black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room. Which is why when my friends and I found one another at dinner each night, it was with some degree of relief. It’s why we stayed a long time and laughed as much as we could.
My two white roommates in Pyne Hall were both perfectly nice, but I wasn’t around the dorm enough to strike up any sort of deep friendship. I didn’t, in fact, have many white friends at all. In retrospect, I realize it was my fault as much as anyone’s. I was cautious. I stuck to what I knew. It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging—the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.
Cathy, one of my roommates, would surface in the news many years later, describing with embarrassment something I hadn’t known when we lived together: Her mother, a schoolteacher from New Orleans, had been so appalled that her daughter had been assigned a black roommate that she’d badgered the university to separate us. Her mother also gave an interview, confirming the story and providing more context. Having been raised in a home where the n-word was a part of the family lexicon, having had a grandfather who’d been a sheriff and used to brag about chasing black people out of his town, she’d been “horrified,” as she put it, by my proximity to her daughter.
All I knew at the time is that midway through our freshman year, Cathy moved out of our triple and into a single room. I’m happy to say that I had no idea why.
* * *
My financial aid package at Princeton required me to get a work-study job, and I ended up with a good one, getting hired as an assistant to the director of the TWC. I helped out about ten hours a week when I wasn’t in class, sitting at a desk alongside Loretta, the full-time secretary, typing memos, answering the phone, and directing students who came in with questions about dropping a class or signing up for the food co-op. The office sat in the front corner of the building, with sun-flooded windows and mismatched furniture that made it more homey than institutional. I loved the feeling of being there, of having office work to do. I loved the little jolt of satisfaction I got anytime I finished off some small organizational task. But more than anything, I loved my boss, Czerny Brasuell.
Czerny was a smart and beautiful black woman, barely thirty years old, a swift-moving and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals and seemed always to be having four or five ideas at once. For students of color at Princeton, she was like an über-mentor, our ultrahip and always outspoken defender in chief, and for this she was universally appreciated. In the office, she juggled multiple projects—lobbying the university administration to enact more inclusive policies for minorities, advocating for individual students and their needs, and spinning out new ideas for how all of us could improve our lot. She was often running late, blasting out the center’s front door at a full sprint, clutching a sheaf of loose papers with a lit cigarette in her mouth and a purse draped over her shoulder, shouting directives to me and Loretta as she went. It was a heady experience, being around her—as close-up as I’d ever been to an independent woman with a job that thrilled her. She was also, not incidentally, a single mother raising a dear, precocious boy named Jonathan, whom I often babysat.
Czerny saw some sort of potential in me, though I was also clearly short on life experience. She treated me like an adult, asking for my thoughts, listening keenly as I described the various worries and administrative tangles students had brought in. She seemed determined to awaken more boldness in me. A good number of her questions began with “Have you ever…?” Had I ever, for example, read the work of James Cone? Had I ever questioned Princeton’s investments in South Africa or whether more could be done to recruit minority students? Most of the time the