I wanted to live that life. Throughout my MA program, I had always intended to get my PhD, but I was going to get my PhD in creative writing and write my great Haitian American novel and get a teaching job and be set for life.
And then, as one of my work duties, I went to the annual conference for the National Society of Black Engineers to man a recruitment table for the College of Engineering. The woman whose table was across the aisle from mine throughout the conference, Betty, began talking to me about the school she worked for, Michigan Technological University, and how they had a great technical communication program. I had never heard of Michigan Tech, and was certain that I’d be staying at UNL. After the conference, though, she stayed in touch and she was persistent. Then the woman I thought I was in a relationship with broke up with me, on Valentine’s Day, via e-mail, and suddenly, I wanted to be as far away from Lincoln as possible. I applied to Michigan Tech, was accepted, and they made me an offer I could not refuse—enough money to nearly match my salary, teaching opportunities, tuition remission, and terrible health insurance. That summer, I moved to Hancock, Michigan, sight unseen, to attend a doctoral program at a school I had never heard of in a field I knew nothing about. My brother Michael Jr. transferred to Michigan Tech and joined me. As we drove into town, we both realized that we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The Upper Peninsula was so very remote. The two-lane country highways we took for hours were dwarfed by trees thick with leaves. There were deer everywhere as the sun set, so we slowed to a crawl. When I met my landlord, who lived in the upstairs unit of an old building where she and her deceased husband had run a dry cleaner, she stood behind her latched screen door as my brother and I stood on the porch. She peered out at me and said, “You didn’t sound like a colored girl on the phone.” I was thirty years old.
29
There was something comforting about graduate school and living a life of the mind. My body didn’t matter because I was in school, taking classes and learning things. I was learning how to teach on the job. I had very specific responsibilities that demanded nearly all of my focus, my time and energy.
But I couldn’t forget my body. I could not escape it. I didn’t know how, and the world was always there to remind me.
On my first day of teaching, a Monday, I threw up before class because I was terrified, though not of the teaching itself. I would be teaching freshman composition, and while managing a classroom is always a challenge, I felt comfortable imparting onto my students the basics of writing persuasively. What I feared was my appearance and what they would think of me. I worried that if they didn’t like me, they would make fun of me, mocking my weight, and I was not at all sure how to make them like me when I felt so very unlikable, and always had. I worried about stamina and whether I would be able to stand for fifty minutes. I worried about sweating in front of them and how they would judge me for it. I worried about what to wear, because my standard uniform of jeans and T-shirts was too casual and what little dressy clothing I did have would have been way too dressy for the classroom.
The good thing about school is that students have been trained, from an early age, to follow the rules. They come to class and generally sit and behave in an orderly fashion. When you tell them to do things, they do those things. I walked into my first classroom, my heart pounding, sweating everywhere, my head ringing with all of my fears and insecurities. I was carrying a big box of Legos because I figured, if nothing else, the students might enjoy playing with toys. At first, they didn’t seem to realize I was their teacher, and I was not sure if they were unsure because of my size, my race, or what I vainly hoped was my youthful appearance. When I stood at the front of the classroom, they hushed, and realized I was the teacher. I took attendance, my legs rubbery with anxiety, and then went into discussing the syllabus, the nature of the class and what would be expected of them—regular attendance, active participation, homework turned in on time, no plagiarism and the like. It was reassuring to have these administrative details to go over with the students, but when I was done discussing the syllabus, I actually had to teach and my anxiety rushed right back through me.
At the end of that first class, as the students filed out of the room, I wanted to collapse with relief because I had survived those fifty minutes of being fat in front of twenty-two eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds. And then I realized I was going to have to do it all over again, on Wednesday and Friday, week in and week out for the entire semester.
I went to my classes. I taught. I studied. I tried to make friends and did, with a small measure of success. On weekends, I played poker at a casino in Baraga, the Ojibwe reservation about forty miles away, hunched around the table with strange men, where I was intent on taking their money, which often I did. I still didn’t sleep much. I kept eating, trying to find some kind of peace.
And then, one day, I was walking home from the gas station across the street, where I had gone to buy cigarettes. I wore a knit cap on my head, a ratty T-shirt, and pajama pants. I looked terrible, but no one at the Citgo cared. I didn’t care, either. A man started calling after me, shouting, “Hey, Casino Girl,” which only made me want to run. I assumed that he was going to make fun of me because I had long become accustomed to people, men mostly, calling out cruelties from their cars, their bicycles, when they walked on by—letting me know exactly what they thought of my body.
This was not that. He followed me to my apartment and up the stairs, so I quickly closed the screen door, latched it, and stared out at him. “You play poker at the casino,” he said, and I nodded, reluctantly. I tried to place him but couldn’t. He looked like every other white guy I saw around town—dark, shaggy hair, a beard, wearing flannel and denim and work boots. “You’re always talking shit at the poker table. Do you wanna come hang out with me and my friends?” He pointed toward the distance. “Absolutely not,” I told him, wanting him to go away, but he was mighty persistent. I was unsure what he wanted from me, but I knew it couldn’t be anything good. Maybe he wanted me to go meet his friends so they could hurt me. Maybe he wanted money. I ran through the possibilities as he kept yammering on. Finally he said he needed to get back to his friends, and I closed my door, unsettled. I couldn’t sleep that night, staring at the ceiling, worrying about the strange man who followed me home.