Ikhide Ikheloa: Notes from my Middle Passage - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics: The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said that she did not realize she was black until she came to America. That is a pretty dramatic way of telling the truth. When I came to Oxford, Mississippi from Nigeria in the early 80’s to attend the University of Mississippi (OLEMISS), I knew I was black—but my notion of blackness was very different from what it meant to be black in America, certainly in OLEMISS. Come to think of it, I had no idea what I was doing when I accepted a place at OLEMISS in 1982. I came to a place that seemed hostile to black folks, and by the time I realized what I had done, I was too broke to leave the place. I was miserable.
I was not the only one miserable. I found out that OLEMISS was smack in the middle of America’s anxieties about race. I read about a man, James Meredith, whose crime apparently was that he was black and therefore ineligible to be in a classroom with whites—real human beings—or so said the Mississippi authorities, just 20 years before I entered the school. The federal government disagreed, and military guards escorted Meredith into OLEMISS over the objections and dead bodies of racists. For a long time I kept thinking,
I should never have come here. I kept remembering their admissions catalog in our library in Nigeria, and that catchy phrase: “OLEMISS! Come get the spirit!” I got the spirit alright—of racism and the restlessness of change.
