Page 35 - Spelman50thReunionBook

Chadwick Hall, My First Gingerbread House

by Delores ‘Raine Parker Crockett

Spelman College was the only college I applied to for admission. My acceptance as the class valedictorian was
a given (In my mind, I was a star). Coming from Daytona Beach, Florida all alone on a Greyhound Bus, when I
finally arrived on campus, I was awestruck by the number of students who were accompanied by their parents. I
didn’t know and neither did my mother who though encouraging, had not been to college herself; so who knew?

Handsome Morehouse men escorted me to my dormitory——way in the back, in the corner, in the dark of the
campus—Chadwick Hall. Remotely located, but absolutely beautiful, this was my home for my entire first year at
Spelman.

Chadwick was a big, stately, old house with huge rooms that had been converted into a dormitory. We felt that it
had been a last minute accommodation for a group of vagabonds who had been accepted late into the class
(totally unverified but that’s how we felt). There were fewer than 50 of us in that big house with the huge rooms
and we grew to love each other immediately, bonded by our mutual feeling of exclusion.

Very few of the boys wanted to walk all the way back there to visit us; rarely did any of our freshmen classmates
come back there to visit. When we heard about a panty raid coming to campus, we eagerly awaited our suitors—
to little avail. In hindsight, we know we got more heart-healthy exercise because we had to walk the furthest to
EVERYTHING.

Because there were so few of us, we developed life-long and enduring friendships. And we absolutely loved
living in our Gingerbread House with the biggest rooms we had for the remainder of our Spelman campus
experience. But I would venture to think that many of us still wonder what other paths our lives might have taken
had we lived our Freshman year smack in the middle of the happenings (Morehouse North and South Halls and
Packard)..

I for one know that mine might have been different because I fell in love with one of the few Morehouse men
who did walk all the way back to our end of the campus. Who knows, had I lived up front, I might have fallen for
a lazier man who didn’t have to walk so far