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Chapter 18

William Carter Jr.

New York City, May 2015

Kofi had been on William Carter Jr.’s mind ever since it had been mentioned that someone was looking for leads on him. For years, William had been on high alert about Kofi, but as his wealth and status grew, an inverse relationship formed with his paranoia. It reduced. William had told Jacqueline that the Kofi information was well contained because that’s what he wanted to be true.

“It’s contained for now,” he’d said to her just the night before, unsure if he could even trust that statement.

As he sat in a new briefing with this specialist, who had nothing to say but that personal IP addresses were not readily traceable and that increased search traffic on the name was not necessarily any cause for alarm, William instructed him to go to the ends of the earth to find out what was going on.

“Oh and sir?” the new specialist said, his cheeks reddening in front of an impatient William, whose assistant had already rapped twice on the door. “It turns out that your, er, daughter is interviewing your former classmates and friends about you for your birthday. That’s why a lot of them have been contacted. It’s harmless and sweet. I think the surprise is ruined now. Sorry about that,” he said dutifully before gathering several folders and exiting William’s office.

“I hate surprises,” William muttered to himself before opening his office door to go outside for a smoke.

This information about Kennedy was welcome because the alternative theory that he was spinning was that some do-gooder reporter was poking around in order to dispute his legacy. There were definitely several things in his past that he didn’t want anyone to find. Specifically, he hoped that the truth about Kofi wouldn’t come to light, not that there was anything to find. He’d done his best to make sure of that.

Unlike what he experienced with his boarding school roommate, Russell, William didn’t enjoy a comfortable friendship with Kofi Asare, and that was primarily because he seethed with jealously at the way Kofi had seamlessly integrated himself into the Harvard community. Seamlessly was a relative term, of course, since Kofi was still a dark-skinned Black boy on the historied Cambridge campus, but he had experiences and resources that William did not. Firstly, Kofi had lived in several different places all over the world. His father owned a hotel in Ghana and traveled abroad frequently, especially to European locales like France and Switzerland. And while living in an Accra hotel paled in comparison to, say, traveling to Luxembourg’s chateaus, it was certainly more acceptable than the modest Roxbury quarters that William sometimes called home.

Secondly, by the nature of his father’s work, Kofi was skilled in charm. He could readily converse on a range of topics with sparkling humor. He spoke three languages fluently and was sharply dressed for every occasion. He would jokingly refer to William as “brother” because a couple of their Harvard classmates assumed they were related. Well, William thought it was a joke, and it was in the context of Harvard. But for Kofi, his father had always said that Black people, especially the ones in the Caribbean or America, were always family to the ones from Africa. The joke part was that they looked absolutely nothing alike, not to mention had different accents and totally opposite dispositions. All this fueled William’s anger toward his roommate in a way he couldn’t articulate, even though the boys were generally civil to each other.

Kofi came to Harvard to study architecture, and ultimately his desire was to become a full-time designer of residential buildings. His goal was to double major in engineering so that he could marry the tactical and artistic parts of the process to oversee building in Ghana. William, in contrast, was increasingly steered toward economics and business by Professor Hill. To retaliate against Kofi’s effortless ease at assimilating into Harvard, William kept the club a secret from Kofi. Technically speaking, this was antithetical to what Professor Hill was trying to achieve by bringing Black Harvard students together, but William Carter Jr. reasoned that the group was for American students. And besides, he’d been instructed to keep the club a secret. There was no need to take a risk bringing in someone like Kofi.

At the end of their freshman year, Kofi found an off-campus apartment that he convinced his father to lease for him. Since it was no cost to him, he asked if William wanted to continue rooming with him for free. William, for his part, was stunned by his roommate’s generosity and realized that perhaps the animosity he harbored toward Kofi was a one-way thing. He was lucky indeed. It was a deal that he found almost impossible to pass up, considering how obsessed he was with saving money. Thanks to Kofi, William was able to sail through his remaining three years at Harvard.

At the same time, William had become Professor Hill’s protégé, allowing himself to be dressed, influenced, and guided by this man whom he trusted like his own father. He distanced himself even more from his family, who, though less than thirty minutes away, rarely saw him.

Professor Hill, during one of his meetings, had once told the group of students he’d gathered, “You’ll hear the motto of ‘All for one and one for all,’ or that ‘When one wins, we all win.’ That’s simply not true. You lot in this room right now, you’re the best there is, and you can’t let yourself be dragged down by anyone else who couldn’t make it here. It’s your life, your destiny, and you don’t have to carry anyone else’s burdens.” William, now a senior beginning his spring semester, had smiled when he’d heard this, words that affirmed the types of feelings he secretly harbored.

Meanwhile, Kofi had been struggling with what he was trying to accomplish for his structural engineering elective that year, confiding to his roommate in their apartment one night last year. William had listened closely, pushing aside his jealousy, wondering how he could put what he was about to learn to his advantage.

Kofi wanted to create a solution for the many manufacturing problems with building materials in Ghana. His ultimate goal was to make something simple enough that the parts needed for homes wouldn’t need to come from multiple sources or factories. Currently they were made ad hoc when someone bought land and decided to build, which was common for middle-class people wanting to be homeowners. To avoid paying price-gouging developers, people needed cash for their own land, but then building the home became incredibly costly as well. The constant customization produced a bottleneck that slowed the entire home-building process down significantly. When materials were sourced outside of the country, as was often the necessity, there were extensive shipping problems and delays, and so if it were possible to make something that could be seamlessly produced within the existing infrastructure, it would help to accelerate the housing market. His architecture brain also told him that these things needed to be beautiful as well as functional. And he was attempting to counteract the age-old criticism that he’d heard his entire life from his own boarding school peers: Africa was backward and primitive.

He was stumbling with aesthetics, not able to come up with something that his professors found to be appealing enough. The problem was that anything that was affordable and structurally sound enough was hideous. The most beautiful materials with the most inspirational lines and curves had costs that far outweighed what would be perceived as “affordable” housing. He thought that he found a breakthrough when he’d produced LEGO-like block fixtures that would fit into one another, easily built upon. It offered marginal customization, but if the idea was to get as many people as possible into the safest and most inexpensive housing, this was the best he could do for the moment.

For his engineering elective final, he spent the remaining weeks in May constructing a miniature replica of what he wanted these buildings to look like. The apartment smelled like rubber cement and paint, as Kofi was pulling all-nighters repeatedly to make sure that the project was exactly how he’d imagined it. Conversely, William was breezing through his economics exams, even having a grade high enough in one class to exempt him from a final.

One night, William was in his bedroom balancing his personal finance budget when he heard a humongous crash come from the living room. When he ran over to the main space, he saw Kofi just staring at the carnage all over the floor. William had watched Kofi carefully build his model for his final. It had been a rendering of an apartment complex with six buildings built completely out of the original blocklike structures that he’d envisioned for the project. In the center was a diorama version of a park with native fruit trees. William was impressed with the scale and detail of it, that Kofi was thoughtful enough to show how nature would be integrated into the space. And now Kofi’s vision was in pieces all over their living room floor.

“What the—” William tried to make eye contact with Kofi and instead found a blank, unreachable person on the other end. Without further warning, Kofi let out a sudden, severe scream, one that made the hairs on William’s arms stand up, and then began to weep. Kofi’s tears flowed freely as he got a glass of water from the tap and then walked to his room.

William Carter Jr. let an hour go by before gently knocking on Kofi’s door and pushing it open. Once inside, he found Kofi seated silently on the bed, withdrawn, eyes puffy and blank. William hesitated slightly before pushing himself inside and sitting next to Kofi on the bed. They sat together, staring at the same bare white wall before Kofi finally spoke in a whisper.

“I worked on this project forever,” he said. “I was so careful. I got to the final early. I was prepared, ready. I was nervous but I was ready. I don’t even remember what I said. It was just seventeen minutes of talking that they threw away. I met with four professors and the architecture department head. They told me to wait outside and that when they called me back in, I would receive my grade. So I waited outside. Barely took them five minutes. They called me back in and gave me a D.” He paused, hanging his head again. “A D isn’t failing, but it might as well be. They said that the project was ‘imaginative but impractical.’ I couldn’t even say anything else, I was so upset. I just thanked them and left.”

“What are you going to do now?” William asked him.

“Nothing?” Kofi responded. “What can I do?”

“You could probably appeal. It—” William made eye contact with Kofi, caught the frost of his icy gaze, and stopped talking. He knew before the suggestion left his mouth that it would be a futile effort. The administration’s decision would stand.

William felt a wave of conflicting emotions bubbling to the surface. On one hand, he had never thought of Kofi as a friend, but on the other, it was strange to see him in such a broken, demoralized state.

“Kofi,” he said, “I think I know someone who can help.”

When Kofi didn’t respond, William sprang into action nonetheless. He gave Kofi a chaste pat on his knee and rose to his feet to exit his bedroom. When he shut the door, William looked around their apartment. He began picking up the pieces of the model. He picked up two blue pieces that were stuck together and held them close to his face for inspection. He didn’t quite know what he was looking at, but it was kind of fascinating, like a toy. He tried to build back what he could by putting together the things that made the most sense, sort of like doing a 3D puzzle. When he was done, he left the partially repaired model on the living room poker table, but not before picking up the stuck-together blue modules he’d first noticed. He slipped them into his back pocket and headed to Professor Hill’s for one of their private chats.