I read this,
and remembered this,
and what came to mind were the school shirts.
My high school had official school shirts and jackets. They were sold in several stores. Wearing them was never mandatory so I never had one while I was a student. All students were required to do was wear blue and/or white shirts, for gym, and if possible for classes on Friday. T-shirts were fine, which was good because C-cups and button-down shirts do not match. On Fridays I wore blue or white shirts and cheered for the team.
Then I went to college. For winter break I wanted to go home. My parents wrote to say I was forbidden to go home. It would be too "dangerous." They had locked up the house and gone to spend the winter at one of "Aunt Dotty's" properties in Florida. The tax system was designed to punish anyone who owned an unoccupied house, and Aunt Dotty was become increasingly picky and difficult with regular renters, so from time to time family members had to go and spend a few months in one of her houses. They were nice houses in nice neighborhoods, so nice that people even put up with the voices in Aunt Dotty's head. Aunt Dotty was a nice person who tried to show visiting relatives a good time. Spending winters at her properties would have been great for a person who was not allergic to Florida.
I was allergic to Florida. A two-week break meant two weeks of a messy "cold." I'm pretty sure it was the chemicals they sprayed in hope of keeping the mosquitoes down. The mosquitoes they had at the time never bit Dad or my siblings or me but I could see that they weren't being kept down very effectively by the way they surrounded Mother.
We'd go out and walk on the beach, me mopping my nose and Mother slapping her mosquitoes. Lots of kids my age were there. None of them spoke to or noticed me. I was with my mother and a small child so obviously I was fourteen or fifteen, which my baby face made believable, rather than eighteen. I had voted against Mondale in November and re-signed my student loan agreement as an adult, but as far as anyone in Florida was concerned I was still a child. With a "cold" that would go away about the time the bus reached Atlanta. Hardly anybody even seemed to notice the C-cups.
Why are so many well-off American women so angry or "depressed"? Hmm. Could it be that unacknowledged but real system of rape-terrorism that makes it "dangerous" for a teenaged girl to spend the winter break where she wants to be, doing what she wants to do? I don't know how many other women had the experience of spending winters in nice parts of Florida, feeling miserable, feeling that even going back to school would be better than this, not being allowed to spend our breaks alone in our own homes. I know it was definitely an experience of being part of an oppressed class.
Anyway, one afternoon as we came in from strolling on the beach Mother said to me, "Where is your school T-shirt?" (Actually she named the little church college I attended. It was not a big-name school, none of my friends had even heard of it, its only desirable feature was that it was supposed to be protecting my theoretical innocence from that rape-terrorism again. It was not protecting my innocence from Communists or criminals, only from men.)
I was surprised. I had clothes. The school was expensive and I had no money to waste on frivolity like new clothes. A rich school friend, observing that everything in my closet had been either made by me or handed down from an older person and most of my dresses weren't even real cotton, had taken me to a shopping mall and announced, "Some rich alumni," who were closely related to her, "have donated money so you can have whatever clothes and shoes you want." Not wanting to reject the gift altogether nor to put myself under obligations, I'd bought one pair of cheap, pretty, sensible-looking shoes (that were destined to hold up for exactly one job interview). Otherwise I was content to wear hand-me-downs until I started earning serious money. After all, I had grown a little taller since age thirteen, and I wouldn't have minded growing taller than 5'4", although I never did.
"Didn't you see all those other kids out there advertising this college and that university?" Mother said impatiently. "We didn't see anyone I knew but, if we had, I want people I know to know that you're in college too. When you get back to school, buy a school shirt."
So, carrying the twenty-dollar bill she handed me, I went into the school store. There were racks of shirts, jackets, and hoodies, designed to fit the basketball team and make everyone else look like a basketball boy's younger sibling, spelling out the school's name in blue and white. There was one rack of girly T-shirts with the school's acronym--I'm not trying to protect them, it was CUC--right across the C-cups. I didn't like any of the school shirts. I liked a few of the message shirts the school also sold. Hmm...I could afford one message shirt, $11, if I took the cheapest and girliest school shirt, $9. I became the proud owner of a shirt I considered flattering, with "No Smoking Around This Shirt" across the shoulders not the C-cups, and a pallid pink shirt with "CUC" and some floral motifs across the bustline.
"So they'll think your name is Caroline Ursula Cook?" Mother said. "Get one that says 'Columbia Union College'! Loud and proud! You know, like all those other kids, half of whom probably flunked out of the schools they were advertising, anyway!" But she didn't really insist, because we spent the next winter with Dad's rich uncle, five hundred miles from any beach.
In my third year I had some long talks with various teachers and counsellors. The library staff definitely wanted me to continue managing the special collections in the basement until a government office lured me away, the music department definitely wanted me to stay in the travelling band, and the radio instructor definitely wanted me to consider a minor in broadcasting because low female voices were in demand at the moment and I could switch between NBC and BBC English. The English department was used to me. The psychology department would have been glad to take me because I'd talked a few classmates out of doing stupid things, despite having been unable to talk my best friend out of taking drugs, or even taking drugs flagrantly in the dormitory. The dorm manager, whose business I wasn't any more, I thought, and the parents of a whole set of yuppie brats, just as definitely wanted me to consider a major in something that was taught only at a different school.
There were things I'd done that might have been grounds for some sort of discipline, if not expulsion. The Discipline Committee apparently never heard about the time I fell asleep on the job, the time I overstepped my authority and ordered some public school students to leave the library, or even the class from which I "withdrew failing" after midterms. But the counsellor assured me that nobody got expelled for those things. In fact I never was expelled, or even suspended. I just got a lot of talk about the benefits of transferring to university ahead of schedule, and then my financial aid somehow got messed up and I had to withdraw from a whole term's worth of classes, not failing, in time to get the full refund. It seemed that, by listening to the adults who said there was no point in being at a Christian school in Washington if I wasn't going to cultivate the grace of hospitality, by having friends and trying to help people, I'd become what some people called the Queen Bee of the intellectual snob clique. That's another story; I've told it before.
Anyway, didn't I want to use my talents in the psychological field? And wasn't I gravitating toward the new field of "health psychology:"? That was taught only at Andrews University! I needed to be at Andrews! Or so I was told.
I did not need Andrews University, nor did it need me, and my main accomplishment there was to pick up "chronic mononucleosis" from that infamous contaminated batch of measles vaccine. That's a separate rant. Anyway I went there in September. Dad's rich uncle, with whom I'd spent the summer, had given me a wad of pocket money to be spent judiciously on ways to earn more money in a new town, make the right sort of friends (no addicts), and buy a school shirt. Loud and proud.
I picked one of the hoodies designed to fit basketball players. Before washing, it hung down around my knees. I remember it spelling out ANDREWS UNIVERSITY in letters a foot high. I figured at least Mother ought to be satisfied with that the next time we had to go to Florida, and the hood would help conceal my puffy face.
Andrews University could boast a little more academic rigor than Columbia Union College. I learned things that were not covered in grade nine, even in classes.
One thing I learned was that I have low taste in friends.
Andrews was too big a place even for preaching about a "family feeling." Student social life seemed to revolve around clubs. Usually membership was free, and people paid the cost of whatever they did individually, but the point of having a club was that people who had a little money might help people who had none. The best club was the Scholars; they had a house of their own on campus and were allowed to stay in their house overnight working on projects. New students couldn't join the Scholars, though some of us were herded into a room and told we were being watched as potential Scholars material. There were other clubs for people with special talents and interests, including the Gymnics and a selection of musical ensembles. There were a few clubs organized by nervy students who just decided to call themselves clubs, like the "Union of Socialistic Daters." (I didn't want to know.) For people who had nothing to offer there were place-of-origin clubs that met sporadically to organize car pools home at breaks. There was no Virginia Club. A few other people from Virginia were at Andrews, and none of us would have had any time for anything so demeaning as a place-of-origin club.
Well, right away one annoying girl invited me to a meeting of what they called the Black Students Christian Forum.
CUC had a rather awesome social club organized by and for Black students. Townspeople packed into their open meetings; they had a touring band. Non-Black people could attend meetings by invitation only. Invitations weren't hard to get; they even let one White guy tour with the band. I didn't tour, but I often went to open meetings and sang along.
That made Andrews' BSCF seem even more pathetic. They didn't even have a choir. They were a place-of-origin club for Black people.
I thanked the girl for inviting me. Did I want to go back? Well, no; I didn't think I'd fit in. There was one friend from CUC I would have liked to stay close to at Andrews. She did happen to be legally Black but there was no way she'd ever have been interested in that BSCF.
Social clubs are what their members make them. There is no particular reason why a place-of-origin club can't do things and have fun. Increasing membership may be a first step in that direction but you can't expect people who don't even qualify for membership to do it for you. Even if the qualifications for membership include being Black and, by an honest mistake, you have mistaken a legally White person for a Black person.
Anyway that girl was a very annoying young person who I always suspected had not made an honest mistake; she just wanted a pretext to start a whine about how I just didn't like Black people. You could even say that that was true, in the sense that she and her two friends were Black and I didn't like them. I take human beings as I find them. Some of my favorite people are Black; under the One Drop Rule, both my husband and my adoptive sister could be counted as Black, though their legal ethnic identities were Indian and Mexican respectively--but I'm not racist enough to think that means I have to like all Black people.
What my Black friend was going through at Andrews was discussed in a nonfiction book that was published ten years later, so we don't need to go into it here, except to say that the reason why I "ghosted" her was that I'd learned the rule that the older friend always has the right to back away and the younger friend must not be a nuisance. The reason why she "ghosted" me was that she was living through active persecution. She wouldn't have wanted to cry on my shoulder about it. After all these years I don't know that it makes any difference but, for whatever it's worth, I cared. Still do.
Meanwhile, as a gospel singer I was enthusiastically recruited, the same weekend, into a club that was mostly for ministerial students. They had a busy schedule. I liked the busy-ness, until I'd run myself completely off my feet. As Seventh-Day Adventists, their demographic situation was a little odd, but we had fun and they were friends.
What was odd was that in the 1980s Seventh-Day Adventists had very mixed feelings about women ministers. The church had always had women ministers. They organized seminars, led women's and youth groups, counselled the confused, visited the sick, sometimes even offered a message from the pulpit before the male pastors gave the sermon. The church had, at that time, some members who actually preached that it was natural and beautiful when men were in hierarchical positions above women. The women ministers were paid about two-thirds as much as the male pastors. However, in order to qualify for those higher-paid positions as pastors, male ministers had to be married and were basically hired as couples. This meant that Adventist pastors' wives had to be able to do everything "real" ministers did, sometimes literally backward and in heels, but never receive payment at all. It also meant that male ministerial students were, often rather desperately, looking for wives.
I was not at all interested in being an Adventist pastor's wife, I said. "Oh well, that's all right," the boys in the club agreed. The other female member of the club, that term, was somebody's sister who was still in high school. "You'll make friends!"
I did. So did the high school girl. She really was rich, and I had more pocket money than most students did after a summer with the rich great-uncle. This made us seem like potential friends to people who seemed "the right sort."
Did I have a weakness for collecting things I didn't need? asked one girl at lunch. Her family spoke English but, for reasons unexplained, lived in France. I collected paper dolls, I admitted. (Still do.) She collected Corvettes. I didn't say anything judgmental. I thought of one of the boys in the club going into a Michigan winter with one pair of boots, that leaked.
Friday afternoons were for town leave. One for all and all to the mall! Back then video games were usually played on big commercial machines in commercial establishments where people spent a lot of time waiting, or in specialized video arcades on malls. I could afford to pay for a few games, but some of the well-off wanted to spend the whole afternoon at the video arcades. Get a life! I liked to stroll around and make sure I'd seen everything. Back then malls tried to offer a pleasing sensory experience with harmonious colors, pretty displays, soft lighting and music. It seems to have been more profitable than the later trend toward glare and blare. I liked watching the craftspeople do their thing in their little shops. I seldom bought anything. Well, a headset--I thought the dormitories should have issued those, for the sake of peace--and the new paper dolls of the season.
Extra money was for sharing with people who had less. Clubs were a subtle way to do that. Your club "brother" or "sister" who was in dire need would know who in the club had a little money, but not who had personally paid for new boots or a cafeteria meal card. Town leave was a time to mingle with people in my classes who belonged to different clubs, but I wondered whether they were rich enough to buy the junk they bought and still help people who had less, or whether they'd managed to avoid knowing anyone who had less.
I agreed to share a room with the roommate nobody wanted because she was moving out. I didn't want another roommate. Adventist schools didn't like that, though when I went to Berea everyone understood perfectly; lots of people like to have a room of their own. The school counsellor wanted to talk to me about finding another roommate.
"How do you expect to live with another person when you get married?"
"If and when I get married, my husband and I will be able to afford rooms of our own!"
The counsellor shook her head and nattered about how she'd bonded with her roommate by shopping for decor for their dorm room. I shook my head. Expensive as Andrews was, penniless and alone in the world as some of the students were, who would ever want to waste money on decorating a dorm room? So, maybe "the right sort of people" did.
So, maybe I was not "the right sort of people" myself, because I preferred the company of people who knew there were thousands of better uses for money than decorating a dorm room. My Black friend, who didn't look older than most students but had a son in the Marines. My club brother the Vietnam veteran. The foreign student who sang beside me in the official college choir, who had to live with a teacher and had no social life and wasn't learning conversational US English on schedule. Serious responsible people who' had lives, like me.
I chipped in to the Boots For Brian (or whatever his real name was) fund and then, at Thanksgiving...I loaded a tray with soy-and-wheat-gluten "turkey" and a use-up-the-leftovers salad. Two people waved from two different tables. One was the richest boy in the club. The other was the boy who worked on the groundskeeping crew and made sure the sidewalks I used were shovelled. I took the opportunity to get further acquainted with him. My super-rich club brother took offense in an insufferable Seventh-Day Adventist way. I said I was leaving the club. The stress seemed to feed the virus I'd been fending off. When everyone else came back for classes I went down with mononucleosis. Other people in the club wanted me to stay in the club, which felt good, though irrelevant. People helped pack up my things and load me onto a bus. I earned decent, but not Scholars-worthy, grades on class work without taking the exams.
I never once wore the ANDREWS UNIVERSITY hoodie.
I never put any effort into being a social leader, a "missionary," in approved evangelical style, ever again, either. If it involved that much competition and peer pressure, I'd rather be a hermit, thanks all the same. And I've never been a very evangelical Christian, either.
I found the hoodie in a storage barrel in the barn, a few years ago, as unworn as the coffin-draping-size flag my grandmother had decided was too good to bury with my grandfather. I have let them remain unworn.
