In the hospital, before Eugene succumbed to death in 1993 at age 37, we had a lot of talks before he went up to heaven. He was quarantined, of course, but they let me in anyway since I was his only family. Our topic was always fairly obvious – we talked about running track.
I told him how I had spent a lazy afternoon in Louisville at a track meet talking to Wesley Unseld. We always competed to make the best track stories, leaning heavily on our strong abilities to make things up. There in the Grand Strand hospital, every evening, we tried to remember highlights of certain meets and road trips, just passing the time as he got ready to pass on and as I got ready to grieve the loss of my friend and colleague.
We remembered our favorite restaurant stops on the road. We remembered how we were almost late to one state meet because Quintard Tucker, whose older brother Coach Daffy was in prison at the time and so couldn’t be with the team, spent at least 30 minutes in the men’s room of a restaurant stop on the way to Columbia and so made the whole team arrive with barely enough time to warm up. (Nobody told Quintard what do do, least alone his coaches. If he wanted to spend extra time in the restroom before we got back on the road, he did. Quintard won a state title that year in the shot put, by one quarter of an inch. He always attributed to his lighter weight after leaving the restaurant.)
Those days are over now. Eugene is gone. Then why do I write about him now, here in a space where we just talk about language teaching? It is because now, with the arrival of the Black Lives Matter movement, I have had a very thick amount of wool removed from my eyes and so have been able to gain profound insights into what Eugene was really experiencing every day right next to me as we coached our athletes and lived our lives at Myrtle Beach High School.
So do I need to apologize for writing here on my PLC about my friend, gone so long now and yet more alive in my heart than ever, for the reason that it has nothing to do with language teaching? No.
I now look back and wonder if, back when he was a student at MBHS, someone had invited Eugene, like the white kids, to explore his talents at languages? What if there was room on his schedule for a language class? What if Eugene had been deemed as capable of “doing the work” required in a language class? What if Eugene had been taught in a way that affirmed his intelligence?
(to be cont.)