I stayed quiet, because already I had a reputation for being stuck-up, even though I hadn’t told anyone that my parents were alumni. But Roslyn “Roz” Fauntleroy didn’t worry about anyone thinking she suffered from superiority. She took to the floor of the lobby to carol her discontent.
“I didn’t come to the sticks for this craziness,” Roz said. “I’m already not getting any financial aid—my daddy makes too much money for that welfare check they pass out. He’s not paying full tuition for me to dodge some rats.” Turning to our dorm mother, she squinted, a direct sign of insolence.
Mrs. Stripling’s auburn wig tilted wearily over her eyebrows. “It’s called a Pell Grant, Roslyn. And you don’t have to shame our students in need.”
“I’m not shaming anybody. I’m only telling y’all, my daddy is a lawyer. And he will sue this school if I get bit by whatever’s running around here.”
After the meeting, Roz walked up to Keisha and me. She wanted to know, what did we think about this bullshit?
“It’s a shame, shonuff.”
Keisha looked down at the floor. She was in love with Jesus, and I waited for her to say that the body was God’s temple, and that included her mouth, thus, cursing was a violation of temple laws, but Keisha gave Roz a pass. I sighed in a bored way, pretending I was above this whole discussion. When I’d called my parents about the dorm problems, Daddy said he was passing the phone to Mama, who told me I could have attended Mecca University and stayed at home. But since I thought I was grown and I was so anxious to leave my parents, I shouldn’t let little things like vermin and some colorful water get in the way of my higher education. And please don’t forget to say “hey” to her old roommate, Mrs. Giles-Lipscomb. She was the college librarian now.
A day after our dorm meeting, when Roz had asked to move into our room on the first floor, Keisha had argued our large room could hold another twin bed easily. I’d parried that Roz seemed very bossy and I’d left my mother at home, but Keisha had countered with an appeal to my guilt.
“Ailey, that girl lives on the third floor, and there’s no air-conditioning! You know it’s too hot up there. It’s the Christian thing to do.”
“Okay, but when you get tired of Roz’s mouth, don’t you come running to me. You tell it to Jesus. Ask Him to fix it.”
Yet in our room, Roz would sometimes speak in whispers—one never knew who was listening at the door—and it was during those times that Keisha and I grasped that she wasn’t as tough as she seemed. In those moments she would draw us closer, tell us the secrets required for any true female friendship: Since Roz’s parents had divorced, her mother and she were struggling financially. They shared a one-bedroom apartment in southwest Atlanta. Whenever Roz visited, she slept on the let-out in the living room. And while it was true that her father was an attorney and that he made too much money for Roz to receive financial aid, that was only on paper. He paid for her tuition and her books but complained that his new family—with the woman he’d left Roz’s mother for—required too much money for him to cover the rest. So during the summers, Roz worked as a secretary. Her father’s grandmother had bought her a used car, but the rest was on Roz.
Though Keisha’s early morning habits were annoying, she looked after Roz and me. She woke us early every morning before breakfast so we could study together. She was a social work major on scholarship. Roz was an English major who planned to be a lawyer. I was majoring in premed. I took my classes with the other premed freshmen, and only saw my roommates in our room, at meals, and on Fridays, when we returned to the chapel’s congregational space for the requisite Freshman Orientation.
When Dr. Charlemagne Walters, the dean of students, lectured the freshmen in the college chapel, he told us what he thought to be the most salient facts about Routledge College. We were required to memorize everything. Dean Walters started his first lecture by giving us the background on the two founders of the institution, Mrs. Adeline Ruth Hutchinson Routledge, and her spinster sister, Judith Naomi Hutchinson. The latter was a deeply religious woman who had died four years after the Civil War, in 1869. Dean Walters told us that Adeline’s desire to start our college originally had begun with her sister’s idea for a school for Negro girls. That’s why even though Judith had passed away four years before the official founding of the college, her name was listed along with Adeline’s as a founder.