“No, uh-uh, Roz. You look like an old lady with that bun.”
“You got your nerve. Where you get that ugly dress? Your grandma?”
Keisha didn’t even acknowledge the insult. She pulled Roz’s hair into a loose ponytail, asking me to get a rubber band from her purse. I searched past the packets of disposable handkerchiefs and loose peppermint candy until I found the band, and after Keisha was done, we both clapped our hands. We remarked how beautiful Roz was, as she told us to stop ribbing her up. She didn’t have any money to give us.
That was the morning that six guys stopped us on the way to breakfast. They all directed their conversation to our roommate. The next morning in mandatory Sunday chapel, Keisha had to elbow two brothers out of the way when they tried to sit on either side of Roz. Shame on them, Keisha said. Trying to flirt on the Lord’s day, but she was grinning.
*
At the next Freshman Orientation, Dean Walters focused on the change to the curriculum of the college.
When Mrs. Adeline Routledge had been alive, the college had aligned itself with the principles of Du Bois and featured a liberal arts curriculum. In theory, the students of Routledge College were supposed to provide a buffer between the folks living in the Georgia countryside and the white citizens of the state; graduates were charged to go out into the world and present an example of what glories the race could accomplish when its members put their minds to it. However, in practice, the college had been viewed as rabble-rousers by whites in the community, and interracial relations were violent. In 1916, two Black male faculty members were murdered on their way back from a visit to Atlanta, and in 1919, another disappeared and was never heard from again after he tried and failed to protect his wife from gang rape at the hands of five white men.
Tensions settled greatly in 1924, however, when Mr. Thierry De Saussure, Violet’s husband, added a vocational track to the schedule of courses, similar to the academic track of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, led by Booker T. Washington. Though the move was applauded as timely and practical by Routledge’s all-white board of trustees, in late September of that same year, there were protests from the faculty—Black and white members alike—who encouraged the students to join them; three-quarters of the student body refused to attend classes, and the other students sat looking silly in empty rooms. Mr. De Saussure responded to the protests by firing half the faculty and giving those truant students the weekend to decide whether they would attend classes again on Monday morning or be expelled. Without their faculty leaders, the students’ courage folded and they refilled the classes, including the new agricultural science courses for the young men, and the domestic courses for their female counterparts; those classes would be eliminated in 1985, but Mr. De Saussure’s proclamation was well recorded in college history:
“Miss Adeline founded this institution on nothing except love for our people and never-ending prayer. If need be, I will rebuild Routledge College on those two humble foundations.”
Abdul raised his hand. “Why’d that De Saussure dude add that vocational track like at Tuskegee? I don’t get that. Everybody knows Booker T. Washington was an Uncle Tom.”
“Really? Who is this everybody?” our professor asked.
“Like, everybody in Philly.”
“Tell me, do any of your friends carry guns in Philadelphia?”
“Yeah, we got them jawns.” Abdul looked around severely, like he planned to shoot up the entire bourgie section.
“Down south, civilized Black men don’t carry weapons on our persons. We carry our intellects. Down here, African Americans must learn how to improvise. That’s what Mr. Booker T. Washington did at Tuskegee, and what Mr. De Saussure did here as well. He knew that certain southern whites did not want African Americans going to college, so he tricked those whites by requiring the vocational track. That way, they wouldn’t know he also was teaching us science, math, literature, and foreign languages. And I am grateful for that improvisation, because this school was still standing when I enrolled in the fall of 1954, instead of being burned to ash by the Ku Klux Klan. Aren’t you happy about that?”
The bourgie section nodded and turned to look at Abdul, but he stayed quiet, fingering his twig like a talisman.
Dean Walters moved on to the timeline of the buildings on campus. The plantation house had been built by Matthew Parson in 1856. The barn, no longer standing, had been built in the same year. The schoolhouse predated the college’s official founding year, built in either late 1871 or early 1872.