It was dark when I got back to Brooklyn, and I blew into the apartment like a hurricane—wild, distressed, shaking, triumphant.

Marream was waiting with a bottle of rum and a cigarette, and between drags, I told her everything in broad strokes—how I was remembering things, piecing together the truth. I told her about my mother’s violent denial, our explosive fight through the fireworks, and my trip to Philadelphia to retrieve the contents of the black box.

Marream had one hundred questions.

She wanted details, facts, and timelines, but the story was not coming out in a clean, linear narrative. The memories came in a torrent, blinding flashes, images that tore me apart.

She kept pressing me for details, and her eyes—while filled with compassion—seemed far away, and I quietly wondered if my revelations had come as a blow to her intuition. Marream prided herself on her prescience, and although she had never met my father in person, she had always, on some level, empathized with him, tried to convince me that what he had done—while certainly not admirable—was, perhaps, not that bad. She believed that even if his actions were wrong, his intentions were generally good, that he understood the indignity of poverty, and that, at root, the conspiracy was engineered to protect the family from the humiliation of poverty. For, Marream argued, the pain of poverty was not rooted solely in physical deprivation but in social constructions. It was not the absence of material things themselves that ached—but, rather, their semiotic and social meaning; thus, deprivation was not so much a physical condition as it was a state of mind. Marream could, theoretically, forgive thieves and murderers whose crimes she could understand. Who, in moments of desperation, has not entertained the thought of simply taking what you need? And who would not kill for his child? There were circumstances, she often argued, in which both crimes were justifiable, but rapists, on the other hand, she abhorred as less than human.

We had often argued the point, for I believed that murder was a graver crime than rape. Rape, I argued, you could survive; murder, on the other hand, was final. Marream, however, was firm in her conviction that rape was a greater evil, always motivated by the desire to inflict pain. It was, she explained, brutal, unspeakable, cruel.

I could see she was struggling to reconcile my story with the narrative she had constructed, so I changed the subject.

“Do you want to see what the money looks like?” I asked and held open the bag.

Marream’s dark eyes gleamed with curiosity, but when she peered into the bag, her face fell.

“That’s it?” she said.

I was surprised. I expected her to be impressed.

“It’s so small,” she said sadly. “It looks like hardly anything at all, and people work their whole lives—for that? It would take me years to save that kind of money.” She looked devastated. “Years and years of work. For what? For nothing.”

***

I had been thrown completely off my axis, but the rest of the world kept turning, and when I woke up the next morning, I had an important appointment to keep. I showered, put on professional attire, and tied my hair up in a bun. Still I was young enough that I didn’t know it was inappropriate to wear open-toe shoes to an academic job interview, so my pedicure peeked out of my heeled sandals as I drove over the Brooklyn Bridge and up the FDR to the South Bronx.

The job was with the College of New Rochelle—a small liberal arts college in Westchester county founded by Ursuline nuns in 1904. It had once been a Catholic women’s college, a “finishing school for girls,” but in the 1970s, money was tight and enrollment was low, so the college diversified and created a nontraditional baccalaureate program designed to “empower” working adults—largely African and Caribbean American women—to obtain a college degree. The program was called the School of New Resources, and the college now operated five urban campuses across New York City (in Coop City, Harlem, Lower Manhattan, Bed-Stuy, and the South Bronx), where they offered daytime and evening classes in the Liberal Arts.

I had taught one course—an introduction to Writing about Literature—during the spring semester. The class was conducted at the Brooklyn campus in Restoration Plaza. I had been teaching for years, but nothing in my experience could have prepared me for that level of institutional chaos of registration. Students kept appearing and disappearing throughout the semester. By the fourth week of class, only half the students had books, so I spent hours preparing handouts, but resources (like toner and printing paper) were scarce. Throughout the semester, I kept waking up in the middle of the night, obsessing over the curriculum and worrying  about my students, their writing, their performance on the final exam. I had misgivings about the school. I didn’t understand why some of my students—while obviously brilliant—were struggling with the basic mechanics of the sentence.

Still, when a colleague on the search committee, told me about a new line and encouraged me to apply when a full-time position opened in the Letters Department, I wrote the job letter.

Now months later, it was the height of summer, and I was not the same person who had written the application. I didn’t know who I was, but I felt like I was flying through space and time as I flew up the FDR, running a few minutes late and weaving through traffic. I wasn’t in my body. My hand maneuvered the clutch as the car passed over the Third Avenue bridge, but my mind was in another dimension. The storefronts streaked past, but I could only see the black box, a crystal ball, the walls of my childhood home, and my father. In the parking garage, I gathered my papers and checked my makeup in the rearview mirror; I looked like myself but knew that I was someone else entirely. I got out of the car, walked through the darkened garage, and stepped like a shadow into the bright light of day.

It was New York City in July; my hair wilted, and the heat rose in waves off the pavement. I didn’t yet know how to jay-walk, so I walked all the way to the end of the avenue black to catch the crosswalk. I must have looked conspicuous with my long red-blond hair, heeled sandals, navy dress, dark glasses, and diamonds—the ghost of myself, a specter of something. Half-dead, half-alive, a pale specter ambulating bustling the thoroughfare, referring to a scrap of paper for the address, scanning the buildings. A lost soul in desperate need of direction. 

A man whistled. I jumped. A middle aged woman caught my eye as she brushed past me and hissed, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

My face burned noisily red as hung my head. Of course, I am ashamed, I thought to myself and kept my eyes trained to the ground for the rest of the block. When I reached the address—332 E 149^th Street—I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place. It was rundown: a plain, beige-yellow, eight-story building with a college banner hanging over the front desk.

“I’m here for a 1:30 interview,” I said as I gave my name to the security guard at the desk.

“Third floor, Ma’’am,” he said, and I felt the man’s eyes on my back as I pressed the button and waited for the elevator. I could hear the carriage moving up and down in the elevator shaft, but the doors didn’t open. I glanced over my shoulder at the guard. When he looked in the other direction, I ducked up the stairs. 

In the office, the secretaries greeted with indifference bordering on contempt. With the kind of polite derision that speaks as if you are not present in the room, I was instructed to sit and wait. I looked at my hands and pretended to study my notes. I listened absently, and they gossiped about people I did not know. I heart was racing, and I was so focused on slowing my breath that I almost didn’t recognize my name it was called. I rose and lumbered down the hall to a conference room with a U-shaped configuration of desks and windows that looked out over the shops that lined 149^th Street, where there was a looped recording that loudly advertised “low prices” in English and Spanish throughout the interview.

The committee was polarized and diverse, comprised of eight people: half black, half white, half women, and half men. I could feel their faces pointed at me in varying states of receptivity. My colleague winked, and a short man in a bowtie flashed me a big, toothy grin. The committee chair’s face was a neutral mask, and there was a woman on the panel who wouldn’t meet my gaze. I took my place in the hot seat, and the inquisitive ring of faces closed around me, and the rapid-fire questions began.

I’ve always interviewed well. I am my father’s daughter and learned early to tell people what they want to hear. I clutched the pink crystal in my left hand and tried to summon the correct answers. Still, as my voice echoed through the chamber and reflected across the faces of the assembled committee, I wasn’t even sure where I was, much less how my responses were landing.

A tall, slender man with long locks asked about my administrative experience. I replied that I had maintained records and done clerical work for the School District of Philadelphia and for a charter school, which was shamefully true; for years, I had worked for my father, done his bidding.

The committee chair was a pale, elven man with a white beard. He asked about teaching, and I said, “I believe teaching is the best learning experience. I learn much more from my students than they learn from me, and I learned more from SNR students than from any other student population I’ve worked with.”

I could hear papers rustling as the interviewers took notes. I glanced at my supervisor, who gave me a nod of encouragement.

After a pause, the committee chair asked, “What did you learn?”

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “Traditional undergraduates may have an academic grasp of the materials, but SNR students understand the literature on a human level. They have lived experience. They understand the stakes of a story, and why an author would choose to tell a story or write a poem in a given way. Being in dialogue with them expanded my understanding of the texts we discussed.” The room was quiet. “I also learned,” I said. “That intellectual potential has nothing to do with economic privilege, which was, of course, something that I thought before working with your students, but it is now something that I know on a more visceral level.”

Looking back, I am astounded by the depths of my ignorance. My response echoed through the chamber, and I knew immediately that the answer was simultaneously right and wrong.

I made another mistake when I asked about money. The question I raised was, “Does the job pay a living wage?”

The committee exchanged sideways glances. Finally, the committee chair said, “We will negotiate the contract terms with the selected candidate.”

I watched as one of the campus directors raised a folder like a shield and whispered something to the man beside her.

Soon, I was dismissed and found myself back on the street. I felt like an alien being, an interloping traveler to another world, and, at the same time, there was something very familiar about the experience. I couldn’t name it or quite put my finger on it, but something about the school reminded me of my father.

***