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was something about it, and about politics in general, that made me queasy. For
one thing, I was someone who liked things to be neat and planned in advance,
and from what I could tell, there seemed to be nothing especially neat about a life
in politics. The parade had not been part of my plan. As I remember it, Santita
and I hadn’t intended on joining at all. We’d been conscripted at the last minute,
maybe by her mother or father, or by someone else in the movement who’d
caught us before we could follow through on whatever ideas we’d had for
ourselves that day. But I loved Santita dearly, and I was also a polite kid who for
the most part went along with what adults told me to do, and so I’d done it. I’d
plunged myself deep into the hot, spinning noisiness of the Bud Billiken Day
Parade.

I arrived home at Euclid Avenue that evening to find my mother laughing.
“I just saw you on TV,” she said.
She’d been watching the news and spotted me marching alongside Santita,
waving and smiling and going along. What made her laugh, I’d guess, is that she
also picked up on the queasiness—the fact that maybe I’d been caught up in
something I’d rather not do.

hen it came time to look at colleges, Santita and I both were interested in
schools on the East Coast. She went to check out Harvard but was disheartened
when an admissions officer pointedly harassed her about her father’s politics,
when all she wanted was to be taken on her own terms. I spent a weekend
visiting Craig at Princeton, where he seemed to have slipped into a productive
rhythm of playing basketball, taking classes, and hanging out at a campus center
designed for minority students. The campus was large and pretty—an Ivy League
school covered with ivy—and Craig’s friends seemed nice enough. I didn’t
overthink it from there. No one in my immediate family had much in the way of
direct experience with college, so there was little, anyway, to debate or explore.
As had always been the case, I figured that whatever Craig liked, I would like,
too, and that whatever he could accomplish, I could as well. And with that,
Princeton became my top choice for school.

Early in my senior year at Whitney Young, I went for an obligatory first
appointment with the school college counselor to whom I’d been assigned.

I   can’t   tell    you much    about   the counselor,  because I   deliberately    and almost