Freedom is Like a Basketball Court
Or so I thought at 17
Reverend Williams always answered my questions with questions. If she weren’t so kind, it would have been annoying.
After Karen, I hung out with her a lot. She seemed to know how I felt. She was nice to me in the way people are when a grandparent dies. That part felt good.
I wanted to become a Christian like the others.
Technically, I was already Christian because I belonged to the church, and my family never missed Christmas or Easter services. The adults bristled if anyone else sat in our pew. I played point guard on the church basketball team for three years. There was never a time when I wasn't Christian.
And I knew how to be reverent. Scouting taught me that. Dad's hands and Mom's eyes taught me all the essential things when I was five. Like not looking back at the choir, not talking once the ministers started, when to stand, reciting stuff from memory, when to sing, and how to sit still. My scoutmaster, Uncle Wally, led me to experience awe when touched by the splendor of creation.
But after Karen, I knew I wasn't a real Christian. Not like Mrs. Roberts or Karen's mom. Not like my friends. Not like Karen.
They seemed to get it. Church stuff made them who they were—something - a contagious joy - made you want to be around them.
Their Christianity was a life changer. Mine was a membership.
Time was of the essence. Had to master the real Christian thing before departing for college. Had to pack their joy in my suitcase. Then things would be OK.
Reverend Williams' office was at the church gym entrance. It had a huge glass window, so all a kid had to do was make eye contact. She'd smile back, and before you knew it, she was answering your questions with questions.
The questions started when she realized I had no plans to attend LSU. By then, I had narrowed my choices to West Point, Annapolis, Michigan, and Georgetown.
She asked why I wanted to be a military officer. The military was not popular then because of Vietnam.
When I responded that I felt it was my duty to defend our country, she asked why. When I said it was essential to protect our freedom, she asked me what I meant.
Freedom was the correct answer. The year before, we'd had Bicentennial Minutes on TV every night celebrating the birth of our nation. We were the leaders of the free world. To be American is to be free. The military fights to make sure we stay free. Everyone knew that.
No one had ever asked me what freedom was. It was a given. Never had to explain what it was. Or why I was willing to die for it.
There was a popular song, Born Free. There's the answer. We are born free. It's our right. As the Declaration says, no one can take freedom from us. We are "As free as the wind blows."
She asked me what it meant for the Holy Spirit to make us free. I thought she had changed the topic at the time because the song didn't mention the Holy Spirit.
The ministers mentioned it a lot.
I rolled my eyes whenever people spoke of the Holy Spirit for much of my life. Perhaps because the creed we recited weekly called it the Holy Ghost. Since childhood, the Spirit was this mysterious thing that was good but invisible.
Like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Whenever anyone mentioned the Holy Spirit, I imagined Casper. Truth.
When Reverend Williams spoke of the Holy Spirit, I had no idea what she meant. Certainly could not comprehend what it had to do with freedom.
It was frustrating because the Holy Spirit stuff came easy for real Christians, just not for me.
Perhaps she sensed my confusion. She took a different tack. Shifted my attention to the third verse of Born Free. Why does the song say that freedom is a space where no walls divide you?
I was too ignorant of the Bible to follow her point.
It's embarrassing to remember how clueless I was at seventeen. I would love to report that I picked up on Reverend Williams' cue and immediately connected baptism and a commitment to Jesus's emancipatory politics. I'd love to recall that, henceforth, I understood my calling to defend freedom by knocking down walls rather than fortifying them. Life would have been so much easier had I grasped then that freedom was not what I thought, that the joy I wanted to harness could not abide in a heart that divided the world into friends and foes.
Instead, I parroted the politicians who led my local culture. Freedom was the opposite of a space with no dividing walls. It meant having a walled-off space where you could always make unimpeded choices.
I learned that from the nightly news.
Numerous White Baton Rougeans have pridefully pointed to the 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott. Lasting six days, it preceded the more famous Birmingham boycott by two years. Martin Luther King consulted with Baton Rouge boycott leaders in organizing the Birmingham ride-share program.
It is ironic that White Baton Rougeans celebrate the 1953 boycott, given that they resisted the 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate public schools longer than any city in the United States. Moreover, even in 2023, White Baton Rougeans continued to resist the spirit of that court order by seceding from Baton Rouge to form an affluent, predominantly White city with its own school system.
SCOTUS ordered desegregation long before my birth. Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for NAACP, filed the Baton Rouge lawsuit in 1956. The litigation was settled 47 years later.
Whites made up roughly two-thirds of the public school population when I was born. When the desegregation lawsuit ended, Whites made up only 11%, with Hispanics exceeding White participation in a primarily Black public school system. Today, most Whites attend private schools created to avoid court-ordered integration.
In 1970, a federal judge ordered the school board to end school districts based on race. They resisted. After they shut down the most dilapidated separate-but-equal buildings, the school board created 102 "neighborhood school" districts. I went to one of the 19 schools that remained all-white or all-black because our neighborhoods had been segregated for so long.
When I was in junior high, Judge Parker said public school faculties had to reflect our population's 2:1 White/Black ratio. Before that, I had never met a Black teacher. Mrs. Gillette, an English teacher I loved, transferred to Broadmoor as part of that court-mandated third. As I recall, the first Black students showed up senior year. There were eight in our 1,500-student population. Desegregation, for me, meant exposure to Black teachers, not students.
But it was also a significant way adults taught us about freedom. The nightly news was filled with ongoing school board battles between politicians and federal judges. The message was clear. The federal government was interfering with our God-given right to determine who counts as neighbors and how we want to run our neighborhoods. The court order was the beginning of communism that would destroy our country. It was un-American. We had to fight to protect our freedom. Etc.
Reverend Williams pressed about the lyric that urges us to "Stay free, where no walls divide you." But, at seventeen, I couldn't see walls as divisive. The politicians on the news said walls are protective. Who was I to trust?
Looked through her window at our basketball court. That was a place I felt at home. A place where the rules made sense.
Told her freedom is like having your own private basketball court. You can dribble wherever you want with the ball. If anybody pushes you around, it's a foul. It's against the rules for anyone to mess with you there. Freedom is a private space that only you control.
She didn't say anything. She got that look on her face that adults get when they know you're both wrong and too proud to learn anything more in that moment. It was the same look my sister-in-law - a decade older than me - got when I insisted I would never get married. A wait-and-see smiling presence.
As for me, I wanted to become a real Christian. But based on her questions, I still didn't get it.