Page 102 of You've Got a Place Here, Too
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
“Maybe we should join a church.”
Daddy laughed.
“Or make her go to an HBCU,” Mama said.
“By the time she’s college age, Deb, you can’t make the girl do whatever you want.” For a long while Daddy was quiet, and I thought he’d dropped off to sleep. My heart, riled by this talk of my future, began to quiet too. Then he said, “But I don’t see what a campus visit could hurt,” and I lay awake the rest of the night—our New York escape, it seemed, slipping away.
To this day I tease Mama about that year, and how she must’ve thought she was slick. How she suddenly “discovered” a recruiting event at Florida A&M University. Daddy would stay homewith Omari, she said, but at the start of May, Mama would chaperone me to the campus, halfway through the panhandle but just two and a half hours’ drive from our house, so that we could spend one special weekend with other college-bound high schoolers and their parents.
“And you’ll get to stay in a dorm!” Mama said, as if that would be the most exciting thing.
“But what is thepoint?” I asked her, in a panic. “You know NYU is my number-one choice! I’m already working on the application!”
“What you need to do is explore your options,” Daddy chimed in from his recliner. His expression demandingIndulge your mother.
“And FAMU is a wonderful place to start,” Mama said. “You might as well. It’s practically right next door.”
Exactly!I thought, but the fix was in.
The appointed weekend, Mama dragged me to the welcome program twenty minutes early, then dithered for ten over where we should sit. The auditorium was strewn with orange and green bunting, and from our vantage point at orchestra left, projections of the rattlesnake baring its fangs hissed at us sideways from everywhere. Parents strolled in smiling and nodding at each other, as if they were privy to some secret intel, but a lot of us kids, I’d learn later, were petrified. I’d felt so defiant that morning, choosing an outfit I’d wear on any other Saturday with Kelly Traynor—my daisy-studded babydoll dress, my oxblood pleather Mary Janes—but glancing at the other students around me, these kids with whom I was meant to share an innate bond, I felt those shields beginning to falter. “Situp,” Mama fussed, and knocked my arms away from where I’d crossed them over my stomach.
The program started: PowerPoints mapping out the campus, a panel of alums sharing their success stories, a highlight reel of the famous Marching 100 playing Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade. Then FAMU’s own president, Frederick S. Humphries, a giant with a graying Afro and a booming voice, launched into a pitch that turned the place into church. “We say to Harvard, to Princeton, to that old Ivy League: No one will believe in Black scholars more than we do!” Dr. Humphries preached, and somebody’s mama yelped an amen. The audience laughed, and folks turned to see who the comedian was.
That’s when I spotted him. Sitting two rows in front of me, a boy who looked eerily familiar…It took a second to register exactly who he was—the visor he wore on the job hid his hair, which I could now see was a small asymmetrical fade, and his apron likely covered the Wu-Tang logo on his own black XXL tee—but in that second it took my two worlds to flicker, then superimpose, he spotted me too. That other Black kid from our Saturday nights at the Taco Bell.
What was I expecting him to do—point me out as a liar, a poseur, an Oreo? I don’t know; the insecurities I carried back then feel ludicrous now, now that I understand every kid in that room was probably terrified, and anxious to be accepted. And I couldn’t see, in that moment, what the next few years would look like—how this boy and I would share mad jokes and mixtapes, library hangs and holiday rides back to Jacksonville. All I knew was what was happening in that auditorium, and how it allowed me to release, in one long and relieving whoosh, a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding: That kid’s face—Jeremiah’sface—cracked open into the warmest smile.
Crazy,he mouthed, his eyes still smiling at me, and at mymother who loved me, and my cheeks hurt for how hard I cheesed back at him.
2.
“Wait a minute…Ma!That’syour story? You came here because you liked someboy?”
I snap out of the past, thirty-odd years later, to find Jossy—my baby who’s no longer a baby, my budding little feminist fighter—gaping at me over the lid of her caramel Frappuccino no-whip. On MLK, outside the School of Architecture, we’ve just boarded the new shuttle bus, a bright-painted thing that we’ve been told circles the campus every fifteen minutes. The Venom Express, they’re calling it, and it has the nerve to be extremely air-conditioned against the scorching heat me and my crew once battled daily on foot. Before it pulls farther away from the Set—that beloved redbrick runway show we used to watch like a movie every Friday after class—I look through the back window, by instinct seeking a glimpse of McGuinn, but then I remember, with another pang, that they tore down all the old girls’ dorms years ago. They’ve been replaced by sleek shared suites with individual thermostats, electronic key access, washers and dryers, giant bathrooms. And they have Starbucks in Coleman Library now, and a food court with a Wingstop and a Smoothie King, and an amphitheater named after a famous movie-producer alum who graduated back in the nineties with me…
“I mean, that’s not, like, thewholestory,” I say to my daughter. I peer out the opposite window—maybe so she won’t catch me blush, maybe to see what else is new around here. “I had a lot to balance, a lot to think about in terms of who I wanted to be.”
“But did you get in? To NYU?”
“Honestly, love, I didn’t end up applying.”
“So you’re saying you gave up your dream school like”—Jossy snaps her fingers—“just because some dude shot you a smile?”
I sigh. “I got to New York eventually, didn’t I?”
“What about your girl from Eagleton? She must’ve been pissed.”
“Mmmm.” I grimace, remembering that part. Remembering how I told Kelly Traynor, in the passenger seat of her cherry-red Saturn, that soon after that scholars’ weekend I’d gotten a full-ride offer from Florida A&M University—the “Life Gets Better” scholarship, which would cover every cent of tuition down to taxes and fees and give me a stipend each semester to boot. Remembering how I was on the verge of telling her about Jeremiah—that we’d hung out a couple times since the campus visit, and that he was smart and funny, and that in fact he loved to skate too, and he’d promised to teach me sometime, if I wanted—but before I could crack open my heart, my best friend cut me off, green eyes glittering mean underneath the edge of her bangs. I couldn’t possibly go to a place like “FAM-ooh,” she said, because—cue the cringe—“Girlfriend, you ain’t really Black!” I just sat there, confusion and shame a glut in my throat. Her speeding, her smoking, the public nuisances Kelly Traynor found funny—none of it scared me as much as the moment I realized the depth of my own meekness. And I decided I wouldn’t feel that way, ever again.
But I hesitate to detail any of this, or the fact that Kelly Traynor and I stopped speaking full-stop once high school was over. It probably wouldn’t resonate with my daughter, not when she’s so different from me at this age—so alpha, so full of conviction. Not when her own K-through-12 friends—the Brooklyn Benetton Bunch, as we parents of color secretly call them—are still herwhole world, and a lot more evolved than us Eagleton kids ever were. I watch as Jossy sits her coffee between her knees and pulls her phone from her pocket. She starts texting—probably complaining to one of her girls right now—and emits a small snort underneath the roar of the bus. At best I’ve bored her, annoyed her at worst. Proven, either way, my total irrelevance.
“Give me that,” I say, and snatch the phone away. She casts her eyes down; I’ve raised her better than to roll them at me. “The basic point I’m making, Jocelyn Marie—the point that your grandparents were trying to impress upon me too—is that life can be full of surprising possibilities, options you don’t even know to appreciate yet. But you won’t have them unless you keep your mind open. Okay?”
Jossy shrugs, but when I hand the phone back to her she turns it face-down on her lap.
“And believe me, baby girl, I get it! I get that you’re worried it’s too different down here from what you’re used to at home—that it’s super conservative, Bible Belt, or whatever…”
