Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
One of the tricky challenges of profiling people who aren’t famous is to read just enough into their lives to make them represent something bigger than themselves without stripping them of their individuality and turning them into a symbol.
Robert Kolker walked that fine line in 2006 when he wrote about a young African-American woman caught between the world of privilege and the streets - who went to the best schools and wound up in a cheap flat with a bullet in her head.
Her name was Tiesha Sargeant. Although she was raised in the gritty neighborhood of Brown Heights, Brooklyn during the 1980s and 90s, her hardworking and loving Guyanese immigrants had no trouble keeping her out of trouble as they inspired her to succeed. Her father told Kolker: “People talk about Tiesha like we were a downtrodden family who went after the American Dream. We don’t see ourselves as any embodiment of any dream of any place. We were the embodiment of the Sargeants. We think we should go to the best schools and do the best things. That’s how I taught my kids.”
Tiesha aced the tests used by the Prep for Prep program that selects a handful of poor, minority students to attend the elite private schools in Manhattan and was admitted to the Brearley School. Kolker writes:
Every few years, a school like Brearley has a superstar student who seems to be everywhere at once, and this was Tiesha. She was a co-head of the student government, the junior-prom princess, second soprano in the chorus, played field hockey, tutored younger kids. If the curtains opened, she was onstage, dancing and singing. Teachers and students got used to her speaking up in class, almost as a daily performance piece. Her teachers remember her as a sharp, persuasive writer—this in an English program that’s said to be better than those at a lot of colleges.
If Tiesha was beloved, she was also on display. “She knew all eyes were on her—the girl from Prep, the head of the class,” says Anna Mirer, a Brearley friend. “There was a feeling that her every success and failure meant more because it was her.”
If her parents and the culture of Brearley tended to dampen her racial identity, her admission to Wesleyan University helped amplify it. Kolker reports:
A mini-Berkeley of the East, Wesleyan has a large percentage of minority students, and the campus is known for its progressive politics and multiculturalism. Tiesha began to shed the Brearley persona, plunging into an exploration of racial-identity politics. She steered much of her academic work to the study of a social archetype of her own creation that she called the Loud-talking Black Woman, or LBW. “The LBW was the woman who was not afraid to assert herself, who would risk being put down for not keeping her place, and who would challenge a black man trying to subjugate the black woman in order to assert his own manhood,” says Krishna Winston, the professor who coordinated Tiesha’s Mellon undergraduate fellowship, which funds minority students considering postgraduate work.
But Kolker’s article does not become the story of a woman who returned to her roots in search of her authentic self. It was more complicated than that. During college she spent a summer as an intern at Goldman Sachs. After graduation, she interned at Conde.net before accepting a paying position in 2004 as a minority recruiter for Credit Suisse.
Most of Tiesha’s friends in New York were from Wesleyan or Prep, and many of them lived in Brooklyn not far from her parents. She’d go to whiskey tastings for black professionals and media-world networking parties, IM-ing her friends to join her. D.J. Reach from Carson Daly’s talk show was a Wesleyan friend, and he got her into clubs. … {but} Tiesha knew how many Prep kids wound up in golden handcuffs. She saw how she and her black colleagues worked twice as hard to be accepted and how some became co-opted. … By August 2005, Tiesha had had enough. CSFB offered her a chance to change jobs, but she decided to leave Wall Street. She called Conde.net and landed a job as a freelance production manager. She loved the hours and the magazine culture. She told friends she finally had time to write. She started freelancing, channeling her Prep sensibility: For Blackplanet.com, she wrote a piece that featured “The WWB (Working While Black) in Corporate America Survival Guide.”
Tiesha’s family and friends don’t know why she became attracted to Keve Huggins, a high school dropout who “worked in a record store, deejayed, did some telemarketing, had a baby girl with a former girlfriend” and was suspected by the police of selling pot. Most believed “it was in some ways a point of pride for her to be dating someone who, like Keve, didn’t look good on paper.”
She told them she was happy and what could they do when she said they were moving in together? Despite their concerns, everyone was surprised when thye heard the news:
Police arrived at Keve and Tiesha’s apartment at about 1:30 A.M. on Sunday, May 14 {2006]. Keve was there, his shirt covered in Tiesha’s blood. The officers found three ounces of pot in the apartment and a .380-caliber gun in the backyard and took Keve in for questioning.
A dozen years later, her murder remains unsolved – as mysterious as its victim’s life.
