Lake Pontchartrain glistened as Rinata Williams rode north from New Orleans. She watched from the backseat in August 2012 as the city gave way to the causeway, miles and miles of concrete bridge she hoped would ferry her to the future she’d been promised.
No one in her family had ever left home for college. Before Hurricane Katrina, just half of New Orleans public school students earned a high school diploma, and few went on to succeed at a university. But as her mother steered toward Alabama, Williams believed she would be different. She’d spent four years at a high school determined to send minority students like her to college. She’d earned a high GPA, an above-average ACT score and a scholarship worth tens of thousands of dollars. She’d been one of the first graduates in a new charter school landscape that many in New Orleans believed could fix a broken education system.
They cruised east, and her favorite R&B station crackled with static as the signal from New Orleans faded. Her uncle turned around in the front passenger seat. Soon, he told Williams, everything would be new. He twisted the dial and landed on a station playing Tim McGraw. Williams listened to a few lines, then began to sing. She actually liked the country song.
The sun blared bright as they pulled close to Birmingham Southern College. The campus looked as beautiful as it had when Williams visited with a high school chaperone a few months earlier. Williams loved the way its brick buildings sat on a hilltop, the way the grass stayed green and mowed. But her stomach tightened as she looked out now. She was the only student with dark skin and the red-and-black braids that had been popular back home.
Her mother killed the engine, and Williams started to cry. Newspapers had reported that nearly everyone in Williams’s graduating class at Sci Academy in New Orleans had been accepted to college, as if they were a group moving toward one unprecedented future together. But her friends had left for universities in Vermont and Colorado and Massachusetts. Her family would drive back to New Orleans that afternoon.
Williams opened the car door, then cried harder. To succeed here, she realized, she would have to face college alone.