civil rights activism saw him lose his university scholarship in 1966, before he could complete his degree. And how in 1971 he pedalled a 10-speed bicycle from Boston to San Francisco, where he worked for two years as a street artist on the flower-powered Haight Ashbury scene – “I did macramé”. He stayed on there for more than 20 years, working as a social care worker with the intellectually handicapped, until he returned to Virginia in 1996 to look after his ageing mother. His mother passed away in 1998, but Henry stayed in Virginia, where he finally graduated from university with a BS degree from St Paul’s College in 2007.
“Coach didn’t like that!” Henry laughed, when I told him how my family had all heard of those winning high-jumps with his sweatsuit on. And when I remarked how wonderful it was that his memoir of a lifetime’s struggle against Jim Crow laws and institutional racism should have gone into the post the same day he’d helped to deliver Virginia’s 13 electoral college votes to our first black president-elect, Henry laughed again and said: “I wanted my book to catch that boat before it left!”
It needed a dreamer like Martin Luther King to foresee a sea-change as seismic as Obama’s victory, given the legacy of slavery in the US, and the endemic discrimination which trammelled the lives of millions of black Americans like my old schoolmate Henry.
“I may not get there with you,” MLK said of the promised land in a speech in Memphis a day before he was assassinated. But for Henry Cabarrus – and all of us who cast our ballots for Barack – having lived long enough to see that prophecy of equality fulfilled on Inauguration Day feels as sweet a thing as has ever happened.