Hill Women

by Cassie Chambers

  Then I felt uncertain. It was late spring by the time I received the acceptance letter. I had less than two months on campus before I would leave for the summer. If I was going to transfer to Yale—and I knew from the moment I opened that envelope that I would transfer to Yale—I wouldn’t come back to Wellesley. I had spent a lot of time building a world for myself in this place. Even in the midst of my roller-coaster relationship with Diego, it was a place where I felt welcome. I had deep friendships and casual acquaintances. I couldn’t believe that I was willingly walking away from it all.

  But, at that time, I was someone who placed the possibility of achievement over existing relationships. Maybe it started when I left Berea to go to UWC—when I walked away from everything and everyone I knew in order to pursue an opportunity outside of the mountains. Maybe I believed that in order to become the person I wanted to be, I had to blindly chase objective achievements.

  My mother was over the moon when I told her I was going to Yale. I remember calling her on my cellphone from the student center and hearing the awe in her voice. For the next week, she answered her phone with “Hello, this is the mother of an Ivy League student.” Aunt Ruth was similarly impressed. “Well, Yale, now, that’s a fancy school,” she told me proudly.

  The rest of my Owsley County family was less excited. I announced I was transferring to Yale at a family birthday party. “Huh,” Dale said, a flicker of wariness in his eyes. He knew that he didn’t understand this world I was part of, and he wasn’t going to talk about something so unfamiliar to him. “I may be an old ignorant hillbilly,” Dale says often, “but I know enough not to let anyone else figure it out.” The rest of the family offered faint words of congratulations before moving on to talk about my cousin’s new girlfriend. I wondered, in that moment, if I had my values wrong. I wondered if my mother had felt the same way when she’d told her family about her acceptance to Berea College years before.

  My parents picked me up from Wellesley at the end of the year. I was perfectly capable of driving myself home to Kentucky, but they wanted to see Yale, and this gave them the perfect opportunity. We drove back to Kentucky through Connecticut and stopped in New Haven. I felt a small prick of pride when I stepped onto campus for the first time. I made sure to tell anyone at the tour who would listen, “I’ll be going here this fall.” There was something freeing about being an admitted student there. I still wasn’t sure I belonged, but I knew I could at least fake it well enough for others to believe that I did.

  Diego had told me he was proud of me for getting in to Yale, but I don’t think he liked it, deep down. I think it threatened him that I was on equal footing with him, made him feel as though he had less power in the relationship.

  Not too long after I arrived at Yale, he screamed at me during yet another fight, “Do you want me to break up with you? Is that it?”

  “No,” I responded calmly. “I’m breaking up with you.” I hung up the phone, waiting for the emotions to hit me. I expected to feel sad. Instead, all I felt was relief.

  I never spoke to him again. I didn’t need to. I now belonged in the world he had introduced me to. I was no longer anybody’s guest.

  “Cassie, your credit card is for emergencies. Maybe cool it a little,” my father said through the phone. I knew he was right. In my first semester at Yale, I was using my credit card a lot. Yale was surrounded by trendy bars and elegant restaurants. Students flocked to them, and I, trying to fit in, did the same.

  For most students, spending money wasn’t a problem. The median family income at Yale is $192,000. Nineteen percent of students come from the top 1 percent income bracket, and almost 70 percent come from the top 20 percent. There are more students from the top 1 percent income bracket than from the bottom 60 percent combined. Only about 2 percent come from the bottom 20 percent. That’s a lot of numbers just to say: Yale students by and large have money. They could afford to buy a drink or two every night.

  In 2018, Yale estimated that it costs an average student $73,180 for tuition and living expenses per year. I was shocked when I learned that approximately half of my classmates received no financial aid to help defray this cost. They came from families that could afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year just for college tuition. There was no way my family could do that—the annual tuition almost certainly was more than our annual income at the time. Even with my substantial UWC scholarships, I still received additional assistance from Yale. My father joked that he was glad that “Yale thought we were poor,” since it meant I could afford to go there.

  Yale felt more privileged than anywhere I had been before. By that, I mean that Yale students seemed to have certain advantages other people didn’t. A lot of aspects of life just came more easily for them. I had caught glimpses of privilege at UWC and Wellesley. But at Yale, privilege was the norm. It was pervasive, all encompassing.

  UWC valued internationalism. It wasn’t necessarily rooted in money—it was about how many obscure cities you had been to, how daring your travels had been, how many hostels you had slept in. At Wellesley pockets of the community prioritized money, but it was more common to value inclusiveness, almost radical inclusiveness. At Wellesley I learned that the spectrum of sexuality didn’t stop at LGBT—you also had to include QQIA+.

  But at Yale, students valued the privileges that our society so often holds in the highest regard: money, power, and connections. I know there were pockets that didn’t place much importance on those things, but, in all honesty, those things were part of the reason I was drawn to Yale. I intentionally and doggedly sought them out. I thought they were necessary to succeed.

  I had never lived in this type of environment, and I spent hours my first semester trying to decipher its complex status code. Plastic purses for rich girls, I typed into Google one night. I searched the images until I found one that matched, and I ordered my first Longchamp bag the next day. I turned to eBay for the things I couldn’t afford. I bought a used Burberry scarf and a deeply discounted used Gucci purse. My stomach dropped when I lost the scarf at a party a few weeks later. Unlike many of my classmates, I couldn’t afford to buy another one. I wasn’t always successful at my attempts to decipher these hidden rules. I still haven’t been able to figure out who makes the black ballet flats with the gold design on the toe.

  Navigating Yale wasn’t just about learning how to be comfortable around wealth. One of my friends comes from a well-to-do family in Alabama. But even he felt out of place when he went to Yale for law school after attending a state university. “It’s like everyone else is playing a game,” he told me years later. “It’s not just that you don’t know the rules—it’s that you didn’t even know there was a game being played.” By the time he figured out how this game worked—network relentlessly, befriend powerful people, host and attend dinner parties—he felt like he was a year behind the rest of his classmates.

  My parents did their best to support my newfound desire for overpriced things. They didn’t understand it, but they wanted me to feel comfortable in my new environment. I cringe when I remember telling my mother, just before I ordered the scarf I would later lose, “You don’t understand. Everyone has a Burberry scarf.” That statement wasn’t quite true, but it felt true then. My mother, ever self-sacrificing, told me to use her credit card to buy it.

  When my mother was in high school, she was on the homecoming court. She was thrilled, but worried that she didn’t have anything appropriate to wear. Granny knew, without Wilma saying anything, that Wilma needed a dress for the occasion. Granny broke into Papaw’s money box, found a ride to town, and bought Wilma a brand-new one. It was a brown knee-length dress, and more money than they could afford, but Granny wanted her daughter to feel comfortable, even special, for the event. After hearing that story, I understood why my mother bought me the Burberry scarf.

  * * *

  —

  Along with my new exte
rior, I added a twist to my interior narrative. People on campus were curious about the new transfer student, and it didn’t take long for me to realize they lost interest when I started talking about a small town in the foothills of Appalachia. It sounded so middle class, possibly even poor. But not the type of poor that was trendy to take an interest in. I thought I saw their eyes glaze over as they looked for a way out of the conversation.

  Eventually I began telling people the things I believed they wanted to hear. “I grew up on a farm in Kentucky. We had horses,” I would say, hoping to conjure images of manicured fences and well-pedigreed racehorses. I never told anyone that the farm I mentioned was in a holler called Cow Creek, or that the horses were nothing more than old farm animals. They didn’t ask too many questions. Most of the time they would laugh and say something like “Well, a real-life Southern belle, all the way up here in New England.”

  The Yale community valued intelligence, so much so that being smart could, in some ways, make up for a lack of money and social standing. I threw myself into my classes, staying up late and waking up early. I chose classes based not on what I was interested in, but on what I thought I could do well in. I earned good grades, and I think some classmates began to respect my drive and achievement. The better I did in my classes, the more I began to feel I had objective proof that I deserved to be there. I graduated from Yale with a perfect 4.0 GPA.

  By graduation, I was pretty good at behaving like a person with privilege. I had almost convinced even myself that this was who I was. I knew how to dress for a cocktail party, and what to wear to a formal event. My residential college hosted a series of events for seniors designed to teach us how to behave in different types of social settings. Our final event of the year was a lobster bake with unlimited lobster. It was the first time I had ever had lobster, and I analyzed everyone around me to make sure I was eating it correctly. I felt as though I had, again, constructed a façade, an outward-facing version of myself that I wanted to show the world. It was important to me that it stay intact. In hindsight, I wonder how many of my classmates were doing the same thing.

  I look at this, the impulse to turn myself into something I wasn’t, and I’m a bit disgusted with it. Now I’m not even sure that this transformation was necessary to fit in, to be valued, at Yale. Even if it was, I wish I would’ve been strong enough to own my identity and roots, to recognize the worth in the ways I was different from other students. But, like a lot of people in their late teens and early twenties, I desperately wanted to belong, to have friends, to fit in. I wanted to be able to seize every opportunity available to me, the opportunities that my family had worked hard to give to me. I didn’t think I could do that as just myself.

  * * *

  —

  Yale felt surprisingly male. It’s not that Yale didn’t have plenty of programs designed to support and empower women. It did. Tons of them. And, as at most progressive universities, gender was a topic discussed frequently and thoroughly in the classroom. Those efforts, however, did not entirely erase the feeling that Yale was a place where men belonged more than women, where male voices mattered a bit more than female ones.

  After my first year, I walked through a Yale spring reunion. I knew Yale did not admit women until 1969. So, of course, I also knew that all of the classes before that year were male—only it was different seeing it in person. The unbroken sea of masculine faces was a powerful visual reminder: for many years, women weren’t welcome here.

  But it’s not all history. When I was at Yale a certain section of socializing revolved around fraternities, many of which were clustered on streets close to campus. Just like the finals clubs at Harvard, the male members controlled access to this part of social life.

  I stuck around Yale for an extra year to complete a combined bachelor’s/master’s in public health. That year, the fraternities gained national attention when one frat made pledges march to the Women’s Table—a fountain that commemorates women at Yale—and chant “No means yes; yes means anal.” That same year the Justice Department began investigating Yale for failing to eliminate a hostile environment toward women.

  I wasn’t surprised. Many times I’d heard men objectify women in the dining halls. I’d seen them selectively allow women into parties based on their appearances. I’d had several friends talk to me about how handsy a guy had gotten at a party, and how he persisted even after the woman said she wasn’t interested. Many of the women justified this behavior based on the man’s drunkenness. “He didn’t mean to cross a line, I don’t think. He was just drunk,” I heard more than one friend say.

  I think a sense of entitlement was at play. It’s hard not to feel entitled to things when the whole world tells you that you are. Yale students are told that they are the best and the brightest, that the world is their oyster. Powerful people pass through campus on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure I once saw Tony Blair and Denzel Washington in the same day. There’s a sense of invincibility that comes from it all. And, if an institution—such as a fraternity—tells you women are among the things that are yours to take, you probably start to believe it. Years later, I watched my Facebook newsfeed fill up with my classmates’ stories of “Me Too.” The harassment, objectification, and assault at Yale had been even more pervasive than I’d realized. In 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the nation focused its attention on the good-old-boys party culture of Yale. Are people really surprised? I thought.

  I’ve talked with plenty of female classmates who didn’t feel the same way about Yale as I did. They found it supportive, nurturing, a place of true equality. And I do think it’s true that Yale, as an institution, tries to foster inclusiveness and parity. It’s equally true that there are many good, thoughtful men at Yale, both as students and as administrators. But I also know that I’m not the only woman to leave Yale feeling as though this institution was not entirely a place for her.

  None of this means that I didn’t have an invaluable educational experience there—I did. I had the privilege—and, yes, privilege is the word I mean—of studying with some of the brightest students in the world. At Yale, I felt like the opportunities available to me were increasing every day. I began to really believe that I could go anywhere, be anybody, do anything.

  * * *

  —

  My mother’s world was expanding around this time as well. When I was growing up, there were few things that received as much scorn from my mother as alcohol. She was opposed to drinking, so we didn’t keep alcohol in the house. Once, when I was a teenager, I found a few beers in the fridge. I immediately notified my mother. At the time, I was convinced some horrible human had planted them to make God mad at us. Now, I wonder if maybe my father just didn’t remember to hide his leftovers after his Super Bowl party.

  My mother’s deeply rooted feelings about alcohol came from her childhood in Owsley County. There, alcohol use doesn’t just describe something you do; it describes who you are. You are either the type of person who never drinks or the type of person who is drunk all the time. The judgment leads many people who do drink to do so in private.

  Historically, there was also secrecy around alcohol production in Appalachia. Moonshine gets its name from the way it’s made: at nighttime—under the shining moon—so that no one can see the smoke coming up from the still. The first moonshiners trace back to just after the American Revolution, when Scotch-Irish immigrants brought their whiskey-making traditions with them to the mountain hollers they settled. Moonshining increased in prevalence during Prohibition and the subsequent Great Depression because it was one of the few ways mountain communities could make extra money. They shipped most of the moonshine to larger cities, such as Chicago.

  Moonshining began to decline following the Great Depression, but it still thrived in communities that had strict liquor laws. Owsley County was such an area: until a few years ago, it was a dry county, meaning it was i
llegal to sell alcohol there. Several of the surrounding counties were also dry, so the moonshine market remained strong. When I asked Aunt Ruth if moonshiners still existed today, she answered: “Why, Lord yes!” My father told me about a man who approached him in a parking lot a few years back with a mason jar and a conspiratorial smile. In 2018, law enforcement busted a moonshine operation in Louisville, Kentucky.

  I’ve never been offered any moonshine myself, but that isn’t terribly surprising. Alcohol has a gendered history in Owsley County. Young men were almost expected to go through a phase of excessive drinking, “sowin’ their wild oats,” as people like to say. Women were not given this leeway. When my mother was young, one of her brothers showed up at high school “dead drunk” after drinking with some friends. Granny and Papaw rolled their eyes and sent him to bed to sleep it off. But Granny and Papaw wouldn’t let Wilma attend any gathering that might have alcohol. “You can’t be around those drunks!” Granny would exclaim. Anyone who drank was bad, Granny thought, but women who drank were especially bad.

  Even though many Appalachian communities are dry, there is not a statistical difference between alcohol use rates in Appalachia and the rest of the country. Appalachia does report a lower incidence of binge-drinking than other parts of America, but the overall alcohol consumption is about the same. Maybe this is a sign that things are changing, that alcohol use is becoming more accepted. In 2013 Owsley County made it legal for stores to sell liquor. Berea still prohibits alcohol sales in stores, but in 2015 the city passed an ordinance to allow some restaurants to sell alcoholic drinks by the glass.

  My mother retained her wariness of alcohol well into adulthood. Once, when we were at dinner, my father asked her if she would like a glass of wine. She responded, “I most certainly would not,” as she shot him a look of disdain. She was offended that he would even ask.