answer was no, but once she mentioned it, I became immediately interested.
“Have you ever been to New York?” she asked at one point.
The answer was again no, but Czerny soon rectified that. One Saturday morning, we piled into her car—me and young Jonathan and another friend who also worked at the TWC—and rode along as Czerny drove full speed toward Manhattan, talking and smoking all the way. You could almost feel something lifting off her as we drove, an unspooling of tension as the white-fenced horse farms surrounding Princeton gave way to choked highways and finally the spires of the city rising in front of us. New York was home for Czerny, the same way Chicago was home for me. You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.
Before I knew it, we were in the teeming heart of New York, locked into a flow of yellow taxis and blaring car horns as Czerny floored it between stoplights, hitting her brakes at the absolute last second before a red light caught her short. I don’t remember exactly what we did that day: I know we had pizza. We saw Rockefeller Center, drove through Central Park, and caught sight of the Statue of Liberty with her hopeful hoisted torch. But we were mainly there for practical reasons. Czerny seemed to be recharging her soul by running through a list of mundane errands. She had things to pick up, things to drop off. She double-parked on busy cross streets as she dashed in and out of buildings, provoking an avalanche of honking ire from other drivers, while the rest of us sat helplessly in the car. New York overwhelmed me. It was fast and noisy, a less patient place than Chicago. But Czerny was full of life there, unfazed by jaywalking pedestrians and the smell of urine and stacked garbage wafting from the curb.
She was about to double-park again when she sized up the traffic in her rearview and suddenly seemed to think better of it. Instead, she gestured to me in the passenger seat, indicating I should slide over and take her place behind the steering wheel.
“You have a license, right?” she asked. When I answered with an affirmative nod, she said, “Great. Take the wheel. Just do a slow loop around the block. Or maybe two. Then come back around. I’ll be five minutes or less, I promise.”
I looked at her like she was nuts. She was nuts, in my opinion, for thinking I could drive in Manhattan—me being just a teenager, a foreigner in this unruly city, inexperienced and fully incapable, as I saw it, of taking not just her car but her young son for an uncertain, time-killing spin in the late-afternoon traffic. But my hesitancy only triggered something in Czerny that I will forever associate with New Yorkers—an instinctive and immediate push back against thinking small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it and just live a little was her message.
* * *
I was learning all the time now. I was learning in the obvious academic ways, holding my own in classes, doing most of my studying in a quiet room at the Third World Center or in a carrel at the library. I was learning how to write efficiently, how to think critically. I’d inadvertently signed up for a 300-level theology class as a freshman and floundered my way through, ultimately salvaging my grade with an eleventh-hour, leave-it-all-on-the-field effort on the final paper. It wasn’t pretty, but I found it encouraging in the end, proof that I could work my way out of just about any hole. Whatever deficits I might have arrived with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not procrastinate.
Still, it was impossible to be a black kid at a mostly white school and not feel the shadow of affirmative action. You could almost read the scrutiny in the gaze of certain students and even some professors, as if they wanted to say, “I know why you’re here.” These moments could be demoralizing, even if I’m sure I was just imagining some of it. It planted a