Defying the Verdict Page 5

  CHAPTER NINE

  “We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”

  —MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

  IN JANUARY OF my senior year, I was introduced to improvisational theater. Cora, a classmate from school and fellow summer arts participant, had auditioned for an improvisational theater group forming at Baltimore’s Theatre Project. The auditions were open to high school juniors and seniors. When I called the theater at lunchtime from the pay phone at school, I was informed the auditions were over. They were finalizing the participation roster. After calling back every day for a week, I was invited to audition for the ensemble.

  At fifteen, while performing in The Everlasting Arm, I learned to transfer my emotions to characters in scripted drama. Now, I learned improvisation technique alongside students from other Baltimore-area high schools. We explored creative theater techniques, developing the awareness of our bodies in space that is necessary when interacting with others spontaneously.

  I learned that improvisation requires control. We practiced establishing eye contact to predict one another’s movements. I excelled at holding my body completely still for tableaus, and I could spin in a circle longer than anyone else in the group thanks to learning spotting for dance, a technique where you have the same distinct focal point for each turn.

  During the improvisation workshop, we were encouraged to pinpoint our strengths. I identified storytelling as an area of personal gifting. In our final workshop session, when participants took turns exaggerating one another’s strengths, I remember one of the guys in the group taking center stage to imitate me telling a story, using a high-pitched voice. I have since learned to control my pitch.

  The Theatre Project’s director, Philip Arnoult, created the theater venue in 1971 to make improvisational theater by performers from the United States and other countries available to theatergoers in Baltimore. Inspired by the success of our teen improv group, he created a program using us as core performers. His concept became the Baltimore Neighborhood Arts Circus. Professional avant-garde artists partnered with members of our group as well as additional students hired and trained for this summer arts endeavor. Our mission was simply to bring theater to Baltimore’s clearly defined neighborhoods. With a grant from the Baltimore Arts Council, we performed Tuesday through Saturday for eight weeks during the summer of 1977. The neighborhood launch followed a prep week with our individual teams during which time we honed such skills as mime, juggling, storytelling, and performance chants before the neighborhood launch.

  Because we were off on Monday, my friend Debbie and I renamed that day Circus Sunday, and planned activities together. Our friendship was meaningful, charged with spontaneity as well as complementarity. We spent hours talking about our lives, sharing thoughts with each other that we had never shared with anyone else. We were able to share our deeper feelings with one another, creating a grounded relationship.

  Throughout the inaugural Circus Summer, in a spirit of community, we chanted, played games, sang songs, juggled and taught neighbors to do so as well. Each week, teams traveled to different neighborhood parks and recreation centers to set up our metaphorical tents. Students were paid through the city. We were given complimentary metro bus passes to travel around the city without personal cost. Because my family had been living apart since the housefire, I sometimes brought Linda along. It was my way of maintaining my connection with my baby sister.

  Gomo, an African drummer, often travelled with my group. I wanted to play percussion along with another young woman. Denying me that privilege, he smiled and affirmed, “You’re a dancer, baby.” Dancing was indeed what I needed to do to keep my head clear.

  Meeting people from different neighborhoods and traveling around the city independently increased my self-confidence and my readiness to go off to college alone and leave my beloved Baltimore behind. Not to mention the fact that I would be separated from my parents and siblings for the first extended period.

  4536 Finney Avenue may have been psychically uncomfortable for me at times, but it was home—the place, in the words of Robert Frost, where “when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

  The more difficult separation I endured before college was the end of my relationship with my boyfriend, Jerry. He, along with Bernice, anchored me successfully through the depression of 1976. Although we continued to go out throughout the summer, he officially ended our relationship just before my graduation. He explained, “I don’t think you can sustain a long-distance relationship.” When I visited Williams College that January, I had come back raving about a young male student I met who I thought would make a great friend. At the time, I did not understand how he could have seen that as a potential problem. Besides, I was matriculating at Wesleyan, not Williams.

  The real beginning of the end was my reaction to the poem Jerry wrote me in April, which ended, “The young will play, the old will rest / The stars will shine brightly in the sky / And I will always love you, or at least try.” When I laughed inappropriately as his reading ended, unsure of how to respond to this sentiment, he ripped the paper up. Though I gathered the pieces and kept them, I bruised his ego. I wish I could attribute this to an illness rather than my emotional immaturity.

  Though devastated, I suppressed the impact of having my heart put through a meat grinder before being placed back in my chest. I accepted Jerry’s decision and in the spirit of improvisation, I concluded, I loved like a seventeen year old. I suppose that love just wasn’t strong enough. Shutting off the love valve, I continued, After all, I’m going away to concentrate on getting an education. Being dumped was difficult for me. I repressed the rejection I felt confronting the loss of my first love. With nothing constraining me, I could uproot myself from Baltimore and replant myself in whatever place I fancied.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “somebody / anybody / sing a black girl’s song”

  —NTOZAKE SHANGE

  I PACKED THE last of my belongings the morning of my departure for Wesleyan. I had spent time with my parents, Linda, and my brothers the day before. Karen and Teenie were at the house saying goodbye as Uncle Vernon helped place my two large suitcases and my trunk into the rear of his station wagon. Having stayed up late partying with friends the previous night, I was bleary-eyed as he drove me to Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station.

  After helping me check my belongings, Uncle Vernon waited with me in the train station until it was time to board the train. Though tired, I felt a slight adrenaline rush as I settled into my seat on the railcar. In six hours, I would arrive at Meriden station, the closest station to Middletown. A Wesleyan student was scheduled to meet me upon arrival and drive me to campus. I looked out the window, wishing Baltimore a silent farewell before falling asleep.

  I was briefly awakened when the conductor in New York asked me to show my ticket again for the last half of the trip. The next thing I knew, he was calling through the railcar, “Meriden is next. Meriden station will be our next station stop.” I went to the restroom and splashed my eyes. I was beginning a brand new life.

  Upon arrival, my volunteer driver and I loaded my things into her car, chatting about the school during the twenty-minute trip. We arrived on campus at the Malcolm X house, the African-American specialty house in which I would share a two-room double with my roommate, Michelle. When I arrived, she had claimed the inner, more private room. The outer room was mine. Michelle was a pre-med student from Brooklyn. After we became friends, she called me her artsy-fartsy roommate from Baltimore.

  That evening, Michelle and I went to dinner in the dining hall where most of the black students were sitting together on the right side of the cafeteria. We joined them. I was excited to see so many black faces at school. Though in reality, the black population was ten percent of the total populace of my senior class at Park. The ice cream and freshly baked bread were especially delicious, definite contributors to the freshman f
ifteen.

  After dinner, I convinced Michelle to walk with me around campus using the maps we had been given in our welcome packets. As a member of the Baltimore Neighborhood Arts Circus, I had grown accustomed to quickly familiarizing myself with new territory. And I didn’t want to seem lost, but that spoke to control issues, not fear of new places.

  I entered Wesleyan planning to pursue a dual major in psychology and theater. Thinking psychology would be an academic fit for me, I enrolled in Foundations of Contemporary Psychology. The course proved more difficult to get through than I expected, when I staggered into depression at the end of the semester.

  However, I learned and embraced an applicable psychological truth, Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization. Maslow depicted human needs being met according to a hierarchical pyramid. He listed physiological needs at the lowest level, followed by the need for safety in body and resources. The middle level, at which many people get stuck, was the need for love and belonging, followed by the self-confidence and respect tier. The pinnacle of the pyramid was self-actualization, where a person perfects herself in the areas of creativity, problem-solving, and lack of prejudice. I saw myself living between levels four and five. As I studied psychology, I believed I would ascend to level five and eventually become a therapeutic helper.

  Participants in Introduction to Acting were required to audition. I chose a monologue from Angelina Weld Grimke’s play Rachel as my audition piece. The judging panel of three theater professors included Esteban Vega, a person of color, whose production choices brought multiracial theatrical opportunities to Wesleyan students. Esteban was impressed by my choice from the work of a female playwright who was part of the Harlem Renaissance.

  The auditions unearthed so much talent that the panel decided to offer two sections of the course instead of the customary single section. I went to the bookstore to buy my books before the class lists were posted. Seeing the bookstore only stocked enough books for one section, I grabbed the Stanislavsky methods book and placed it in my basket. A classmate who had also auditioned for the class was present at the time. “You’re buying the book?” he questioned. “We don’t even know if we’re in the class.”

  “You might not know, but I’ll be chosen for the class,” I responded confidently. Unlike me, my classmate had to wait for the second shipment of books to get his copy.

  In October, Esteban planned a trip to Broadway through Ujamaa, the black student union. We saw the matinee performance of Vinette Carrol’s Your Arms Too Short to Box with God followed by an evening performance of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. The first play excited me, being the first Broadway show I had ever seen. The second play amazed me, resonating in my spirit, as the actresses taught me the reality of what women can become when they bind together. At the end of this choreopoem, the women repeat, “I found god in myself & I loved her fiercely.” They embraced the rainbow, the promise of success, rejecting suicidal impulses.

  The play was a great companion piece to the female empowerment album I had listened to repeatedly the previous summer, Nightbirds by Labelle, featuring the songs “All Girl Band” and “Lady Marmalade.” Having bought a copy of the play for colored girls, I performed one of the monologues, “Toussaint,” as my final project for Introduction to Acting. As my life continued, reading poems from for colored girls became an essential routine for me.

  Besides our resident advisor, everyone who lived on the upper level of the Malcolm X house that year was a young woman. We developed a comradery over the course of the semester. I became especially close with my roommate Michelle as well as Leslie, a female freshman who lived in the Butterfield dorms. Early in the semester, using the list of African American students in the class of 1981 provided by my RA, and in Arts Circus style, I searched out and connected with each of my fellow minority freshmen.

  To provide an opportunity for us to know each other, I planned the black freshman party at the Malcolm X house, providing grain alcohol-spiked punch for the attendees. Only seventeen, I enlisted a senior to purchase the alcohol for me. Not a lover of alcohol, I only tasted my concoction; the sweetness of the juice masked the potency of the liquor.

  During mid-semester break, I visited Bernice at Williams College. I had planned to catch a bus back to Wesleyan. While there, I ran into the Dean from my school who gave me a ride back to campus. One of Wesleyan’s first African-American graduates, he was interested in how I was enjoying my first semester and inquired about my future plans. I shared my love of theater and my wish to become a children’s psychologist with him. The Dean bought into my enthusiastic confidence.

  In November, I was an extra in the play adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son, directed by Esteban. I also assisted the costumer for the play, The Lion in Winter. Students in Introduction to Acting were required to participate in one performance-related activity outside of class. I chose two activities because my mood had heightened. Although my energy level was up, my productivity level decreased.

  As my thoughts and behavior began to escalate, I started forgetting things. I left a costume I had repaired for the lead actress in The Lion in Winter in a friend’s room. Because she had gone out of town, I used heightened sensual charm to convince her resident advisor to let me in to retrieve it. I fell behind in attendance at compulsory language lab sessions for my French class and eventually dropped the course.

  I got a ride home for Thanksgiving with a hall mate who was spending the holiday in Washington, DC. While at home, I overheard Mama mention my father had developed arthritis in his spine. Processing her words in my emotionally heightened state, I assumed the condition was severe. Irrational thoughts of my father being sick and maybe even dying triggered the strongest melancholy I had ever experienced.

  When I returned to campus, I was awash with sadness. I cried often, but I forced myself to memorize my monologue and study for my psychology final. Lacking the energy to complete my final English paper, I arranged an extension with my instructor.

  I didn’t want any of my peers to know, but I set up an appointment with the school psychologist. Although it was not my viewpoint, I knew many black people shunned psychotherapy. I slunk from the Malcolm X house to the student behavioral health center located directly behind it.

  Philippa Coughlin, Ph.D., founded and directed the Office of Behavioral Health for Students at Wesleyan University beginning in the early 1970s. She was an early pioneer in the field of behavioral health for college students. She worked with Carl Rogers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a doctorate in humanistic psychology. Rejecting psychoanalysis, Rogers taught people how to thrive in an environment of genuineness, acceptance, and empathy. Dr. Rogers believed people self-actualize when their ideal selves and their self-images match. Dr. Coughlin’s therapeutic style was informed by this point of view.

  After three sessions with Dr. Coughlin, in which I shared my depression from senior year, we decided I would benefit from a medical leave of absence. I would see a therapist in Baltimore and schedule an appointment with her in September for reinstatement.

  I stored some of my belongings at Malcolm X, taking mostly clothing home with me. I assured the friends who expressed concern over my extreme sadness that I would be okay, and they would see me in September. As I boarded the train, I believed my mood would improve and that I would return to Wesleyan for the following fall semester.

  Treating this semester as a false start, I rehearsed to myself, being a colored girl, I will move on to the end of my rainbow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Get Up! You are not defeated!”

  —CAMRYN D. LITTLE

  I RETURNED TO White Oak Avenue, experiencing what my future college roommate Penny and I later labelled the brink of abysmal despair. I spoke to a couple of friends from Park the week after I came home, attempting to process what went wrong my first semester at Wesleyan.

  After Christmas, I spent mornings in b
ed, enveloped in a cocoon of self-pity. But my Aunt Nellie was not going to allow me to succumb to defeat. On an early January evening, my aunt came home from work to find me fully clothed, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, eyes filled with tears. When she sat on the other bed in the room, I hoped she was about to sign off on my self-sabotage. After all, I was the one who had to take a semester off from school, shaming myself by lacking the inner strength to move forward.

  Contrary to my expectation, Aunt Nellie began telling me that I was able to pull myself together. She used herself as an example. At that time, though she and Uncle Vernon had separated, she refused to let the separation, which later ended, derail her life. As she said, “Charita, when you’re feeling bad for yourself, you have to realize there is always someone else worse off than you.” She shared how she continued to be pleasant at work and how, when she found it too emotionally painful to worship at the same church as my uncle, she went to another church. She continued, “No matter how bad you think your life has become, there’s always something to be grateful for. You have to decide what that is.”

  I was able to receive Aunt Nellie’s wise counsel. I was fortunate to be staying with her during this trying time. After that talk, I thought about how right my aunt was. I went to Loyola University and received counsel from Father Geary, a Jesuit priest whom Father Henry referred me to. One of the nuns at St. Ambrose suggested that my depression was “anger turned inward,” but Father Geary and I did not think I was angry. We met weekly for a couple of months until my mood had normalized.

  Feeling better, I began looking for employment and preparing family meals. Soon after I returned from school, my cousin and her two sons moved back home. Of course, I was used to living with many people, and I enjoyed my younger cousins.