The Highest of Seven Hills by Dawnie Walton #2
The program started: PowerPoints mapping out the campus, a panel of alums sharing their success stories, a highlight reel of the famous Marching 100 playing Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade.
Then FAMU’s own president, Frederick S. Humphries, a giant with a graying Afro and a booming voice, launched into a pitch that turned the place into church.
“We say to Harvard, to Princeton, to that old Ivy League: No one will believe in Black scholars more than we do!” Dr. Humphries preached, and somebody’s mama yelped an amen.
The audience laughed, and folks turned to see who the comedian was.
That’s when I spotted him. Sitting two rows in front of me, a boy who looked eerily familiar…
It took a second to register exactly who he was—the visor he wore on the job hid his hair, which I could now see was a small asymmetrical fade, and his apron likely covered the Wu-Tang logo on his own black XXL tee—but in that second it took my two worlds to flicker, then superimpose, he spotted me too.
That other Black kid from our Saturday nights at the Taco Bell.
What was I expecting him to do—point me out as a liar, a poseur, an Oreo?
I don’t know; the insecurities I carried back then feel ludicrous now, now that I understand every kid in that room was probably terrified, and anxious to be accepted.
And I couldn’t see, in that moment, what the next few years would look like—how this boy and I would share mad jokes and mixtapes, library hangs and holiday rides back to Jacksonville.
All I knew was what was happening in that auditorium, and how it allowed me to release, in one long and relieving whoosh, a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding: That kid’s face— Jeremiah’s face—cracked open into the warmest smile.
Crazy, he mouthed, his eyes still smiling at me, and at my mother who loved me, and my cheeks hurt for how hard I cheesed back at him.
2.
“Wait a minute…Ma! That’s your story? You came here because you liked some boy ?”
I snap out of the past, thirty-odd years later, to find Jossy—my baby who’s no longer a baby, my budding little feminist fighter—gaping at me over the lid of her caramel Frappuccino no-whip.
On MLK, outside the School of Architecture, we’ve just boarded the new shuttle bus, a bright-painted thing that we’ve been told circles the campus every fifteen minutes.
The Venom Express, they’re calling it, and it has the nerve to be extremely air-conditioned against the scorching heat me and my crew once battled daily on foot.
Before it pulls farther away from the Set—that beloved redbrick runway show we used to watch like a movie every Friday after class—I look through the back window, by instinct seeking a glimpse of McGuinn, but then I remember, with another pang, that they tore down all the old girls’ dorms years ago.
They’ve been replaced by sleek shared suites with individual thermostats, electronic key access, washers and dryers, giant bathrooms. And they have Starbucks in Coleman Library now, and a food court with a Wingstop and a Smoothie King, and an amphitheater named after a famous movie-producer alum who graduated back in the nineties with me…
“I mean, that’s not, like, the whole story,” I say to my daughter. I peer out the opposite window—maybe so she won’t catch me blush, maybe to see what else is new around here. “I had a lot to balance, a lot to think about in terms of who I wanted to be.”
“But did you get in? To NYU?”
“Honestly, love, I didn’t end up applying.”
“So you’re saying you gave up your dream school like”—Jossy snaps her fingers—“just because some dude shot you a smile?”
I sigh. “I got to New York eventually, didn’t I?”
“What about your girl from Eagleton? She must’ve been pissed.”
“Mmmm.” I grimace, remembering that part.
Remembering how I told Kelly Traynor, in the passenger seat of her cherry-red Saturn, that soon after that scholars’ weekend I’d gotten a full-ride offer from Florida A I’ve raised her better than to roll them at me.
“The basic point I’m making, Jocelyn Marie—the point that your grandparents were trying to impress upon me too—is that life can be full of surprising possibilities, options you don’t even know to appreciate yet.
But you won’t have them unless you keep your mind open. Okay?”
Jossy shrugs, but when I hand the phone back to her she turns it face-down on her lap.
“And believe me, baby girl, I get it! I get that you’re worried it’s too different down here from what you’re used to at home—that it’s super conservative, Bible Belt, or whatever…”
“Not just whatever, Ma,” she says, and I can tell by the heat in her voice that she’s loaded for bear.
“Not when we’re talking about a public university, at the mercy of whoever happens to be running this state.
And I mean, I know it was purple those years you grew up here, but do I have to remind you how retrograde Florida is these days?
Electing that evil-ass governor? A man who spews hate for every kind of marginalized and vulnerable person?
Who sees hurricane after hurricane devastating his constituents and still denies climate change is even a thing ? Who—”
“Okay, okay—yes, hon, I know.” I’ve noticed another mother on the bus, clearly eavesdropping on us, beaming me a get her together glare. “But you know where that man got his education, right? Yale undergrad. And Harvard Law. Two of your top contenders, hmm?”
“Right, and how ’bout Agent Orange went to Penn?” the other mother interjects, and suddenly I find that we’re trading those same knowing grins I resented when I was seventeen.
The Venom Express rounds Palmetto Street, stopping underneath its pretty umbrella of oaks, and on her way off a tall young woman in basketball shorts and Nike slides bends down to Jossy to hand her a flyer.
“Trust and believe,” the girl says, in that particular drawl I have missed since leaving North Florida.
“We out here fighting that fool every day.” She slips on headphones as she bounces off the bus, and before Jossy folds and slips the paper inside her jeans pocket I spy the word Alliance, the letters LGB.
My girl is quiet a moment—moved, it seems, by a respectable peer.
By the time we’re cruising down Wahnish Way she’s gazing out the window, where the huge bronze statue of a rattler, coiled and ready to strike, sits outside a student services center.
Jossy taps the window as we pass it. “We can take some pictures in front of that later,” she says. “You know, for Grandma. And for your Stories too, if you want.”
“Okay,” I say, hope surging again. Already I’m planning the post: #WeBraggDifferent #HBCUMade #ExcellenceWithCaring #BabyRattler #StrikeStrikeAndStrikeAgain #93TilInfinity…
“But tell me,” Jossy says, smirking. “Why do you even know where DeSatan went to school?”
“Hey, I do my oppo research.”
Jossy giggles and picks up her phone again. This time she turns on selfie mode and starts filming a video. “ Opps, Ma. Say I research my opps. ”
“I absolutely will not.”