Amena Brown:
That time I met India Arie. That time I went on a really bad date. That time I was directed by Robert Townsend. That time I got mono on Thanksgiving. That time I went on a really bad Christmas tour. That time I... Hey, you all. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. I'm Amena Brown. It is winter of 2022, the beginning of 2022. I hope you all are staying warm. I hope you are taking care of yourselves and being as gentle with yourself as possible right now. I think that is so, so important so don't forget. Be gentle with yourself. As you can, be gentle with other people too, right? I'm taking you all back for this That Time I episode. I've been thinking a lot about location and place and how the places that we have literally physically been, the places that we're from, how they play a role in who we become.
Amena Brown:
I've been thinking a lot about my journey to moving here to Atlanta, which is where home is for me. I've been here in Atlanta since '98. I have some other episodes that I'll be doing as the year progresses to talk about my journey here in the city and the ways that I feel Atlanta has really built me as an artist. Also, my dating history. There'll just be quite a few things to discuss as it relates to the city of Atlanta. But I could not start on talking to you about my journey to moving to Atlanta and making Atlanta home without starting with what brought me here, which was getting into Spelman College. This is a That Time I went to Spelman episode. For those of you that are not aware, I really hope that you're aware as you're listening to this.
Amena Brown:
But for those of you who aren't aware, Spelman College is a historically Black college and it is one of two all female historically Black colleges in the country. So I am very proud to be a Spelman grad and wanted to share with you all the story of how I actually ended up at Spelman. I grew up a military kid and I got a chance in one life to experience two branches of the military. My dad was in the Air Force until he retired. My parents got divorced when I was around six or so. My mom later entered the Army. When my mom entered the Army as a nurse, then we did a little bit of traveling. And that traveling led us to, I'm thinking this must have been Walter Reed. I have to ask my mom now. I have to ask my mom, you all. My mom might come back on here and verify these things.
Amena Brown:
But my mom was in the military. Nevertheless, she was a nurse at a hospital that I'm thinking is Walter Reed because of how old I was at the time. I was nine years old. My mom took me to where she worked, to the hospital. I got a chance to meet a pediatrician there. Her name was Dr. Wilkes. My mom tells the story that she introduced me to Dr. Wilkes who was a very good friend of hers. She let Dr. Wilkes take me into her office. My mom didn't actually go in the office with us. All she knows is when I came out of being in Dr. Wilkes office, I told my mom that I was going to go to Spelman. I've had this dream to go to Spelman since I was nine years old. We lived in Silver Spring, Maryland at this time when my mom was working at Walter Reed, which was a very big military medical center at the time.
Amena Brown:
My best friend Portia, we were best friends in elementary school. We had this pact between us that we were both going to go to Spelman. Then in the middle of sixth grade year, my mom ended up getting stationed in Texas, in San Antonio. And so I moved away from all the East Coast things and ended up in Texas where I spent the rest of junior high and all of high school, but I never forgot about wanting to go to Spelman. Spelman was still my number one choice. Of course, this was also in an era of time in my middle school, into high school years. This was the era of a different world and getting a chance to see this fictional representation of a historically Black college. But also in my case, some of the representation that was happening on a different world was actually part of Spelman's campus.
Amena Brown:
Some of the pictures of what were the dorms and different things were actual buildings at Spelman, right? Shout out to those of you that are listening and remember this magazine, but there was a magazine at this time called Young Sisters and Brothers. It was called YSB Magazine. Every year or maybe more than once a year, but I remember it being every year, YSB would have a whole issue. Part of the issue would be dedicated to historically Black colleges. It would have rankings and different things you could learn. I remember taking all those out of the magazine and putting them up on my walls. I come from a family that there was a lot of conversation about education. I don't remember in my upbringing it really being like a choice about going to college.
Amena Brown:
My grandmother, my mother, everybody that was around me growing up was talking to me a lot about where did I want to go to college, what did I think I might want to study. All these questions that had the assumption in them, you're going to college. It's just, where do you want to go? What do you think you'll do when you get there? Do you think you'll pledge when you get there? You know, all those questions. Also, my junior high and high school time, my mom and I attended. My mom, my sister and I, we attended a good size Black church in San Antonio, Texas. There was a lot of emphasis on education in our church. Every year, it got to be around May time of the year, there would be one service every year that would just celebrate all the graduates.
Amena Brown:
People that were graduating high school, college, people who were graduating from grad school. It was this big to-do of our church community really wanting to lift up education as being something that was really important for us as Black folks. So I had that in my family, but I also had that in this church that I was going to. There was always this big celebration whenever students were graduating from high school. They would have a time where they would announce where those kids were going to college. There would just be this uproar in the audience at whatever school you had been accepted to. Giving you this idea of what that sort of end of high school time was for me as it got to be time to begin applying for schools. I ended up applying to Spelman.
Amena Brown:
I also applied to Clark Atlanta because even then and today, Clark Atlanta has a fantastic mass media and communications program. I hope it's still called that because it's been a while since I was in college, you all. But they had a wonderful mass media communications program. I just thought, I want to get to Atlanta. There was something about the city of Atlanta that I felt like my future was there. I was like, I'll apply to Spelman. I'll apply to Clark Atlanta. At least I have two shots of getting into one of these and actually getting to the city that I really want to go to. But then as I was getting in the process of applying for college, my mom was starting to ask me like, "You're not going to apply to any schools in Texas?"
Amena Brown:
And honestly, the thought hadn't crossed my mind. No shade to my listeners that live in Texas, but I just never quite felt at home at home in Texas. Texas felt like home to me because my mom was there and my mom is home to me. But Texas never felt like home. When we moved there, I just anticipated that I'm going to turn 18 and go live somewhere else. And really, even more specifically that I wanted to just return to the East Coast, that I had enjoyed living in the D.C. area. I just wanted to be back in that part of the country. My mom had asked me about applying to Texas schools so I applied to two Texas schools to have a safety. I applied to Texas A&M at College Station. I applied to University of Texas at Austin or UT.
Amena Brown:
Also, I had been courted a little bit by Sarah Lawrence, which was in New York. Sarah Lawrence actually wanted me to go early decision. I was afraid to go early decision because that would mean if I got into Spelman that I wouldn't be able to go. You know, if I got into Spelman and got into Sarah Lawrence, that I'd have to go to Sarah Lawrence. So I did apply to Sarah Lawrence, but I didn't end up going early decision because I really wanted to see was I going to get into Spelman or not. Let me tell you all what it was like applying for college in the '90s. Some of you all are going to be like, what were you all doing? Why was life like this? But it's wild to me now to think that my whole college application was on paper. Nothing was electronic yet.
Amena Brown:
I'm applying for college between '97 and the beginning of '98. We were just getting used to having a little bit of the internet, but it was still like dial up and modem and AOL where you had a limited amount of hours that you might have available to use the internet. But nothing of the college application process was online. Everything was on paper. The only thing that I remember doing on the computer was typing out my essays and different things like that and printing them out, things like that to put into the packet. I do remember this really interesting time and I don't know if this is just a part of being a teenager and that sort of change in life when you're about to graduate high school and go into whatever is next for you that may potentially take you away from your parents' house.
Amena Brown:
But I remember starting to lag behind on my college applications, because applying for college is a lot of work. It's essays and the application itself, it's gathering all the letters of recommendation that you need to get from your guidance counselor or other teachers, and filling out all this stuff about your extracurricular activities. I mean, I just remember it being, it would be a lot even applying to one school, not to mention if you're trying to apply to multiple schools. And so I think I was good on it for a while. I really don't know if I started getting afraid, I can't remember consciously doing this, but I look back on it and kind of feel like I started slowing up on the deadlines and different things that I was supposed to be turning in. My mom noticed that I was doing that.
Amena Brown:
I will never forget this. She called me into her bathroom and basically got in my grill and was like, "You are slowing down on getting the things together for your college applications that you need." And in the way that a mother could threaten you in the late '90s, she did. She was just basically like, "You're going to turn 18 and you're getting out of this house to go someplace. And I would like for it to be college for you, but you're going to leave here and go someplace. Okay? So you're going to go there and sit at that computer and finish your essays and do all the things you're supposed to do." And there was something about her getting in my face, getting in my grill a little bit that kind of like shook me back into reality. And so that's what pushed me to finish the rest of my college applications. Okay.
Amena Brown:
Because this was the era of all the paper, it's so wild to me today to see like when kids get into college that they're finding out on the computer, in their email or something, it's all digital now. Right? But we were literally waiting to get snail mail. We were waiting to get physical envelopes from these schools to tell us if we got in. Typically, if you got a big envelope and a thick envelope, then that meant you got in, because that meant they were sending you the additional paperwork and all that stuff that you needed for whatever your next steps were. If you got the thin envelope, then that was typically how you knew you didn't get in, because on the thin envelope they were typically, we regret to inform you and whatever, whatever, you know.
Amena Brown:
I remember all the schools that I applied to, I got in to all of them except I was technically accepted into Sarah Lawrence but I was accepted on a wait list, which is fascinating, right? That they were wanting me to go early decision, then I didn't and I got in, but they were like, ah, we'd only have a slot for you if someone else decides not to accept their acceptance letter. The last of all the acceptance letters to come was Spelman. I feel like maybe it was around February that I started getting some of the other acceptance letters and I don't think it was till late March or early April that I got the acceptance letter from Spelman. I was over the moon to get that envelope. I was so excited. It had all the information about room and board and getting you started on filling out all the stuff for who your roommates were going to be and all those things.
Amena Brown:
I have a picture, I'm going to have to see if I can find it, you all, because I think it's in my senior book. But I have a picture of me in a Spelman t-shirt that Dr. Wilkes many years later had given to me. I had been wearing it for years. It still fit me. I took pictures of myself wearing that shirt right as I was starting to pack up and get ready to attend Spelman. You might be asking, did I ever visit Spelman? Did I ever step foot on the grounds of the school? And the answer to that is no. I don't know that I would advise anyone when you're applying to colleges to not visit them. But Spelman was just such a, it was like a revered place to me but was also a trusted place because I knew an alumna. I knew Spelman's reputation just in America and worldwide in some regards that I felt like whatever's there is great. Whatever's there, I'm cool. I'm with it.
Amena Brown:
I even went to Atlanta the summer before I went to college. I think we may have driven by like the area, the Atlanta University Center, but we didn't go in deep enough that I got to see the campus. So I did not see Spelman's campus until it was move in day for me, which would've been August of '98. This was a fascinating time moving into college into a dorm and all that is just, just a fascinating time now thinking about it. I mean, my mom and dad both having been in the military, I had experienced a lot of travel early on in my life. So the concept of moving someplace that I didn't really know anybody, we had no family in Atlanta. I think we had one friend that had gone to the same church that I grew up in. She was like a mentor to me. We knew her.
Amena Brown:
And so my mom and I stayed at her house when we got to the city before it was time for me to move in. But she was the only person that I knew in Atlanta. I didn't know anybody here. I didn't think I knew anybody else that was applying to Spelman and had gotten in. Although fun fact, my friend Portia that I mentioned to you earlier, I was in line to get my first ID at Spelman and who did I run into in the line but Portia. Fun fact, Portia and I both ended up applying to Spelman and getting in and graduated the same year. Shout out to Portia, girl. I'm going to tell you what's interesting in thinking about my college experience, because you have heard me talk in previous episodes. I think Celita and I touched on this in our, How to Survive a Friend Break-up episode.
Amena Brown:
I may have talked about this in some other places here as well, but you know, I had an interesting college experience. Because for me, coming to college was a time to be very focused and to get what I came for in a sense. I was a church girl. I was very sheltered. I think there were other people around us and around our family at the time that just thought, oh, that girl is about to go to Atlanta and get turned all the way out, you know? But in reality, I was too afraid. I was too afraid to actually let myself get turned out, you know? I think in some ways I look back on it and think, you know, I felt some pressure and I'm not sure that it was a bad sense of pressure. But here I was, my mom's a single mom, just sacrificed so much for my sister and I. Sacrificed a lot for me to be able to go to Spelman because it wasn't cheap and it wasn't something we could afford to write a check for and that kind of thing.
Amena Brown:
Then my church was so supportive of me, not even just in their encouraging words but in their money. Members of the church were giving me money for my application fee to stay in the dorm. They were providing me with money to start my first bank account when I moved here to Atlanta to go to school. So I felt this great sense of like, I don't want to go home having squandered the support of all these people in my life that are believing in me and are wanting to see me succeed. So when I got to Spelman, it was time for business as far as I was concerned. Part of that was because I was coming from having been so heavily involved in my church and in doing ministry work, the thought was, well, if I get involved in other like church activities of some kind, then that will be a way for me to stay out of trouble because that's how my time in high school was.
Amena Brown:
I was very involved in my church and then doing a lot of activities there that really kept me literally from having time to get in trouble. You know? As soon as I got to Spelman, I pretty quickly got plugged into a campus ministry that is now defunct and joined a church and just tried to get around as many other Christian and church going folks as I could in hopes that that would insulate me in a way. And in some ways it did, right. We'll talk a little bit more about that in future episodes. In some ways I'm like, well, but we'll talk about that. There was a guy that I dated. I want you to know, you can't see my fingers but I'm doing very large quotation marks, air quotation marks here, "dated." There was a guy I dated when I was growing up in church. If I would've had a high school sweetheart, I probably would have considered it to be him.
Amena Brown:
Although I don't know that we even dated long enough to be considered high school sweethearts necessarily, but we went to the same church. He was a year older than me. I'm not going to say his name to protect the innocent/or the guilty. Probably both actually, the innocent and the guilty. We dated. And when I say dated, we did what my mom allowed, which was I got to wear his starter jacket. Shout out to that. At church, I got to hang out with him at church. I got to hang out with him when our families were at social functions, and that's it. We didn't go places alone, he and I, so that's why I tell you the dating is very loose there. He was a year ahead of me. I thought he was going to apply to Duke because Duke was his number one choice, but he also ended up applying to Morehouse College.
Amena Brown:
And if you're not familiar with the Atlanta University Center, at that time, Atlanta University Center was comprised of six schools. It was Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morris Brown University or College, Morris Brown. I can't remember if it was university or college right now, you all. And Clark Atlanta University, Morris Brown College, I'm pretty sure. Four, those four. Then The Interdenominational Theological Center and Morehouse School of Medicine. Those were the six schools that were there in the Atlanta University Center, all within walking distance together. Some of these schools kind of shared of resource in certain ways that you could kind of take classes across campus. I took writing classes at Morehouse as well.
Amena Brown:
He, almost said his name. He got into Morehouse and he started emailing me from school. Basically, he was telling me all the things I needed to be prepared were going to be going on when I got to Spelman. He was telling me how much weed he smoked and all the parties he was going to. He was laying the groundwork with me that his parents had given him a car, and anywhere I needed to go, he was totally willing to take me there. I think that he thought I was going to get these letters from him and want to like rekindle things with him when I got to Spelman. Probably thought I would be very naive and wide-eyed and ready to listen to all his wisdom as a sophomore, I guess. But his emails immediately were like red alerts to me because I'm thinking if you're partying and smoking weed, we can't hang out because I need to graduate and I need to not be sent home for anything. Like I need to make it through school because I have all these people behind me supporting me.
Amena Brown:
So there's this particular moment that I remember, my first year. There were a few moments that happened to me in my first year at Spelman that were really indicative to me that this wasn't high school anymore. You're in college now. Are you going to try and reinvent yourself and be someone else completely, right? Because there are all these new people there that are meeting you. You don't have any sense of a reputation with them. You get to decide who you're going to be. If you're going to reinvent someone new, if you're going to be who you are and deal with the process of that. There were a couple of moments right there that I was like, okay, I am still my same church girl self. I can try to pretend and be more knowledgeable about life and pretend that I'm more as they would've said back then worldly or whatever, you know, but I just wasn't. I was a church girl. I was a nerd. I was a bookworm, that's me. That was who I was.
Amena Brown:
This guy that I told you all I "dated," he tried to reconnect with me once I got to Spelman. He really wanted me to give him my phone number. I had a rule my first year of school that I would not give my phone. I would not give my phone number in general to anyone that I felt uncomfortable with, but I would also not give my phone number to someone I hadn't had more interactions with to kind of get to know them and see if they were a trustworthy person. Right. I want you all to know that this was mainly out of just me being scared of everything that I was doing, making these choices here. But that's what I felt like I had to do to survive there. Right. I remember he was very upset with me. He got very angry with me. My roommates were with me in the parking lot of Spelman. He was badgering me like, "You're really going to walk away and not give me your number?" I was like, "Yes, I am."
Amena Brown:
He was getting so angry about it that it started making my roommates angry too. They were like, "She said that she don't want you to have her number," like back off, back off, you know? It was one of those moments in young Amena's life where I would have this happen to me, and this happened to me in my adult life later too, that sometimes I would be in a dating situation or something. I would end up in a situation where I would get to watch that person react to something in this way that I was getting to see sort of an element of their true self, not just the representative that they put out there. I didn't know that he was going to have a temper like that or that it was going to get under his skin that badly, that I just didn't want him to have a way outside of email to reach me, you know. So on a level, that moment was empowering for me but I also remember going to Sisters Chapel, which is our chapel on Spelman's campus.
Amena Brown:
At that time, I think now there is again a prayer room in the basement of the chapel. At that time, it was not the renovated prayer room that's there now. It was the old prayer room with the old, like thick velvety carpeting and it was full of mosquitoes. You had to kind of turn on this window unit AC in hopes that it would blow all of the mosquitoes away. I remember I left my dorm after we got back on campus. I remember walking over to Sisters Chapel and going into that prayer room and just praying to God for God to help me make it through school. It was really important to me to stay focused and succeed there. There were a lot of things that I knew could derail me. I was in that little place just realizing, here I am, I'm here, you know, without my mom, without my church community. This is on me.
Amena Brown:
I think in a way it gave my relationship to God something more personal because I was getting a chance to really have real talk with God myself, you know? That is a very big moment that I think happening in those first couple of months of school kind of set the groundwork for how the rest of my time of school would be. Another moment that I've shared a lot when I go to colleges that happened that first semester at Spelman. My mentor that I told you was like the one person that I knew in Atlanta, she would check in on me. She was married at the time and so she and her husband sometimes would call me at school and he'd get on one phone at the house and she'd get on the other phone. They'd kind of check in on me. He asked me, he was like, "So have you decided what you want to major in?" And you all, my initial major at Spelman was psychology and I'll tell you why.
Amena Brown:
I felt called to preach. For those of you that grew up in church, this is familiar phrasing, right? This feeling called to something. Typically, when someone has this experience when they're growing up in a church environment, it's typically not that you're like I knew I felt called to be a doctor or something like that. That's typically not what happens. People use that term typically to mean something related to ministry or church. You feel called to be an evangelist. You feel called to be a preacher. And I felt called to preach or pastor or something like that as a very young person around 12 or 13. Growing up, as I have also shared here on the podcast, you know, I grew up watching a lot of women preach. I grew up in a church where I was watching some of the women just preach the house down and preach way better than the men could preach.
Amena Brown:
So I would study over time what the women preachers had studied when they were an undergrad. A lot of them studied psychology in undergrad, and then they went on to seminary. That was my plan originally, you all. I was going to go to Spelman, get my degree in psychology, become a preacher. I was going to attend ITC, which was The Interdenominational Theological Center because my pastors had attended there. My mentor had attended there. Then I was like, I guess I'll see what happens if I'll pastor or preach or whatever I'll do when I finish that, but that was my plan. And this day, first couple of months of school, I'm on the phone with my mentor and her husband. He says, "Okay, what's your major?" I tell him psychology. He's like, "Okay." I explained to him the whole thing I just told you all what I've intended to be.
Amena Brown:
He was like, "Okay." He had attended ITC as well. Then he said, "Let me ask you this." He said, "If you were rich and you had all the money in the world, like you had so much money that you didn't have to go to college to get a job," he said, "Would you still go to college?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Why?" I said, "So I could write about it." He said, "Okay." He said, "Well then, after you finished college, what would you do with your time?" I said, "Oh, I would write books and I would travel the country and speak to people and do book signings and stuff." He said, "That, what you just described doesn't sound like psychology. It sounds like English, like an English major." My immediate thought was, "I'm not going to major in English because English majors are broke."
Amena Brown:
My mom truthfully had hopes that I would eventually want to go to med school, because before I got down my preacher train, I was going to be a gynecologist when I was younger. But let me tell you all, I thought that the job of a gynecologist was basically talking to women all day. I thought that someone else was like the shampoo assistant that did all the surgeries and exams and all that stuff. And then when the women needed someone to explain to them the procedures or give them counsel on their health, that that's what they came to the gynecologist for. That's totally what I wanted to be for a long time to the point that at a certain point my mom took me to the hospital that she worked at in San Antonio, introduced me to a Black woman gynecologist there.
Amena Brown:
I met her, did a tour of the hospital with her. She said, "Yeah, my job is 75% surgery." I was like, oh, knock me over with a feather. That's not what I signed up for. I was signing up for 85% talking. The irony is truly, I have made a living now of spending a lot of my time talking to women. In what I imagined a gynecologist did, I'm totally doing that for a living now without surgery at all. But that is what made me also switch away from thinking about medical school. But when I was a psych major, my mom, she had her hopes up still like you could be a psychiatrist, you could still do that. When I went to her and told her that I was thinking about changing my major to English after this conversation, that was one of the first things my mom said to me.
Amena Brown:
She was like, "You know, having an English major can be really great for you going into medical school because you'll have all your writing skills. That's important for a doctor too." But I have to give a shout out to my mom because my mom just was dreaming big for me, but she also wanted for me to be able to do whatever I was passionate about. When I went to her about changing my major, she didn't give me any static. I switched over to English because I thought to myself, well, at the end of the day, I'm the one who has to sit in these classes and do all this work. I've always loved reading and I've always loved writing. I truly do in my dream dream want to be a writer. English seems right. I feel like there was so much alignment that happened in my life at the moment that I changed over to that major and majored in English at Spelman.
Amena Brown:
Fast forward to my last year at Spelman, I'm there in my English major. You've heard me talk about this here on the podcast. I've started going to open mics out in the city. I'm performing spoken word on campus and off campus too. Just finding myself, feeling just so passionate about writing and about those possibilities for me. Feeling really challenged. My studies at Spelman were very, very rigorous. I cannot really recall a lot of classes that just felt like they were super easy. I mean, it was rigorous scholarship. It was rigorous academic work. And I also have to say it was a competitive place to be going to school, not in the sense that I felt I was in competition with my classmates, but in the sense that as we were all matriculating, you're watching these amazing Black women that you're in class with get scholarships to these amazing grad schools.
Amena Brown:
You're watching them get internships at these amazing companies and then subsequently get hired at those companies even before they graduated. Right. In that sense, it was a competitive environment to be in because you were seeing all of these Black women around you succeeding. And there I was sort of feeling I think a little aimless as I was getting into my last year. Inside my heart, I wanted to be young Toni Morrison, young Alice Walker, young Nikki Giovanni. But when I looked at their careers, a lot of their amazing opportunities came to them when they were in their 30s and 40s. So I almost felt like I'm graduating at 22. I need to find something to do, to bide my time until this magical period of my 30s will come along when all this amazing career stuff will happen to me. I just didn't know what to do.
Amena Brown:
The only thing I could think to do that I thought would bide me time was apply to grad school. And so I applied to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. I applied to the University of Pittsburgh. I applied to NYU. I applied to Georgia State. And to give you context of the timing when I was graduating from college, 9/11 happened the September of my last year of college. There are a lot of ways those of us, I would consider myself to be Gen X still. I don't know what the years are based on who's Gen X or who's millennial, but I would consider myself to be Gen X. It's interesting for those of us who are Gen X to talk with folks who are millennials and talk about what it was like for those of us that were graduating college at that time, right after 9/11.
Amena Brown:
The strange place the economy was in at that moment, that we also were dealing with a lot of that economic fallout and what that meant for how we were going to be able to get our lives or our careers started. When I've talked to a lot of my friends who are millennials, it's interesting to reflect upon what for them what some of their times were like getting out of college and sharing with them what that was like for those of us that were graduates in 2002, but we were graduating into an economy that was still trying to rebuild itself after such a tragic moment had happened at 9/11. By the time I was graduating, things were still kind of, I feel like people were still scrambling a little bit and a lot of us were yearning to find something that felt like stability to us, I think. It was like I knew inside I want to be a writer but I'm not sure.
Amena Brown:
So I applied to grad school because maybe that'll buy me time. Masters of Fine Arts is the terminal degree, but it's also 2002 at this point. Spoken word as an art was not considered to be academic. It wasn't considered that. In the ways now that you know some well-known spoken word poets that are professors, that are also academics in addition to being performing artist. But that just wasn't true when I was graduating school. It was sort of like the spoken word poets were doing wonderful and rigorous work, but were not considered to be respected in academic world. So me submitting a portfolio at that time that was full of spoken word poetry was like, who wants to see that? We're looking for couplets and sestinas.
Amena Brown:
We're looking for your sonnets. That was the kind of work that a lot of those schools were looking to see. Right? Long story short, a girl applied to three grad schools to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. A girl did not get in to any of those grad schools. It's funny now to think about that, that I ended up making a career as a poet when I tried to apply to get the highest degree in poetry and couldn't get in. My last year into my first year as post grad was a really interesting time because I really didn't have a plan B after grad school didn't work out. But one of the things I knew about myself and this is kind of interesting because whenever I talk to young folks, when I talk to people who were college age, I always want to encourage them. That just because you're young doesn't mean that you don't understand your own inner voice. It doesn't mean that you don't know some things to be true. You may have a lot more in life that you've got to learn or experience, but who doesn't? Right?
Amena Brown:
All of us have things we have to learn and experience. But when I think back on my 22 year old self, my 22 year old self knew that I wasn't built for corporate America, knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I would probably need to do something that would involve me having to have my own different path. Right. The thing I didn't know was what do I do about that? You know? Where do I go to get started? Right? Probably if I knew what I know now, I would've studied entrepreneurship a lot more because that's really what I was heading towards. If I was going to have a career as an artist and a writer, I was headed towards being a business woman and having to learn how to run my own business. I probably would've studied that a bit more, but I didn't know that so I had a rough and tumble journey like many of us do to discovering what I wanted to be doing for a career and for a job.
Amena Brown:
When I think now about my time attending Spelman and what does it mean to me to be a Spelman woman or a Spelmanite and how do I think that time impacted me, I think number one, there was something so, like beautiful doesn't even really tell what I'm trying to say to you all. Like there was something so beautiful and impactful to have gone to school with all Black women from all over the world. It was so fascinating to be in one demographic really, but experience so much diversity among us. You know, I was coming from Texas. There was a certain way that I dressed. The girls who were coming from the Northeast, there was a certain way they dressed or spoke. Right? And the West Coast, and the girls coming from the Caribbean, and the girls from different countries in Africa. It was like we were truly representative of Black women all over the diaspora.
Amena Brown:
I knew Black girls at Spelman that grew up Catholic and watched them walking to mass on Sundays. And where I grew up, I didn't know anybody Black that was Catholic. I was meeting Black girls that grew up Baha'i or grew up atheist or agnostic, or grew up Muslim. You know, just all of these rich experiences that we brought to each other, that we were truly, truly not a monolith. And to actually have been able to experience that is really one of the inspirations behind my poem, Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl. Because it has a line in it that says, "We Black girl in every way we want to." Going to Spelman was literally watching Black girls becoming Black women and being Black girls in whatever way we wanted to. I think there was something really powerful about experiencing the freedom of that at such a young and impressionable time in my life.
Amena Brown:
I will say it mattered to me that I got into Spelman. That was a big deal to me. It mattered to me graduating from Spelman, but every touch point I've had back to my alma mater, it matters to me even more, the more time goes on. This year 2022, as of this recording, this year will be my 20 year college reunion. We reunion every five years. At each reunion, like when I do my reunion since I graduated in 2002, all the graduates or I should say all the alumni of Spelman that graduated in years that ended in two and seven also reunion with me. That's 2002, it's 2012, right? The students that are graduating in 2002 will eventually reunion with me, but it's also 1967 and 1942. We are getting a chance to know all of these rich sisterhood and heritage.
Amena Brown:
When we're at our college reunion, we are seeing Black women who are our grandmothers or sometimes our great-grandmothers ages that walked similar halls that we did. We're also seeing the students that are at their first college reunion that have only been out of college for five years. There's been something really beautiful about being a part of that legacy for me that just roots me and grounds me in my place in the world that I think is so powerful. The last thing and really important thing that I feel I gathered from having been a Spelman graduate and having attended there is because I was going to school with all Black women, there was this confidence that I feel I gained that I don't think I realized actually until I was years out in the workforce. You know? There was this confidence I gained there because we learned a lot of Black history. We learned a lot of womanism and Black feminism. We were really steeped in not only what are the systems that oppress us, but also what does liberation look like?
Amena Brown:
What does it look like to be empowered as a Black woman? What does it look like to be free? Right? And so I realized that between being a Spelman grad, having grown up in a Black church that instilled a lot of confidence in me, having been raised by and around confident Black women, the combination of that for me meant that I entered a lot of spaces that maybe some of the people there thought I didn't belong. My early parts of my career as you all know were in White Christian conservative spaces. Many of those spaces I was the only Black person there, the only young person there, the only woman there. For many, many years it was that way. But I didn't feel like I didn't deserve to be there. I feel like that was instilled in me from going to Spelman, that there was not a place as a Black woman that I didn't deserve to be just like anybody else. You're at the table. I deserve to be at the table just like anybody else.
Amena Brown:
You're getting the invitation. I deserve the invitation just like anybody else. You're getting the salary. I deserve the salary just like anybody else. I don't think I knew that at 22, but I think by the time I was in my early 30s and had really gotten into the work of my career, I realized there is a confidence in me that was instilled in me through Black women, and in some particular ways through the Black women that are a part of Spelman's community. So big shout out to Spelman. I still am so proud to be a graduate of Spelman. I am so proud to have experienced what it's like to attend a historically Black college and university. Shout out to being a Spelman. It is really wonderful. Shout out to all my Spelman sisters who are listening.
Amena Brown:
Thank you all for checking out this episode with me and being in the living room with me while I talked about that time I went to Spelman. I'm looking forward to coming back and talking more about what happened in my journey in Atlanta after deciding to make Atlanta home after graduating Spelman. So tune in for that. See you all next time. HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast.