Fancy Diplomas Cost More Than Money

I remember wandering around New York City with legs numbly dragging along behind me.  My thoughts trailed shortly thereafter. I was slurring my words. I was dizzy. The world around me was a blur of lights. I was dying. And I was alone. And no one could help me.

I started at Vassar in the late summer/early fall of 2005.  I had started working as a bus girl at a local restaurant in the fall of my sophomore in high school when my sister, who was already working there, needed coverage so she could take the ACT and had me fill in for her. I sort of showed up that Saturday morning and never stopped coming. A slightly hapless busser who broke as many dishes as she cleared, I worked myself into the hearts of the benign owner and his septuagenarian mother, who was more than a little bit racist—she’d frequently pull me close and tell me tales of her youth that were riddled with stereotypes and bigotry, and all I could do was smile and laugh quietly. So caught up in her own stories, she never questioned that I sincerely enjoyed hearing her tell me about the “colored girl” she used to fight with. But that’s another story.

The summer before I went to Vassar, I worked as much as I could to save up money for my big escape. I couldn’t work too many hours though, because the on-the-water seafood restaurant was only open for lunch from 11:30am-2pm and for dinner 5-9pm, maybe 5 days a week. I can’t be sure anymore. Time and trauma have a way of erasing the fine lines of memory.  At the end of the summer, I bought 4 things—(1) a one-way Greyhound Bus ticket from Mobile, Alabama, to Washington, DC, and a corresponding Amtrak train ticket to Poughkeepsie from DC;  (2) a roundtrip Greyhound Bus ticket from Mobile, Alabama, to Washington DC, Amtrak to Poughkeepsie, and vice versa; (3) two pairs of dress pants from Target; and (4) two thin coats from Target. The one-way ticket and clothes were for me; the round trip was for my dad.

My dad, my sister, and I boarded the Greyhound Bus in Mobile at a reckless time of the morning, and Greyhound was being Greyhound. If you don’t know what that means, consider yourself lucky. The train was overbooked, and the conductor told us that there weren’t enough seats for all three of us, and that there wouldn’t be room until people departed in Montgomery. My dad looked at my face, an inch from breaking down into tears—I only had money for snacks at each location and no money for change fees and delays.  My dad, a man who had worked his whole life in factories and in blue collar jobs and who had no money to send me off to college, and had only accepted my buying his bus ticket because he knew I couldn’t go off to New York by myself, looked at the bus driver and said if there weren’t any seats, he’d sit on the stairs until Montgomery. And he did. From Mobile to Montgomery, my father sat on the steps of the Greyhound Bus as it chugged mercilessly along. I’ve never been angrier or more loved.

In Montgomery, when passengers deboarded, he got up and claimed a seat next to my sister and me. She and I were full of rage and had spent the entire ride up plotting the downfall of Greyhound. My father, however, was in good spirits and looked at us with that grin of his and asked who was going to buy him a coffee in the Montgomery depot.

I don’t remember much of the bus ride to DC, where we briefly stopped over for my sister to embark upon her senior year at Georgetown University, and I only vaguely remember getting on the train to Poughkeepsie. We had slept over in DC with my sister in her house—I think it was on S Street…or K Street—so we got on the train fresh the next morning. We got to Vassar and checked me into my dorm. My dad only had a few hours there with me before his next train back down to DC so he could catch the bus back to Mobile, but the time we had was priceless. He saw my dorm. He met people who would later become my best friends, then my enemies, and he saw my school before anyone else in my family. I got choked up when he left, and I still get choked up thinking about the departure.

Once he had left, I immediately felt ill at ease. With him there, I was too excited and proud to realize that my clothes were thin and cheap next to my classmates. Once he had left, all the insecurities crept in—and would remain in the space—for the duration of my time there. Several girls in my fellow group asked why my dad hadn’t stayed the night, and I was too embarrassed to say that we couldn’t afford a hotel room, so I just shrugged and said it was fine and that I was excited to be on my own. And I was. Sort of.

I’m not going to talk just yet about the myriad problems I faced at Vassar upon arrival—Hurricane Katrina decimating my hometown; the racial tensions brewing at Vassar due to a racist publication from the conservative group that I had joined; overdrawing my bank account after I reluctantly agreed to go on a trip with my fellow group to the Poughkeepsie Galleria and had bought a tank top and shorts from Target that cost slightly more than the $30 I had in my account; being told that my Southern accent made me sound uneducated…I could go on. And I will, but not now. The Vassar Years could be an anthology series, and if so, this volume would be titled “Those Times I Tried, and Failed, To Die.”

Freshman year was a blur…everything was different. Leaving the South didn’t make my life better. The quiet racism I’d endured back home was now masked behind a liberal façade. I could do nothing right. I wasn’t liberal enough for the liberals, and I wasn’t conservative enough for the conservatives, but the conservatives wanted me more. A token black girl to prove that their racism wasn’t overly abhorrent. I wasn’t the right kind of feminist—I wanted to take my husband’s last name one day and that made me an enemy. I joined the Christian Fellowship, but I didn’t worship like they did, so I was never truly at home there either. I grew up knowing gospel music; praise songs were new to me. I didn’t want to close my eyes on a Tuesday night and sway. That made me a bad Christian. Perpetually an outcast and sliding more deeply into despair than ever, I was relieved at the end of the year when I got to leave.

Sophomore year was worse, somehow. My depression was overwhelming me, and I was barely able to function. A few weeks into the school year, overwhelmed and feeling the world cave in around me, I went into my bathroom and carved outlets into my wrists, praying for some sort of feeling to burst from me. For a fleeting moment, it worked. Then the shock of red blood hitting the white of the sink snapped something inside of me. I rushed to one of my closest friend’s rooms, where many of the girls from my fellow group were gathered, and I yelled something at them. Maybe I asked for help? Maybe I was crying inconsolably? I’m not sure. What I do know is that moment of weakness marked the opening of a new chapter of my time at Vassar.

The next 24 hours were a blur. Campus security was called. I was sent to the hospital. Then to the health center. I was told that my mother was coming to pick me up. I was told that I could not leave the health center. Once I realized that they were sending me home, I panicked. I waited until no one was looking and I ran out of my prison cell. I ran to my House Advisor’s on-campus apartment and banged on the door, screaming, and crying. I screamed that they were trying to send me home and begged her to come intercede on my behalf. I sat outside of her locked door for who knows how long. A friend of mine came with campus security after some span of minutes. They took me back to the health center, locked me in, and left me there until my mother arrived to collect me.

I was told I couldn’t come back until a psychologist and/or psychiatrist signed off on the paperwork that I was fit to be at a place as nice as Vassar. I went for broke when my mom wasn’t looking and told the Dean of Students that if I went home, I would not be able to see anyone because we had no money. I begged him to let me stay; I promised I would see counselors at school. I promised to be good. I was earnest. I was sincere. He was unmoved. He said he hoped to see me next semester.

As expected, I saw my therapist, who I had been seeing since I was a junior in high school, approximately four times. I saw my psychiatrist maybe twice. Copays don’t care about poverty and don’t accept EBT. He filled out the appropriate forms, and I was allowed to come back to Vassar in the Spring of 2006. I was required, however, to meet with an on-campus therapist weekly. It went mind-numbingly bad. He was a postdoctoral fellow. Sweet. New. He liked me. He thought I was funny. He empathized with me. I think he was my first emotional affair.  I’d come into his office, and we would start off so promising. We’d laugh, exchange anecdotes, tease each other.  Then we’d get into the substance. I would start to tell him how I felt, how I was doing, and I would watch his smile fade. I’d see his brow furrow. Sometimes he’d look down in such sadness. After a few sessions of this, I could not bear his pain. I stopped talking about how badly I was doing. I glossed over my pain and focused on his happiness.  In our sessions, we continued the banter. We read poetry. He taught me what a poet laureate was. We laughed like old friends. He was happy, and yet all the while, the glass person inside of me was steadily cracking. I was on the verge of falling down a well, but for my weekly hour with him, I was sweetness and light. Finally, I wasn’t failing at something.

Socially, I was flatlining.  My friend group who had, save for two or three exceptions, ignored me during my absence, remained absent. While I was gone, I largely received no letters. No emails. No calls. I had naively thought that when I got back, things would return to normal, and I would have friends again. But life doesn’t work like that. I was instead met with coldness.  I had been dismissed from the friend group like the pariah Vassar felt I was.  The few faithful in the group remained faithful and are—to this day—among my closest friends. Those few good friends in the group, and those outside of it, helped to cushion the billowing waves of isolation, but nevertheless, I spent the semester in agony.  Drowning. I tried to start a chapter of College Republicans somewhere in there. I think at that point I just liked irritating the limousine liberals who ignored me, treated me like a distraction, treated my voice like a nuisance, and yet still posted MLK quotes on the regular, demanding the world stop in the name of racial justice, peace, and understanding as though that made them the kings of the enlightened.  For the first time in my life, I was the wrong kind of black, and there was never a day that went by at Vassar that someone didn’t remind of that. My experiences of racism weren’t real enough. My beliefs were “naïve.” I couldn’t understand the struggle because if I did, I’d be on their side. I was pitied. Derided. And cast aside. I think in today’s lingo, I would say I was subjected to racist microaggressions. Back then, I was just the problem.  The right kind of black or the wrong kind of black, it seemed no matter where I went, I just couldn’t get it right.

The crushing realization that my escape from the cage I had lived in in Alabama had led me into yet another cage at Vassar mortally wounded me.  I felt alone. I felt abandoned. I was misunderstood and hated. I had spent all my life leaning into code-switching, trying to fit in, striving to prove that I was good enough on my own, and yet there I was, in the ivory tower, at the elite college, and I still wasn’t enough.  My grades were not what they should have been. I was sleeping 15 plus hours a day.  The light in me was fading, and I was running out of reasons and energy to re-light it.  I ended up making my first real suicide attempt at the end of the semester. I won’t go into details. Campus security was called. I was taken to the hospital (again); then to health services (again); then I was watched as I left for my bus home. It was the end of the semester, and they let me leave on my own, but not before telling me that I had to have a psychiatrist sign off on my return.

The summer of 2006 was a blur. I saw my psychiatrist a couple of times. I worked as a cashier at CVS and held onto as much money as I could. My psychiatrist ostensibly sent my form back to Vassar. He said he did. I have doubts that he ever did. I didn’t hear from Vassar, and as the beginning of the semester approached, I grew nervous, anxious. I took the bus up to Vassar like normal. En route, I received word that I would not be allowed to return for the semester. I got off the bus in NYC heartbroken. At rock bottom. I thought of what to do, and I realized that this was my chance to finish what I had tried to start at the end of the last semester.

I had never been to the Empire State Building, so I decided to spend my last dollars to buy a ticket up so I could jump down. Imagine my shock and disappointment when I saw the mesh wiring around the ledges. Tears slid down my face as I realized I couldn’t just jump off. I don’t remember taking the elevator back down. I remember wandering into a bodega and buying extra-strength Tylenol PM. I remember taking as many of them as I could. I walked around NYC at an increasingly sluggish pace. I called my friend Ned (or did he call me?). I told him I was dying and didn’t want to die alone. Looking back, how cruel was that to say to another scared 19-year-old? He didn’t act 19 in that moment though. He kept me on the phone, kept me talking. He asked me random questions that weren’t so random. Questions like what street signs I saw. What buildings. I told him, and in my haze, I was surprised when he showed up in what felt like minutes later. Ned lived in New Jersey but was in NYC for some reason. I don’t remember. I don’t know that I asked. He took me back to a family friend’s apartment in the city before bringing me to his home in New Jersey. I remember he asked me not to try to kill myself while we were in his family friend’s apartment because it would be difficult to explain. Ever the southerner, I obliged, because bad manners were never in style.