Dark College Years

Academically, I was 100% prepared for college. Emotionally, I was not.

So the first thing that happened when Daddy transported me from my newly ghetto lifestyle with Foster Mama to the hallowed halls of Yale University was that I broke out in fever blisters and sank into a deep depression.

I'd applied to Yale for one very superficial reason: my senior year in high school, U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the #1 undergraduate school in the country. And I wanted to be #1.

Yale was actually my second choice.

My first choice was New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. I was accepted into NYU's playwrighting program ... but I didn't want to spend four years chained to a typewriter. I was given a partial scholarship ... but Yale's package was $1,175 better. I liked the idea of living in New York City ... but the endless concrete and subway piss completely overwhelmed me.

Throw in the fact that Yale's minimum wage was 35 cents an hour higher, their campus was greener and they put on a spring visit geared toward minority students, and the scales tipped in Yale's favor.

I chose Yale, and I pretty much regret that choice even to this day.

I more or less hated everything about it, starting with the gargoyles that leered at me from the top of every building. While my classmates chirped happily about how much they loved the Gothic architecture, I felt like I was living in a horror movie. I was afraid to go into the stacks by myself, because I was convinced that a serial killer would emerge from a dark, musty bookshelf and stab me, or one of the supposedly harmless bats would turn into Dracula and bite my neck.

But my dislike of the gray, stony atmosphere was nothing compared to my barely suppressed hatred of my classmates.

Most of my classmates were well-to-do, and many were filthy rich. That included the black students, most of whom were decidedly middle-class. My welfare-to-Yale mindset didn't know the difference. To me, anyone who hadn't endured welfare cheese, free lunch, ugly hand-me-down clothes and bus tickets was rich. I couldn't relate to my suitemates' tales of European vacations, and they had no concept of what it meant to work 20 hours a week at a crappy on-campus job only to turn over 1/4 of my pitiful check to Yale to pay for the "family contribution" portion of my tuition.

I chafed at the experience of being a "black girl" instead of a "smart girl." In Detroit, a city that was 75% black, I wasn't judged based on race, except when dealing with Arab store owners and the occasional white suburbanite.

I was judged based on my individual personality quirks.

At Yale, my primary personality quirk was my skin tone. My white classmates, and even some of my professors, couldn't tell one black girl from another. They used our names interchangeably and skimmed over us in conversations, but felt threatened and baffled when black students huddled together at "the black table" in the large, dark, dismally ornate dining hall.

I quickly discovered that college wouldn't live up to my fantasy of what I thought it would be.

I thought that college would mean fun, friends, and most importantly, my first real boyfriend.

I hadn't dated in high school, except for my tawdry sexual experimentation with 40-something Johnnie Walker and a brief demonstration of my new-found oral-sex skills on a boy from down the street.

Yale brought no increase in my dating activity. None of the black boys expressed any interest. Few of the white boys registered me as a distinct entity, let alone a potential mate.

So I threw myself into my books, joined a theater group and wondered how I would possibly make it through a full four years.

By the middle of my sophomore year, I was dating local jailbirds and dreaming of dropping out.