SMALLBANY
People in town called it Smallbany. It was just under two square miles, bordered by the city of Berkeley to the south and east, by the gray-blue waters of the Bay on the west, and by the town of El Cerrito on the north. In 2017, Albany had just under twenty thousand residents, residents who counted themselves lucky to live in a place that seemed to offer the sophistication of the metropolitan Bay Area combined with the intimacy of a small town.
Of course it was exclusive, when you considered the cost of housing, but it wasn’t one of those fancy suburbs with gated subdivisions and sprawling McMansions. Albany felt like a funky little backwater. The town had two main thoroughfares: Solano Avenue, a pedestrian boulevard peppered with small boutiques and restaurants, and San Pablo Avenue, a charmless state highway lined with car dealerships and insurance offices and dive bars. The homes were mostly stucco bungalows and wood-shingled houses, and in 2017, the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, many were beginning to plant IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE signs in their yards to signify that they were part of what was then being called “The Resistance” and thought that BLACK LIVES MATTER, WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS, and KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING. The town had a horse racing track, and a bowling alley, and a 310-foot hill that humped abruptly from the flatlands like the back of a dinosaur. It had a tiny bayfront beach and an odd thirty-three-acre open space called the Albany Bulb, a former dump for construction debris that had functioned at various times as a homeless encampment, a makeshift museum for graffiti art and scrap-metal sculptures, a marshland habitat, and a dog-walking trail.
Almost half the residents were white and more than a quarter were Asian. Thirteen percent were Latinx. You could call it “diverse,” and probably did if you were white, but it didn’t feel diverse to its Black residents, who made up just under 3 percent of the population and whose numbers were shrinking all the time. It wasn’t that diverse economically either—regardless of race, most of the residents were professionals with college degrees. Still, there was something comforting about living in a like-minded community at a time when so much of America seemed to be embracing bigotry and prejudice. And even if you didn’t love Albany, even if you missed being in a bigger or busier pond, you would stay until your children graduated from high school. Because the schools were Albany’s crown jewel.
Three elementary schools. One middle school. One high school.
Forty-one percent of the town’s 7,661 household units contained at least one kid, a kid whose parents had shoehorned themselves into whatever dwelling they could afford so that their child could snag a seat at one of the district’s desks. Small schools, where your kid wouldn’t get lost. Challenging schools, where your kid would get the best education.
If you were one of Albany’s 1,129 high school students, you knew you were lucky to be there. In 2017, your role was spelled out in a page-length poem in the high school yearbook that offered a breathless torrent of instructions for incoming students:
Work hard.
Make your parents proud.
Families rent Albany homes just so their kids can go to school here.
The prize at the end: college. And not just any college. A good college.
“Subconsciously your self-worth is partly defined by where you go to college,” one white girl remembers. “Everyone was competitive and wanted to stand out. Our whole grade was fierce with college and academics.”
If you were Black, the pressure was even more intense. While the percentage of white and Black students nationwide who got their education from community colleges is about equal, Black students were about one third less likely to graduate from a public four-year university, a discrepancy fed by differences in both income and access.
“I always told myself, I can’t leave here going to a community college. Albany is the top—everyone leaving here is going to a four-year. I need to be going to a four-year just like everybody else,” a Black girl recalls. “I had that in my head: I can’t be one of those Black girls who doesn’t graduate, doesn’t go straight to a four-year. I need to get my SAT scores high, my ACT scores high. I always felt like I was competing against everybody else.”
Copyright © 2023 by Dashka Slater