We are a college-educated family; when it came time for me to think about applying, it was a question not of whether to go to college but where.
During spring break of my junior year, Mom and I took a road trip out of Wisconsin to the East Coast to visit a dozen or so schools in the span of ten days. After eight hours of driving Interstate 80 east through Illinois, Indiana, and into Ohio, we were ready to pull over for the night, only to learn there were no vacancies—none for one hundred miles due to a big convention, we were told. We pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot outside of Cleveland, reclined our seats, locked the car doors, and slept in the car. The next morning, we went back into McDonald’s to brush our teeth and wash our faces. There was little I could do in those circumstances with my hair.
By the following night we’d made it all the way to Hanover, New Hampshire, where we stayed in a motel. The next morning, we showered and I put on a pretty drop-waist dress that was lilac with little white flecks, and we headed off for our tour at Dartmouth College. Our tour began in the library, which was full of students at long tables and computer terminals, and I edged my way toward the front of the group so as to talk with the student guide while Mom hung back with the other parents. As we were headed out of the library there was some kind of commotion behind me, and I glanced back to see a Black boy who had leaned too far back in his chair at a computer terminal and was flailing to right himself.
Later, my mom told me that when I’d walked past that boy, she’d seen him do a double take and continue to follow me with his eyes to the point where he’d had to lean way, way back on two legs of his chair. Between the lines of Mom’s story I could read her dreams for me: There are Black people out there. Not only that. Maybe Black friends. Maybe even a Black boy who would find me beautiful.
As she spoke I tried to act cool. But I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my veins. We drove from Hanover to Boston, to New York, and to Pennsylvania, visiting school after school after school, and I replayed my mother’s story again and again in my head and interlaced it with the image I still had of that boy in my mind. Maybe there’d be boys like him at these colleges. Maybe I’d feel more normal once I got out of Middleton High. In the privacy of my own mind, I blushed.