There Will Be No Miracles Here

Gerald recounts his experience with Yale football, especially the “coup” he leads against the upperclassmen who normally dominate the team. By the start of his sophomore season, Gerald and six of his classmates are starters for the team. It is a strong season.

During that season, however, Gerald breaks his hand in a game against Princeton. The following game is against Harvard, and it seems Gerald is needed.

This brings him to retelling the story of his father, who broke his back in his sophomore year and sat out eight games. Just before the 1977 Orange Bowl, Rod Gerald was provided with cocaine, which he had previously never tried. His team won the game, and Rod won MVP—developing a drug habit in the process.

Gerald’s team beats Harvard to win the Ivy League Championship. Doctors had deadened the nerves in his arm so he could play. Gerald receives a ring for the game not unlike the ring his father received for winning the Orange Bowl. Rod had given that ring to his son, who wore it until he received his own.

Chapter 15 revisits Gerald’s high school years to introduce his lover River. They meet online when Gerald is still in high school, but River clearly represents a more mature relationship than Red.

River is three years older than Gerald and makes them wait until Gerald is 18 before meeting in person; Gerald’s relationship with Red occurs in the intervening years.

After two years of online messaging, they meet on the night of Gerald’s prom, with Gerald borrowing Tashia’s rented car and keeping it secret. He drives south to the small town of Carson.

Gerald enters River’s dark house quietly, led by River past where River’s parents presumably are. It is a path he will follow many more times.

They have sex, and then River tells him to leave and pretend it never happened because he has a boyfriend. Later, River calls Gerald when in Dallas, and they have a similar encounter. Gerald wonders if his own willingness to be silent is what makes him desirable and how he comes “to believe that silence was better than uncomfortable words” (204).

Sometime later, River calls on Gerald’s birthday, and a relationship develops between them. In 2006 Gerald becomes acquainted with River’s insecurities when River has a bad reaction to coming off of ecstasy. Gerald reflects on the difference between “excuses” and “reasons,” observing that while there may be no excuse for certain behavior, there is usually a reason.

At River’s initiative, the couple enters an intense and “excruciatingly honest” relationship (208). Gerald calls these 259 days “perhaps the most important days of my life” (208).

After describing those days in some detail, Gerald recounts how he ends the relationship and breaks up with River. He explains that this is why those days are so important: “once I ended them, I had no doubt that I could do anything” (219).

In Chapter 16 Gerald shares the experience through which he transformed from “one of the most bitter reclusive boys to ever attend Yale College” into a leader (221). Gerald disclaims credit for this development, attributing it instead to students at Cornell who form the Men of Color Council among the Black students at the Ivy League colleges. Not wanting to join them, Gerald creates his own alternative.

The chapter includes some reflection on Gerald’s origins and identity. For example, he observes that what defines his people, as he understood it when he was at Yale, “was not only that we had so much pigment in our skin but that we had so little money in our bank accounts” (223). Thus, Gerald draws a distinction between the other Black students and his people, “between their kind and mine, between the blacks and the n******” (225).

Gerald identifies the unnecessary suffering of any person as a universal basis for compassion, an observation he follows with a story of his own unnecessary suffering due to deeply entrenched social forces. He provides a letter that he wrote as a child in 1999, unedited. The letter was addressed to a senator who, along with a judge, heard young Casey Gerald speak about his need for funding to participate in an educational opportunity to travel to Australia. The senator promised $1,000 in front of a small crowd, as did the judge. Neither followed up. The letter was never sent, despite Ms. Davis’s assistance with the vocabulary, because the principal convinced Gerald not to send it.

At Yale, Gerald grows angry about the effects of the system that holds his people, and African Americans generally, in an oppressed state. This plays a role in the group Gerald starts after rebuking the Cornell students’ efforts.

The group becomes the “Yale Black Men’s Union.” Its purpose is partly structured around a statistic Gerald finds: only 92% of Black students recruited to Yale graduated, compared with 98% of all other students. It also aims to improve the extent to which Yale’s Black students work for others in the Black community.

Gerald and Daniel share many discussions based on their experiences mentoring disadvantaged Black high school students, along with their appreciation for the opportunities provided by Yale despite its problems. Gerald worries that the Black community at Yale is not sufficiently active in serious ways. That becomes another motivation for the group, as does Gerald’s concern that many Black students lack appropriate confidence or pride regarding their place at Yale.

Gerald and Daniel set out to recruit other students. This is how he meets Elijah, whom he describes as “the most serious” recruit to Yale that he ever hosted (233). At Elijah’s recruitment dinner (which Gerald did not witness), it was said that Elijah’s guardian told the academic counselor that Elijah could not “be let down again” (233).

Gerald watches over Elijah and other recruits, such as Trevor, who plays his position on the football team and has a similar background. Elijah is Mexican, not Black. He and Gerald apparently see in each other a confrontational nature that requires a steady calmness to bring the person out.

Along with Daniel, an upper-class leader named AJ Hawkins, and a few others, Gerald started starts the Black Men’s Union and becomes its first president. He looks to the Black faculty, such as Dr. Edward Joiner, for guidance.

Gerald also highlights his friend Quincy, who is a year below him. He relates an anecdote about the time he drives Quincy back to Tulsa while on his own way back to Dallas. Gerald has a rule that he only stops when the gas tank is empty, to make good time. He refuses Quincy’s eager request to use the restroom. Then, when Quincy is driving, Gerald asks to pull over and appreciates that Quincy does not.

Gerald reflects that he was “glad to show Quincy what was feasible when he threw out all prior notions of what was plausible” (242). Those two words—feasible and plausible—relate back to Gerald’s first days at Yale and thus imply how far he has come since then.

In addition to receiving leadership and recruiting guidance from Black faculty, Gerald also receives input from a graduate student named Noah Lockhart. For a variety of reasons, Gerald organizes a tribute to Black women, which proves to be a successful recruiting event.

Chapter 17 conveys two aspects of Gerald’s life that readers have previously only glimpsed. Both occur in New York City.

The first happens during the summer of 2008, when Gerald works for Lehman Brothers, the very large Wall Street investment firm. His primary goal is to make money. That summer, however, was when the mortgage crisis exploded and triggered a major recession.

Gerald learns more than he expected to while at Lehman. He got the job because he had worked at a law firm in Texas, where he was in a constant rotation of lunches based on his rags-to-riches story. As he became interested in investment banking—solely to make money quickly—Gerald benefited from the association of one of the firm’s lawyers with a banker at Lehman Brothers.

Gerald learns the advantages of networking and how financial industry culture works; he also sees the stark difference between the world he grew up in and the one in which he finds himself in summer 2008. He explains that the American dream is real, but not the way it sold, with stories of hard work generating success. Rather, the American dream depends on relationships: “If you know the right people, they can help you do anything, be anybody, rules and hard work be damned—as long as they like you” (255).

The book’s theme of social policy becomes explicit here. Gerald explains that the real American dream cannot support everyone, no matter how hard they work, so it is rarely (if ever) acknowledged to be what it is.

Gerald throws in an anecdote about a meeting with President George W. Bush that holds a crucial lesson. Two years after the meeting, Bush brings Gerald up during an interview—changing the details of the story to help his point, using Gerald as a symbol. In that moment Gerald sees that he is the embodiment of the American dream. He reflects: “It took me many years to realize that instead of smiling and saying thank you, I should have wept” (257).

The second aspect of Gerald’s life highlighted in Chapter 17 is his sexual orientation and exploration of the gay clubs in the city. He encounters a fellow student and so struck that he calls River and seeks the input of another friend. Ultimately, the experience seems to help Gerald learn to accept himself.

Between Chapters 17 and 18, Gerald includes “An Interlude for Me,” a four-page discussion of a reoccurring dream in which Gerald is stabbed in the chest. Most of the dream involves his effort to escape someone trying to kill him and his encounters with others who either do not believe him or try to falsely reassure him until his killer arrives. The dreams began shortly after Gerald’s stint with Lehman Brothers and have recurred ever since.