The hum of those insects and the twisting limbs of the live oaks stayed with us long after we’d gone north again, beating in us almost like a second heart. Even as a kid, I understood innately that the South was knit into me, part of my heritage that was meaningful enough for my father to make return visits to see his people there. It was powerful enough that Dandy wanted to move back to Georgetown, even though as a young man he’d needed to escape it. When he did return, it wasn’t to some idyllic little river cottage with a white fence and tidy backyard but rather （as I saw when Craig and I made a trip to visit） a bland, cookie-cutter home near a teeming strip mall.
The South wasn’t paradise, but it meant something to us. There was a push and pull to our history, a deep familiarity that sat atop a deeper and uglier legacy. Many of the people I knew in Chicago—the kids I’d gone to Bryn Mawr with, many of my friends at Whitney Young—knew something similar, though it was not explicitly discussed. Kids simply went “down south” every summer—shipped out sometimes for the whole season to run around with their second cousins back in Georgia, or Louisiana, or Mississippi. It seems likely that they’d had grandparents or other relatives who’d joined the Great Migration north, just as Dandy had from South Carolina, and Southside’s mother had from Alabama. Somewhere in the background was another more-than-decent likelihood—that they, like me, were descended from slaves.
The same was true for many of my friends at Princeton, but I was also coming to understand that there were other versions of being black in America. I was meeting kids from East Coast cities whose roots were Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican. Czerny’s relatives came from Haiti. One of my good friends, David Maynard, had been born into a wealthy Bahamian family. And there was Suzanne, with her Nigerian birth certificate and her collection of beloved aunties in Jamaica. We were all different, our lineages half buried or maybe just half forgotten. We didn’t talk about our ancestry. Why would we? We were young, focused only on the future—though of course we knew nothing of what lay ahead.
Once or twice a year, Aunt Sis invited me and Craig to dinner at her house on the other side of Princeton. She piled our plates with succulent fatty ribs and steaming collard greens and passed around a basket with neatly cut squares of corn bread, which we slathered with butter. She refilled our glasses with impossibly sweet tea and urged us to go for seconds and then thirds. As I remember it, we never discussed anything of significance with Aunt Sis. It was an hour or so of polite, go-nowhere small talk, accompanied by a hot, hearty South Carolina meal, which we shoveled in appreciatively, tired as we were of dining-hall food. I saw Aunt Sis simply as a mild-mannered, accommodating older lady, but she was giving us a gift we were still too young to recognize, filling us up with the past—ours, hers, our father’s and grandfather’s—without once needing to comment on it. We just ate, helped clean the dishes, and then walked our full bellies back to campus, thankful for the exercise.
* * *
Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind. It’s from sophomore year of college and involves Kevin, my football-player boyfriend.
Kevin is from Ohio and a near-impossible combination of tall, sweet, and rugged. He’s a safety for the Tigers, fast on his feet and fearless with his tackles, and at the same time pursuing premed studies. He’s two years ahead of me at school, in the same class as my brother, and soon to graduate. He’s got a cute, slight gap in his smile and makes me feel special. We’re both busy and have different sets of friends, but we like being together. We get pizza and go out for brunch on weekends. Kevin enjoys every meal, in part because of the need to maintain his weight for football and because, beyond that, he has a hard time sitting still. He’s restless, always restless, and impulsive in ways I find charming.
“Let’s go driving,” Kevin says one day. Maybe he says it over the phone or it’s possible we’re already together when he gets the idea. Either way, we’re soon in his car—a little red compact—driving across campus toward a remote, undeveloped corner of Princeton’s property, turning down an almost-hidden dirt road. It’s spring in New Jersey, a warm clear day with open sky all around us.
Are we talking? Holding hands? I don’t recall, but the feeling is easy and light, and after a minute Kevin hits the brakes, rolling us to a stop. He’s halted alongside a wide field, its high grass stunted and straw-like after the winter but shot through with tiny early-blooming wildflowers. He’s getting out of the car.
“Come on,” he says, motioning for me to follow.
“What are we doing?”
He looks at me as if it should be obvious. “We’re going to run through this field.”
And we do. We run through that field. We dash from one end to the other, waving our arms like little kids, puncturing the silence with cheerful shouts. We plow through the dry grass and leap over the flowers. Maybe it wasn’t obvious to me initially, but now it is. We’re supposed to run through this field! Of course we are!
Plopping ourselves back in the car, Kevin and I are panting and giddy, loaded up on the silliness of what we’ve just done.
And that’s it. It’s a small moment, insignificant in the end. It’s still with me for no reason but the silliness, for how it unpinned me just briefly from the more serious agenda that guided my every day. Because while I was a social student who continued to lounge through communal mealtimes and had no problem trying to own the dance floor at Third World Center parties, I was still privately and at all times focused on the agenda. Beneath my laid-back college-kid demeanor, I lived like a half-closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on achievement, bent on checking every box. My to-do list lived in my head and went with me everywhere. I assessed my goals, analyzed my outcomes, counted my wins. If there was a challenge to vault, I’d vault it. One proving ground only opened onto the next. Such is the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.
Kevin, meanwhile, was someone who swerved—who even relished the swerve. He and Craig graduated from Princeton at the end of my sophomore year. Craig would end up moving to Manchester, England, to play basketball professionally. Kevin, I’d thought, was headed to medical school, but then he swerved, deciding to put off schooling and instead pursue a sideline interest in becoming a sports mascot.
Yes, that’s right. He’d set his sights on trying out for the Cleveland Browns—not as a player, but rather as a contender for the role of a wide-eyed, gape-mouthed faux animal named Chomps. It was what he wanted. It was a dream—another field to run through, because why the heck not? That summer, Kevin even came up to Chicago from his family’s home outside Cleveland, purportedly to visit me but also, as he announced shortly after arriving, because Chicago was the kind of city where an aspiring mascot could find the right kind of furry-animal suit for his upcoming audition. We spent a whole afternoon driving around to shops and looking at costumes together, evaluating whether they were roomy enough to do handsprings in. I don’t remember whether Kevin actually found the perfect animal suit that day. I’m not sure whether he landed the mascot job in the end, though he did ultimately become a doctor, evidently a very good one, and married another Princeton classmate of ours.