Chapter 28
Veritas
Jeremiah takes the napkin off of his lap and puts it down beside his plate before he begins.
“Back in 2020, I was 19 years old, and the equality movement was just getting started. Within a few years, I had become involved in campaigning for reparations for African Americans to address the systemic racism I thought existed in America at the time. Then, one day, out of my front window, I see a big, black Cadillac with tinted windows pulling up in front of my house. Now, I lived in inner-city Chicago, and I’m thinking, ‘That’s a drug dealer. What’s a drug dealer doin’ pullin’ up in front of my house?’ About that time, a big, black mountain of a dude gets out of the front of the car and starts walking up the path to my door. I wasn’t a man of peace in those days, so while he’s walking up the path, I go and grab my gun. By the time he knocks, I’m ready.”
He raps his knuckles three times on the table before he continues.
“I open the door nice and slow, ready to pull my gun out from behind my back, and I ask him who he is. He tells me that Mr. Harry Stillman wants me to come for a ride with him. You may not know who Mr. Harry Stillman is, but he was a black businessman who was one of the most wealthy men in Chicago. His face was on billboards all over town. He started out with convenience stores, then branched out into real estate—this guy had it all, the real American Dream.
“The big man at my door steps to the side so I can see the car, and the back window of the car rolls down, and there he is, Mr. Stillman, looking out at me.”
“So, what’d you do?” I ask.
“Well, I told the man to hold on a minute, went and put up my gun, and went for a ride with Mr. Stillman. We drove from my neighborhood to an even worse neighborhood. I saw three drug deals go down on the way to where we were going, and I began to regret the fact that I’d left my gun at home. And then we pull up in front of this run-down shack of a house that was all boarded up, and the car stops. Mr. Stillman rolls down the window so I can get a real good look at it and says to me, ‘You see this house? This is where I grew up.’
“I was shocked. ‘You grew up here?’ ‘Yes,’ he says to me, ‘and, yes, and the neighborhood was just as bad then as it is now.’ So I asked him, ‘How did you get from here, to makin’ all this money and driving around in this nice car and owning all those businesses?’ For the next hour and a half, Mr. Harry Stillman answered that one question.
“He told me that he was a young man, up to no good, with no father in his home—he didn’t even know who his father was. He said he was headed for drug dealin’ and jail when a man in the community began to take an interest in him. The man took him under his wing, helped him with school, and then to get a job. He taught him the value of hard work, helped him get into community college, and told him that he could either blame others for where he started out in life or take advantage of the opportunities he had all around him and make something of himself.
“He eventually earned a degree in business, then went to work for a man— a businessman who just happened to be white. After a while, he started a business of his own. Now, at the time he spoke to me, Mr. Stillman owned three different companies. He told me about how he worked with many people of different races to become successful, and while he did encounter a few people who treated him differently because of his race, most didn’t. Most looked at what he brought to the table—his passion, his business skills, his character—rather than the color of his skin.
“He dropped me off at my house and asked me a question: ‘So, do you want to keep blaming others for what you don’t have, or do you want to take what you do have and make something great out of it? If you’re always looking for someone to give you another fish, you’ll never become a great fisherman. If you’re always looking for someone else to make life fair, then you’ll never learn to succeed in a world that isn’t. Because life isn’t always fair, no matter what the color of your skin is. The soldier that gets his legs blown off by a roadside bomb while he’s protecting your right to protest didn’t get treated fairly. He can spend the rest of his life blaming others for what happened to him, or he can take advantage of the opportunities he still has and do something that helps others.’
“I was dumbfounded. I could hardly believe what he was telling me, but I couldn’t think of any reason that he would lie to me. He knew who I was. He knew I was an activist pushing for reparations for African Americans and claiming America was a racist nation, keeping the black man down. And yet the story he just told me—who he had become and how he succeeded—was evidence against everything I believed.
“He dropped me off at my house and gave me his card, telling me that if I ever decided to take advantage of the opportunities I already had instead of blaming others to give him a call.
“For the next few weeks, I thought a lot about what he said and took a hard look at my own life. I began to realize that the more the crowd I was involved with had succeeded in getting reparations and special treatment for the black race to address the past wrongs against our people, instead of feeling like the shackles were removed, I had become more and more angry. As I began to really examine the situation from this new perspective, I began to see some things I hadn’t seen before. I began to see that although we had succeeded in getting a bunch of laws passed and special actions taken to redress the past wrongs and supposed systemic racism, life in the black community hadn’t been getting much better. And I started to question why that was. I started to question if racism really was holding the black man down or not. I mean, racism hadn’t held down Mr. Stillman, and he had come from the same place as many of the people I was trying to help, with the same disadvantages, facing the same racism that I assumed was so powerful that it was holding back the entire black race. At the end of it all, I realized that he was right. Blaming others had become a way of life, not a way of escape. So I decided to give his advice a chance.
“I called him up and took him up on his offer. He helped me get my G.E.D., helped me get into community college, and I took a job working for him. In the process, I learned that there wasn’t as much anti-black racism out there as I thought there had been, and what little there was didn’t seem to slow me down that much. I met a lot of people of all colors who were willing to help me along the way.
“At the same time I’m going through this transformation, more and more laws are getting passed to protect various identity groups and enshrine more and more preferential treatment for the various groups. And I see that instead of actually helping people live in harmony with one another, it seems society is just coming up with more and more special groups who are blaming other groups for their problems and trying to force others to treat them the way they want to be treated. Everything under the sun suddenly becomes someone’s supposed ‘right,’ and people have to speak a certain way or use a certain pronoun and not say certain words, or else they can lose their job or even get put in jail. And it seemed everyone forgot how to get along with people who were different from them.
“By the time the equality suits were mandated, it was almost a relief. It did cut down on a lot of the bickering and fighting between groups. But it wasn’t true freedom. It was just another government-enforced mandate trying to tell people what they could and couldn’t do. And that didn’t sit right with me. So I and several other like-minded people—some educators, a few business people, and a couple of scientists—started this group to help re-gain our freedom and teach people how to get along with each other. And it wasn’t long before people started calling what we were doing the freedom movement.”
“You started the freedom movement?” I ask, shocked. He chuckles.
“Well, I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, there were other people doing things to push back against what was going on, but the group I helped to start did become one of the main groups.”
I lose track of time as both I and Thomas pepper Jeremiah with questions about the early days of the movement. It’s dark outside by the time our conversation starts winding down, and Jeremiah says goodbye for the night.
Thomas and I spend the next hour talking about his visit and what we learned. Afterwards, we look through the books on the bookshelf and pick out a thick one to start reading called The Count of Monte Cristo. We make it through the first three chapters before I’m so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open. I give Thomas a good-night hug at the door before heading over to my own cabin.
I wonder what the future holds for us here and what the various ‘options’ might be that Jeremiah mentioned.
