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  My admiration for this book helped me in another unexpected way. When I’d finally finished all the course work necessary to graduate from high school and it was time for me to figure out where I wanted to go to college, my decision was easy. Even though I applied to thirteen different schools, all neatly listed on an Excel spreadsheet I’d made, one stood out from all the rest. Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, had friendly and personable instructors and a stellar art department. It was also a Christian school, so Larry and Ruthanne could have no complaints about my decision. But, most importantly for me, Dr. John Perkins and his son Spencer both lived in Jackson.

  Chapter Twelve

  Belhaven College

  DIAPERS HAD BEEN HANGING from our clothesline in Montana for more than two years, but by the time I left for college in Mississippi in 1996, all my younger siblings were potty-trained—as well as walking, talking, and using utensils to feed themselves. I’d even taught Ruthanne how to braid Esther’s hair and, just as importantly, helped her to see that braids were beautiful—at the very least because of their practicality. Packing up and leaving the only home I’d ever known was difficult, but not for the reasons you might think. After I’d helped raise four children from infancy, moving to Mississippi felt more like a midlife transition than a coming-of-age one and I knew that I was far too young to be feeling that way.

  Before leaving Montana, I called Spencer Perkins. He’d been the first Black student ever to attend Belhaven, but it wasn’t his thoughts about campus life that drew me to him. After reading More Than Equals, I felt such a powerful connection to him and his philosophy on racial reconciliation I asked him if he’d mentor me while I was living in Jackson.

  “Why don’t you come to church when you get here,” he said, “and afterward we’ll go to the house and talk and go from there.”

  After services at the Voice of Cavalry Fellowship, the church Spencer’s father John founded in 1972, I went with Spencer, his wife Nancy, and their three kids to the large lot on Robinson Road where Antioch was located. The three spacious Antebellum houses on the property had been divvied up to accommodate several different families, but I spent most of my time with the Perkinses. We hit it off so well that I was soon living something of a double life. During the week, I shared a dorm room on campus with a petite ballet dancer who had blonde hair and blue eyes, and I spent an inordinate amount of time in the library; on the weekends I went to church in all-Black West Jackson and hung out with Spencer and his family.

  The first time I visited Antioch, Spencer and I talked at length about one of his favorite activities (in addition to barbecuing and shooting hoops), fishing. When I asked him where I could find a shovel and set about digging worms for him, I couldn’t have made him any happier if I’d handed him a million dollars.

  Whenever I think about fishing, I’m always reminded of a passage from one of Grandpa Perkins’ speeches in which he gave the old proverb “If you give a man a fish . . .” a decidedly new twist. “If you teach a man to fish,” he said, “he may never eat because all that really matters is—who owns the pond.” As someone who’d lived through the Jim Crow era, he’d seen plenty of capable Black people denied jobs and opportunities even though they’d been “taught how to fish.”

  After my first visit, eating lunch at Antioch after church on Sunday became a weekly ritual. One afternoon while chatting with Spencer in the family room of his house, he asked me what sort of artwork I did. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any pictures with me to show him. “I bet your art doesn’t look like that,” he said, pointing to a large framed print on the wall. It was a beautiful but tragic painting of a Black mother with a baby strapped to her back, picking cotton in a field.

  “Actually, that’s exactly the kind of art I do,” I told him.

  When he finally saw some of my pieces, his initial skepticism turned into unmitigated support. Spencer was always smiling and laughing, but he grew very serious when talking about my artwork. “You need to focus on your art,” he often told me. “It’s a gift.”

  My comfort level wasn’t nearly as high on campus—at least initially. I arrived there looking like I’d just stepped off the set of Little House on the Prairie or escaped from a religious cult. Wearing a homemade ankle-length dress and no makeup, I walked into the cafeteria the first day of classes and was greeted by a picture as strange to my eyes as the sight of me must have been to everyone else: the cafeteria was completely segregated, with all the tables occupied by white students except for one on the far side of the room. At the start of my freshman year only 5 percent of Belhaven’s student body was Black, and most of them could be found hanging out at the “Black table” at some point during the day.

  As I walked through the cavernous room buzzing with chatter, my heart nearly skipped a beat. Everyone looked so normal compared to me. I could see it on their faces whenever they glanced my way: Who the heck is this? Searching for a reassuring face and not finding one, I carried my tray through the gauntlet of white faces until I arrived at the Black table in the corner. That I shouldn’t sit there because I was born to white parents and all the table’s occupants were Black didn’t occur to me. A true fish out of water, more than two thousand miles from where I’d been born, I’d gravitated to where I felt most comfortable, and, after the initial awkwardness wore off, that’s how the people sitting there made me feel.

  Looking back on this moment, I wonder if the students at that table were so nice because they felt sorry for me. I was dressed like a peasant, after all, and I obviously had no friends. Regardless of their motivations, they were incredibly kind to me, almost sympathetic. When they started talking about the Black Student Association (BSA) meeting scheduled for that afternoon and I asked where and when it was, they let me know the location and the time and only shrugged and smiled when I expressed a desire to join them.

  It was the first BSA meeting of the year, which meant dues needed to be paid and all the leadership positions filled. Excited to join my first student organization, I secured my membership with a five-dollar bill and watched as members were voted into office. We elected a president, vice president, treasurer, and secretary that afternoon, but it quickly became clear that no one wanted to be the historian.

  There was a long, awkward moment of silence. Finally, I raised my hand and started walking toward the front of the room just as I’d seen the previous candidates do, and as I did, I was greeted with barely muffled snickering.

  Even the newly elected president, Winston Trotter, couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “Hold up,” he said. “Why are you here, and why do you want to be the historian?”

  Being raised with no sense of humor whatsoever, I delivered an overly earnest speech explaining how passionate I was about Black culture, how I’d always felt a connection with Blackness, and how deeply I cared about my siblings’ future. My enthusiasm caught everyone in the room a little off guard.

  “But what exactly do you know about Black history?” someone asked.

  The rambling dissertation that followed encompassed all the Black historical figures I admired most and was so long-winded Winston had to cut me off. “We need to wrap this meeting up, so let’s just go ahead and vote.”

  Running unopposed, I won in a landslide.

  As the BSA’s historian, my main responsibility was documenting all the club’s activities, but I took the role much more seriously than that. I wanted to educate people about why BSAs were so important to have on campuses. I also took it upon myself to inspire my fellow members by continually reminding them about pivotal moments in Black history. To this end, I revised the historian’s duties to include preparing a brief Black history lesson for each meeting and giving a historical presentation during mandatory chapel every Tuesday of Black History Month. Rewarding my commitment and knowledge, my fellow BSA members reelected me to the position all four years I was in college.

  My affiliation with the BSA made it impossible to ignore the many issues confronting Belhave
n’s Black students, and, as time passed, I grew more determined to do something about them. I helped create the first African American history course ever taught there, and it remains a part of the curriculum to this day. I worked with the college’s president to increase the recruitment and retention of Black students, and by the time I graduated, the Black population on campus had increased to nearly 15 percent. And I helped organize a conference to discuss “racial reconciliation”—the restoration of peace between Black and white communities I’d read about in Beyond Charity and More Than Equals—that paired Belhaven, which was historically white, with nearby Tougaloo College, which was historically Black.

  While I was at Belhaven, I also developed a radar for anything that seemed inequitable to or dismissive of the college’s Black students and committed myself to changing it. For instance, I was just about to settle into a three-day weekend in the middle of January my freshman year, when I looked at my Biology syllabus and saw that class was scheduled for Monday. What was going on? Surely a college wouldn’t schedule classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, would it? Wasn’t it a federal holiday? It had to be a mistake, right?

  I brought all my questions with me to the office of Dr. Roger Parrott, Belhaven’s president, first thing Monday morning. Dr. Parrott informed me that Belhaven had never given its students and staff that day off. I was surprised to hear this, but anyone who knew Mississippi better than I did wouldn’t have been. While the federal government made MLK Day a national holiday in 1983, it wasn’t recognized on the state level by all fifty states until 2000. One of the states that initially dragged its feet was Mississippi. When it finally did come on board, it managed to rob the day of much of its power by giving equal billing to the leader of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, making the third Monday in January a holiday with a name as awkward to say as it is to celebrate: “Martin Luther King’s and Robert E. Lee’s Birthdays.” While post offices and banks had no choice, schools and businesses were given some latitude when it came to observing the holiday.

  Fortunately, Dr. Parrott was new to the college, shockingly young, and very broad-minded, and he let me know that he was open to the idea of recognizing MLK Day on campus if a consensus among the student body could be obtained. That’s all I needed to hear. I wrote a petition and shamelessly pushed it in front of everyone I could find, and within a month I’d acquired enough signatures to make the holiday an official celebration on campus the following year. And not just as a vacation day. In keeping with the King Holiday and Service Act, which President Clinton made a law on August 23, 1994, I worked with the administration to organize a day of service. During the first year the holiday was observed at Belhaven, more than two hundred and fifty (mostly white) students worked on Habitat for Humanity homes in West Jackson, which, in a city that remained nearly as segregated as it was in the 1960s, was known as “the Black side of town.”

  My growing connection to Black culture was also apparent in my artwork, which, like the pieces I’d shown Spencer, focused on Black faces and figures and was unashamedly pro-Black. The images almost exclusively depicted aspects of the Black experience I felt were beautiful and empowering. Tired of seeing white people taking center stage all the time, I wanted to use my art skills to offer a more equitable and compassionate treatment of Black culture. Two such pieces—one done on elk hide (“Irma Leah”), the other on deer hide (“Tatters of Time”)—helped me pay for my first year of college after I won the national Tandy Leather Art Scholarship. Another landed me an exhibition in New York City after Fabian Uzoh gave a woman from the United Nations a very compelling description of the piece about the Rwandan genocide I’d made in high school. She called me to say that she wanted to display it in the lobby of the UN headquarters, saying it perfectly captured the type of empathy they wanted to promote about the Rwandan refugee situation. As a financially strapped college student, I couldn’t afford to fly there for the reception, but apparently the staff was so moved by the piece that they renewed the usual three-month loan period four times. When the piece was returned to me after a year away, I donated it to Tougaloo College, where it remains today.

  My predilection for painting Black figures didn’t sit well with some of the white students in my art classes, who often made fun of me for it. If I wanted to focus on human rights and injustice, a few of them told me, I should paint Irish people. I got so sick of being pressured in this way I actually tried painting white people a couple times, but it never looked or felt right to me. I had difficulty seeing highlights and reflections on pale skin. Even when the models in my figure drawing class were white, they came out looking Black on my sketch pad. In the end, I embraced the talents I had and stopped trying to please other people or help them understand me.

  Some of my professors noted that, unlike most freshmen majoring in art, my body of work already had a clear focus. That didn’t do me much good as I looked for a place in North Jackson (read: the white part of town) to display my artwork during my second semester at Belhaven. When none of the art galleries there took an interest in my work, I visited the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center in West Jackson. Originally the site of Jackson’s first public school for Black children—the novelist Richard Wright graduated from there in 1925—Smith Robertson was enjoying a second life as a museum that celebrated the art and experiences of Black Mississippians.

  Turry Flucker, the museum’s curator, gave me a tour of the building. When I mentioned that I was looking for a place to display my artwork and had brought some slides with me, he was kind enough to ask the receptionist to set up a projector on the table in his office. Soon after we sat down, he broke step with the formality he’d previously displayed. “I understand you want to show your art here,” he said, “but we’re a Black museum and you’re white. What could you possibly show me that I would be interested in?”

  His words stung, but I got it. All he could see was the color of my skin. I dropped my slides into the projector carousel. “Let me show you.”

  The first slide showed one of my signature pieces, “AFRIKA,” and after seeing it, Turry leaned back in his chair and said, “Wow.” When I got to the end of my ten-slide presentation, he surprised me with his enthusiasm. “So,” he said, “we’re going to need at least fifteen mid- to large-sized pieces for the show.”

  Two months later, a mixed-media exhibit by Rachel Doležal made its debut at the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center. At the opening reception, the educator and artist Jolivette Anderson read her poem “Pieces of You, Pieces of Me,” which was inspired by “AFRIKA” and made me cry. I didn’t sell any paintings at that show, but it was a rewarding experience nevertheless. The audience was roughly half white and half Black and everyone was a bit out of their comfort zone, but they were all together under a single roof with a single purpose and that’s one of the first steps on the road to healing race relations.

  As I got more involved with the BSA, campus activism, and my artwork, the more Afrocentric my appearance became. I started wearing my hair in Poetic Justice box braids and sporting dashikis and African-patterned dresses. I thought the patterns and embroidery of these clothes were beautiful, and in the Mississippi heat, the fabric did a good job of keeping you cool without being immodest. Wearing this style of clothing made me feel more confident and more beautiful.

  As a result, most people didn’t know what to make of me. “So, what are you?” I was asked all too often. My responses tended to be awkward, tortuous, strained. Because I didn’t fit neatly into a box and didn’t know how to articulate who I was or how I felt in a way that made sense to people, I’d end up bouncing from one story to the next until I’d told them nearly everything about my life. I’d usually start off by saying that Larry and Ruthanne were white before describing how I was instinctively drawn to Black aesthetics, culture, and history, and then I would mention my siblings and the racial justice work I was currently doing.

  These long, rambling answers satisfied very few people—and
seemed to bore the pants off most. You know how when most people ask how you are, they don’t really want to know the answer? They just want you to say, “Fine.” That’s how these encounters felt. People just wanted me to say I was Black or white. They didn’t want to hear, in all its boring complexity, about the journey to self-identification I was on. I could see it in the way they shifted their weight from one foot to the other and stopped making eye contact with me while I was talking. They were tired of listening. They were done having this conversation, and before long I was, too.

  I stopped volunteering information about my identity to people unless I knew them really well. It became much easier for me to let them make assumptions about me. I noticed how much more relaxed and comfortable Black people who assumed I was Black were around me. The minute I corrected them, the comfort level we’d enjoyed just a moment before disappeared, so I stopped doing it and started letting them identify me however they wanted to. If they identified me as a light-skinned Black woman or a mixed-race woman, which they frequently did, I didn’t mind.

  My laissez-faire attitude toward my racial identification was much more difficult to maintain when it came to filling out applications and medical forms. Prior to my departure from Montana, I generally felt obligated to choose WHITE, CAUCASIAN, or EUROPEAN AMERICAN when I was asked to check a box identifying my race. If the form allowed me to choose more than one category, I would also check NATIVE AMERICAN because of what I’d been told about my great-grandmother’s ancestry.

  When I was living in Mississippi, I felt like I should continue checking WHITE on such forms. According to other people’s perception of racial categories, that was the truth—even though I’d begun to feel like that description was increasingly misrepresentative of who I was and how I was being treated by others. I would sometimes check OTHER when that was an available option, as a way of clarifying the difference between me and the distinctive breed of white people who lived in the Deep South. If providing an answer was optional, I would avoid making a selection altogether. The more I learned about race in college—that it has no genetic underpinnings, but is a social construct—the less obligated I felt to check WHITE. Some of my biracial friends would play around with these forms, alternately checking WHITE, BLACK, or OTHER just to see how it would affect the way people responded to them. I thought it was a clever idea and a useful sociological experiment, particularly as I grew more ethnically indeterminate in my appearance.