The Fence Part 1

The Fence.

A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide.

d.i.c.k Lehr.

THE NEIGHBORHOODS.

Prologue: January 25, 1995.

When Kimberly c.o.x was awakened by the telephone ringing in the middle of the night, the fourth-year medical student had been sleeping hard. She'd slept through the Boston police and ambulance sirens blaring an hour earlier on Blue Hill Avenue two blocks from her home. She was likely used to the discordant sounds; the wail of sirens was not unfamiliar in Dorchester, where she and her family lived, one of the many black families making up the neighborhood.

When the phone rang, she was alone in bed. Her first thought was that her husband, Michael, was calling. Michael was usually home by 2 A.M.; if he was going to be later he would call. Then Kimberly noticed the clock: It read 3:30.

She picked up the receiver.

Mrs. c.o.x?

Kimberly did not recognize the voice.

The caller identified himself as Joe Teahan, an officer with the Boston Police Department. Kimberly worked to clear her head. The name meant nothing to her. In fact, Teahan was a white officer who worked with her husband in the department's elite anti-gang unit, composed of officers working primarily in street clothes, who targeted the street gangs of Roxbury and Dorchester. The gang unit's supervisor had instructed Teahan to call Mike's wife. "Just don't scare her," the sergeant had said.

Kimberly listened as the voice told her Mike had been in an "accident."

What kind of accident?

He's alive but hurt. He's on his way to Boston City Hospital.

Kimberly was up and standing by the bed. She was nervous all over. She dressed quickly. Teahan said they would send a car to get her. But it wasn't that simple. Fast asleep in their bedrooms were her boys, six-year-old Mike Jr. and Nick, whose fifth birthday was still fresh on everyone's mind. She told Teahan she'd call him back after figuring out the logistics. She hung up and hurriedly dialed her mother-in-law. Kimberly was thinking Bertha c.o.x could stay with her sons. But when Bertha arrived a few minutes later, she insisted on going along with Kimberly to the hospital. This led to more telephone calls to other family members to ask them to hurry to 52 Supple Road, where Michael and Kimberly and their boys lived in the second-floor apartment of the two-family home owned by one of Michael's sisters.

It took nearly an hour for Kimberly to sort it all out. That's when Joe Teahan and his partner, Gary Ryan, pulled up in front of the red-brick house. The two officers had first met as cla.s.smates in the police academy and had worked side-by-side for most of their four years on the force. They could see that fellow officer Mike c.o.x was living in the middle of it all. Walking a block in any direction landed you on a street where guns and drugs were the name of the game. In fact, for Mike and the dozen or so gang unit officers on a special operation that night, the trouble had begun only three blocks away.

Kimberly and Bertha c.o.x came down the brick front steps, hurried across the cement walkway of the tiny front yard, and climbed into the backseat of the cruiser. The two officers stuck to the script. They told Kimberly that Mike had head injuries. They said he likely slipped on a patch of ice, hit his head, and "split it open pretty good." Gary Ryan did not share what he'd thought when he first saw Mike on the ground, his head so bloodied and swollen, "it looked like a gunshot wound." The sergeant had said not to alarm her. Little else was said during the short drive to the hospital about a mile away.

The two women were taken to the emergency room entrance. They rushed through a double set of automatic doors. The entry-way's linoleum floor was covered with a carpet rolled out in winter-time to absorb wet snow and slush. Nurses steered them through the trauma unit's two heavy wooden doors that swung outward.

For a weeknight in the winter, the emergency room at Boston City Hospital was a busy place. Surgeons and nurses in the operating room were working furiously on a man named Lyle Jackson. Jackson, twenty-two years old, had been shot three times in the chest by two gunmen at a small take-out restaurant on Blue Hill Avenue, where he'd gone to munch on chicken wings and a hamburger. The young Roxbury man had been in the ER less than an hour. Meanwhile in the acute care unit, two other Boston police officers were receiving treatment. Jimmy Rattigan occupied one of the thirteen bays, and his partner, Mark Freire, was in another. Both had been injured while chasing Lyle Jackson's shooters. Their cruiser was demolished when it hit a parked van on a narrow Roxbury street.

Kimberly and her mother-in-law found Mike in one of the other bays that circled the unit, each enclosed by a cloth curtain hanging from the low ceiling. When she first saw her husband, Kimberly said nothing. She walked up to where he lay on a gurney and studied him. It was as if in these surroundings, Kimberly, anxious up to this point, switched gears and a.s.sumed the detachment of the budding physician that she was. Observations she made were clinical: hematoma, the size of an egg, on the patient's head; a swollen face; swollen nose; one laceration on his scalp that would require sutures, another on his lip. Multiple abrasions and scratches.

Kimberly c.o.x was confused. She was looking at someone suffering from multiple injuries-serious injuries. She thought, "It didn't look like he had slipped and fell."

When Boston police officer Craig Jones stepped through the curtain and into the tiny ten-foot by twelve-foot bay, Kimberly recognized him right away. Craig was Mike's partner and good friend. Kimberly saw that Craig was agitated, even upset. There were other officers with him whom Kimberly did not know. One or more of them crowded inside too. Kimberly and Bertha c.o.x were seated by Michael's side.

Then another police officer, a black officer, tall and dressed in uniform, appeared at the curtain. He did not actually step inside, but poked his head into the bay. The officer was addressing Craig Jones, but Kimberly heard him say, "I think I know who did this."

Craig Jones and the others stepped outside. To Kimberly, the talk was mostly in covered, hushed tones. But this she was able to hear: "I think cops did this."

Kimberly was speechless. Bertha c.o.x was not.

"What?" she asked. "Police officers did this?"

The question hung in the air.

"Oh my G.o.d," Bertha c.o.x said.

By dawn, the morning TV news stations in Boston were broadcasting reports about the shooting of Lyle Jackson, the high-speed chase that followed, and the dramatic capture of four men suspected in the shooting. The city's leading newspaper, the Boston Globe, also ran a story in its morning edition about a shooting that turned into a homicide case when Lyle Jackson was p.r.o.nounced dead at Boston City Hospital. The newspaper stories mentioned officers Rattigan and Freire and the injuries they had sustained.

But no story mentioned anything about Michael c.o.x.

PART I.

Two Cops and a Drug Dealer.

CHAPTER 1.

Mike c.o.x.

Boston police officer Mike c.o.x directed his partner to swing by his house before heading over to check out the scene at the club Cortee's. The apartment at 52 Supple Road in Dorchester was only about a mile from the club. Mike ran inside and pulled off his black nylon Windbreaker, the one with his unit's patch st.i.tched on the left breast beneath the Boston PD emblem. He changed and hustled back outside.

It was just before midnight. The below-freezing weather wasn't the reason for the clothing switch. Mike needed to fit in, and within minutes he and his partner were walking into the low-slung building with its unwelcoming dirty brick exterior. The club resembled a warehouse about to be condemned. The three windows in front were so narrow and smeared that inside they guaranteed darkness, not light. The only touch of style was the rooftop sign-with the name, Cortee's, written in a swirling red script across an orange background.

The club was smack in the middle of a neighborhood known as Four Corners, which was targeted periodically by city leaders and neighborhood advocates for urban renewal. The newspaper article announcing one such effort described Four Corners as "a neighborhood where mothers do not let young children play in front yards. Where nearly 40 percent of families with children under age five live in poverty. Where teenagers keep their eyes open and routinely throw furtive looks over their shoulders. Where empty lots and 'for sale' signs scar almost every block. Where street justice is the law of the land."

At the club on a Sat.u.r.day night two months earlier, a near-riot had broken out; a young Dorchester man was stabbed in the b.u.t.t and the back and taken by ambulance to Boston City Hospital. When police arrived they found a crowd outside shoving and fighting and throwing bottles. Three men were arrested in connection with the stabbing, and police caught two other men slas.h.i.+ng the tires of a cruiser.

Mike c.o.x squeezed past patrons to make his way deeper inside. Next to him was Craig Jones. Right away they liked what they saw: The club was running at full throttle, the music blaring across a large room jammed with at least a couple hundred people. Hip-Hop Night guaranteed a crowd, even on a weeknight in January when the temperature was 29 degrees and Boston's inner-city streets were mostly vacant.

No one noticed them as cops. Craig was dressed in blue jeans and a black-hooded sweats.h.i.+rt underneath a black leather jacket, while Mike wore a three-quarter-length black coat-the kind of puffy, hooded, goose-down parka popular in the 'hood. Underneath he had on black jeans and a black sweats.h.i.+rt. A black Oakland Raiders wool hat was pulled over his head. Mike had a.s.sembled the outfit for a.s.signments like this, borrowing the parka and skullcap from a teenage nephew.

Mike's getup was the more elaborate of the two, which was no surprise. He was clothes-conscious-and always had been. Craig had certainly noticed this during the five years they'd been partners. There was another cop in their unit who sold jackets, sweats.h.i.+rts, T-s.h.i.+rts, and hats featuring Boston police patches and logos. Mike was a regular customer. The Windbreaker he wore most nights while on patrol had come from this guy. "Mike liked those police clothes," Craig said.

They walked to one side of the club to sit in a couple of empty chairs. Together they made quite an impression. Mike was six feet, two inches tall and weighed 215 pounds or so, and Craig was even taller, by two inches. They were both strong and fit and athletic. Mike's parka was long enough to conceal his handcuffs, badge, and semiautomatic handgun, a gun smaller than the one issued by the department that fit snugly into a tiny holster.

The two were members of the department's elite AntiaGang Violence Unit, or AGVU, a collection of forty cops who roamed the meanest streets of the city in pursuit of street gangs, drugs, and guns. "You had more freedom to investigate much more serious crime," Craig once said about why he found satisfaction in the role as street-gang fighter.

Their call sign, for police radio purposes, was Tango Ka8, or TKa8.

"Tango" stood for the gang unit.

"K" meant they worked in plainclothes.

"8" stood for them-c.o.x and Jones.

By 1995, Mike had been on the force for six years, Craig for eight. Mike was twenty-nine and Craig was thirty. Through work, they'd become close friends. Craig brought his daughter to Mike's house for his son's birthday party, and Mike went to Craig's house for his daughter's party. Sometimes they'd go out together and shoot pool, and, for a bit, they played basketball on the same team in the police league. In fact, Craig was probably the only one in the gang unit who knew anything about Mike's background and personal life-that Mike, for example, had grown up in Roxbury a few blocks from the gang unit's offices at 364 Warren Street. Or that Mike had attended a private high school in western Connecticut. Mike was especially sensitive about that. On a police force where the officers were mostly working cla.s.s, white, and mostly educated in urban high schools, no way he wanted to be seen as a black prep-pie. Indeed, when it came to his personal life, Mike went mute.

They worked as a team in plainclothes. The public often confused working in plainclothes and working undercover. The two were vastly different. Undercover meant a.s.suming a phony ident.i.ty to infiltrate a criminal organization. Plainclothes work meant simply not wearing a uniform on the job. It also meant driving an unmarked car-a police vehicle without the blue bubble on the roof and the blue-and-white coloring and lettering on the exterior. Mike and Craig drove a dark blue Ford with no blatant police markings. But it was equipped with a siren; blue lights concealed in the front grille; wig-wag, or blinking lights, in the rear; and a blue light on the front dashboard.

By blending into the street, Mike and Craig were looking for an edge. It was unrealistic to think street-smart gang members would not spot them or their unmarked car. But what they were looking for was a few extra beats before the click of recognition. "It helped me, you know, you'd be right on the scene, or very close to someone before they recognized you as a cop," Mike said. The gang unit cops valued those extra seconds, whether during a routine patrol of a housing project or during a raid.

Mike and Craig were inside the Cortee's to perform some quick reconnaissance near the end of their regular s.h.i.+ft. It was part of a larger plan. To cops, Hip-Hop Night might as well have been called Gang Night. The music attracted the gangs, and, Mike said, "wherever they go, there is going to be trouble." He and Craig had gotten "intelligence," or word from informants, there was conflict in the air. Mike and Craig wanted to size up the scene and make certain the club was humming. They and a handful of other teams from the gang unit then planned to return and set up outside before closing time-2 A.M.-when the crowd would begin pouring into the street.

The unit had high hopes for a rich return on their investment.

Seated at the table, Mike and Craig looked around. Even if they'd wanted to talk, the music was too loud to be heard. The only light was over by the bar area. Neither was too worried that anyone would make them. "They'd really have to get right in your face to recognize you," Mike said. But it was their look that was mostly the source of confidence in not being identified. "Craig is a good-sized guy, and I'm a good-sized guy, and we're dressed up like that. Most people are not thinking, Oh, cops.

"They're thinking, Whoa! Like, stay away from them."

Mike saw g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers from a number of different street gangs-Humboldt, Castlegate, and Corbett, to name a few. "Craig would see somebody, hit me, and I'd look, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I see." They both felt the combustibility in the room. The two stood up, walked back across the floor, and left. They'd seen enough and would be back, confident closing time would be the right time for the gang unit to be hiding nearby in the dark.

The civil rights movement made itself heard in Boston in 1965 with a legal blockbuster. The Boston branch of the NAACP sued the city's school committee in federal court seeking to desegregate public schools. The lawsuit marked the formal beginning of legal and civil conflict, building nine years later to court-ordered busing.

Two days after the court filing, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew into Logan Airport to tour Boston and then lead an estimated twenty-two thousand protesters from a playground in Roxbury to the historic Boston Common downtown. In the rain on April 23, King said, "The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideals of freedom." The crowd roared with approval.

Two months later, on June 17, 1965, Michael Anthony c.o.x was born to a family living in the heart of Roxbury. He was the youngest of six children. His parents, Bertha and David, had lived in Boston for a decade. They were from Tennessee, where they'd met, married, and started a family. Their move north was part of the great migration of blacks during the 1940s and 1950s. They had followed Bertha's mother, Rosa, the first to come, who found work as a maid for a wealthy Jewish couple, Norman and Helene Cahners. Norman Cahners oversaw a publis.h.i.+ng empire he built from a single magazine, and he was known for his generosity and philanthropy. They owned homes in the city and in Brookline, just west of Boston, and Mike's grandmother Rosa moved between the different homes. The Cahnerses also purchased a house in Roxbury for her to live in: 62 Winthrop Street, which was half of a large, side-by-side two-family home.

When Rosa's Jewish neighbors put their side on the market, Rosa urged her daughter Bertha and son-in-law to move north, and on January 20, 1955, they bought 60 Winthrop Street. The c.o.xes paid $6,500, borrowing $5,500 from a Roxbury bank. Everything fell into place nicely. Bertha and David settled into 60 Winthrop, with Rosa right next door. Rosa then persuaded another daughter, Ollie Parks, and her husband to move north; eventually Ollie went to work for the Cahnerses as well.

The c.o.xes' Winthrop Street was a one-way street running westerly from Blue Hill Avenue, Roxbury's main thoroughfare. From the opening at Blue Hill Avenue, the street consisted mostly of small apartment buildings and homes, many in disrepair. The c.o.xes' house at 60 Winthrop was toward the other end of the street, a couple of blocks from Dudley Square. The buildings were better kept on this end. Even so, coming upon 60 Winthrop required a double take. The structure was oversized, even for a side-by-side two-family, with the c.o.xes' number 60 sharing a center wall with its mirror image at 62 Winthrop Street. But more distinctive than its size was its unusual architectural style. "One of the more robust manifestations of Italianate style in Roxbury and the Boston area," noted the city's Landmarks Commission.

The c.o.xes occupied a home that reflected the full arc of Roxbury's social and ethnic history-from the original Puritan settlers to Irish, Jewish, and then African American. The land was originally owned by the Reverend Thomas Weld, who, along with his brothers, emigrated from England in the 1630s and came to own hundreds and hundreds of acres of land in the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. The Reverend Weld became the first minister of the First Church in Roxbury in 1632, and the entire Brahmin family became deeply embedded in the state's history; in modern times, they included the actress Tuesday Weld and the state's sixty-eighth governor, William F. Weld, who served from 1991 to 1997.

In 1852, Samuel Weld built the large double Italianate on Winthrop Street. Its main entrance-located on the side-had gabled door hoods and an oriel, or bay window, above it. The large pine front door opened to a s.p.a.cious entry featuring high ceilings and an elliptical staircase curling upward to the second floor. It was the kind of splashy, grand entrance showing off the owners' standing and wherewithal.

For the remainder of the century and into the 1900s, the house was owned by Charles D. Swain. Swain was a rich man, a prominent merchant who owned one of the largest stores in the bustling and fast-growing Dudley Square nearby. The Swains and later owners of 60 Winthrop Street were insulated from any development by ab.u.t.ters when an order of Carmelite nuns moved next door in the 1890s. The order built a monastery and enclosed the grounds behind a brick wall fifteen feet tall.

The house changed hands, just as the neighborhood did, with the Yankees giving way to the Irish at the turn of the century. In 1914, when he began serving his first term as mayor, the legendary and charismatic James Michael Curley lived one street over on Mount Pleasant Avenue. By the 1920s, the Irish were moving out of Roxbury, replaced by Jews, and during World War II the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan-a three-square-mile area-became home to ninety thousand Jews. Blue Hill Avenue, observed the historian Thomas H. O'Connor, was "often derisively dubbed 'Jew Hill Avenue' by members of other ethnic groups." Following the war, the Jews migrated south into the suburbs, and Roxbury became a black neighborhood.

Many blacks moving to Boston filled the housing projects sprouting up all over Roxbury during the postwar building boom. Owning a home was less typical-and put Mike's parents squarely in an emerging black middle cla.s.s. The climb up the economic ladder was nothing less than hard-earned. Mike's father was known for his work ethic; he went to work as a boy, ending his formal education after the sixth grade. In Boston, he was the first black to own a landscaping business, D. E. c.o.x Landscaping. He also eventually owned florist stands, one in Dudley Square and one downtown. He was a heavy-smoking man, lean and small, known for his quietness and long hours on the job. In time, Mike's mother went to work at Raytheon, where she was a wire sorter at the defense technology company in Waltham for nearly three decades. One neighbor said Bertha and David c.o.x "worked very, very hard to make a better life for their kids."

When Mike was born he was truly the baby of the family. The three sisters, Cora, Lillian, and Barbara, all born in Tennessee, were in their mid-to-late teens. His brother David was fourteen, and Ricky was seven. Mike was surrounded by women who not only looked after him but told him what to do: his mom, grandmother, and sisters. "I was talked at, I wasn't really talked to," Mike said. His father, meanwhile, displayed the same firm hand over family affairs as he did with the landscaping business. "He had them all in line," a neighbor said.

Under a careful eye, Mike was allowed to play at a nearby park. His parents mostly made him stick close to home, where he'd shoot basketball at the hoop in their driveway. Mike had no idea about his home's fancy bones. The chandelier in the entry was long gone, and the handsome wood floors were covered with wall-to-wall carpet. Even if he noticed it, he never wondered about the remnant wiring still strung along the creases in the walls or ceilings-wiring for the "call bells" the Swains used to summon servants from their quarters on the third floor. The sinks in the bedrooms were left over from when servants carried water to the rooms in buckets because there was no running water. Mike viewed the large house with its three floors and two staircases as a playground.

His bedroom as a boy was the tiny room above the front entry with a country view, completely disconnected from typical Roxbury. The room looked over the high brick walls enclosing the Carmelite monastery: green lawns dotted with maple, oak, and fir trees. In springtime, the apple and cherry trees blossomed pink and white flowers. Bells rang daily, calling people to prayer and, as the nuns would say, "directing their thoughts to the faithful presence of G.o.d in their midst."

The house at 60 Winthrop Street was like a sanctuary, sequestering Mike from the trouble not far away. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Dudley Square area became a no-man's-land. "A day doesn't go by without a stabbing or shooting or a.s.sault with a baseball bat or club," a judge in the Roxbury District Court once said. "Unemployment is bad. Housing is bad. The schools are bad. When you have these conditions, you're going to have crime." Merchants suffered, and many stores closed and storefronts were boarded up. "People are afraid to walk the street," complained one merchant to the Boston Globe. In 1971, when Mike was five, the city opened a new, $4 million police station across from where Winthrop Street ended at Dudley Square. More than three hundred officers were deployed. Several months later, a new $3.5 million gla.s.s and concrete courthouse was built next door. Both were seen as necessary to tackle the sharp rise in murders, rapes, and drugs.

Mike got to know some of the officers, and they seemed nice. He was also drawn to shows on TV about police, and he daydreamed about being a police officer. But the idea felt daring and even intimidated him. "I didn't really think I could be a police officer for some reason. I didn't know if I was good enough." He really liked one officer named Will Saunders, a family friend who made a lasting impression on Mike, mainly because of his race. "There were not very many minority officers then, so he really stood out."

Father and son shared a number of traits, but most notable was their reserve. In kindergarten, Mike suffered one of his recurring nosebleeds during nap time. He didn't say anything to the teacher, and just lay there as the blood pooled. When nap time ended, the teacher saw Mike and was aghast. His parents were called in for a meeting. "He doesn't talk," Mike recalled the teacher saying with worry. "All he had to do was come get us and he didn't even do anything."

Cauterizing resolved the nosebleeds, but Mike's quietness continued. It was a reason he repeated the first grade. "I was immature," said Mike. "I didn't talk. That was a big thing." For elementary school, Mike followed his older brothers to a private Catholic parochial school in nearby Brookline, St. Mary's School. "My folks didn't know much about education, you know, my dad had a sixth-grade education and my mom, I think, eleventh grade. But they knew the Boston public school system wasn't that good." In the early 1970s, the escalating battle over forced busing was in the news all the time, and his parents grew alarmed. The c.o.xes were neither particularly political nor religious; they just wanted something better for Mike and his siblings-so, before there was "white flight," the name given to waves of white Bostonians fleeing the city school system, there was "c.o.x flight." Mike's grandmother Rosa heard about the Brookline school from her employers, and, Mike said, "She pa.s.sed that tip on to my mother and father."

For his parents, the school was a stretch financially-a couple of hundred dollars in tuition plus the cost of school uniforms. He sometimes heard "grumblings" from his father when the bills were due. For his part, Mike just followed along, even if privately he wondered why he had to attend a school so far from home. It seemed so far away because of the family's early morning routine-Mike was out of the house by 6 A.M. to ride along in the station wagon while his father drove his mother to work in Waltham and then backtracked to drop him off at school in Brookline. Mike took the bus home from school and went next door to stay with his grandmother. "My mother wouldn't get home until later, and my dad worked pretty late all the time."

St. Mary's had about two hundred students. There was one cla.s.s for each grade, with fifteen to twenty-five students. Mike realized right away he stood out-he was usually the only black student in his cla.s.s. But he did get used to his surroundings. "There were a lot of kids who, although we looked different, we had a very similar background. Their parents weren't wealthy. They were hardworking, middle-cla.s.s people." Nonetheless, things happened to remind him he was different from most kids at the school.

It happened once when he was eight when his aunt Ollie landed in the spotlight. Working for the Cahnerses, she answered the front door on January 19, 1974, to find a red-haired woman on the stoop. The Cahnerses were in Florida on vacation. The woman began asking for directions and suddenly pulled a pistol from her coat pocket. At the same time, a man wearing a ski mask stepped into view and pointed a gun at her. The burglars taped Ollie's hands together, made her sit in the foyer, and stuffed paper into her mouth. They raced from room to room, yanking paintings off of walls. They fled with three, including The Rustics, by Winslow Homer, valued at up to $200,000. The next day's newspaper coverage was extensive. "Masked Pair Loot Brookline Home of Publis.h.i.+ng Executive," ran the Boston Globe headline over a story that recounted how Ollie freed herself after the "bandits" left.

In school the next day the armed burglary was a hot topic, and one of Mike's cla.s.smates carried a copy of the newspaper, which included a photo of Ollie.

"That's my aunt," Mike said.

Your aunt's a maid?

Mike was embarra.s.sed. He said no more and realized he should have kept his mouth shut.

By the time Mike was in the seventh and eighth grades-spent at a middle school in the city-teachers were encouraging him to spread his wings. Mike began reading a lot, thanks to an English teacher. "She'd hand me a bag full of books-read these!" His grades were strong and he was a natural athlete. With his teachers' guidance, he applied to several private schools. Milton Academy offered him a scholars.h.i.+p. Mike liked the school because it was fairly close to home, in the town of Milton south of the city.

In September 1980, Mike began the ninth grade at the elite private school. His father drove him, but the school year was barely under way when David c.o.x fell ill. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Mike recalled, "He had surgery and they took out part of his stomach, and he was pretty ill. He came home and had lost of a lot of weight, a lot of weight, and he had stopped working." The family was in crisis.

For Mike, Milton Academy was a crisis-academically and culturally. To get there Mike began traveling a network of buses and trains. He invariably arrived late. He usually got a ride home after playing sports, but it was well after seven o'clock before he could even think about his schoolwork. "But I am flat-out tired, and I'd go upstairs and go to sleep." If he was lucky, he'd wake up early to do some work. "If I didn't wake up I'd go to cla.s.s and now I haven't done the work. So I'd try to do it between periods."

His head spun, but given his nature he said nothing. He didn't ask for help at school. He didn't say anything to his parents. "I didn't want to disappoint my father." He knew his father had cancer, but wasn't sure what that meant.

"No one really explained it to me, but I could see he was getting sicker."

Because of the complicated commute, Mike often missed meeting with his adviser before cla.s.ses-meetings that were part of the fabric of the academy's day. One day his adviser caught up with him. He pulled Mike aside. Mike rubbed his eyes and sneezed. He'd begun suffering from allergies, although the condition hadn't yet been diagnosed. Mike just knew his head was stuffy all the time and his eyes watered constantly. The adviser waited a second and then said he had a question to ask.

You smoke a lot of pot, don't you? Before school?

Mike was dumbfounded.

You can tell me, the adviser said earnestly. It's okay.

Mike sat there. To him, the world was divided into two groups-kids and grown-ups. With friends, he felt okay, and "I did what I did. Played sports and was friends." With adults, "I just didn't talk. Talking wasn't my thing." Facing his adviser, Mike basically didn't say a word. He did not speak up and protest, did not seize the opportunity to discuss his rough start. "I was just sitting there, thinking, I don't know what you're talking about."

The adviser took Mike's silence as confirmation. You really should stop, he said. You really should.

The meeting ended. Mike left feeling more disoriented than ever, and the feeling just worsened as the year went on. Most of all, he felt alone going through the biggest culture shock of his life, a shock that was not about race. He'd attended a largely white school at St. Mary's, so being the rare black at Milton was not a foreign experience. It was the wealth; he'd never been around or seen such wealth before. He became acutely self-conscious. Seeing some of his cla.s.smates' mansions left him paralyzed socially. "I was petrified to bring anyone from school to my house. It was just embarra.s.sing, you know. Oh my G.o.d, look at the house I live in, look at how these people live." He dodged conversations on campus when cla.s.smates talked about where their fathers went to college-Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and other elite schools. He was embarra.s.sed his aunts and grandmother were maids. He was even embarra.s.sed his mom's name was Bertha.