I had to go down into my basement and find it, but after a few minutes of sorting through a mass of accumulated boxes from 14 moves in the last 21 years, there it was. A brown moving box with my mom’s handwriting in thick black sharpie, “Joey’s Yearbooks.” In my hands – “In the 1995 Doghouse”. Our senior high yearbook. All I have to do is turn to page 8, bottom row, third from the left, and there he is.
I look at that picture, the one where the words are written underneath “Xavier Davis”. I haven’t seen Xavier since 1995. Yeah, when we graduated high school together. I’m reminded that he was class president. I’m reminded that he was “Most Likely to Succeed”. Along with Kristin Miller, who’s in Indiana, saving souls and surrounded by a trio of kids who look just like him. Or Whitney Wells, who helps bring children into the world as a nurse on the maternity wing and has a beautiful family of her own (do you still have those boots?). And Nadia Ryder, who I thought was awesome in High School and who I lost touch with but I’m sure she’s still as kick-ass now as she was then.
I think about a lot of kids from our class. Kevin Land, who I remember from our Califf days when we would get to school early, help set up the lunchroom, and then Coach Dudley or Coach Harrington would let us play basketball until school started. He’s got a beautiful family now. Kim Markham is up near Seattle, with two awesome kids, a love for robots, and has a bad-ass motorcycle gang. Vermonica Sands is in Philly, molding young lives and giving them the tools to be productive citizens just like she is. David Jones is a rock star, looking like a mix between Duck Dynasty and some Old Testament prophet, and that is just incredible. Valvin Hambrick, the leading rusher of the Jones County football team, is making sure kids are coached and taught in the right way and he has a beautiful wife. So many more stories to be told.
There’s a lot of sawdust and baggage and musty stuff crammed in my head between now and nearly 22 years ago. On the one hand, I’ve a notion of what life was like for Xavier – his career as a teacher, his imprint on young and impressionable minds seeking to learn math (or forced by the state to do so, but then again, math counts!). I don’t know how hard life was for him, though, what he struggled with, how he was recovering from a car accident from a few years back, what his relationships with his family and friends were like. A void of sorts, something I’m comfortable with because it’s seemingly impossible to keep track of virtually every person you have ever encountered. But the key here, and this is why I’m writing this, is that hearing that Xavier has died has left a mark on me somehow.
That’s just it, the pain and sorrow for someone that I didn’t really know or have the energy or drive to keep in touch with, and yet I want to express that his life did mean something, to me and countless others. This is a testament to the time I spent with Xavier, a way of acknowledging a deeper truth about my reality, our connectedness to each other in life and death, and how that fits into the overarching tapestry of the Universe.
I guess I first meet Xavier when our classes were combined between Mattie Wells Elementary School and Gray Elementary and we were all lumped together at Califf Middle School. Here’s a real nostalgia bomb – I could write on and on about middle school awkwardness and pain and fun and shame and humiliation and goodness – but I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds of what was and what would never be. But as I met Xavier and we journeyed together through middle school and on to Jones County High School, the sense that I’m left with is that, in the daily encounters that I had with him, he always made me feel good about who I was, he always made me laugh, and at the end of the day, he made me feel like I fit in, that I could be comfortable in my own skin, just who I was even if I didn’t know who that was.
This is the essence of soul, isn’t it? That God created us in God’s image to be beautiful and loving and kind and to give from what we have and to do no harm. How much beauty did Xavier give in singing with NXS (best R&B group of the ‘90’s, hands down). Or how did you want to come to Xavier’s defense when he would push back against a teacher in trying to figure out what we were supposed to learn? I remember him having that kind of intellectual bravery, asking those questions of “why do I need to be tested on this?” I was always a little too chicken-shit to “rebel”, afraid of getting in trouble or not being perfect or letting people down. The insecurity of Joey Greene, short, white, nerdy, playful, funny (at least I think I’m funny), a teenager that was unsure of the world and what I was supposed to do in it.
But Xavier’s fellowship and friendship inspired me in a way I didn’t know but acknowledged through a way that nowadays would have been preserved on the internet. The Jones County High School Academic Team went on WMAZ Channel 13’s “Teen Challenge”, a quiz show hosted by Frank Malloy, and I sat on the team with Kristin Miller, Rebecca Hawkins, and Sarah Shell, and we answered all sorts of questions about all kinds of things (in my boredom as a child I read the encyclopedia and I remember Jodi Bray calling me “Doogie Howser”). In the intro segments, we would get to say something about ourselves, and I remember giving a “shout-out” to Xavier on t.v. My three minutes of adolescent fame, awkwardly squirming in front of the bright lights of a Middle Georgia television studio on that hill in Macon right by Shoney’s, nerdy, bowl-cut Joey saying hi to Xavier, who I think was actually sitting in the audience with Mrs. Simpson when we taped the broadcast.
Xavier made me feel normal and accepted. And I wanted the world to know then as I do now that somehow, in the same way that I write this, it’s about something bigger than me, and him, and the details of our high school existence. It’s about community and hope and goodness and freedom and leaving the world a better place than how we found it.
I bet in the past 22 years, since graduation, there are a lot of nuances and contours to Xavier’s life that we best leave where they are. We are all broken and beat up and ashamed and sinful and have done bad things at times and have not always lived up to our full potential. We probably look at each other’s Facebook pages and run the gamut of “Good for them!” or “oh, things haven’t changed much in two decades”, or “that’s just pitiful, now” and we may get upset in reading or learning that we have differing political viewpoints or religious ideas (you voted for who because Jesus told you to?), but at the end of the day, in 1995, when we graduated from JCHS we were a community sent forth into the world to just exist. And everywhere we go we take a part of that community with us and weave it into the communities that we find ourselves in.
And the Xavier Davis’ of the world remind us that we can laugh, sing, learn, have fun, and struggle with each other and not have to be complete assholes because the world has enough assholes already. We can be gentle and encourage each other, love each other, take care of ourselves and each other, breath in the possibilities of what the future holds because we are not alone and the heart and soul of this world, that which I call God and understand through the tradition given to me in Christianity, doesn’t change and that ground of love and belonging are holding Xavier in the light of no more sorrow or pain, and we are being welcomed toward it. He’s leaving a gift for me right now – a memory, a smile, a laugh, a willingness to harmonize and it sits in my soul like, “yes, it’s o.k. Xavier is o.k. You are o.k. Death sucks. Life is hard. The world is a good place, a better place because of Xavier’s imprint, and we all belong.”
Rest, brother Xavier. Sleep in the goodness of the Lord. Say hi to Jermaine Orrington for us. Remember us. And may light perpetual shine upon you.