About Stephon / ← 02 · Home & Manhood / 03 · New York: Becoming / 04 · The Journalist →
New York· Becoming
Freedom looked like becoming more fully myself.
A life still opening.
Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan at night · Kai Pilger · CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
October 7, 2011 · Northbound
New York met me at the intersection of grief and possibility.
The day after helping lead my grandmother’s funeral, at 22, I headed north—still completing my Columbia application and two weeks behind in schoolwork at a public honors college. I carried Baltimore with me, not as something to escape, but as the ground from which I could reach for a big-city dream.
The city became a classroom I could wander without reaching the end. “Empire State of Mind” played at Columbia Journalism School orientation and again at graduation. Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange became the soundtrack to my first summer. Between those bookends came Superstorm Sandy, a presidential election year and an education shaped as much by the bustling streets of more than eight million people from every walk of life as by the classroom.
I interned at NBC News’ TODAY, was selected for The New York Times Student Journalism Institute and pledged Alpha Phi Alpha in Harlem. I found close friends, mentors and line brothers. I grew more at home in my identity and learned that my ambition did not need to shrink to fit the room.
2012
A City in Motion
That first summer, Channel Orange. At orientation, “Empire State of Mind.” Then Superstorm Sandy and a presidential election year. The city was in motion. So was I.
2012–2013 · A City in Motion, continued
The City Kept Opening
Friendship. Craft. Brotherhood.
A wider sense of what was possible.
Harlem · 139th Street
Lenox Avenue at West 135th Street · 1920s · Schomburg Center, New York Public Library
I lived on West 139th Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, with the City College of New York and St. Nicholas Park woven into the neighborhood around me. Every Sunday, I walked through those streets to Abyssinian Baptist Church. I did not yet know my family had ties to Harlem. I only knew I was building a life there.
I officially joined Abyssinian on Father’s Day in 2013, after attending since I first moved to the city. For years, the day had carried the ache of growing up without my father present. That Sunday, I chose not to let absence have the final word. I claimed a spiritual home—and began giving the day a meaning of my own, a choice that still informs how I approach fatherhood today.
I learned the family connection later. Belonging had arrived first.
