Later, during our sophomore year, Suzanne would take another plunge, deciding to bicker at an eating club called Cap and Gown—“bicker” being a verb with a meaning particular to Princeton, signifying the social vetting that goes on when clubs choose new members. I loved the stories Suzanne brought back from the eating-club banquets and parties she went to, but I had no interest in bickering myself. I was happy with the community of black and Latino students I’d found through the TWC, content to remain at the margins of Princeton’s larger social scene. Our group was small but tight. We threw parties and danced half the night. At meals, we often packed ten or more around a table, laid-back and laughing. Our dinners could stretch into hours, not unlike the long communal meals my family used to have around the table at Southside’s house.
I imagine that the administrators at Princeton didn’t love the fact that students of color largely stuck together. The hope was that all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony, deepening the quality of student life across the board. It’s a worthy goal. I understand that when it comes to campus diversity, the ideal would be to achieve something resembling what’s often shown on college brochures—smiling students working and socializing in neat, ethnically blended groups. But even today, with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students. In my experience, it’s a lot to ask.
At Princeton, I needed my black friends. We provided one another relief and support. So many of us arrived at college not even aware of what our disadvantages were. You learn only slowly that your new peers had been given SAT tutoring or college-caliber teaching in high school or had gone to boarding school and thus weren’t grappling with the difficulties of being away from home for the first time. It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.
This is doable, of course—minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time—but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could.
My two white roommates in Pyne Hall were both perfectly nice, but I wasn’t around the dorm enough to strike up any sort of deep friendship. I didn’t, in fact, have many white friends at all. In retrospect, I realize it was my fault as much as anyone’s. I was cautious. I stuck to what I knew. It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging—the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.
Cathy, one of my roommates, would surface in the news many years later, describing with embarrassment something I hadn’t known when we lived together: Her mother, a schoolteacher from New Orleans, had been so appalled that her daughter had been assigned a black roommate that she’d badgered the university to separate us. Her mother also gave an interview, confirming the story and providing more context. Having been raised in a home where the n-word was a part of the family lexicon, having had a grandfather who’d been a sheriff and used to brag about chasing black people out of his town, she’d been “horrified,” as she put it, by my proximity to her daughter.
All I knew at the time is that midway through our freshman year, Cathy moved out of our triple and into a single room. I’m happy to say that I had no idea why.
* * *
My financial aid package at Princeton required me to get a work-study job, and I ended up with a good one, getting hired as an assistant to the director of the TWC. I helped out about ten hours a week when I wasn’t in class, sitting at a desk alongside Loretta, the full-time secretary, typing memos, answering the phone, and directing students who came in with questions about dropping a class or signing up for the food co-op. The office sat in the front corner of the building, with sun-flooded windows and mismatched furniture that made it more homey than institutional. I loved the feeling of being there, of having office work to do. I loved the little jolt of satisfaction I got anytime I finished off some small organizational task. But more than anything, I loved my boss, Czerny Brasuell.
Czerny was a smart and beautiful black woman, barely thirty years old, a swift-moving and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals and seemed always to be having four or five ideas at once. For students of color at Princeton, she was like an über-mentor, our ultrahip and always outspoken defender in chief, and for this she was universally appreciated. In the office, she juggled multiple projects—lobbying the university administration to enact more inclusive policies for minorities, advocating for individual students and their needs, and spinning out new ideas for how all of us could improve our lot. She was often running late, blasting out the center’s front door at a full sprint, clutching a sheaf of loose papers with a lit cigarette in her mouth and a purse draped over her shoulder, shouting directives to me and Loretta as she went. It was a heady experience, being around her—as close-up as I’d ever been to an independent woman with a job that thrilled her. She was also, not incidentally, a single mother raising a dear, precocious boy named Jonathan, whom I often babysat.
Czerny saw some sort of potential in me, though I was also clearly short on life experience. She treated me like an adult, asking for my thoughts, listening keenly as I described the various worries and administrative tangles students had brought in. She seemed determined to awaken more boldness in me. A good number of her questions began with “Have you ever…？” Had I ever, for example, read the work of James Cone? Had I ever questioned Princeton’s investments in South Africa or whether more could be done to recruit minority students? Most of the time the answer was no, but once she mentioned it, I became immediately interested.
“Have you ever been to New York?” she asked at one point.
The answer was again no, but Czerny soon rectified that. One Saturday morning, we piled into her car—me and young Jonathan and another friend who also worked at the TWC—and rode along as Czerny drove full speed toward Manhattan, talking and smoking all the way. You could almost feel something lifting off her as we drove, an unspooling of tension as the white-fenced horse farms surrounding Princeton gave way to choked highways and finally the spires of the city rising in front of us. New York was home for Czerny, the same way Chicago was home for me. You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.
Before I knew it, we were in the teeming heart of New York, locked into a flow of yellow taxis and blaring car horns as Czerny floored it between stoplights, hitting her brakes at the absolute last second before a red light caught her short. I don’t remember exactly what we did that day: I know we had pizza. We saw Rockefeller Center, drove through Central Park, and caught sight of the Statue of Liberty with her hopeful hoisted torch. But we were mainly there for practical reasons. Czerny seemed to be recharging her soul by running through a list of mundane errands. She had things to pick up, things to drop off. She double-parked on busy cross streets as she dashed in and out of buildings, provoking an avalanche of honking ire from other drivers, while the rest of us sat helplessly in the car. New York overwhelmed me. It was fast and noisy, a less patient place than Chicago. But Czerny was full of life there, unfazed by jaywalking pedestrians and the smell of urine and stacked garbage wafting from the curb.