Cashmere and Pearls

I have always enjoyed walking through cemeteries. An advantage of living in New England is that one doesn't have to go far to find land full of crooked gravestones, many from the 18th century. About a mile from my house, there's the picturesque Little Neck Cemetery, where a passenger from the Mayflower is buried. Nearby are the small stones for four young sisters who died within days of each other in 1833. Today, on a whim, I stopped for a few minutes at the Rumford Cemetery, an historical cemetery that's also in East Providence. I'd passed it many times before, but had never wandered in.

I love old cemeteries because I admire the artistry of gravestone art - the skulls and wings, the vines and angels; Old English phrases like "Here Lieth;" the long "s" that still always looks like "f". I love the Puritan names that sound decidedly un-Puritan, like "Experience" and "Freelove," both of which I saw on women's gravestones. I love the permanent typo and correction I noted on a centuries-old stone, where the dead person's name, incorrectly carved "Carpeter," had an "n" inserted in carved superscript with a perfect proofreader's caret.

Mostly, though, I love cemeteries because I imagine the lives that were lived and the stories the dead could tell. I get choked up at the tiny stones of the four sisters, thinking about their parents, who were buried nearby some thirty years later, curious about and yet not wanting to fully imagine the virus or fire that decimated that family or how that marriage survived in the wake of such grief. I wonder what kind of women "Experience" and "Freelove" were and whether the stonecarver who forgot the "n" in Carpenter was upbraided for his mistake - was he an apprentice? 

Hundreds of lives and narratives, some of which were probably quite ordinary and some, surely, that bucked hard against convention: not least the Mayflower pilgrim, whose religion may not have looked like any form of Christianity today, but who fled persecution nonetheless, or the more recent immigrants from Portugal and the Azores who also traveled across the ocean to establish lives here. 

Perhaps it wasn't accidental that it was today that I decided to visit the Rumford cemetery and once again contemplate the richness of different lives. This week, at Smith College, my alma mater, the campus newspaper published an odious letter written by an alumna from the Class of '84 that lamented the current state - more specifically, the student composition - of the College. At every turn, the author finds fault with Smith students. Her college has gotten too full of first-generation college students. It's too poor, too gay, too full of people who aren't white, too foreign. Moreover, there simply aren't enough women in cashmere coats and pearls. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Smith, it is a women's college, historically one of the "Seven Sisters" schools in the US. It has long been considered one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country and is known for academic rigor and for producing high-achieving, accomplished women. Its roster of alumnae includes such luminaries as Julia Child, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Sylvia Plath, to name just a few. However, in earlier decades, it was populated more by rich white women from expensive prep schools and wealthy suburbs (hence the very white short list above). 

My time at Smith wasn't easy. I grew up in one of the very counties that the letter writer mentions, and I was, I am embarrassed to say now, just as ignorant as she in many ways. I hadn't spent much time around people different from myself, and it can be really uncomfortable to learn that you don't know as much as you think you do about the world. Oh, the arrogance of certainty, and in my case, youth. 

In my first year, I spent more time watching "Days of Our Lives" than studying, and wound up on academic probation. I left Smith in the middle of my sophomore year, when I was coming out of the closet and suffering from depression, took some time off, spent two semesters at Vassar, and, finally, returned to Smith, where, 18 months later, I graduated in the top 10% of my class.

Along the way, though, something happened: my eyes and mind were opened to the wider world. I began to care about the lives of people whose backgrounds and narratives were different from mine, sometimes markedly so. I began to care about the places those women were from. I became a global citizen, and I haven't looked back.

Since this alumna's letter was published, I've never been prouder to call myself a Smithie. Hundreds of us have posted our stories on the campus paper's website and on Tumblr feeds and Facebook pages. In mine, I noted that I'm still preppy (and I do still love my cashmere and pearls), but that my experience at Smith was not one where I learned to think more narrowly about life. What all of these gloriously different stories reveal - and what I think the gravestones today said, too, albeit more quietly - is that each one of us has something important to say. Smith, in my case, helped me learn how to say it, and to say it with conviction and without apology. 

Here I am, far right, in matchy-matchy white, yellow, and orange. But one look at my fellow Smiffenpoof (a cappella group) alums and dear friends below will tell you that while we may look like an unlikely tribe, we Smithies are a tribe nonetheless, and one in which I take tremendous pride.

Namaste,
Kelley