In America, successful Black folks often hear the admonishment “Never forget where you came from.” But that warning rarely accounts for how wide the chasm can grow between your origins and your destination. When achievement catapults you far from where you were raised, keeping a foot in both worlds can require an instruction manual. In her debut memoir, “Up Home: One Girl’s Journey,” Ruth J. Simmons has written one.
The youngest of 12 children born to sharecropping parents in Grapeland, Tex., Simmons is best known as the first Black president of an Ivy League university: She presided over Brown University from 2001 until 2012. She also served as president of two other universities: Smith College, from 1995 until 2001, and Prairie View A&M, from 2017 until this year.
Her memoir rarely makes reference to these lofty positions. Instead, Simmons chooses to end this volume of her life story just as her academic studies are finishing. “Up Home” reads like a document of proof that Simmons has not, in fact, forgotten a single thing about where she came from — not the shanty-like farm home she was born into, nor the rat-and-roach-infested house her family was living in when she left high school. She has not forgotten her father’s abuse nor her mother’s acceptance of it. She remembers every educator from elementary school through college who illustrated for her, whether in style of dress, precision of diction or method of instruction, that there was a life beyond the one she returned to when school was over.
“Up Home” is a love letter to every person who helped Simmons make her way out of poverty, from those in her Texas hometown to those at Dillard University, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1967. She then made her way to Harvard, where she earned her doctoral degree in 1973. Whether through church, school or her greater community, Simmons constantly looked for inspiration to help her transcend her family’s provincial way of life.
At first glance, respectability politics seem to play a significant role in Simmons’s early life. In recalling her teacher Miss Ida Mae, she muses: “Until that year, everybody I knew was an uneducated farmer or laborer who spoke or read with difficulty. To be in the presence of a person who spoke so well was a revelation. I wanted to seize control of these words and make them work for me.” Simmons waxes romantic about several other educators with the same high regard for how they eschewed the common dialect and committed to perfecting their English, and explains how she embraced the same nuances of language, so that she might find within big, impressive words an inroad to a career beyond farmhand, domestic help or factory worker.
It isn’t until these individuals reappear in “Up Home” that we see how Simmons comes to appreciate them more for their commitment to communities like hers than for their physical appearance or polished diction. When we encounter Miss Ida Mae again in the narrative, the teacher is in her 80s and attending a special program being held for Simmons in Grapeland, after she’s been named president of Smith College. Simmons recalls: “’I’m so happy to see my baby!’ she sang out as if I were still a six-year-old. … It struck me more than ever how much her attitude and commitment to her students had influenced my views about education and my attitude toward my own students.”
On its surface Simmons’s memoir reads like a coming-of-age tale of remarkable success despite the author’s humble beginnings, a victory lap for a woman who’s achieved far more, academically and professionally, than many women of her generation. But the venerated college administrator upends and elevates that predictable theme with frequent, self-assessing asides in which she wonders if, in her quest to escape her surroundings, she judged them too harshly. This is especially true in her depiction of her relationship with her mother, who died while Simmons was in high school. “I was openly dismissive of practices that evoked country living. It certainly did not occur to me until years later that Mama would have had more appealing clothing and a more polished appearance if she had not put our needs before her own.”
In the end, Simmons credits her mother’s many sacrifices with propelling her success. Because her mother instilled in her eldest children a strong sense of responsibility for her younger ones, Simmons was able to rely on her older siblings for financial and moral support as she pursued various ambitions after her mother’s untimely death. She laments that her mother passed before she was able to witness both her daughter’s achievements and her gratitude — and she wonders, even now, how to bridge the gap between her experiences and those of all the family and community members who supported her. She writes of her studies abroad: “How could I speak of the beautiful train ride to the south of France or the ride along the Camargue on horseback without an air of self-importance? I was at once embarrassed to be able to enjoy these experiences when they could not and concerned that this new life would create a barrier between me and them. That feeling has remained as, even today, my life is immensely different from those of most of my siblings.”
In writing a memoir with such an acute focus on the life she left behind, Simmons provides an instructive guide for those who straddle this line between a difficult past and an exultant present. Though the final third of the memoir seems rushed as she breezes through major life events like graduations, marriage, children and divorce, Simmons has succeeded in writing a measured and thoughtful account of her Before and After. “Up Home” concedes that it’s difficult to continue cherishing meager beginnings after attaining a quality of life far beyond what is typically imaginable for someone born into Simmons’s circumstances. But that continued concession makes her story even more compelling. Her dogged commitment to looking back and finding the laudable parts of her challenging early life provides as clear an explanation for her storied accomplishments as her degrees and career appointments.
Stacia L. Brown is a writer, audio producer and mother based in North Carolina. You can find more of her work at stacialbrown.substack.com.
One Girl’s Journey
By Ruth Simmons
Random House. 224 pp. $27
