seed of doubt. Was I here merely as part of a social experiment?
Slowly, though, I began to understand that there were many versions of quotas being filled at the school. As minorities, we were the most visible, but it became clear that special dispensations were made to admit all kinds of students whose grades or accomplishments might not measure up to the acknowledged standard. It was hardly a straight meritocracy. There were the athletes, for example. There were the legacy kids, whose fathers and grandfathers had been Tigers or whose families had funded the building of a dorm or a library. I also learned that being rich didn’t protect you from failure. Around me, I saw students flaming out—white, black, privileged or not. Some were seduced by weeknight keg parties, some were crushed by the stress of trying to live up to some scholarly ideal, and others were just plain lazy or so out of their element they needed to flee. My job, as I saw it, was to hold steady, earn the best grades I could, and get myself through.
By sophomore year, when Suzanne and I moved into a double room together, I’d figured out how to better manage. I was more accustomed now to being one of a few students of color in a packed lecture hall. I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
Some of my peers felt their otherness more acutely than I did. My friend Derrick remembers white students refusing to yield the sidewalk when he walked in their path. Another girl we knew had six friends over to her dorm room one night to celebrate her birthday and promptly got hauled into the dean’s office, informed that her white roommate evidently hadn’t felt comfortable with having “big black guys” in the room. There were so few of us minority kids at Princeton, I suppose, that our presence was always conspicuous. I mainly took this as a mandate to overperform, to do everything I possibly could to keep up with or even plow past the more privileged people around me. Just as it had been at Whitney Young, my intensity was spawned at least in part by a feeling of I’ll show you. If in high school I’d felt as if I were representing my neighborhood, now at Princeton I was representing my race. Anytime I found my voice in class or nailed an exam, I quietly hoped it helped make a larger point.
Suzanne, I was learning, was not an overthinker. I nicknamed her Screwzy, for the impractical, sidewinding course of her days. She based most of her decisions—who she’d date, what classes she took—primarily on how fun it was likely to be. And when things weren’t fun, she quickly changed direction. While I joined the Organization for Black Unity and generally stuck close to the Third World Center, Suzanne ran track and managed the lightweight football team, enjoying the fact that it kept her close to cute, athletic men. Through the eating club, she had friends who were white and wealthy, including a bona fide teenage movie star and a European student rumored to be a princess. Suzanne had felt some pressure from her parents to pursue medicine though eventually gave up on it, finding that it messed with her joy. At some point, she was put on academic probation, but even that didn’t seem to bother her much. She was the Laverne to my Shirley, the Ernie to my Bert. Our shared room resembled an ideological battlefield, with Suzanne presiding over a wrecked landscape of tossed clothing and strewn papers on her side and me perched on my bed, surrounded by fastidious order.
“You really gotta do that?” I’d say, watching Suzanne arrive back from track practice and head to the shower, stripping off her sweaty workout outfit and dropping it on the floor where it would live, intermingled with clean clothes and unfinished school assignments, for the next week.
“Do what?” she’d say back, flashing her wholesome smile.
I sometimes had to block out Suzanne’s chaos so I could think straight. I sometimes wanted to yell at her, but I never did. Suzanne was who she was. She