What Nobody Is Telling You About Saint Peter’s
Donte and Warren in The Campus Activities Office
I'm only writing this because I can't force Malcolm Gladwell to do it. So, if it sucks, address your hate mail properly. I cannot stop obsessing over the Saint Peter's 2022 NCAA Tournament run. I can only think of a few people who might be reading this who know what it's like to play in front of 20,000 people. (That's right. I know some folks.) But, not two weeks after you played in front of a few thousand and in a season where you might've played in front of a couple hundred. That's a whole lot of sticking to the game plan and doing what got you here and never finding a reason to believe that you and your teammates aren't enough for the big stage. Coming from Saint Peter's, where nothing is big except the mission, it's beautiful to see such poise and grace lead to triumph and joy. I've never met any of these kids. But, they just kept showing up in rooms they were never meant to be in and kept proving they were good enough to be there. We felt that.
Over two decades ago, my aunt Chita proudly dropped me off in Jersey City for college. I landed at the doorstep at (then) Saint Peter's College with little that could be considered a life plan, some world-class tenacity, and one prime objective- get the paperwork. There was no scenario where I could imagine coming home without that degree. What I did not have was a roadmap for how I was going to pay for school or a true sense of why it was really valuable for me to be there. It just felt like what I was supposed to be doing. Not in the sense of being the thing that people were telling me to do. 17-year old me had nooo problems going against the grain. But, it felt like whatever the outcome would later be for my life, there was some reason that I belonged at Saint Peter's right then.
A couple of months earlier, my freshman orientation experience was wild. My bus from DC to Jersey City got canceled while I was at the Greyhound station. My only option was to take a bus leaving immediately for NYC and figure out the rest when I got there. This would be a metaphor for my time in Jersey City. I arrived at Penn Station several hours before the start of the agenda. I slept in the station for an hour or two before lugging the suitcase that I borrowed from auntie around the bus station until I figured out how to get to Journal Square. It's a quick, 15-minute walk to campus from there. But, in the middle of a Jersey City July carrying a 40-lb piece of luggage, it was a nightmare. When I went to lift the bag, a loose wire got caught and tore a hole in my pants. I arrived super late, sweaty and disheveled. I rushed through my first placement exam so they'd let me run back and shower with the remaining time. I couldn't meet my future classmates looking like this. I later learned that, in my haste, I tested well below my potential. I tried to remedy this with an explanation, a couple of meetings, and an offer to retake the test. No dice. Spiteful, teenage me decided to show them how wrong they were by aggressively overwriting each of my five-paragraph essay assignments. I ended up writing my way into a meeting about changing my major to mass communications because I was "destined to be a writer."
In addition to learning how to navigate the inner workings of the school administration and literally navigating a daily game of IRL Frogger across Kennedy Blvd to get to class, I also had to find my way through new friend groups. That's the freshmen experience. Saint Peter's was apparently one of the most diverse schools on the planet. In that sea of diversity, I ended up with a blond white kid from Lancaster, PA, for a roommate. He joked that he and his stepdad, Skip (the first Black man I'd ever met with this name), initially read the list of roommates assigned to our 4-person suite and joked that "Donte Johnson might be a brother." We immediately realized that we're more alike than we are different, and Warren quickly became the other half of the dynamic duo. I pulled him into my circles, and for me, he did the same. We MCed a bunch of events, became RAs and orientation leaders, and helped each other through some rough patches in those first couple of years. Friends joked that we were the poster boys for the school. If your brand is diversity, connecting a kid from the 58th St in DC with a Mike Birbiglia look-a-like from Lancaster, PA, is a pretty remarkable success story if it works out. Minus a couple of scrapes and bruises, it worked out better than anybody could've ever predicted.
L to R: Donte, Skip, and Warren taken by Sherry Phenegar (Warren’s Mother)
As my perspective started to broaden, I found myself talking, learning, and caring about things that never mattered to me before. I remember wrapping up a conversation in poly sci in my first year and having Dr. Anna Brown share with us casually that she was going to be absent for our next scheduled class because she was going to get arrested. For the 20th time in the first few months I was at this school; somebody said something that broke the previous record for the craziest thing I'd ever heard. I asked for clarification. She mentioned that she was going to a protest and that it was very likely that she'd be arrested for her participation. So now two things. First, I didn't realize people were still on the whole protest thing since the country assassinated its way to a tidy ending of the Civil Rights Movement. Second, it sounded insane to me that she or anybody else was actually planning to get arrested. It also felt like the kind of thing that she shouldn't be allowed to tell a bunch of impressionable teenagers. Where I grew up, police harassment was part of the deal, and in many cases, so was bending a law or two. And everybody I knew was doing everything they could to avoid having any encounters whatsoever with the police. I would later join Dr. Brown on a trip to DC for a protest at The Pentagon. It was my first. Along the way, we stopped off to spend time with The Berrigans. I had never heard of these folks, and there were no iPhones that I could use to sneakily look them up before we entered their home. Turns out they're legends. I won't go into detail. But, this was also my first exposure to the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" rule. The expression that must've crawled across my face when they said that to me on my way to the bathroom had to have been priceless. It all just seemed like par for the course goofiness at the time. I was constantly processing the fact that folks were living all kinds of different lives out there and apparently had been the entire time. I just wasn't previously aware of it. The protest was that we would sit cross-legged in a circle at one of the entrances to The Pentagon to oppose the sanctions in Iraq. A few years later, someone flew a plane into that building.
L to R: Warren, Linda, Donte, Leidy
Nobody was calling this social justice work at the time. Or at least nobody I knew. Now It's become fashionable to trot out grainy black and white pics of MLK at a podium every January for posts that both honor him and also point out that organization x welcomed him with open arms back before it was the cool thing to do. Saint Peter's is among the institutions that did this back then and still does this now. So, I was exposed to it pretty early. And, listen, that's not nothing. It matters. There are plenty of folks who were avoiding him, and us, like the plague or worse, in outright opposition to his work. Cool to be able to say you were on the right side of history. Say it loud and proud, early and often. Beyond what must've been a really incredible day on campus when MLK spoke at SPC, I'm inspired and impressed by the work done through the university that directly benefits marginalized people every day.
Martin Luther King, Jr speaking at Saint Peter’s College (photo from Saint Peter’s Website)
There are so many people who personified the work. Honestly, there are too many to name. One of the most memorable was Father Jack. John McSherry looked like George Carlin, peed in public, and cussed pretty much whenever "shit" was a better fit for the moment than "darn" or "shoot." We would have conversations and walk away, both blown away by what we'd learned about the other person's lived experience. I didn't know much about priests before I got to Saint Peter's. But I was pretty sure they all agreed to follow the same playbook. So, I couldn't wrap my brain around why he was allowed to drop f-bombs all the time. It struck me as authentic, and I was all about it. He didn't do it the way t-shirted CEOs do it at team pep rallies nowadays. They were just words. And beneath the words was just a decent and hilarious guy who dedicated his life to helping other people. This also was confusing af to young me. One time a small group of us went on a Campus Ministry trip to Roanoke to paint an elementary school. On the way, we had a slight mishap with the school van. Crazy to think that teenagers were driving into things before smartphones existed. But they were. For the record, I think it was me, not "we," who had the mishap. I was expecting something in the way of an angry or disappointed reaction. Frustration, at least? Quite the opposite- the situation was met with understanding, compassion, and encouragement. And, even crazier, I wasn't removed from the driver's seat. Imagine being responsible for a diverse handful of city youths driving down 95, one of them has an accident, and you take the opportunity to reinforce a sense of belonging and worthiness instead of doing what's justifiably "safe" and taking the wheel. Shit was crazy. Shouts out to Father Jack. RIP.
Warren resting after painting inside the school in Roanoke, VA
That, to me, embodies the spirit of what folks are doing there every day. I could go on and on with the stories. Pax Christi, to me, is showing up every day and doing more than you have to for people who deserve better than what they've got. It's more than a slogan. It's a calling. For all of us who've been on the giving and/or receiving end of such radical kindness, that's why you root for this basketball team. When you dedicate your high school years to playing a sport and then get left out of the recruitment wave, that's schools saying we're not willing to bet the cost (not the retail price) of you going to school here on your ability to be good at basketball—the nerve. So, you start your young adult life by being told in writing that people are betting against you. It's an experience analogous to what many of their peers have gone through in life, in general. My energy on the campus swung on a pendulum between "I deserve to be here" and "I'm playing with house money. So, let's make something shake" for four years. Countless folks who've come through St. Peter's in recent history are first-generation college students, or come from immigrant families, or are people of color, or they're kids from the projects making friends with kids from Amish Country or all of the above. And once in a generation, somebody gets to smash the pendulum on national TV for all of the rest of the folks out there who over-index on heart and under-index on resources. Today, and for the rest of forever, we're all Peacocks (yes, even the coach who left and the players in the transfer portal).
