By BENJAMIN BARTU
In a Berkeley church, past earth-toned pews, beneath a foyer reserved for community events and club gatherings, on the other side of the wall from a soup kitchen that promises a free chicken curry meal come Friday, John Muster sits in his office, parsing through old emails. He’s alone, almost, with the exception of his coworker, Garrett. Since the onset of the Covid-19 lockdowns the two of them have come into Mentoring Academy, the school where they work, daily, to teach classes through Zoom. It helps infuse their days with a certain sense of normalcy. Odd as teaching is now, neither of them are strangers to the out-of-ordinary. When it arrived on the scene eight years earlier, Mentoring Academy may have been the strangest hybrid high school in all the Bay Area.
With three students to its name, the school provided one-on-one tutoring services while allowing students to do most of the work themselves through online classes: Brigham Young University, ALEKS mathematics, KhanAcademy, etcetera. The school grew in size; from three students at the time of its founding to thirty-four over the course of seven short years.
Covid has thrown the fledgling institution’s future into question. Mentoring now finds itself teaching all its classes through Zoom, rather than online in-person. In some ways, John notes, theschools’ initial reliance prepared it for the pandemic. Small class sizes make it more manageable, but nothing could have prepared Mentoring for the loss of half their enrolled students, making ends meet more difficult, has necessitated a restructuring of the academic calendar, and has increased the remaining students’ sense of isolation in an already difficult time.
John’s been coughing surreptitiously, nursing a bag of Kettle chips he’s not supposed to be eating while sipping from a glass of orange juice through a candy cane patterned straw. A soft octogenarian of middling stature, he wears his kind face well and has a Grover Cleveland mustache that would put the former president’s own to shame. It’s currently peppered with shards of potato chip.
John Muster in Mentoring Academy. Photo
taken by Garrett Mayer.
He takes a long sip from his juice and clears his throat. Shakes his head; rights himself.
“You want to talk about the trio.”
*
“Selma.” John begins.
Deep wrinkles are set beneath his eyes. He slurs his words, result of a recent mycelium infection in his right arm that went undetected for too long. When he first felt the infection prick his central nervous system, in the middle of a dinner party at the onset of the new year, he believed he was having a stroke. He takes medication, but the effect on his speech is permanent. In the past he has spoken bitterly of the impediment. Today he is all apologies.
“I was attending college in Ohio when Freedom Day was going on [in Selma],” John says.
At the time, a close friend of John’s was a seminarian in Chicago. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you need to get on the bus.” The friend had said, who had become involved with freedom riders and the civil rights movement. “We have to go to Selma.”
“I had no clue why. I read up on the topic. I finished my semester in college, and I got on the bus.” The year was 1964. The bus didn’t take John to Selma. It took him to Neshoba County, Mississippi.
“We were white,” he says. “Everywhere we went we were way back [at the protests], and by the time we’d get up there, you know, get up to where it was, the bloodiness was over. People were already in the hospital. And I was pissed. We all were.”
John arrived in Neshoba as part of a group of students volunteering to help Black Americans register to vote. He had, he believes, his own ideas about how he thought it would go.
“There were,” he stops to count, “four men, I remember, who me and my coworkers persuaded to register.”
“The next day,” he starts. Stops. Looks down and sighs. Raises his hand to his chin and lets it linger there for a moment, as if it could keep the truth in him or the world at bay.
“The next evening. The three of us who had registered them were driving down the road near where they lived, and two of them were hanging from a tree. They had been lynched for trying to vote.”
John felt guilty. Of being stupid, of being unaware. He has carried that guilt forever, the guilt that he is someone in who guilt can still be carried. He had to go home. John walked into the office the next morning and announced his plans for departure.
“I couldn’t ask people to vote and to register,” he says, with conviction, “if they were going to be hung for voting.” His coworkers said they’d pick up his remaining work. And then John left.
“And the other three members of the group that I worked with…were Chaney. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The trio. The freedom summer murders. They were killed days after I left. And if I had stayed, I would’ve been one of them.” John stops again. Falters once more.
“If I hadn’t have gone home, I’d have gotten in the car. I’d be dead too. And still I carry this. I’ve never lost it. I’ve never been able to.”
The Freedom Summer Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwermer
were committed on June 21st, 1964, mere days after John left Neshoba.
*
A person tries to put these things together. People suffered, people died, John suffered, he runs a high school now. People still suffer. Some things make sense and others resist our efforts to invent meaning for them. John felt compelled to go to Neshoba because he wanted to do what was right, and for the same reason he left. Because of this he survived, and for this reason he has lived to teach to this day. Whatever else one might say about Mr. Muster, his moral compass is unflinching.
John wanted to teach before 1964, and he went on to do it after. Something must have changed in him, though he doesn’t care to guess what. He had a job he wanted to do and he set to doing it, bright with grief.
The official interview’s over: We’re just talking now. He tells me an old story he loves that I know by heart. Of a high schooler he helped tutor one summer, pro bono. They met daily at a bench in a park. The boy would have epileptic seizures triggered by attempting simple math problems. Algebra 2, Geometry; anything requiring careful thought and attention. Like the mycelium infection that plagues John now, the boy’s neural networks would begin flaring after just a few minutes of effort and he’d have to stop.
Over time it got easier; if we’re lucky, and they were lucky, pain dulls and releases us. A few minutes became a dozen, became a half hour, became enough. At that age so much about it seemed strange — John’s patience, his generosity.
Now, remembering that summer, “our summer,” he calls it each time we meet and remember together, what was muddled to me, unclear then, comes again clearer. John always knew what he wanted to do. He knows how fortunate he is to have lived to cherish what time he’s had to do it.
John thinks he’ll make a lifelong educator of me yet. In some sense I think he’s wanted that since he first started tutoring me, since I first started taking classes at his three-student church-basement high school, since I first started teaching at his sixteen-student church-basement high school.
He thinks he’ll convince me yet. He reads me an email he’s received from the other side of time.
Dear John,
The other day a friend of mine asked me which educators have had the most outsized effect on my life, which caused me to do some reflecting. Your name came to mind, and after a quick search I am so glad to see, after tracking you down, that you chose to continue shaping young people’s lives for the better throughout your own life. You may not remember me but some sixty years ago, at a faculty family gathering, I expressed interest in a camera which you had brought to take pictures and, though I was only nine at the time, you trusted me enough to offer to let me use it for the afternoon, going to take whatever pictures I wished throughout the gathering. It was the first time in my life an adult had given me that much responsibility, and I never forgot it. Thank you.
All my best,
——
John smiles gleefully.
“I remember the kid! That you can not know for so long that — that you had that big an impact on someone — and then that person remembers you, and reaches out six decades later. It’s amazing. Amazing.”