It’s a week into the start of a new semester and my brain is muddled. Somehow, I’ve been teaching on my community college campus for twenty years. Everyone who was in my department when I started is no longer here. Given my white hair, being the senior member is apt, but I don’t feel that way. I can still see the faces of my students in one of our former, now destroyed, bungalow classrooms, the wall unit air conditioner vibrating through the floor, back when our campus, like me, was less grown up. Now, I’m in a modern room, with good technology and large windows upon which my students solve problems as if they were in A Beautiful Mind. But the faces in front of me haven’t changed all that much, nor many of the feelings behind them.
The first week is blur. My energy is high as I talk to every student, work at learning names and pronouns, and try to create a classroom culture that will support them over our sixteen week marathon. Eighty-four new faces. Some confident, some insecure, wondering if they belong here, unsure how this experience will be different from high school. A young woman asks me if she can go home as she’s experiencing nausea. I explain that she’s an adult and should take care of her needs and remind her that she can find me in office hours before the next class. Another tells me she can’t afford the $15 statistical software package (the only cost in my class) right now. I tell her I can work something out with the publisher and I remember to do so. A young man gets visibly upset when he struggles to access a file with his laptop, but, later in the class, when I draw a connection to modern statistics from the 1936 election, he shines, being able to fill in several historical details. I hope to remember to see if I can guide him in crafting a final project which can connect to his interest in history.
Before class in my office, I read their surveys. I asked them about their goals and fears and what they needed from me to succeed. They’re scared of failing, ambitious about their futures, and need me to be patient and explain concepts well and not be a jerk. I hope I can manage that, but again my mind wanders. In less than two weeks, my first book comes out, a huge milestone in another part of my life. I have a launch, a book tour of sorts. Will I be able to manage that? And then, in just over two months, there’s an election, over which I obsess. Will we manage to avoid another complete betrayal of our values? Can our country finally shake off a bit of its misogyny? I think about Kamala Harris and my mind jumps to 1996.
It was impossible not to notice the stares as we walked around the campus. We were an unusual pair; me, a thirty-year old white guy and, Liz, a gorgeous seventeen-year-old young Black woman, taking in the sights at North Carolina Central University, an HBCU campus. There was a comic element to the looks, especially with the college men. I saw jaws drop when they saw Liz and heads shake at me. Who is he? Definitely not Dad. Better not be Sugar Daddy. The relationship was simple. I was Liz’s uncle by marriage. The uncle who had volunteered to drive her hundreds of miles on a junior year, spring break college trip. The uncle who, while driving through rural Pennsylvania, pointed out that we were headed far south from our liberal northeast hippie town and that this arrangement might look a little strange. “Turn the car around Uncle Fran,” Liz said. I didn’t.
One young man decided to ignore who I might be, and followed us around, acting as our personal guide. He said he was a junior and that he’d be an RA next year. He gave us a thorough tour including “his dorm.” He had charm and was smooth, well, until he slipped Liz his phone number in plain sight, telling her he’d be glad to meet up when she got here next fall. Liz was friendly but aloof. She was a stellar student, basketball star, model, and senior class president-to-be. She oozed charisma and this attention was nothing new. I doubted he had a chance with her even if she were to attend his school (she didn’t, she choose Hampton, also an HBCU, instead).
But I took away much more than these flirtation efforts from our few hours at North Carolina Central. Even as an outsider, I felt joy on the campus. Joy on the faces of the Black students who could relax, who could be themselves among peers. They walked without being watched, without being the only one, with the knowledge that their faculty looked like them and supported them. Two years ago, with Roi Fainéant Press, I facilitated the publication of work from some students at Howard University. In the intro to the issue, Tricia Elam Walker, the English Professor with whom we collaborated wrote:
There is a special nurturing that takes place at HBCUs. We faculty care for and raise up these special individuals who generally come with a history of struggle, racism, discrimination, etc. in their DNA, whether they’ve experienced it or not. And most have. Many students come to us after having been the only person of color in their previous school or one of a few or the only one in their high school’s AP classes and quite often they have suffered trauma because of it. At an HBCU there may be other issues, but students don’t have to cope with the microaggressions of these past situations and can experience some semblance of walking through the world without being reminded daily of the color of their skin. They can release those long-held breaths and strengthen their inner resources in preparation to go back out to America’s racial battlefield in four years.
I find so much truth and beauty in these words as they transport me back across time. Who knows where those students may land with such nurturing, perhaps in our country’s highest office.
I don’t teach at an HBCU, but I do have students who have experienced the history of which Prof Walker writes. Some of my students will need that special nurturing. I hope I’m able to discern which ones do. And, muddled brain or no, I hope to provide some of it.
Happy fall semester. And vote the right way.
San Diego Stories is out in a week from Cowboy Jamboree Press. Learn more at francoisbereaudwriter.com. One of the stories includes a photograph from my beloved Miramar College.
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