I also had started writing for the school’s newspaper and magazine, at Tess’s encouragement, and discovered I liked it.
* * *
I leaned heavily into the proximity to Tess and my brothers in that first year, frequently joining them for dinner and borrowing Tess’s car to get back to campus. After one dinner late in the first semester, the night before finals, we’d just put the boys to bed, and I was getting ready to leave. “Drive carefully,” Tess said. “I mean it.”
I promised that I would. The snow had already started as I pulled out of the parking lot of her housing tenement where she lived with the boys. It was dark and hard to see, but I drove slowly along with the few other cars on the stretch of Route 4 between Portsmouth and Durham. I kept my eye on the speedometer, because I knew that if anything happened and it was discovered that I had been driving too fast, Tess would be livid.
Mine was the only car on the road when I hit a patch of ice. The wheel turned abruptly to the right, and the car swerved uncontrollably. I panicked and turned the wheel the other way, exactly what you’re not supposed to do.
I got out of the car and saw that I’d hit a telephone pole. The right headlight was smashed, and there was a considerable dent in the fender. It was snowing hard now, and absolutely freezing. There were no cell phones. No one else was on the road. I wasn’t physically hurt, but I was terrified and shaken. Not as much terrified to be alone on the side of the road in the middle of the night on a dark snowy night as I was in anticipation of how Tess was going to respond to the accident. I walked to the nearest house, which luckily was not too far, and asked to use the phone to call a tow truck. The tow truck driver gave me a ride back to my dorm, and I called Tess from the pay phone on our floor.
“How bad is the damage to the car?” she asked. I’d known she would be angry, but I wasn’t ready for the callousness in her voice. “You’re going to have to pay for it yourself, you know.” Tears streamed down my face. I nodded over the phone as if she could hear the gesture. “You understand?” I managed to get a yes out before hanging up the phone.
I deposited more coins into the slot and dialed home. “Mom, I was in an accident with Tess’s car.” Before I could say another word, Mom said, in a panic, “My God, are you all right?” I slid down the wall next to the phone, my back pressed and tight, eyes closed and wet. “I’m OK, Mom.”
I sobbed in my bed for the rest of the night, soaking my pillow all the way through. Sarah tried to comfort and console me, but there was nothing. I couldn’t even articulate why I was crying so hard. It was beyond my control. It was compulsive. It felt deadly. I couldn’t get away from it. That was the night that I learned the difference between my mom and my birth mother. The precise and harrowing elucidation of unconditional love versus conditional love that I’d felt at my high school graduation party, but had been unable to articulate.
Twenty-Four
An essay I wrote for the UNH magazine that took aim at the school’s lack of diversity, and how the demographics, while firmly reflective of the state of New Hampshire’s, should be more inclusive, led to a few public speaking engagements, and also granted me an invitation by the UNH President’s Commission on the Status of Women to attend a private luncheon with Angela Davis. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, sitting at the head of a long table set with plates of fruit and pastries.
She wore dreadlocks then, a hairstyle that I didn’t understand, and had grown up judging as dirty, matted hair. I knew people made a choice to wear their hair that way, but I didn’t understand why they would want to. Who wants to run their fingers through that? I had learned from Tess that one of the most appealing and sought-after things about a woman for a man was the idea of running his fingers through her hair.
Seeing Angela’s dreadlocks changed my entire way of thinking: they didn’t wear her, she wore them, and they seemed simultaneously ancient and modern. She looked like a goddess to me, and her voice, majestic and commanding, sounded like unapologetic power. I began to think about organizing around my blackness, and the celebration of black culture, for the first time.
I asked around, and after learning that there hadn’t been a Black Student Union on campus in twenty years, I decided to start it back up. Starting a Black Student Union and actually running it were, of course, two different things, and I had no idea where to begin.
* * *
And then I met Elijah Freeman.
Classes with Elijah were legendary at UNH, where he’d been teaching black literature and writing as the university’s only black male professor for nearly twenty years. He was a fiercely committed and charismatic teacher. Tall and lithe with a graying afro and tawny brown skin, Elijah was stern but engaged. He loved what he did and it showed.
“Oh, yeah, Elijah,” Tess said when I told her that I’d signed up for his class. “I had him when I was at UNH.”
How had Tess not mentioned that she’d had such a well-regarded black professor as a student there when she was trying to convince me that UNH was my best bet? He was a beacon for the few black students on campus, and a high-profile veteran of the university, not just as a professor but also as a black man navigating white spaces.
“Why didn’t you mention him before?” I asked at the kitchen table in Tess’s apartment.
“Because he has major women issues, like, major. He, like, wicked can’t deal with women.” Her response was so flip that it immediately seemed suspicious.
I was still stinging a bit from the car accident, and Tess’s attendant reproach. I wasn’t in the mood. “Well, I guess we’ll just have to see,” I said. Tess shrugged her shoulders and left the room.
* * *
I sat in the front row for every class, and soaked in Elijah’s words and wisdom like gospel. He commanded the classroom as he spoke about James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, whose novel Sula became my bible after I first read it in his class. He talked about the power of words and how integral history, all history, but especially black history, is to the way that we use language, the way we write about ourselves and the world around us. How we think about history as we write, he said, is what turns an essay into literature. I wrote about books by Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, and Toni Cade Bambara.
Their words and worlds, and the structure and grace across every page, felt biblical and made my insides churn and my mind explode. It was like guzzling love, fast and warm and sweet in my throat. Thousands of words would present themselves, breathe and carry ideas and images clear through to the very end of an entire book without mentioning a white character.
Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” resonated so deeply with me I could hardly believe it. I felt rage that I was only discovering her so long after I’d needed her, which was from the beginning. Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry, Hurston wrote. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
I used that quote as the starting point, and wrote an essay I didn’t know I could write about how I managed to navigate my high school experience without falling into despair—how somewhere deep down, I always believed my company was worthwhile, despite the rejection and the racism, and that maybe, just maybe, the white boys who didn’t like me “that way,” and my racist teachers and racist boss at the oil company, were missing out on something lovely. They were missing out on me.
You’re gaining steam! Elijah wrote in his comments.
I wasn’t a great writer right away, but I wrote well in high school, and stronger than I ever had before in Elijah’s class, and his encouragement and advice on how and where I could improve—Remove the ego from your work or Is this really what you’re trying to say? Go deeper—made me more confident with what I could aim for.
When I shared my essays from class with Tess, she brought out the writing she’d done when she had taken the same class, work she’d saved for unknown reasons that I didn’t ask about. “Feel free to use t
hese as guidance,” she said, laying a folder of single-spaced, one-page essays, with her name typed at the top, dated from 1971 or thereabouts, with the same black scratch of Elijah’s handwriting in the margins. Make your point more clear, one read. This seems harsh, said another.
After my first class with Elijah, and changing my major from political science to English, I decided to request him as my primary academic advisor. In our first official meeting as advisor and advisee, I asked him about Tess. “Do you remember a student in the ’70s named Tess Bancroft?”
He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head slightly. “Ah, yes. Why?”
“Well, she’s my birth mother, and we’re pretty close, and she told me that you were her teacher, too, and that you hate women.” I didn’t plan to say any of this, but it’s what came out all at once before I’d had a chance to think.
Elijah just stared at me for a minute, somber and still, weighing his words.
I plowed on, filling the awkward silence. “I mean, it’s a very difficult relationship, as you can imagine,” I continued, thoughts just tumbling out uncontrollably now. I’d never talked to anyone so openly about Tess before. And that I was talking so openly about her to my first adult black male role model felt like a release, like opening floodgates I hadn’t even known existed. “And I’m actually feeling really unsure, or, I don’t know, like there’s something not right about it, and I’m just, I guess, really confused.”
Elijah crossed his legs and rested both of his hands, one on top of the other, on his knee. His office was a windowless room, but somehow always felt filled with the kind of warmth only the sun creates. Shelves lined with books, stacks of papers to be graded on his desk. “What I remember about Tess is that she was very smart, very stubborn, and that she had some issues with black folks,” he finally said.
“Issues with black folks? How? What do you mean?” I sat on the edge of the smooth leather couch in his office opposite his desk, and then, feeling too eager, leaned back and folded my arms across my chest to try to look cooler. Elijah said he thought she was too smug about black culture, as if she knew everything there was to know about black folks, and had trouble deferring to the experience of actual black people. I heard this as him letting me in on something, sharing authentic black knowledge that I couldn’t get anywhere else, especially not from Tess.
“I feel so torn,” I confided. And I did. For the first time, someone, another black person, an adult black person, was articulating what I had been feeling about Tess for years regarding race. “It’s just so weird, right? She slips into what she thinks is a black woman’s voice, or makes all these authoritative statements about black boys and men, like, why?”
That, Elijah said, is what racism is, and how racism works. It gives white people the power to interpret or outright co-opt our experiences, our voices and identities, as they like, whenever they like. “Look, I have no animosity toward Tess, but to be perfectly honest, I’m worried about you,” Elijah said. “I don’t believe she deserves your loyalty.”
I needed someone to say this. Someone to look out for me, to recognize the damage she was doing to my self-esteem, to notice the way I second-guessed myself whenever I brought her name up. How my body language changed, and the tenor of my voice ripped through my chest, in turns strident and shaken.
* * *
I gave another talk at UNH about my own personal experience growing up in rural New Hampshire, trying to navigate my blackness, feeling isolated and either unseen or overseen. I emphasized how difficult and disheartening it was to be at a school that so vividly reflected that experience, and how necessary it was for the few black students at UNH to feel empowered.
Tess was in the audience, and afterward we went for coffee at a diner on campus.
“You seemed uncomfortable up there at times,” Tess said.
“I was nervous,” I said defensively. It was only my second time giving a public speech to such a large audience.
“It felt to me like you were playing at being black,” she said. “Like you didn’t really know how to embody your sense of self as a black woman.” I could feel her eyes boring into me, swimming around under my skin with sharp, tiny fins.
“I’ve learned a lot in Elijah’s class, just from writing and reading, listening to him talk about black culture and history,” I said.
“Taking a class with a black professor doesn’t make you black, Rebecca,” Tess said dismissively.
“Shouldn’t I get to decide what makes me black?” I said, feeling agitated, under attack, bullied—as if even the most truthful explanation of how I was feeling came across desperate.
“But how would you know, Rebecca?” Tess said this as if it were the eighteen thousandth time she’d had to articulate this to me. “I’ve been around far more black people than you have—culture is more than skin color, and Elijah is obviously trying to take advantage of your naivete.”
“But why?”
“For his ego, Rebecca! What do you think?”
* * *
A few weeks later, Tess announced she would be starting in the master’s program at UNH in the fall. Couldn’t she just let me have this one experience? Had she planned all along to come back to UNH? Was she doing it so that she could keep an eye on me and Elijah?
Luckily, I was already planning to transfer out of UNH. I learned about a school called Hampshire College through the dean of minorities at Brown University, where I’d first set my sights when I decided that I had to leave UNH. Again, the dean at Brown, like the dean at NYU, said the issue of money would be a stumbling block, and asked if I’d heard of this school Hampshire. He said it had a reputation for being a bit of a hippie school, but that it was making a concerted effort at diversifying its student body, and its curriculum, self-designed, seemed like it might be right for me based on the conversations we had.
I scheduled an interview at Hampshire, and was, to my surprise, met by a black woman, Sunny, an assistant dean of students, who gave me a tour. She was very candid about the school’s lack of diversity, but also said she was encouraged by Hampshire’s rigorous diversity initiatives. We strolled through campus, a lateral, village-like compound with utilitarian structures, nothing especially pretty or bucolic like UNH’s campus, which immediately and ironically put me at ease. I’d had enough bucolic to last me a lifetime. Sunny said there was a strong, if small, community of color that was inclusive and low-key.
Students we passed on their way to and from classes looked both focused and relaxed, as if they were walking in a direction they wanted to go. Sunny told me about Hampshire’s membership in the Five College Consortium; how, as a Hampshire student, I would be able to take classes at one of the other colleges—Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, and UMass Amherst—which offered a nice way to get off campus, which could start to feel insular after a while.
“But tell the truth,” I said. “Do you feel like the only one? Like the only black person in the room, like all the time?”
Sunny stopped, gave me a knowing smile. “I wouldn’t be here if I did.”
Sunny’s close-cut afro suited her round, inviting face. She was both honest and critical as she explained that more and more black students were coming in every year, and that black students from the other colleges frequently took classes at Hampshire, widely viewed as the most experimental and challenging of the five schools. Sunny also pointed out that, while there were by no means enough, the school had black staff and professors, none of whom were shy about throwing down the gauntlet when it came to conversations about race and racism within the Hampshire community, and in the broader national discourse.
“We are, like most things, a work in progress,” Sunny said. “But I promise you will not feel like the only one here, and you will be able to take control of your studies and direct your interests in a way that you can’t really do anywhere else.”
Convinced it would be a better environment for me, I applied to Hampshire, and was awarded a full academic scholarship. Th
e fall semester at UNH would be my last.
Twenty-Five
I was waitressing at a resort hotel a few miles away from where Riana lived the summer after my first year at UNH. I’d found the job through the job board at UNH, and had heard that you could make big money at places like this. When Riana found out I was so close, she invited me over one afternoon. I borrowed a coworker’s car and drove to her house, a small cabin cowering under a scant grouping of trees, with a vacant dirt driveway.
The house’s interior—the laundry piled up on the couch, formula canisters and baby bottles half full on the kitchen counter, garbage spilling over and out of its container, small harnesses to carry bodies that couldn’t crawl or move properly on their own—reflected the life of a single working mother overwhelmed by twin babies with health issues. Even though Riana technically was not single, she might as well have been. Her husband, Eddie, who I knew had beaten her more than once, was of little to no help with the boys, resented their disease, and blamed Riana for it.
Sun crept uneasily through the dirty panes of two windows as the babies now started to coo, the sound coming as a relief, and the smell of something rotten rose up every now and then. It was my day off, and I suddenly wished I was spending it in a more pleasant way. Riana moved things around, pushed a few blankets to the side of the couch so that I could sit.
“You want anything to drink, Becca? Coffee?” Riana asked. She was the only one in our family who called me Becca, and she always said it in a soft, plucky tone.
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