Except for that pesky hurricane, Andrew, the summer of 1992 was magic. I had made something almost like a home for myself in Miami. I roamed the place, searching for stories or just diversions, just living. I ate grouper sandwiches on the Miami River, roamed and fished and waded the Glades, floated on trade winds, stayed warm. My then-girlfriend moved on about that time, but I didn’t feel much sting. We had been mostly just roommates for a long time. Passion is something you really don’t miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, “Boy, I wish I had a Coke.” The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.
This was a sweet time, even sweeter by the simple fact that this life now had a distinct horizon. I had been here almost three years, longer than I had stayed anywhere in quite some time. Even though I was happy, I was restless. I needed a change.
Lord, did I get one.
On the urging of some friends, I applied for a Nieman Fellowship for journalists to Harvard University, for nine months of study in 1992 and 1993. It is the most prestigious fellowship in the country, about the nicest thing that can happen to a working journalist who lives story to story. I had about as much business at Harvard as a hog in a cocktail dress, and the competition for the thing was fierce. But friends told me I was perfect for it, and it for me. How many journalists, my friends told me, had gone as far as me, but were as ignorant.
In essence, all you had to do to win it was write two essays about yourself, and convince a selection panel that you would make use of the time, give something back to the university, and not burn the place down. The truth, I would learn over the next few months, was that a lot of the people who got in it were not people filling gaps in their education, but people who had fancy educations already.
I felt like the lowest form of hypocrite. I did not need a fancy education to do my job. I was openly scornful of people who rode their school ties like some chariot. In fifteen years of writing stories for money, all I had needed was talent. I wore that chip on my shoulder like a crown. I hung my plaques on the walls, all of them, until my living room looked like a dentist’s office and I had some left over to give to Momma. When I had finally proved myself, at one of the best papers in America, I came looking for, for what?
I told myself it was because the man in charge, the Nieman “curator,” was one of the legends in our business, a Southerner, a former New York Times editor and reporter named Bill Kovach whom I had always wanted to work for, or at least talk to. It would be, as I said in a magazine story about Kovach once, like “shooting the bull with Moses.”
But it was more than that. I applied to the place and the program because they had something I wanted.
I made the next-to-final cut and was invited up for an interview before a panel of Harvard professors and journalists who had been Nieman Fellows before. They held it in an elegant old white house that is the Nieman headquarters, a house that just looked like Harvard, somehow. The interview was held in a room where the selection panel sat gathered around a table. At least I didn’t have to stand before a raised dais.
It would be a lie to say I was shaking when I walked in. I have never been afraid to talk, never been shy, always able to think on my feet. But I was a little nervous here, because it was more than a test to see if I would get $25,000 in cash, a year off from work, free tuition and all the sherry and goose liver pâté I could handle.
It was a test of whether or not I really belonged among these people, in this world, even if only for a year-long visit. Nothing they would tell me would make me feel less than proud of who I was or what I had done, over years. At least, I sure hoped not. No, this was a test of whether or not I could make them believe that I was smart enough to give something in return, something of value, to the finest university in the land. I had spent a lifetime telling myself I didn’t give even a little bitty damn what the smart people thought. Yet here I was, hat in hand to them.
It was worse than I ever imagined.
One of the first questions they asked me was if I was a fake, if “this Southern thing” this country boy image, was just my gimmick. It was not that I sounded Southern—Southerners are some of the most pretentious people on earth—but that I sounded country, or, since I was at Harvard, “rural.” Southerners, a lot of them, work to rid themselves of their accents. They believe they sound slow, or at least unsophisticated, to outsiders. I guess now I know why.
I got mad then, but I just smiled through the heat in my face and said that no, I really was what I sound to be.
“I am not a phony,” I said. “This is what I am.”
Another person on the selection committee asked me how I could say, in one of my essays, that a respected black mayor in Alabama had failed the people who voted for him. His inference seemed to be that, me being a white Southerner, I was probably also a racist and a redneck.
I told him that when the mayor had taken office, blacks had owned less than one percent of all business in his city. Three terms later, almost time for their children to vote, blacks still owned less than one percent of all business.
“I don’t expect anyone to correct in a few years a hundred years of good ol’ boy leadership,” I said, but the mayor had time to make a small difference in the pocketbooks of his constituency.
The questioner nodded his head, and I thought, “I dodged a bullet, there.”
But the hardest question, the one that tripped me up, was from Kovach. It was simply: “Why do you want to do this?”
I told the truth. I told him that I had worked hard and taken risks—to my life, my career—to get where I was, but that this business of journalism has a bubble of pretension over it, one that I often found myself pressing against. Harvard would give me a needle, to burst it, to get through. I had proved myself. But, as my old editor Basil Penny had said, I didn’t have enough jelly on me.
“To tell the truth,” I said, “it’s gonna mean a whole lot more to other folks than it will me.”
Kovach wasn’t buying that answer, which was just half an answer. I don’t remember precisely what he said, but it was to the effect of: “So you’re saying that painting a big ‘H’ on your chest will take care of all your problems?”
I said no, I wanted to learn. I told them what I wanted to learn and why, so I wouldn’t be always winging it, so that I could write with some authority, instead of just seeming to.
When it was done, the man who thought he was fast on his feet, who was determined not to let the fancy people put him down, was raining sweat. It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride.
I was certain I would never see this room again, this house. They asked me to please leave by a side door, so that I wouldn’t come into contact with other hopefuls waiting in the lobby of the old house.
The plane ride home was the longest one I think I have ever had. I had gone to visit the fancy people, with my hand out, and left feeling like I had forgotten to clean out from under my fingernails.
The Nieman Fellows are apprised of their selection by an early morning telephone call, a few weeks later. If your phone hasn’t rung by 9 A.M., you’re probably screwed. I didn’t sleep at all the night before.
The telephone rang at about 7 A.M. It was Kovach. He asked me if I would come to Harvard, that he was proud it had come true for me.
It occurred to me then that I wasn’t wearing any britches—I wasn’t wearing anything—and here I was talking to a journalism icon in my birthday suit.
I hung up the phone, hugged my girlfriend, and felt the guilty relief wash over me. I tell myself now that it should not have been important, so important. I can almost make myself believe it.
I called my momma and told her that her middle son was going to the most prestigious college in America. We had talked about it, from time to time, but it meant nothing to her until it came true. Like I’ve said before, my momma is weary of broken promises.
“Thank God,” she said. Then, in a worried voice, “Where is that at?”
I told her it was in Cambridge, near Boston, in Massachusetts.
“Lord God,” she said, “you’ll freeze to death.”
Kovach, whether he is proud of it or not, would turn out to be a guiding force in my life. I learned later that he campaigned for me, whom he had never met until that day. I guess he did it because he thought I had earned a chance to be there. Or maybe it was because he was from Tennessee, from a place below the gentry, himself.
Either way, I was by God going. My girlfriend, Rachel, bought me a duck hunter’s coat for my birthday, the closest thing we could find in the mail-order catalogs to a freestanding shed. I bought a pair of insulated boots, and some long-handled drawers (long underwear), and gloves. I was ready.
I had a plan for leaving. I made a big payment into Momma’s house fund—and planned to take the four hundred dollars I had left in my checking account and head south, on a seaplane. I would listen to steel drum music and act a fool for a few days, till I was broke, then kiss Rachel good-bye—we were still friendly—and head north. A puff of wind off the coast of Africa messed everything up.
Hurricane Andrew punctuated my life and times in Miami with winds that blew 180 miles per hour. I had been invited over to St.
Pete for a going-away party, and hurried back to Miami across Alligator Alley into a wall of black clouds. Everyone else was going the other way.
I had sold my old Firebird, and as Andrew swirled offshore I roamed the mostly empty streets in a rented Thunderbird, searching for people who were stupid enough to stay. Among them, I saw a single homeless man who seemed not to have gotten the word, and was unimpressed when I told him to duck and run. It was as if, after what he had lived through, a hurricane would be nothing short of cleansing. Finally the winds blew the car around too much to safely drive, and a falling limb crashed down and sheared off the left taillight. I tried to go home to my little house near the bay, but the police said no, it was too close to the shore. So I went to our office, just a quarter-mile inland, to ride it out. I had a paper sack full of junk food—Oreos, Cheetos, pork rinds, I believe—and some bottled water. I got a futon and put it on the floor. Then, as the windows trembled and the giant storm bore down on south Florida like the wrath of God, I rolled up in the futon like some big ol’ burrito, and went to sleep.
I woke up to chaos, to sailboats in trees, to shredded houses and ruined lives. My own little rented house was wrecked, awash. The beautiful banyan trees that faced the office were in splinters. I had written a hundred stories, staring across at them, and for some reason the sight of them, in kindling, saddened me worse than any other structural harm.
Oddly, Andrew came to south Florida on precisely the day I had planned to leave it. I stayed on for three days, amazed at the power of it, and finally drove to the Miami airport with a ticket to Atlanta, then Boston.
As the plane lifted off, I took one good, last look at the city that had somehow suited my character, even though my Alabama drawl seemed so out of place in a city where the words were flavored with Cuba libres (rum and Coke), where English had long become a second language. From high up, it looked like someone had picked up one of those snow globes they sell in the tourist shops and smashed it on the floor.
I spent a day or two at home, in Alabama, before heading north again. I know my momma was proud of me for going back to college, even though she was not real sure what a “fellowship” was. Fellowship, to us, was what you did in church when the preacher told you to turn around in the pew and shake hands with your neighbor, which, in this case, was not far from accurate. Even though it was not “real Harvard,” as one Anniston Star buddy had felt compelled to point out to me—he had been to real Harvard—it was still a nice thing, I told her. I learned later that she told everybody who would listen that her son was going to Harvard.
She tried to give me some blackberry jelly and pickled peppers to take with me, and told me to dress warm. She said my blood was thin from all that time in Florida, so I would catch a lot of colds unless I wore long underwear and two coats, at all times.
I spent one last lazy evening down in Sam’s barn, just talking. I didn’t talk about Harvard. I felt sure that he, of all people, would be least impressed by this gift of free, fancy education. When two friends drove up, we walked outside to talk, to just stand around. It is something Southern men do, when they don’t have anything to say. They will just stand around, quiet, shifting their weight from foot to foot, until someone finally feels moved to talk. This time, it was Sam.
“Ricky’s goin’ to Harvard,” he said, and I swear to God he said it proud.
There was a long silence.
“Well,” one of the young men said, from under the bill of his cap. “That’s good.”
Then they started to talk about the mill, about layoffs and slowdowns, and, for reasons I am not quite sure of, I was ashamed.