THE STORY PART

Student days and a search for community.

- BY HILTON ALS

In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much about the university—not even that it was an all-boys university—until I got there. It was a new world for me. I had lived most of my life until then in a family of girls. Now there was a family of boys.

I didn’t live on campus. I lived with my aunt, my uncle, and an adored older female cousin in Brooklyn. At around that time, Our Ma, inspired by her sister and eldest daughter, was planning on moving from Brooklyn, where I grew up, to Atlanta. A new start. She was just over fifty then. She made it clear that there were certain rules I had to follow if I was going to stay with my aunt’s family. I had to pay rent, twenty dollars a week. “Nobody lives for free,” Our Ma said.

At first, my aunt objected to the mandate: I was just a schoolkid. But Our Ma was adamant; it was either that or I would come and live with her and my little brother in Georgia. There were several reasons that my mother put her foot down. One was Daddy. As long as she’d known him, he'd lived rent-free with his mother, whose economic smarts my mother revered. “Mrs. Williams could throw a handful of peas in a pot and feed a whole army,” Our Ma said. Mrs. Williams had a husband and two other children—two girls—but, for her, Daddy always came first.