“What’ll be your concentration?” he asked.
“My what?”
He leaned in closer. “Your major…”
“Ohhh,” I said. “What’s that?”
I didn’t know anything about concentrations or majors. I knew Concentration was a hand game we played when I was a kid, and I knew mid-major and high major in terms of NCAA lingo. But that was it. Outside of basketball and street shit, I had no clue what to study or what I wanted to be. I could not recall anyone ever asking what I wanted to be professionally, besides my uncle during his occasional attempts to talk sense into me. But I’d respond, “I just wanna run these streets, Unc,” as he sighed in distress. I hadn’t thought any further than that until now. But one thing was certain: I never wanted to return to that hellhole vitamin factory or anything remotely like it.
Now this nerdy-looking man was pressuring me to decide what I wanted to study for the next four years. But I did not know. Each of us was increasingly annoyed with the other. He was exasperated by my ignorance. And I was tired of listening to him talk white, saying “Yes” instead of “Yeah” and “Excuse me?” instead of “What?” and ending words with hard ers.
He showed me a list of majors. My hands felt clammy because I had no idea what some of the words even meant. Terms such as biomedical science, civil engineering, and informatics were as incomprehensible to me as Chinese characters. I was too embarrassed to ask for more information, and to save face I pretended to think rationally and intently about each option.
“Hmm… no, not that one,” I muttered. “Oh. Eh. Nah.”
I stroked my chin thoughtfully as I moved down the list, but his impatience was rising. I felt rushed by the way he cleared his throat. The clock kept ticking. The words on the page were scattering and spiraling into a cyclone of confusion. I leaned closer, skimmed with a finger, and pronounced each word phonetically to show that I was giving each one due consideration. Finally, I landed on a word I recognized, and—bingo!—I knew that I had found it. My anxiety waned. A burden was lifted. My fate was decided. I was satisfied that I had discovered the easiest major of all: English.
I walked out of the office thinking, I speak English, so this will be a breeze! Plus, I remembered my conversation with Mills—the one high school teacher I respected—when he said that studying English made him a compelling speaker. I grew excited thinking about how the fancy words he used made all of the girls pay attention. My romance game was about to reach the stratosphere. These college girls weren’t ready for some real nigga shit couched in poetic language, to be swept off their feet and wooed with the elocution of a reformed ghetto Shakespeare. Those were my intentions, until I entered the classroom and quickly discovered that Shakespeare was no friend of mine.
I wish someone had told me what being an English major actually involved. Mills left out the parts about expository writing and literary criticism and six-hundred-page books. As soon as I entered the classroom, impostor syndrome stepped out from behind the door and whacked me in the face with a cudgel. I felt like a peasant in the presence of Shakespeare and Homer and Hemingway and the literary elite. I kept silent to avoid shame, but anyone could see that I did not look like an English major. I was more out of place than the Black girl who scowled at the use of slang, or the Black guy who wore khaki shorts with open-toed sandals. I looked even more anomalous than the goth girl with black fingernails, black clothes, black boots, and a black cape. Imagine that.
My classmates and I could not have been more different. No matter what style they affected, these were mostly high achievers, mostly white and evangelical and privileged. Many came from places where they had little interaction with Black people. And here I sat, a former drug dealer turned ball player turned dropout, fulfilling every Black stereotype they could have imagined.
I listened to the class conversations thinking, What the fuck are they talking about? Why does everyone look so weird? and This poem makes no fuckin’ sense! I was ready to throw in the towel when my professor assigned one hundred pages of Dante’s Inferno to be read over the weekend. I thought, Who the fuck reads a hundred pages in three nights? As soon as I read “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathways had been lost,” I said, Oh hell nah, they got me fucked up! and slammed the book shut. Then the professor asked in a soft, dramatic voice, “And what does the dark forest symbolize?” My face scrunched up as I thought, The fuck? It means the forest was fuckin’ dark! As for passing those dreadful quizzes, I had a better chance of borrowing the goth girl’s cape and using it as a cloak of invisibility. But I remembered my conversation with my advisor. “One more fail or withdrawal,” he said, “and you could be done.” So I turned to the only mechanism that might help me survive: cheating.
I was tired of being the dumb Black kid. I knew I wasn’t as smart as the rest of them. And so did they. A peek through the door of our English class and you’d spot me like the proverbial black sheep in a flock of snowy ewes, sulking silently in the back corner, rap music leaking from the headphones that defiantly plugged my ears. The cord fell down the side of my T-shirt, grazed the floor at the heel of my Timbs, and looped up into the pocket of my bootcut jeans.
I’d jot down character names and quick facts from SparkNotes on facial tissue. During quizzes, I pretended to blow my nose for a quick glance at my cheat sheet. For papers, I paraphrased peer-reviewed essays I found on JSTOR, hoping to outwit the software that automatically scanned our written submissions for plagiarism. For class discussions, however, I had nothing. Classes were small, which made my silence glaringly obvious. Like that inglorious moment when I fumbled William Faulkner.
“Of the themes you all have identified in ‘A Rose for Emily,’” my professor said, “which appear to be most consistent?” Then her gaze fell on me as she said, “I’d love to hear from those of you who haven’t shared yet.”
There were eight of us, and I was the only one who had not said a word. My seven classmates sat in the front row, jumping in with comments on everything we read, and behind them were five rows of unoccupied desks. I sat alone in the back row, slow to realize that my isolation made my failure to participate even more obvious.
“Brandon?” she prompted.
I glanced up from my iPod. Heads swiveled and all eyes were on me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “can you repeat the question?”
I’d heard clearly but needed extra time to find words to hide the fact that I had not read the short story.
“Faulkner’s themes,” she answered. “Which do you think were the most consistent throughout the piece?”
This English-major jargon didn’t make sense to me and I sat through every class feeling like the others were speaking a foreign language.
“I agree with what she said.” I couldn’t remember her name, so I pointed at the eerie-looking girl in the front row.
“And what did she say?” the professor probed with suspicion.
I hadn’t actually heard what the goth girl said, so I abandoned my initial tactic and took a shot in the dark.
“I think it’s about love,” I mumbled. “The rose.” The way it came out jumbled made my statement sound like a question.
“Perhaps it could be.” Her suspicion hardened into certainty. “But how would you justify that, considering the story is about death?”
Fuck, I thought. I squinted my eyes and flipped through the puckered printout, turning pages frantically to create the illusion that I was searching for a rebuttal. Or so I thought. My professor was visibly irritated, sitting on the desk, her crossed leg jiggling, her blue eyes peering over her winged glasses, her skeletal fingers clasped at her pelvis. My professor didn’t budge as she patiently awaited an explanation. When I gave none, whispers and chuckles broke the interminable and awkward silence. I became a joke, an object of ridicule, and the affirmation of a Black stereotype.
My face contorted. My head sunk with shame. I had never felt so infer
ior. The discussion continued, but I was excluded by my own incompetence. I felt low, displaced. I had no voice. And as a result, I was invisible.
I couldn’t sit there any longer. I reached for my bag and quietly slipped through the door. By the time I reached my apartment, an email had landed in my inbox. The subject: We Need to Meet ASAP. I had no idea that my life was about to change.
Crossing campus to DeMoss Hall, it felt like I was walking the green mile. A marble fountain guards the giant four-story edifice. Roman columns tower above an Olympian staircase ascending to an imposing entranceway. Once inside, it took me a minute to find the offices for the English and Modern Languages faculty, which were tucked away in a side hallway behind an anonymous double door. I walked the main hall of this building nearly every day, but I had never noticed the faculty offices. Nor had I ever looked at the wall of display cases filled with trophies or read the four words emblazoned above the exhibit: LIBERTY UNIVERSITY DEBATE CENTER. It meant nothing to me.
When Professor Nelson saw me at the open door of her office, she gestured toward a chair that was perhaps the only uncluttered surface in the room. Huge bookcases were crammed with shabby paperbacks and pristine hardbacks, and unsteady stacks of books rose from the floor like a city skyline. Her desk was littered with typewritten pages bleeding red ink, empty coffee mugs rested on stained napkins, and a formal, gold-framed portrait of what must have been her family looked disapprovingly down at the mess.
After I sat and shucked off my backpack, she reached into a laptop bag and extracted a sheaf of double-spaced pages with my name at the top. She slid the sheets toward me and let silence settle for a minute.
“Did you write this?” she asked. Her tone was calm, not accusatory, leaving the door open to candor. I considered my next lie, thumbing through the pages before nudging them back to a neutral position. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Time froze as various scenarios played in my mind. She might pick up the essay and say, “Brandon, this is superb!” Or maybe she’d turn sarcastic and say, “You sure fooled me; there’s no way I could have ever detected that you stole this peer-reviewed essay from JSTOR.” But she did neither. Instead, she set the essay aside, as if it was not the most important matter. She looked calmly at me, her elbows resting on the desk and her fingers interlaced. She leaned forward and said, “I want to know more about you.”
Minutes passed and it was as though the essay was forgotten. She asked about my family, my aspirations, my struggles. Not as though she was interrogating me, but as though she cared to know. As we talked, my lie lingering unattended between us, I felt my wall of wariness begin to crack. But I didn’t recant.
In the course of an hour, we exchanged tears, laughter, and promises. She was vulnerable with me: she told me about having surgery for cancer. I was vulnerable with her: I told her about my history of drugs and violence. She made me feel safe. We laughed at stories about her childhood. I told her stories about my own. We went from chuckling to whooping with laughter, like old friends chatting under ideal circumstances.
I never thought that I could bond with an older white woman. Then our conversation suddenly shifted. There was a natural pause in our exchange as she softly smiled at me like I was her own child. Then came the blindside hit.
“Brandon,” she said, “just tell me the truth.”
She’d tricked me. Soon as I had let her in. I should have seen this coming. My childhood, my secrets, her stories that she used like bait to draw me in—it was all a ploy to make me defenseless. I felt exposed, like I had been meat-checked by an old white lady. I was furious and glared at her across her trashy desk, my fingernails sinking into my palms as I clenched and unclenched my fists because I did not know what else to do.
“You can tell me,” she said, seemingly unaffected by the shift happening before her eyes, my anger falling apart into confusion and pain. Her steady gaze spoke volumes. “I’m not your enemy,” she added softly. But I did not believe her. My view of the world was so fractured that everyone was my enemy, out to expose my vulnerability and fraudulence. It made sense to assume that I was stranded in my lonely foxhole, and that no reinforcements or rescue party would ever come.
“Fine,” I said angrily. “The truth is I can’t read this stuff.” Faulkner, Homer, Dante—I didn’t understand a word of their books. I admitted to plagiarism. I admitted to cheating on the five-question quizzes. I admitted to being just as dumb as she and my classmates supposed. I admitted that I was one F or W away from flunking out of college for the second time. My voice rose and cracked with stress and hopelessness. And when I wound down—before I could bolt from the room—she rose from her chair. She walked over to me. She wrapped her frail arms around my body and promised me that I was safe. I closed my eyes, and I rested my head on her shoulder as her empathy calmed my spirit.
“I understand if you have to fail me,” I said, head sunken.
“I’m not going to fail you,” she said, refusing to accept my surrender. “We are going to redo it.”
I didn’t understand what she meant by “we.” In this instance, simply allowing me to redo it would be an act of grace. But when I explained that English was too hard, that I wasn’t cut out for it because I was so many miles behind everyone else, she wouldn’t allow me to wallow in self-pity. She told me that I was not in it alone. She was willing to get down into the trenches and struggle with me until I figured it out. She went beyond the call of duty for me. Over the next several months, she spent weekends and time outside of her office hours to help teach me how to read and write. But the way she did it was, perhaps, the most impactful. She met me where I was, as a Black man. She talked about two other Black men who’d charted their own journeys to literacy. Their names are Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X. But I brushed aside these well-meaning comparisons, certain that my deficiencies were far worse than any shortcomings these men ever had. But she did not enable my self-pity. I saw everything that I wasn’t. But she saw everything that I had the potential to be.
“You have two decisions you can make,” she said to me one day. “You can moan about your disadvantages, or you can do something about them. The choice is yours.”
Suddenly, it struck me that I had been here before—not as a student, but as an athlete. When I was in middle school, I realized that I was not going to grow tall. I was fast, I was strong, I was skilled, but I was short. Yet as an eighth grader, I was recruited to play on the high school level of the Amateur Athletic Union, a national league for elite travel basketball. I’d send defenders crawling on the floor with swift crossovers, plow through the lane with agility, and spring in the air for a layup—only to have my shot deflected to the rafters by a six-foot-something giant who would stare me down as the crowd cheered. My confidence about my skill was undermined by worries about my height. I concluded that I was out of my league.
But Coach would have none of that. With a piece of gum flapping in the corner of his mouth, he’d step to my face and in his drill sergeant voice say, “We don’t complain, son. We compensate.” Excuses weren’t allowed. And if I, or any of us, ever tried to use them—it didn’t matter what point of practice we were in—he’d halt and roar, “You makin’ excuses, boy?” Then the whistle would blow as he screamed, “Assume the position!”
Fifteen wheezing bodies would hit the floor and, while doing push-ups, we’d chant in chorus: “Excuses are tools of incompetence, which build monuments of nothingness. And those who specialize in them seldom specialize in anything else.”
So I’d stopped making excuses on the court and invested in a pair of strength shoes, training sneakers with a platform in the front that forces your calf muscles to bear the strain of keeping your heels elevated. For an entire year, I spent hours in my garage—mornings, after school, weekends—jumping rope and doing plyometric training. By the time I reached the ninth grade, I could soar above the rim—dunking and jumping higher than most guys who were older and taller than me. It was this discipline—and the int
ense labor—that allowed me to play much taller than I was.
I realized that Coach and Professor Nelson were sending me the same message. There was probably no academic equivalent of strength shoes, but I wanted to know more about the two Black men she had mentioned. Of course, I’d heard their names before, thanks to dutiful Black history programming in school every February. Those learning modules were meant to engender respect for Black history, but they actually oversimplified and diminished it. Douglass was famous as an abolitionist and the sainted Black friend of Abraham Lincoln, but I knew nothing of him as a self-taught scholar and rhetorician. And when our textbooks or teachers made any mention of Malcolm X, he was positioned as the violent antithesis to Dr. King—not celebrated as a revolutionary and an autodidact.
I purchased the two books. I struggled to read them and it took a long time. My eyes watered, I fell asleep often, and I gave up several times. Not because I was uninterested. I was not conditioned to sit and read for extended periods. I spent more time looking up words than actually reading the books. I read through entire paragraphs and pages, then had to go back and read them again for understanding. It was tough, but there was something new and unusual pushing me through. As I read deeper, I was lost in the best way. And I was found in the same way. The feeling was euphoric, and foreign. Eventually, I finished. And it all made sense. If they could rise above their disadvantages to become scholars, there was no excuse for me.
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