Harvard is less a depicted campus than a turning point in memory: the place a young woman is about to leave for as her close circle disperses, and the destination around which she measures the changes she expects in herself. The recollection connects education and literary life with both separation and a growing distance from white people.

A Destination at a Parting

As the young women prepare to go their separate ways after high school, Harvard is the speaker’s destination. Diana Gordon and Imani are headed to Howard, while another friend is bound for Oaxaca. The departures make Harvard part of a larger scattering: each friend is beginning a different life, and the speaker wonders what hers will become.

Uncertain Expectations

The recollection does not present Harvard as a settled ambition or an uncomplicated promise. The speaker wonders what she will do there, imagining a life of picking up and dropping off men, missing New Jersey, and trying—and failing—to love Boston. These expectations give the destination an ambivalent character: it offers a path forward, but not an assured sense of belonging or happiness.

Books and Distance

The speaker anticipates being drawn further into books at Harvard, while also being pushed further away from white people. The two changes sit beside one another without being explained away: intellectual immersion accompanies a sharper social divide. In the recollection, Harvard thus marks not only educational departure but a formative separation, linking the speaker’s developing relationship with books to her estrangement from the white world around her.