homey than institutional. I loved the feeling of being there, of having office work
to do. I loved the little jolt of satisfaction I got anytime I finished off some small
organizational task. But more than anything, I loved my boss, Czerny Brasuell.
Czerny was a smart and beautiful black woman, barely thirty years old, a
swift-moving and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals
and seemed always to be having four or five ideas at once. For students of color at
Princeton, she was like an über-mentor, our ultrahip and always outspoken
defender in chief, and for this she was universally appreciated. In the office, she
juggled multiple projects—lobbying the university administration to enact more
inclusive policies for minorities, advocating for individual students and their
needs, and spinning out new ideas for how all of us could improve our lot. She
was often running late, blasting out the center’s front door at a full sprint,
clutching a sheaf of loose papers with a lit cigarette in her mouth and a purse
draped over her shoulder, shouting directives to me and Loretta as she went. It
was a heady experience, being around her—as close-up as I’d ever been to an
independent woman with a job that thrilled her. She was also, not incidentally, a
single mother raising a dear, precocious boy named Jonathan, whom I often
babysat.
Czerny saw some sort of potential in me, though I was also clearly short on
life experience. She treated me like an adult, asking for my thoughts, listening
keenly as I described the various worries and administrative tangles students had
brought in. She seemed determined to awaken more boldness in me. A good
number of her questions began with “Have you ever...?” Had I ever, for
example, read the work of James Cone? Had I ever questioned Princeton’s
investments in South Africa or whether more could be done to recruit minority
students? Most of the time the answer was no, but once she mentioned it, I
became immediately interested.
“Have you ever been to New York?” she asked at one point.
The answer was again no, but Czerny soon rectified that. One Saturday
morning, we piled into her car—me and young Jonathan and another friend who
also worked at the TWC—and rode along as Czerny drove full speed toward
Manhattan, talking and smoking all the way. You could almost feel something
lifting off her as we drove, an unspooling of tension as the white-fenced horse
farms surrounding Princeton gave way to choked highways and finally the spires
of the city rising in front of us. New York was home for Czerny, the same way
Chicago was home for me. You don’t really know how attached you are until