My Vanishing Country

by Bakari Sellers

  But I knew I could finish college because I’d seen my sister and brother do it. I spent lots of time on the Morehouse campus with my brother Lumumba when I was around eleven and twelve. I was allowed to carry his and the other football players’ helmets after the games. I had a front-row seat into college life and the intellectual conversations that were happening around us. I’d sit in my brother’s bedroom listening and joining in on discussions on everything from charter schools to the socially conscious lyrics of southern hip-hop groups like OutKast and Goodie Mob. My brother and his roommate would play a Goodie Mob jam, stop it, deconstruct what was just said, and start the song back up. We were strictly into southern rap. Atlanta hip hop, in particular, was big with us, and I’m sure that was part of the reason that going to school in that city appealed to me and Jarrod. In high school, Pastor Troy’s “No Mo Play in GA” was huge. In college it was all OutKast and the Dungeon Family.

  The moment my brother accepted Morehouse’s offer, I saw an invisible network become visible. Graduates he didn’t know were calling him. I was literally experiencing an element of the famous Morehouse mystique come alive.

  Years later, I had no idea Jarrod got accepted at Morehouse until one of our counselors told him in church one Sunday that I was going to go there. Jarrod saw me in school and said, “Yo, you going to Morehouse?”

  “Yeah, I’m going.”

  “Alright. I got my letter, let’s be roommates.”

  “Cool,” I said, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  III

  School Daze:

  The Making of a Morehouse Man

  When I arrived at Morehouse College, I was only sixteen years old, but no one guessed my age because I was six-foot-five and some change. I arrived with Hercules, my four-foot-long ball python, which probably should have been a dead giveaway, but my age was a kept a secret, at least until my mother sent a huge bouquet of balloons to the dorm months later that said “Happy 17th Birthday.” I was mortified, to say the least.

  Although pets were prohibited on campus, Hercules lived in my dorm room without Michael, the residential director, ever finding out—maybe because Michael wasn’t around much since he was newly married. Michael treated us like grown men, having only one rule: don’t disrespect me and make me write you up.

  Jarrod and I moved into Room 122 in the honors dorm called Graves Hall. It was one of those old-school college dorms with one twin bed to the right and another to the left. I had my snake, and Jarrod had his television. We were the only boys from Orangeburg at the time, two among a group of people labeled “country.”

  * * *

  Morehouse was unlike anything we had ever seen. From the moment we walked on campus in downtown Atlanta, we knew we were someplace special. Large statues of black men stood throughout the campus, and dorms were more than a hundred years old. The school was founded in 1867 to teach children of former slaves to read and has grown to be one of the most prestigious, private, all-male educational institutions in the nation.

  Freshman orientation constantly emphasizes the “Morehouse mystique,” the school’s legacy, and the “Morehouse man”—men like Martin Luther King Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Herman Cain, and others; we learned we are mayors, scientists, actors, top government officials, writers, politicians, and activists.

  The institution is very careful about revealing what exactly are the ingredients of the school’s successful Morehouse mystique, but part of it is raising a young black man’s consciousness, from the moment he walks on the campus, drilling it into his head that he is someplace special, that he is part of a society that holds him up, and that he must make sure his fellow brothers do the same. It is the experience of going through something very challenging and coming out of it stronger and with tight bonds between those who supported you or struggled alongside you on that journey.

  I remember something Henry Goodgame, an administrator at Morehouse, told us: “Regardless of whatever they said you can never do, you’ll never be, you are coming to a place where we all know that you can succeed; if you give us an opportunity to use what we know, we will help you get it. If you want to be like a man on the street, you want to be dealing with drugs, then stay in the street, because there is a whole industry for that—go back out there; but if you want to be here and you want to be a leader for your race, a leader for a global society, then you’ve got to work with the formula that we have, that we know works.”

  The orientation ceremony is designed to be a sacred moment for the freshman. It’s a rite of passage, and far more than dropping a kid off at college and helping him get his room straight. We all gather with our parents in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. It’s a sight to see: about seven hundred young black men, all dressed alike in the school’s colors, same black tie, same white button-down shirt, same pants, and same maroon blazer.

  Dressing in uniform is not only ceremonial, but it’s a key piece of the mystique. The idea is that you lose your individuality, developed in so many different hometowns, and become a class of men who are destined to lead. We dress like one unit, which says: it matters to me, your brother, that you are successful because you represent me, and I represent you.

  During the ceremony, the administrators and students give powerful speeches, telling us to look to our right and left because we are in a room of greatness. This is a school, they say, where giants were groomed. As we look around, we see poor kids, rich kids, country boys, urbanites, former thugs, science nerds; there are international students, children of celebrities and kids of diplomats; there are people raised by struggling parents and everything in between. But we all have two things in common: we are black men, and we are all at the top of our classes. Exceptions to stereotype, we are all young black men who want to be serious students.

  Of about four hundred kids at Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School, only about five boys, including me and Jarrod, were part of the top 25 percent of our class—the rest were girls. At Morehouse, hundreds of black boys graduated at the top of their classes.

  During a parting ceremony, parents are told they have done the right thing. They are asked: “If you can’t leave your son at Morehouse, where can you leave him? The streets are not safe; the world is not safe; but here, your son will build a network that will be to his advantage in the long term.” We all leave the chapel, walking arm-in-arm with our parents toward the school’s large gate. Once we get there, we are told to stop, and our parents are told to keep walking through the gate. While their backs are turned to us, the gate is closed and we head back to the chapel. By the time our parents turn around, we’re walking away, leaving them as boys forever.

  My mother says it hits parents right then and there that their little boys are on their way to becoming men. “I cried as hard with Bakari as I did with Lumumba,” she says.

  * * *

  Once we shed the regalia, we could see how different we all were. There were the Houston boys, who wore only Polo boots. The DC guys wore only two to three colors—black, red, and blue—and they loved futuristic sneakers, like the Nike Air Foamposite, and hoodies. The Atlanta guys had their own dialect. And since they were on their own turf, they were comfortable wearing flip flops and socks. The New Yorkers wore massive white T-shirts and hats that were intentionally too big. They could be obnoxious because everything that came out of their mouths was “New York City.” The Detroit guys, in their Coogi and Fat Albert sweaters, were the sharpest dressers of all. They tended to be suburban black kids with corporate executive parents who desperately wanted their sons to experience what it felt like to be around other African Americans.

  Jarrod and I were “country.” Our attire was a combination of ill-fitting clothes we once thought were cool—anything from Belk department store. We wore Nautica, Polo, and Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts and added a pair of khakis if we were trying to dress up.

  Despite our outward differences, we all noticed that something was actually happening; the speeches and the
way the administrators and older students carried themselves was quickly rubbing off on us. We were constantly told that we were part of a brotherhood built on helping each other achieve. We started to believe we were part of an environment where you stay woke, and it was our responsibility to keep our fellow brother awake so he didn’t miss what’s offered.

  Something in the air encouraged mutual respect, but we were still very young with a lot to learn. On that orientation day, Jarrod and I met someone who’d be an important part of my Morehouse life from the first day to the last. The same way Jarrod started on me the day we met in high school, I started on Brandon Childs. He was from outside of Atlanta, not country but not city either.

  Whereas people assume I’m a basketball player because of my height, there was nothing about Brandon that screamed baller. He was only six-foot-one, he wore glasses, and he was quiet. “He was a kind of lanky, kind of goofy kid, who liked to dance, and he wasn’t boisterous,” Jarrod recalls. So when Brandon told us he had a basketball scholarship at Morehouse, which was very rare, I started trash talking: “If somebody looking like you got a basketball scholarship, I know I can get one.”

  My trash talking never stopped until I saw Brandon on the court, dunking on people, shooting threes. He was a brilliant slasher, and he played defense. Morehouse didn’t have a good deal of basketball success, but during the four years we were there, Brandon turned the team around. He was that good.

  Brandon became a great friend, but Jarrod never let me live down my early comments to Brandon: “Of all the people Bakari chose to talk trash about, and literally on the first day of Morehouse, is the guy who ends up becoming one of the stars in all the history of Morehouse basketball.”

  What made this especially funny to Jarrod is that there’s an ongoing joke among my friends that I’m not as good of a basketball player as I think, despite my love for the game. Morehouse was a Division 2 team, and so there’s a limited window for guys who want to try out for basketball. Jarrod never let me live down the fact that I didn’t make the “walk on.” “What’s so funny is Bakari talks like he’s really good, but he’s not,” Jarrod says. “I’ve been watching him play basketball for years. He’s never been good. In his mind, he knows basketball, so in his mind he’s good.”

  After I didn’t make the walk on, Jarrod proceeded to report the fact to friends back home. He called Gavin Jackson, a high school classmate from Orangeburg. “You won’t believe this,” Jarrod said.

  “What?” Gavin said.

  “Man, that boy Sellers is trying to walk on to the basketball team.”

  Gavin was like, “Who’s team? Spelman’s?” (Spelman is Morehouse’s adjacent women’s college.)

  Despite our mutual jabs, Jarrod’s been someone I can always depend on, the truest example of brotherhood. He ended up running my successful political races in college as well as my run for a seat in South Carolina’s House of Representatives. Still, it’s humbling to have grown up in Denmark and to have a friend like Jarrod, who will always keep you in your place. It’s probably the reason I’m not afraid to show my flaws to the world, and I’m sure Jarrod could say the same thing.

  During those early days after freshman orientation, Jarrod and I found it easy to make friends. Jiving carried on into college, and our mastery of it made us stand out. In fact, many of the brothers at Morehouse were taken aback by our superior skills in the art of verbal warfare, especially when they tried to snap back. They soon learned we were slightly better. Often, another student would get exasperated and say, “Ah, y’all so country,” and we’d own it, because we knew being called country at Morehouse was said out of brotherly love.

  * * *

  During our second month at Morehouse, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. We woke up late that day, and Jarrod turned on his television to see the Twin Towers burning. We initially thought it was a terrible accident, but then we started hearing about terrorists. Of course, the only terrorists these two country boys had ever heard of were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

  That day classes were canceled, and a few students had to leave campus and head home to the Northeast to be with their families. For some of us, it felt like the science fiction movie Independence Day, where aliens attack Earth. Still, many others felt safe in Atlanta, reasoning that no one would attack a majority black city—what would be the point of that? Somehow, things went on as usual.

  Jarrod was as studious as ever, but I wasn’t the best student, maybe because I was only sixteen, free of my parent’s rule, and could get into any club I wanted to in Atlanta with a fake ID. My weekend started on Thursday and ended on Sunday night. And I was having the time of my life—until everything went sideways.

  During my first semester, I was summoned to see the dean, who told me I was being placed on academic probation. Several months later, I lost my academic scholarship. I was also arrested on the campus of our sister school Spelman. I was sitting in Spelman’s student center with a Spelman girl, and we were having so much fun that we forgot to keep an eye on the time. I looked up at the clock at around 10:30 p.m., past curfew, and then saw campus police officers rolling on me heavy, four cops deep. They escorted me off campus, and I was cited for trespassing and actions unbecoming of a Morehouse man.

  There was more change to come. I started out as a pre-med student; my sister was a doctor, so I just figured I was going to be a doctor too. But that clearly wasn’t a good fit. Because I had skipped grades when I was younger, math never clicked for me, and I didn’t have any idea that so much math would be involved in my attempt to be a physician.

  I eventually had a moment of introspection when I realized that I needed to find a major that would accept all of my credits because I wasn’t going to be able to afford to stay for an extra year of school if I failed my first year. So I changed my major to African-American studies. Luckily, all my pre-med credits were accepted. My short adventure with the medical world had ended.

  My brother Lumumba wonders whether it was a good idea for my parents to skip both me and my older sister, who also went to college at age sixteen. He says that Nosizwe and I could be awkward children because we were always younger than all of our peers.

  When I was younger, my sister and I had hilarious arguments about who was the smartest. Lumumba says, “They got the brains, but I got common sense.” It’s often said in our family that Nosizwe and I are different kinds of learners. She’s a quick learner but had to study. Bakari, they say, could listen and comprehend what he heard.

  Lumumba was a little different; he was always that person who thought things out. The summer before he was to attend Morehouse, he looked for work that would make him the most money for school but also provide him with enough physical activity to keep his body in shape for college football. The construction firm he chose coincidentally was the company my parents would hire to build our new home, a large brick ranch house on three to four acres of land. So when my brother returned home from school for Thanksgiving, he was able to live in a home he had built with his own hands, which he called one of the most spiritual moments of his life. He learned what it felt like to help make a brick-and-mortar reality out of something dreamed up on paper. The year before, he had decided he should work under a chef because he loved to cook. And he did just that. Now he’s a minister and a sought-after tech executive. Whereas my sister and I pursued jobs that provided a service rather than the highest salaries, Lumumba did both.

  * * *

  Although my mother, especially, wasn’t happy with what she was hearing about me in Atlanta—the girls, the partying, the fake IDs, and losing my scholarship—there was little my parents could do. They knew I wasn’t going to fail in school because they had raised me early on to do the right thing, but still my mother was worried because, as she put it, I was “young and country.”

  Actually, I was dead set on building relationships and creating moments. This is what my parents always taught me, and this intentiona
l parenting I received early on in life helped me to rebound from my mistakes.

  My goal at Morehouse was to experience being a student, to find my passion—and I did. The job of a professor is to make students’ brains sweat, to keep students on their toes with the best of research. My grades never got much better, hovering a bit under or exactly at a 3.0, but they never got worse either. I never skipped class, always did my work, and continued to learn, but my focus was no longer on making perfect grades. Rather, I was discovering new ideas, finding and experiencing my interests.

  The summer following my freshman year, I was seventeen and wondering what to do. Jarrod had his summer already laid out. He was going to Washington, DC, to be an intern with the Congressional Black Caucus foundation at Congressman Jim Clyburn’s office. I wanted that too, but when I tried to apply, I was told Clyburn’s office was not going to sign another intern. So I called my mother. She’s always relentless when she wants something or when she believes we need something. This is the woman who talked her way into a prison so my father could meet his baby daughter. When I told her my dilemma, she picked up the phone and called Jim Clyburn himself. (Congressman Clyburn was from Sumter, South Carolina, and he and my dad had been extremely close during the 1960s.)

  “I want my son to be an intern,” she said.

  And they hired me.

  I was paid $998 that summer. I stayed in Washington with my Aunt Florence (country folk pronounce “aunt” as “ain’t” or “aintie”), my grandmother’s sister. She lived in a beautiful brownstone near 14th and Kenyon Street NW, right across from an elementary school and a McDonalds.

  I survived on the food provided at legislative receptions and whatever frozen scraps my great aunt had in the freezer. One of the special things she taught me, even at her age, was how to shave. I needed to learn to shave because I could afford to get a haircut only every other week and was beginning to have facial hair, which meant I didn’t have that clean-cut look that was so common on Capitol Hill.