“Wait, from Star Wars? Yoda quoted Dr. King? In which movie? I need to watch this.”

“I’ll see if I can find it,” I say jokingly. “That was very inspiring.”

I bounce up and start shouting lines from Dr. King’s speeches: “Mine eyes have seen the promised land! I’ve been to the mountaintop!” The Black shame simmering in my center crumbles beneath the prodigiousness of Dr. King’s words.

Earnell, finally accepting his duty as a Call preacher, joins me. We continue our dramatic recital until a white, blond staff member exits the elevator and says, “Umm… what’s going on here?”

“Nothing much,” Earnell says, enlivened. “Just a couple of new age negroes remembering who we are and finding our way home. You are welcome to join us.”

The math tutor is only the first step in fixing the mess I’ve made. I convince Professor Cartwright to let me retake the midterm in a week. I explain my new approach of asking for help. “I was just afraid to fail,” I say, “but now that I’ve actually failed, I’m not afraid anymore and want to fix this.” He is moved by my plea. “I’m glad you came back,” he says. “I’ll always have a second chance for someone who doesn’t give up. Happy to help in any way I can, Ms. Brown.”

I hunker down, taking hours of tutoring each day. I pore over the textbook, trying to understand. I work and rework the problems on the old exam and the practice ones the tutor gives me. This tutor, unlike Zach, understands my limitations and my strengths. Tracey, but I call her Tray Tray—the “hood name” I give her on our second meeting—also comes from privilege. She was raised in Cape Cod but, thanks to her wealthy parents’ foundation, spent her summers volunteering in countries with big education deficits.

“It changed me,” she shares after one of our study sessions. “Seeing people with so little who were as gifted and smart as me, but just hadn’t had the luck of being born in the ‘right’ place. I learned from that experience that so much about whether you make it in life or not is about positioning. Where you happen to land first, and nothing else. I vowed to use my time and energy to help others who may not have had the same access and opportunity. I mean it’s the least I could do based on all that has been given to me. It’s the only way I could live with it, the imbalance in the world.”