nccotus

I felt like I was picked for this.

I was a lonely little English girl left behind over an abortion and dumped there. My roommate was a Black girl on scholarship from Harlem.

She was wise and wary, I was not.

we were both placed in a remedial English class with a lovely Scottish military officer. I had trouble with language because of the conflict between British and American usage. As well as for other reasons.

my roommate complained when I got an A and she got a B and said he was discriminating against her. I got mainstreamed into the regular English class. It was a sad, sad day for me. In fact, I never got over it until this very day, 49 years later.

I developed a fanciful relationship with the mainstream English teacher that persisted throughout my life, he and his wife became my advisers and continued to be my teachers. But it did not compensate me for the trouble I had over needing that special help and losing it.

I hate to report that I heard that that Scottish military officer teacher shot himself over that summer, and I would guess that that was one of the reasons that I was held up in my mind over these issues all through these many years. Obviously this was all hushed up at the time. This is a thread that had to come unraveled. The Harlem roommate also complained that I was prejudiced the same as everybody else even though we had been as best friends. The whole situation was so traumatizing. My brother was allowed to leave Kent and return home to public school. I was not given that option.

In 1986, at the R-1 psych ward in West Reading, I asked Dr. Rotenberg—the Chief Psychiatrist—who had been called in for a consultation, “What’s wrong with me?” It was five in the morning. I was so desperate. He said, “You are a deeply disturbed young woman.” It was the best shot at a diagnosis I had gotten at the time. The clinical diagnosis was the same as Dr. Rodenberger’s: borderline personality disorder, i.e. no schizophrenia. This was just prior to the clamped catheter incident that turned everything on its head and all but ended my life.

the relation with the Black girl at Kent left me valuing being a scholar as she was there as a scholar, i.e, on scholarship and she was also a very, very beautiful young woman. I was cute but not like her. But we were paired together. But then she ditched me when the Fall semester was over and roommates changed. I was lost with my Winter term roommate. In later life I had sucked it up about this early experience of a close relationship with a Black woman and fostered affirmative action in ways large and small. Until I learned recently not to any more. As far as I can tell, Black folk want to do it for themselves these days and don’t want our help, or, certainly not from a person like me. I got so much flack for trying. But let it be said that I was. Trying. It must be admitted that it was a noble motive in the face of people who try to say that I am prejudiced or offensive. It got that way under Obama for me as for so many people like me who had tried to help and got dicked over for it as Black world moved into eminence. I took the worst beating and weathered it as best as I could.

see my next post, which is ready to go.