When I told you where I slept, you said in order to embody black excellence, especially at a place white northerners deemed elite, I must
When I told you where I slept, you said in order to embody black excellence, especially at a place white northerners deemed elite, I must maintain healthy distance from my colleagues and never let them see me “disheveled.” I heard, that first week, from more white colleagues than I could count how lucky I was to be at Vassar. When you were my age, you’d been teaching at Jackson State for two years. I was six years old. I wondered if your black colleagues, who were your professors a few years earlier, called you lucky to be back teaching at Jackson State.
