Ethical Ambition by Derrick Bell

Author:Derrick Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2002-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

During every day of our thirty years together, my late wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, played a crucial part in my ongoing education, in molding the person I am. She was mother of our three sons, confidant, advisor, and best friend. I had known her since childhood - we both came from working-class families in Pittsburgh and had been classmates in junior and senior high — but it wasn't until we met again nine years later that I began to see her in a different light. We had, unbeknown to each other, both moved to Washington, D.C. Learning that I was there, she called and invited me to attend service with her at a newly formed Church of the Redeemer.

The church was started by a young minister, Rev. Jefferson Rogers, whom we both admired. Rogers was important in my life for two reasons. First, he had resigned as pastor from a prestigious black church because he found the congregation hopelessly bourgeois, and more interested in status than doing the Lord's work. I was impressed that, far from suffering as a result of his action, Rogers was enthused with his work in starting a new church.

Second, Jewel and I spent many happy hours in the Rogerses' home with his wife, Mary Grace, and their three young children. During those visits, I began to see that marriage could support rather than burden my ambitions if I found the right person. And as I watched Jeff Rogers, one of the best-read persons I know, and Jewel argue for hours over any of a variety of subjects, it seemed clear that Jewel was that person.

Listening as she more than held her own in those debates, I began remembering the qualities I had so appreciated in our school days.

She was still smart, of course, but also articulate and self-assured in a way that I did not remember as a teenager. Even more impressive was how personable she was, and our common backgrounds provided a basis for easy comfort and sharing. Then there was something else: Jewel had an insight into people that bordered on the supernatural, giving her an uncanny power of understanding people's thoughts and feelings with an acuity that left me breathless. Her professional training had only served to heighten these skills.

The next summer she was program director at the Urban League-sponsored James Weldon Johnson Summer Camp for black children, a position I had held a few years earlier, and where we had both been counselors years before. I visited her at the camp and one evening, under the stars, I asked her to marry me. To my everlasting good fortune, she said yes, and we were married not long afterward.

I was twenty-nine, and Jewel was twenty-eight. I had just joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She had her own career as a psychiatric social worker, and continued to pursue it with energy and success, but she still managed to be a bulwark of support during the years when I had to spend weeks at a time away from home.

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