Friends: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

that was okay. I liked the food—they had greens and fried chicken—but the dorms were kind of old and they had roaches in them. I didn’t think I wanted to go there. Where should I go? Close by? Far away? California seemed kind of far…. The counselors at school were no help. If you didn’t ask them to get in your business, they didn’t get in it and you went wherever you went.
    Since Mr. Langhorne had sent this letter, I applied to the schools he suggested, along with Mount Holyoke and Howard. I got into Miami first, and was awarded the Martin Luther King Scholarship and only had to pay four hundred dollars to attend.Then I got into Howard but had to pay five thousand dollars, which seemed like a million dollars. I got into the University of Virginia but not U.C., Berkeley. I also got into Mount Holyoke.
    â€œThat’s a girls’ school and there are two kinds of lesbians—born and made,” my mother warned.
    I didn’t know what she was talking about; we’d never had a conversation about lesbianism. But I figured she didn’t want me to go there.
    When I got the acceptance letter to Yale my mama started screaming, “My baby’s going to Yale! My baby’s going to Yale!” She fell onto the bed, started kicking her feet into the air and having a fit. I was just sitting there reading, “You have been accepted out of nine thousand applicants….” All I had to do was get a thousand-dollar loan—from them. So I guess I’ll be going to Yale and not Howard, I thought. But I was very intimidated. I remember trying to push to the back of my mind the thought “they’re supposed to be smarter in the North. I may not be able to cut it.” I did, and decided, Well, I’ll go for a year. But if I can’t cut the mustard and get kicked out, then I’ll go to Howard, which is where I wanted to attend anyway.
    Of course, after I told my counselors I got into Yale they were proud and thought it was wonderful. I remember one of them saying, “You’re going to Yale! That is the best drama school in the world!”
    Ah hah!

Chapter 2
Where the Heart Is
    I come from a family that took what life dished them and made the best out of it. My father, Conroy Vance, was from Chicago, where he was raised in a foster home. His biological parents had given him up when he was three or four—old enough to remember them and to have been traumatized. I don’t know why his folks didn’t raise him and don’t know if he did, either. He never recovered from the abandonment, yet he lived a full and meaningful life.
    My mother was the oldest daughter of Lloyd and Virginia Naomi Daniels. She had one sister, Lois Ann, right behind her in age, then eleven years passed before her brothers Lloyd and then Lee were born. My maternal grandfather—everybody called him Pappy but I called him Granddad—was president of the longshoreman’s union in Chicago. Between his income and my grandmother’s clerical work for the Chicago Department of Treasury, they and their children lived decently, as the lives of black folks in the 1930s and 1940s went. Working on the waterfront was difficult and dangerous, and in the winter when Lake Michigan would freeze over there wasn’t much work. As head of the union, Pappy would tap into the treasury to help members out during those frigid months. To hearfamily members tell it, when my mother was in her late teens, Aunt Lois’s new husband insisted on working on the docks. Pappy didn’t want that for his son-in-law. But he gave my grandfather an ultimatum: “If you don’t let me work, I’ll sit at home.” Pappy relented, and apparently, one winter, gave him some money to tide him and Lois over. Someone reported Pappy to the authorities. The police came after him. Pappy evaded the cops for six months. But while he was on the run they harassed his family, banging on the door of