Part Eight: The Foundation
He started at the bottom. He was genuinely insistent on this — not the bottom of a hierarchy designed to progress him upward quickly, but the actual bottom, the level at which you are most useful by doing tasks and listening to people and not being in charge of anything.
The Mitchell Foundation had a community center in East Baltimore, near the docks, that ran after-school programs and workforce development courses and a food assistance program that operated three days a week. Thomas showed up on a Monday morning in a jacket that was too good for the work and spent his first two weeks understanding what this was. By the third week, the jacket was different.
He went to schools. He went to the docks — the actual working docks, where the men and women who had made Mitchell Shipping what it was spent their days. He talked to them, and more importantly he listened to them, which was not something that had previously been a skill he developed.
Clarence, the dockworker who had spoken to Eleanor at the funeral, told him the thing about the names — your father knew every one of us — directly to his face. Thomas did not defend himself. He said: “I know. I’m sorry.” And then he asked Clarence to tell him about his work, and he listened for forty-five minutes, and Clarence told him afterward that he seemed to be trying, which Clarence said was more than he’d expected.
The trying was real. Eleanor watched it from a distance and then from closer, as the months passed and Thomas came to see her with less of the performed quality that had always characterized their relationship and more of something she recognized as unmediated. He made mistakes. He described them to her honestly, which was new. He asked for advice without the subtext of someone who has already decided what the advice should be.
