Attached to all of this was a new vocabulary, one I needed to master. What
was a precept? What was a reading period? Nobody had explained to me the
meaning of “extra-long” bedsheets on the school packing list, which meant that I
bought myself too-short bedsheets and would thus spend my freshman year
sleeping with my feet resting on the exposed plastic of the dorm mattress. There
was an especially distinct learning curve when it came to understanding sports. I’d
been raised on the bedrock of football, basketball, and baseball, but it turned out
that East Coast prep schoolers did more. Lacrosse was a thing. Field hockey was a
thing. Squash, even, was a thing. For a kid from the South Side, it could be a
little dizzying. “You row crew?” What does that even mean?
I had only one advantage, the same one I’d had when starting kindergarten:
I was still Craig Robinson’s little sister. Craig was now a junior and a top player
on the varsity basketball team. He was, as he’d always been, a man with fans.
Even the campus security guards greeted him by name. Craig had a life, and I
managed at least partially to slip into it. I got to know his teammates and their
friends. One night I went to a dinner with him off campus, at the well-appointed
home of one of the basketball team’s boosters, where sitting at the dining room
table I was met by a confounding sight, a food item that like so many other things
at Princeton required a lesson in gentility—a spiny green artichoke laid out on a
white china plate.
Craig had found himself a plum housing arrangement for the year, living
rent-free as a caretaker in an upstairs bedroom at the Third World Center, a
poorly named but well-intentioned offshoot of the university with a mission to
support students of color. (It would be a full twenty years before the Third World
Center was rechristened the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural
Understanding—named for Princeton’s first African American dean.) The center
was housed in a brick building on a corner lot on Prospect Avenue, whose prime
blocks were dominated by the grand, mansion-like stone and Tudor-style eating
clubs that substituted for fraternities.
The Third World Center—or TWC, as most of us called it—quickly
became a kind of home base for me. It hosted parties and co-op meals. There
were volunteer tutors to help with homework and spaces just to hang out. I’d
made a handful of instant friends during the summer program, and many of us
gravitated toward the center during our free time. Among them was Suzanne
Alele. Suzanne was tall and thin with thick eyebrows and luxurious dark hair that
fell in a shiny wave down her back. She had been born in Nigeria and raised in
Kingston, Jamaica, though her family had moved to Maryland when she was a