The sand painting that purported to welcome people.
Dang! Senegalese folk have some mad dramatic welcome art! In the U.S. we just print WELCOME on a mat, and leave it outside our front door. West Africans invoke the wrath of God. I saw that painting, and was like, “I’m a foreigner and a visitor. I am not an enemy. I repeat. Foreign. Visitor.”
Shot:
My schoolmate Chip sits in the foreground. He’s wearing a polo shirt and has a video camera hanging around his neck. We are on a boat. In the background is Goree Island.
Goree Island was the final point of departure for many slaves headed to the Americas and was our next major stop on the trip. Monsieur Gueye had arranged for a guided tour of the compound where wave after wave of captive Africans were housed, processed, and shipped westward across the Atlantic, if not from this exact location, then from others like it along the western coast of the continent.
Walking in the centuries-old footsteps of ancestors is probably the most humbling thing I’ve experienced in my life. We stood in the cramped cells. We held the weighted shackles. We looked through the infamous doorway of no return that opens directly onto the ocean and offered a one-way ticket to the afterlife for troublemaking captives. At low tide, people fell to a rocky death. At high tide, sharks, accustomed to fresh meals, awaited the occasional plunge.
This was, by far, the quietest portion of our trip. No jokes. No enthusiasm. Silence that sounded like what it was: our awe and respect.
Shot:
Our teacher, Monsieur Gueye, stands under a tree that towers above him. When he was a child he planted this tree.
One of the most enjoyable and shocking parts of the trip was our visit to Monsieur Gueye’s village. The adults with us joined the village elders and talked about adult things.
We students hung out with some of the kids there, who took us on a long walk. They all commented on our appearance: “You look so old!” they kept saying to us. Apparently, for our ages, we black American kids had a Benjamin Button thing going on. We joked among ourselves that America had caused us to suffer from racism-induced early aging. After the village tour, it was time for the meal, which is always the highlight of any of my trips.
I remember one of the women of the village “introducing” us to a live chicken. He was really cute. Then she told us we had just met our dinner. I was fine with that. To this day, I count that meal of extremely fresh chicken and couscous as one of the top five meals of my life. I loved it so much I took a picture of it. I was foodspotting in 1995!
Our Senegalese journey ended with a visit to two extremely different places. The first was a resort on the coast. Again, our teacher wanted to provide us with a range of impressions. The resort was hot (physically and metaphorically). I got really excited when I found out there were nude beaches nearby, but then very unexcited when I saw it was heavily populated by fat, naked Germans. That was not the image I wanted of the Motherland.
One of the best meals of my life, foodspotted in 1995.
The last significant stop we made was a cultural center built in honor of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Senghor was the man. A noted writer, poet, cultural theorist, and politician, as we learned on the tour, he was the only African admitted to the vaunted Académie Française, a French institution that has existed for centuries as the authority on the French language. Senghor is also well known for creating the cultural-historical concept of Negritude, which sought to elevate the cultural history of Africa to the same level as that of Europe. In his own way, perhaps Senghor was living the tenets of a book we’d call How to Be African.
The trip had more than met my expectations. I did buy a crapload of kente cloth at amazing prices. I ate local foods. I purchased “African art.” I returned to a site of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. I dodged aggressive street vendors who were so persistent as to follow us for a mile. But the absolute moment of magic occurred while my friends and I were swimming in the Atlantic Ocean.
The waves were smooth and massive. I was in Africa looking west back to America, and I thought to myself, “I could die now, and be so very happy.” It wasn’t that I had a desire to die. What I felt, though, was a sense of completion, satisfaction, and contentedness I’d never known before that moment. Making that journey did not make me any blacker, but it completed a circle in my life that I hadn’t realized was broken until it was made whole again.
But I Don’t Want to Kill People
The reason why people send their kids to a place like Sidwell is to get them into a place like Yale.
—Cheryl Contee
I’ve always loved talking to people, asking them questions and researching options. From the time I was in elementary school, my mother began tasking me with all family phone-based research. Whether we were planning a vacation, searching for a gutter-cleaning service, or looking for just the right pair of Ma’s cowboy boots, it was my job to call around and get the best deal. I was absolutely made for the college-search experience, and I especially loved college fairs.
Unlike in my phone research, I could interrogate these college representatives in person and collect the shiny brochures full of idyllic photos that make each campus look like a retirement home for young adults where everyone plays sports, everyone reads outside, and everyone is happy. There was never a question about whether or not I was going to go to college. Sidwell’s tuition was an investment in improved college prospects, and I was not about to waste it. But, as sophomore year and standardized testing season began, I didn’t have very strong ideas about where to apply. I just knew that cost and financial aid were going to be important.
I’d almost had to leave Sidwell for financial reasons after my freshman year, and convinced my mother to keep me there only after extensive lobbying. I sold her hard on my desire to stay there, explaining that I’d just been elected as vice president of the Black Student Union, was doing well in classes, and all my friends were there. Meanwhile, I made a bold and persuasive case directly to the school’s development and financial aid office, explaining that I might have to leave because of money and asking them to increase my grants. I figured it would be a loss for both of us if I had to drop out for financial reasons. They looked good on my résumé, and I looked good on theirs! That experience taught me that sometimes the best way to get something is simply to make your case and directly ask for it. You might just get the affirmative answer you’re looking for.
Most significant, I made a deal with my mother: she would continue to cover the cost of Sidwell, and I would be responsible for covering the cost of college. I readily agreed to take on that debt burden. It was easy to do at sixteen years old. I had no idea how much college tuition was or that it would increase at over three times the rate of inflation.* Like the U.S. government, I figured I’d have a way to get the money when it came time to pay up, but for my high school self, this deal meant that in addition to attending college fairs and information sessions, I attended special scholarship fairs and did independent research on every possible way to pay for school. At one scholarship fair, I had an unforgettable encounter with a man from the navy.
I never had any intention of going into the navy or any other branch of the armed services. I was a hyperpolitical, self-righteous, semimilitant kid who attended a Quaker school, railed against U.S. imperialism and “no blood for oil,” and remembered proudly and loudly that black folks had refused the Vietnam draft. As I was walking by the navy booth on my way to some non-military destination, a bald black man in uniform tried to sell me on the navy and how much it would pay and all the great leadership and technical skills I would acquire with its money. I had to cut him off.
“I’m sorry. I’m not really interested,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to kill people.”
“Oh, you don’t have to kill people! You can work on the mechanical side.”
“But then I’d be helping fix machines that people use to kill people, so basically
I’ll be killing people, and I don’t want to kill people.”
“Okay, but you could work in our technology division. Satellites! Radar! Networks! All the cool stuff.”
“Right, but once again all that cool stuff is in the service of killing people, which I already told you I don’t want to do.”
We were at an impasse. He was trying to convince me that the navy had all this great opportunity and money to cover my college costs. I was trying to convince him that murder wasn’t really my thing. The man became frustrated and called in reinforcements in the form of an older white man drenched in medals (probably for killing people). The Decorated One warmed up:
“So I understand you have some hesitation about applying for a navy scholarship,” he said confidently.
“No, no hesitation at all. I’m definitely not interested. As I told your colleague here, I don’t want to kill people.” Did the black dude think that a white man would be more effective at getting me to compromise my non-murder values? I stuck to my guns, and eventually both men moved on to other prospects.
By my junior year at Sidwell, when it was actually time to apply, I had developed a little more clarity around my college goals, and the last place I imagined I would end up was a New England liberal arts school. I had recently read Andrew Hacker’s book Two Nations, which chronicles persistent racial and class segregation in America. According to Hacker, some of the whitest states in the U.S. at the time were in New England. The idea of committing myself to this region for four years freaked me out, but my fears weren’t only over race. I had become obsessed with the region’s notorious coastal and air pollution—I was also a little environmentalist—and I imagined stranded whales rotting on a litter-strewn, segregated beach patrolled by racist cops and owned by preppy frat boys who beat black kids like me with their lacrosse sticks. The End Times, basically.
Even beyond the issues of race and flesh-dissolving oceans, attending a New England liberal arts college felt redundant. Part of the reasoning behind attendance at such schools is to prepare yourself for mainstream society and figure out how to “play the game,” especially as a black person in America. I thought six years at Sidwell had already accomplished that. I had become comfortable among the upper class and the powerful. I went to parties in Potomac, Maryland. I got a part-time job at the Washington Post, due to a Sidwell connection. Chelsea Clinton signed my yearbook! I became an inside man.
Most important, my big lessons from Sidwell weren’t all dark and oppressive and horrific. On the contrary, I made great friends and received a great education. The teachers there pushed my mind much harder than I’d been used to, and the resources I was able to exploit there are the foundation for most of what I’ve made of my life. Those resources included early access to the Internet (1993!), impressive science labs, a real focus on writing, and the general idea of entitlement. By “entitlement,” I don’t mean “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine!” I mean the sense of personal possibility. It’s places like Sidwell that produce people who feel that they can do anything they want, and that the world is their playground. Their (our) default orientation is “Yes, we can.”
Still, all the acclimation had exhausted this brother, and I was pretty sure I’d had about enough of white people, at least for a while. I’d learned valuable lessons and was ready to go home.
In my mind, home was a historically black college, specifically Morehouse College in Atlanta. The older brother of one of my best friends had graduated from Sidwell and pursued a combined engineering degree program from Morehouse and Georgia Tech. I saw his path and wanted to walk in his exact footsteps. That would have been physically difficult, since I stand at about five feet nine inches, and he’s over six feet, but metaphorically speaking, I saw his path as my future.
I looked forward to a college life in which I didn’t feel the constant need to defend or speak for my entire race. I figured a black college would offer me that. Then my friend Paul, two years older and attending Harvard, sent me an e-mail that changed my life. I’ve since lost the original, but the gist of his message was, “You really need to check out Harvard. I’m having a great time, and I think you’d like it here.”
Paul is one of those guys for whom I have extreme respect. We had spent ridiculous hours together working on the high school newspaper, Horizon, and when you regularly work with someone until four a.m., you either discover that they’re one of the best people you know, or you begin plotting ways to make them disappear. With Paul, it was the former. My mother loved Paul, too, so his opinion went a long way in our household. Shortly after his e-mail, I attended a Harvard information session at Sidwell early one weekday morning. I was shocked by the appearance of the man running the session. He was black, short, partially bald, and immaculately dressed in a suit, white shirt, and bow tie. My first thought was, “A Black Muslim is in charge of Harvard recruiting? Where’s the bean pie!?” The man, of course, was not a member of the Nation of Islam. His name was David Evans, and he was (and still is) a senior admissions officer for Harvard College. He’s responsible for much of the significant boost in the enrollment of minority students at Harvard since the early 1970s and has been honored numerous times in recent years for his contributions. I don’t remember anything specific that he said during that high school information session—I think I was too distracted by the bow tie—but his presence was unforgettable, and the fact that he was at Sidwell representing Harvard left a massive impression on me.
With Paul’s recommendation and the bean pie–less, bow-tied admissions officer on my mind, we added Harvard to the Summer Thurston Family College Tour 1994 (STFCT 1994!! Woohoo!!!).
Like our camping trips of yore, we loaded up the family vehicle, an Isuzu Trooper at this point, with the essentials: AAA map books, peanut butter, books on tape, and the family dog, Honey. There was no such thing as a Thurston family road trip without the dog, and her opinion probably counted as much as my own in the college-planning process.
This tour reminded me of my visits to DC private schools six years prior, and I had as many instant judgments this time around.
I don’t remember much of Yale besides the physical darkness. I found the Gothic architecture a little frightening, and the city of New Haven felt like an afterthought compared to the school’s campus. The whole place made me feel gloomy, and I couldn’t get past it.
The idea of MIT was a natural fit in some ways. I was a big math and science nerd and figured I would end up working in math or computer science as a profession. MIT is a school that refers to its buildings by numbers, which I thought was cool, but it was also trying too hard to convince us that there were “women” and “fun” available there. The tour hosts actually showed us a video talking only about how much fun students at MIT have. The school doth protest too much, I thought, but once I actually became a student at Harvard, I was surprised to discover that MIT did indeed know how to party and certainly black MIT was the hub of much of black Harvard’s social life.
My mother and I tried to visit Northeastern University but couldn’t find it for the longest time. In the search process, we came across the intersection of Tremont Street and Tremont Street. I’m not kidding. If you wonder why Boston drivers are so famously terrible, consider that they have to navigate space-time paradoxes like this, and cut them some slack.
Harvard, contrary to these other experiences, just felt right.
My tour leader was named Peter, and he was a member of something called the Crimson Key Society. After I enrolled, I determined that these student volunteers are disturbingly enthusiastic and love Harvard a little too much. They smile all the time. They have little anecdotes about everything. I don’t think they are capable of expressing anger. If you are ever in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you should test this out by doing your best to annoy them. They’re unbreakable. But on my first-ever visit to campus, I actually found Peter’s excitement exciting.
Cambridge was beautiful, and so was the school’s campus. Peopl
e were playing sports and reading outside, and just like in the brochures, everyone looked happy. That tour affected me for reasons other than the pleasing appearance, though. I also got this inexplicable feeling that this was a place I could be myself.
My mom and our dog, Honey, had not joined me for the tour. They were posted in the Cambridge Common, a triangle-shaped park at the center of Harvard Square where, in 1775, George Washington first gathered a group of volunteer fighters that would become the U.S. Army. In her own stories of how I ended up at Harvard, my mother would always recount how she saw me returning to them in the park: “You were floating, and I knew it. This boy wants to go to Harvard!”
Being Black at Harvard
No one said hello.
The day I moved into my freshman dorm in Harvard Yard began early that morning in a room at the Susse Chalet motel three miles north of Harvard Square. My mother, our dog, Honey, and our Isuzu Trooper arose in the modest accommodations, like on so many previous Thurston Family road trips. My mother boiled water for tea in her portable hot pot. I walked the dog. But there was more excitement on this day. Moving into your freshman college dorm is an exciting time. The kids are moments away from being able to do whatever they want with whomever they want. For parents, it’s the same: “Get out of my house, you freeloader. I want to invite some friends over and drink without having to worry about you ruining it.” In my memory, the actual act of moving in is replayed in slow motion, like a car crash. But to this day, beyond the visual impression of station wagons, footlockers, and hugs, most of what I remember is that no one in town or on campus looked me in the eye or said hello as they passed.
How to Be Black Page 9