“I’m all right,” Belle said. “Come on. Don’t be like that.”
When her parents left, she looked around. She wasn’t used to sharing sleeping quarters, and the two beds in the room alarmed her. Belle’s parents were country, but their house was big, with four bedrooms. She’d always had her own room, but when her large-eyed, brown roommate opened the door, Belle smiled brightly at her.
*
During Belle’s first week on campus, she wondered if she had made the right choice of a college. Maybe she should have found some spunk and applied to Spelman anyway. The campus was in the country, but the students acted as if they were walking around their own private metropolis. The girls dressed in church frocks, heels, and stockings every day, along with wearing lipstick and powder. The boys wore starched pants and collared shirts with ties. And Belle never had seen so many light-skinned folks congregated in one place. In particular, the sororities were filled with the fairest girls, whose curly, waved, or stick-straight hair definitely could pass a fine-tooth-comb test. Each of the sororities seemed to have a strict quota for members who were darker than brown paper bags, too, for there were no more than two girls per organization who could be characterized as “high brown.” Belle felt like a fly in the proverbial buttermilk, though she was dressed beautifully. Dear Pearl had a fine seamstress hand; she had sewn all of Belle’s clothes growing up, but her taste was old-fashioned. So Uncle Root had picked out a huge, modern wardrobe at Rich’s in Atlanta, after driving there, passing for a white man, and befriending a widowed saleslady to whom he gave Belle’s measurements.
Yet besides her great-uncle and her roommate, Marie Giles, Belle was very lonely. On Sundays, Belle walked with Marie to the chapel’s “refectory,” a fancy word for cafeteria. They passed by many light-skinned girls who threw haughty, unfriendly glances. After Sunday breakfast, a staid service in De Saussure Chapel. An uninspiring, quiet pastor who didn’t shout to glory or even raise his voice, as he droned on about Sarah and Hagar.
Then, too, there were the distinctions made between the male and female students. There were strict curfews for the students, but only the females were punished for walking into the dorm lobby after ten at night. The males could roam the campus at will. Leaving through the gates of campus was an even bigger challenge for a young woman, for she was expected to be attired in a dress that was four inches below her knee, and she was required to wear a hat and gloves and carry a pocketbook—no matter the outside temperature. A young woman was not allowed to bring a car on campus or to leave through the campus gates without either two other female students or one of her parents, but male students didn’t need a chaperone and were free to drive.
But there were a few respites that first year. Marie made friends easily, and wherever she went, she dragged Belle along. There were so few men to serve as romantic partners, Routledge seemed like a single-gender college, and the young women in Routledge Hall acted accordingly. They dressed up in cocktail gowns, put on music, and danced with each other. Those who didn’t want to dance cheek to cheek with another female sat at card tables and played many hands of bid whist. Belle discovered she was good at the game. She had a competitive side.
And on Friday afternoons, her uncle Root—whom everyone called Dr. Hargrace—taught Freshman Orientation in De Saussure Chapel. He strode down to where the pews were located, instead of staying up on the stage. In his patrician drawl, he got in subtle digs at the unequal rules between men and women on campus, snorting that women had been allowed to drive since Mr. Ford had designed the nation’s first automobile. In between his slight protests, he drilled the freshman class on the institutional history of the college, such as, the school had been founded during Reconstruction, when droves of white northerners had rushed south with their missionary zeal. They considered themselves friends to the Negro and worked as teachers at grammar schools built to educate former slaves, and colleges were started, too. But the Bostonian who had founded the college had not been a white woman. She had been a free Negro.
Before the Civil War, Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge had lived with her husband, Coffee; their child, Violet; and her spinster sister, Judith Naomi Hutchinson. Then the husband died, and after the war, the sister died, too, and Mrs. Routledge and Violet traveled down to Georgia to help their newly emancipated people. Teachers were greatly needed to aid the masses of ex-slaves who didn’t even know their ABCs, let alone how to read; it had been against the law, before the Civil War.