A Jury of One's Peers

Sitting on my desk is the final “absolute, no kidding, no extensions possible” request for my submission to the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1981 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report. After twenty-five years, Harvard wants an accounting of what I have done with my life. I ignored the three or four previous requests because I had trials to work up and columns to write.

Yeah, right.

Here’s the real reason. I am scared to commit to paper a life story that—let’s be real—almost certainly will not be as impressive as those of my classmates. Scarier yet, am I really prepared to stack the reality of my forty-six years up against all those expectations and lofty dreams I had when I marched out of Harvard Yard in June 1981?

In high school, I was a strange amalgamation of Steve Urkel from television’s Family Matters and Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Klump, with a touch of Richard Roundtree in Shaft. I was nerdy, but also cool (well, at least I tried to be). My classmates toted backpacks through the halls and wore jeans and T-shirts for their senior portraits; I proudly carried a briefcase to class and wore a tuxedo in mine. My parents, battle-scarred veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, were native Mississippians who moved our family to Denver in 1964. They were educated professionals, but both had grown up enduring the daily indignities of the old Jim Crow South. They very desperately believed that the “talented tenth,” as African-American scholar W.E.B. du Bois termed the best and the brightest black folk, had a moral duty to “uplift the race.” Therefore, my sisters and I were raised, as were most black middle-class kids in the late sixties and early seventies, to get the best credentials we could, so as to continue to carry out that duty.

When I got into Harvard, my father promptly plastered five Harvard bumper stickers onto our two cars. The Denver Post ran a story headlined “Collins Headed to Harvard.” The assistant principal at my high school asked me to forget the times he had reamed me for various transgressions and to instead remember him fondly when I “became somebody big.” And when I arrived in Cambridge in September of 1977, the entire Class of ’81 was shepherded into the Harvard Square Theatre, where we were told that we were the most brilliant and talented group of young people ever assembled in one place, destined to scale great heights in recorded human history. Of course, we knew that was a slight (but only slight) exaggeration.

Placing a kid like me, one already infused with an inflated sense of my own importance, in an institution like that was very dangerous. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad I went to Harvard. I did learn that there were people—many people—smarter than I was. Unfortunately, I also believed that most of them were at either Harvard or similarly self-absorbed elite institutions.

I remember a late-night discussion during my senior year that involved deciding, only half jokingly, who in our little group would be best suited for which Cabinet post. We not only believed that great power and riches awaited us somewhere over the Ivy League rainbow, we were also all afraid of facing each other if, years later, we ended up back in Kansas—not powerful, not rich, just, well, ordinary.

Ever since my college days, I have heard, sometimes softly and sometimes quite loudly, an incessant murmuring in my head. Sometimes it comes just from my parents, asking, what have I done “for the race”? At other times, they are joined by the chorus of those damned Harvard ghosts, taunting me with my own boasts made long ago and with expectations that were never fulfilled: The fancy political appointment that never quite materialized. Those unmade millions resting in someone else’s bank account.

The truth of the matter is, I am not a master of the universe—far from it. If I follow the script for columns like this, I am supposed to say that I have come to terms with how my life has turned out, I no longer am tormented by those voices, and I cannot wait to see my fellow members of the Class of 1981 next summer. But I know that’s not entirely true. As much as I tell myself that I am content with my rather ordinary life—and, for the most part, I am—I still hear the voices, albeit not as forcefully as in years past. And if I am “real” with myself, I gotta admit that they can still push my buttons.