Locals

The Chapel, Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., from the Boston Public Library's Tichnor Brothers Collection, via wikimedia

When I was a freshman, I rushed a fraternity. A white one, because there was no Black Greek life on campus. Ant never let me forget it. We both knew I had other options. Like with the city-wide chapters affiliated with my PWI. I could have made the effort. You make time for the things you want to do. There were guys my year, the ones with cars, who drove off-campus so they could rush a Black fraternity. A handful of others took the city bus. I heard about this one kid who walked back and forth, no matter the time or distance. Too broke for a ride. Too embarrassed to ask for help.

Before I became a pledge, and officially a brother, when the college cafeterias were the only way to ease my stomach, I’d see the Black Greeks sporting their letters and colors among the other Black and brown kids who sat at The Island, a long, elevated table with black metal high chairs in the center of the main cafeteria.

I ate with them my first few weeks of school, knowing no one else. They took me in. They looked out for me, the guys in particular. They introduced me to upperclassmen and girls. They invited me to meetings and kickbacks at their off-campus apartments.

In time, they passed me books about the Divine Nine. They told me what it meant to be part of a brotherhood. A real one. One that lasted until death, not four fleeting years.

They told me that being in a fraternity, a Black fraternity, was about more than dark basements littered with beer puddles. More than blacking out to house music, which wasn’t real house music anyway. More than snorting and popping anything handed to you four and five times a week.

They had their fun, too, of course. They told me how they partied until the sun cracked open the sky. But hours later, they still made it to their service projects—hungover, but there.

Being in a Black fraternity was about leadership, they said. About developing a voice and a vision. About providing resources in all the ways we’re systematically denied them. A support system.

It was about legacy. Always legacy.

And it all sounded good. Good for someone who came to our school from out of town. Or who felt like they were missing something. Or who felt like they needed community—their community.

I was keen on adopting a new one.

I tried my luck with the white fraternities. I dropped the Black kids, the Black Greeks, the second I could—once I became a pledge. Because at the end of the day, most of my time was spent on campus. Not floating around the city. So, all that talk, all that support, all that chatter about brotherhood? It meant nothing. Less than nothing. On my campus the Black kids weren’t worth shit, which meant Black Greeks weren’t worth shit, and I wasn’t trying to catch whatever they had.

Ant, my cousin, went to the community college downtown. He took classes whenever he had enough cash saved up to afford them. But he was the reason I enrolled in the private college fifteen minutes from where I grew up in the South End with my mother, down by the Colt Armory and the adult probation department. Back then, Ant lived in the South End, too. He and my aunt stayed in an apartment above a restaurant on Franklin Avenue, down in Little Italy, which it still was in spirit, though the days when men spent hours upon hours drinking and talking calcio, reminiscing about their villages in the old country, and then stumbled five or ten minutes home, were gone. Most of them now hopped into cars and drove out to the suburbs. To Wethersfield and Rocky Hill and Cromwell and Glastonbury. Returning only to shop and eat and talk shit on lazy afternoons at the Italian grocery stores and restaurants and hangouts that dotted the street.

The neighborhood was now Puerto Rican and Dominican. It was Colombian and Peruvian. There were the Jamaicans who chose not to live with the other West Indians in the North End, and there were the Bosnians who had fled shit we knew nothing about and didn’t care