When Dean Walters talked about the founders, he would pull out his handkerchief and dab his eyes.
“Our people, our people! What a mighty race!”
He told us the original mission of our college was to lead students to seek knowledge in a way that adhered to Christian values. The school motto was chiseled in the marble floor of the library, surrounded by a lapis lazuli Valentine’s Day heart, which represented that same muscle of Judith Hutchinson. We were never—ever—supposed to step on the heart. Yet what our Freshman Orientation professor could not explain, despite his copious knowledge of our college’s history, was why, in one hundred eighteen years, the board of trustees had never appointed a second female president of our college. The only woman who’d occupied that role had been Mrs. Routledge herself, but even then, she had called herself the “principal.”
When I asked about the gendered redundancy of our college administration, Dean Walters paused and tilted his head to the side. He was a diminutive man, only a couple of inches taller than my mother, and he overenunciated every word.
“Tell me this, Miss Garfield. Do you question why there has never been a female president of our great nation?”
“Actually, I do, very much.”
The students in the chapel gasped and looked back at me.
“I see,” he said. “Miss Garfield, I don’t know why the board of trustees in their infinite wisdom selected these esteemed men to lead us. I just think it’s a coincidence they are all men.”
Neither could Dean Walters answer why the institution had gone coed in 1922, eighteen months after Mrs. Routledge had died, and a year after her daughter had married Mr. Thierry De Saussure and then appointed him as the second leader of the school. He was the one who had begun calling himself “president,” and who had decided that the school would be called “Routledge College,” instead of “Georgia Institute for Colored Girls.” According to the official origin story, Mr. De Saussure thought that allowing male students to matriculate would increase enrollment, since the college was located in a remote part of Georgia.
I raised my hand again.
“Miss Garfield, I’m trying to get through this material by the end of class. What is your question?”
“I went to the library and looked up old yearbooks.”
Dean Walters perched on his toes. “Did you, now? Wonderful!”
“Yes, sir, I did. When you gave us the handout to read, I thought I might do some more research.”
“Well, that is simply fantastic!”
“Thank you. And I counted the numbers of female and male students from 1922 to 1990, and what those numbers show is that Mr. De Saussure’s coed strategy has been a complete failure.”
The students whispered.
Roz poked me.
Dean Walters came down on his heels. “That is simply not true.”
“I’m sorry, but it is,” I said. “While the number of students rose from three hundred or so students in 1922 to almost a thousand in 1990, the percentage of male students has remained around nine and a half percent. So why didn’t one of the other presidents decide to have Routledge go back to an all-female school?”
“Because we already have Spelman College in Atlanta and Bennett College in North Carolina, and those are colleges for African American women. Now let’s move on—”
When I raised my hand again, he cut me off.
“No, Miss Garfield. We have finished. We are through. I know you come from the City, so let me explain that down south, when an elder says, let’s move on, that means, Stop talking, young lady, because you aren’t offering anything important to the discussion. Do you understand, Miss Garfield?”
“Yes, sir.”
Though I was the daughter of college alumni, I hadn’t yet told anyone. I didn’t want to sit in the “bourgie section” of Freshman Orientation, the first rows of chapel pews, where alumni’s kids clustered. They were referred to as “grandchildren,” since their parents had been formed in our college’s pulsing Negro womb. The bourgie section gave enthusiastic cosigning to Dean Walters, smiling with no irony when he referred to Routledge as “the Harvard of the South.” They already knew the words to the college hymn, “Dear Routledge, We Sing Your Praises High”; unlike me, they didn’t have to constantly look down at the cheat sheet throughout the song.
Some other freshmen tried to buck Dean Walters’s indoctrination, such as Abdul Wilson, who walked around in red, black, and green outfits with matching knitted caps. He chewed on a long twig and insisting on calling out, “Hotep,” when he saw my roommates and me on campus. He got under Keisha’s skin—she’d reply that she blessed him in the name of Jesus, and switch right on past him.