Becoming Somebody

Author: Dallas Carter, Logan Davis, Ethan Hauger, Ipa Oburu

"If only she could see me now, I thought, the colored girl that impeached her null-and-void, past-its-expiration-date, bankrupt guidance."

Introduction:

This adaptation draws from a powerful chapter titled "I Am Somebody" (chapter 8) from the book "Say I'm Dead," transforming a personal narrative of educational and racial identity into a 4 minute visual journey. The story follows a young woman's transformation through two contrasting educational environments in 1960s America: Howard University and Harvard Business School. The story explores themes of resilience, growth, identity, and belonging.

Storyboard

Video:

Excerpt

Author: E. Dolores Johnson
Johnson, E. Dolores. "I Am Somebody," "Searching," "Deep South," and "A Lingering Smoky Odor," Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 90-129.

In the fall of 1966, I hurried across campus to Howard University's Crampton Auditorium and took a seat for freshman orientation. This was the start of my journey on the road to the good life, whatever that meant. The president, a warrior from the Brown v. Board of Education NAACP strategy team, welcomed our all black and brown class from everywhere in the dia-spora, calling us the future of the race. We had been admitted, he said, in order to help raise our race. We, the talented tenth, would become all we could be, and lead our people's progress. His message was as electrifying as the fact that he, the distinguished university president, was also black. So were the deans and administrators. It amazed me to see that black people could hold such lofty positions.

In the girl's scholarship dorm, we buckled down, studying pharmacy, mathematics, and economics until the time we lived for came: Saturday night dances at the university ballroom. A girl down the hall had convinced me that "to be seen" at the dances I needed the sophisticated black-is-beautiful Afro of a Howard woman. The campus was leaning into Afrocentric everything. Girls wore kente cloth wrap skirts as we greeted each other in Swahili. Jambo! Habari gani? The school of social work was focused on the particular needs of the black community such as poverty and poor education, and the medical school was the center of research on sickle cell anemia, which afflicted mainly African Americans.

A dormmate criticized girls on the floor who straightened the natural curl and kink out of their hair as wanting to be like white people. It wasn't done at Howard, that kind of self-hating denial of your own gene pool. Trying to suppress the "good hair" spawned by my white mo-ther, I sat on the floor between my friend's knees as she rubbed alcohol-soaked cotton onto my roots and strands. My hair kinked more and blew up in volume to something worthier of hep black women. Then I hurried across campus, to show my blacker stuff in the elbow-to-armpit ballroom dance.

So began my growth as a self-aware, proud black person, the hallmark of Howard's black mecca education. Kinky hair was a statement that bolstered my place among the young, gif-ted, and black, and helped free my mind from the ghetto grids that had nearly limited me.

David did just the opposite in high school. Before he became a Righteous Black Brotha after Vietnam, he'd conked his soft hair. He worked a putrid chemical paste into his roots over the basement laundry tub until its burn made him holler and wash it out. But he was mighty pleased when he ran his hand over his patent leather straight hair, like he was one of the Temptations.

When I look back years later at our efforts to transform our hair, I see how confused we both were. We had not yet discovered how to love who we were as we were, because we wanted so badly to fit in with what black people with other kinds of hair were doing. David wanted conked white hair and I wanted black Afro hair. Our in-between hair was one of those constant reminders that while we said we were black, our biology showed we were mixed. Without the confidence to own what we were, we tried to ignore or downplay that fact around our black brethren.

By the end of my freshman year in 1967, I'd become a Howard Woman-connected, committed, and centered in the black world. It was fabulous, knowing my future was in my black community's rising strength. I gladly inhabited that insular world, building the courage and skills neither I nor my family had had in my earlier upbringing. We knew who we were at Howard, and none of us had any intention of letting white people push us aside when we graduated.

The first day at Harvard, I took a seat in the amphitheater classroom designed to foster student debate. Of the ninety classmates who would have all our classes in that same room together the first year, I was one of only four blacks and three women. My confidence fell away as I overheard older white students extol their corporate experience, bandying business concepts about that I'd never heard of. I wondered how I got in.

My largely entitled, aggressive, and impressively smart classmates, including an Argentine aristocrat and sons of major American corporate presidents, had a lively discussion on what a good EPS was. I leaned over ask my neighbor what EPS was. As he told me "earnings per share," the look on his face was quizzical, like "How couldn't you know something that simple?" I felt like the same isolated black kid on my first day of high school honors classes. Sweating it among confident white people who believed it their due to belong there but thought I didn't became my life.

Some white 44-Long student I didn't know came around the curved corridor of Aldrich Hall and physically blocked me moving to my next class. That well-built preppy wanted me to know I had no business being there. What was Harvard thinking, he demanded, giving his highly qualified friend's seat to me and rejecting the friend? Affirmative action had no place at Harvard, and I was going to waste the education. He walked off as abruptly as he'd confronted me, not waiting for a reply.

His outburst made me doubt the opportunity I had, not because I couldn't learn what the business school taught, but because it gave me a glimpse of the personal price of dealing with that kind of attitude in business. It stressed me more to wonder if it would be worth it or if I should run while I had the chance.

A couple days later, a professor called on me to discuss a case on the prospects for a new type of washing machine. I tried to equate the number of loads Mama and I had gotten done over our basement washtubs against the new, improved machines that Company A planned to revolutionize the market with. After presenting my opening analysis, discussion was thrown open for comment. The class ate me alive. About forty students, intent on squeezing out more profit, not clean clothes, waved their hands and jumped out of their seats to win points by trashing my arguments. Their surprising aggression, something I had never seen in a classroom, rendered me unable to rebut. Some behavior was more one-upmanship than worthwhile contributions, just as I came to understand when working in corporations. It was part of the game. Be seen. Be dominant. Put the other guy down so you can get ahead. As classes went on, some students who even made ridiculous comments were entertained. One suggested putting police in pink uniforms to diffuse civic tensions. The aristocrat suggested financing a New York subway expansion by raising fares to twenty-five dollars.

The first six weeks ground me down. I wondered if I did fit, sitting quietly back in my third-row seat, observing the fray. Classmates with three to seven years of business expe-rience, as well as military officers and corporate managers, eagerly dove into that shark tank, harpooning each other with concepts I had yet to learn. I realized there was much more to this program than solving cases every night on how to design factories and create strategies to improve balance sheets. There were major deficits to overcome.

Perhaps the youngest person admitted out of a class of nine hundred, straight out of undergrad, one of only a couple dozen blacks, and without any business experience whate-ver, I became progressively more depressed. The white kids were having parties to which the blacks were not invited. There was no concerned black faculty to talk with as there had been at Howard.

With the first marking period, we black students compared notes and found that the same accounting professor gave every one of us a grade of "low pass." It had been a silly dream, thinking all it took to get a degree from Harvard was hard work. With no counselors or support to turn to, I decided to quit.

I left my partly filled suitcase in the middle of the dorm room floor and went to the dining hall for dinner. It was the final minutes the hall was open, when hopefully all the students had gone. As I slid my tray down the steam-table rail, the lone black employee on campus, a dark stout woman in an apron and hairnet, waited. I dithered disinterestedly over the choices.

"What's the matter tonight?" she asked. "How you feel?"

"OK, I guess." Why tell her anything? She'd never understand.

"You keep your head up, hear? Don't you let nobody, and nothing, stop you."

She defiantly put both a piece of beef and a piece of chicken on my plate, her own expression of support.

"I'm rootin' for you. Awlright?" Her stare was the tough love look my grandmother cast over us, her kind of encouragement, telling us what was expected while making clear what we had better do.

I nodded at the cafeteria lady and thanked her. My grandmother had given me $2,000 of her remaining $5,000 life savings to go to Harvard. These older black people put their hopes for the race in people like me, just as Howard University had.

Harvard had let me in and claimed they made no admissions mistakes. I went back to my room and put my sweaters back in the drawer. Across the hall, I told the two black guys rooming together that I'd thought of quitting. They laughed like Richard Pryor had delivered the punch line in a new stand-up act.

"Fool," one said, "we're all struggling. But ain't none of us quitting. Not us and not you." We talked for hours about our frustrations and what it took to succeed, even if the whites had shut us out of their study groups and never invited us to their parties. Those two men became lifelong brothers to me.

In the next two years, the notion that being educated meant the polite recitation of facts or correct calculations evaporated. Day after day we ground through complex business case studies, sharpening the analytical arguments and decisions that could cost or make hundreds of millions of dollars. It seemed like Monopoly money at first, yet in our daily cases, we were taught that we would be the people making those decisions in our careers. It was like nothing I'd ever thought of, and certainly nothing I'd ever heard black people talk about.

I was uncomfortable with my weak presentations. Other students who were born to lea-dership, like the heir to a dairy fortune or the son of the president of a major luggage company, were smooth and poised. I took notes on the polished code of the executive suite flowing out of their mouths, their casual mastery of the game.

That was a critical part of where I wanted to go. My success would depend on me coming to the conference table with solidly analyzed ideas, convincingly delivered in business proto-col. Even if you can read music, you can't have the solo if you can't sing. I quit marveling and got in the mirror, practicing the prescribed code of my business-savvy classmates: "Cut the level three features and price as a loss leader so we can beat the competition to market." I'd come too far not to play the game that would get me out of my old less-than life.

Two years later, I walked behind top-hatted marshals in the graduation procession at Harvard's outdoor Tercentenary Theatre. The tinny sound of the student orchestra wafted over us. I caught a glimpse of the day's speaker, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who exposed Russia's forced labor camps and gulags.

The throng of guests we filed past captivated me. Hundreds of America's elite were assembled in that campus audience. They were the white parents and families of my jeans-and-snea-kered classmates who, save my Jewish roommate, had never invited me to anything in our two years together. I saw their self-assurance, tanned and dressed in custom clothes, especially the athletically built white man in a pale lemon sports jacket with gold trimmed heels on his shoes. He chatted in modulated pleasantries through thin lips and straight white teeth, tilting his salt-and-pepper head toward his elegant wife.

Sitting among them, the program went on as printed, though not much of what was said and done that day stays with me now. My mind was somewhere else, thinking about where I came from and where I was going. Howard had taught me I was somebody who had a chance. Harvard had taught me I should expect success managing major businesses.

That sunny morning of grandeur was my graduation from so much more than Harvard. I'd earned my ticket out of the ghetto and into a life with the same choices white people had. Or so it seemed.

What I remember most about that day was thinking about my high school guidance coun-selor. The one who flipped that black hair behind her ear and wrote the sewing school phone number for me, because "colored girls don't go to college."

If only she could see me now, I thought, the colored girl that impeached her null-and-void, past-its-expiration-date, bankrupt guidance.

The first day at Harvard, I took a seat in the amphitheater classroom designed to foster student debate. Of the ninety classmates who would have all our classes in that same room together the first year, I was one of only four blacks and three women. My confidence fell away as I overheard older white students extol their corporate experience, bandying business concepts about that I'd never heard of. I wondered how I got in.

My largely entitled, aggressive, and impressively smart classmates, including an Argentine aristocrat and sons of major American corporate presidents, had a lively discussion on what a good EPS was. I leaned over ask my neighbor what EPS was. As he told me "earnings per share," the look on his face was quizzical, like "How couldn't you know something that simple?" I felt like the same isolated black kid on my first day of high school honors classes. Sweating it among confident white people who believed it their due to belong there but thought I didn't became my life.

Some white 44-Long student I didn't know came around the curved corridor of Aldrich Hall and physically blocked me moving to my next class. That well-built preppy wanted me to know I had no business being there. What was Harvard thinking, he demanded, giving his highly qualified friend's seat to me and rejecting the friend? Affirmative action had no place at Harvard, and I was going to waste the education. He walked off as abruptly as he'd confronted me, not waiting for a reply.

His outburst made me doubt the opportunity I had, not because I couldn't learn what the business school taught, but because it gave me a glimpse of the personal price of dealing with that kind of attitude in business. It stressed me more to wonder if it would be worth it or if I should run while I had the chance.

A couple days later, a professor called on me to discuss a case on the prospects for a new type of washing machine. I tried to equate the number of loads Mama and I had gotten done over our basement washtubs against the new, improved machines that Company A planned to revolutionize the market with. After presenting my opening analysis, discussion was thrown open for comment. The class ate me alive. About forty students, intent on squeezing out more profit, not clean clothes, waved their hands and jumped out of their seats to win points by trashing my arguments. Their surprising aggression, something I had never seen in a classroom, rendered me unable to rebut. Some behavior was more one-upmanship than worthwhile contributions, just as I came to understand when working in corporations. It was part of the game. Be seen. Be dominant. Put the other guy down so you can get ahead. As classes went on, some students who even made ridiculous comments were entertained. One suggested putting police in pink uniforms to diffuse civic tensions. The aristocrat suggested financing a New York subway expansion by raising fares to twenty-five dollars.

The first six weeks ground me down. I wondered if I did fit, sitting quietly back in my third-row seat, observing the fray. Classmates with three to seven years of business expe-rience, as well as military officers and corporate managers, eagerly dove into that shark tank, harpooning each other with concepts I had yet to learn. I realized there was much more to this program than solving cases every night on how to design factories and create strategies to improve balance sheets. There were major deficits to overcome.

Perhaps the youngest person admitted out of a class of nine hundred, straight out of undergrad, one of only a couple dozen blacks, and without any business experience whate-ver, I became progressively more depressed. The white kids were having parties to which the blacks were not invited. There was no concerned black faculty to talk with as there had been at Howard.

With the first marking period, we black students compared notes and found that the same accounting professor gave every one of us a grade of "low pass." It had been a silly dream, thinking all it took to get a degree from Harvard was hard work. With no counselors or support to turn to, I decided to quit.

I left my partly filled suitcase in the middle of the dorm room floor and went to the dining hall for dinner. It was the final minutes the hall was open, when hopefully all the students had gone. As I slid my tray down the steam-table rail, the lone black employee on campus, a dark stout woman in an apron and hairnet, waited. I dithered disinterestedly over the choices.

"What's the matter tonight?" she asked. "How you feel?"

"OK, I guess." Why tell her anything? She'd never understand.

"You keep your head up, hear? Don't you let nobody, and nothing, stop you."

She defiantly put both a piece of beef and a piece of chicken on my plate, her own expression of support.

"I'm rootin' for you. Awlright?" Her stare was the tough love look my grandmother cast over us, her kind of encouragement, telling us what was expected while making clear what we had better do.

I nodded at the cafeteria lady and thanked her. My grandmother had given me $2,000 of her remaining $5,000 life savings to go to Harvard. These older black people put their hopes for the race in people like me, just as Howard University had.

Harvard had let me in and claimed they made no admissions mistakes. I went back to my room and put my sweaters back in the drawer. Across the hall, I told the two black guys rooming together that I'd thought of quitting. They laughed like Richard Pryor had delivered the punch line in a new stand-up act.

"Fool," one said, "we're all struggling. But ain't none of us quitting. Not us and not you." We talked for hours about our frustrations and what it took to succeed, even if the whites had shut us out of their study groups and never invited us to their parties. Those two men became lifelong brothers to me.

In the next two years, the notion that being educated meant the polite recitation of facts or correct calculations evaporated. Day after day we ground through complex business case studies, sharpening the analytical arguments and decisions that could cost or make hundreds of millions of dollars. It seemed like Monopoly money at first, yet in our daily cases, we were taught that we would be the people making those decisions in our careers. It was like nothing I'd ever thought of, and certainly nothing I'd ever heard black people talk about.

I was uncomfortable with my weak presentations. Other students who were born to lea-dership, like the heir to a dairy fortune or the son of the president of a major luggage company, were smooth and poised. I took notes on the polished code of the executive suite flowing out of their mouths, their casual mastery of the game.

That was a critical part of where I wanted to go. My success would depend on me coming to the conference table with solidly analyzed ideas, convincingly delivered in business proto-col. Even if you can read music, you can't have the solo if you can't sing. I quit marveling and got in the mirror, practicing the prescribed code of my business-savvy classmates: "Cut the level three features and price as a loss leader so we can beat the competition to market." I'd come too far not to play the game that would get me out of my old less-than life.

Two years later, I walked behind top-hatted marshals in the graduation procession at Harvard's outdoor Tercentenary Theatre. The tinny sound of the student orchestra wafted over us. I caught a glimpse of the day's speaker, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who exposed Russia's forced labor camps and gulags.

The throng of guests we filed past captivated me. Hundreds of America's elite were assembled in that campus audience. They were the white parents and families of my jeans-and-snea-kered classmates who, save my Jewish roommate, had never invited me to anything in our two years together. I saw their self-assurance, tanned and dressed in custom clothes, especially the athletically built white man in a pale lemon sports jacket with gold trimmed heels on his shoes. He chatted in modulated pleasantries through thin lips and straight white teeth, tilting his salt-and-pepper head toward his elegant wife.

Sitting among them, the program went on as printed, though not much of what was said and done that day stays with me now. My mind was somewhere else, thinking about where I came from and where I was going. Howard had taught me I was somebody who had a chance. Harvard had taught me I should expect success managing major businesses.

That sunny morning of grandeur was my graduation from so much more than Harvard. I'd earned my ticket out of the ghetto and into a life with the same choices white people had. Or so it seemed.

What I remember most about that day was thinking about my high school guidance coun-selor. The one who flipped that black hair behind her ear and wrote the sewing school phone number for me, because "colored girls don't go to college."

If only she could see me now, I thought, the colored girl that impeached her null-and-void, past-its-expiration-date, bankrupt guidance.

DMU Timestamp: January 21, 2025 22:02

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