In Pharaoh's Land

I would enter Radcliffe College in September 1971, but graduate from Harvard College four years later. Mine was the last class of women admitted to Radcliffe; I was one of 56 black women; 165 black men had been admitted to Harvard. Women had been allowed in the same classroom as men since 1943; but they were only allotted seats during the sixties - before that they had either to stand in the back or sit on the floor. And throughout my undergraduate career, it would be difficult to figure which was harder: being black or learning how to negotiate young womanhood.

Aunt Hugh had written a letter of recommendation to Radcliffe on my behalf. "June may not be a Gregory by blood," she had written, "but she is one by nurture. In every way, she has grown up a part of this family."

But I didn't feel a part of a family which had produced three generations of Harvard graduates. I felt more like the family's pet stray, not one of its heirs apparent. Besides, Blacks constituted exactly ten percent of the incoming class. That number joined the other fractions: half-black, half-white, three-quarters of the year in Atlantic City, one-quarter in Los-Angeles - calculations of race which seemed to undermine my destiny.

Yet, members of my adopted Gregory family had walked Harvard Yard in the days when black students were counted in single digits, not by percentages. During my first weeks at school, I searched out stately Lowell House. Uncle Gum had lived there during his undergraduate days at the turn of the century, exactly seventy years before me. Aunt Peggy had told me that one of Uncle Gum’s roommates had been southern, to the antebellum manner-born. When this roommate’s parents visited, Uncle Gum had had to pretend he was his roommate’s servant; for if the parents had discovered Harvard allowed blacks and whites to room together, there would have been an uproar.

I felt a mixture of anger and tears that he ever had to undergo such humiliation. It forced me to buck up and endure.

Among the black freshmen matriculated into Harvard in September of 1971, I fell within the mean: a high school grade point average of 3.8; SAT scores of 1200. David Evans, who had forsaken an engineering career at IBM to help Harvard find “qualified” black candidates, greeted us individually at the first black freshman mixer. As we introduced ourselves, Evans, Harvard’s first black admissions’ officer, quoted, from memory, our hometown high school, SAT score, and place in our graduating class. His welcoming ritual was meant to reassure each one of us that we were not “affirmative action” babies, but as I listened to my classmates’ scores, I felt dubious. I’d achieved that 1200 SAT with a perfect score on the English portion of the test, but a marginal 400 in math. I had many black classmates with perfect scores.

We soon discovered that during high school, many of us had perfected the art of walking the cultural tightrope. We echoed “Power to the People!” slogans and supported black liberation, while secretly admiring the language of Shakespeare, Donne, and Shelley (or Galileo, Pythagoras and Einstein). It wasn’t that we disagreed with the supposition that black people were oppressed in the United States; but that we had found things to appreciate in the culture of our oppressors. Like Kabuki players, we changed masks. Finally, we formed our own tribe: the Young, Gifted and Black. Loosed from Aunt Peggy’s sheltering canopy of rules, that was like being dropped in the middle of a tempest in a daysailer.

As a first semester freshman, I was admitted to an upperclass poetry workshop. I knew little about the modern poets whose work formed the foundation of the class. In high school, we had studied the usual suspects: Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson; and T.S. Eliot - the Eliot of "Under Milkwood," not "The Wasteland." I was unfamiliar with John Berryman or even Anne Sexton, although I had heard their names. Aunt Peggy did not want me to read them – particularly Sexton, because she didn’t want me “getting ideas.” Now I read them, and became infatuated with the idea of writing from the depths of despair. Rather than assume that the material itself didn’t speak to me or to my experience, I assumed that the fault was mine; what’s worse, I assumed that nothing I could say, write or bring to the class would speak to my classmates’ experiences, either.

Sensing that I was floundering, my professor suggested that I bring my “black perspective” to the class. I did not know what he meant; having only the perspective I had been raised with in Atlantic City. There was no canon of Afro-American literature in 1971. I knew only what I had been taught, and I was too young to have any perspective on that at all.

Inside the sheltered gates of Harvard Yard, at the Freshman Union, a daily celebration of black pride took place. We formed a bas relief, sitting against the wall, our Afros towering over our heads. Over lunch, we adapted “the dozens’” -the street game of jiving and taunting one another with jokes about each other’s relatives - and played it like star poker players. On the street, our jibes would surely have led to a fight; but, safe in Cambridge, we fired away, developing friendships – and even love affairs – in the midst of our rivalries.

I discovered I had a peculiar talent for these ripostes, even though I would never have dared play the dozens on the streets of Atlantic City.

“Yo’ mama’s so ugly her face looks like it caught on fire and somebody stamped it out with a football shoe,”

“Yeah, well your mama’s so ugly she sleeps with a dog.”

“Yo mama so ugly she grateful for whoever will fuck her.”

“Yo mama so ugly she hasn’t been fucked since your pet greyhound died ten years ago”

“Yeah, well yo mama’ so ugly she’s grateful for whatever she can get. She told me so before I left her last night.”

Of course, we weren’t all down with the game. Monique avoided these exchanges altogether. Another classmate told me, with a distinguished swagger, that he knew nothing about the dozens since he had gone to Choate.

“Choke who?” I asked.

“Choate. Choate. It’s a boarding school.”

“Oh,” I said, a note of pity in my voice. I thought boarding schools were for kids whose parents didn’t want them.

Monique laughed at my ignorance, and told me that Choate was a very exclusive place, along with Exeter and Andover – parents sent their kids to these schools because they practically guaranteed entry into Harvard.
I felt sorry for those who had spent their entire school career scheming to get admitted to Harvard.

Several of my classmates provoked our collective opprobrium: those who chose to socialize exclusively with whites even though their skin, noses, and hair dictated that they join us in the mural we presented in the west side of the dining room. There was, for instance, Sara, isolated in South House, a thin, honeycolored woman who wore her hair straightened while the rest of us vied to see who had the biggest Afro. At first we felt sorry for her, over there where no black folks lived. She refused to join us at the table, and, although she sometimes acknowledged us individually, she would never speak if more than two of us were together.

Who does she think she is? we wondered, our suspicions rising. Maybe, we guessed, falling into the vernacular, heads wagging side to side, she just don’t want to be black.

One morning, arriving at breakfast early, I found her already in the dining hall. We sat together.

It turned out she had lived on Convent Avenue, not three blocks from Uncle Hugh and Aunt Sylvia.

“We all thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with us,” I said.

“Why should I be judged on whether or not I’m black by whether or not I speak, or whom I sit with?” she responded. She had perfect diction, although her voice was raspy and high-pitched.

“Because it’s what we do,” I said. “It’s what makes us black. We acknowledge each other’s existence.”

“I just refuse to be judged as black by whether or not I speak to strangers,” she said.

“But other black people aren’t ‘strangers,’” I argued. “We’re all in the same boat. We help each other out. We’re all brothers and sisters.”

“I don’t have any brothers and my sister grew up in the same house as me,” she said sharply. “My mother taught me not to speak to strangers.”

I was so taken aback that it didn’t occur to me to ask why she was speaking to me then, at breakfast, when she wouldn’t acknowledge my presence if I sat with three or four other black students at the table. I was preoccupied, just then, with the awareness that in defining what was black and what wasn’t, I was taking the same point of view that my prisoner-students in Bridgewater had taken with me. I backed down, then, and asked her major.

She wanted to be a creative writing major. So did I. We promised to read each other’s work.

Some of my dormmates, having seen us together, asked me what was the score on Sara. I recounted the conversation.

“Who ever heard of a sistah from Convent Ave and 141s street not wanting to talk to black people?” Monique exclaimed, echoing the consensus. “She sounds strange to me.”

I wondered how Monique could possibly know, as she herself had grown up in Long Island.

I went home at Christmas break eager to tell Aunt Peggy about my joy at finding a community of smart black folks, about our black table and the social shenanigans and judgments that transpired there, but she wasn’t happy to hear about any of it.

“It distresses me to hear you talking black black black!” she said. “I hope you take advantage of all the opportunities. Don’t set yourself apart. You weren’t like that in high school, why are you like that now?”

I told her that in high school there had been few black people with whom I could discuss Shakespeare and Cesaire, George Clinton or the Last Poets and Nietzche. If there had been, I might have sat at such a table there.

I had expected Aunt Peggy to applaud the notion of black students coming together, a sort of permanent Niagra Movement, the group of black Talented Tenth overachievers that W.E.B. DuBois had assembled in 1918 to develop the future of the Race. After all, I had heard her tell my brother Larry, just the previous summer, that the black power movement had had a point when they criticized her generation for moving too slow.

“They called us ‘accommodationists,’” she had told him ruefully. “Maybe we were, a little. Maybe we shouldn’t have been so gentle about demanding our rights before.”

Aunt Peggy wanted civil rights so that she could move to a nice house with a wraparound porch in Longport, while I wanted to build a house like the one in Longport right there on Indiana Ave. I called that black nationalism.

She warned me not to confuse nationalism with advancing the race. Her warning was prescient; Afrocentricity would raise our self-esteem in the short run, but in the years since, the packaging and commercialization of black street culture as the only “authentic” African-American experience, combined with the resulting short-sighted identification of educational achievement with “white” behavior, has made a mockery of what the founding fathers of the civil rights movement meant when they spoke about equality.

But at eighteen, I didn’t understand what she meant. And I couldn’t grasp that distinction.

(Excerpt from Secret Daughter by June Cross and reprinted with permission from the author).

(Originally published at GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, June Cross).