Making a path where there is no path

I did not let go lightly. I tried desperately to make myself like the idea of staying at Smith, kowtowing to the Tenure Committee, and maybe, if I were fortunate, making my way up, over the next fifteen or twenty years, to becoming a full professor, entitled to exploit junior faculty myself. It was what everyone around me was doing. There is nothing I like better than reading, writing, and discussing with a group of smart 21-year-old women the intersections of class, gender, and race in art. Why couldn’t I do it? It wasn’t just the long hours; hell, I’d worked long hours all my life. It would not be clear to me for a very long time. I’m not sure it’s entirely clear to me now. Nobody at Smith had come there the way I did, so I’m just going to lay it out plain, once and for all, right here. How hard it was to get there. How hard it was to leave.

I finished high school in 1963 with a dream of becoming a college professor in a tweed jacket with leather elbows, smoking a pipe in a book-lined library with a fireplace, a droopy-eared basset hound resting his head on one of my felt-slippered feet. I’d never known a college professor, but I read about them in books, and I had known and loved a couple of basset hounds. All the heroes in books were male, and I had always imagined myself doing what they did, so why not? 

It would take me 23 years to work my way through B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. My parents didn’t help me; I got a few college loans and some minor scholarships, but mostly I worked my way through. I’d go part-time two years and full-time one, with a day job and a weekend job and typing at all hours for seventy-five cents a page. During the decade it took for me to finish the B.A., I married, had a child, and was divorced. My ill-chosen marriage fell apart and my ex-husband kidnapped our child; and I lived in seventeen different apartments, moving when the rent went up or the bus routes changed or the landlord wanted my apartment for his kid. I remember the number seventeen because when I was grieving my lost three-year-old, I applied for mental health services, and in order to qualify for the low end of their sliding fee scale, I had to list all my sources of income and all my residences for the past ten years.  

I took at least one class a semester and sometimes as many as four. I met more interesting people in my jobs than at school, fell in and out of love several times, drank a little, smoked a few joints, had intoxicating conversations about politics, race, and the means of production, but mostly I worked. Ten years for a B.A., toward the end of which I fell in love with Seth’s father, a professor of medicine who left me soon after I got my B.A. for what he said was “a more appropriate” woman--a medical doctor. More appropriate to his class. I started my M.A. three weeks before Seth was born. I realized I was a lesbian when he was about two. I finished my M.A. when he was three and my Ph.D. when he was nearly twelve. In all that time, I knew nothing but poverty, never had quite enough money to buy a pair of shoes for Seth before he developed blisters on his toes. His idea of a vacation was a picnic blanket on the grass in the nearest urban park and a peanut butter sandwich, maybe with jelly if I could afford it. I was always writing another paper, and every weekend I brought home a stack of books. I read while he was in Judo, Karate, Aikido class. I wrote research papers in the car while he took drum lessons, played soccer or baseball. I promised him when I got my PhD I would get him a puppy. I kept my promise.

One night after I turned in my resignation letter, I was walking Seth’s five-year-old Portuguese Waterdog mix, near the President’s house on the path that skirts Paradise Pond, and I asked myself: is there anything I need to do with this PhD before I really drop the hell out of the academic game? I had recently hosted a guest lecturer, Tess Onwueme, who said to my class of brilliant young women, “You haven’t lived until you hear the Igbo women singing at Nsukka.”