Tayari's Blog: Happy Birthday, Spelman!

As many of you know, I am a 1991 graduate of Spelman College. There I took my first writing class with Pearl Cleage, back when she was a young adjunct professor. She wasn't full-time, so looking back I know this was a job she did for love because adjuncting pays nothing, no benefits, just a few bucks. She treated me like a writer before I was one.

I took several literature classes from Gloria Wade Gayles who was a wild and passionate professor, determined to challenge us in innovative ways. She gave me the words to explain the dis-ease I felt when looking at the world around me. She taught me that I wasn't just black, but that I was a woman, too. In her class I gained the critical and theoretical frame work from which my stories grow.

I cannot forget Anne Warner, my adviser when I edited, Focus, the campus literary magazine. She stood up for Andrea when the typesetter was offended by one her excellent haikus. She taught us about responsibility. When it was my turn to be editor, she let me do my thing, choose my staff, and make my mistakes.

And then there is Spelman herself, like a mother and I mean that with all the complication that word brings. She raised me, loved me, scolded me, punished me when I was wrong, sometimes when I wasn't. I think I can say that Spelman brought me up in her own image. I would not have written a word without her.

When Rockefeller gave Giles and Packard the money to start Spelman, he had no idea that it would produce the likes of Bernice Johnson Regan, Pearl Cleage, Tina Ansa, Alice Walker, Esther Rolle, Marion Wright Edleman, and me. The hundred dollars he gave didn't hurt him any-- he was the richest man in America. He gave far more to the other Rockefeller institutions such as Carnegie Mellon. But Giles and Packard took what he gave and started their school in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church.

Handing over the cash, he asked them, "Will you stick?" He meant would they last, would they stick with this crazy idea of theirs, to make a school for Negro women. They assured him that they would and he said that they should come back in a year if they were still in business, if they had stuck, and he would give them more money. We all know the rest of the story.

I have typed this entry without consulting a single reference book. This is the story I learned as a freshman, sixteen and eager to see what I could become. That question, "Will you stick?" had echoed in my head for the last twenty years as I try to do the things at which statistics say I should fail.

Giles and Packard stuck, and not just because Rockefeller has promised them more money, but because they felt that they were doing God's work, fighting the good fight. They stuck because their consciences would not allow them to do otherwise. So, I am taking a moment to honor them today, on the 125th anniversary of the founding of Spelman College. May their courage, vision, righteous indignation, and old-fashioned stubbornness live on in each of us.