“At what point did you decide that there was something worth investigating here?” Jake Tapper had asked Ephraim Western, who was speaking from the Yale Broadcast Studio.
“I actually had a very strong reaction the first time I saw him in person,” Ephraim said, looking nervously into the camera. “That was five years ago. He came to my high school, to speak about affirmative action, which as you know he strongly opposes. I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘That man is not Black.’ It was visceral, and it never left me, but of course subjective reaction is not fact and it’s not a valid basis of responsible journalism. I realized, in reviewing his published work and interviews, that his identity as African American was an intrinsic part of the dialogue around him and his ideas, but that he himself had never explicitly self-identified as Black in public or in print. I mean: ever.”
Tapper said, “He published a book when he was very young, still a teenager. And he famously opted not to include an author photo for that book. Why was that if the point was to create an assumption about his ethnicity?”
“Well, first,” said Ephraim, “it’s true that he was young when he wrote Against Youth, though as our research has established, not quite as young as he said he was. I think deflecting interest in his racial identity was a strategic decision to emphasize his ethnicity even as it made the point, publicly, that ethnicity was irrelevant. We were meant to see him as an intelligent person with a work ethic and a passionate belief in pure meritocracy. But we were also meant to be inspired by his story: a poor boy of color who grows up in a shack, in an underserved southern, rural community, who is orphaned as a teenager, who never goes to school, who self-educates, and who goes on to Harvard and a Rhodes Scholarship and becomes a respected author and conservative figure and informal advisor to the president. All without accepting any form of what he considers unearned preferential treatment. That’s a brutal repudiation of identity politics.”
“But of course it wasn’t based on fact,” said Jake Tapper.
“No. None of it was fact.”
Eli Absalom Stone had indeed been born in West Virginia （not, as Harrison had once insisted to his brother Lewyn, western Virginia）， but the only shack in his early life had been the one his father kept the lawnmowers and Weedwackers in. The family had not been wealthy, except, perhaps, by West Virginia standards; Eli’s father was a contractor working mainly in St. Albans, a suburb of Charleston, and his mother had been a homemaker. She’d died in 2006, while Eli was at Oxford, but he hadn’t seen her since the day he left home, years before that. Neither had he seen his father, who was alive and unwell and still in St. Albans, and who wouldn’t have recognized his son if the two of them passed on the street. Or his older sister, who might have, if—big if—she’d ever felt it necessary to look twice at a Black person.
Also, his name wasn’t Eli Absalom Stone.
His name was Rowan Lavery, and a perfect Scotch-Irish reflection of his genetic, philosophical, temperamental （and, incidentally, dermatological presentation） that was, too. Lavery had been educated in St. Albans public schools which were entirely inadequate to his needs, at least as far as he, himself, was concerned. He was too smart for his classmates, his childhood friends, his teachers, his parents, and his older sister （who was still in St. Albans, caring for their father）， and much, much too smart for his pastor at the Lutheran church his family attended, who once told him that, with a great mind like his, he ought to consider becoming a high school teacher.
But he was not too smart for Oren Gregories.
The summer before his final year of high school, Lavery had driven to UVA and presented himself to Professor Gregories, a person whose book on cultural identity and cultural displacement he had very much admired. He went back a couple of times that fall. Then he stopped going home.
There had once been an actual person named Eli A. Stone: an African American boy whose very short life had begun and ended in Elkins, West Virginia, two years after Rowan Lavery’s own birth. The Absalom got added later: maybe a biblical allusion, maybe a nod to Faulkner. （Maybe it just sounded so good.） Eli, who was brilliant and also a good writer—two things that did not always go together—would spend that year at work on Against Youth, and yes it was every bit as eloquent and persuasive as Harrison Oppenheimer would discover in due course. But while the freshly minted Eli Absalom Stone was certainly capable of writing the book on his own, he did have a very involved mentor in Dr. Gregories, and a bit of assistance in finding a publisher. By the time the book came out, pointedly without an author photograph, he would also have been physically unrecognizable to anyone who’d known him before.