Maggie’s Son : Why Did He Succeed and Some Didn’t? He Found the Answer in Her Dream

Dr. James Comer clearly remembers the house call he made one night in East Chicago, Ind., when he was a young intern moonlighting for another doctor.

Opening the apartment door, he was instantly repelled by the sight of thousands of cockroaches crawling on the walls and on two children asleep in orange crates on the floor. A greater shock came, however, when Comer recognized the children’s mother, who was the patient, as a girl he had gone to high school with--someone he remembered as having been like him, smart and with “potential.” Now she was suffering from severe depression stemming, he surmised, from the abject poverty she lived in. And, Comer recalled sadly, there was no remedy for that in his doctor’s bag.

Powerful Turning Point

“That was a powerful turning point,” Comer said during a recent visit to Los Angeles from his home in New Haven, Conn.

Why did their lives turn out so differently?

Now the associate dean of the Yale School of Medicine and a professor of psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center, he provides a touchingly personal answer to that question in “Maggie’s American Dream: The Life and Times of a Black Family,” published in November by New American Library.

The book tells a black success story, the first half of which focuses on his remarkable mother, Maggie Comer, who was born poor in the rural South in 1904. As the story unfolds in her own words, she tells of how she never finished grade school, suffered under a cruel stepfather and worked a series of menial jobs most of her life--from domestic to operating the elevator in the hospital where James was an intern.

Toiling against the odds, she reared five children who would later earn 13 college degrees among them and go on to successful careers. One son is an optometrist, another son is superintendent of public schools and her two daughters are teachers.

The second part of the slim volume presents James Comer’s story about his own quest for meaningful work. The second eldest of the five Comer children, he is, aside from his posts at Yale, a regular columnist for Parents magazine, author of several books on racism and education and a noted expert on the education of inner-city youths.

Central to both sections of Comer’s frequently painful memoir is the idea that a child’s earliest experiences at home and at school can shape aspirations and accomplishments later in life. It is a notion that was embraced strongly by Comer’s mother and would deeply influence the successful work Comer, as a psychiatrist, would do later with underachieving minority students in New Haven schools.

As he relaxed on a recent morning in the living room of the Van Nuys house shared by his son, Brian, and his daughter, Dawn, Comer reflected on his mother’s incalculable influence on his life and the sense of urgency he felt in sharing the details of her life with others.

“There are many black success stories that aren’t being told,” the 54-year-old psychiatrist said. “All you hear about is the gangs, the families that have been overwhelmed. I feel it is very important to understand what successful black families did and how they function, even just to know that they exist. Because the stereotypes give you the notion that they don’t exist.”

In a neat, dark business suit sans tie, Comer sought to explain why he took a tape recorder to his mother 10 years ago and asked her just to start talking--about her upbringing, marriage, jobs, values, “how she figured out all of those things,” he said, that enabled her to beat the odds society had stacked against her.

According to James Comer, his mother “in some ways defies description”--even by someone like himself whose professional focus is observing and understanding the twists and turns of human character. On this morning, his mental image of Maggie Comer brought a grin and a gentle chuckle.

Still Active at 84

“She is always rushing somewhere,” he said, leaning into the sofa in the sparely furnished living room. At 84, he said, she is still going strong, active in church, clubs and school affairs in East Chicago, where she lives in an apartment owned by one of her sons.

She balked initially at baring the intimate details of her life.

“I just lived and tried to help others and thought nothing of it,” the octogenarian confirmed recently in a telephone interview from East Chicago. “I didn’t let my children know how hard it was to raise them. Not being an educated person, I had to make it the hard way. But I loved it, I love my children, I love my life.” And gradually, she allowed her son to convince her that sharing her story might help others making the same struggle.

James Comer recalls that the seed for the book was planted during a visit to a family cemetery in Comer, Ala., a town named after the owners of Comer’s slave ancestors. It was about 1977, and the “Roots” phenomenon was going full force. Looking at the graves of several generations of his father’s family, he thought to himself glumly, “Here lies the history of my family--gone forever.”

Some months later, his mother joined his family for a vacation in Barbados. Remembering the feelings stirred during the graveside visit, Comer had brought along a portable tape recorder, intending to create an oral history of his mother’s life that would be for family consumption only. Interviews were conducted sporadically over the next six years, but it took Comer a long time to see that the story “went beyond my mom” to broader themes he had been been struggling with for almost 20 years in his academic work.

Comer’s first book, “Beyond Black and White,” analyzed the personal and social consequences of bigotry in America. It had been published in 1972. Then in 1975, he co-authored, with Alvin Poussaint, a child-rearing guide for black parents. In 1980, he wrote “School Power,” which described his efforts to bring about a drastic change in New Haven’s low-achieving inner-city schools.

New Book Emerged

It was only after showing the transcript of his mother’s rambling narrative to several colleagues that he began to see the outlines of another book, one that he thought could describe the black experience more effectively than his previous writings had.

“I always felt there were things that were difficult to describe because other people didn’t have the same experience,” he said. “At the same time, I knew there were larger factors that play in with the personal experience. My family experience turned out to be a better way to describe the black experience than I had been able to do.”

His mother was born Maggie Nichols in Woodland, Miss., the child of sharecroppers. She remembers little about her father because he was killed by lightning when she was 5. But Jim Nichols was always calling her “Doll,” she recalls in the book, and she remembers being his favorite among the five children. It was this brief but solid relationship that, James Comer believes, gave his mother the inner fortitude to rise above the many hardships she would face later at the hands of an uncaring stepfather who often deserted the family for long periods, beat her mother, mistreated the children and kept them on the move, from Mississippi to Arkansas and finally Tennessee.

She met her husband, Hugh Comer, in 1920 when she ran away from home to live with a half-sister in East Chicago. Comer, who was the deacon in the town’s black church, was stern and serious but “as near perfect a man as there can be,” Maggie Comer says in the book. He didn’t smoke, drink or go carousing, and he was the type who, “if he told you he was going to do something, you could bank on it,” she said.

Together, they built a solid home environment and worked hard to get ahead. They saved enough to buy a small parcel of land, built and rented out two duplexes and opened a grocery store. Two or three days a week, Maggie cleaned the houses of white families.

But, as she recounts in the book, “I didn’t just cook and clean. I worked with my eyes and ears open,” learning all manner of practical tips. Those ranged from how to shop for a good deal and the wisdom of paying a little more to buy higher quality goods to what kinds of soaps and oils were best for bathing babies.

“I watched and listened to them (her employers) and the way they lived,” she said. “For me it was like going to school.”

As James Comer relates in “Maggie’s American Dream,” she read to her children when they were young--the Comers received not one, but three Sunday newspapers when they were growing up--and made sure she got to know their teachers.

Comer says now he is certain that is why he and his siblings seemed to get more help and encouragement in class than did other black youngsters whose parents never came to school. Every good grade or other school achievement was treated as a victory for the family.

Buddies Never Made It

As Comer grew older and went on to college, he would run into or hear about former schoolmates who never made it. One died from alcoholism, another has been in and out of mental institutions, while a third former chum has spent much of his life in prisons. There was always a sense of “There but for the grace of God go I,” he said.

Gradually, Comer realized that “the difference between me and my buddies was that my parents were involved,” especially his mother, he said.

“My mother, with father standing behind her so supportive, could go into the schools and interact with school people so that when there was a problem, it got fixed. People in school knew they had to pay attention to make a difference for us, or they would hear from my mother.”

It was all of those things, he said, that in 1968 led Comer the psychiatrist to help start an innovative program the ripples from which are still spreading. It was an intervention project at two poor, black elementary schools that, among the 33 schools in New Haven, ranked at the bottom of the achievement scale.

He and Dr. Albert Solnit, then director of the Yale Child Study Center, viewed poor school performance not as stemming solely from weak curriculum, lax student discipline or inadequate teachers and parents but as “something organically wrong with the whole school,” said Muriel Hamilton-Lee, associate research director of the Yale school development program. “It was controversial because it was so comprehensive.”

Aimed at Social Network

So Comer and Solnit designed the program to draw parents into the schools as volunteers, and to provide plenty of support for the teaching staff, largely through a team of mental health professionals. The idea, Hamilton-Lee said, was to improve the social relationships within a school that help students want to learn.

By 1975, the schools were performing as well as or better than the top schools in the city on standardized achievement tests, Comer said, and today, the schools continue to make progress. The New Haven approach has been put into practice in 50 schools around the country, primarily in the East and the South.

Listening to his mother’s story made him realize, he said, “how much your parents and your family can play a supportive role and even a destructive role . . . and how that family and social network you are a part of really shapes your life and your future and the things you believe in. My work is really just an extension of what she (Maggie Comer) believed in and what she was interested in.”