The University of Virginia marks both an educational achievement and an unfinished expectation in Nella Rogers’s life. She earned her first degree there, but the university years did not produce the close Black friendships and future she had pictured; in retrospect, she connects that distance to her later uncertainty about belonging, Black hair, and relationships.

Education and Early Plans

Before attending the University of Virginia, Nella imagined that college would take her far from home, where she would make Black friends and earn an exceptional degree in English literature. She had also pictured a larger future: if she liked the university enough, she might stay for a second degree, teach at a university, marry a Black man, travel, and eventually have children. She did complete the first degree, but the rest of that anticipated life did not come to pass.

Her route into publishing later retained a practical connection to her education. At Wagner Books, Nella’s résumé had been strengthened by an editor who was a friend of one of her professors at the University of Virginia. That connection gave her access to a professional opportunity, even as it complicated her ability to criticize the workplace’s reliance on elite credentials and personal networks: she recognized that she had benefited from the very kind of access she wished senior employees would not use as their primary hiring criteria.

Social Life and Belonging

Nella’s first year at the University of Virginia included a couple of Black sorority parties, but she decided they were not for her. She did not want to go through the demanding, costly process of being selected into a sisterhood that did not feel organic to her. Her choice was not presented as a rejection of Black community itself; rather, it became part of a longer-running uncertainty about how and where she might find that community.

Looking back, Nella sometimes blamed herself for not keeping up with Black Student Alliance meetings and for not venturing beyond her comfort zone more often. She wondered whether a closer connection to Black peers earlier in life would have helped her learn about natural hair sooner, start a literary organization for young Black women, or participate more in street demonstrations. These are retrospective possibilities, not events she says she actually pursued at the university. Their importance lies in the way she measures what she missed against what she later wished she had known.

Relationships and Retrospective Meaning

The university was also where Nella briefly encountered a potential romantic connection with a Black classmate named Marlon. They met on a plane during a holiday season, and he asked her out in the baggage claim area. She went on one date with him. Later, Nella wondered whether having more Black friends as a child might have made her less self-conscious about her relationship with Owen, since she would at least have known from experience that she had been courted by a Black man.

The University of Virginia therefore occupies a double place in Nella’s history: she completed the degree she had worked toward, yet the broader version of college life she had envisioned remained largely unrealized. Her later decision to cut off her relaxed hair came only after moving to New York City, reading Black writers, and encountering a much larger natural-hair-care aisle. In retrospect, the university years figure in her sense that she learned some parts of herself later than she wished, while the professor’s professional connection also helped open the career door through which she entered publishing.