heads as an athlete. He’d traveled around the Midwest on a summer rec-league team that featured an incubating superstar named Isiah Thomas, who would later go on to a Hall of Fame career in the NBA. As he approached high school, Craig had been sought after by some of Chicago’s top public school coaches looking to fill gaps in their rosters. These teams pulled in big rowdy crowds as well as college scouts, but my parents were adamant that Craig not sacrifice his intellectual development for the short-lived glory of being a high school phenom.
Mount Carmel, with its strong Catholic-league basketball team and rigorous curriculum, had seemed the best solution—worth the thousands of dollars it was costing my parents. Craig’s teachers were brown-robed priests who went by “Father.” About 80 percent of his classmates were white, many of them Irish Catholic kids who came from outlying working-class white neighborhoods. By the end of his junior year, he was already being courted by Division I college teams, a couple of which would probably offer him a free ride. Still, my parents held fast to the idea that he should keep all options open, aiming to get himself into the best college possible. They alone would worry about the cost.
My high school experience blessedly cost us nothing except for bus fare. I was lucky enough to test into Chicago’s first magnet high school, Whitney M. Young High School, which sat in what was then a run-down area just west of the Loop and was, after a few short years in existence, on its way to becoming a top public school in the city. Whitney Young was named for a civil rights activist and had been opened in 1975 as a positive-minded alternative to busing. Located squarely on the dividing line between the North and the South Sides of the city and featuring forward-thinking teachers and brand-new facilities, the school was designed as a kind of equal-opportunity nirvana, meant to draw high-performing students of all colors. Admissions quotas set by the Chicago school board called for a student body that would be 40 percent black, 40 percent white, and 20 percent Hispanic or other. But the reality of who enrolled looked slightly different. When I attended, about 80 percent of the students were nonwhite.
Just getting to school for my first day of ninth grade was a whole new odyssey, involving ninety minutes of nerve-pummeling travel on two different city bus routes as well as a transfer downtown. Hauling myself out of bed at five o’clock that morning, I’d put on all new clothes and a pair of nice earrings, unsure of how any of it would be received on the other end of my bus trek. I’d eaten breakfast, having no idea where lunch would be. I said good-bye to my parents, unclear on whether I’d even still be myself at the end of the day. High school was meant to be transformative. And Whitney Young, for me, was pure frontier.
The school itself was striking and modern, like no school I’d ever seen—made up of three large, cube-shaped buildings, two of them connected by a fancy-looking glass skyway that crossed over the Jackson Boulevard thoroughfare. The classrooms were open concept and thoughtfully designed. There was a whole building dedicated to the arts, with special rooms for the choir to sing and bands to play, and other rooms that had been outfitted for photography and pottery. The whole place was built like a temple for learning. Students streamed through the main entryway, purposeful already on day one.
There were about nineteen hundred kids at Whitney Young, and from my point of view they appeared universally older and more confident than I’d ever be, in full command of every brain cell, powered by every multiple-choice question they’d nailed on the citywide standardized test. Looking around, I felt small. I’d been one of the older kids at Bryn Mawr and was now among the youngest of the high schoolers. Getting off the bus, I’d noticed that along with their book bags a lot of the girls carried actual purses.
My worries about high school, if they were to be cataloged, could mostly be filed under one general heading: Am I good enough? It was a question that dogged me through my first month, even as I began to settle in, even as I got used to the predawn wake-ups and navigating between buildings for class. Whitney Young was subdivided into