It was the end of our second interview,1 and I wanted to ask David Caldwell, Jr., something that would help me summarize the life stories of this remarkable man, a well-respected cop and leader of the environmental justice movement in Chapel Hill who grew up in Northside.
I glanced at my question sheet and asked: “When you look back at your childhood and everything, what do you think was the critical point where you really had your ‘a-ha moment,’ saying, ‘Okay, now I know what I want to do with my life’?”
After graciously trying to answer the question, Mr. Caldwell took it down a different path altogether: “It’s like a cake. Eggs don’t make the cake. Water, the margarine, the baking powder, they don’t make the cake. You have to put it all together. And as you start putting those ingredients together, it’s, ‘Oh, this is a cake! Let’s put some icing on it.’ So then you move on to the next level. [You say to yourself] ‘I’ve set a goal I’ve attained. Let’s go one step further. Let’s see what that will be like.’”
As someone who has read many a historical narrative, I think it is very easy to misrepresent people by looking too hard for a turning point, a highlight, a seminal moment in their lives. These moments often only emerge in the telling of a story, aided by hindsight and a conscious search for a connecting thread. You don’t usually feel as though you’re making history when you’re living it. In the search for a neat narrative, stories are created and meaning is assigned in the telling, and after a while the telling becomes the story.
But what if our life stories were told in bits and pieces and could be assembled in different ways each time we tell them? What if we resist the impulse to settle on one version, one unifying theme? What if we decide not to follow any recipe?
Mr. Caldwell’s narrative was a series of memories, each with its own personal significance. So, for example, he told this story about how he overcame some of the difficulties he faced as one of the first students to integrate his middle school: “My first year in the seventh grade … was very rough, hated it. I failed that year—and by the time I came back in the seventh grade again, I’d lost about thirty or forty pounds. I had already learned everything. This was like a refresher course. ‘So this was what it feels like to make an “A”.’ … And it’s like you can see everything.” Things turned around for him when he persevered and received some unexpected recognition: “In junior high I got my first award. It was a Robert Conrad award, which is a thing for just an overall good guy, friendly guy. And I got that. And I was like, wow, this is pretty neat. And after that, they started coming in. You know, (…) player scholarship, just stuff just started coming in.”
At the same time, other memories give a much clearer picture of what he experienced day-to-day during the early days of integration: memories of racism; of having to live up to the behavioral expectations of a star athlete while friends organized civil disobedience in opposition to the school’s unjust administrators; of feeling both pride and regret at being the son of a policeman charged with arresting student demonstrators; of a high school history teacher, the remarkable Mrs. Joyce Clayton, who told him to honor his father’s struggle to make a living and a life for his family rather than to condemn him for the concessions he felt he had to make as a result; of his warm relationships with classmates and fellow members of Chapel Hill High School’s Class of ’72, both black and white. All these stories don’t have to fit into a neat unifying narrative. There are many ways to tell his life’s stories, and each story can stand alone and take on significance in the telling.
Mr. Caldwell’s way of looking at his life makes a lot of sense. We are not shaped by one or even a few key moments. We are always in the process of becoming someone, trying new approaches, new paths. And the more time we take to reflect, the more consciously we move through life. No path is forged in a moment; it’s always unwinding, forged without a real sense of where we will end up. We are constantly making decisions– sometimes consciously and deliberately, often unconsciously. And far from being determined in advance, our lives, as Mr. Caldwell reminds us, consist of decisions we make, risks we decide to take … or not take. Deciding not to act rarely becomes part of the narrative we share with others, since most of us think we have to tell our life story as a series of decisions or reactions. Often when I have asked people permission to conduct an oral history interview, they are reluctant to share their stories because they are convinced they have not lived a particularly extraordinary life. But a person’s life is much more than a personal narrative. It gives others insight into a time and place, a community, and a way of life that is both unique and representative of a bigger story.
In telling his stories, Mr. Caldwell shows that what other people say and do matters. Others shape our stories and their stories become intertwined with our own. Even when we think we are making our own decisions, we are weighing what we’ve observed and learned from others. There are moments when the words and actions of others fall on fertile ground and resonate deeply. Or, to return to Mr. Caldwell’s metaphor, there are times when we discover a new ingredient for the cake, and we fold it into the batter.
Finally, Mr. Caldwell reminds us there is no recipe for life. With his typical humility, he says he can’t advise others on what will bring success. There is no formula that makes one person’s life a success story, even though many life histories are written that way. In talking about his classmates and contemporaries in Chapel Hill, he brings it back to baking by telling me about an annual baking contest: “The people get the same ingredients and cook the same thing and none of the biscuits turn out the same. They don’t know why. Everyone has to follow the same recipe, but they don’t come out the same. So I think that’s probably what happened with us is that we all use the same ingredients. … Some come out a little bit sooner, some of them later.”
The same ingredients produce different results, since not all the variables are within our control and each baker is different. And each cake is unique. We’re all just putting it together, one ingredient at a time.
MIGHTY 