1972–1982
THE GRADUATE
God held the line and Carole did not graduate. She was sent away, back home, presumably in disgrace. Later girls at Goode fared better. They studied abroad, won the chemistry prize and the Spanish prize, distinguished themselves at lacrosse, on violin. They marched for equal rights and equal pay, the right to consume birth-control pills and protest against nuclear power; they became treasurer and even head of class. They raised money for scholarships, organized and excelled. They ventured into the world, taught prostitutes in Central America to read, electrified villages in Africa, invented lucrative investment products on Wall Street. They entered the House and Senate, or raised children who did; they became cantors and neurologists.
Carole returned to Brooklyn, to her single working mother. It seemed to those she left behind like a vaguely terminal condition. Carole had had a chance; she’d thrown it away. Only Aileen Rebozos kept in touch with her and sent updates to The Goodeman. For an awkward year, Carole worked in some kind of shop. She held a tiny show of men’s heads in a gallery—but in Brooklyn. She went abroad—to Paris and Ghana! Two years later, Mrs. Graves received a letter from Carole, curtly asking God for a recommendation and a transcript to be sent to the Rhode Island School of Design. God, by now miserably emeritus, wrote with grim pleasure of Carole’s crimes against the school, her failure to graduate, the arrogance with which she’d occupied the new space that had been made for her—and for women of the future.
Carole wrote in her essay about being the only one, and then one of a very few of the first:
It didn’t matter so much that the Head was a sexist or a bigot or a snob, or basically uninterested in my testing him. That didn’t harm me. I was used to it; I already had an aloof and absent father. God Byrd was just one person—a person he never had to question or think about—and I had more than one identity. How could that not be good? I had to decide on what relation I had to other people. Some people willed me invisible at Goode. I mean, the assumption was that we—students of color, girls—would simply assimilate. Nothing would really change. That was the point, wasn’t it?
My mother—she died this year of cancer—was ferocious, determined. And all her determination centered on me. It was what she gave me instead of affection, mostly. She didn’t talk to me gently; she didn’t ask what I wanted to do. She saw life as a struggle—that’s why she sent me to a virtually all-white school. If it had been an all-white, no girls school forever, she would have been even more determined to send me there.
At Goode, they repressed our true nature the way farmers stop watering their tomatoes, leaving the plants limp to swell the fruit. We were like that, “dirty girls” so parched and thirsty and stressed, it’s strange our pencils didn’t snap in two when we bit them. I don’t remember critical thinking, logical inquiry, the quadratic equation, plane geometry, dactylic hexameter, Bernoulli’s principle, the past participle of the verb tenir, the first element on the periodic table, the capital of Benin, the vice president under Taft, the rules of soccer, lacrosse or tennis, whether narcissism comes before or after the Oedipus complex, whether the prime rate goes up or down in a recession. What I remember is boys everywhere, like big white mice. I remember white men talking, talking, talking. No one asked about my experience as a human being. The Goode School was like a huge white skin that covered everyone—that covered me. My whole consciousness was black and poor and female every second of every day. The experience damaged, sharpened and defined me, and I would not trade it for anything.
After RISD, Carole went to Yale. She won prizes; her name turned up, sometimes attached to the Goode School like a burr on a wool scarf. She found a dealer and “turned out,” as Mrs. Rebozos put it. That was the point, wasn’t it? That Carole should carry with her the air and substance of entitlement, and a strong character. That she should “turn out,” as if she had been white and wealthy, and a boy.