Black student enrollment at Northwestern University was almost nil prior to the mid-1960s, when, thanks mostly to civil rights legislation, things abruptly changed. According to NU’s African American Student Affairs office, the freshman class of ’65 included only five blacks; by the fall of ’68, when Angela Jackson got there, that number had jumped to over 100. But the preppy, white-bread school wasn’t ready for them. The spring before Jackson arrived, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, black students waged a two-day takeover of the bursar’s office that ended when NU agreed, among other things, to establish a department of Afro-American studies. Those tumultuous years on the Evanston campus are the focus of Jackson’s debut novel, Where I Must Go.
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“I felt they were lies about us,” she says. “I couldn’t relate to them. I wanted to push back and give authentic representations of my life and the lives of the people of my generation. . . . I wanted to bear witness to the generation that broke the mold. I think that generation of African American students helped transform the nature of universities, so now you have not just African-American studies, but women’s studies, Hispanic studies, Asian studies. It’s not as diverse as it could be or should be, but it is better.”
The coming-of-age story takes its first-person narrator, 17-year-old Magdalena Grace—like Jackson, the middle daughter of a black, working-class, south-side family—through her freshman year on the leafy campus of Eden University, which bears a striking resemblance to NU. Readers familiar with the NU campus are likely to find that resemblance especially fascinating. But Jackson emphasizes that Where I Must Go is a work of fiction. “What’s true about the book,” she says, is that it “captures the experience of African-American students at predominantly white universities across the board.” So while the characters were inspired by members of Jackson’s family and people she encountered at NU—including Negro Digest editor Hoyt Fuller, a visiting professor when she was there, and James Turner, a student leader who went on to found the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University—they’re not those people. At least, not exactly.
She’ll be working on the revisions for the second volume of the trilogy this year, and is expecting it to go faster, though she’ll be dealing with the same old challenges. The struggle puts her in mind of one of her teachers at NU—poet Peter Michelson, who, she recalls, told her that fiction moves things along, while poetry stops them. “A poet lingers in each moment—you get all the senses going and the language is heightened,” Jackson says. “To strike the right balance between my work as a poet and my job as a fiction writer, to tell the story, I have to be careful not to linger too long and not to fall too much in love with the language.”
Sat 4/24, noon, Haiku Fest Awards program, Woodson Regional Library, 9525 S. Halsted, 312-747-6900
