In September of 1985 my parents fly out to Stanford with me and help me move into my dorm, Branner Hall, home to 10 percent of the freshman class and predominantly white. In the late afternoon, we and my 160 dorm mates and their families gather in the huge lounge at the center of the first floor to hear a welcome talk from the faculty member who will be living with us in the dorm and supervising the dorm staff—History Professor Kennell Jackson. As I sit on the dark turquoise rug with my back against a white square column, my knees hugged to my chest, my eyes glued to Professor Jackson, I can’t shake the question: What is he?
Kennell is in his midforties, tall, with a bit of a paunch protruding against his crisp white shirt and with enormous feet clad in leather dress shoes at the base of his khaki pants. He has an oblong head, a flat nose, twinkling eyes, and facial hair that covers the entire lower half of his face, sparse, but manicured like a putting green. He is balding, and where he has hair it is short and coiled like his facial hair, and blends well into his skin, which is reddish, like faded terra-cotta.
Kennell had walked to the front of the packed room in an aw-shucks, almost sheepish manner, deliberately casual though, I thought, as if the casualness was a carefully cultivated affect. I’d glanced over at my parents who stood against the far wall, and seen them exchange raised eyebrows and smiles with one another. Maybe they were having the same impression.
When Kennell begins to speak he keeps his elbows at his side and pats the air around him with the long fingers of his large hands, like a pianist plonking all ten fingers on the piano at once, and I hear in his Virginia drawl both words and sounds I’d never heard before. He tells us stories in fragments, and goes off on tangents, and just when I am wondering whether all of my professors in college will be this weird, he ties all of his thoughts together, masterfully. He closes with a look of mischief flashing across his face, eyes crinkling, lips pursed in a wide smile, explaining what we could expect in the coming year as if we students are embarking upon an unprecedented adventure together.
When Kennell finishes speaking we stand in clumps near him waiting to introduce ourselves. The lounge slowly empties, and I meet up with my parents in the dorm’s courtyard to begin to say good-bye. I stand on my tippy toes to hug Daddy’s tall frame, then lift my head up to receive his kiss as he lowers his head to touch his lips to mine. “You’ll be okay, baby,” he pronounces, putting his strong hands on my shoulders. I nod quickly and eke out a high-pitched “Yeah.” In seventeen years I’d only seen Daddy cry once—when he was using a screwdriver and it slipped off the screw and plunged deep into the palm of his left hand. So as my sixty-seven-year-old father tears up under Palo Alto’s cloudless blue sky surrounded by my new classmates and their parents outside of my new home, both he and I know to look away.
I turn to Mom, who, at five feet and half an inch, seems to be about half my father’s height and is smiling wide. Any anguish she might have been feeling over sending her baby to college two thousand miles from home seems to have given way to a kind of glee—the same glee she’d shown when the kid almost fell over in his chair in the library at Dartmouth. It’s her race strategy look. Her “We Gon’ Be Okay” look. She throws her arms open and pulls me into her tight embrace. As she squeezes her final hug into me she whispers, giddily, “Isn’t it great you have a Black Resident Fellow?”
It astounds me now to say it but I’d had no idea; until Mom told me Kennell was Black, I was the lightest-colored, most different-looking Black person I’d ever known. Daddy and Mom climb into their rental car and I wave and wave and wave until they drive out of sight. Walking back to my new so-called home, I feel uplifted. Maybe if someone who looks like Professor Jackson belongs within Blackness, well maybe there’s a bit of room for me in there too.