There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

All I knew was that I was not white and that I would have been heartbroken if I had been born white. But this institutional completeness was a bit too complete, since it wasn’t until I arrived at Yale that it dawned on me that the defining trait of my people was not only that we had so much pigment in our skin but that we had so little money in our bank accounts, so little food on our tables, so few books in our classrooms, that we did not take family vacations, that we did not go to the museum, that we did not pay for our lunch at school, did not buy our toys at Toys’R’Us, did not order steak in restaurants, if we ever went, did not go to the dentist for our six-month cleaning, if for anything, did not have vision exams to know we needed glasses, which we could not afford anyway. And we did not add all this up and call ourselves poor—perhaps because it was so obvious that it did not need to be said, or because it was so common that we found more interesting language for each other, or because we were ashamed. I’m not sure. Whatever the case, the black students at Yale were a mighty rich discovery—not only because they had so much more or had lived so differently than I had, but also and especially because they looked at me as though they were itching to pose Du Bois’s question: How does it feel to be a problem? Quickly and surely I began to suspect, as perhaps the coolie suspects when he first encounters the Brahmin, that these elect were invested in the distinction betwe...