David held my hand in an earnest way. It was confusing. I knew what I wanted but couldn’t find the words. I hoped that someday my feelings for a man would knock me sideways, that I’d get swept into the upending, tsunami-like rush that seemed to power all the best love stories. My parents had fallen in love as teenagers. My dad took my mother to her high school prom, even. I knew that teenage affairs were sometimes real and lasting. I wanted to believe that there was a guy who’d materialize and become everything to me, who’d be sexy and solid and whose effect would be so immediate and deep that I’d be willing to rearrange my priorities.
It just wasn’t the guy standing in front of me right now.
My father finally broke the silence between me and David, saying that it was time for us to get my stuff up to the dorm. He’d booked a motel room in town for the two of them. They planned to take off the next day, headed back to Chicago.
In the parking lot, I hugged my father tight. His arms had always been strong from his youthful devotion to boxing and swimming and were now further maintained by the effort required to move around by cane.
“Be good, Miche,” he said, releasing me, his face betraying no emotion other than pride.
He then got into the car, kindly giving me and David some privacy.
We stood together on the pavement, both of us sheepish and stalling. My heart lurched with affection as he leaned in to kiss me. This part always felt good.
And yet I knew. I knew that while I had my arms around a good-hearted Chicago guy who genuinely cared about me, there was also, just beyond us, a lit path leading out of the parking lot and up a slight hill toward the quad, which would in a matter of minutes become my new context, my new world. I was nervous about living away from home for the first time, about leaving the only life I’d ever known. But some part of me understood it was better to make a clean, quick break and not hold on to anything. The next day David would call me at my dorm, asking if we could meet up for a quick meal or a final walk around town before he left, and I would mumble something about how busy I was already at school, how I didn’t think it would work. Our good-bye that night was for real and forever. I probably should have said it directly in the moment, but I chickened out, knowing it would hurt, both to say and to hear. Instead, I just let him go.
* * *
It turned out there were a lot of things I had yet to learn about life, or at least life on the Princeton campus in the early 1980s. After I spent several energizing weeks as a summer student, surrounded by a few dozen other kids who seemed both accessible and familiar to me, the fall semester officially began, opening the floodgates to the student population at large. I moved my belongings into a new dorm room, a one-room triple in Pyne Hall, and then watched through my third-floor window as several thousand mostly white students poured onto campus, carting stereos and duvet sets and racks of clothes. Some kids arrived in limos. One girl brought two limos—stretch limos—to accommodate all her stuff.
Princeton was extremely white and very male. There was no avoiding the facts. Men on campus outnumbered women almost two to one. Black students made up less than 9 percent of my freshman class. If during the orientation program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice. While Whitney Young had been somewhat diverse, I’d never been part of a predominantly white community before. I’d never stood out in a crowd or a classroom because of the color of my skin. It was jarring and uncomfortable, at least at first, like being dropped into a strange new terrarium, a habitat that hadn’t been built for me.
As with anything, though, you learn to adapt. Some of the adjustment was easy—a relief almost. For one thing, nobody seemed much concerned about crime. Students left their rooms unlocked, their bikes casually kickstanded outside buildings, their gold earrings unattended on the sink in the dorm bathrooms. Their trust in the world seemed infinite, their forward progress in it entirely assured. For me, it was something to get used to. I’d spent years quietly guarding my possessions on the bus ride to and from Whitney Young. Walking home to Euclid Avenue in the evenings, I carried my house key wedged between two knuckles and pointed outward, in case I needed it to defend myself.
At Princeton, it seemed the only thing I needed to be vigilant about was my studies. Everything otherwise was designed to accommodate our well-being as students. The dining halls served five different kinds of breakfast. There were enormous spreading oak trees to sit under and open lawns where we could throw Frisbees to relieve our stress. The main library was like an old-world cathedral, with high ceilings and glossy hardwood tables where we could lay out our textbooks and study in silence. We were protected, cocooned, catered to. A lot of kids, I was coming to realize, had never in their lifetimes known anything different.
Attached to all of this was a new vocabulary, one I needed to master. What was a precept? What was a reading period? Nobody had explained to me the meaning of “extra-long” bedsheets on the school packing list, which meant that I bought myself too-short bedsheets and would thus spend my freshman year sleeping with my feet resting on the exposed plastic of the dorm mattress. There was an especially distinct learning curve when it came to understanding sports. I’d been raised on the bedrock of football, basketball, and baseball, but it turned out that East Coast prep schoolers did more. Lacrosse was a thing. Field hockey was a thing. Squash, even, was a thing. For a kid from the South Side, it could be a little dizzying. “You row crew?” What does that even mean?
I had only one advantage, the same one I’d had when starting kindergarten: I was still Craig Robinson’s little sister. Craig was now a junior and a top player on the varsity basketball team. He was, as he’d always been, a man with fans. Even the campus security guards greeted him by name. Craig had a life, and I managed at least partially to slip into it. I got to know his teammates and their friends. One night I went to a dinner with him off campus, at the well-appointed home of one of the basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room table I was met by a confounding sight, a food item that like so many other things at Princeton required a lesson in gentility—a spiny green artichoke laid out on a white china plate.
Craig had found himself a plum housing arrangement for the year, living rent-free as a caretaker in an upstairs bedroom at the Third World Center, a poorly named but well-intentioned offshoot of the university with a mission to support students of color. （It would be a full twenty years before the Third World Center was rechristened the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding—named for Princeton’s first African American dean.） The center was housed in a brick building on a corner lot on Prospect Avenue, whose prime blocks were dominated by the grand, mansion-like stone and Tudor-style eating clubs that substituted for fraternities.
The Third World Center—or TWC, as most of us called it—quickly became a kind of home base for me. It hosted parties and co-op meals. There were volunteer tutors to help with homework and spaces just to hang out. I’d made a handful of instant friends during the summer program, and many of us gravitated toward the center during our free time. Among them was Suzanne Alele. Suzanne was tall and thin with thick eyebrows and luxurious dark hair that fell in a shiny wave down her back. She had been born in Nigeria and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, though her family had moved to Maryland when she was a teenager. Perhaps as a result, she seemed unhooked from any single cultural identity. People were drawn to Suzanne. It was hard not to be. She had a wide-open smile and a slight island lilt in her voice that became more pronounced anytime she was tired or a little drunk. She carried herself with what I think of as a Caribbean breeziness, a lightness of spirit that caused her to stand out among Princeton’s studious masses. She was unafraid to plunge into parties where she didn’t know a soul. Even though she was premed, she made a point of taking pottery and dance classes for the simple reason that they made her happy.