M

earned to gain access to the tall corporate castles lining Van Buren. But I did like
how determined they looked.

Meanwhile, at school I was quietly collecting bits of data, trying to sort out
my place inside the teenage intelligentsia. Until now, my experiences with kids
from other neighborhoods had been limited to visits with various cousins and a
few summers of city-run day camp at Rainbow Beach, where every camper still
came from some part of the South Side and nobody was well-off. At Whitney
Young, I met white kids who lived on the North Side—a part of Chicago that
felt like the dark side of the moon, a place I’d never thought about nor had
reason to go to. More intriguing was my early discovery that there was such a
thing as an African American elite. Most of my new high school friends were
black, but that didn’t necessarily translate, it turned out, to any sort of uniformity
in our experience. A number of them had parents who were lawyers or doctors
and seemed to know one another through an African American social club called
Jack and Jill. They’d been on ski vacations and trips that required passports. They
talked about things that were foreign to me, like summer internships and
historically black colleges. One of my black classmates, a nerdy boy who was
always kind to everyone, had parents who’d founded a big beauty-supply
company and lived in one of the ritziest high-rises downtown.

This was my new world. It’s not to say that everyone at the school was rich
or overly sophisticated, because that wasn’t the case. There were plenty of kids
who came from neighborhoods just like mine, who struggled with far more than
I ever would. But my first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of
something that had previously been invisible—the apparatus of privilege and
connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes
that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.

y first round of grades at school turned out to be pretty good, and so did
my second. Over the course of my freshman and sophomore years, I began to
build the same kind of confidence I’d had at Bryn Mawr. With each little
accomplishment, with every high school screwup I managed to avoid, my doubts
slowly took leave. I liked most of my teachers. I wasn’t afraid to raise my hand in
class. At Whitney Young, it was safe to be smart. The assumption was that
everyone was working toward college, which meant that you never hid your
intelligence for fear of someone saying you talked like a white girl.