This article is about an old friend – Eugene Williams. He is pictured at the bottom of this article.
Eugene was one of my assistant track coaches at Myrtle Beach (SC) High School. He mainly coached the sprinters, having run the 200 and 400 meters himself at Myrtle Beach High about twenty years earlier.
The term for runners like Eugene was that they have “wheels”. On the long bus rides around South Carolina on away meets, Eugene would tell me stories about his high school races, with amazingly accurate recall of details. He ran in the low :50s/high :49s in the toughest event in track, the lung-wracking 400 meters, his best event.
In my mind over the years I was even able to form an image of Eugene running the quarter, how he started, when he floated, how he dealt with getting boxed in, when he made his moves (usually at 300 yards coming into the final straight after dusting off most of the competition on the back stretch). The image I got in my mind was of a whippet. If it came to it, which it rarely did, Eugene blasted people off the track in the final 100 yards like a freight train with a cow catcher on the front. It must have been glorious to be at the finish line for one of Eugene’s races, cheering him on as he dug deep, running from his gut for the Green and Gold Seahawks.
Eugene was a champion athlete, yes, but he was also a champion of a person. He lived in the aptly named Race Path Community of Myrtle Beach. He lived on Neighbor Lane. Neighbor Lane actually wasn’t very neighborly. When we dropped the athletes off late at night after away track meets, being a “shoot zone”, they all ducked onto the floor of the bus whenever we went through there.
But I could never duck because I was the one driving the bus. And Eugene never ducked either. He just sat there and smiled and made cracks about the danger (ever-present to him since he was born there) as he rattled off some observation about the potential he had seen on the track that day, getting ready to call in the results of the meet to theSun News and add more numbers to his meticulous record-keeping of our team’s results.
The trailer Eugene grew up in had only three sides – the fourth side was pretty much “open air”, with big sheets of thick plastic to ward off the cold in the winter. That trailer really only had three sides. It was right next to Joannie Hayes’ trailer, which also had three sides, but wasn’t quite as bad. I remember seeing Joannie, who one year earned a perfect score on the National French exam that year at level 3, earning her #1 in the nation honors, in the Charlotte airport year later. When I asked her what she was doing, she replied that she had just graduated from the Duke University School of Medicine.
Eugene’s dad left that trailer when he was only six years old. During those six years, Eugene was occasionally beaten. That accounted, perhaps, for his pronounced stutter.
In the hospital, before Eugene succumbed to AIDS 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. The topic is fairly obvious – we talked about running track. We tried to remember highlights of certain meets and road trips, just passing the time as he got ready to pass on.
We remembered certain post-meet meals. We remembered our favorite stops for breaks on the road. We remembered how we almost didn’t make it to one state meet because Quintard Tucker, whose older brother 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. Quntard went on to win the title that year in the shot put, winning by one quarter of an inch.)
How did Eugene and I remember details like that? It was because we were friends and were thinking about our athletes along the the same lines. But those days are over now. Eugene is gone. Then why do I write about him now? It is because now with the arrival of the Black Lives Matter movement, I have had a thick amount of wool removed from my eyes about what Eugene was experiencing every day right next to me as we coached our athletes and lived our lives in Myrtle Beach High School.
Do I need to elaborate on that? No. Not now, right? 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?
Or does it? What if, when he was a student at MBHS, someone had allowed him to explore his talents at languages? Of course, he wasn’t. The language classes back then, my French classes certainly, were mainly for white kids who could “do the work”. But what if the language classes offered at MBHS had allowed Eugene in? What if he had been taught in a way that affirmed his intelligence. He wasn’t just a former star athlete and then coach, he was brilliant. But he didn’t get to explore languages.
What am I saying here? Nothing. I’m just reflecting on my past as a teacher and coach.
At the end, Eugene didn’t look too much like Eugene. When we got to that point, it was me doing most of the talking. The way I looked at the whole situation, there in that corner room of the hospital with the word in big letters QUARANTINE on the door (they let family in and I was just about it as far as family goes), was that Eugene was finally rounding the the final curve and entering the straightaway for the final push to the finish, this one decidedly different from the final motoring curves from his earlier days, was that I could almost see him timing his moves again. But this time it was a struggle. Oh Lord, have mercy, that had to have been a different kind of pain from the kind one experiences on a track.
Just remembering here. Remembering a strong man, a kind man, a real man. So what’s the thought, the object lesson in this? For me, it is that, for a little less than a minute, once or twice a week, when he was in high school, Eugene was a champion. Before high school and after high school, he was not a champion. But, when he had his MBHS thinclads on, in those meets from long ago, he flew magnificently through the South Carolina heat, bowing to few.
Eugene’s posture, even in his 30’s (almost an advanced age for residents of Neighbor Lane), was exemplary. Standing by the track in workouts and in meets, he stood with his shoulders back and his head high in the same way he ran, with pride. There was always joy in Eugene’s face during a big meet.
I would submit this story to anybody in our country who wants to destroy American Public High Schools. I would submit this story to anyone who has been a teacher. Mark my words, when you are retired from language teaching, you will not reflect back on the wonderful kids who won all the academic awards in languages, those few kids, those privileged kids.
Instead, you will look back and wish you had plunged into the Black Lives Matter movement more, and how you maybe could have examined your instruction so that when other Eugene Williams maybe wanted to be accepted into and then treated fairly (in terms of the research) in your classes
We will pull together, America, under the BLM flag. Let’s do it for Eugene. It’s a new day.
