the load, whatever it might be.
Susan played the cello, which I had only seen occasionally on TV. I loved music, all kinds of music, and tried to be open to whatever music was around: organ music at Collection, bagpipes, hootenanny, even white rock and roll, but the string quartet concerts were my undoing. Susan loved the string quartet classical music concerts that were given in Bond Hall. At first, I thought these gatherings were okay. The music was melodic, peaceful, and played with passion by the student musicians. I tried to follow along and thought I did fairly well for the first couple of concerts, but then my mind began to wander, and I almost fell asleep during one of the recitals. Science courses and labs took up all my time, and I think that an innate appreciation of classical music was not in the cards for me. Susan soon realized this, and I stopped attending those recitals with her. Occasionally, I could pick up an R&B radio station from Philadelphia on my clock radio, so she soon figured out that I was much more appreciative of this type of music. She even told one of her other acquaintances that she had a roommate who also loved this music genre. This acquaintance eventually came to our room to meet me, but lost her enthusiasm at possibly finding a kindred spirit when she discovered that I was a Negro. Susan thought that this was funny, but also very hypocritical of her acquaintance, whom she never mentioned again. I think that this was also around the time when B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world (who had written a letter to welcome me to the campus before I arrived and before our pictures were printed in the Cygnet), also rejected me by not initiating any further contact after they realized that I did not fit the expectations raised by my surname. Fitting into campus life was going to be harder than I expected.
My response to African and Caribbean music was entirely different. I felt as though I was at home. Through Bridget, I met Jannette who introduced me to music from NYC and the islands that I had never heard before—calypso, soca, and black American artists like Arthur Prysock, Nina Simone, Lou Rawls, and Nancy Wilson. The music of my childhood was southern R&B—James Brown, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding, Motown sounds, blues singers like Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, and, of course, gospel music. When I finally got to hear African music and see African dance, I knew that I had found the original source of the music and rhythm that I loved. One of the first things that I bought with my own money was a record player, followed by albums. I picked up the habit of grazing record stores on a regular basis, a practice I continued throughout medical school, well into my late twenties.
At the end of my second month at Swarthmore, on my eighteenth birthday, I was still hanging out with my roommate from Ohio, wearing my “preppy” clothes and penny loafers, and trying to find my place at Swarthmore. I came back from my afternoon classes to find a surprise that I have not forgotten after all these years. I even have a picture of it: me in an A-line, sleeveless, green floral dress, a permed, mid-length page boy cut hair with bangs, and a forest green glass vase/jar that was placed on the top of my dresser in the left-hand corner. I was smiling a big, open-tooth smile and blowing out the candles on a cake that had been delivered for my birthday. My mother had arranged to have a birthday cake complete with candles and a birthday card delivered to my dorm room. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased that my special day had not been forgotten. I remember how grown up and loved I felt.
I came to Swarthmore to study science, preferably chemistry, because my mother taught high school biology and I saw myself as destined to teach high school chemistry. My mother had a good life as she went to work, made money, and had some level of independence in spite of having a husband and four children. I never saw myself as being married or having children—that was for the normal pretty girls. I knew that I would always have to take care of myself and thought that teaching high school would do the trick for me. I loved science, and still do, but I was surprised at the joy and opening of the spirit that I felt in English class.
The great awakening occurred in second semester of sophomore year: fourth semester of math, calculus, second semester of physics, and second semester of physical chemistry. I barely made it out of those courses alive. These courses would “separate the men from the boys,” the true scientists and mathematicians from the wannabes. It was clear that I was not a real scientist. As I looked around for another path, my friendship with several of the postbaccalaureate students (most of them were HBCU graduates who were spending an academic enrichment year at Swarthmore, usually as a pathway to additional degrees), showed me the way.
Female physicians were unknown in my world and seemed mythical to me, even if Bridget and Susan had originally expressed interest in this profession, but I thought that if a post BACC could get into medical school and become a doctor, so could I. I changed course and took biology classes, eventually earning majors in both chemistry and biology. The path was smooth and the detour almost imperceptible, but I knew that medical school was the way forward.
Sharples Dining Hall and the Beginning of Black Consciousness
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