Many of us see the city’s West Side, if we see it at all, as a place of pain, poverty and danger. Some of those who live there do so with little hope and no escape.
For a book that is ultimately uplifting and always enlightening, “A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America’s First All-Black High School Rowing Team” begins in that place, its author writing, “At fifteen, I had already run for my life, had bullets fly straight past my head, skipped over pools of blood, and witnessed dead bodies on the street.”
Welcome to Chicago, specifically the Chicago of the late 1990s (though sadly things have not gotten much brighter since), when a young student at Manley Career Academy named Arshay Cooper is trying to cope the familiar troubles of teenage life in a place shadowed by the troubles of a precarious environment.
Cooper is the author of this book, originally published to considerable praise but little public attention in 2015. Now handsomely repackaged by Flatiron Books, its return coincides with the upcoming premiere of a film that captures and updates the story of Cooper and some the friends, coaches and mentors who transformed his life.
I will review that film, titled simply “A Most Beautiful Thing,” before its July 17 opening at theaters across the country, including the AMC River East here. In short, it is a great movie.
But let us focus now on this book, which would a good thing for you to read before seeing the film. It is a coming-of-age story told with the benefit of adult insights and mature hindsight. Cooper is an introspective young man and a fine writer now but when we meet him in these pages, he is struggling to form a personality and a life.
“It’s hard to believe in the American Dream when you walk home through streets of abandoned buildings scattered with baggies of drugs,” he writes. “It was like God existed everywhere but here.”
His mother is a former drug addict (“I didn’t respect her and treated her like a dead woman roaming the streets. … She was dead to me”) who was later saved by and became energetically devoted to religion. He has a younger brother and sister, an older brother who is a gang member. He has seen his father only once since he was born. He goes to school, tries successfully to steer clear of bullies, gangs and dope. He dreams of being a chef. He sweetly and awkwardly courts a classmate named Grace, who “seems easy like Sunday morning while the other girls seem hard to deal with like Monday morning.”
His unlikely path to success and, indeed, salvation starts when a 32-year-old white options and futures trader named Ken Alpart shows up at Manley. He is a former University of Pennsylvania rowing crew team member and the founder of an organization called Urban Options, which was in the business of helping and enriching the lives of West Side kids.
Alpart wants to recruit kids for a rowing team and, out of curiosity, dozens initially show up for a look-see. In a world where, as Cooper writes, “one of the first things you are taught through rap music and from your parents is Trust No One,” only eight boys appear for the first serious practice and the team would vary in number over the next months and include a few girls. Cooper was always part of it, eventually being named team captain.
Initial suspicions quickly vanish until he is, Cooper writes, “feeling I am part of something. Practice was different that other classes … where teachers focus on your shortcomings.”
Yes, it is different and Cooper, joined by a lively group of schoolmates, is exposed not only to a demanding sport but a world outside their rough and tumble urban clime.
Their physical journey takes them to the Lincoln Park lagoon; the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where “the tree leaves match the caramel-and-cinnamon-brick colors of the school”; the East Bank Club, where they observe a locker room with “naked old white men everywhere”; into fine homes and summer jobs. Reading, one can feel their worlds expanding but remain always aware that being “on the water is the only thing that calms the storm in us.”
They learn to trust, even in the face of a few parents’ skepticism and distrust, and insults from members of the school’s football team (“How is rowing those slave ships?”). They learn what it is like to compete in an all-white world, against teams from Loyola Academy, St. Ignatius and other private schools. They learn how to row and to swim and to succeed.
The rowing competitions do not dominate these pages. This book is less about this specific sport than how that sport becomes transformative, empowering some kids, giving others a direction. Some don’t make it. As one puts it when he drops out of the program, “Rowing … doesn’t put food on the table and stop the kids from Manley from clowning me if I don’t have new threads. The streets are calling, and rowing will have to wait.”
But as Cooper puts it, “I want to be an agent of change and the responsibility of reaching out to those who are hurting. I want to be an agent of change for my teammates and those around me but I feel a little bit like I have one foot in and one foot out because I am still young and want to be cool. But in the hood, the cemetery is full of young guys who wanted to be cool.”
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He is cool and is scheduled to participate in a YouTube Live event 7 p.m. July 30 for the Chicago Humanities Foundation, where he will be virtually interviewed by Ron Stallworth, the Chicago-born law enforcement veteran and author of the bestselling book “Black Klansman,” which became the basis for Spike Lee’s 2018 film “BacKkKlansman.”
Stallworth admires the book, offering these words on its jacket: “I was immediately captivated. Arshay’s writing evoked the emotional angst of teens growing up in the inner city of Chicago.”
Yes it does and you will admire it too.