“After that, I think,” said Roger Fount one evening, “you ought to go to Oxford. I’ve said the same to Eli. You appear far too impressed by that,” he told Harrison, looking amused. “There were very few of us, actual intellectuals among the so-called ‘Scholar Athletes.’ You’d be amazed, some of the idiots they took. Squash players who could read. Rowers who could count. At Oxford you should do PPE. And we can help you land in one of the better colleges.”
PPE? Harrison had asked.
Politics, philosophy, and economics. The only course worth studying while on a Rhodes.
He wanted to ask why Fount thought he could actually plan for a Rhodes Scholarship, but he didn’t. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t want to know.
By the second week, in the gloaming of a rich and fragrant evening among the Monticello fruit trees, he found himself ruminating on the notion of family, and how smoothly the word had begun to slide over these new relationships with these amiable and fascinating people, and how fractured and abrasive that same word had always seemed in connection with his actual relations: mother, father, sister, brother. （He did not, at that point, include his more recently acquired sister.） When he considered how the three of them had been made （something he certainly did not make a habit of doing!） he thought of nameless lab workers, gloved in latex and leering over their innocent cellular divisions through a microscope. It was … well, it was many things. But what it wasn’t? Familiar. Maybe the reason he had never felt anything real for any of those people in his nominal family was that he had not actually chosen them. And why, by the same token, should they love him? Did they love him? He had been every bit as forced upon them as they on him, and at the end of the day, none of it meant anything.
This, on the other hand, meant something.
These remarkable people! They wore their brilliance so lightly and were so passionate in their contemplation of America: the ongoing experiment, their country. He inclined toward them, not only intellectually but, he realized, actually physically, and not only from an affinity of mind but through a surge of natural affection that felt revelatory. The relief from pretense, it was so freeing that he floated along with it, released at last after all the long years. He loved everything about this place, and what was happening to him here.
The two of them, himself and Eli, were to speak on the same evening. Following dinner, the group took their seats in the library, some balancing decaf in gold-rimmed cups and saucers on their laps, others holding heavy crystal glasses of whiskey. Harrison knew nothing at all about what Eli had prepared, and was not the only member of the audience to react visibly when his friend announced that the theme of his talk was a reconsideration of Booker T. Washington, nearly a century after his death.
“Oh! Ha ha,” said someone behind Harrison.
Harrison didn’t turn around.
Eli began with Washington’s 1895 “Atlanta Compromise,” in which he’d urged Black Americans to delay direct engagement with the white establishment （aka “the establishment”）， both in general and on the issue of civil rights in particular, and focus instead on their own education and financial security, in order to become such hardworking, wealth-accumulating model citizens that even the most recalcitrant racists in even the most Confederate states would see no reason not to share the harvest of American liberties with them. Eclipsed in due course by W. E. B. Du Bois’s more aggressively oppositional outlook, Washington had fallen, over time, into a historical trench of Uncle Toms, to the point that he and his Tuskegee Institute stood for nothing so much as a notion of self-negation. The Walden School had entirely written Booker T. Washington out of the shining story of the Civil Rights Movement, suggesting that the rise of Black Americans jumped directly from Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King.
Booker T. Washington’s long game, Eli argued, had been perfectly calibrated. In 1895, American Negroes （as Washington identified this group, and self-identified） were not in a position to oppose, let alone impact, white America; indeed, that would remain the case for decades to come. The notion of using those intervening years to build power and self-reliance within their own community was sound strategy, not capitulation. And, said Eli, looking out at his audience, Black Americans’ abandonment of this strategy in favor of Du Bois’s alternate path had only demonstrated this to be so.