Not long ago, I was reminded of what a myth it is that people
can’t change, that generations of behaving a certain way only
leads to more of the same.
Friends of ours have made enormous efforts as a couple, and a
family, to help their neighborhood be a better place for kids.
Once a thriving, middle-class community to which the husband’s
grandparents immigrated, it has, in recent decades, fallen into
sad decay with their city’s economic depression. Little by little,
the couple’s home-that house his grandparents bought long
ago-became a safe haven for the neighborhood’s kids, many of whom
had little or nonexistent home life, or parents that just didn’t
know how to get up from taking too many hits when they were
already down.
As our friends and their own three children watched their home
evolve into a de facto Boys and Girls Club, they decided to be
intentional about it. They bought the house next door (an
affordable prospect in a neighborhood where few choose to live)
and invested in putting a pool in their backyard. Over the next
decade of summers, a lot of kids gathered around that pool. The
warm welcome they received there included rules, limits, and a
chance to develop self-discipline that most would find nowhere
else.
The organized fun that those kids experienced revolved around the
couple’s efforts to offer them the biggest possible service-a
chance to develop what Dr. King once called "the content of their
character," and to understand that this is the real purpose in
life. Helping kids do this meant devoting their home to these
activities every summer and offering scaled-down versions after
school and during school vacations. It also meant being available
at all hours, and gradually assisting many of the children’s
parents, who came to trust them like family.
None of it was ever easy, and the sacrifices were huge. But our
friends say they can’t imagine any other life, and that their own
marriage and family life is stronger than ever because of it. Many
of the dozens of kids that passed through their house, and a
number of their parents, have found possibilities in life they
might never have known existed, or might have believed couldn’t
ever exist for them.
I thought I knew this couple’s story until, when I visited them
recently, the husband nodded toward a city bus stop as we drove
past and said, "That’s where it all began."
Over dinner, the two of them continued the story that began with
their courtship and decision to marry shortly after high school.
He described how, as they were standing at that bus stop one day,
star-stuck with love and making big plans for their future
together, he’d said something offhandedly. A car of men with faces
as dark as most of their neighbors today had driven by and without
even thinking, he’d uttered a racial slur. It was something he’d
heard fairly frequently in his family, among his peers, and at
that house his grandparents lived in.
"I’ll never forget the look on her face," he told me as he eyed
his wife beside him. "That look in her eyes, it was a combination
of disbelief and anger, disappointment and-sadness." That look, he
said, had made the biggest impact on him of all, unleashing
changes he could never have predicted.
His wife explained that she’d grown up with her family’s foster
son, who she truly loved like a brother, and who was black. The
circle of her family’s African-American friends was also wide.
Hearing her future husband say something like this seemed
unthinkable, and unacceptable. As she turned to him with that look
that day, she’d told him, "I don’t think I can be with you."
At the time, her husband notes, any remorse on his part was
motivated strictly by the desire not to lose her. "But I also
didn’t want to lose the love and trust and respect for me that I
saw leave her eyes when I’d said that," he says. "And I also knew
that I wanted the mother of my children to be someone who had the
strength of conviction that she had. "It was brave to take stand
like that, because she really loved me, and what I did must have
been a big disappointment to her."
Like the efforts they later made to help their neighborhood’s
children, nothing came easily, or overnight. But he did have a
kind of epiphany that day, he says. "I realized that I had more
choice about what I could do, and think, and believe, than I had
understood. A lot of my actions and beliefs came out of the way my
family and those who I’d grown up with saw things, and it was my
responsibility to recognize where I’d been influenced by that, and
to decide for myself.
Standing at the bus stop that day, he couldn’t have imagined where
such a willingness to change would lead him. Not only did that
house of his grandparents eventually become an interracial
community center, but his own circle of friends and family, an
ever-widening circle whose members he treasures, looks so much
different than it might have had he chosen a different path that
day at the bus stop. That circle includes the kind young black man
who is his son-in law, and the three lively little granddaughters
he and his wife love so much.
The kind of change that moves away from blind imitation of the
past is nearly always an act of real moral courage, however small
it may appear at first. The smallest action or decision to change
based on principle or new understanding can often be overlooked by
others, seemingly invisible, at the time. But as my friends-and
their many friends-can testify, it initiates a quietly powerful
momentum that, like the lever of Archimedes, can sometimes move
the world.
