THE VALEDICTORIAN LOOKING UP

Miami Herald, The (FL)
September 10, 1995
Author: JOHN DORSCHNER Tropic Staff

In June, the night before graduation, while rehearsing her valedictorian speech, Shani Gray broke down in tears. "Mama, hold me," she begged, an uncharacteristic request from an 18- year-old who prides herself on being tough and confident. "What's wrong?" Pearl Gray asked as she hugged her daughter.

"I don't know," Shani murmured.

For an instant, she had been overwhelmed by what was about to take place. After years of struggle, of sometimes waking up at 2 a.m. so she could study till dawn, it was over. Shani Gray had finished Miami Carol City High with an astonishing 5.127 grade-point average. Usually, the highest average in a big-city high-school class is decided by hundredths, even thousandths, of a percentage point. But Shani was finishing a full quarter-point (.251) above her nearest competitor. But what had it all been for? She still didn't know how she could pay for college.

Although she'd been granted the honor of delivering the valedictory speech, Shani was bitter and angry. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain by working hard and making top grades. But in her view, she'd been slighted by the people who should have helped her figure out how she would afford a higher education.

In her valedictory speech, she intended to say what was on her mind.

As Shani hugged her mother, maybe she sensed that her speech would not go as she'd planned. Or maybe she realized that the day soon dawning was not as much the end of one thing in her life as it was the beginning of everything else.

The Right Track

It is easy to find failure at Miami Carol City High School, as it is in most big-city schools. Kids drop out, get pregnant, get arrested. The threat of violence is everywhere. Once, Shani says, her band practice was cancelled because there had been automatic rifle fire on the practice field. A couple of years ago, gunfire in the stands stopped a Carol City-Northwestern football game. Shani escaped by flattening herself on the ground, then dashing to the band bus. For weeks afterward, officials made North Dade teams play their games in the afternoons, in front of empty stands, to avoid further violence.

Carl D'Agostino, a 46-year-old Carol City history teacher, says many students are different today from those he went to school with: "These kids are more explosive--step on their sneakers, and they want to pull a knife. They have a sister that's a prostitute, a brother who's dead, another brother on murderer's row--it's a horrible environment that many of them come from. They've been brutalized. They're already 25 years old when they're 14."

Yet, from such a school emerge students like Shani (pronounced SHAW-nee) Pearl-Lee Gray. She is a driven young woman who does not want to depend on others. "It's up to an individual to stand up for himself," she says. "You yourself have to succeed."

But success has not been easy for Shani Gray. The northern Carol City suburb where she lives is a predominantly black area of single-family homes. Some residents are firmly middle class, but others, like the Grays, cling by their fingernails to the dream of middle-class stability. At the moment, the family of four is supported only by Pearl Gray's legal-secretary income of $33,000 a year, out of which comes not only taxes but $8,000 for medical and other insurances.

Most of the homes on Shani's block have iron-barred windows. Shani herself has never been a victim of a crime, but her mother was robbed at gunpoint while parking their 8-year-old van in the driveway. The robber took her purse and her Bible, which had a hundred-dollar bill stuffed in it.

The Grays' house is cramped, and in a state of remodeling hell. Some walls have been knocked out. Others are raw concrete blocks. The construction project is on hold, awaiting more money. Termites are eating away the wood, but there is no money to tent the place. Half of the tiny living room is taken by a hospital bed, occupied by Shani's aunt, Viola White, who is suffering from cancer.

One afternoon, sipping a Chek cola at the dining table while a groaning floor fan tried to stir the heavy summer heat, Shani talked about her dreams. They are surprisingly specific. By the time she is 30, she says, she wants this: "Married. One child, a boy. A husband who would be an accountant or own his own business. And I'd be a public official in the criminal justice system -- someone who gives orders."

Why does she, like so many of the top Carol City students, want to go into law enforcement?

"I've dreamed about it since I was a little girl," she says. It's not just getting rid of bad guys to give decent people a chance to live peaceful lives, but "maybe finding a way to help those who've gone astray to get back on the right track."

Reaching for the Stars

"There are thousands of Shani Grays out there," says Mark Zaher, who oversees Dade schools' scholarship advisory program. "There are kids who do their scholarship applications in closets at home because it's so loud in the house."

While newspaper articles frequently focus on a black underclass mired in defeat or a black middle class angered by corporate glass ceilings, another group gets little attention. It is made up of the unsung but determined black young people--whether dirt-poor or at the bottom edge of the middle class--who are working optimistically for their slice of the American dream.

One of these is Shani's boyfriend, Octavius Smith. For a while, Octavius was boarding a school bus near his North Dade home at 4:55 a.m. Monday through Friday to travel to Braddock High--a new, already overcrowded, virtually all-white school in the far southwestern suburbs. When he had after-school activities, he often would not get home until after 8 p.m.--putting in at least a 15-hour day.

Octavius was willing to do this because he thought it was his best shot to get a good education. "It was a whole different environment," he says of Braddock. "No idiots acting up in class." He only stopped going because his mother thought the long commute was taking away too much of his life.

Another of Shani's friends, Sakeena Hazuri, had to wake up for a while at 3:30 a.m. to make a 4:20 a.m. bus to Braddock. She didn't complain: "You have a flashlight. Do your hair, read, get some sleep." After two years at Braddock, she decided to transfer to Carol City -- but only because she had been selected as a majorette in the school's award-winning band.

At Carol City, these friends found, as Shani has, that there were advanced placement classes where the students resembled them -- quiet, hard-working, ambitious.

As with Shani, most of the top students at Carol City come from strongly religious families. The students' faith seems to have given them the intensity they need to avoid the ills of the modern world, while focusing on the good.

Mandissa McCalla, No. 2 in the class of '95, says: "I know I cannot have made it without God. We have a very religious family, and they've been behind me all the way." And Anner Holder, the class's No. 3, lists as the first reason for her success: "My faith in God."

Carl D'Agostino, their honors history teacher, attributes the success of students like these to their "work ethic. . . . They decide they're not going to be pulled down by this garbage. They're reaching for the stars, and they have teachers who believe in them. And some make it."

Nerd Glasses

Pearlie Mae Drummond and Roy Lee Gray both graduated from Miami Jackson High. Both were good, but not sensational, students. Roy took some junior-college courses and became a respiratory therapist. Pearl studied shorthand and became a legal secretary.

Their first child was a girl, Sharon. About the time she started elementary school, the family moved to Carol City. Sharon was an earnest student, but suffered from dyslexia and had to work hard to earn B's and C's. When she was 8, Shani was born. A year later came Roy II.

Pearl had gone to church as a child, but like many others, she had slipped away. When Roy II was 6 months old, she says, "I decided to rededicate myself to God." Spurred by religious neighbors, she got back into her faith in a serious way. No violence on television. No secular music. All the radios in the Gray house are tuned to Christian music stations.

Shani attended Skyway Elementary, where three-quarters of the students are impoverished enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. In many schools in poorer neighborhoods, there is sometimes pressure to be an underachiever. Bright kids are taunted as "brains" or "nerds." But from the very beginning, Shani's parents motivated her to learn. On her first day of first grade, the bus driver forgot to pick her up. Shani cried.

In second grade, Shani learned an important lesson when another student bet that she couldn't drop her A's and B's to straight C's for one quarter. She accepted the challenge. She won--at least in her classmate's eyes.

Her parents were astonished at her sudden decline in performance. When they discovered the reason for the drop in grades, they were angry. Shani recalls being spanked. Pearl doesn't remember the spanking, but she clearly remembers telling her daughter not to let such a thing happen again.

From then on, Shani's report card was littered with A's.

Her father, Roy: "We never had to tell her to study. We had to tell here to stop studying and go to bed."

Not that she was a perfect child. One sultry evening, Pearl and Shani sat at their dining table trying to remember the worst thing Shani had ever done. It didn't take long before Pearl grinned. "I'll tell you a story," she said.

One year in elementary school, she realized both Shani and young Roy needed glasses. Stretching the family allowance, the Grays bought two pairs of cheap, sturdy glasses. "Nerd" glasses. Within a short time, both pairs were lost. The kids insisted they didn't know how they'd lost them. "I did spank them," Mom said. Each received a new pair of specs--this time in more stylish frames.

"Then, just recently, during the renovations to our house," Pearl continued, "we were digging up the side yard, and what did we find there?"

"Not mine! Not mine!" Shani interjected, still stung by the memory. "You found Roy's!"

"We found both pairs," Mom stated emphatically.

Shani shook her head. "My glasses fell off when I was running," she maintained. "I didn't know what happened to them."

Security

When Shani was 10, her sister, Sharon, 18, had a baby. Sharon's schooling stopped. Motherhood overwhelmed any thought of a career. Shani adored the baby, but saw firsthand the problems: "I know what baby-sitting is like, except when you're a mother, you just can't walk out the door at the end of the evening." She became determined that motherhood would not interfere with her studies.

In sixth grade, the beginning of middle school, Pearl told her daughter that she needed excellent grades to qualify for college scholarships, because the Grays could not afford to pay for her schooling. Shani responded. Her first year at Carol City Middle School, she received her first perfect report card of "A-1-A's"--all A's for academics, 1's for effort, A's for conduct. Her parents celebrated by taking her to Po' Folks, a Broward restaurant.

Shani sailed through Carol City Middle School. When it was time for high school, some relatives wanted her to go somewhere other than Carol City High, but it was the closest school, and the Grays figured that its honor classes would give Shani a good education.

As with most parents, the Grays' main concern was security. In a survey, only one-fourth of Carol City parents gave the school an A or B for providing a "safe and orderly environment." That was only about half of the countywide figure: 47 percent of high-school parents across Dade give their schools an A or B for safety.

Pearl Gray puts it bluntly: "The school isn't safe."

It's not uncommon for female students to have purses grabbed just outside the school or to have thick braided silver chains called herringbones ripped off their necks. Last year, two students were found inside Carol City High with guns, an improvement over the previous year when six students were found with guns. In 1993-'94, Carol City reported 241 instances of crime and violence. That figure is considerably higher than the numbers reported by affluent suburban schools. For example, Killian High in South Dade, a school with an enrollment 75 percent higher than Carol City's, had only 150 criminal incidents.

Both Shani and her mother say that last year, when Mary Henry took over as principal of Carol City, security improved. "Ms. Henry has a take-charge attitude," says Pearl.

These days, up to 17 people with green T-shirts that say SECURITY roam the premises with walkie-talkies. At least one is in each main corridor of the school, and others use golf carts to patrol the parking lots and grounds. Their job: Keep outsiders from entering, and keep students in the classrooms. Without the security force, some students would ignore their teachers' protests and do what is called "walking the halls."

In Her Own Write

And many just keep on walking: About 750 students start ninth grade at Carol City each year. Only 400 are still there for 12th grade. Of the 315 who graduated with Shani, about 60 will go to four-year colleges.

The mean score of Carol City kids who take the Scholastic Aptitude Test is a combined 638 for verbal and math. The Dade County mean is 819; Killian High's mean is 871; the national mean is 902.

Shani says her SATs were 950 -- well above the school average, but not sensational by national standards. "Maybe I don't test well," she says.

Almost all of Shani's classes were honors or advanced placement. Turmoil and raucous students are rare in these more difficult classes. Harder classes give higher grade points. Shani's 5.127 grade point is based on a scale in which an A earns four points in a regular class, five points in an honors class, and six points in an advanced-placement course.

Her grades were not perfect. In 10th grade, she got a B in English. In the first grading period of the '94-'95 school year, she received a C in calculus, although by the end of the semester she had raised that to an A.

"Being valedictorian wasn't in my mind," she says. "I just kept doing the work."

She recalls her junior year as being her roughest. Her toughest class was advanced-placement history, taught by Carl D'Agostino. Over Christmas vacation, she says, students had to write a dozen essays.

D'Agostino says he wanted his students to learn to write college-style papers. "I slave-drove them," he boasts. " 'Don't just tell me what you read, but interpret.' . . . When they leave me, they know how to write."

D'Agostino rode Shani particularly hard. "She was very, very self-motivated, very industrious. But you can't read her writing," he says. So he demanded that she write out the alphabet more than 20 times, upper and lower case, working carefully on her penmanship.

Shani admits that since she was already staying up half the night studying, "I wasn't too happy about that."

Neither was her mother. Pearl came to the school and confronted D'Agostino. "Her mother blasted me to the royal dickens," the teacher recalls. "I told her, 'She's very smart, but if they can't read her writing, how can she do well?"'

Shani's handwriting improved. Her essays, says her teacher, were so good that she not only received an A for the course, but was selected the top history student for all of the 11th grade.

In fact, she got A's in all her classes her junior year. Though she still had a year to go, her grade-point average was so far above that of any of her classmates that she already knew she would be class valedictorian.

Baby Shaq

Like all students, Shani was always conscious of what other students thought of her, and she wanted to be more than "just a brain."

During her freshman year, there were snarky comments when her name was mentioned in honors assemblies. In the following years, only well-behaved students were invited to assemblies, so the jeering stopped. But Shani was still occasionally ridiculed for the strong moral stands she does not shy away from voicing. (When a male journalist asks a halting question about personal ethics, she looks him straight in the eye and announces: "I'm still a virgin, and I made that decision myself.") If boys taunted her in the school corridors -- "Hey, the door is rusted, the key is disintegrated" -- Shani shrugged it off: "People know where I stand," she says firmly. "I'm a Christian."

Still, she worked hard to be liked. In her junior year, she set her sights on the activity that guaranteed the most popularity in the school: sports. Shani, the brain, became Shani, the jock. Kind of. At 5-foot-10, she was tall for a high-school girl, and she had a lot of driveway basketball practice playing her brother and his friends. But the Lady Chiefs take basketball as seriously as Notre Dame takes football. Shani found herself a bench warmer, backing up Necole Robinson, a six-foot-two, 250-pound superstar.

Still, Shani showed no fear, practicing against the star they called "Baby Shaq." She endured 12-minute runs and a brutal practice drill called Suicide. Sometimes, she was so exhausted after practice that she couldn't eat dinner. Even so, she sometimes stayed up half the night studying.

Being a member of the Lady Chiefs gave her a new image in school. When she walked the halls, people shouted at her, "Hey! That's Michael Jordan!" She was getting points for trying.

In the spring, Octavius Smith asked her to the prom. He was a serious young man from a religious family. They were in several advanced-placement classes together, and his class ranking was fairly high -- "No. 48, I think," Shani says.

She considered Octavius a good friend, but not a boyfriend. She had never had a date before. "When he asked me, I took it as a joke. I said, 'Are you serious?"' He said he was serious. She was thrilled.

Her mother gave her a 2 a.m. curfew "unless they went some place else" after the dance. Shani gave her a call: Octavius wanted to take her to an IHOP. Mom said OK. When she got home at 3:30 a.m., Octavius gave her a good-night kiss. She went inside and found her mother asleep. She woke her up so Mom would know what time she had arrived home.

A-1-A

As they neared the end of their senior year, many of Shani's peers were focusing on state schools. Her good friend, Jamie Castellano, chose the University of Florida, assisted by a $2,000 minority scholarship. The class's No. 2, Mandissa McCalla, who had SAT totals of 1250, was turning down Yale (she was worried about the stress and the $29,000-a-year expense) to go to Florida A&M, which Carol City students call "FAM," as in family. The class's No. 3, Anner Holder, also opted for FAM. So did Omar Kelly, editor of the student newspaper.

"I could have gone to Columbia," says Omar, "but it was too much money." He chose FAM because it cost only about $7,000, much of which he could pay off with a plethora of scholarships and grants, and, as a traditionally black school, it provided "a nurturing environment, almost like a family setting." That view was shared by others, and made FAM the most popular destination for college-bound Carol City seniors.

Shani, always the individualist, had something else in mind. She considered FAM's racial mix too similar to that of Carol City. She thought it was time to see what the majority white world was like. She also wanted a college that was small, Christian and offered a major in criminal justice.

On a Youth for Christ trip to Washington, D.C., she perused the booths set up by Christian schools. She found one that fit her requirements: Taylor University, a 150-year-old institution with a 425-student campus in Fort Wayne, Ind. More than 90 percent of the school's students are white.

Shani and Pearl flew up for a visit -- it was her first plane ride -- and Shani fell in love with the place. "Friendly people. Christian atmosphere." Fort Wayne seemed small, but it had a Burger King, which meant it fit her requirement of a city with amenities.

Taylor's tuition-room-board cost per year: $15,333.

Shani's family had virtually no money to pay for her college education, and the family knew there were cheaper alternatives. Florida International University offers free tuition to all local valedictorians, and state schools have other funds available for minorities. But the Grays prayed about the decision, and decided Taylor was the right place. "We believe in being God-led," says Pearl Gray. Somehow, it would work out.

Shani says she hoped to get help from Eva Black, the high school's College Assistance Program (CAP) counselor, whose job is to help kids get into college and find money for them. Shani says she kept going to the CAP adviser's office, seeking information about scholarships, but most of the time Eva Black was not there. She says she learned that some students who were close to Black were told about scholarships that she was never informed about. But despite her frustration, Shani never formally complained.

A half-dozen other students voiced similar complaints to Tropic. But Black does have supporters. Richelle Williams, who was voted "Best All Around" and is going to Florida State, said, "Most of my scholarships I got from her. I'm not going to blame everything on Ms. Black. She wasn't A-1-A. But she did her job."

Eva Black did not return Tropic's phone calls. Mary Henry, the school principal, says that Black gave equal help to those who sought her out. The problem, Henry says, was that some students dropped by Black's office frequently while others, like Shani, did not. She says that news of all scholarships was read during morning announcements, but some students complained they couldn't hear them in their hectic classrooms.

As the school year neared an end, Shani had one scholarship: $500 from Ford. That wasn't going to get her far in Fort Wayne.

Shani thinks she was intentionally slighted by school counselors made uncomfortable by her attempts to live out her religious beliefs by starting a school Bible club. At first, administrators told her the club would violate the constitutional separation of church and state. Her mother, Pearl, came to school to argue. The school backed down: The club was allowed a meeting room. But a resentment persisted, Shani says. Her evidence: While announcements for other clubs were read over the loudspeaker in the mornings, those for the Bible club were not. The counselor didn't return phone calls. (Principal Henry says this happened before she came to Carol City and she knows nothing about it.) Such incidents sometimes made Shani feel she was waging a lonely battle. For her motto in the yearbook, she selected this: "When no one believes in you, believe in yourself and allow God to guide you."

Shani was upset about something else: She was not selected as "Best of the Class" -- an honorary title bestowed on the "best" male and female seniors from local high schools by class counselors. The honorees are given 20 seconds to wave in Channel 33 promos that ran through the summer.

It might seem like a petty complaint to some, but Shani thought she was being denied recognition that she had worked hard for. "Why not go to the best in the class?" she asks. And to her, the best has to mean best grade-point average.

The anger about this award bubbled through her thoughts as she prepared her valedictory speech. At the same time, she was going through more serious turmoil. In late spring, her father, Roy, suddenly moved out of their Carol City house. After years of support, Shani says, he just vanished. Pearl says she hopes the situation is temporary, and is expecting him to come back. Shani says she has communicated with her father only once since he left, a phone call he placed shortly after she was formally named the valedictorian: "Congratulations. Keep up the good work," he told her, but gave no explanation about the split.

When asked whether her father's leaving bothered her, Shani says, "I don't think about it." As she speaks, her lower lip trembles.

Freedom of Speech

Shani did four drafts of her speech. All began with a quotation from Dr. Seuss: You have brains in your head / You have feet in your shoes / You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

An early draft, however, had this dark paragraph: "Was it easy? Of course not. There were long nights of studying that turned into the next school day. . . . During that time we learned a lot of hard lessons in life. The one that sticks out the most is the one we knew all along. . . . No matter how hard you work you're not always rewarded. Sometimes who you know and not what you deserve dictated what you received. Certain awards, scholarships and even the TV 33 Best of the Class Honor was denied me. Why? Because I didn't know the right people. . . . Sure it hurts and yes through all the pain there is forgiveness, but I and many others carried on."

Her mom thought the pronouncement was too negative, so Shani toned it down a little and showed it to a school counselor, who corrected some grammar and told her the thought was still too negative. Her mother agreed. In Shani's fourth and final draft, the complaint was only a vague lament: "How did we do it? When we missed out on scholarships, awards and other special events. How did we make it this far? When it seemed it was who you knew and not what you achieved that seemed to dictate what you received. Sure it took hard work, determination and unity."

The Carol City graduation ceremony was held at the auditorium at Florida International University. As the seniors were lining up outside, Helene Giles, the school's activities director, told Shani it wouldn't look right for her to walk in holding the rolled-up copy of her speech. Giles took it and said she would place it under Shani's chair on the stage.

Shani was so excited about the ceremony that she didn't think much about handing over the paper. A slew of relatives, including a grandmother from Alabama, had come for the ceremony; her father, however, was not there. Flanked by her classmates, she marched through the ROTC honor guard. On stage, she found the speech, as promised, under her chair, but when she picked it up she saw that the five vague lines of lament had been X'd out.

As she stepped to the podium, she was shaking. She looked out at the sea of faces, 300 graduates and their parents, a throng of perhaps 1,000. She remembers staring at a gold and blue banner at the back of the hall. As she began her speech, she decided she would read the offending paragraph anyway--how could they punish her now?--but when she got to it, she found the crossed-out words hard to read. She stumbled over the first of them, and then decided it was best to skip the paragraph.

"I could tell something was wrong," says Frederica Wilson, a school board member who had been Shani's principal at Skyway Elementary. "When she stumbled over her words, that was not like the Shani I knew. I could see a glaze over her eyes."

Still, the audience, not knowing what was happening, gave her a standing ovation. Afterward, close to tears, Shani showed her family and fellow students the crossed-out lines. Everyone was upset.

For years, Pearl Gray had told Shani to respect her elders. But to Shani, this was an insult. Her uncle, Carey Gholston, was so angry that he called The Herald to complain.

Two days later, the education writer, Jodi Mailander, wrote a story about Shani. Giles, the school's activities director, acknowledged that she had read the speech and told counselor Faye Brown to cross out the lines because they were "negative."

The article pointed out that just a year before, after a similar controversy, the school board had made a rule: No censorship of valedictorian speeches. Period. Dade's best and brightest should be allowed to say what was on their minds.

"I'm stunned anybody would have the nerve to do this after last year," school board member Frederica Wilson told Mailander.

Principal Mary Henry called in Shani for a three-hour meeting with the counselors to answer Shani's various complaints.

The counselors said Shani could have done much better with scholarships if she had chosen a state university rather than a small, out-of-state school. As for the Best of the Class for Channel 33, that selection was based strictly on the counselors' judgment. "It wasn't just academics," says Henry. "The young lady selected had very good grades and was involved in so many activities at school."

One counselor insisted that Shani had given permission for her speech to be edited at the commencement. The principal says she has dealt with her staff in "an appropriate fashion" concerning the speech censorship, but won't say what steps she took.

School board member Wilson doesn't buy all the explanations: Shani's achievements and her economic need were such that something more than $500 should have come her way. "There are scholarships available to distinguished students that aren't tied to such-and-such school. I am upset. This is the valedictorian we're talking about. She should have gotten something. . . . We need to be taking another look at the roles of the CAP counselor and see that somebody is watching the store."

Principal Henry agrees: "Obviously our CAP program can be improved, and it will be improved." Henry acknowledges that the program shouldn't depend on students' dropping by the office. This year, in addition to the loudspeaker announcements, Henry has told Black to visit each senior English class weekly, "so that no student can say, 'We didn't hear it."'

The Summer of '95

To Shani, all the explanations were so many "lies and cover-ups." But, she said, "You learn and go on."

Anyway, she was too busy to worry about it. She worked full time as a Winn-Dixie cashier at $4.50 an hour. As a junior employee, she had shifting schedules, and worked mostly nights. During the days when she was not working, she accompanied her aunt, Sheriley Gholston, who ran the summer Bible school at Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in Liberty City. Sundays were particularly arduous: church and Sunday school at Mount Calvary from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m., then several hours more in the hot sun, working with family members in a street ministry to the homeless near Jackson Hospital. While Aunt Sheriley and Pearl sang hymns, Shani accompanied them on the bass clarinet.

Her boyfriend, Octavius, worked nights at a Clucker's. Occasionally, Shani and Octavius' nights off matched, and they had a date.

As the end of summer approached, Shani conceded she was a little nervous about going off to distant, sometimes cold Indiana. "I say my prayers every night," she said.

Some of her prayers were answered. A woman reading about her in The Herald story pledged $1,000 for each of the first four semesters. A Herald fund donated $1,000. A fellow Pearl Gray once worked for gave $200. The Grays pieced together school loans, a work-study program and funds from other sources, so that, of the $15,000 needed for the first year, they had found all but $1,600 by mid-August.

A week before she was to leave for school, CAP Inc. had its scholarship-announcement night. The program raises $700,000 through private donations to be given to the neediest of public- school graduates, and the money is doled out in $500 to $2,000 chunks in late summer, after all other sources of scholarships have been exhausted. Shani and Pearl went. After an agonizing series of speeches, the envelopes were handed out. Shani's long fingers struggled nervously to open the envelope. "Here!" shouted her mother, grabbing for the letter. "Let me do it!" But Shani pulled it away from her.

Finally, she flipped open the envelope. Right at the top it said:

Shani Gray

$1,000.

"YES!" shouted Pearl Gray, pumping a fist. The final $600, she figured, they could make up by installment payments.

A Van to the Future

Meanwhile, Shani's grandmother in Alabama sent Shani three boxes of warm woolen clothing for her first cold-weather winter. Shani rejected a lot of the clothes as outdated, but kept enough to fill a good-sized box.

Pearl decided to drive Shani to Indiana in their 8-year-old Chevy van. Aunt Sheriley Gholston and her four children decided to come along. Shani's brother Roy was also coming, as was a small refrigerator for the dorm room. The van would be crowded.

"So that will make two adults . . .," Pearl started to say one afternoon, then caught herself. "Three adults," she said, glancing at her newly mature daughter, "and five children." Eight in all.

"That's right," Shani said with a proud smile, "three adults." She begged Mom to let her take the last week off from Winn-Dixie, so she would have plenty of time to pack.

"We'll be broke," her mother warned. She still didn't know how she was going to pay for the trip.

Shani and her mother compromised: The 18-year-old was allowed to stop working on Wednesday, giving her two days to get ready for college. Pearl got the van fixed up -- a church deacon did the work for $100. Two days before they left, Pearl received an anonymous cashier's check in the mail for $300, with a note that said only: "God bless you."

The check would pay for their trip. "Our prayers have been answered," Pearl muttered.

Final preparations took most of Friday night. At 4 a.m., with hair curlers inserted, Shani fell asleep on the couch. She awoke about 5:30 and went back to getting ready. Shortly after 6, while dumping ice into the ice chest, she cradled the phone to her shoulder and had a last-minute whispered conversation with Octavius.

The family loaded the van with a big platter of chicken, snack packs, juices and colas. Then the group huddled for a prayer by the van. "Father God," began Aunt Sheriley, "enter into each of our lives as we travel." She thanked God for the money they had received. She prayed for the old van to make it. She prayed for Shani's new life: "Shape and mold her into the person you would want her to be."

At 7:32 a.m., as the sun was rising over the roofs of Carol City, the van pulled out for its long trip north. Shani's new life was beginning.

And so was the question of how the Grays were going to pay for college next year. If you ask Pearl Gray about that, she just laughs.

Section: TROPIC
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