A Review of Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

If there are over 40 million Black Americans, there are over 40 million life stories, experiences and perspectives. No two black individuals are the same. No two black American families are the same. This evening, let’s explore a single name and see how life can play itself out in different dimensions. It is rare that we can assess the impact of a single name through the filter of different places in life.

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In 1985, author J. Anthony Lukas published a classic book on race relations and busing in Boston through the eyes of three families — the Divers, a white upper-class family; the McGoffs, a white working-class family; the Twymons, a black working-class family. I saw the last name and felt immediate recognition. Sure, the spelling was off by a letter (“o” rather than an “a”) but close enough to suspect some family tie. I never found any but there are less than 4,000 Twymans in the United States of America. Half of us are white and half of us are black. Around 90% of us are descendants of an indentured servant, George Twyman I (1663 - 1703), who left his home in Kent, England for the New World as a teenager.

I immediately bought the book, Common Ground, and started to read it. I am a fast reader, so I happily put off my law casebooks for this insight into race in Boston. I read with special interest the travails of this Twymon family in downtown Boston.

It quickly became clear a nearly identical name and common race meant nothing in terms of a shared life. One could match on a name and race and have little in common. I was not moved to seek out these Twymons in Boston. Why was I not curious?

Several material and relevant distinctions in life experience became apparent. The Twymons lived in the Orchard Park housing project. I had no experience with housing projects. I had never lived in a housing project. Housing projects to me were something far away in the city of Richmond or Washington, D.C. or Philadelphia or New York. There were no housing projects on Twyman Road or Jean Drive. The black people I knew built their own red brick homes with no assistance from the government. The red brick homes on Jean Drive were developed by a black real estate developer, James B. Friend, Sr. This was my comfort zone.

The Twymons suffered from rioting and break-ins during the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. I never experienced race riots on Twyman Road in 1968. Sure, I recall sadness and black and white images of Dr. King’s funeral procession on the television in the living room. However, I would be lying if I said there was civil disturbance on my street. That would not be true. Small businessmen and shop owners are not the rioting type.

I read further for some overlap in experience. Same race and almost the same name — surely I would see echoes of my life in the Twymon household. The more I read, the less I recognized.

“roving gangs of black youths” — nope, suburban young cousins were not roving Twyman Road/smile. Gangs were roving the streets of downtown Boston and frightening the Twymon family in their housing project apartment.

“fires burning and cars with their windshields shattered” — there were no such goings on on Twyman Road. It would be beyond comprehension for a cousin to smash an uncle’s windshield. Like who would do that? And for what purpose pray tell?

“smashed windows and burned out stores” —not my experience when Dr. King was murdered. This was the experience of the Twymons in Boston.

“Police cars prowled the rubble” — I never saw a police car on my street until twice in high school. And even then, it felt like an elephant was walking down the street. Police were a non-existence for me on Twyman Road and Jean Drive. So, perhaps I lack animus against police officers like my Father-in-Law…?

“old-style ghetto merchants” — we shopped at suburban malls. Didn’t do ghetto shopping.

The more I read, I more I saw how the lives of the Twymons were of a type. They would have viewed me as a white-sounding alien and I would have been on guard to not say something stupid. By the time I was half-way through Common Ground, I concluded there wasn’t much common ground between me of Twyman Road and the Twymons of Orchard Park housing project.

I had more in common with the Divers. Colin Diver watched students play on the Cambridge Common. I jogged through the Cambridge Common when Common Ground came out. Diver served on Harvard Law Review. I was a third-year law student at Harvard. Diver had a place reserved for him at a distinguished Washington, D.C. law firm. I had worked for a distinguished Washington, D.C. law firm over the summer. Diver knew Langdell Hall as did I. Diver walked through Harvard Yard on a daily basis. I was no stranger to the Yard.

Shared experience connected me more to the Diver family than the Twymon family. I did not see me in Common Ground. The Twymons were not me.

The very first time I ever saw my family name in a book was in college. Curious as always while studying at Alderman Library, I discovered one day that there was a book published in 1964 about my Twyman family. The Promised Land (1964) is the story of my distant cousin James Twyman (1781 - 1849) and his stirring decision to free all of his slaves and provide them with a grubstake for a new life in Burlington, Ohio. I traveled to the Farmington Country Club outside of Charlottesville, Virginia and met with Dr. Twyman, the doctor for the country club. We reviewed The Promised Land together and attempted to find the missing link but we could not.

I was comfortable and at ease with Dr. Twyman. We shared a name and, more importantly, a suburban life experience. The country club outside of Charlottesville was closer to what I knew in Chester than the Orchard Park housing project in Boston.

Conclusion: It is ironic that I read Common Ground with great anticipation. And the more I read, I more I recognized an important part of Boston history and school busing. It was simply not my experience, despite a common race. Yet again, we see that the human condition is more than race.

As for the author, J. Anthony Lukas, life proved too much for the man. “Lukas had been diagnosed with depression in the late 1980s.^[5] In an interview that followed the publication of Common Ground in 1985, he had given some hints about his frame of mind, linking it with his career as a writer:

All writers are, to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. In my own case, I was filling a hole in my life which opened at the age of eight, when my mother killed herself, throwing our family into utter disarray. My father quickly developed tuberculosis – psychosomatically triggered, the doctors thought – forcing him to seek treatment in an Arizona sanatorium. We sold our house and my brother and I were shipped off to boarding school. Effectively, from the age of eight, I had no family, and certainly no community. That's one reason the book worked: I wasn't just writing a book about busing. I was filling a hole in myself.

In 1997, Lukas committed suicide on June 5. The suicide occurred in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I wish the Twymons in downtown Boston well. They have a family and a community.