Ennis Cosby Knew Worth of a Helping Hand

Properly credentialed and steady at my post in the press section at the president’s inauguration, within shouting distance of the man himself, a witness to history surrounded by the most successful of my peers, I am, as so often before on such occasions, filled with fear. This time it makes me think of Ennis William Cosby.

Fear, not of the violence that took his life but rather the more mundane persistent and personal terror shared by all dyslexics over having to perform in conventional ways when your brain does not track quite that way. In my case today, it’s the pressure to file properly spelled, cogently organized, grammatically correct copy, on deadline. Small potatoes to some, a horror to others. I’m not complaining, mind you. I made my claim to be heard, and the fact that you are able to read this means that with the aid of great teachers, computerized spelling checks and my wife, sons Christopher and Peter and friend Cara, all of whom are on line to protect me from the more egregious errors of syntax, I will be heard. But the fear never fully disappears.

It is a fear that young Cosby would have well understood, having devoted his life to working with kids with learning disabilities. It is a terror of failure, known keenly by those who, despite their ability and best efforts, flunked seventh grade. What we have in common, along with millions of others including my marvelous son Josh--who thrilled me by admonishing a smug Santa Monica school district special ed administrator to call it a “learning difference,” not “disability” or “handicap”--is a conundrum of difficulties loosely labeled dyslexia. What we have in common is the fact that we learn differently than most folks because letters or numbers get scrambled, or we have small motor problems or we become confused under time pressure or are flustered in our efforts to conceptualize in ways that lend themselves to standardized tests. What we also have in common is the potential to excel.

In my time, in the public schools of the Bronx, no one knew of such complexity in the learning process. I was simply pronounced dumb and slow because I couldn’t learn cursive writing or spell worth a damn and so was tracked to oblivion until a friendly science teacher discovered that I was good at physics and some other subjects if given half a chance. Since then, a great deal of progress has been made in recognizing and treating dyslexia, but even one from so privileged a background as Cosby went undiagnosed until college years. As he poignantly wrote, “The happiest day of my life occurred when I found out I was dyslexic . . . the worst feeling to me is confusion.”

I have been thinking of young Cosby almost constantly since the news of his being gunned down off the San Diego Freeway not far from my home. The smiling optimism of his file photo burns into my brain and anger fills me that this young man’s optimism spilled out wasted on the indifferent concrete of that freeway offramp. It’s the same freeway my son Josh takes to a school called Landmark, where he has opportunities that could save the lives of so many others now tracked to state prisons and other societal markers of educational failure.

It was Ennis Cosby’s dream to create a school for kids with dyslexia. “He wanted to make sure that kids who might not have the opportunity to have the help that he had would get it,” his professor recalled. “So he did all he could to help poor kids.” As I write help, it comes out hepl, and the reason I remain a bleeding heart liberal is that I think we all benefit when the cry for “hepl” is understood.

These are the thoughts that went through my frayed mind listening to the inauguration speech of William Jefferson Clinton, a guy who also came up the hard way but who was blessed with the saving grace of testing well. Clinton knows he benefited from the level playing field, and he will not compromise government’s obligation to keep it level. But where he has failed is in reaching out to those who need a helping hand, as Jesse Jackson might put it, to be pulled from the quicksand of failure to the high ground of opportunity.

Those of us with dyslexia, and that ranges from Albert Einstein to Cher, have known that a helping hand spells the difference between pain and performance. Bob Dole, who pushed through the Americans With Disabilities Act, which has helped dyslexics enormously, knows that. If I had any moment of regret at the inauguration, it came with the sense that Clinton does not know what it means to flunk the seventh grade.

Ennis Cosby did. But despite that, he got a master’s, was going for a doctorate and planning to start a school for dyslexic kids, making him--to use his father’s words--my hero, too.