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Chapter 14

Asher Bennett Carter

Harvard, March 2015

“Bro, you’ll never guess who I saw last week,” Asher’s friend Viraj told him on the phone. “He was working at a coffee shop near Columbia. Made my Americano and everything.”

“Who?” Asher asked, refusing to attempt a guess.

“Ernest Morris,” Viraj answered, pausing for a reaction.

A thing that was widely known, even to Asher Bennett Carter, was that he wasn’t very smart. He also had a fairly terrible memory. Aside from these two little things, he was an asset to his family in every way. He was handsome, charming, athletic, and most importantly, didn’t ask that many questions, especially compared to his irritating sister. He didn’t question himself, his place in the world, or anything else that might cause him to have to consider subjects beyond two categories of thought: squash and money.

“I have no idea who that is, man,” Asher said finally.

“Bro! Yes, you do. He got his ass beat outside of Ivy. Come on, you have to remember that. He was like in a coma or something,” Viraj said.

“Oh yeah, that guy,” Asher replied. “Guess he’s awake.”

Viraj chuckled on the other end. “He’s just as weird as ever and still such a try hard. I bet you he interns at NPR or something. What a tool.” Viraj changed the subject to the upcoming summer and asked Asher if he wanted to join his family in the Mediterranean.

Asher said he’d get back to him on dates, with his attendance at his dad’s seventieth birthday party mandatory for obvious reasons. They hung up, and Asher went back to staring at an email that he was planning on writing to his nicest professor to see just how he could salvage at least one of his failing grades. Year by year, school had increasingly become a nightmare.

As much as the Carters were eager to give Asher access to the greatest networking opportunities a kindergartener could have, there were certain unavoidable consequences to putting your Black child into an elite white environment. In grade school, Asher had the Triple A’s and Teddy, and that friendship thrived as much as it could but ultimately had limitations. As they matured, they began to compete, really compete, for everything—sexual partners, admission into more elite schools, sports, careers—and there were ugly holes that began to puncture an otherwise peaceful picture. With stakes so high and competition so steep, a very slight, very steady stream of resentment would flow toward anyone who had any kind of perceived advantage, and for Asher, that could mean either his money or his Blackness.

The question of how any below-average student who happens to be exceptional at a sport ends up at the best school in the country is a pointless one to ask, doubly so if said student’s last name is set to become part of the American dynastic canon. This was Asher’s general assumption before he got to Princeton, but when he arrived, it became clear that the question would be asked of him over and over again. His world had expanded to include a new campus and new people, and those new people had questions.

Even though he didn’t want to admit at first that he remembered him, one of these new people was Ernest Morris. Ernest liked to go by the name Earn, since he said he had to “earn everything” he had. Ernest Morris, a boy so thin that his elbows and knees could be considered registered weapons, hailed from a small town outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Occasionally when he would speak, a drawl would slip through and drape a syrupy sedation over his words. He was the class valedictorian at his public high school, which would have been more impressive had it not been a statistic for most of the incoming freshman class at Princeton. Ernest wore his hair in a flattop fade, a living tribute to one of his idols, Spike Lee. There was something vaguely ’80s about the way that he presented himself, his classmates unsure if it was a purposeful stylistic choice or a sign of a profound lack of style. All this to say that Ernest stood out, and he liked it.

Asher and Ernest had in fact met before Princeton. Ernest was the recipient of the Carter Foundation Scholarship, a fund that William Carter Jr. personally oversaw to ensure that some of the best and brightest young Black minds would be able to attend college debt-free. Every year, twenty students from around the country were offered these scholarships, and in a big, flashy, well-photographed ceremony, William would present them with a check. He would give a short speech about how “these young minds would make a difference” and how he was happy to be a small part of their story.

During his senior year at Dalton, Asher happened to have a squash tournament in Florida. If he wanted to get a ride on the jet, he had to first stop in Atlanta with his father, which was where he and Ernest met for the first time at the scholarship ceremony.

He’d made polite small talk with several of the kids, including Ernest, the two boys mostly discussing what they knew about Princeton once they’d figured out they’d be attending the same school. Even though Asher had never really experienced a person like Ernest, after their brief interaction, he counted on forgetting him immediately.

“So I’ll see you on campus?” Asher said distractedly as he was leaving and offered Ernest a closed fist.

Ernest, slightly frazzled, returned his own shaking fist forward before stuttering out, “Ye-yes, see you there.”

Asher first ran into Ernest in his American film seminar. Ernest made it a habit to sit front and center for every class. He greeted Asher enthusiastically every time. He desired to be both seen and heard. He engaged constantly with the material, but he was also very outspoken about his opinions, which he himself described as “rooted in Black liberation.”

Asher liked to sit in the back of the class with whatever other athletes were present. Sometimes he had a squash friend, but he would also settle for companionship from someone on the tennis, crew, football, basketball, or lacrosse teams. In the class that he shared with Ernest, he had two squash team friends. One was an Indian immigrant, Viraj, who was the descendant of diamond dealers and spoke four languages fluently. The other was a sandy-haired Californian named Canon, who was a competitive surfer until he went to a Silicon Valley private school where he discovered that squash was more than just a vegetable. The three boys were a trifecta of collegiate youth and attractiveness, looking like a GAP ad but sounding like the wrong side of a Reddit thread.

One day, midway through their first semester, Ernest cornered Asher before class. Ernest slapped down a flyer printed on blue paper that looked to Asher to be a homemade imitation of something that might announce a band performance.

“What’s this?” Canon asked, making a motion to pick up the flyer.

Ernest slid the flyer just out of his reach. “This is a private invitation,” he said, spectacled eyes still on Asher’s as he moved the piece of paper closer to him.

Asher lifted it to read while Viraj and Canon framed him and read over each of his shoulders.

Power to the People

The Black Student Union at Princeton is pleased to welcome you to the inaugural meeting of Power to the People , a new initiative formed by Ernest Morris for leadership, community, and activism.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

After he was finished reading, he looked up at Ernest. “We hope you’ll join us,” Ernest said.

“Oh yeah? What about me?” Canon asked, a tone of mock hurt in his voice.

“Like I said,” Ernest replied with a small smile, “it’s a private invitation.”

“Uh, thanks man. I’ll have to check my schedule and let you know,” Asher said. “I have squash pretty much daily, you know? Takes up a lot of time.”

“Hope to see you there, brother” is all Ernest said with a nod before turning to make his exit.

“Poindexter-looking ass,” Canon mumbled before grabbing the flyer, crumpling it up, and tossing it in the trash.

From then on, Asher made it a habit to avoid interactions with Ernest, but it felt like Ernest spent a strange amount of time seeking out opportunities to be near Asher. Asher found a minimal reprieve sophomore year when it was time to bicker for an eating club. He chose Ivy Club, or rather, it chose him because out of all the eating clubs on campus, it was the only one that made sense for a student like him.

Historically, Ivy was the most formal of the eating clubs, where children of mostly Northeastern families opted out of the pedestrian dining hall and into a social club-cum-cafeteria where everyone was thought of as “Ivy material.” Years later, when these students were sitting in front of co-op boards and joining other rarified institutions like country clubs or advisory committees, the experiences they had with Ivy would have laid the blueprint. Their muscle memory would kick in, and they would sail on to the next step, bypassing the anxieties that people more unfamiliar with such a process would ordinarily feel.

It wasn’t as if Ivy was only about money, but it was one of the most expensive eating clubs, and that did tend to deter applicants who might not be able to afford the fees. There were other things that were important to members when they thought about curation for the club, like having the right “look” or being freakishly talented in something quite unique. Someone poor but hot might just get lucky. For the most part, Ivy was extremely white, as was all of Princeton, but particularly Ivy.

Asher did weigh all his dining options, and he thought it might be controversial that he was going to bicker for Ivy, given its history, but given his own history and as a member of the squash team, it was already where most of his friends were. His freshman year, it didn’t matter because the students were sorted into residential colleges where they ate and lived, but after that, it was imperative for the preservation of the social experience that he find an eating club. The most persistent problem that he could find with joining Ivy was that there were few to no other Black student members. Ordinarily, he expected this just based on where he lived and went to school before college, but in this case, he would be intentionally selecting to place himself in an environment where he was, once again, the only one.

Plus, he’d begun dating Tatum Bamford, a bombshell knockout from Connecticut. And yes, she was white. Asher didn’t consider himself the girlfriend type, but Tatum had a magnetism and authoritative presence that made resisting her pointless. They met by random chance, lined up on the same side of a flip cup game. Neither she nor Asher missed once, draining their cups in a speedy chug and then balancing the red plastic on the edge of the table to flip them upside down. Tatum was a blond pacifist heir to a weapons fortune who’d spent her high school years at Taft and invested in African charities, including raising money for Darfur. She was familiar with the Carter Corporation and all their positive work in Ghana, which Asher was barely conscious of, but he wasn’t above using it as a means to an end, which in this case was a hookup. It turned out, after the good sex, that he actually enjoyed spending time with Tatum. She was sweet, uncomplicated, and very into him. Tatum had an older brother in Ivy, and so she knew before she even set foot on campus that was where she would bicker. She more or less convinced Asher to do the same, though the push came with the force of a feather because really, he’d already decided that’s where he’d be.

So yes, when prompted, he did remember Ernest Morris getting his ass beat outside of Ivy and all the other things that happened while he was at Princeton. And still, Ernest wasn’t really on his radar because he had bigger problems. He felt sad about how complicated everything in his life felt now. The rare spark of ambition that he felt after his gap year working with his father had led him here, but this wasn’t the life for him. He’d never wanted to be at Harvard Business School, and he should have never had to enroll, all of this crystal clear in his head especially now that he was in danger of failing out. He had to come up with a great story for his professor before his parents were alerted to just how messy the perfect life they thought they’d given him had become.