Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  I was frustrated by the campus’s de facto segregation.

  I lived in the Communications Residential College (CRC), a dorm where students had to apply for renewable membership. I was a journalism major with an interest in film, so I was attracted to the dorm because of its videotape and film editing rooms, darkroom, and audio production booth. CRC’s residents were ambitious, talented students with very similar interests. I was program director for the dorm radio station I helped cofound, a pirate station we called WXLO, which is still on the air with an official sanction, today known as WXRU. While I lived there, I also wrote a screenplay and coproduced a video movie my friend Rob Vamosi directed, based on one of my short stories, and I spent many hours helping students finish their film and TV projects. To me, it was paradise.

  Almost everyone in the dorm was white. A black film major named D. J. Wells lived in CRC, and I grew close to him and his best friend, Albert Mensah, a black premed student from the adjoining dormitory who shared D. J.’s wicked sense of humor. With peer pressure from D. J. and Albert, I had a brief stint patrolling Evanston’s streets as a trained Guardian Angel, a manifestation of my civic duty that, in retrospect, was one of my stranger college diversions. But most of the blacks I met were like me: Their social circles were nearly all white, too. And none of my best friends, neither black nor white, were interested in political meetings or rallies. For that aspect of my life, I was entirely on my own. Even immersed in the company of friends who were as precious to me as blood relatives—a newfound family—I always felt something was missing. Charlie was often away, and she didn’t live in CRC long. She didn’t like the isolation from other blacks, so she moved out after one year. She wanted to live closer to her friends; if I had moved out, I would have been leaving mine.

  Black students at Northwestern tended to flock to the Foster-Walker complex, the heart of black social life on campus. Charlie had also pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the traditionally black sorority, which my mother had encouraged me to pledge. After watching Charlie and her friends stay up until 3:00 A.M. making projects out of construction paper and running to Burger King on errands to please their AKA superiors, though, I didn’t have the stomach for it. Instead, I pledged Chi Omega Rho, a co-ed fraternity that at the time had five or six other black members, making it the most racially mixed Greek organization on campus. I didn’t have to perform any humiliating or stressful tasks to get in, but I was feeling more like an Oreo all the time.

  I felt my Oreo-itis even more strongly when I checked out a couple of meetings of For Members Only, the black student organization to which Charlie had received such a dramatic introduction. FMO held regular meetings at “The Black House,” which had a reputation for being very militant. Someone told me once that white people were not permitted to set foot into The Black House, even if they were reporters covering a story. I felt like a white woman in blackface when I set foot in FMO’s meetings, given that I knew and liked so many whites. I did not go back to FMO after my freshman year, perhaps for no other reason than my belief that it had a meeting place where whites were supposedly banned. I might have made a difference if I had approached FMO with the notion that I could help shape the organization, rather than simply accepting that it had already been shaped by others. Had I become active with FMO, I would have met exactly the sort of conscious, activism-minded black students I craved to meet. But I was intimidated, not to mention that I felt like the members would not approve of my circle of friends. I think I really believed I would be expected to entirely abandon my white friends to avoid alienation from blacks.

  It seemed social forces on campus had conspired to make me choose between having white friends or black friends when I simply wanted to have both. I despaired in the cafeteria, noticing that black students ate at the tables with their friends and white students ate with their own, too. A few of us ate among interracial groups with others in our dorm, but we were in the minority. Blacks who sat with whites were also subjected to the occasional cutting glances of passing blacks, many of them strangers, who thought we had gone out of our way to make a statement by distancing ourselves. My frustration with constantly straddling a racial line caused me great discomfort during my college years. Since my mother’s college experience was all I could draw from, I had envisioned opportunities to work for social change with both blacks and whites united.

  Johnita became a freshman at Harvard University two years after I entered Northwestern, and she had the college experience I’d hoped to have: She was copresident of the Association of Black Radcliffe Women, regularly attended meetings of Harvard’s Black Students Association, and traveled in black and white circles with equal ease, though for the first time in her life most of her friends were black. At Harvard, she didn’t feel the same pressure to choose sides. “It was wonderful. It was a great feeling to be around others I had something in common with,” Johnita says today. “I was exposed to black students with a social consciousness, and our views of the world seemed similar.”

  But Lydia, who went to Wesleyan College, a small liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, found herself feeling cut off from black social life. She did not live in Malcolm X House, where most of the handful of black students opted to live. She was paired with her white freshman-year roommates by university housing, they became fast friends, and they lived together the entire four years they were in school. Like me, she longed for more black associations, but at the same time, she says, “I felt like an outsider.”

  I knew the feeling.

  In a sociology class one day, the professor asked the students to raise their hands if their parents made more than $200,000 per year. To my utter shock, more than half the students’ hands shot up. My father was making a good living as a county administrator, to the point where I was shy about mentioning his salary to anyone I knew, but he wasn’t making that kind of money, and it was a real eye-opener to me that so many of my classmates came from such affluent homes. Damn, I thought, these people here are RICH.

  That wasn’t the case for most of the black students, whose families probably made less than mine. In fact, Northwestern seemed to have a very good record of bringing in promising black students from Chicago’s economically disadvantaged areas. So, there we were: a campus with white students from affluent families who probably knew very few blacks at home, and blacks often from poorer backgrounds who probably knew very few whites. In retrospect, it’s no wonder there seemed to be so little communication between them.

  I felt one last gasp of optimism when I saw signs advertising a meeting for a new group: START—Students Together Against Racial Tension. It turned out to be an all-white meeting, and suddenly I was forced to be an ambassador, since all eyes were on me: “Why do black kids sit with only other black kids in the cafeteria? Why won’t they sit with us?” someone asked me. That bothered me, too, but I knew it wasn’t black students’ responsibility to pepper themselves throughout the room so all the white kids would get a chance to “experience” them. I sighed inwardly and answered as patiently as I could that all students tend to sit with their friends. “You sit at tables with only white students, don’t you? Why is that?” I said, and there were enlightened nods around the room.

  That was the last time I went to a START meeting. I wasn’t in the mood to give Sociology 101 lessons to a bunch of clueless white kids, no matter how well-meaning they were. I was still trying to figure it all out myself, and I wanted to be part of some kind of action. I longed to start a CORE group like my mother had belonged to in college, and I even wrote her about it, but CORE had changed so much by then, Mom said, she doubted it would serve my purposes. Instead, I could have tried to start an NAACP college chapter, but it seemed like too much work.

  Instead, I gave up. I concentrated on socializing and working on arts projects in my dormitory, which became my cocoon. This was the first time in my life I was making real friends—the kind I had longed for in high school—who would remain my friends for life.

&nb
sp; In 1985, my sophomore year, the anti-apartheid movement hit Northwestern. The conservative campus began to rustle restlessly, and before I knew it I was attending rallies that were drawing 200 students, spurred by a new group called the Anti-Apartheid Alliance and others. Northwestern, like many institutions, had money invested in companies that did business in South Africa, and students were raising their voices to demand that the campus divest its investments in apartheid. Finally! I was utterly electrified.

  Exiled South African poet Dennis Brutus was on Northwestern’s faculty at the time, and I remember hearing him read his poetry at a rally in his pained, melodic voice. As I scanned the crowd, though, I saw a schism: Most of the students at the protest were white, as were most of the students who wore red ribbons to symbolize their opposition to investments in South Africa. Somehow, even a movement designed to help end segregation and discrimination in South Africa could not overcome the de facto segregation at Northwestern. I couldn’t believe the irony of it.

  Not that I didn’t understand what was repelling the other blacks. Many of the white students involved in Northwestern’s anti-apartheid movement were sincere and hard-working, but there were also large numbers who simply looked flaky—draped in tie-dye, wearing flowers in their hair, strumming guitars, obviously trying to recreate their parents’ hippie days. I’m sure most black students took one look at them and rolled their eyes, assuming their activism was nothing more than a fashion statement.

  That didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was the good that might come of it. And how much more good could we do if we all worked together? I read a skeptical quote from the president of FMO in the Daily Northwestern, about Northwestern’s anti-apartheid movement, and I immediately fired off a response to him. Yes, they’re white, but they’re sincere, and we all have a common goal, I told him. The president at the time, a theater major named Harry J. Lennix, called me right away, and offered to get together to discuss my concerns. He had a deep, rolling voice, and I should have jumped at the chance! But instead, fearing a confrontation with a brother who was clearly more “down” than I was—writing a note is easier than a conversation, after all—I cowered away. We never met to talk, and yet another opportunity to build a bridge evaporated. I was pathetic.

  Today, after tracking Harry down through Northwestern’s black alumni network, I have come to learn that FMO was involved with behind-the-scenes negotiations to encourage the university to divest. Lennix attended those high-level meetings, though he says he grew annoyed with Brutus’s criticism that FMO wasn’t doing enough. “Back then, I tried—I did all that—but the bottom line is, charity begins at home,” Harry says with his hallmark candor. (He is also an amazing actor who has since had roles in The Five Heartbeats, Titus, The Matrix Reloaded, and a Showtime movie about Adam Clayton Powell, Keep the Faith, Baby.) “We’ve got enough problems right here.”2

  Unlike Harry, I was not ready to be a leader during that time. I always balked when the ball came back to me. I was not, it began to seem to me, cut from the same cloth as my mother.

  Even with the anti-apartheid movement, I had no patience for meetings. At one Anti-Apartheid Alliance meeting, I watched students arguing over which tactic to employ when it seemed obvious that they should use both. When I meekly raised my hand to make the suggestion, they applauded as if I were a prophet. The constant tugging and negotiations between individuals trying to formulate plans of action has always frustrated me.

  But rallies! I loved rallies. I loved the emotionalism that comes with hearing words you believe in your heart to be God’s simple truth, and to raise your voice skyward to demand change. I loved the fellowship of like-minded believers. When I went to rallies, I felt transported, and I was certain that so much earnest belief could change the world again, just as it had changed the world in the 1960s. If I had been a college student during my mother’s time, I thought, I wouldn’t have been one of the organizers, but I would have shown up at the appointed time to hold my placard and march, or sing, or chant. And, yes, to go to jail.

  At Northwestern, I finally got my chance to see what I was made of.

  One rally drew the largest crowd ever, and we stood shoulder to shoulder in the courtyard of Rebecca Crown Center, the campus administration building visible from a distance because of its soaring, monolithic clock tower. I do not remember everyone who spoke that day, but Dennis Brutus was there, making the plight of black and “colored” South Africans all the more poignant through the gentle music of his poetry. In his speech, Brutus told the crowd, “It is a shame Northwestern University is profiting from the blood, the suffering, and the broken bodies in South Africa. It is time for Northwestern to clean up its act and get out of that bloody mess!”3

  Other speech makers, including other professors, all overflowed with earnestness. A fever sweeps a crowd under the right circumstances, that same fever I’d yearned for since the first day I’d walked onto that campus, and the fever was there that day. I had tears in my eyes. When the drumbeat of the chanting began, with fists raised in the air—Divest NOW! Divest NOW!—I imagined I might have been in Tallahassee or Selma or Montgomery, and I felt myself pulled into a human current of students surging forward, driven by their passion.

  I hadn’t planned on it, but I was suddenly part of a student takeover. Inside the administration building, as secretaries scurried out of the way, I felt stunned, basking in the exhilaration and joy on the students’ faces as we cheered our tiny victory. We had brought work at Northwestern’s administration building to a halt. Now the university would have no choice but to pay attention to us, just as an earlier generation of Northwestern students in the 1970s had taken over the administration building to demand a black studies program. For most of us, I’m sure, this was the most drastic action we had ever taken, and we were all probably surprised at ourselves. We were putting ourselves at some risk for something we believed in.

  When the telephone rang, a student answered, “Nelson Mandela Center!” and we all cheered again. Nelson Mandela might have been languishing in a prison thousands of miles from us, but he was in our hearts that day. Politically speaking, that was my happiest day at Northwestern. I felt an even bigger charge when a campus police officer made his way past the throng of students to tell us that the building would be closing at five, in less than an hour, and anyone who hadn’t evacuated by then would be arrested and taken to jail for trespassing. Fine by me, I thought. Finally, I was about to become the person I’d always believed I could be. I was going to relive my mother’s experience in Tallahassee.

  More than a hundred students were inside the administration building, I believe, but I did not know any of them, with two exceptions. One was a member of my co-ed fraternity, Roger, and the other was Larry, a journalism major I had met when we participated in Northwestern’s Summer High School Institute as high-school juniors. Both were white, and both were determined to be arrested. While my arrest would be a lonely experience, at least I would not be entirely alone.

  As it got closer to five o’clock, the organizers made it clear that no one was being pressured to stay, that everyone would have to make an individual decision to be arrested. Slowly, some students began to drift out of the building, but my resolve was still firm. I would remain.

  At about quarter to five, I heard someone struggling to have my name heard over the din of chatter. “Is there a … Ta … na … na … REEVE here?”

  “That’s me!” I said, completely startled, raising my hand.

  “You have a telephone call.”

  Who in the world? Who would know to reach me here? I was mystified. To get to the desk, I climbed over the students sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor.

  When I picked up the phone, I could barely hear the tiny voice. “T? It’s Kate.” Kathryn Larrabee was my new roommate at CRC, a blonde-haired white girl, and it was completely out of character for her to try to reach me under such bizarre circumstances. She is now a gifted novelist, the author of An Everyda
y Savior,4 and back then we were two starry-eyed kids who mostly talked about our dreams of being writers one day, not politics. I was convinced there must be an emergency at home.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, panicked.

  “Geez, what’s going on over there? I thought I’d never find you. I have a message for you from J. D. He says you guys are supposed to have dinner at 5:30. He can’t do it any other time, and he’s leaving early tomorrow. What should I tell him?”

  J. D. Roberts was one of my best friends, a boy I’d had a crush on for a portion of my freshman year. He had been the driving force behind the dorm radio station where I had invested so many hours. I’d been looking forward to dinner with him. J. D. wouldn’t be coming back in the fall, so this dinner was meant to be our good-bye. I hadn’t expected him to plan it so early.

  “What should I tell him?” Kate said again.

  In that instant, it was as if the person I hoped to be was once again smothered by the person I really was. I was trying to make myself say, Tell J. D. I have to cancel dinner because I’m about to get arrested. I opened my mouth to say the words, but I couldn’t.

  “Tell him I’ll meet him at 5:30,” I said, my heart sinking.

  My walk out of Nelson Mandela Center that day was long, indeed. Even though we’d been told we were under no obligation to stay, I imagined accusation in the eyes of the other protesters as they watched me winding my way toward the door. I knew I was leaving behind any dreams I’d had of following in my mother’s footsteps as a college student. We simply were not the same people, and we did not live in the same times.

  When I spoke to my mother on the telephone that night, I hesitated, but then I told her what had happened. I braced to hear her withering disappointment that her warrior stock had given birth to someone so weak of character.

  “Oh, Tananarive-a,” my mother said, adding the extra syllable to my name the way she and Mother often did. “I’m glad you didn’t get arrested. Don’t get arrested, do you hear me?”