in their path. Another girl we knew had six friends over to her dorm room one
night to celebrate her birthday and promptly got hauled into the dean’s office,
informed that her white roommate evidently hadn’t felt comfortable with having
“big black guys” in the room. There were so few of us minority kids at
Princeton, I suppose, that our presence was always conspicuous. I mainly took
this as a mandate to overperform, to do everything I possibly could to keep up
with or even plow past the more privileged people around me. Just as it had been
at Whitney Young, my intensity was spawned at least in part by a feeling of I’ll
show you. If in high school I’d felt as if I were representing my neighborhood,
now at Princeton I was representing my race. Anytime I found my voice in class
or nailed an exam, I quietly hoped it helped make a larger point.
Suzanne, I was learning, was not an overthinker. I nicknamed her Screwzy,
for the impractical, sidewinding course of her days. She based most of her
decisions—who she’d date, what classes she took—primarily on how fun it was
likely to be. And when things weren’t fun, she quickly changed direction. While
I joined the Organization for Black Unity and generally stuck close to the Third
World Center, Suzanne ran track and managed the lightweight football team,
enjoying the fact that it kept her close to cute, athletic men. Through the eating
club, she had friends who were white and wealthy, including a bona fide teenage
movie star and a European student rumored to be a princess. Suzanne had felt
some pressure from her parents to pursue medicine though eventually gave up on
it, finding that it messed with her joy. At some point, she was put on academic
probation, but even that didn’t seem to bother her much. She was the Laverne to
my Shirley, the Ernie to my Bert. Our shared room resembled an ideological
battlefield, with Suzanne presiding over a wrecked landscape of tossed clothing
and strewn papers on her side and me perched on my bed, surrounded by
fastidious order.
“You really gotta do that?” I’d say, watching Suzanne arrive back from track
practice and head to the shower, stripping off her sweaty workout outfit and
dropping it on the floor where it would live, intermingled with clean clothes and
unfinished school assignments, for the next week.
“Do what?” she’d say back, flashing her wholesome smile.
I sometimes had to block out Suzanne’s chaos so I could think straight. I
sometimes wanted to yell at her, but I never did. Suzanne was who she was. She
wasn’t going to change. When it got to be too much, I’d scoop up her junk and
pile it on her bed without comment.