Jamie
The most dangerous thing about Jamie Okafor is that they make you want to stop pretending.
Jamie || First Meeting || Debate || Character
Our first official partner meeting was on a Tuesday, in the library, at a table in the back corner that Jamie had apparently already claimed because they were sitting there when I arrived with my notebook and my index cards and the defensive architecture of someone who has prepared extensively for a social interaction. Jamie had no notebook. They had a cup of coffee from the cart outside the library — how they had convinced Mr. Portman to let coffee in the library was a mystery I didn’t pursue — and a copy of a poetry collection that I recognized because I’d read it twice and never told anyone. They were reading it when I sat down. They finished the page before they looked up.
“Alex,” they said. Not a question. They said my name the way people said words they had already sorted — placed it in a category and moved on.
“Jamie,” I said, and opened my notebook to the debate framework I’d prepared because preparation was how I managed first meetings, even ones that weren’t technically social. “I’ve been thinking about the topic. I have some structural approaches to the affirmative case that I think could be — “
“Do you actually believe it?” Jamie said.
I looked up. “Believe what?”
“That authenticity requires courage. Do you believe it, or do you just think you can argue it?” They had a specific quality when they asked this — not challenging, not provocative, but genuinely curious. The kind of curious that expected a real answer rather than a prepared one. It was deeply inconvenient. “Because here’s the thing about Callahan,” Jamie continued, settling back in their chair with the easy confidence of someone entirely comfortable in their own skin. “She can tell the difference. She’s been doing this for thirty years and she can hear, in the first thirty seconds of an argument, whether the person making it actually believes what they’re saying or whether they’ve just constructed a convincing architecture around a position they’re intellectually managing.” They paused. “Her words, by the way. Intellectually managing. I read her paper on competitive debate pedagogy. She uses that phrase three times.”
I stared at them. “You read her academic paper?”
“I research my collaborators,” Jamie said, with perfect calm. “I read yours too. The one you wrote for the Jefferson Advocate last year about affirmative action in university admissions. It was good. You knew it was good. That’s partly why it wasn’t great.” They looked at me with the brown-green eyes that I had not, until this moment, been in close enough proximity to observe properly. “You write like someone who knows exactly how good they are and is protecting themselves from the possibility of being wrong. It produces technically impeccable prose with no pulse.”
The silence that followed this assessment lasted approximately four seconds, which in conversation time was a geological age. I had been told I was a good writer many times. I had been told I was a good debater many times. Nobody had ever told me that my excellence was defensive. Nobody had looked at the surface of my competence and identified it accurately as a surface. I sat across from Jamie Okafor in the Jefferson library on a Tuesday afternoon and felt, for the first time since eighth grade, genuinely seen — and immediately wanted to leave the room. Instead I said: “Do you talk to all your partners like this?” “Only the ones worth the effort,” Jamie said, and opened the poetry collection again. “So. Do you believe the resolution or not?” I thought about the third index card. About the three years of management. About the specific courage that authenticity required. I said: “I’m working on it.” Jamie smiled — not a gotcha smile, not a triumphant one. A warm one, small and real and somehow, impossibly, like they understood what working on it meant. “Good,” they said. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said since you sat down.” They turned back to the poetry. I opened my notebook. We worked for two hours, and the framework I had prepared was almost entirely replaced by the end of it, and the new framework was better. It had a pulse.
On the walk home I took out the third index card. I looked at it for a long time. I put it back in my pocket without changing it. But I was thinking about Jamie’s question — do you actually believe it — and the thing about questions like that was that once they were asked correctly, they didn’t go away. They just moved in, arranged their things, and made themselves comfortable in the part of your mind you had been trying to keep empty.