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Looking for my roomie...

I have looked everywhere I know to look. I have searched Facebook and MySpace, knowing full well she probably wouldn't cotton to such nonsense. I have Googled and asked Jeeves and subjected myself to the unending e-mail barrage of Classmates, but she is nowhere to be found.

Please, somebody help me find my roomie!

It was the summer of 1972 and I was a rising freshman at Mercer University. A packet of housing information arrived in the mail, asking for my personal data to assist in choosing a roommate for me from among all the other roommate-less freshman women arriving that fall. College was to be my grand escape from the sameness of my life to that point, so I requested a roommate from distant lands (west of the Mississippi and north of the Carolinas) and I asked that she be black.

Well, she turned out to be neither of those things. First, she was from my hometown, born and bred, and a graduate of the "Army brat" high school on the other side of town. Secondly, she was not black. However, she was a warm, rich shade of mahogany that contrasted starkly with my pasty white hippy chick complexion, had an Afro as wide as her shoulders, and was wearing a dashiki.
Even though my parents were standing behind me when she walked into our dorm room that first day, I could feel my parents' faces settling into the teeth-gritting, plastered-smile masks worn by polite white Southerners who suddenly find themselves in the presence of that other race with whom they feel most uncomfortable. Oh yeah, this was gonna be good...

We were roommates for two years during which:

Poet James Baldwin looked down his nose at the students gathered in my Writing Poetry class and said that as far as he was concerned, everyone in the South spoke "colored".

The Tattnall Square Baptist Church on the corner of the Mercer campus barred my roommate, me, and three others from entering their house of worship because of the skin color of three of us, then split in two when the minister read my scathing (but Biblically annotated) declaration of hypocrisy from the pulpit the next Sunday and said he agreed that blacks and whites should be able to worship together.

Dick Gregory came to speak and called all whites "superniggers", an insult that became a term of endearment between she and I, and my new name on notes, birthday cards, and the door of our dorm room.

On a visit home, members of my father's church questioned whether my roommate and I used the same toilet. To add to their disgust when I said we did indeed, I informed them that we also wore each other's clothes. Horrors!

I introduced her to Rod McKuen and she bought me an African carving to show me how butts were supposed to look. We both read Malcolm X and for awhile there were silences between us. She returned to the all day Sunday services of the traditional African Episcopal Church and I abandoned my Southern Baptist roots for agnosticism and transendental meditation. But mostly we were two girls away from home for the first time, exploring our freedom, sharing our lives until all hours of the night. Two years, two dorms, and always in trouble with the RAs for laughing and talking too loudly.

She was my maid of honor when I got married. Her father and my husband ended up teaching together at the same middle school. She became a Volunteer in Service to America (VISTA) worker and I moved to the country and had a baby. Her family threw me the only baby shower I had. I did the reading at her wedding. She had three girls, I had two. We lost touch, found ourselves in the same class when we both returned to another college, shared the trials and tribulations of adolescent daughters, lived in different states, lost touch once again. Then someone told me her husband had died, unexpectedly, and much too young. I wrote her to offer my sympathy, she called me, we caught up with our lives, and then...

It's been over 15 years since that last call. So why am I looking for her now? Because on November 4th, this country elected Barack Obama president of the United States and as I wept through the celebration of that night, there was only one person I wanted to share that moment with -- my roomie. I wanted to see her eyes shining, hear her voice shouting, laugh and cry and dance and sing out loud with her until someone came and told us, like so many years ago, to quiet down. We had different histories until we shared a history of our own; new history is now being made and despite the distances of time and space, it is again shared. She is the only thing missing from my joy in this moment.

And now it is the night before the inauguration and I can't find her anywhere. I want to hear where life has led her, share her daughters' stories, learn whether she found love again, and if she is a grandmother like me. Yes, Renee, I have six (!) grandsons in multiple hues of ethnicity, and one of them even reminds me of you:




Catherine Renee Lewis McBride,

Baker High School Class of 1972,
Mercer University Class of 1976,
Columbus State University graduate school,
former (?) resident of Buena Vista, GA

your supernigger misses you and wishes you would call...