“Milton? What kind of name is that?” she asked after a mutual acquaintance had introduced us. A friend would have introduced me as Alan.

“My father’s,” I answered.

“Oh. Was he white?” She could not conceive of Milton as a Black name. Citing Milton Nascimento as an example did not count for her. He was foreign. Upon learning I studied French and Linguistics, she judged my majors to be as incongruous as my name. Smart African-Americans studied Engineering or Medicine. The rest went into Business or Communications.

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Milton Alan Turner is my given name. My father insisted that his first born be named after him. My mother insisted upon a middle name (which my father lacked) to avoid confusion. Thus, I am called Alan at home and Milton at school or work. The result has been a schizophrenia akin to the one described by Jorge Luis Borges in Borges y yo. Milton is the one things happen to; Alan is the I.

Milton is self-assured (sometimes outright arrogant), boisterous, gregarious, and aggressive. An exceptional student, it was always assumed that he would be the first in the family to attend college; his father had dropped out of high school and his mother lost much of her sight by the age of 18. After attending a predominantly Black lower middle-class parochial school, he went on to St. Ignatius High School and Georgetown University, both predominantly white and upper middle-class. An honors student in French and English, he completed the equivalent of four years of Spanish in two in order to take AP courses in all three languages his senior year. At Georgetown, he double-majored in Linguistics and French, continued coursework in Spanish, and added Catalan. During his junior year at l’Université de Nice (France), Milton supplemented his studies in Lettres modernes (literature) and Sciences du language (linguistics) with Italian and Langues d’Oc (Provençal and Nissart). After a year’s work in French-English translation at Georgia State University, he returned to Cleveland to teach French, Linguistics, and Spanish at his alma mater. He is the first lay (and still the sole) African-American teacher at St. Ignatius where he currently serves as Vice President of the Faculty Association and co-moderator of ΔΩ, a group designed to assist and support the 6% Black and Hispanic minority population of the school. He has also taken Education classes at John Carroll University and participated in a seminar for teachers of AP French at Manhattan College.

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“That was my roommate, Milton,” Bob explained to his sister after I handed him the receiver. “You can’t tell from his voice, but he’s Black.” He never understood why I found his comment insulting. He intended it as a compliment.

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Alan is quiet, introspective, a loner, and prone to self-doubt. Due to the solitary nature of his two major interests (books and music), a friend once labeled him a hostile introvert. He is an avid reader with a penchant for comic books, Négritude poetry, Latin American fiction, and texts in Linguistics. After briefly studying violin and trumpet, he bought an electric guitar to emulate George Benson. Dissatisfied with his progress, he bought a synthesizer and taught himself to play piano (a lifelong dream his family could not afford). His musical tastes range from the R&B of his childhood to Jazz and in turn to Brazilian music through which he taught himself Portuguese. The eldest of two boys, he was given many adult responsibilities at an early age and at 28 years old he is often still seen as acting much older than his age. At age 9, his parents divorced. He spent the subsequent summers with his father in Atlanta and school years with his mother in Cleveland. His interest in reading and success in school made him the obvious choice over his brother as his mother’s secretary, accountant, and eventual chauffeur. Confused by contradictions in his life, Alan often felt isolated. His grade school classmates considered him too “proper” or white. In high school, he was too vulgar or “street.” In Atlanta, his speech was too Northern, and in Cleveland, too Southern. In college, he was viewed as neither Black nor white. He was, in the words of his roommate, an “exception,” a status he likened to being neutered.

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Milton’s reasons for applying to this seminar are academic and professional. His training in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the world has nurtured a strong appetite for international literature. The opportunity to continue this education through the studies of works which, despite a shared language, possess a unique cultural heritage and perspective is irresistible. He must also admit, with some shame, that despite a knowledge of Francophone and Hispanic literatures, his knowledge of Anglophone writers from Africa is rather scant. Of English-language writers from the West Indies and the Pacific, he is quite ignorant. This seminar would provide an excellent sample of texts with which he may begin supplementing this deficiency. Professionally, one of the goals of his school’s stated philosophy is graduating students who are “open to growth.” To this end, he intends to expose students to world authors through either his course in Linguistics (during the World English and Language Policies unit) or a proposed class on the Dialects of English. He further hopes to work in helping other teachers incorporate these or similar works into the English, History, and Theology curricula.

Alan’s reasons are more personal. A few years ago, on the recommendation of a close friend in the Peace Corps teaching English in Sierra Leone, he read Chinua Achebe’s No Longer At Ease. Obi Okonkwo’s story is in many ways quite similar to his own. Both studied language and literature rather than the “practical” fields their families preferred. Both studied abroad and learned what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land. Both returned finding themselves strangers in their own lands as well. The proposed themes of the seminar are of great personal importance to Alan. The obstacles encountered by a race attempting to reach a position of equity or self-determination, the consequent struggle of its pioneers to preserve their personal identities while necessarily maintaining a dual cultural existence, and the uncertainty over the success of such transitions are among the problems he has faced in the course of his own development. He offers a special voice to the seminar for he is the embodiment of these issues in the American context. By examining the variety of contexts in which these struggles occur during the seminar, his goal is to attain a greater understanding of the human condition and ultimately of his own.

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Like Borges, I am not sure which one is responsible for the writing of this essay. I do know that both Milton and Alan are enthusiastic about contributing to your seminar and either would be honored to be selected.