A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life - Hardcover

Deval Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767931122 ISBN 13: 9780767931120

Publisher: Crown, 2011

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER · 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Deval Patrick, “an inspirational figure guided by optimism and hope who presaged the rise of President Obama” (The Boston Globe), recounts his extraordinary journey from the South Side of Chicago to the governorship of Massachusetts.
 
“I’ve simply seen too much goodness in this country—and have come so far in my own journey—not to believe in those ideals, and my faith in the future is sometimes restored under the darkest clouds.”—Governor Deval Patrick

In January 2007, Deval Patrick became the first black governor of the state of Massachusetts, one of only two black governors elected in American history. But that was just one triumphant step in an improbable life that began in a poor tenement on the South Side of Chicago, taking Patrick from a chaotic childhood to an elite boarding school in New England, from a sojourn doing relief work in Africa to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and then to a career in politics.
 
In this heartfelt and inspiring memoir, he pays tribute to the family, friends, and strangers who, through words and deeds, have instilled in him transcendent lessons of faith, perseverance, and friendship. In doing so, he reminds us of the power of community and the imperative of idealism. With humility, humor, and grace, he offers a road map for attaining happiness, empowerment, and success while also making an appeal for readers to cultivate those achievements in others, to feel a greater stake in this world, and to shape a life worth living.

Warm, nostalgic, and inspirational, A Reason to Believe is destined to become a timeless tribute to a uniquely American odyssey and a testament to what is possible in our lives and our communities if we are hopeful, generous, and resilient.

Governor Deval Patrick is donating a portion of the proceeds from A Reason to Believe to A Better Chance, a national organization dedicated to opening the doors to greater educational opportunities for young people of color.

About this title

About the Author:

Governor Deval Patrick was the governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015. He was born in Chicago in 1956. After junior high school, he received a scholarship to attend Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and from there he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He has worked as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and was later appointed, by President Clinton, as the assistant attorney general for civil rights. Governor Patrick has also been general counsel at Texaco and Coca-Cola.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

VISION IS ESSENTIAL

In 1999, in a weekly meeting of the five most senior executives at Texaco, our boss, the chief executive officer, asked whether the company lacked vision. The global energy industry was in the midst of great consolidation, with legendary giants merging and famous brands disappearing. I was a relative newcomer to this world, and it felt like a game of billion-dollar musical chairs played around the circular table of a plush, walnut-paneled conference room. We sensed we were losing, and I was surprised by the muffled response to the boss's question. If there was a vision for the company beyond just making money, no one in that room knew what it was.

The moment resonated with me for a different reason. According to scripture, "Without a vision, the people will perish." I knew that lesson well.

Growing up with no money, I knew my family had a simple vision: to no longer be broke. Though we occasionally lived from hand to mouth, my grandmother hated for us to describe ourselves as poor. "We're broke," she declared. "Broke is temporary." Splitting rhetorical hairs seemed odd when we were hungry. But my grandmother's message conveyed a much larger truth, especially in that place and in those times. She taught us to imagine a life that was better than or different from our own and then to work for it.

The South Side of Chicago was like a small southern town in the 1950s and '60s. Many of the inhabitants were recent arrivals from "down home," as they called it-the cotton fields of Mississippi and Georgia, the tobacco fields of the Carolinas, or the railroad yards of Arkansas and Louisiana.

People spoke like southerners, with a lyrical quality to their speech. Subjects and verbs rarely agreed, and sentences had the rhythm and pace of the South. Everyone communicated by telling stories, often allegorical, never hurried. The old folks quoted scripture freely and from memory. My grandma Sally's favorite was the Ninety-first Psalm, which she summoned when she was stressed: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." The elderly also carried themselves with a courtliness that belied their lack of formal education and proper English. You were expected to greet others on the street with "good morning" or "good afternoon." Kids addressed adults as "sir" or "ma'am."

Scowling down on us were the infamous Robert Taylor Homes, a miles- long stretch of identical seventeen-story "projects," which would become synonymous with the public housing woes of urban America. But most people I knew lived in two- and three-story tenements, with an apartment or two on each floor. There was block after block of these squat, solid-looking brick or frame buildings, with rickety railings, chipped concrete steps, and porches whose boards needed replacing. Clotheslines were strung across postage-stamp backyards or connected to back porches from separate buildings. A few families kept chickens in a backyard coop for eggs and meat. The front stoops, with their folding lawn chairs, drew neighbors

outside on summer evenings. Churches and schools provided stability.

The stockyards, where cattle and pigs were brought from the Great Plains for slaughter, were a short bus ride away. You could smell the stench in our neighborhood when the wind was right. In the summer, a horse-drawn wagon cruised our streets, the fresh fruit arrayed on a bed of hay and the driver yodeling "Watermelons!" to attract his customers. On those same roads limped a menacing man with a misaligned eye who pushed a crude wooden cart on bicycle tires, offering to sharpen knives on a stone that screeched when it spun.

Much of life seemed to center on food-getting it, preparing it, doing without it. Tiny, makeshift gardens miraculously yielded collard greens, tomatoes, and pole beans. Great pots of greens with ham hocks or fatback simmered all day long on small apartment ranges. Black cast-iron skillets sizzled with porgies or fish that were caught in Lake Michigan or even the Washington Park lagoons, gutted and scaled, rolled in cornmeal, and fried in bacon fat, the latter rendered from many a breakfast and kept in an old coffee can on the stove. Cornbread, easy, cheap, and filling, was served with everything. Whatever was for dinner, it was considered bad form not to offer something to a neighborhood kid who was hungry. And in that neighborhood, someone was always hungry. The smells were full of flavor and anticipation with one outstanding exception. When someone was cooking chitterlings-pig intestines stewed for hours in broth-the stink drove out all bystanders.

My earliest impressions of my parents were of a stern father who always seemed to be observing us critically, and from a distance, and a brooding mother who would lie in bed for hours, smoking silently and staring off in dark, deep thought. They seemed to have negotiated their way into their marriage. In an exhange of letters within days in 1954, they communicated both a hunger for and skepticism about each other and their future. He wrote: "If your choice matches mine, we match. I can show you but don't intend to make you see it if you don't want to. On the other hand, if you do agree, you've got a mate."

She replied, "I have a great affection for you, and feel we could make it together. I hope and will do the best I can not to be selfish as far as this is concerned. I want to give as much to you as you have given to me."

My father, Pat, was a jazz musician, and as this letter suggests, he seemed to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about their relationship. It would be on his terms, period. His greatest and first love was music. My mother, Emily, appears to have felt chronically misunderstood and responded favorably to his insights about her. An ardent romance it wasn't.

But they tied the knot, and soon afterward, in August 1955, my sister, Rhonda, was born. I followed a short eleven months later, in July 1956. When I was born, the four of us lived in a basement apartment at 79th and Calumet, and there's a favorite family photograph of me sitting on my father's shoulders outside that apartment when I was two or three years old. I have vague recollections of living there, of being bounced around by my father in that apartment. I have a vivid memory of him pouring milk on my sister's head at the kitchen table one night when he got upset with her. I thought it funny at the time.

Any sense I had of contented family life came to a jarring end when my father decided to leave and move to New York when I was four. I knew nothing of the tensions. My mother, who had dropped out of high school to pursue him, hoped he would return, a hope she nourished by sending him letters regularly. "We all love you very much, and are trying to understand you," she wrote. "Try and do the same for us." When Chubby Checker became a sensation, she wrote, "The kids have gotten so they twist on everything; every kind of beat." She would include little notes from us in her letters. Rhonda's penmanship was remarkably clear at age five or six. Mine was horrible.

My father sent some money once or twice a year, and the landlord was kind about waiving the rent for months at a time. But our finances went from tenuous to desperate, and we had to move. We were offered an apartment in the new Robert Taylor Homes, but my mother could not bring herself to live there, still hoping, I think, for her husband's return.

There would be no reconciliation. My mother tried to make it on her own for a few years, mostly with the help of welfare, but feeling lonesome and needing help, she moved us into her parents' apartment on Wabash Avenue. Since we spent so much time there anyway and I adored my Gram and Poppy, I thought this was a great idea. Little did I know that for my mother it was a sign of defeat, and that my grandmother made her feel like it was for many years.

The tenement that we lived in with my grandparents consisted of four apartments on two levels with two separate entrances. The apartments were identical, long and narrow. Ours was on the first floor. The door from the small, tiled vestibule opened on a dark, narrow hall. To the right, with a window on Wabash Avenue, was the living room with a gold upholstered sofa with clear plastic slipcovers, a dark green leatherette recliner, and a light brown stuffed chair, also covered in plastic, facing the television. That television, with its oversized cabinet and small screen, seems to have always been on and at full volume, whether for Gram's soaps (her "stories") during the day or the network news in the evening. It took a long time to warm up, so we had to plan ahead if there was something we didn't want to miss. The firehouse across the street had two trucks with an uncanny ability to roar off, sirens wailing, just at the punch line of a favorite sitcom.

Next down the hall was my grandparents' room, small and orderly, with twin beds, a matching dresser and chest in walnut veneer, and a large radiator painted white with a tin pan or kettle on top to generate a little humidity in winter. I was born in this room, in my grandmother's bed. She and my uncle Sonny assisted. There was no doctor; labor was brief. According to family legend, after Uncle Sonny cut and tied off the umbilical cord, Grandma wrapped me in a blanket and placed me in the warm oven with the door open until the doctor arrived. Grandma told this story every Thanksgiving when she was dressing the holiday turkey in the very same roasting pan that once held me.

My mother and sister and I occupied a smaller bedroom across from the one bathroom. It was furnished with bunk beds that took up most of the space. For a time we could double up, but eventually we had to rotate so that one of us would sleep on the floor. Whoever's turn it was for "floor night" followed a ritual: you would lay down newspapers, then a thin blanket, then a sheet, then a threadbare cover. Part of the morning ritual was to disassemble all of this and stack it neatly under the bed. The room's one window opened onto an air shaft and the neighbors' window fifteen feet across.

At the end of the hall was a dining room, off of which was a small, rude kitchen with one bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling on a frayed cord. At the end of the cord, just above the bulb, was the kitchen's one socket, where Grandma plugged her electric mixer or iron, depending on the chore at hand. It could make running in from the back door hazardous.

We didn't know to complain. It was home. The notion of having more than one bathroom or multiple sockets in the kitchen or a window with a view was not something I thought much about. We were better off than many. What we had was always orderly, even if our lives were not, as if making hospital corners on the beds each morning would keep the economic chaos at bay.

If we had been tempted by pity, my grandparents would not have allowed it. They came to Chicago from Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s, driven by ordinary middle-class aspirations for themselves and the family they hoped for. Their vision was simple and clear, and it helped shape my own. But, though they shared a vision for their lives, God could not have matched two more different personalities.

Sally Embers Wintersmith both embodied and defied the stereotypical grandmother. Grandma-or "Gram," as we called her-baked cakes every Saturday morning, saving the beaters and bowls to be licked by the grandkids, and made every holiday and birthday an occasion. She could jump rope with Rhonda and her friends and read to me in ways that would make stories come to life. She also cursed so stridently and with such creativity that she would have felt at home in any barracks or locker room. The daughter of an Irish landowner and his black

"charwoman," she had bright red hair and hazel eyes and was light- skinned enough to "pass," as the old folks used to say. When she and my grandfather would drive through the Jim Crow South, she would go into the diner first, get a table, order for herself and the family, and then call everyone in once the food was served. The proprietor was less likely to refuse them at that point, but the ploy didn't always work. One time, a waitress said she would have to serve my grandmother and her family in the kitchen. Gram drew herself up, looked her square in the eye, and said, "We don't eat in the kitchen in our own home." She walked out with her family in tow, leaving the food untouched on the table.

Grandma helped manage our tenement for the nonresident owner, which defrayed the cost of the apartment. She would, among other things, collect the rent, arrange for repairs, and keep track of coal deliveries for the basement furnace. She collected the gossip as well, a job that occupied a good deal of her time.

As talkative as Grandma was, my grandfather was nearly as taciturn. Reynolds Brown Wintersmith, whom we called "Poppy," was strong, slightly bent, and balding, not quite six feet tall. My grandmother adoringly said that in his youth, he was "built like a Roman soldier." He wore a faint perpetual smile and had a twinkle in his warm brown eyes, but he rarely spoke directly to me or other family members beyond simple pleasantries. He had a delightful way of humming, though-indistinct tunes of his own composition, which seemed to keep trouble at bay.

Poppy's work ethic kept us more stable than most. He was a janitor at the South Shore Bank at 71st and Jeffrey for more than fifty years. When he wasn't sweeping the floors, he drove the executives. When he wasn't driving the executives, he did odd jobs for their families or cleaned the nearby Laundromat. He was always pleasant, respectful, and dignified. At the bank, he was beloved by everyone from the tellers to the chief executive. At his memorial service, the bank president said that had my grandfather lived in a different time, he would have retired as the bank's CEO.

Poppy put others at ease and was a good example of how to get along in the world. But in my youth, he remained somewhat impenetrable. When I helped him shovel coal and scrape out the clinkers from the coal furnace at home, he would say nothing save the barest instructions. I helped mop the floors of the Laundromats, but all he told me was what to do and what not to do. On the drives to and from those jobs, only his humming would break the silence.

Only on rare occasions would emotion break through his stoicism. After President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, when the Chicago schools closed out of respect,

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0767931122
• ISBN 13: 9780767931120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240