Feelin' It - A College Journey of Epic Proportions

Chapter 1
The Wonder Years, Detroit

My basketball skills were not impressive, and my singing abilities were about as nonexistent as my rap prospects were. I had no rich family members who would die and leave me an inheritance, nor parents who had set up a trust fund for me. Well, there went all my “get out of the hood free” cards. The only way I knew to succeed was to take the long road following the age-old, tried-and-true path of higher education. How else could I claim my sliver of the American pie and achieve my American dream? I needed to graduate high school, get into a decent college, pick the right major, and land a lucrative job. Although completing a college degree does not guarantee success, it was a far better option for me than scrambling for a job right out of high school, going to the military, or waiting for that lucky lottery ticket to fall out of the sky (or someone’s pocket).

Before we jump into my college journey, allow me to provide some background information. My childhood was mostly prototypical of any inner-city Black youth of the time. I hail from a little town by the name of Detroit, in the southeast corner of Michigan, built on the river of the same name. Maybe you have heard of it. I was born in the mid-1980s, the same decade that gave us such wonderful innovations as crack, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and Reaganomics. It was a wonderful time, or so I have heard. I’m being cynical; it wasn’t all bad. I grew up in a time when kids eagerly anticipated Saturday morning cartoons with a bowl of their favorite cereal on hand. Hulk Hogan and Macho Man alternated between tag team partners and sworn enemies when wrestling was on. I was barely in grade school when Michael Jordan was still trying to make it past Isiah Thomas’s Bad Boys for a championship. A new music video from Michael Jackson could interrupt any television broadcast, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was the ultimate action hero. My mother and father divorced when I was five, so I was raised in a single-parent household. Despite that, I knew my father and had a good relationship with him, so this isn’t one of those “my dad left for a pack of smokes when I was seven and never came back” kind of stories.

Detroit was a checkerboard of good neighborhoods, ghettos, and smoldering remains from a bygone era of prominence. The population of the city was nearly 90 percent Black at the time, and virtually all of my friends, family, and classmates reflected this. My teachers in Catholic school were disproportionately White, gas station and grocery store owners were often Middle Eastern or Arabic, but everyone else was Black. My house always felt like a home, complete with a front yard and backyard in a decent neighborhood known as Woodbridge. I was blessed with the divine providence of living right next door to my grandparents. They bought a duplex when my mom was still a kid, and after her divorce, they let us rent the side that was vacant. I occasionally watched the show The Wonder Years when I was growing up. My daily life looked nothing like the suburban Americana depicted in the show, but I still envisioned myself as the main character, Kevin Arnold, from time to time. He was an Everyman of sorts, and we had a few things in common. I too had a bespectacled best friend, a quiet demeanor, and a social status that was neither remarkably popular nor a social leper. That is where the similarities ended.

The image Detroit evoked throughout the mid-1980s and the 1990s was always some variation of a lawless, postapocalyptic, smoking crater where a city used to be. The once thriving industrial economic engine had all but seized up. The automotive capital of the world, the home of Motown records, the Paris of the West experienced a decline that was unprecedented for a major American city. The only survivors of the catastrophic consequences of race riots, white flight, and the waning automotive industry were pimps, murderers, drug dealers, and welfare moms, according to outsiders. Detroit was easy fodder for disparaging comments and the butt of late-night talk show host’s jokes. Many Detroiters walked around with a chip on their shoulders because of the way we were seen in the national spotlight.

While my single-parent household and fixed income made for a prototypical city existence, my life was less mired in conflict than one would expect. Life below the poverty line afforded us the basics, but disposable income was rare. I never got into fistfights, played the summers away in my backyard, and traveled freely within the borders of my neighborhood. There were no drive-by shootings to duck or gang members for us to appease. I walked to school alone or with my sister without major incident. The occasional stray dog would startle me along my path, but people rarely bothered me. I walked past vast open fields and long-abandoned buildings on my way to school. My parents and grandparents would regale me with tales of what once stood in place of the graffiti-laced structures and overgrown fields. I could hardly envision the city as it must have been in their day, with bustling streets and shops on every corner. I felt a sense of community when the local store owners knew me by face or by name, or when I randomly bumped into my classmates while running errands. It was possible to live a somewhat normal childhood, even in the valley of the shadow of death as it was depicted.

As I grew older, I came to understand the prevalence of random violence and the fear that goes along with that. My mom entertained a few crazy boyfriends that made life at home tense sometimes. A few near misses reminded me that minding my own business wasn’t necessarily enough to prevent me from becoming a statistic. When I was in high school, a homeless guy pulled a knife on me for some cheeseburgers. Once, I was a few minutes late to the bus stop because I was waiting for my sister to finish up a test she was taking. Upon our delayed arrival, we found the bus shelter had been peppered with stray bullets. Just minutes earlier, one of the guys at the bus stop exchanged words with someone driving by, and the shooting began. We were just in time to witness the aftermath. My mom taught me not to start fights or engage with those spoiling for one, because you never know what weapons they might have.

I survived the Detroit public school system from preschool to the third grade. I attended Edmonson Elementary, which was right across the street from the notorious Jeffries Projects. Our great-grandmother lived in one of the high-rise buildings and our father was a byproduct of those same housing projects. I was a good student and had a stable group of friends. From grades four through eight I did hard time at Saint Leo, a Catholic school. Edmonson’s classes only went up to the fifth grade, so when my sister graduated, my mom decided she didn’t want her to attend the local middle school. She felt the education was weak and the social climate was too wild for her children. It had turned into a very different school from the one she had known back in her day. I wasn’t exactly thrilled when my mom told me I was going to be starting at a Catholic school in the fall; we weren’t even Catholic. I was getting ripped out of a familiar scene and spliced into a movie already in progress. Saint Leo was a K-8 school, so it made sense for me to follow my sister. Plus, it meant neither of us had to walk to school alone. I was too young to appreciate what a life preserver I had been thrown and how much sacrifice went into paying for private school. All I cared about was leaving my friends behind and being precluded from a fifth grade graduation with everyone I had grown up with.

For most of my early years, I was considered a smart kid. I was plagued with very persistent, sometimes severe asthma, with hospitalizations occurring at least once yearly. I missed a lot of school as a result. However, I could usually complete the work and pass my tests as if I had been there the whole time. I was performing better than many of the kids who had perfect attendance. Around the end of middle school, I started developing a mild disinterest in school. I found it slow and unnecessarily cumbersome. I vividly remember sitting in my seventh grade English class, eyes glazing over, as my teacher rambled on about diagramming sentences. Despite her insistence that this was important for our futures, I knew I would never diagram another sentence after I left her classroom. By the time I made it to high school, my days as the smart kid were numbered.

For high school, I attended the renowned Cass Technical High School, rejoining the public school system. It was one of the top three high schools in the city, along with Renaissance and Martin Luther King. Cass Tech was a heavyweight with many famous alumni. Diana Ross, Lily Tomlin, three beauty queens in Naima Mora, Kenya Moore, and Carole Gist, former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, rapper Big Sean, and even John DeLorean—yes that DeLorean from Back to the Future time machine fame—all passed through its doors. Even my mom, exponentially less famous, also graduated from Cass. It was a magnet school, meaning students didn’t have to be zoned to that particular school district to attend, provided they passed the mandatory entrance exam. I easily passed the test and gained admittance to the eight-floor behemoth.

My disinterest in school soured to disdain when the work became more difficult. I was also going through my awkward teenage years, and I didn’t feel like I fit in at all. I wasn’t bullied or ostracized; I just never found my crowd. I did not fit with the geeks or the gamers, the cool kids or the slackers, the class clowns or the jocks. I stayed to myself and just...