30
AFTER HIS CONVERSATIONS with Uncle Cyrus, and then Bill Robbins, Raff resolved not only to go to a law school, but if at all possible to one of the most demanding and best. He converted all of his remaining elective courses to those considered most suitable for prelaw students.
"To tell you the truth, Uncle Fred," he said one day, "it's been pretty easy here, once I got into it. I thought FSU would be some kind of boot camp, like MIT and Caltech were rumored to be. There are some hard courses, all right, but the students know all about those, and they only take them if they're really serious about the subject. I tell you one thing, you don't get a very good idea of what a university is like in a little place like Nokobee High. You've got everything here, if you look around a little. You can make it as hard or as easy as you choose. I suppose it depends on how ambitious you are. I've really liked it here. And now I think I'll do well in law school."
To those close to him, familiar with his indifferent record at the permissive Nokobee County Regional High School, Raff's performance at Florida State University had come as a surprise. He qualified for early election to Phi Beta Kappa. For that Uncle Cyrus sent him congratulations and an expensive Omega watch. His honors thesis on the Anthill Chronicles was widely talked about by those faculty who knew of it to be likely one of the best ever submitted by an undergraduate.
"You could get into any graduate program in the country," Needham told him. "That is, of course, if you decide to stay in biology. It's for sure that if you change your mind about law school, we'll find a place for you here. I don't doubt you'd have enough for your Ph.D. in three, maximum four years.
But Raff's mind could not be diverted now from law school and back into biology. That could be kept for another time. In the fall of his senior year, he applied to a dozen law schools, half in the South and half outside. He had the grades, and he had an unusual science background as an add-on. He'd taken some of the right prelaw courses. He expressed an intention to work on environmental issues, pro bono if need be. He was backed by strong recommendations from faculty members at Florida State University. It did not hurt that as a son of the central Gulf Coast, not known for scholarly achievers, he was a geographical minority.
By April Raff had been accepted by most of the schools. Those rejecting him included, to his surprise, Emory University. The positive responses did include, however, his first choice, Harvard Law School. On hearing the news from Cambridge, his friends and mentors threw a party to cheer him on. Most arrived wearing twin ant antennae made out of wire. Uncle Cyrus sent him a letter of congratulations, as close to ecstatic in tone as the good gray man could manage.
In midsummer, as he was planning to move north, he made one more pilgrimage to Lake Nokobee. He walked its whole perimeter. He halted where he knew one of the resident alligators lived, and caught a glimpse of it, all but eyes and dorsal surface of the head submerged beneath duckweeds. He made a mental note of the ground flora that was in bloom at this time of year, and scanned the big longleaf pines until he saw the flash of a red-cockaded woodpecker traveling from one treetop to another. Before leaving, he silently renewed his pledge to the beloved place.
One week after Labor Day, Ainesley and Marcia drove their son from Clayville to the Mobile Regional Airport for the first air trip of his life. The facility was nowhere close to the international hub envisioned by Cyrus Semmes and the Gulf Gateway Coalition, but busy enough to make the eastern approach to the terminal one of the most congested in the United States. He flew Delta over to Atlanta, was awestruck by the immensity of the airport, and then almost lost as he puzzled his way through to the departure gate for Boston. In order to travel between terminals there, he took his first train ride.
Emerging from Logan Airport in Boston, Raff confronted in the MBTA the first subway of his life. To his embarrassment, the FSU Phi Beta Kappa and Harvard Law School student had to ask three official-looking people in a row, each impatient and surly, to his way of thinking, how to get to Harvard Square. Hauling his heavy suitcase and bent beneath an overladen knapsack, he was humiliated again when he emerged from the exit kiosk and was forced to ask several more people to find his way to the graduate student dormitories on Oxford Street. One of his advisers spoke with a strong East Indian accent. Another, poorly dressed and seemingly frightened by his approach, could respond only in Spanish. Along the way he listened to passersby to see if he could hear the famous Harvard accent.
"There is no such thing as a Harvard accent," his roommate, a black minister's son from Gabon in Africa, said to him when he finally arrived at Richards Hall. "That's not what this place is all about. Welcome to Harvard."