Boy in two hoods
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One of the stranger things for Emmanuel was to watch the way money was spent. "I'd see people buying $80 ties," he says. "They'd shop on the Internet and always check the box for overnight delivery."
Emmanuel's monthly spending limit at the school store was $75. He watched some students spend up to $500.
He wasn't envious, he insists. "Mostly I just think that if I had that much money," he laughs, "I could spend it much better."
But what did burn was the way his new friends sometimes reminded him that he couldn't do the same.
"Sometimes they rubbed it in my face," he says. "Sometimes they treated me with sympathy."
The sympathy was the worst.
"Don't give me any sympathy," he says, with a flash of anger in his eyes. "I love my life and the way I live it." What sustained him at such moments was what he learned at the East Harlem School.
Hageman, Emmanuel knew, had lived through much of the same treatment. Half black and half white, he grew up in East Harlem but attended one of the city's most exclusive prep schools on a scholarship.
When Hageman warned his students that accepting the scholarship was the easiest part of the bargain, he knew what he was talking about.
And in sharing his experiences he gave Emmanuel words that the boy held on to throughout his first year of prep school.
" 'Don't let their ignorance disappoint you' - those were Ivan's words," Emmanuel says. "I knew it was ignorance. It made me feel I was the better person, the bigger person, when I didn't react."
But there were also chances for Emmanuel both to teach and to learn.
In a class discussion on progressive taxes, Emmanuel startled a classmate by pointing out that some families might go hungry if their taxes were raised.
"It was a friendly debate but I think he heard me," he says.
But Emmanuel himself was surprised when he got close to a female student from an extremely wealthy Manhattan family. He rather dismissively assumed he knew her type at a glance - until they opened up and talked about family problems one day.
Then Emmanuel was amazed to discover how much they had in common.
"People have to learn to get to know each other before they judge," he says. "And I have to learn that, too."
Freshman year is done and Emmanuel's sights are fixed on the future. "This year was about learning to fit in," he says. Next year will be about moving ahead.
Already his gaze is turned toward college. "Cornell, Duke, Princeton, Brown," he rattles off quickly when asked about the schools that interest him.
But he's also thinking hard, both about the EHS student who will follow him to Deerfield in the fall, and about his brother, who will enter Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., a largely white institution.
"Do the work, cope with your schedule, and remember that if you make one or two good friends in the beginning you're fine because more will follow," is the way he summarizes his advice to them.
"That's what I did," he says, his eyebrows arching upward to express a jolt of happiness and surprise. "And it turned out better than I thought."
