For the AfricanAmerican Cultural Center's 50th, Below are the 5 shortest published in BLACK HARVARD/BLACK YALE, 2011. Contents:
6. Charles Payne, Y'1952—Retribution 8. Yale Memories: A Look Back, By yolanda joe, Yale Class of 1984,Trumbull College. 16.Brotherman--By David Thomas, Y 1987 18. Denise Byrd, Y'1988 20. Erica S. Turnipseed, Y’1993--My first semester as a woman
6. Charles Payne, Y'1952—Retribution
At 18 and away from Charleston, West Virginia to live alone for the first time, I came to Yale in 1948. I was a member of the first freshman class which was composed of nonveterans. Some of my selfconfidence and sophistication had been rudely challenged in New York when, dressed in my new gray suit, tie and accoutrements from Frankenbergers Men's Department in Charleston, I was offered the chance to buy a choice diamond ring after only about 45 steps into Grand Central Station. After declining, I walked on somewhat amazed and chagrined by the ability of a New York hustler to pick me out of the crowd of exiting passengers. In any case, I was not amazed at Grand Central Station having been to New York with my Mother three years earlier. I looked at the Hoffritz collection of cigarette lighters, gifts, cutlery and Swiss Army knives, glanced at magazines and found the New Haven Railway and hence off to Yale without losing my suitcase, ticket, letters or spendingmoney. The trip to the University was accomplished by taxi and the sight of the "Old Campus" arising out of the Green like a medieval castle was impressive. I was assured, when I asked the Campus Cop that the gates were never closed and that there was no curfew at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. as there had been at West Virginia State College. He seemed somewhat bemused by my query but I was impressed. After following directions, I got the key to my assigned freshman room in Welch Hall, then found the building and after three flights of stairs, found the room. Yale had been designed in better times with only two students to a room, each with a bedroom and a common study. My letter informed me that I would have two roommates selected at random by names drawn from a hat. Somehow it didn't come as a surprise, however, that my two roommates were also young men of color. Dick was from Cincinnati (Wyoming, Ohio to be precise), tall, a mathematical whiz, and Jack, short, energetic and from New Haven. Jack wanted to live away from home and so was at least a mile and half away from home and felt good about it. After comparing letters, we decided that Yale didn't lie....it just had several hats. (It later transpired that the fourth Negro, as we were then called, was sufficiently fair to photograph white, and so was rooming with a freshman from Texas in the WW11 Quonset huts out near the Peabody Museum. Nathan was happy there and so were his roommates so that his freshman experience was truly unique. My parents arrived by car that afternoon, having driven from Charleston. They packed stuff I couldn't carry and gave me the thrill of traveling to school on my own. My Mother had packed Bates curtains and bedspread, sheets and other bedclothes, together with my radio, winter clothing, a few favorite books, my camera and other essential items together with two blankets. Mother was both wise and frugal and had summoned forth an olive drab blanket and one of more coarse wool with olive drub interwoven edging which, she said, had been in the family since World War I. Apparently the blankets had been kept in the fitted suitcases from the trunk of my Dad's old Packard touring car. My Mother had spirited away the suitcases and trunk when the car was sold after WWII. The blankets certainly looked as if they had been locked away, but while both smelled musty, the old woolen one certainly looked warm. It would be covered by the new bedspread which, I was reminded would match the curtains, so there was no further discussion. The blanket stayed and was appreciated later. Freshman year now seems like a big pudding with events lying at or just below the surface like raisins. I had played football in high school and so went out for the Yale freshman team. No one at Yale knew anything about Negro high school football in West Virginia. Levi Jackson had been the varsity captain the year before, so this new black athlete got a really fair trial. Unfortunately at 6'3" and 176lbs. with full equipment in August, I was neither an offensive nor a defensive end. The fact that I could punt and pass and was the scrub team quarterback in high school gave me an unusual combination of useless skills which remained unused after the results of the first math quizzes were received. My father had not sent me to Yale to be an athlete. Of more lasting importance was the discovery of station WJZ, New York one autumn afternoon and listening to a then 17yearold Stan Getz play his first recorded solo at the end of the Coda to "Summer Sequence", a Ralph Bums extended jazz composition performed by the Woody Herman orchestra. The discovery of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Ventura and his Bop for the People and the whole world of modern jazz and bebop soon followed introduced by the late night voice of Symphony Sid Toren from Birdland and Bop City. I have grown up, grown gray and have been saddened as onebyone these inventive musicians have died. I have also grown in introspection, appreciation and delight at the legacy which they have left to influence Rock and Roll, Rap and HipHop, Reggae, Ska, and now World Music. Without having heard Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte's recording of "Lean on Me" as a jazz vocalist and George Shearing's "The Fourth Deuce", I wouldn't have been able to study until 2 or 3 a.m. in the most challenging academic environment I had ever faced. It turned out that many of the white students had already seen the freshman courses at Yale through their preparatory schools but it was all new to me. One lovely discovery was that I had family in New Haven. The Powell family lived there at that time and my Aunt "Princess" resided in the Hanna Gray Home on Dixwell Avenue. I do not know whether or not the home still functions but it was a place of quiet, escape and wonderment to walk down to visit Aunt Princess who must have been in her seventies. On far too few Sunday afternoons I could sit and talk with her and marvel at her clarity of thought and expression and her beauty. There was never a question as to why she was called "Princess". I never understood the "heeling" system for participation in the Radio Station, WYBC, the Yale Daily News, the Lit and other activities and, as far as I know, it was never formally explained to anyone who didn't have a need to know. There wasn't enough time to do any of these things and stay abreast of the premed course requirements so that freshman year was work broken only by a "Dear John" letter from my high school girl friend who found it necessary to marry a young man from West Virginia State College; learning the amount of beer I could imbibe; an occasional date with a New Haven high school girl; Italian neorealism postwar films like Bitter Rice and the Bicycle Thief and Christmas Vacation. To my regret, it seemed that the Ivy League began its Christmas vacation just as the more traditional schools, which did not have two week reading periods before exams, ended theirs. I got to see three or four friends boarding the trains back to school as I arrived on the Chesapeake and Ohio and that was that. Summer passed none too rapidly. Because I was the first male honor student in my high school class, I took considerable kidding when my struggle to maintain a Dean's List average was mentioned. It seems that my female high school honor peers were leading the classes at their respective schools while I appeared to be a playboy way up there in New England. I do remember getting the reputation as being eccentric, if not totally mad, because I was collecting butterflies for Dr. Remington in the Zoology Department. The ecological distribution of lepidoptera in West Virginia, not to mention much of the area South of the Holland tunnel was not readily available to the Yale zoologists. Spending two mornings a week in a meadow on the W.Va. State College campus with butterfly net, notebook and cyanide jar was a real stimulus to acquiring a rich vocabulary of humor. None of us students who collected were credited in the brief paper on the species variation of Coleas philodice as deduced from the phenotypic pattern of their spots, but I took some pride in seeing it published. Pierson College beckoned in the autumn and, to save train fare, my Mother allowed me to drive her prized 1946 Chevrolet sedan to New Haven via the West Side Drive through New York to the Merritt Parkway and into Connecticut. Mother and I carted my stuff up to one of the two rooms in the third floor of Pierson which we four Negro students had decided to share as roommates. Pierson, with a reputation as being very "white shoe" and with "Slave Quarters" seemed to be taking a risk in reducing its real estate values but we actually enjoyed the ambience. Unfortunately, one of our two rooms was on the opposite side of the hall from the other so we turned one into a living room and the other room housed two bunk beds. Yale had just begun allowing student telephones as I recall, and we enjoyed that luxury and the shared bill. Mother and I then went down Dixwell Avenue to see Aunt Princess and, because I was told that she had once worked for Yale during the 1920's and 1930's, we invited her down to see that one of her family had, at last, achieved admission to Yale. The University had provided maid service for its young gentlemen, as I understand it, well into the 1930's. Apparently these ladies tidied up, made beds, removed trash, cleaned and otherwise served the students. Such had been the lot of Aunt Princess and, for a maid to see a young member of the family enrolled as an Eli was a signal occasion. To see an expression of panic and despair on the face of your seventyodd year old beautiful aunt is a harrowing experience. Visions of fainting, heart attacks, strokes, rapidly course through your mind and both my Mother and I were quite concerned. Mother and Aunt Princess sat down on my unmade bed with the bedding piled at one end including the sheets and the folded blankets and had a whispered discussion which was so obviously private that I did not dare intervene. Mother seemed reassuring and supportive and after some minutes the previous atmosphere of pride and smiles and even a subdued laugh was achieved. The rest of the day was extraordinarily pleasant. I was allowed to show off my accomplishments and my second year was off to a running start Just before Mother left to return to Charleston via New York for shopping, I asked her about the incident which had so shocked Aunt Princess. Family progress was underlined when Mother, quite seriously, told me that Aunt Princess was afraid that the Yale authorities would seek her out when they saw the coarse woolen, WWI surplus blanket on my bed. It seems that she had purloined it years before when she left Yale's employment, and now it had returned! Retribution was sure to follow. I have told this true story to my own tribe, most recently my youngest son, the last of seven children, during his August vacation with me while swimming at Caesar's Creek lake park. We shared a coarse woolen blanket with olive drab trim which will remain in our possession until at least the 21st Century.
8. Yale Memories: A Look Back, By yolanda joe, Yale Class of 1984,Trumbull College. To the Tune of "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder
Looking back on when I was a little girl enrolled at Yale..... Then my only worry was for finals what I'd pass or fail..... Even though we sometimes did not get good good grades we were happy with the effort that we made! Sneaking out of Harkness, hang out with my Buddies at The House.... Greeted at the Bur-sar with, Girl, thought I told you not to charge that stuff! Trying your best to bring the water to your eyes thinking it might stop them from taking your lunch card!
I wish those days would come back once more why did those days ev-er have to go... I wish those days would come back once more why did those days ev-er have to go... we loved them so... Do-do-dupe-dupe-do-dupe-do-do...
Professor says Im sorry, can't accept ah-nother Deans excuse... Just one more, Ill give you nothing but the best I can really do.... Mama tells you baby, go to Sunday school... Sermons at Black Church are what get you through... Smoking pipes and waving hankys on the march thru Phelps hall.... Parents goin crazy especially when your name is called.. You grad-u-ate and learn that, college was alright... But while you were doing it, the diploma seemed out of sight!
I wish those days would come back once more why did those days ev-er have to go... I wish those days would come back once more why did those days ev-er have to go... we loved them so... Do-do-dupe-dupe-do-dupe-do-do…
16.Brotherman--By David Thomas, Y 1987
Brotherman, Brotherman where for art thou brotherman?
Where were you my brother when I needed you? Where are you my brother now that I need you? Let's let bygones be bygones And look forward to a brand new day
No more talk about selling out And who sold whom out Lest you should hear me shout
No more rehashing the past And all its painful scars
I forgive you my brother. I love you my brother. Don't you know the only way we can stand is together.
Yesterday they pitted you against me But today it's clear, now I can see That you are my strength, and you are my life You are me and I am you
So, what do you say my friend Are we brothers or are we not? You think that we can give it a shot
I stand here awaiting your earnest reply Don't leave me hanging, and don't say goodbye For you've got to know the reason why
I'm your brother in arms and yours alone The one, the only, Brotherman
18. Denise Byrd, Y'1988
In the foggy recesses of my memory, my relationship with Yale began when I was eight or so, maybe before. Every now and then, my father, an avid jazz fan, would load my sister and I into his Buick and we would take a Sunday ride to New Haven. He was hoping to catch a free concert on the green and we were hoping to get fresh ice cream before the concert and not on the way back home. The drive to New Haven was always a wonderful prelude to fresh ice cream. The road connecting Waterbury, the former brass capital of the world, to New Haven, the present home of Steve's Ice Cream, was nothing short of a tease with its dairy farms and large clear state reservoir. As we would drive down Dixwell Avenue (?), Yale would grow in the distance swallowing up everything familiar--everything like Waterbury, everything like New Haven, everything like us in our Buick--until there was only just Yale campus. I always looked up as we drove past those fortresses of higher education. Even though I lived only thirty minutes away, Yale was a place as rare and distant to me as the Buckingham Palace. The Fortress of Yale, I believed, was a place where the rich and famous went to school. My family was not rich or famous. Years later when I ended up in a boarding school, primarily for the rich, those Ivy covered towers slowly began to diminish in size and fierceness. Perhaps I could pass through one of those tall arches on my way somewhere. As a Dean's List minority student in an elite boarding school, I quickly learned that I would not have to take the same painstaking path to landing in an Ivy League as my nervous peers. Basically, I didn't have to apply to elite, hard-to-get-into universities. They applied to me. Uneasy with the notion that life was going to change and that I was actually going to college, I'd sit mute across from the Director of Student Placement as he rattled off the latest offer. "Yale was out of the question", I told him. "My mother would bring me chicken soup", I explained. After spending my entire adolescence in a secluded boarding school, I wanted out, out of proximity to my family, out of Connecticut. I wanted something new. Yale was definitely not on my future radar screen. Attracted to the idea of a creative curriculum, I chose Brown, got in early, and looked forward to life in Providence. I was cozy, happy, on my way out of Connecticut, when I promised my mother that I would at least apply to Harvard and Yale. I was leaving her. I had to give her that much satisfaction. I signed the papers, put them in the mail, went shopping for interview clothes, and looked forward to a free trip to Boston without any supervision. I didn't even think about the Yale interview. But, I still remember it. In fact, it epitomized my ensuing years at Yale, safe, but slightly off somehow. My alumni interviewer showed up in a corduroy jacket, looking slightly disheveled and as if he was as uncomfortable in the stuffy Dean's office as I. He immediately suggested we take a walk. That was my Yale interview--a stroll through the wooded paths of Choate. We just talked. I remember no questions. I just remember the tattered elbows on his cord jacket and the briskness of his pace. He intrigued me. After four years at Choate, I had begun to associate all elite institutions with stuffiness, protocol, you know, blue jackets with crests on them. This guy from Yale was no blue jacket. Two weeks later he sent me a note and a copy of the pages from the handbook outlining the theater department. We never spoke again. But, now I was interested. What could be the harm in taking the bus ride over for the accepted students' weekend? I could look inside. Take a peek. A weekend at Yale couldn't possibly be as bad as my Harvard experience whereat I awoke in the middle of the night and took the first train back to Wallingford. Boston, a city where blacks are expected to move over for whites on the sidewalk, frightened me. After my short but powerful experience in that scary, too-white, too-uptight city, I figured that maybe I should stick with what I know. In the tradition of well-worn corduroy, Yalies proved to be laid back and black--a combination that had been sorely missing in my life. It had been a while since I had been outside of my little coterie of black pals at Choate. At a grand total of thirty (out of a thousand students), we didn't necessarily love each other; but, we admitted to needing each other, like family. And like any other family carved out of circumstances, our similarities often did not extend beyond that one bond. Yet, here I was sitting on the floor with an ex-Choatie and her friend, eating Kasha, discussing Baldwin, and the pros and cons of Ivy Leagues in general. I had a feeling that in the Fortress of Yale I could actually pick and choose my black friends. Perhaps here I could reach that ideal state our surrogate Mom at Choate had told me about--the state of social identity in which you didn't feel like you have to change your clothes to be around your friends. Having become a bit of a hippy in boarding school, I often found my new self not fitting in when I arrived home to hang out with my "real friends". And, so, I longed for the day when I would not have to change my clothes to be around my pals. Later that night, standing in the House in the company of more Blacks than I had been around in years, something clicked. I felt at home--and properly dressed. I don't know if it was the kasha or the party at the House, or the cute guys; but I left that weekend knowing that I belonged at Yale. Maybe I could put my mother on a schedule. Maybe on the weekends I could meet my father for ice cream. Maybe doing the "right thing" and still feeling normal and alive was possible. In the Fortress of Yale, I felt I could finally have both elitism and comfort. I was wrong. I should have known life would not be normal when they placed me in a suite with three other "creative people". Perhaps here I should mention that I went to boarding school on an art scholarship. At fourteen, "When I Grew Up", I wanted to be Ruby Dee or Lorraine Hansberry. At Yale, in the company of my "creative roommates", I spent my freshman year not cramming and hitting the books all night but, instead, creating songs with my roommate on Biology so that we would not fail. On the weekends, while most freshmen sweated away in overheated dorm basements getting to know each other, we were out in New Haven nightclubs pretending to be foreigners because it was a good acting exercise. The only time I pulled an all-nighter was to learn a hard bit in Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neil. Somehow I wasn't fitting in. The realization that my life at Yale was definitely not going to be like my classmates' sunk in at a critical moment in my sophomore year. When I did not get into a popular seminar on Intellectual History, I went to see the prominent Professor in hopes of begging for admission. I will never forget the humiliation I felt as he explained that when he asked for a creative interpretation of his essay questions, he did not expect me to write fictional monologues. I cried right there. I was way off course and didn't even know it. After that meeting, I resigned myself to being different. I better find out what I was doing there or I'd find myself constantly in tears. Shut out. Wrong. Not quite what Yale was about. And once I accepted that I was not an academic, I found my Yale. Elitism became something new, something fresh. I started a weekly poker league and kept my apartment open to anyone who wanted to scribble in the tattered notebook on the table. More of my friends were graduate students than not. And more of my time was spent writing than reading. Somehow those tall buildings provided safety for me. I could just doodle and scribble down words that no one would ever read because hey, this was Yale. I let my hair grow wild, a la Don King, and started spending time at the theater in the House, which became one of the few places on campus in which I felt at home. There I met August Wilson, Lloyd Richards, Dennis Scott and a group of actors studying in the drama school and slumming in the House. They taught me what I was hungry to learn. At one point, the high point of my days was running into August on his way from a coffee shop with a million characters still fresh in his brain. He would rattle off lines in funny voices and I would know that I was next to greatness. This was the place where Theater had lived and breathed and died and resuscitated itself. It was okay to be an Ivy Leaguer because I was living in the footsteps of greatness. Giants. Pulitzer Prize Winners. It was okay to want to be Ruby Dee or Lorraine Hansberry when I grew up. When other students looked at me funny in my father's old worn leather coat, (which he inevitably threw out while I was studying in London), I could look back at them like you don't know what you're missing. You don't know what Yale is about. You don't know that this place is really all about theater. I'm not different. You are. In the mid-eighties, there was no better place to be black and involved with theater in America. Such crossbreed needs a very special place to feel at home. At Yale, I did for fleeting moments experience some beautiful minutes.
20. Erica S. Turnipseed, Y’1993--My first semester as a woman
On Friday, September 1, 1989 I became a woman. The change was unceremonious but immediate and complete. The day that I moved into Wright Hall on Yale's Old Campus was my first day of fullfledged 'womanity'. Ironically, I had attended the PreRegistration Orientation Program (PROP) and Freshperson Conference (with the theme "Life, the University and Everything"), but amidst my multitiered formal preparation into the world of Yale, no one had bothered to mention the change in status I was now experiencing. And compounding my new womanhood was my black womanhood, a phenomenon in itself fraught with peculiarities. My first year plunged me into a troubled sea of Donald Kagan, multiculturalism, and political correctness that I had only read about up until that point. The campus was awash with flyers announcing panel discussions, round tables, teachins and speakouts on the issues of the day. Considering myself openminded, I took it all in with grace. However, my interior world of roommates and friends and men ??(n?e boys) presented greater challenges. With no sisters to my credit (I have two brothers) I found living amongst fellow woman novel and occasionally difficult. The women who peopled my closest physical circle-my suite-were two very different white women and an Asian woman. Together, we represented affluent southern Florida, central New Jersey, smalltown Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York. While our school year together proved that Yale's system of matching up complementary personalities was mostly successful, I was not to know this truth for a while yet. As one of my roommates-naked and lotioning herself from headtofoot after a midday shower-talked to me incessantly on our first day as roommates, I wondered if I'd ever get accustomed to knowing so much about the habits of my nonrelations. Despite the fact that she punctuated every second sentence with my name, I struggled not to look at her because of my 'unenlightened' sense of decorum that told me not to look at the innocently exposed crotch of another, even if she is your roommate. And so I didn't all year. Seeking to find my feet in my new environment, I tossed about the campus that first weekend with classmates whose fragile friendships were the anchors of my new existence. Fortuitously, I found myself with what I thought were prospects of a boyfriend. When this very attractive southern 'gentleman' gave me his high school football ring to loop through my necklace, I was beside myself with joy and, at 2:00am on a Sunday morning, I floated up the Wright Hall stairs to my doom room. My roommates were already clad in nightwear and trading stories about their own escapades of the first weekend. My conquest however, had another level of seriousness. We considered the meaning of my ugly pendant that I wore with pride, and surmised that my 'beau' was a man of few words but great passion and therefore liked to express himself symbolically. Sunday afternoon was met by freshmen littered about the grass of Old Campus. I joined my PROP friends where they sat and immediately became the focal point. (Well, the ring caused all the stir.) And so I had the pleasure of recounting the simple romance of the night before. When they learned that I returned to my dorm room alone and hadn't so much as kissed my admirer goodnight, their prophetic silence forecasted an unpleasant outcome. The most worldly of the bunch informed me that I had blown it. "Erica, he was looking for you to sleep with him. Or something?! Why'd you think he gave you the ring?" "Because he likes me and he didn't know how else to say it." I defended my honor. "And he'd still like you now if you had slept with him!" Dumbfounded, I was unable to resist the humiliation of being marched to his dorm room by this same woman so that we could get further clarification. His roommate came to the door. Securing our names and whom we wished to see, he closed the door completely to relay the message. Returning after a few minutes, he pushed the door ajar and told me that my fickle beau wanted the ring back. As I listened to his words echo in my brain, I peered past him to see 'my man' scrunched into a lounge chair, his eyes trained on the TV screen in front of him. I responded to his roommate, "If he wants it back, he will need to come to my room to retrieve it himself." I smiled a smile that would become a fixture of my nascent womanhood and left. My accomplice was shocked but satisfied. I watched her as her thoughts scurried about her head and she assessed who had been the victor. I didn't show my hurt or disappointment at this rejection or my own naivete. Instead, I remained composed and wore my annoyance as a badge of honor. We returned to our assemblage of fellow new women and I stood quietly as my sidekick recounted the story. Satisfied that I sounded not too pitiable, I allowed them to bandy about the mantras of righteous women who can't take doggish men. My first year continued to offer life lessons in bite sized pieces. I found that my mouth was always full. Could it be that I was really so na?ve that I could expect men, or women, so new to this terrain, not to challenge my own womanhood at every turn? But 18 was the oldest I had ever been in my whole life and I presumed that anyone older than that had wisdom, maturity and perspective. The members of Women of Color seemed to have more collective wisdom and experience than all of their ages combined. Andrea and I, the only freshwomen in the group, listened as juniors and seniors spun out cautionary tales, and cried tears of frustration and anger. We listened to stories of men who were not ready for the fabulous women there were and women who felt challenged by their greatness. Women discussed their forays into bisexuality, their coming out experiences and their reclaimed celibacy. They talked about remaining whole and affirming themselves and each other. After many of those meetings, Andrea and I would debrief, each of us caught up in the intensity of the varied experiences of "of color" womanhood. Whereas my roommates and I were negotiating our individual identities in a collective space and Women of Color affirmed our many layers of identity, my women's a cappella singing groupThe New Bluesought to define our collective identity for each individual woman in the group. My singing group was a baptism by fire into the cult of white womanhood. Yes, of nearly 20 members, our group was among the more ethnically diverse singing groups on campus and boasted one Asian and three black women. However, we all integrated our racial and ethnic identities into our womanhood in radically different ways. And our singing group identity, like that of Yale in general, created a common denominator that was distinctly white and uppermiddle class in that it took for granted the products of race and class privilege. This truth was not lost on my black brethren and sistren, some of whom openly questioned my blackness when I first joined The New Blue. Tap night-the night I learned I had been chosen by the singing group-had been exhilarating (complete with a kiss and some dirty dancing with my momentary love). But the day that followed threatened my removal from the 'blackhood'. We were freshmen, and our loyalty to the inner black circle was fierce and unsophisticated. As I joined the lunchtime crowd at the black table in Commons that fateful day, the accusations of betrayal were etched into the body language and actions of my cohorts. Some ended their meals prematurely while others relocated to the hastilyformed black table beside me. Sensing the harbinger of trouble, Curtis, my ethnic counselor, sat with me. As he congratulated me for being tapped by The New Blue-then the best and oldest women's singing group on campus-he knew that this was the source of my problem. In the succeeding days, Curtis quickly did some damage control. Emphasizing to all who would listen how wonderful my membership to The New Blue was for "us," he tapped into my classmates' collective memory of the pride felt by their family and friends who reveled in their own matriculation at Yale. I continued to act normal, and together we overcame the suspicion of my wavering blackness and I was restored to the 'blackhood' with elevated standing. Despite the apparent solidarity of the 'blackhood', we nevertheless suffered our own brand of differential treatment. Black women on campus, and particularly firstyears, often reacted to each other based upon how they ranked in the collective assessment of black men. That is, the most soughtafter women (who usually fell into a particular aesthetic) built their primary friendships amongst themselves. Those of us who found ourselves outside of that group (I was among that number) had more free reign, but we all reacted to the system the men had established. Though some of this antagonism dissipated during our tenure as undergraduates, its freshness in our first year created a stronghold that most of us could only fight within instead of against. Perhaps my own way of bucking the system was to choose 'Renaissance men' for my affections. I reasoned that, because these men (a junior and a senior in particular) were actors and singers, they constructed their social realities beyond the 'blackhood'. They were universal beings, and therefore free of the scrutiny of the blackometer. But in casting my heart into the ring, I joined the throngs of white women who also sought to know their treasures. I also learned that my Renaissance men had largely opted out of the black thing in all things romantic. My status as a black first year who was not a member of the campus select won me no points with my 20yearold tantalizers. As the semester wore on and I cleared hurdles of womanworldliness and black authenticity, I felt suddenly wise beyond my years. But while my cohort of friends and my Brooklyn hometown affiliation paid for my forty acres and a mule amidst the righteous blackhood (after my initial fumble), my womanhood was more uncharted. The savvy implicit in the appellation of woman was a constant challenge. The tacit gameplaying in so many social interactions eluded me. The New Blue's beliefs about religion and feminism and body image illfitted my reality. And my membership in Women of Color allied me with women who many black women viewed as the [self] ostracized, the jaded, the bitter and the whiteidentified (because it was housed in the socalled 'white Women's Center'). But amidst the difficulties of defining my black 'womanity', or perhaps because of them, I was blessed to recognize the true friendship of a very remarkable woman who was to become the sistafriend I had never had before. It was a night whose coldness bit into our cheeks and crept into the spaces between our layers of clothing with the hope of finding exposed flesh. Tanya and I had gone to see a movie that night. Standing amidst snow on the crisscrossing stone walkways of Old Campus where our paths diverged to our dorms on opposite ends of the green, we talked for nearly an hour about everything our minds could think to discuss. There, in the space of two football fields, we were all by ourselves exploring the world through our words. Whereas our collective black womanhood may have initially drawn us to each other, the earnestness of our friendship nurtured a sistafriend closeness based upon mutual admiration and enjoyment. Now, ten years after my first foray into womanhood, I am humbled and awed by far I've come and what I have yet to experience. Embracing my 'womanity', I marvel at the many ways my friends and I revise our notions of our own womanhood. And Tanya continues to be one of the sweetest parts of that journey.
Table of contents 3 Susan Marie Jenkins, Y’1989— 4 Charles Martin, Y'1974— Tentacles and Sting 14
Susan Marie Jenkins, Y’1989-- A Part of the YaleTradition In Preparation
Being 17 years old in 1985 meant that my world consisted primarily of high school classes, parties, volunteer work, trying to evade some of my parents' rules and working to get into college. As I attended an all girls public school, my daily life was a blend of what some might consider public school chaos (public transportation, girls from disparate backgrounds, and overworked teachers) and the inherent feminism of an all- female environment. What I mean by the latter is that with out boys there was a sense of the rightness that girls would be the star athletes and class officers, win academic and leadership honors, run extra-curricular clubs as well as being the class clowns, discipline problems, and trouble-makers. I am not sure at the time that my classmates, or I, realized the benefit we were getting from this school and how it would affect our lives. For me, I think it played an integral part in my going to Yale and I am convinced that it was critical to my graduating with honors four years later.
Let me digress a bit before explaining what Yale eventually meant to me. Although my world in the spring of 1985 revolved around a small set of core goals and activities, the rest of the world was dealing with things like the anti- apartheid movement, the middle of the “Regan- Era”, AIDS, and the popularization of something called “black urban culture”. Being African- American in the United States, I think I may have been more aware of some of these phenomena than were my eventual Yale classmates. My up-bringing, similar to many others at that time, meant that I had developed a dual identity and an ability to travel in many circles. I saw the racism faced daily by African Americans as well as the individual and community strength we possessed. From an early private school education and other efforts of my parents, I was familiar with the “dominant” culture and from the rest of my life I was comfortable with my “minority” status. These are the worlds that collided when I arrived at Yale.
Even though I came from a middle-class background, from parents with college degrees, and with an expectation of going to college myself, I don’t think any of us thought seriously about my going to the Ivy League. While there was no reason to think I couldn’t achieve in that environment, it simply wasn’t the norm. From my high school of approximately 1,200 only one or two girls went to the Ivy League each year. Among my friends I think only one had her heart set on one of these schools. Even though my school was a public magnet school the counselors routinely advised White/European American girls to go to Penn State and Black/African American girls to go to Temple University. There was no precedent for an expectation that I would go to Yale. That is until I received a letter, based on my PSAT scores, from the Yale admissions office inviting me to apply.
Now this got me thinking. There was no guarantee of acceptance or success, but the invitation was enough to broaden my horizons. I had always assumed that I would go to college. I had the grades and background that would have made it a surprise if I had not attended. The press is always full of stories of the first African American to go to college from this or that family, but among my friends, classmates, and neighbors college was actually the norm. Many of us had parents with post-graduate degrees. Although my father grew up in a racially segregated Washington DC, walking past “White” schools to attend the one for “Colored”, three of the four children in his family went to Howard University. I am not saying that it was easy for them, and it is true that my parents were of the firsts in their families to go to college and in my mother’s case onto a Masters degree in education. Nevertheless, among the middle class African Americans of my world, it was practically common for us to go onto college. However, that said, I still hadn’t thought that I would go to an Ivy League college. I want to say that there was little racial discrimination at Yale and that I faced very little hostility or unfair treatment based on my race, gender, background (or some combination of these.) But, I cannot say that with confidence because I cannot have full insight into the Yale experiences of members of the majority. I didn’t feel that I had it particularly hard, but I cannot say that they did not have it easier. At the very least they did not bring an entire society’s doubts about their academic ability or right to a Yale education with them to campus. They, as a group, did not have to overcome nagging fears about whether they belonged or would succeed. On the individual level, I am sure that we all brought uncertainty about whether we could do the work. But, in my experience, African Americans and other students of color also brought many group level external doubts.
There were messages from majority group members that we were there only based on affirmative action, that we were not suited to the environment, and that we would be lucky to just survive (no mention of flourishing!) There were also pressures from within our own communities and families suggesting that our success was also their success. Even without the racism present in every other facet of society, which did find its way into Yale as well, we brought additional baggage to school that had to be dealt with in order to succeed.
Mostly, though, I brought the joy I saw on my parent’s faces, especially my father’s, when I told them that I had gotten into Yale. As soon as they knew I wanted to apply they also knew that they had to figure out some financial magic if I did get in; because if I got in there was no question of my attending. We all knew that to face life in America I needed as much credibility as I could get--and a Yale education certainly provides that. If I had to be twice as good to get half as much, as the saying goes, I knew that a Yale education was a good start. However, before the worry of how to pay arrived, their faces were radiant with pride at this achievement. For those first few moments and days we were all excited and proud. Then the reality of the whole thing started. I continued to go to other college open-houses and even went to the prospective student weekend at Yale with an open mind. The more people I talked to the more obvious it became that I would be throwing away a huge chance if I chose to go somewhere else. My parents, on the other hand, came to me a few days after my acceptance and many difficult financial discussions amongst themselves to tell me that I could go and that they would pay my entire way so that I wouldn’t have extra worries. Given that, any fears about the academic work and leaving home had to be put aside. I knew that if they were willing to sacrifice to foot the bill I absolutely had to go and better do well. Given this understanding of the situation I was determined to get over any concerns I might have.
Upon Arrival
I put on that brave face until my parents left campus after getting me settled in, and then I got scared. I didn’t know anyone and wasn’t sure what was expected of me. Luckily, as I had walked around campus with my family I ran into some others from the Yale minority recruitment weekend I attended the previous spring. We exchanged phone and room numbers. That evening I called around to see what the plan for dinner was and from that point had a built in set of friends. We did what White/European American people always complain about: we (a group of 10 black students and one Chinese- American who had grown up in Detroit) went everywhere together. White/European American friends told me later that they felt we were so lucky to have built in friends. But it wasn’t luck. We knew how hostile the majority group could be, and how unusual we were to our classmates. Plus, we all had things in common by being black-identified in America. Even though we were from different parts of the country we had common musical, television, cultural, and family lives. Many of us shared common values and to quote the advice from one parent was to say something we had all been told at one time or another. This set of friends guided me into college and gave me comfort. Over our first year we started to drift apart and develop separate interests and other friends, but as far as easing me into college life, they could not have been more valuable. Looking back at it now, I can see that while at Yale we dealt with our baggage. All of us in different ways, but we did what we had to to gain from Yale and to contribute mightily. There were opportunities available that I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere else. Personally, I was a member of the Fencing team, the Yale Hunger Action Project, active in the Yale women’s center, did several independent study projects, worked in the Yale archives, and made friends with a wide variety of people. Among the other African Americans, I had a friend who went on to compete in the Pan- American games in fencing, another who did research in Guyana on Fullbright scholarship, and another who went on to some political prominence in the republican party. These are not things everyone can do especially within the African American community. Being at Yale not only helped qualify us for these challenges it positioned us to have these kinds of opportunities. While I was learning and broadening both my skill set and my mind, I was also changing some minds about African-American people. I met people from groups I had no familiarity with and whom, it was quite obvious, had had little to no contact with African-Americans. Through Yale, I made friends who were openly gay and bisexual, who were millionaires, who were from places like Haiti, Spain and Japan, who were from every region of the US, who had never had a television, who had attended some of the most prestigious prep schools in the country, and who had come from some of the worse neighborhoods imaginable. For me, Yale was a safe place to explore difference, to figure out who I was, to try on different hats, and to grow up. The student body was so diverse people brought their own norms and the requirement that first year students live on campus forced us learn to accommodate each other and, in some cases, appreciate dissimilar life styles. Even though I met many of my African American classmates as soon as I arrived and started hanging with them, I was forced (much to my benefit) to meet other people through my initial roommate assignment, extra-curricular activities, and classroom interactions.
Of course I attended Yale for the academics, but anyone can describe the classes, guest speakers, cultural outlets, and campus.The things that have stuck with me and shaped my life are the intangibles. This is not to downplay the value of the academic training I received. Through several independent study courses I learned the fundamentals of social research that I built on in graduate school and that I use professionally today. The math and science courses that I took while I was still pre- med helped focus my mind. To this day, I can quote facts learned in a Latin American fiction course and theories from a course on the life and times of Freud. Yet, larger than any of the individual facts is that my success at Yale increased my intellectual curiosity and desire to continue learning, as well as giving me the confidence to move forward with my dreams. At some point I realized that I was at least as smart and talented as my classmates and that if I could make it at Yale I had more than a fighting chance of making it anywhere else.
Conclusion
While I did not have the class and experiential barriers described by the subject of A Hope in the Unseen53 my memories resonate with the cultural barriers described. I had the same doubts. I brought the same misperceptions about what my classmates would be like. And, in the end, I found the same comfort and success in my Ivy League experiences. Every day was not easy, but in total I would not trade the experience for anything. To this day, some of my best memories are early mornings in Payne-Whitney, looking out of my dorm window at cross-campus, studying in the Sterling reading room, and late night slices at Broadway Pizza.
53 Suskind, R. (1998). A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League. Broadway Books: New York.
Another way to look at it is that I am a statistic. Not the ones we so frequently see on the evening news or are led to fear by political campaign managers, but the ones described in Bowen and Bok’s book The Shape of the River.
Yale based on affirmative action and diversity goals. I am also one of those people to graduate from Yale with honors, receive a National Science Foundation scholarship based on academic performance, and earn a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan in four years. My memories of Yale are very similar to those reported by former students interviewed for their book. As did their respondents, I did not feel overmatched and that I would have been happier if I had had not had the opportunity and attended a school with more “evenly matched peers”. I was very satisfied with my education, I would make the same choice if I had it to do over, and I am confident that the skills and abilities that I developed as an undergraduate have had a strong and positive impact on my current success and well being.
54 Bowen, W. G. & Bok, D. (1998). The Shape of the River: Long- Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton University Press, Princeton: New Jersey.
As a statistic, rather than a case study, I have met more than a few people who can claim similar achievements. There is nothing miraculous or unreachable about us or about how we prospered at Yale and made it a better place for our presence. There is no secret formula or magic ritual that got us to where we are today or through where we’ve been. We are some of the everyday people who are a part of Yale’s history and tradition.
Charles Martin, Y'1974— Tentacles and Sting
Bio: Charles Martin, B.A. '74, Ph. D.'88, is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Queens College/City University of New York and a photographer whose images are internationally exhibited and part of such museums and public collections as Brooklyn Union Gas, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. His publications include the catalogue Home & Away and articles in journals such as Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Genre, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. He has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, the Tinker Foundation, West Virginia University and Yale University.
For my father, the fraternal twins of college experience were Lincoln University and Yale. His half was Lincoln and mine was Yale. Just outside of Philadelphia, Lincoln, along with other colleges around the country such as Howard, Spelman and Fisk, had long been a powerful, productive magnet for black students more comfortable in an environment where their color marked them as the norm rather than as exceptions or excluded. Langston Hughes was graduated from Lincoln after beginning at Columbia where, he wrote, he felt greatly alienated and less attracted to the Ivy walls than to surrounding Harlem and truck farming in Staten Island. Hughes did, however, take Lincoln to task by bringing to light that the college then employed almost no black professors, a policy he was surprised to find endorsed by a majority of students. Other Lincoln graduates include Kwame Nkrumah, Benjamin Azikiwe and the father of Paul Robeson.
All his life, many of my father's friends were classmates, and sons often followed fathers to Lincoln, as at Yale. For myself, it is mostly memories, not friends, that have endured from my undergraduate days.
Lincoln graduates could be inordinately proud. I remember going with my father to a reunion of several classes where one man stood and spoke of the glories of his classmates. There was rousing applause and then a weak shouting squeaked out of an old man who used a cane and moved with careful effort forward to the podium where he asserted, when he got there, that he was the oldest alumnus present, that few of his classmates were still alive, but that as a barely remaining group they still could do better and with more grace and vigor anything that was possible for any class represented in the audience. He challenged the first man, or any others who dared, to meet his class in any way. He said his few living classmates stood ready! His outburst was followed by even more feverish applause from all assembled.
When I was about to go off to college in Fall 1970, Dad enjoyed draping his face in a long, dampened look at gatherings of his 1940s classmates from Lincoln and woefully noting that I was not enrolling in his alma mater. "Make him!" one outraged graduate said once. "I can't make him" my father lamented. "And now it's too late to apply. I'll just have to let him go where he got in. To Yale!" A bright mood rekindled at this punch line, and the Lincoln men joked that Yale wasn't offensive as an alternative. My father retold the story at every possible occasion. He liked the idea that I went there, and he liked it, again, when years later I returned for a Ph. D.
In some ways it was surprising that I went to Yale. I had gone through most of high school expecting to go to college, but without thinking about where. My parents were not much worried by such a future choice either. Their only concern was that my grades be good. I always liked school and worked at it, and study to me was fun. I don't know if Yale actively recruited my high school, but one day the guidance counselor, Mrs. Donnelly, told me that someone with my good grades ought to apply there. Yale's name did not stand out to me. I do not recall it from before. Princeton was close enough to the Philadelphia area--my hometown, Yeadon--to know about, and I knew one older boy who had gone there. I knew about Harvard, too, as another local boy had gone there. Along with Lincoln, I knew about the local schools such as, Swarthmore, Drexel, Villanova, Temple, University of Pennsylvania. I told my parents what the guidance counselor had said, and they said Yale was fine. I believe I was the first person from Yeadon High School even to apply to Yale.
The decision to go was not automatic, even after the offer of admission. For a long time I wanted to go to Brown University whose reputation was "progressive," though it wasn't clear to me exactly what that might mean, and to my parents such an idea was irrelevant. Grading there was switched from the usual letter system to something else, but that is about all I remember of it. Maybe Brown went to Pass/Fail. Yale halfway followed suit and came up with a grading system of its own that left hierarchy intact, but minus one rung: Honors, High Pass, Pass and Fail were substituted for the usual letter grades, effectively eliminating only "D."
Because I was so interested in Brown, I made a visit there for a special weekend that showcased the campus to black students who had received offers of admission. The students were from many places, with a concentration from the eastern seaboard. Academic programs were advertised and described, and campus life was touted, but I don't recall the facilities such as libraries, dorms and dining halls nearly so well as the musical groups that played those evenings. (Years later I learned my way around Brown, academically, as I taught a year there in Afro-American Studies.) Isaac Hayes and the Cannonball Adderly Quintet performed, and I was a fan of both. The good time I had further inclined me towards Brown, but several of the school's students candidly appraised the weekend to have been a great few days, but a high rise from a usually more subdued and level plain. The place was nice, they said, but not as good as that weekend's atmosphere. I thought about that carefully and finally did listen to the many people, especially my parents, who were saying, that Brown was fine but not a rival to Yale in history, tradition or clout.
That visit was the only campus excursion that I made to help in choosing a college. I accepted Yale's offer of admission without making any inventory of the campus. I figured the school library would be good, that my room would have a bed in it, and that the dining hall would serve food not as good as my mother's. All proved true. I did, though, glance at the campus before moving in. Some high school friends and I drove to Cape Cod--a last outing of people who had gone to high school and graduated together. New Haven was on the way, so we stopped for a brief inspection of the place where a few weeks later I would start classes. I saw Beineke Plaza with its marble walled Rare Book Library and sunken sculpture pit, with freshman Commons--the freshman dining area-- behind. I found my room in Silliman College. An empty wine bottle was in a closet and layers of dust had accumulated all around. We found our way back to the car and drove on to the Cape.
Over my years at Yale, I came to think of the place as a tentacled creature. Yale is not a mother image. It is not soft and caressing. It does not nurse you at a breast. Yale is closer to a sea anemone, that poisonous animal that is beautiful at first glance to the little fishes, but which kills them when they approach its waving tentacles--unless they are clown fish, in which case the sea anemone protects them. In return, the clown fish lure other fishes to the anemone, which lunches on the catch. Once in a while the anemone makes a mistake, or is just in a bad mood, and it devours a clown fish too. I was originally attracted by Yale's waving tentacles of prestige, learning, the mythical name and a cache of snob cachet. In my first year at Yale, it was not entirely clear that I was immune to Yale's sting, though the selection process was supposed to have assured me that even though I might not have been the most handsome person on earth, nor the richest, nor the best athlete, I was fit to be a Yalie and, through four years of Yale I was guaranteed to be at least a clownfish.
Nevertheless, that first year was disconcerting. I became best of friends, by way of books, with Messrs. Sartre, Kierkegaard, Pope, Eliot and others. It also seemed that most whose acquaintance I did not make through a book I would hardly know at all. I had few friends and ate many of my first meals with my three roommates, one of whom was an outsize boor. He was convinced that college board scores made the man and, since he was white, he thought probably he had outscored all of us on campus. He talked of scores all the time but without filling in his numbers. This annoyed me though I knew that he couldn't possibly have outscored me in everything. My combined general score was a little over 1370, and my best specialty test was a few points over 720. My dentist in Philadelphia, whose son was about to go to Williams College, always said with approval that I'd have gotten in anywhere--"even if you'd been white," as he put it. School, and my parents, moreso, had made me quite used to being in general at least an equal among the races.
I led my roommate along paths that were trickier than he surmised. After having many times replied only obliquely about test scores, one day I brought up the subject with him and added casually that scores weren't so important anyway. He was not so sure about that, but conceded that there might be some truth to it, that someone with low scores might do well at Yale, or if not there then in life. My roommate went on to announce his scores and waited for mine. The end of the '60s and the beginning of the '70s marked affirmative action, and there were white students on the prowl to worry those for whom the usually closed doors had been pried a little ajar. I had outscored my roommate in half of the tests. Inwardly, I gloated and smirked and my minuscule opinion of this roommate compressed even more. We didn't much talk about test scores after that, which further thinned our conversation. Other black students--of higher and lower scores, alike--approved of my scores and took them to mean that public high school had served some of us well. In high school, on the days we received report cards, our teachers usually wrote on the board the names of the students whose grades put them onto the Distinguished Honor Roll and the Honor Roll. I usually made the "distinguished," which pleased me and my parents, though none of us was obsessed with grades.
Those high school grades likely would have gotten me some kind of academic scholarship to college, but my father never had such a thought. At Lincoln he had run out of funds and been forced to halt his studies for a couple of years while he worked odd jobs to raise cash to meet college costs and reenter. He never stopped resenting that his parents had not been able to help pay for his schooling, and he carried as a badge of honor the obligation to pay for the education of his children. Once I graduated from college, he never gave me a penny, nor did I ask, but he paid for everything until then. My school costs were, in his mind, the ones that his parents should have managed for him.
In college, race took on new dimensions. It became, for some, less an effortless state and more an exerted territory. In my hometown, black families lived for the most part together in a few neighborhoods, while whites lived apart in theirs. (There were no other groups.) There were a few blocks of spillage where the residents were integrated. The elementary and high school, however, were integrated and race did not define hard lines of friendship though, the school day over, most kids returned to their neighborhoods and that was where most time was spent. On summer visits to my grandmother's home in Culpeper, Virginia, as soon as I was out of the bus station and onto her farm and those of my cousins, the only people I saw were black--and they were mostly family and neighboring farmers. My parents, Southerners both, hated racism, but they, themselves, were not racists though my mother, informally and unstated, held most whites suspect and more or less on probation pending proof of some merit.
But Yale was a marked change, with everyone no longer limited to studying together, but now actually living together. I made friends of all colors and from many places--black, white, brown and yellow Asians, Latinos. In this, I was not alone, but friendships according to color were of concern to some. There were kids who actively sought out other black kids, searching for critical mass in numbers without much regard for affinity. There were also students who, simply, wanted nothing to do with whites--and felt that was the way it should be for everyone. I remember a girl from Honduras who found herself pressured. At Yale she found that many expected her to distance herself from whites, even though she herself was of interracial parents. Such issues were new to her and without use for some others.
And there were white kids, who, though they had occasional black friends, felt comfortable only so long as the circle of friends was mainly white. There were also black kids who, so far as I could tell, had no black friends at all. Many of Yale's students seemed concerned with impressing each other and the professors, but not with making friends. In most of my courses, we went into class and picked a seat without directing more than cursory greetings to anyone. After an hour or so in class it would be time to go. Most picked up their books and left, once again with few if any words to each other. There was a good deal of work to do, and since there are never enough hours in a day, numbers of students extended their waking hours. Will power worked for some, others swallowed cups of coffee, and a few downed amphetamine tablets as though they were vitamins. Winter nights were cold. I typed quite a few papers freshman year huddled in sweaters, wrapped in blankets and wearing gloves because, in the seventies, the country weathered the "energy crisis": worry that the country's oil reserves would run out and that overseas sources, not controlled by the U.S., might slow or close. To conserve, according to public service and news announcements, cold weather thermostat temperatures were to have been kept down at sixty eight degrees. And that was during the daytime, I think. Yale did its part by turning off the heat at night. As many students made it a practice to study late at night, either in their rooms or in libraries that remained open, such as the ones in the colleges, this made for a somewhat frigid student body.
This was, as well, the time of the Viet Nam war and, in New Haven, the then recent trial of Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, whose situation had been underscored by the university's attention when its president, Kingman Brewster, publicly doubted, the year before, that Seale would get a fair trial. Another prominent campus figure was the college chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, a warm-hearted person who spoke of the need to mix belief, social concern and action. The school year before my arrival at Yale, the college's classes did not finish, as many students became interested and involved in the Black Panther trial, from discussing its issues to demonstrating. Such attention to New Haven issues was rare and some did not like it. There were Yalies whose relationship with the city of New Haven consisted of little more than occasionally shopping for an ivy league outfit or a dinner out. Some students, at the announcement that the semester's exams were suspended, simply left town. As one student speaker at the freshman conference put it, phalanxes of limousines and long cars arrived, picked up wealthy Yalies, and escorted them early to summer endeavors.
Yale anti-war demonstrators, especially those of my class, often seemed to me to embrace causes as temporary diversions. With festive yells, Yalies packed off to demonstrations, but often they kept one eye on their watches intent, like Norman Mailer at the Washington peace march which spawned the book Armies of the Night, to return to parties at the end of the day, celebrating in the name of the cause, chic and hip. Of course, some of the activists were dedicated, but they seemed outnumbered to me.
I was among the ranks of the uncommitted. Not because I had no beliefs, but because I found no believable way to express them. The antics of the committed students were hilarious to me, and I knew that my joining their ranks would simply make me ridiculous not to them but to myself. I was never much of a joiner, so I observed. Often, I found myself sitting on the outer circle of events, analyzing them with an eye not cold but distant, recording and categorizing. I noted the things that I did not want to be. I noted the things that I would avoid being. But there wasn't that much that I wanted to be. Not surprisingly, the majority of the people around at Yale seemed to be preparing for professions. Some wanted to be doctors and lawyers. My parents thought that either profession would be fine for me, too, commanding respect and earning good salary. Lawyers are needed everywhere, my parents told me. For a while, I went along and thought I might be a lawyer one day. But there didn't seem to be any compelling reasons for doing any of those things. In spite of the enticements, I could generate no internal fires to drive me along those paths--respectable but without attraction for me.
It was easy at Yale to be insulated against the outside. A thirst for liquor could be quenched without leaving the dorms. (Liquor stores delivered door-to-door on campus, though the state drinking age, at 21, was set above the age of almost all of the students.) For dances, the "mixers" brought women from other schools onto the campus. And secret societies thrived, the most insular groups of all. All of that was changing a little in the 70s, nudged if not rocked by the radical events of the country. For black students, most of these activities were of little, if any, appeal.
Changes, such as they were, though, were seen as momentous, even upheavals. My class was the first that entered with women. A few years before, Yale began the transition from male to coed by admitting some women as transfers. The idea that a rising women's enrollment might cut down the number of entering men--since the entering classes could only be so large--moved the Yale Corporation in 1971, at the prodding of the alumni, to state it would never let the number of entering male Yalies drop below 1000, as this country--and maybe others as well--annually needed the benefit of 1000 new male leaders working for its advancement.
It was lonely away from home, its conveniences and old friends. Before college my visits away had been to two summer camps: Atwater, a black camp in East Brookfield, Massachusetts, farther away from home than Yale would be; and Onas, a Quaker camp on the Neshaminy Creek in Pennsylvania. Neighbors of mine went to Atwater, so a part of home was there with me, and Onas, the first time I went, was an easy transition as my stay was only two weeks. Now college was a real move, and my first extended experience without people I had known since kindergarten. At Yale, I didn't know anyone. The prep school kids had an advantage: they had friends from their schools. College was also the first time that most of my friends did not know one another. In fact, my college friends were separate pockets with little interchange.
One of my roommates and I, not much liking Yale, spent many nights considering alternative plans for the coming years. We thought of the leave of absence: go away for a while and see some world. Find out if it was as forbidding as Yale. But we couldn't decide when would be the best time to take off or where to go. A departure after freshman year would mean, whenever the return, facing three more years of the rut we now were in. We stayed.
The dining hall was another often desolate area. Whenever I entered it alone, I swept it for my few friends. If I didn't find one, I loaded my tray with food and headed for an empty table, preferably in a comer, and sat down to eat, silent, in the noisy dining hall. My college, Silliman, had tables for two by windows, and I liked them. Sometimes there would be two, even three people at one, but I remember one day seeing at the small table someone who had moved a chair to the side of the table so he faced the window, his back to the rest of the dining hall. He may have loved the view, whatever it was that day, but it was clear that he didn't want to be bothered.
Intimidation by the dining hall--or annoyance with it--was common and could be seen every day. I had a friend who most of the three years I knew him at school, would not enter the dining hall by himself. He either called friends on the telephone to come to lunch or he waited until his roommates were around, or he found someone in the courtyard to go in with. But he never went through the dining hall parade alone. There are other people who bring books to the dining hall, and then go directly to small, empty tables, where they will be free to read. A scrutiny of these people would have shown that they rarely turned the pages. They were not doing much reading, but without a book they would have been defenseless. Sometimes I would eat in other dining halls, just for change.
Still, the dining hall staff made an effort to make the place special. There were theme nights where the fare would be French, Hawaiian, southern, "health food" and so forth. There were also experiments with soy-burgers and other replacements for the typical. The staff generally was friendly. I remember an Irish woman, Mary, who always greeted diners with a smile. Michel, a French cook who, by the time I graduated, was director of all the university dining halls, would come to the French table that met weekly or so. Lina, from Nevis, especially liked me, and asked one day, "Where are you from? South Carolina?" I told her no, that I was from Pennsylvania. "All the same thing," she said with a smile. She found that very amusing. Why?, I never knew. She often would mention to me South Carolina (which is where my father was from). After dinner, the main thing was study--to the library for books and to read and write there. My library of preference was Sterling. And if I remember, correctly, the Cross Campus library had not yet opened. That first year, the lawn across the street from Sterling was blocked by wood pickets and behind them was a construction site. We were told that Yale was building the Cross Campus to house the books typically most made use of by undergraduates and so relieve Sterling of the heaviest predictable use. Traditionalists did not want the lawn destroyed, so the Cross Campus was built below ground and then the lawn was replaced. Before I graduated, the Cross Campus was opened complete with the tunnel that connects it to Sterling. I always preferred Sterling, particularly the large Main Reading Room, but also some of the smaller rooms near its entrance, such as L & B. I liked roaming through Sterling's stacks whose books, though often dusty, seemed unlimited. One reason that I chose to return to graduate school at Yale was the opportunity again to have use of Sterling. As a grad student specializing in Portuguese, I often felt that a portion of Sterling's holdings were mine personally. Hardly anyone worked in Portuguese, so the books often were untouched. When I pulled older editions off the shelves to flip through the pages, clouds of dust would rise.
Yale, the tentacled anemone, was attractive to me by the second semester of freshman year. I had gotten over homesickness and settled in to campus life, especially drawn to areas of expression. I took an art course, for which I drew, workmanlike. The professor gave general instruction, and his grad student teaching assistant was very kind and encouraging. She found in my drawings "childlike purity." She didn't have it in her to say I was lousy. I was and I knew it, so easel art was not long with me. Math was a let down, too. I placed into an advanced course, but did not understand anything the teacher said, a problem complicated by his bare command of English. I guess writing down the symbols was supposed to have been adequate. I met with the professor a few times to tell him I could not get through the advanced calculus course. He insisted I could, though he never indicated how. He seemed to feel that no one understood anything, making me just another yet to see the answers. One day, he said, I would get the equations. Finally I convinced someone that was not going to happen, and by then it was late in the semester and the more basic course, that I switched into, still calculus, had covered more ground than I could recover. I stopped going to math altogether and, I don't know why, at the end of the term I checked the exam schedule and took the final. Of course I flunked. It was the only definite thing that happened to me in that class.
Another course I had trouble with for very different reasons was the prerequisite poetry course for the English major. I was not sure I would be a major, but I always liked to read and it made sense to take a course whose major I might want. (I did in fact major in English.) In high school I may not have always liked the reading I did for English, but in this freshman year class it drove me to hell--some of it via Milton's Paradise Lost. One of the class's bookmarks was a student who found a way to insert into any discussion of hell, heaven or in between--i.e. just about anytime--some references to Dante's Inferno, which he pronounced always as though he were in an Italian class. I found him as insufferable as the readings. Back then, I don't think I knew what was canon, but I would have liked to have melted it. Nor did I like my professor, a polite, mild mannered man whom I would have liked to fire to any of the hells we were reading about. But I guess I was worried that he, like Dante, might have had a Virgil to bring him back, so I never tried to put him away. Instead, I skipped class regularly and remember at least two occasions when I sent a paper to class, via roommate. I was absent but the papers were on time. And I did well, too.
In other literature classes, I was always told that I read too politically. This was before the recognition of what today would be called cultural studies. Back then it was heavily New Criticism, especially at Yale whose professors included Robert Penn Warren and William Wimsatt. The critical winds swept over English literature but soughed softly without rustling up much criticism of society. I would find in books issues of class and social position, only to be told that such items were not the significant subjects of the works at hand. It was possible, indeed standard, to read Faulkner without more than a perfunctory noting of race, and to read, say, King Lear as a story about unfaithful daughters without noting why they were so, or that the bastard of the play, Edmund, was a social outcast who understood that his only avenue of respect would have to be paved by himself and over his opponents who could only be met roughly.
I kept reading literature, but found little engaging in the English Department. Offerings of appeal to me in the rest of the humanities were sparse. At such times during the first year, I thought a good deal of taking time off, but I decided to stay and make the best of my predicament.
There were some academic bright spots. One was learning French. The language opened to me France, which I came to like for both Paris and the southern coast. Besides the land, there was the literature. French literature had some things that I enjoyed, from the existentialists that everyone was reading then- -Camus and Sartre and committed littérature engagée--to the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas. But what especially drew me were such Francophone writers as Aimé Césaire from Martinique; Senghor and Birago Diop from West Africa; Frantz Fanon, the student of Césaire. The political writings of Fanon made immediate sense to me and fit much of the confrontation of black and white societies. Césaire made the same kind of sense, and I could lose myself, as well, in his poetry and theater, such as his play on King Christophe of Haiti. But Diop's work had the most impact for me, his Tales and New Tales of the griot Amadou Koumba. These animal stories and accounts of ordinary squabbles, jealousies and resolutions in village life stood out for me because they showed, in foreign language set in foreign place, life and circumstances, relationships and people far more like those I knew at home and throughout all my life than the violent, pained and polemicized work of celebrated American writers such as Richard Wright or William Faulkner. Diop's stories, fables of everyday, made sense to me and, most important, they were not bitter, but happy and sad; not distraught, but successful or facing chicanerie and setbacks. French, out of the classroom, opened a world of literature to me whose characters not only suffered and cried, but rejoiced and laughed. And they did so where to be black was not to be questioned or put on trial. Years later, Diop before he died revealed that the stories were lifelike, but contrary to what was indicated, not all taken from a single griot. Amadou Koumba was a composite, which for me meant that even more people knew such stories, and so multiplied their worth.
Another language that was a spot of some light for me was Arabic. I began to learn it mostly as a break from the school's typically Western offerings. I had really wanted to learn a West African language, but none were offered. Arabic was as close as I got, but as it was not what I really wanted, I let it go after a couple of years. There were other courses that I liked, and more particularly, professors whose minds sparkled.
I liked the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, from Argentina, and an especially good course for me was a seminar on Latin American literature. The teacher, a Latin American man, was informal, widely read, easy going and served a bottle or two of red wine at our weekly classes. He thought we should be relaxed and learn literature in a salon environment. We read a novel or a book of stories just about weekly, and wrote about them, each student presenting a paper in every class. The work of Garcia Márquez, Cortázar, Juan Rulfo, Nicanor Parra, Pablo Neruda and others was introduced to me there, and I learned more about Borges. When I met, a few years later, a niece of Garcia Márquez who studied at Yale, we used to talk about the work of her uncle.
Another excellent course was my senior tutorial guided by Emir Rodriguez Monegal. I would read for a week and then meet him in his office and we would talk about the books. My reading was Latin American novelists--nearly all the writing Garcia Márquez had then done--the occasional book of short stories, and many of the novels of William Faulkner. The fictional locales of Macondo and Yoknapatawpha were regular places of visit for me, and I much preferred Macondo, where one could dream and float in the clouds. Yoknapatawpha was mired for me in nightmares and mud. My final examination was before Monegal and, from the English Department, Michael Cooke, who I had not had any real contact with since dropping, freshman year, a course of his on Romanticism because the questions he posed were, to me, incomprehensible. This second meeting was much better. I got the impression that the final exam was a good moment for Monegal. Though I was an English major, I wanted to work with someone in Latin American literature, and I think the English department had its doubts about the wisdom of one of its majors so directed. Monegal looked at the whole thing, I always thought, as an opportunity to show the marvels of his department and the writers whose work he loved, and some of which he had published.
Latin American writing was so fresh that I wanted to go to Cuernavaca, Mexico, after graduation, and enroll in one of the several crash courses offered there in Spanish language. I dropped plans to go when, just before graduation, I got a job as a newspaper reporter. It probably worked out for the better, as that first interest in Spanish transformed into a desire to learn Portuguese which, many years later, I did in graduate school, where I stayed and got a doctorate and began my acquaintance with Brazil. Now I know Brazil reasonably well, whereas my experience of Spanish has been limited to a few days in Madrid and stops in the Cuban-Chinese restaurants that were downstairs and around the comer from an apartment I had in New York at 101st Street and Broadway.
Norman Holmes Pearson, a professor of American Studies, was another professor whose course I liked. His course was another that required weekly papers in response to fiction that we were assigned to read. I used to get up early in the morning and knock out the papers on my typewriter. I liked the discipline of it. I had worked the summer before as an intern feature writer at the Philadelphia Bulletin, and had grown used to, even quickened, by deadlines. I was used to typing, anyway, since my mother, once a secretary, had taught me to type in high school. I delayed and delayed learning typing until one of my last years in high school and then, I don't know why, I suddenly wanted to type. My mother had me at the keyboard and practicing drills before I would have had a chance to think about it, and at Yale, as at the Bulletin, it paid off. Meetings with Pearson in his office were always scheduled and on time. He told our class that if we were going to be more than five minutes late not to come, but to call and reschedule because after five minutes had gone by he knew he could shut his door and read at least twenty five minutes before someone else would come in.
Pearson was an old man, sometimes in need of a cane, who taught young literature. Some of the class' reading was Ishmael Reed, William Melvin Kelly, Toni Morrison, William Gass, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Erica Jong and Joyce Carol Oates. Out of class, Pearson and I talked about Tom Wolfe. The New Journalism was an increasingly noted trend and Wolfe drew further attention to the movement, both as a central organizer and participant, by collecting together into a book a disparate variety of articles whose primary connection was their different authors' striking use of openly subjective jounalism. I did not know, until he told me, that Wolfe had gone to grad school in American Studies at Yale, been Pearson's student, and had to write two dissertations to qualify. I wanted to know how bad the first one had been.. It was brilliant, wonderful writing, Pearson said. But not academic. So he had Wolfe write another. Pearson often had a glint in his eye and an impish grin. He would say such things and then ask how my own papers were coming along.
Aside from literature courses, I took some courses in writing, and two that stood out were ones taught by Loudon Wainwright and William Zinsser. Both courses required weekly writing--elements of this essay began in Zinsser's class more than twenty years ago--and Zinsser's demand always was for clarity and simplicity. He was an advocate of the ideas of Strunk and White, and after Zinsser taught his course for several years its methods became his very popular book, On Writing Well. His class was enjoyable and he always encouraged us. He wrote a recommendation for me for the job I took as a reporter after graduation, but I never saw him again for twenty four years.
His collected papers were donated to New York University, and his students were tracked down and invited to attend. I sat at the front of the room before the beginning of the ceremony--the acceptance of the papers. From the back of the room I heard his voice which, unmistakable, I recognized immediately. I got up and walked to where he was and, when he paused in the conversation he was having, I said to him, "Hello, Bill Zinsser." He replied in turn, "Hello, Charles Martin." Some teachers forget everyone, and some forget very little. Then again, there probably were not a great number of black students who had gone through his class, so I might have been a stand for color alone.
There were some professors who hated Yale. I took a philosophy course with one who barely required attendance and probably wouldn't have cared whether or not we did the reading. I remember meeting him at the end of the semester, on the lawn of the Cross Campus. We talked and chatted and, at the end of forty minutes or so, he remarked that the conversation had a great deal to do with the paper topic that I had planned. He told me I had earned an A, and he looked with a sneer at the students talking and walking around the lawn. He said he was satisfied with my work, and that was the end of the course! Unrelated to classes, I spent much of my college time listening to music and playing drums. In the marching band I watched the football games, though I stopped after freshman year, realizing at last--as I had not in high school--that the crowds came for the action on the field, not for the band. As I never liked football too much, I did not continue with the band. With the concert band I played in concerts around the campus and went on tour to England, Holland and Belgium. The high point for me was our bus trip through southern England where we visited Stonehenge, which then was not fenced off. You could walk up to the stone monoliths and stand among them. I played in a number of informal bands and, in sophomore year, helped start a band, Mainspring, that stayed together the rest of my college days. We played mainly on campus, in common rooms, dining halls, and sometimes outside on the Old Campus. Our taste was formed by everything that we heard. We played original music, most of it written by Jamie Snead, and whatever else we liked which included the work of Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Flora Purim, Yusef Lateef and Traffic. Most of us listened to a lot of Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, George Clinton and James Brown, but the band was basically a jazz group. The group's personnel varied over the years, but Jamie and I were always in the band. The band practiced in several places and eventually found a more or less permanent rehearsal space in one of the squash courts in Trumbull. No one played ball there, and we covered the walls with sound absorbing material. Eventually some other bands got wind of our space and moved in, too. At one point, there was equipment from three groups loaded into every bit of the space.
As a group, Mainspring was more about music than friendship. We did not spend time together collectively. We did not visit each other much. Some never visited at all. The piano player and I were friends. The guitar and saxophone players were friends. The bass player's friends were not in the band. Even so, we had dinner once a week in the same dining hall, though we usually did not all eat together. We might visit tables for a few minutes, but off the music stand, our interests varied: science, art, religious studies, writing, etc.
Along with playing drums in the band, I often played guitar in my room or in Silliman with some friends whose taste went from Buddy Guy and Junior Wells to Bob Dylan to Hendrix to Crosby, Stills and Nash. Again, we played in squash courts, but these were still used for squash. We'd go over and, if no one was there, we'd go in and play. The echo made it something like singing in a reverberation chamber. Guitar playing was not a strength of mine, but our audience for those informal jams was only us.
I was always impressed by items such as the squash courts, which were to me an example of the degree to which Yale furnished, physically, so much. Though Silliman was a rather ordinary looking place, the campus boasts architecture of many styles and periods, with towers, arches and courtyards replete with gargoyles, and the often plush interiors of the college's spacious common rooms, high ceilinged, wood-worked dining halls and hidden rooms with secret compartments. The Payne-Whitney gym contains on the third floor the largest suspended swimming pool in the world and elsewhere is equipped, for example, with a wooden horse mounted on curved floor without comers so that a polo player could practice shots alone, with the ball always returning. The gym also includes set ups of oars in a sizable mock up scull built into a small pool of running water to simulate the force of actually rowing through a river's current. The crew team could practice indoors. I was aware of crew at Yale since, before coming to school, Yale requested information of the incoming students, ranging from interests and dislikes, to size and weight. Accordingly, the school suggested areas and activities that might be especially appropriate.
The athletic department notified me in the mail that though I was perhaps a little too tall, my light weight suggested that in sport I might be right to be a coxswain--the person who sits at the stem of a rowing scull and bellows "stroke" to the oarsmen to set the tempo. I'd often seen people rowing in practice and races for crew along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, but I'd never thought much about the sport. And there at the gym, the training apparatus beckoned. One thing, architecturally, that I did not like was the look of Davenport College, where the pillars and white arches called up for me images of old southern plantations and imaginings of slavery.
Yale's exaggerated sense of scale that begins with gargantuan and grows to mammoth is not confined to the architecture. The Yale Daily News, rag that it was, was "The Oldest College Daily." Similarly, the Yale Record, was billed as the "Oldest College Humor Magazine." The marching band was the "Oldest Precision Marching Band." Yale's football team won more games than any other football team in the history of the nation. And, hyperbole of hyperbole, there is the supposed grandeur of the slogan, "For God, for country and for Yale."
The trip to Yale opened the door for me, too, to travel, exploration on my own. After freshman year I spent the summer in France. I had studied French through high school without managing more than a bare acquaintance with the language and the first year at college I learned a little more. A good way to learn for real would be total immersion on location--a visit abroad. My parents were not wild about the idea, but they did not oppose it since I had an older brother who lived permanently in Italy. I only wanted to travel for the summer, not relocate, so they were not too much worried that I would be lost to them. My parents must have seen it as a continuation of the move away from home, a step that was not traumatic rupture, but due course. For my father, to be away from home was to move forward through a cycle. He was from South Carolina and had been away from home for college and before that, too. Once, one of his sisters went to the train station to catch a train somewhere, and he went along to see her off. At the station while they were waiting, a friend of my father approached and said he had a ticket to Philadelphia for a trip that he could not make. He asked if my father wanted it. My father said yes. The train to Philadelphia was leaving before his sister's train, and my father told her that now she, not he, was the one sending someone off. He asked some others at the station to tell his parents, and he departed. At least I let them know in advance.
To help me find out about flights abroad, there were newspapers, magazines and word of mouth, all providing lots of information. Icelandic Air was cheap. You went to Iceland and on to Luxembourg. Paris, my destination, was a train ride away, just a few hours. When I exited the airport in Luxembourg, I went to Paris where I spent only about a week before going to southern France and spent the balance of the summer, several weeks of it in a campground run by Catholic priests--who seemed to be about the only religious people on the grounds. From there I made a quick trip to Italy and back to southern France before returning in the Fall for sophomore year. The following years I visited other places I had never been to before. I went to Key West and drove across the country to California. I went back to Cape Cod. I'd been bitten by the travel bug.
At Yale I had my first experience of living in a city proper, though the campus was in many ways removed from surrounding New Haven. Some of the colleges were surrounded by empty moats, imposing walls stood in front of just about all of them, and large iron gates demarcated Yale's domain. Even so, the gates were usually open. The campus was a fortress, but not a locked one as it would come to be as crime and fear rose in New Haven over the years.
New Haven was small and manageable, and struck me rather as a sleepy town. The downtown greens, once walkways of great elms before the city was struck by Dutch Elm disease, were essentially sprawling lawns. I heard otherwise about New Haven from Willie Ruff, a French horn player and bassist who played both classical music and jazz. He had recorded with Miles Davis and was a professor in the School of Music. I got to know Willie while I was an undergraduate, and also would see him while I was a graduate student. He told me about the days when New Haven was alive with jazz. Almost any jazz musician, he said, who played in New York City would play in New Haven before or afterwards, so there had been great music in New Haven all the time. Willie was a good person to know, as well, because he was cheerful and ever in good spirits, one of the folks who it was nice to see around campus.
Photography was twice an affair for me at Yale--as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. As an undergraduate, I was introduced to the darkroom by an upperclassman who informally taught several interested people. I watched him go through some basics of darkroom chemistry, though the way this guy did things it was more like making soup--quite inexact. I developed film and printed pictures, but all of them are gone, which is just as well, as I did not make too many images of note.
I was more interested in taking pictures than in processing them, which still remains true. It was not until grad school that I seriously applied myself to the darkroom and to image making, but that second time around I was working mostly in the Art School. It was at Yale, in the Afro-American Cultural Center, that I did my first photo shows.
Senior year I had a pleasant job. I was a freshman counselor. The pay was something like free room and board. The job was to advise about sixteen or twenty freshmen students. Advisement consisted of looking over their schedules, making suggestions about courses of study, and generally fielding their questions about the place. As a senior, the freshman counselor also stood to show, if there were any doubts, that four years at the place were manageable. I got along well with most of my freshmen, and being their counselor was generally no more complicated than keeping the door to my room open. If any of them wanted to come in, they would. Not surprisingly, I was closest with the several who lived on my floor, as they could drop in on their way to and from their rooms. Getting down or up the stairs from the floor below was hardly insurmountable, but the distance was sufficient that I did know that group less well. I remained for them more a counselor, while for the nearer group the relationship was more informal and less dependent upon an organized meeting. I can't say that I did anything for my counselees but I can say that I don't think I did anything to ruin any of them.
In my last year at Yale, I applied for a job as a newspaper reporter. The summer before I had worked as an intern reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, and I'd liked it, and it seemed a reasonable way to write for a living. My first job after Yale was at the New London Day. I tied down the job well before I graduated so, unlike friends of mine who had no secure next step, I was not worried about what was to come.
I had time to think about the soon to be finished years at college. Despite the difficulties of adjustment and the falseness and pretentiousness of many around me, I liked Yale. I discovered that Yale was the anemone whose tentacles could sting, but that I was a clownfish of sorts, comfortable among them, but soon to be in search of another home--perhaps a less stinging one. As for my father, he continued to remark that Yale, after Lincoln, was not so bad. He put a blue bulldog Yale decal on his car.