6 minute read
After Concealing the Truth, she Told Everyone
By Sally Scherer
There’s no typical UK student with a typical story about a typical life. Everyone has a story to tell.
After trying to hide her story for many years, University of Kentucky graduate Jenisha Watts ’08 CI told hers in an essay that appeared on the cover of “The Atlantic” magazine last year.
The headline read: “Jenisha from Kentucky. I came to New York sure of one thing – that no one could ever know my past.”
She embraces the past now, she says, but it was a long time coming.
Jenisha grew up in Charlotte Court, a Lexington public housing project. She and her siblings were raised – if you can call it that – by their mother who was a drug addict. Growing up, Jenisha was neglected and hungry and left alone a lot. She remembers the police officers at her home, illegal drugs found hidden in cereal boxes and her mother in handcuffs.
Eventually, Jenisha went to live with her grandmother where her love of reading and books was encouraged. Some of her siblings went to live with other family members. Some went to foster care.
Even now, in her late 30s, she can easily remember the trauma of growing up.
“I can still see myself sitting on the Charlotte Court steps waiting on my mom to come home. I can see us all laying on the bed at the Salvation Army when we had to stay there,” she said, adding that the memories are clear.
“I can still go there,” she said.
Jenisha attended what was then Lexington Community College before coming to UK. She was a journalism major. “I was in survival mode,” she said of her days at UK. “I wanted to get out of Kentucky and make something of myself.”
She was a good student but at the student newspaper “The Kernel” she was told her writing wasn’t good enough. She didn’t really understand why, but she wanted to. She says the elective classes she took helped “unlock” a part of herself. She enrolled in a linguistics class to better understand Ebonics and why she spoke the way she did and wrote the way she wrote.
Dr. Rusty Barrett, a professor in the department, taught the class.
“She wanted to learn grammar. She wanted to compare what she learned growing up with what was acceptable,” Barrett said. “She had been told the way she spoke was wrong and that her writing wasn’t good enough. I taught her to analyze her own speech and she did an independent study, her own project, on Bluegrass Black English in Kentucky.
“The more she learned, the more I could see her self-worth coming back,” he said. “It was an amazing thing to see.”
The experience taught Jenisha it was OK to ask questions and to not know the answer to everything. She took full advantage of her curiosity.
She took theatre classes to explore cultural opportunities. She made friends with engineering students who tutored her in her Math 109 class. She attended lectures at the student center and got to know Rosenberg College of Law Professor Dr. Melynda Price who taught her about law and introduced her to books she’d not heard of.
At the time, she never stopped asking questions of Chester Grundy, director of the Office of African American Student Affairs and the Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center at the university; Phil Kramer, Chellgren Chair for Undergraduate Excellence; Lisa Higgins Hord, assistant vice president of community engagement at UK; and author and alumnus Dr. William Turner.
Poet, National Book Award-winner and creative writing professor Nikky Finney inspired her. The duo visited campus in 2023 after her story was published in “The Atlantic.” They spoke at a program “Sisterhood and Mentorship” and reminisced about their time together on the UK campus.
“I use the word daughter with her, not mentor,” Finney said of their relationship. “I told Jenisha not to say any word in my class that she could not pronounce. She had her eyes on the things she wanted most, not the things she wanted now. There’s a difference. She was in it for the long run so I could say that to her. She went to the writing center because she wanted to be a writer. But her toolbox had to be right. Now, I celebrate her ascent, her climb, her fight. She got there.”
That kind of support, and Jenisha’s lust for learning, led her to earn her master’s degree at New York’s Columbia University and to her successful journalism career that included an internship at “Essence,” a researcher and editor job at ESPN and ultimately senior editor at “The Atlantic.”
She wrote plenty of other people’s stories during her career, but writing her own was the toughest, she says. She decided to do it after she became a mother and to help let go of her anger.
“I’ve watched what anger does to people,” she said. “At least once a week I get a call from someone in my family crying and angry about something that happened in our childhood. At some point, you can’t use it as an excuse anymore. You have to let it go. Otherwise, it eats you. It helped me to let it go.”
She spent nearly two years drafting her essay. She interviewed family members who did their best to avoid talking to her. She knew the story would change her and her family. She didn’t want to embarrass anyone, but as a journalist, she wanted to be truthful. She wanted to write about leaving Kentucky for New York and what it was like to try to fit into the city’s sophisticated literary world.
The essay has received critical acclaim and was a finalist in the feature writing category for a 2024 National Magazine Award. She has been asked to speak at events and she was honored with a First Decade Award from Columbia University during alumni weekend.
And she’s continuing to write her story. She’s writing the manuscript for a book after signing a book contract with Ecco, a part of HarperCollins Publishers.
“I used to want to hide all the parts of me that were ‘Kentucky,’” she said. “Now that I’m older, I embrace it. It made me who I am.” ■
