Fisk and Meharry get a lot of love, too, but they don’t have a marching band that participates in the extremely important Battle of the Bands, an incredible showcase of Black college bands and our excuse to travel to Atlanta and dress to kill.
* * *
There was never any doubt in my mind that I was going to an HBCU (a historically Black college or university). I grew up within walking distance of three major HBCUs, on a street named after Meharry. I went to Fisk for summer programs, went to Meharry for free dental care, and went to TSU for Upward Bound. I was also bused to an elementary school across town for desegregation purposes, and in high school I was one of only about twenty Black students out of roughly 120 total in our class. By the time I needed to take the ACT and SAT for college, I was tired of dealing with white classmates. I wanted to be in classrooms where my presence wasn’t questioned, where no one was surprised I knew the answers even as they asked to look at my homework because they’d forgotten to do theirs.
Junior year of high school, I refused to read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in English class, so I didn’t participate in the discussion. My teacher tried to convince me of the merits of reading a book that’s supposedly anti-racist yet would force me to see the name Nigger Jim repeatedly. At some point in the discussion, Elvis Presley came up (I wish I could remember how, but I’d probably mentally checked out for the bread crumbs leading to that) and I said loudly, “Elvis stole Black people’s music.” My teacher tried to shut me down, and a fellow classmate, a Black guy, tried to talk over me and say that’s not what I meant. It solidified how ready I was for an environment where I could talk about white musicians and other artists profiting off Black people—without being silenced.
So while the majority of my Black classmates went to Florida A&M, I went to Dillard University in New Orleans. It’s a small HBCU that doesn’t have the same kind of name recognition as Howard, Spelman, or Morehouse, but I knew that it was where I wanted to be. I’ll tell you a secret: I had no idea Dillard existed until I saw their table at a college fair. A student from the year ahead of me was attending Dillard. She was at the table and successfully recruited me. Despite full rides from TSU and FAMU, I wanted to get away from Nashville, and away from my classmates. I had a fear that I would never grow up if I didn’t get away from the people from my youth. My mom tried to bribe me into staying by buying a new car. It was for her, but if I’d stayed, she would’ve given it to me. It wasn’t enough. I didn’t want a new car. I wanted freedom and new experiences.
The teen TV shows made for and about white kids kept telling me over and over that friends stay together forever and newcomers are a threat to your friendship. Saved by the Bell and Boy Meets World made it seem so cool to follow the friends you’ve known since elementary school into college life. They also showed how difficult it could be when you start to grow apart and become your own person. But A Different World…wow. It not only highlighted how great HBCUs were, but it also served as a reminder that lasting relationships can form when people come from totally different walks of life.
A Different World gave me weekly extended looks into what was possible in Black college life. It was a spin-off of The Cosby Show and was supposed to be a star vehicle for Lisa Bonet as Denise Huxtable, but she left after the first season and the show began to focus on the rest of the cast: Whitley (Jasmine Guy), a rich southern belle attending college to find a husband; Freddie (Cree Summers), a peace-loving modern hippie who wanted to change the world; Jaleesa (Dawnn Lewis), an older student who didn’t have time for everyone else’s shenanigans; Kimberly (Charnele Brown), focused and determined to be a doctor; Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison), a math nerd with a surprisingly tough, protective side; and Ron (Darryl M. Bell), the playboy who just wanted to have a good time. They were all such different characters, but they looked out for each other, even when the foundations of their friendships hadn’t solidified yet.
I realized people could have shared experiences even when we didn’t grow up down the street from each other. And I wanted that. I wanted friendships I’d chosen and not just those I’d succumbed to because of the circumstances of proximity. While that might make it sound like I didn’t like my high school friendships, most of us are all still connected today. I have one close high school friend I talk to almost weekly, and I don’t know where I’d be without her, but even that friendship formed more fully after we’d both been away from Nashville for a while and then returned.
I knew I needed to get away from home to become the person I needed to be. Through the film School Daze, I saw inside the drama of dorm rooms and the messiness of Greek life. I couldn’t wait to have my own experience of frat parties and doing dances like Da Butt. Would there be a musical battle of light-skinned versus dark-skinned women on the yard? There was only one way to find out!
* * *
Dillard University looked like a plantation, and we students often referred to the trees as “hanging oaks.” There were concrete benches with clawed feet up and down the Avenue of the Oaks, which is a pair of sidewalks shaded by large oak trees, connecting the front of campus (classrooms and administration) with the back (dorms and gyms). Because the campus was so small yet open, shaped like the letter U, everyone could see you when you hung out there. At the back of campus, behind the dip in the U, Dillard had a set of tennis courts that had no lights, which meant that was the Lovers’ Lane on campus.
My first roommate was from Mobile, Alabama, and made sure to tell me Mobile is actually where what we know as the celebration of Mardi Gras began. I didn’t believe her then, and I still don’t, but people from Mobile hang on to that tidbit. She was an okay roommate, but she stiffed me on the phone bill we shared (landlines!), so I stopped fucking with her. Luckily, having a boyfriend kept me out of the dorm a lot, so I didn’t have to pretend to be cordial that often.
When DJ and I started dating, a couple of girls vandalized the dry erase board on my door, saying hateful things about why he would possibly be with me, including that I must suck a mean dick. (I think I do all right. It’s really all about the passion you bring.) I wrote something smart but low-impact in response, like “Thanks for your feedback. I’ll pass along your thoughts when he picks me up tonight.” But their comments stung, because it wasn’t the first time in my short dating career that girls around me had insulted me because of who I was dating. DJ was the man on campus, and I was no one special. I didn’t dress well, which meant I had no money, and I had no easily observable talent, nothing to make me stand out even on a campus of twelve hundred students, so of course the only reason he must be interested in me was sex. Shit like that was one of the reasons I used to say I didn’t get along with girls.
I didn’t think I’d have to deal with that kind of pettiness in college. A Different World didn’t show me that anything like that would happen! School Daze did, a little bit—I won’t lie. But neither of them told me that HBCUs were extremely into respectability politics, and as much as the overall message of the schools was to nurture us in safe spaces and teach us what our whitewashed education didn’t, there was also the message that we have to be twice as good because white people are always watching. At Dillard, we had dorm curfews and the girls had to be inside an hour earlier than the boys. I’ve never been much of a partier, but it definitely interfered with my dating life. When we girls would bring up the inequality to our dorm mothers and other leadership staff, they’d give us the line about how our parents trusted that they would take care of us, and that curfews were there for our safety. It was bullshit.
Girls were shamed for their attire. If they dressed in provocative clothes, people assumed they were strippers or had sugar daddies to help supplement their income. It seemed like girls who were assaulted just…disappeared. The school was so small that there were two freshman girls’ dorms, one dorm for all upper-class women, and one dorm for all on-campus boys. There was a collection of duplexes next to campus that older students and other nontraditional students used, but the strict,
sexist monitoring of our personal lives led many students to get off-campus housing as soon as they could.
It seemed like students were also shamed for being gay. It felt like church—you could be a gay man and contribute to the choir or help put on fashion shows, but no public displays of affection were allowed. And you should never actually say you’re gay; everyone would somehow know anyway, so there was no need to name it. One of the basketball meatheads tried to fight a gay upperclassman who was very proud of who he was. He wore his hair straightened and past his shoulders, and it always looked good because he knew how to do hair, so he was his own billboard. The jock walked by the hairstylist and called him the f-word. Hairstylist said, “What did you say?” The situation escalated quickly, and Hairstylist beat Meathead’s ass. The fight launched a wave of gossip, but the responses were to be expected. Most of the women shook their heads, saying stuff like, “I don’t know why niggas don’t realize gay men are still men, and can and will whoop yo ass. They’ve been bullied all their lives. They will fight back.” Meanwhile, the men said basic shit like, “Why does he have to be so flaming though?” Hairstylist didn’t live on campus, so he was already barely around for classes, but after that, he showed up even less. I don’t remember if Meathead was given any disciplinary action, but since he was on the basketball team, probably not.
Now one thing A Different World did prepare me for were rousing classroom discussions and debates. One English professor asked how many of us considered ourselves to be in the poor working class. Most of us raised our hands, but she challenged us: How many of us had parents who were paying for our tuition? How many of us went to private school before college? How many of us could barely get any financial aid because our FAFSA said our parents were expected to contribute most of the cost? It sparked a discussion about race and class, fear of upward mobility, even as we sat in college to earn a degree that was supposed to help us increase our earning potential. It made me think about the need to hold on to something because you don’t know who you are without it. If I achieved upward class mobility and left behind the working-class poverty of my childhood, how would it change me? I looked around the room and saw people in brand-name clothes and expensive shoes and purses raising their hands to say they were poor. It made me uncomfortable in an intriguing sort of way. Maybe we all were poor, but we also knew we were not allowed to look poor. And maybe we were all lying. Sitting in class that day, watching the discussion shift our perspectives, I felt like a real college student, and it made me strangely proud.
My major was English literature with a minor in creative writing, meaning I read many amazing Black authors. We read slave narratives by women. Previously, I’d known the works of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, but in college, I found Mary Prince and Harriet Jacobs. I’d read plenty of Black authors before attending an HBCU, because Mama made sure we had a steady diet of Black media and I was always a curious child in the library, so it wasn’t that I never knew this treasure trove of literature existed. But at college, I wanted to find the writers I didn’t know about. I had a class on African and Caribbean poetry, and it blew my mind. Every poem was rich and full and melodic, no matter the structure, and gave me a different cultural understanding of Blackness and the diaspora. Of course, I knew Black people were different all over the world, and that “the Black Experience” is not just a Black American one, but reading a love poem by an Antiguan author and seeing how the island and the sea can complement that love took my breath away. In storage somewhere, I still have all my literature textbooks and a few packets that taught me Black feminist criticism in such a thorough way that when I made it to grad school, I had a far better understanding of critical theory than any of my white classmates, much to their biased surprise. My professors at Dillard, most of them women, most of them Black, laid the foundation of cultural criticism I still use to this day.
Sometimes my friends who went to PWIs (predominantly white institutions) ask me to tell them about HBCU life and if they really missed anything. My HBCU experience is a bit different than what gets shown on television or highlighted in Coachella routines. Dillard doesn’t have a football team, so homecoming was more about crowning Miss Dillard than halftime shows or parades. I was also in a committed relationship the entire time, so I don’t have exciting tales of drunken hookups or too many wild frat parties. Most parties I went to were because DJ was DJing, but those tales are fuzzy from falling asleep waiting on him and not from too many cups of Omega Oil. Sorority life wasn’t in the cards for me either. I went to an informational once, which seemed to surprise my classmates. I later shared a concern in confidence with a friend who was a member of that sorority. I said I wanted to pledge, but I was worried a couple of people would be petty because I was dating DJ and they had tried without success. She assured me nothing like that would be an issue. The next day, one of the people I was nervous about came up to me and repeated almost verbatim what I’d told my friend, confirming a pettiness I did not want to deal with. Plus pledging was expensive as fuck.
So I can’t give people the exciting stories they’re looking for. So many memories are “You had to be there” moments, like the time the whole yard went quiet because one girl had pulled out her panty liner and slapped her friend across the face with it, leaving a streak of baby powder across her cheek. No one knows how the argument started or how anyone could stand there long enough to watch a woman root around in her panties before pulling out such an unsanitary weapon, but we all heard the THWAP and then the squawk of disbelief. There was a beat of silence and then cries rang out across the campus: “AW, HELL NAW! GIRL, WHAT THE FUCK. OH SHIT!”
Now, I can tell that story, but that doesn’t mean it can happen only at an HBCU or that witnessing how the moment stopped time was the highlight of my four years there. What made being at an HBCU everything I needed and one of the best decisions of my life was how no one questioned my place in the classroom. At Dillard, my teachers and classmates asked me questions to further discussion, not to prove my humanity. We didn’t have to code-switch. We were from all over the world, but Black communication blended easily on campus.
After graduation, I went to Ohio State in hopes of pursuing a master’s degree and then a PhD in English literature. I didn’t know what else to do after college, and people kept suggesting law school or entering academia. Even though I’d always wanted to be a writer and did not enjoy the spotlight of teaching, family, friends, and mentors kept telling me I had to think practically and find a job that would provide security. I thought about going into publishing, but I could never afford the unpaid internships in New York City. Teaching seemed the most accessible job. So grad school and the PhD, it was.
Ohio State gave me a teaching assistantship, and I thought it would be good practice for the inevitable career I didn’t want. I hadn’t chosen OSU, but my friend K was going, and DJ had encouraged me to go with her so I wouldn’t have to start over fresh in the friendship department, especially in a predominantly white environment.
At OSU, in one of my early classes, the TA, a wiry white guy in glasses, showed a short film and asked us to give quick thoughts. I can’t remember the details now, but it covered a history of film, and there was a lot of phallic imagery, like trains going into tunnels and rockets blasting off, which, me being me, I pointed out. The TA asked how I knew that. I looked at him for a second, then waved my hand through a weak explanation, because everyone knows what looks like a dick, but I was also flustered. I was the only one he’d asked to explain their analysis. I was also the only Black person, or even person of color, in the room. Later that year, I won a poetry contest, and the director of the MFA writing program asked me to bring in a copy of what I’d submitted. I was thrilled to do so, hoping she’d offer me a seat in the program, because I’d realized my MA-in-literature decision wasn’t working for me. She thumbed through my poems, with me sitting directly across from her, confusion setting further and further into the lines of her face the more she read.
When she finished, she looked absolutely baffled, and I felt like shit. She couldn’t understand how my poetry had won the prize.
At Dillard, I didn’t have anyone questioning my intelligence or talent. If someone asked me to prove a claim, it was either to shore up my argument or expose the cracks in it, not prove I was capable of thought. And this is not to say students aren’t challenged at HBCUs. We absolutely are, but in ways that are expected in an academic environment. When a friend asked me to explain my choice of line breaks in my poetry, it was to push me into being more deliberate in my creative process, not to make me feel like I could never be as good as renowned white writers. I never had to wonder if my professor was pushing me on an issue because she thought I was enrolled only for affirmative action points. It was such a relief to be in a classroom without having to fight an instructor’s racial bias. Everyone steps into the classroom with biases, but at least at an HBCU, you can usually eliminate one.
I went to college because it was what was expected of me, and I wanted to do it, with the hope I’d become a successful writer. There was also a small Whitley part of me that hoped to find a husband there. I wanted to get married, and since I figured you can write from anywhere, I wouldn’t need a traditional job. I could stay home. In the fifth episode of the first season of A Different World, “War of the Words,” Whitley and Maggie (Marisa Tomei, as perhaps the school’s only white student) debate whether or not women can be married with careers without the marriage or job suffering. Whitley argues that women could not have both, that their maternal instincts will override their need to work, and that women were meant for the softer things in life. Of course, Whitley loses the debate, but I understood why this southern belle would hold these thoughts. All the homecomings and football games and Battles of the Bands I attended always had couples who’d met at college, married, and had children, who then attended HBCUs. HBCUs created legacies.
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