The New York Times-20080128-Stranger in a Strange Land Earns Himself an Encore

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Stranger in a Strange Land Earns Himself an Encore

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Derrick Braxton has six fingers on his left hand, but that's only one of the reasons he had a circle of fascinated students gathered around him one day early in his first semester at college. A freshman at Finger Lakes Community College in Canandaigua, N.Y., Mr. Braxton was eating a salami and cheese sandwich in the school lounge last fall when a curious student stopped to chat and ask where he was from.

The answer: Brooklyn, from the projects.

So much of the energy considered native to New York actually comes from the people who've just shown up: immigrants, aspiring artists, students. Maybe especially students, omnipresent, soaking up finance and Proust and chemistry, not just in the classroom but in the air all around them. What New Yorkers don't see is what happens when one of their own takes some of that energy and exports it to someplace unexpected, say, 300 miles northwest in rural central New York State.

Within minutes, Mr. Braxton was surrounded. Fellow students wanted to know if he'd ever seen someone shot (yes, more than once); what it was like living with all those black people down there (Mr. Braxton, who's black himself, wasn't sure how to answer that one); and what he thought about the Crips and the Bloods (cowards, in his opinion). To the students, most of them from small, mostly white towns, he might as well have been the brother from another planet. And that was before they got wind of that sixth finger.

The questions, if naive, were friendly, and Mr. Braxton, a natural performer and a serious dancer, didn't mind drawing all that attention. He'd spent too much time at the Kingsborough public housing projects in Crown Heights doing just the opposite, making himself all but invisible, keeping his head down, avoiding all those invitations to hang out, which, he knew, would inevitably turn into invitations to fight.

A rarity at Finger Lakes Community College, he was also a rarity at Kingsborough, in that he was college-bound. His mother, who died when he was 17, had insisted on it; his sister, a legal secretary who'd taken in Derrick and his two siblings at her apartment in Kingsborough when their mother died, kept up the drumbeat, though college costs money and she didn't have a lot.

Fortunately for Mr. Braxton, the Independence Community Foundation, a philanthropic group based in Brooklyn, had been trying for months -- unsuccessfully -- to find even one graduating senior living in the Kingsborough Houses who would apply for a $5,000 college scholarship.

Finally, the principal at Bedford Academy High School, a charter school where Mr. Braxton was thriving, urged him to go for it.

The day before the deadline, he submitted the application. The essay he wrote for the Joan Maynard and James Weeks College Scholarship wasn't exactly Montaigne, and his grades weren't off the charts, but he was from Kingsborough, he was the only applicant, and as Marilyn G. Gelber, executive director of the foundation, put it, He was Brooklyn smart -- charming and tough in all the right proportions, with a determination to succeed.

Mr. Braxton chose Finger Lakes Community College in part because it accepted him, late as his application was, and in part because, as Mr. Braxton says, he wanted to get far away from here -- here being Kingsborough, which he left last weekend to start his second semester at school.

Although he is hardly the only black student at the college, the first few days of his first semester were nerve-racking. He noticed when someone he asked for directions to registration deliberately ignored him, and he noticed when a friend of a new friend stayed firmly on the other side of the dorm room.

But he also noticed that most people in cars not only stopped so he could cross the road, but also waved (I thought, that can't happen anywhere else but here); he noticed there were rabbits hopping outside his apartment off campus; he noticed that almost everyone seemed to want to hang out, and nobody seemed to be looking for a fight.

When he started a hip-hop club, it quickly drew a regular following of 20 or 30 (mostly white) students.

About halfway through the semester, a friend of Mr. Braxton's brought him to a cheerleading competition that her niece was in, in nearby, small-town Bolivar. Mr. Braxton, the only black person in the gym, was wearing a sharp-looking baseball cap sideways, and he could feel the eyes staring.

By the time a song with its own dance, well-known to anyone with a passing familiarity with MTV, came on during intermission -- Crank That, by Soulja Boy -- the music and his own nerves had gotten to him. He cruised to the center of the gym and started dancing, bouncing high off the balls of his feet and bounding across the floor.

First a few of the girls in the competition started following along behind him, and then the bleachers started emptying, as their parents and friends joined in, caught up in the contagion of Mr. Braxton's showmanship. People were taking pictures with their cellphones.

In a scene that could have been lifted from some straight-to-video feel-good comedy, a heavyset mother with gray hair positioned herself next to Mr. Braxton to show him her moves and tell him, This is how the old white women do it!

When the music ended, they asked if he'd do it again, and so he did.

Mr. Braxton loved every minute. I felt brand-new, he said. They were all looking at me like, 'Where is this guy from?'

As if they couldn't guess.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Derrick Braxton with an old friend, Kilana Dumont, last week at the Kingsborough Houses in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. (PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIELE STABILE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)