The Crowd Sounds Happy by Nicholas Dawidoff

Author:Nicholas Dawidoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307377524
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

My new school had been founded as a Latin grammar school in 1660, “For the Breeding Up of Hopeful Youths,” according to its benefactor, a Colonial governor, and only in the past three years since the merger with my mother’s school were female youths welcome on the hilltop. It was still mostly men drinking coffee in the wood-paneled faculty lounge, and boys dominated the enrollment in each of the six junior high and high school grades. The place rippled with physicality, achieved its ligature from the assertion of muscle and strength.

On the first day of seventh grade, a tall, lanky eighth grader shoved a seventh grader named Stanley into a row of lockers. Stanley was good-looking, had lustrous ebony skin, but what it covered was a lethal sureness of purpose that galvanized so quickly that Stanley became a blur of recovered balance as he spun and came slashing back at the eighth grader, inflicting blows before other eighth graders could pull him away, the boy more startled than injured, protesting as he backed off that what he had done was his right as an eighth grader, Stanley shouting, telling him, “I don’t care what you are. Do not ever fuck with me again.” Other eighth graders milled around in confusion like ants whose hill had been disturbed—they had been waiting a long year for this day. All of us seventh graders who looked on must have been aware that the eighth grader had chosen the wrong man, that Stanley was way ahead of all of us.

I was never close to Stanley. Instead I watched him then from a distance, wishing that I could somehow still be myself and yet be like him. I can see him ambling around the old brick campus, sometimes breaking into a lope or a curvet, but never a full sprint, for, although he was fastest among us, the point was not to show it. There was a certain coldness about him that could seem aloof, even insolent, yet it meant that when he decided to be amiable it disarmed people. One delightful female teacher used to become so slack-jawed and adoring in his presence she’d coo, “Oh, Stanley,” when he offered just about anything in class, the rest of us shifting in our seats as he grinned that mirthless smile of his. Yet he was never vindictive, was often genial to a subaltern, had the ability to make you feel special, chosen, even when he was only involving you in connivance. He was powerful in that he made others powerless without trying to; he didn’t recruit or advertise, he didn’t ask—he didn’t need to. Stanley’s presence alone made kids fall in line. By the time we were juniors he captained the basketball team and if I encountered him working alone at a basket in the school’s gym, he always accepted my challenges for a game of one-on-one, chortling from the back of his throat as his shots poured through the rim like milk into a glass.

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