A Path All His Own

Barbara Motley moved to Atlanta, where she now resides. She did not wish to be interviewed for this article. Eric Motley finds it difficult to discuss his parents. "My grandparents raised me," he says, giving his stock answer. Motley has never met his father, but there are those in Madison Park who say they know who the man is, and that he continues to reside there. Motley has shown no inclination to investigate the matter.

The professional black class of Madison Park began watching the young Eric Motley. "My daddy said that boy was going to be something," Solomon Seay Jr. recalls of his father, the preacher-activist. Hagalyn Wilson, the pioneering doctor, hired Eric to tend her garden after school. It was his first paying job.

When Eric got to junior high -- bespectacled, quick to pull out a can of Lysol to chase away germs on his hands -- some of the children thought him odd. He stayed after class and tidied up for his teachers, wiping off chalkboards, clearing windowsills. Then he'd dash to his next class, beating the students there who were still lolling in the hallways.

"He was strange," concedes Susan Mayes, one of Eric's seventh-grade teachers, who came to adore him. "He was like a little old man."

In junior high, in the early 1980s, Motley began gravitating toward white kids. He found like-minded company with them. "We got him into classes for the gifted," says Mayes. "He really didn't have much to do with the black children." Motley recalls only one other black youth in the gifted program.

Motley found a hobby: public speaking. Mayes became his coach. He entered competitions. The black boy and the white teacher, driving all over Alabama. "It was a reverse 'Driving Miss Daisy,' " says Motley, recalling the movie about a white Southern woman and her devoted black chauffeur. He won and kept on winning. Mayes's family practically adopted Eric. "He was like a brother, and we rooted for him at his speech competitions," says Meredith Mann, Susan Mayes's daughter. "But he was quirky. Like that Urkel guy on TV." (Steve Urkel was the uber-nerd character on the 1990s sitcom "Family Matters.")

Motley wore high-water pants and hand-me-downs; his grandparents were often in financial difficulty. He started a little bank account with the money he made from his gardening job. Motley's black friends in Madison Park saw less and less of him.

"White people," says Marcus Wilson, a family friend, "snuck into the community and gave Eric things he had never been exposed to. You have to realize that Eric was a community project. People took him in."

As a student at Robert E. Lee High School, which was approximately 40 percent black, Motley avoided black cliques. Many of the black kids were into sports, and sports held no interest for him. He watched the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in the fall of 1991. The proceedings turned into a hurricane of sexual and racial politics. Motley, who had to write a class paper on the confirmation process, fired off a sympathetic letter to Thomas.

His thoughts about politics were beginning to crystallize. "I think it was also the first time I became truly illumined that I was expected to think a certain way, given my race. It was countering everything my grandparents taught me: Think for yourself. Use your own mind. Be your own person. All these retired black persons who had been tutoring me said: 'Stand on your own two feet!' I didn't need the Negro College Fund to tell me a mind is a terrible thing to waste."

There had always been independent thinkers in his black community. Motley's own grandfather George Washington Motley sometimes crossed party lines when voting, eschewing Democratic dogma, while keeping a picture of Thurgood Marshall in the house. During races for class office, Motley found himself siding more often than not with conservative positions, which meant siding more often than not with whites. There were stares, and questioning, from blacks.

He was becoming his own man in other ways, as well. Motown, the prideful anthems of Curtis Mayfield and the sweeping poetry of Langston Hughes did not move him. He preferred Bach, Glenn Gould and Tennyson.