C

us—me and Terri and Chiaka—landed here because we were smart like them?

The truth is I didn’t know. I had no idea whether we were smart like them.
I knew only that we were the best students coming out of what was thought
to be a middling, mostly black school in a middling, mostly black neighborhood.
But what if that wasn’t enough? What if, after all this fuss, we were just the best
of the worst?

This was the doubt that sat in my mind through student orientation,
through my first sessions of high school biology and English, through my
somewhat fumbling get-to-know-you conversations in the cafeteria with new
friends. Not enough. Not enough. It was doubt about where I came from and what
I’d believed about myself until now. It was like a malignant cell that threatened to
divide and divide again, unless I could find some way to stop it.

hicago, I was learning, was a much bigger city than I’d ever imagined it to
be. This was a revelation formed in part over the three hours I now logged daily
on the bus, boarding at Seventy-Fifth Street and chuffing through a maze of local
stops, often forced to stand because it was too crowded to find a seat.

Through the window, I got a long slow view of the South Side in what felt
like its entirety, its corner stores and barbecue joints still shuttered in the gray
light of early morning, its basketball courts and paved playgrounds lying empty.
We’d go north on Jeffery and then west on Sixty-Seventh Street, then north
again, zagging and stopping every two blocks to collect more people. We crossed
Jackson Park Highlands and Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago campus
sat hidden behind a massive wrought-iron gate. After what felt like an eternity,
we’d finally accelerate onto Lake Shore Drive, following the curve of Lake
Michigan north toward downtown.

There’s no hurrying a bus ride, I can tell you. You get on and you endure.
Every morning, I’d switch buses downtown at Michigan Avenue at the height of
rush hour, catching a westbound ride along Van Buren Street, where the view at
least got more interesting as we passed bank buildings with big gold doors and
bellhops standing outside the fancy hotels. Through the window, I watched men
and women in smart outfits—in suits and skirts and clicking heels—carrying their
coffee to work with a bustle of self-importance. I didn’t yet know that people
like this were called professionals. I hadn’t yet tracked the degrees they must have