William Smith heard the knock on the glass and rolled his wheelchair toward the sliding door. He pushed aside the blanket covering the window and saw Rudolph Norris, his old friend from high school, and another man who looked familiar.
Darone?
Meet the characters
William Smith
The adored class prankster whose life was defined by a burst of violence that left him in a wheelchair.
Darone Robinson
An indifferent student and enthusiastic brawler for many years. Pushed constantly by his mother.
Jeffery Norris
Witnessed his uncle being beaten to death with a baseball bat at 8 and swore he would never be a victim.
Tiffany Alston
A strong student whose mother vowed to scrub floors so her daughter could become a lawyer.
David Carter
UPS driver who expresses regrets about dropping out of college and wants his three daughters to get degrees.
Rudolph Norris
Cousin to Jeffery Norris who, at 8, witnessed his stepfather being beaten to death with a baseball bat.
Hasani Chapman
Earned As in school and scored almost 1200 on his SATs, but dropped out of the University of Maryland.
Damn, William thought. Darone Robinson. How long had it been since they had seen each other? It was the fall of 2010; high school had ended 15 years earlier.
The men hugged, and Rudolph and Darone stepped into William’s Northwest Washington apartment, the dirty walls covered with posters of Al Pacino as Scarface and President Obama in sunglasses. A Bible sat on a shelf by the front door. The tiled floor was bare to make it easier for William to get around.
The men opened beers and traded memories of those years at Seat Pleasant Elementary and Hyattsville Middle and Northwestern High, the questions about the Dreamers spilling out faster than the answers.
Have you seen Mr. Proctor?
What’s happening with Jeffery?
What about Tiffany?
All of them shared not just a history but a part in an ambitious social experiment. As children, they’d been promised college scholarships to help liberate them from the poverty and crime that too often plagued their families and their Prince George’s County neighborhoods. Now they were in their 30s, old enough to consider what that experiment had accomplished and how it had changed them.
William Smith had run into Rudolph Norris in recent years and knew that he’d been in the Army and was working as an electrician. William described himself as a rap artist and a hustler, making money any way he could. He’d dropped out of high school in his senior year, and his mother used to say that he wouldn’t have ended up paralyzed if he had been more serious about his studies, an assertion that still angers him years later.
“Ma!” he told her. “If you hadn’t been so strict and let me breathe, I wouldn’t have been out there in the ’hood getting involved with all those people.”
William likes to think he will walk again some day. “Gonna get up out of this chair,” he often says, showing friends how he can make his legs move, if ever so slightly. His smile is still easy, but some of his teeth are crooked or missing, and his eyes are bloodshot. On his right biceps is a tattoo of a wheelchair with a dagger plunged through the seat, and the words “Judgement Day.”
Darone had gone the furthest of the three of them, graduating from Morgan State in 2002. He was married and working as a customer service rep at Pepco. He wore suits to the office on days when he had meetings, and he was comfortable in them. But he wanted William to know that he was still the same Darone, no better than anyone else just because he had a diploma and a house and a job.
“Just because a lot of dreams don’t come true, don’t mean you give up,” William said.
He raised his bottle.
“To the Dreamers,” he said. “To the ones who are here.”
The questions followed the Seat Pleasant 59 through elementary, middle and high school: Would they graduate? Would special attention and hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial assistance from two wealthy businessmen help them achieve the kind of success that had eluded their parents?
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