Peggy’s prompt-----the building across the street

Peggy’s prompt-----the building across the street


The building across the street from my house, my school, my job, my grandmother’s house, the bank, the courthouse, the beach, on US 1, from the house I lived in in college,

When I was in college, I lived in a “scholarship” house, which housed 25-28 “poor but brilliant” (according to the Jacksonville newspaper story about us) young women. In our case, because our house was sponsored by the Florida Education Association, we were all education majors, and we were sometimes called the FEA girls. As opposed to the Theta Chi girls, or the Phi Mu girls, I suppose. Anyhow, the Florida State University campus had a reputation as a “party school”, garnered in most part by the numerous and powerful “Greek” sororities and fraternities whose residences for members surrounded the FSU campus. It was a given that if FEA girls were poor enough to need a housing scholarship, by definition we couldn’t afford (and weren’t allowed) to join a sorority. We were part of the great unwashed GDI’s (God Damn Independents) whether we wanted to be or not.

The majestic building across the side street from our house housed a favored campus sorority. So from our windows, our porch swing, our yard, we could witness up close and personal the various rituals of sorority life, from “rush” week, to pinning ceremonies, to panty raids, to used condoms flung into our yard from vehicles parked on their side of the street. None of these ever made me very kindly disposed to sorority life, particularly the used condoms, as, unlike the sorority girls, we FEA girls were in charge of the upkeep of our property.

So the street was effectively a dividing line between the “haves’ (the sorority sisters), and the “have nots”, the scholarship girls. Secretly, we thought we had the better deal—great roommates, no booze in the house, pride in our academic achievements, graduate school in our plans. But there was no getting around the fact that socially, on campus, we were invisible, and the sorority sisters across the street were Homecoming Queen, Student Body President, cheerleaders, and well-dressed.

I felt right at home with my scholarship girlfriends, given my start in life as the daughter of a commercial fisherman and an academic nerd—pretty far down on the social scale. I’ve never regretted for a day that I was one of them. In fact, those four years as an FEA girl were incredibly transforming for me and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But it was a lesson in how individual merit counts for only so much; what group you belong to also counts a lot. And I was lucky to be on “the wrong side” of the street in Tallahassee, Florida in the early 1960’s.