My Friend ‘Virginia, From Virginia’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/opinion/sunday/boarding-school-friendship.html

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“Hi! I’m Virginia, from Virginia.” I still remember the sound of her voice, puffed as if meringue whisked in air. The Southern accent gave me a start in this crisp place, a boarding school in the small town of Concord, Mass.

I did not understand what wealth was before I arrived at Middlesex, a campus replete with colonial red brick and its very own pond, woods and chapel.

It was there that I first heard about yachts on the Mediterranean and personal cosmetics supplied from Paris while listening in on my classmates’ easy chatter. They were rich, white and cultured. I was black and from Ohio.

People I had never met had donated to the school, gifts that ultimately paid my tuition, room and board. My fellow students mostly did not see me: a brown girl in red plastic glasses on full scholarship. I was an alien on those beautiful grounds of rolling green. I did not know how to be.

Virginia from Virginia extended her arm into this void, found my hand and grasped it. I gained in her a fast friend, fun and fiercely loyal, despite our differences that drilled down to the core. She was adventurous and a devoted breaker of rules. I was timid and rulebound, always certain God was watching. Everything risky I did in high school somehow started with Virginia. She also taught me what an artichoke is, and that it, like us, has a heart.

I did not know then that Virginia’s family was staunchly Republican, or that she didn’t invite me down South for a holiday for fear that her grandmother would make me enter through the back door. I could not conceive at the age of 16 that speaking in a Southern accent made Virginia feel alien on our New England campus, too. What I knew was that this friendship helped me to remain intact despite the assaults on my sense of self-worth that were rarely intentional but cut just as deeply.

Because of Virginia’s daring, I learned that it was not impossible to eat brownie mix straight from the box instead of following the directions. Today we remain friendly, decades after we graduated from high school. She told me that she sees herself as a fiscal Republican and a social Democrat, and teaches her kids that allies come in all kinds of packages.

The philosopher Alexander Nehamas suggests, in a graceful book, “On Friendship,” that this genre of relationship, though indescribably life transforming, is not readily adaptable to broader political goals. The sphere of friendship, he points out, is intimate and closed by nature, the opposite of what a movement for social change must be. But what if the power of friendship is a quiet movement unto itself, one heart at a time, shrinking the shadows between us?

Tiya Miles is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

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