To celebrate my acceptance, my grandmother Gloria and my mother, in town from New York to help me move in, took me and my friend Monique out for dinner to Piccadilly’s, an all-you-can-eat buffet-style family restaurant—one of Atlanta’s many. We all sat down at a large square table, Mama and Grandma Gloria chattering happily about the wonderful Spelman experience I was about to embark on.
“You’ll need a white dress and gloves for the Freshman-First march through campus, Jodie,” my grandmother said.
“Oooo, yes!” Mama chimed in. “We can get something nice at the mall—and then we can also find your bedding.”
They both looked at me, beaming, while I stared blankly back, my eyes full of tears.
For Mama, my attendance at Spelman brought out a pride that went far deeper than me. Her sister, my aunt Lurma, had gone to a Black college, Grandmother Gloria and Great-Grandmother Lurline both went to Black colleges—and Grandma Gloria even returned to a Black college to become a tenured professor. I was stepping into a strong tradition in our family, and they could think of nothing other than how happy they were for me to be part of a history of triumph, determination, and excellence. But all I could feel was that I didn’t belong.
“Jodie, you know Lurma was Freshman Queen at Clark. Maybe you’ll run—I bet you’ll win, as dynamic as you are!”
I started to tune out Mama’s cheerful ruminations as my throat tightened and the tears started to fall. I wasn’t going to run for Queen—I wasn’t even going to make it through the first semester.
I was terrified of the girls who stared at me in the hallways, and of all the things I didn’t know. Terrified, most of all, that this sisterhood I wanted to belong to so badly, these rituals and traditions that my matriarchs embraced so easily, wouldn’t want me.
I sat there quietly at the table while my mother continued to talk with Grandma Gloria—talking through me, around me, detecting none of the fear on my face. I excused myself and found the nearest pay phone to dial my father.
“Daddy…I…want…to…come…home.” Each word was separated by a deep, exaggerated sob—I was losing it. “I hate it here. They hate me. I want to come back.”
“No, Jodie,” he said. “This is exactly where you need to be. It may not be what you want to do, baby girl, but it is what you need to do. Toughen up and handle it. You’ll be fine.” Click.
Daddy knew something I didn’t. He understood that Spelman would eventually change me, move me forward, as his experience at Lincoln University, another Black institution, had for him. “Handle it. Put your hands on it. Work through it. Toughen up!” This was the closest thing to providing comfort that I would get from him.
* * *
—
Lucky for me, our school’s president, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, was a staunch believer in commune. We were asked—demanded, even—to think and learn collectively. As freshmen, we had a ten o’clock curfew every single weeknight and on the weekends we had to be in by midnight, no exceptions. This meant that instead of exploring the streets or Atlanta’s other college campuses like Morehouse or Emory, we were made to explore ourselves, and to befriend one another. We were encouraged to really get to know each woman, and each story that came with her.
We ate, slept, and imagined together every night, learning about one another between teeth brushing, hair washing, and study sessions. Communing together day after day allowed the walls to come down. Surrounded by these girls, slowly, I began to straighten my back when I talked, and I learned to state opinions without a floating question mark in the air—a bad habit I picked up from my private school friends back home. I dabbled in roller sets, started carrying lipstick, and purchased a long white cashmere coat to wear with my combat boots—a touch of elegance to the edge. I nodded to strangers while walking through campus, and called out “Hey, girl!” to people I knew. And I started stepping into every room prepared to be my own hype man. Never downplaying, always dialing up. I even got myself a car, a beige hatchback hooptie that my grandmother sold to me for a dollar.
Dr. Cole insisted we nurture our spirits together, each week, in Sisters Chapel. Filing into our campus’s chapel on Saturdays to attend convocation became something I looked forward to—and a time to learn things beyond what was on the classroom syllabus. Dr. Cole called upon her own band of women, her “sheroes” as she liked to call them—luminaries like Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez, Octavia Butler and Susan Taylor—to put something useful in us. They read us stories and told us about the world—what it would expect from us, take from us, and give to us if we put in the effort. They also told us about hope, and about creating a world not yet imagined. We sat in solidarity each week—row upon row upon row of young women eager to hear words meant for both the mind and the spirit—words specifically for Black women and for future leaders.
Of course, we knew most of Dr. Cole’s sheroes before they even stepped onstage. They were famous, and we admired them from afar, as did the rest of the world—reading their books and the articles that chronicled their careers. But seeing them in person, walking about on our small campus, and standing onstage in our hot, sticky chapel without air conditioning, meant something more intimate. It meant that these women, these luminaries, belonged to us. Live and direct from our humble corner, Dr. Cole’s band of famous women sent a message to a world that watched their every move: These girls are our girls. And if you honor us, you honor them.
These women were giving us what Daddy had wanted from the Jungle, and what Mama had wanted from our bathroom time. It was a feeling of belonging to more than just oneself, of belonging to a warrior tribe.
Behind those large wooden chapel doors, closed to the outside world, it was like being right back in Mama’s bathroom getting my hair brushed one hundred times, where the words flowed easily and the love was obvious. We, Black women, were allowed to be all in our feelings, whatever they were—grateful, angry, inquisitive, bold, righteous—and whenever they surfaced. There, we learned how to simply be.
* * *
—
There is a moment in each of our lives when all we want to do is jump off a cliff, Thelma and Louise style. Or over a wall. Or out a window. Abandoning what is and surging forward—up and out—into the winds of possibility.
It is a typical freshman night on campus. And although I’m supposed to be in bed, I’m more focused on figuring out how to see Aaron. I’m willing to do whatever it takes, even turn my back on Southern protocol, in exchange for his hands—all over me.
My room sits on the second floor of HH, the biggest dorm on campus, spanning half a New York City block. We comprise the most concentrated amount of freshman women—all seventy-five of us could easily get out of control if the opportunity allowed. Academic challenge, political protest, sexual exploration—you name it, we are ’bout it.
Tonight, I’m perched on the back window of my dorm while my unsuspecting RA thinks I’m tucked in bed for the night. HH is built like a fortress—it has more bricks than windows or doors—and it’s where I must remain when the clock strikes midnight, according to Spelman rules. All freshman women have a curfew.
I dangle my legs out the window, just as Ramona dangled hers over the park wall when we were young, and I smile to myself. It’s now or never, I think.
The back windows of our dorm overlook a quiet courtyard. There are no streetlamps, just the moon providing its glow. I like the courtyard because these back windows conveniently allow for a different type of Spelman behavior—like, say, anonymously catcalling the cute Morehouse boys as they pass by during the day: “James, Jaaaames! We see you, cutie!” Even better, these windows are perfect for escaping into the night.
The Georgia night air is still and warm on my arms. The oversized T-shirt I’m wearing drapes off my left shoulder, exposing just enough skin to assure my guy, when I see him, I am not a virgin. And that bare shoulder alone gives me a strange confidence.
WAKE ME UP is written on the front of my tee in bold black letters, and BEFORE YOU GO GO on the back—the lyrics to one of my favorite songs.
I hold on tightly to my window frame and look out across the courtyard, then down at the steep drop below. I don’t dwell on the distance between me and the hard ground, or on the fact that my car has only a drop of gas, and I have even less cash in my pocket. I close my eyes, remembering how bravely Ramona used to jump off the wall around our park.
What’s making my heart race and the sweat drip down my spine is this boy, who is not a Morehouse student—or a student at any college, for that matter. He’s a drifter who lives downtown in a small, dark apartment with a handful of other people. He doesn’t work, he hangs out each night and sleeps all day. And when he calls my dorm hall phone, his voice is muffled and raspy, barely audible over the chatter of women near me. Often I can’t understand a word he says. But I can always pick up on what he’s conveying, which is: I want you.
Aaron’s told me he’s a rock star, but I’ve yet to see him perform. Nor do I care to. What I care about are his eyes and their smudged eyeliner, and the way his pants hang off his bare butt (Aaron doesn’t do underwear). And the way his hair is undone and slightly smelly, and the fact that he is always a bit dirty, especially his hands. And that he is wild.
What’s pulling me out of this dorm window isn’t the sex, although I’m sure we’ll have some tonight. What tugs is the promise of something I haven’t yet had enough of. Something Spelman and Dr. Cole and Sisters Chapel surely can’t teach. It is that thing that made Ramona jump over the park wall: reckless abandon.
There was something about the way Aaron inserted himself into the middle of our girls’ circle at an off-campus party one night that caught my attention. Without formalities or even a “Hello, my name is,” he interrupted our conversation and began talking, practically at us, clearly amused by his own arrogance. All the while he looked me dead in the eye, head cocked to the side, smirk visible on his face, as if to say Just watch. You’ll be mine.
And although from the moment I saw him at that party, it was obvious we’d never be a couple, I wanted him. And so I decided I would sleep with him, frankly, just to see what it was like. Not to fall in love but to experience his kind of sex, in his apartment, on his floor, with his strange friends in the room next door.
Aaron is the furthest thing from my parents I’ve ever met.
So I jump out the window into the night. Leaving behind all the good girls tucked nicely in their pretty little beds.
* * *
—
This was the end of the 1980s, when feminists took the form of lyricists. It was the era of Queen Latifah’s “Ladies First,” Salt-N-Pepa, and Monie Love. Black women were stepping onto the front lines and declaring themselves. Queen Latifah moved me, a Black teenager, in the same political way Gloria Steinem ignited a whole generation of white women to grab what was rightfully theirs. Female rappers during that time were powerful. Strong. Sexual. Complex. They spoke mantras that we could not only blast in our rooms and at parties on Saturday nights, but that we could use to empower ourselves.
It was also a time when media began reflecting life as I was experiencing it. For the first time we were seeing our complex selves on television—reaffirming what we were feeling inside. A Different World, a network television show that followed the lives of students at a fictional historically Black college modeled after Howard University, showed an ethnic mélange of kids who defied easy characterization. They tackled taboo topics like HIV/AIDS, and they were unapologetic about their individuality. Spike Lee had also just released School Daze, putting a spotlight on Black colleges like Spelman and Morehouse.
And amid all this, our Dr. Cole—Spelman’s first Black female president, breaking a hundred years of the institution’s exclusively male leadership, both white and Black, was in her second year. As Spelman’s new leader, she was shaking up the school in the best way possible. We didn’t see her as an agitating disrupter; she was loved by all. And it was her forward-thinking vision wrapped in the affection she had for us that allowed our school to evolve with the times.
Dr. Cole understood what we were craving: more diverse narratives, a louder political voice, and broader definitions of ourselves. Our sister-president understood exactly which aspects of the school’s tradition needed to remain and which needed to be updated. She deemphasized sororities and pushed for higher GPAs. She asked us to be thoughtful and respectful, but not too polite—and never quiet. She pushed us to support our own community, and to simultaneously think globally. Dr. Cole was replacing the white-gloved ceremonies that dictated campus culture before her with a culture infused with activism.
We could feel it, how important she was—the first president in our school’s history ever to physically reflect our predominantly Black and female student body.
Spelman was founded in 1881 with high ambitions. Eleven illiterate students and a meager $100 grew to six hundred students within a year. In less than five years the college was debt- free and backed by two of the wealthiest and most powerful abolitionist families, the Rockefellers and the Spelmans. And roughly a hundred years later, Spelman had become the highest-ranked institution among all historically Black colleges—and among the top ten women’s colleges overall.
Dr. Cole was the newest and most radical leader of this legacy. With her encouragement, we joined the antiapartheid movement, boycotting Coca-Cola products in support of South Africa’s divestment. We protested the Rodney King beating and took STOP THE HATE signs to the KKK rally that marched through downtown Atlanta every year. We were emboldened to take a stand for something, to have a voice. Dr. Cole removed some of the filters through which we saw ourselves, destroying outdated stereotypes of the “well-behaved” woman and connecting the shifts taking place in our culture with what we were experiencing firsthand, every day, at school.
She ushered in a new guard of students who were energized by change—who had aspirations that did not just stop at a top-notch education, proper etiquette, and the prospect of marrying a Morehouse Man. There would be a new type of Spelman Woman during Dr. Cole’s tenure: women who respected and understood the culture as it was, while bringing something new to the table. Not just the desire for education and marriage—but for education, marriage, and activism. We were asked to challenge the world, and be vocal in our opinions—but to do so with grace and decorum, as our mothers had wished for us.
Dr. Cole saw women as being defined by their actions. She saw tradition as something to disrupt if disruption was called for. She could identify the better in something that had been one way for too long—and she reigned not from up high, but from down in the trenches. With us and among us.
Wrapped in Kente cloth, wearing her hair in a short natural, she’d walk the halls and touch each of our faces with the palm of her hand as she passed. Imbuing each of us with the strength she possessed just from walking through life as she did, as only truly great leaders can do. Because, as I was starting to learn, sometimes the king is a woman.
* * *
—
“How did your mom end up running the Panthers?” I asked as I stretched across my friend Ericka’s bed one afternoon during our sophomore year, staring up at the ceiling while De La Soul played from her CD player.
“Because she’s a badass. It was after Huey went to jail, got strung out, and the Party needed a leader. But those fools couldn’t handle her.” Ericka shot straight. “Men,” she smirked.
I sat quietly with that answer: “Because she’s a badass.” I sat with it for hours in Ericka’s room that day, mulling it over in my head, turning it around on my lips, practicing in words what I wanted for myself in truth: “badass.”
I used to spend hours tucked away in Ericka’s dorm room, comparing notes on our lives before Spelman. Sitting on her bed, we talked a lot about traversing worlds. The effort Ericka
described when negotiating different spaces was a feeling I knew well. How it felt to conform or switch whenever we entered our mostly white schools—and then at the end of each day, crossing back through the cultural divide to reenter the familiarity of home. Home, where Jacob Lawrence images and African sculptures adorned the walls and the Negro National Anthem was sung before bed. Where Donny Hathaway and Gil Scott-Heron—or Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver—weren’t just figures we read about, but people in our everyday lives.
My father taught my sister and me about the importance of self-determination as a form of revolt, and for the same purpose, Ericka’s mother taught her how to literally be a revolutionary. Ericka’s mom was Elaine Brown, an involved member of the Black Panther Party, who often conferred with Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver during late-night strategy sessions. In true revolutionary form, Elaine eventually moved up in ranks and became the Party’s first and only female leader. Radicalism was the backbone of both Ericka’s and my experiences.
Some people assumed my dad was the American Dream, starting from nothing and making his way up in life so that he could offer his kids more. But of course, he was just as radical as Elaine. My father saw, thought, and acted through the lens of race—always. His mantras (Don’t let white people confuse you; Let the children be free), his decisions (I’m only paying for a Black college, Jodie; Figure it out for yourself); even his career path—were all centered on his desire to disrupt. His approach to life was radical; in everything he did he was going straight at the problem, tugging at its root and eventually destroying it.
Ericka’s mother felt the same, believing that the only way forward was to destroy an unjust system and rebuild with an eye toward consciousness. Neither was concerned with accommodating or fitting in. Progress, for both of them, meant making people feel uncomfortable in whatever space discomfort was required. Ericka and I, each in our version, were daughters of the revolution.
The Bold World Page 5