A Black Graduate of an Elite Boarding School Gets Real
ADMISSIONS
A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School
By Kendra James
Early in her memoir, “Admissions,” Kendra James describes an off-campus adventure near her new boarding school. The students who accompany her are, like James, Black — among the few Black students at Taft, an elite school that like so many of its kind was built for wealthy white boys. Wandering the Connecticut countryside, James and her friends take a goose egg from a nest. They schedule its care, using dormitory lamps to warm the unhatched gosling, which James names Crookshanks. The egg is moved from lonely desk to lonely desk.
When school staff members eventually discover the egg, unbroken and fetid, in James’s room, James is not present. A white peer has accused her of stealing $20, and James has made an excruciating calculation: Because she lacks the resources on her own to expose the interpersonal and institutional racism driving the conflict, falsely claiming responsibility is the easiest way to continue her education. James confesses and is suspended. The staff find the egg, which, James writes, “had partially broken open in their hands, sending the smell of rotting egg and partially developed goose through the hall.”
She adds, “I was fine with this.”
No tears for Crookshanks. But the reader holds the loss, which is not about a bird, of course, but about teenagers trying to make a home in a place that has admitted them without extending to them a sense of belonging. It’s one of a series of heartaches James layers into her fresh, funny memoir. For James, and for students like her, Taft is no nest.
But it might have been. James was the first Black American legacy at Taft — “legacy” here meaning the child (or grandchild or great-grandchild) of a graduate. (One previous Black alumnus whose daughter attended was Bermudan; the distinction would have been lost on members of the white community at Taft, but it is critical to James.) James’s father, originally from Chicago’s South Side, entered Taft through a scholarship program, and by the time James enrolls, he’s a trustee.
Taft, she writes, was “simply inevitable.” But she feels alienated from other Black students because of an upbringing long on “respectability politics,” and from white students who do not view their Black and Latino peers as integral to their school. Why is James, class of 2006, the first Black American legacy? Because most Black alumni choose not to send their children. Year after year, Black students confront their “innate otherness in this institution,” while the institution remains unchanged.
This paradox, which the sociologist Shamus Khan has described as “a more diverse elite within a more unequal world,” is laid carefully bare in “Admissions.” Black students at Taft are ignored except for their race, but James is not one to be ignored. She dresses boldly (including “a hemp cobra-stitched chain with a large paw-print bead in the center that symbolized my love for Sirius Black”) and embraces the world of fantasy. Her descriptions often rely on idiosyncratic figures — at one point, James “Alex-Macked my way” off a chair; “pre-Season-6 Willow from ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’” is a style influence. Where I got James’s references, I laughed. Where I had to look them up, I appreciated the enactment of her unwelcoming boarding school experience: There is a whole culture here; you’d better learn it. James’s voice is swift, charming and surprising, and it’s delightful to follow as her richly imagined dreams of boarding school are replaced by deep friendships, self-compassion and humor.
James’s gift in “Admissions” is to provide company for Black students in predominantly white spaces. The work of “Admissions” is laying down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she — or any Black student, or all Black students — would manage the failures of a racially illiterate community. After graduation, James finds that white classmates suddenly embrace her, “as though it was normal, something we’d always just done. Suddenly, outside Taft’s gates, I was a person.”
This phenomenon is about the best depiction of elite whiteness I’ve read, nailing the belonging derived from institutional affiliation, which is therefore impersonal and false, but manifests value in spite of this. James writes to illuminate her experience as a Black student at Taft. She throws just as much light on the school’s whiteness.
