My first two years of college, I didn’t think of myself as a “club person.” I wrote for The Student (student-run newspaper) semi-regularly for a while, hosted a radio show (which didn’t turn out to be as social an activity as I thought, even though you’re literally alone in a dark room by definition…), lived in Marsh Arts House while it was still struggling to revive itself post-Covid, tried out a couple bird walks with Bird Club and runs with Run Club. It was all fun, sometimes very meaningful, but never did I have the urge to dive deeper, get more involved in the executive boards. I thought I just wasn’t a club person. I was a free rider, a student-student, not a student-org-student.
This probably isn’t what I’m supposed to say to get you to come to Amherst. I’m supposed to say I was involved in 13 clubs and 5 student publications and loved it all. But I’m going to be honest and tell you that the only club I’ve truly found a home in has been the live-in, dine-in, 22-member club known as the Zü, housed in Humphries House. The first time I’ve believed in, at the cellular level, the mission of an institution bigger than just myself.
I moved in fall of junior year, when, in some sense, I was at an Amherst tipping point. You saw the list of what I’ve tried out. The school felt too small, my options exhausted. I was planning to go abroad in the spring, so I chose social death and moved to the Zü, “just to try it out for one semester.” Low risk. High, high, high reward.
My first cooking night, with another newbie to the Zü, Anya, I chose the menu. Veggie burritos from my special cookbook that required endless chopping to make the filling. Individually wrapped and toasted. I’d never cooked with dry beans before, or any bean other than black beans (the central food group in my Brazilian household growing up, but always coming from a Goya can). I didn’t realize that you have to soak the dry beans for 24 hours before trying to cook them. Francisco, the resident bean expert of that iteration of the Zü, was so ashamed of me. We served a delicious meal, a full hour late, to an expectant crew of Zü veterans. I remember how dark it was outside, still early September. Nobody turned on the dining room lights. Everyone praised us and warned us to never again attempt this type of meal. Never heavy chopping, never individually wrapped or assembled things, never a recipe that requires standing over the stove or frying. That moment I began to understand why the Zü has such a reputation for bean mash. One pot, no chopping, no assembling, no frying. Genius.
The Zü’s gathering principle, food, is literally the foundation of everything. We all need to eat; we all need to sleep. Maybe that’s why it’s so compelling to me. It’s simple. We’re not trying to do much more than live well and live together. But in that pursuit, generations of Zü residents have created a lot more.
This house on 62 Snell Street used to be a girls’ school. Of that original building, only the banister and fireplace remain. Late at night, I swear I can see ghosts of those young ladies gliding around, perhaps angry, perhaps amused, at what this place has become. Then it was a frat, Theta Xi, the oddball frat. After being suspended in 1957 by the national Theta Xi organization for pledging a Black student, they renamed themselves to Alpha Theta Xi, a local, independent organization. Amherst College abolished Greek life in the ’80s, but the frat lived on informally, now co-ed. Students who hung around and lived in the house began cooking for each other in the tiny kitchen that is now our laundry room. The college created a “theme house” designation for dorms so that Theta Xi and Phi Kappa Psi could keep their communality and become Humphries House food co-op and Charles Drew Memorial Culture House, respectively. Humphries House was renovated to accommodate heavy cooking, and the rest was history.
Never has anything been more meaningful than taking part in, and eventually leading, a project larger than myself, that existed long before me and will exist long after. To be part of some sort of (strange) legacy. To sit around our giant dining table every Sunday night and fight over small things like which electric mixer to buy and large things like how our admissions policies should better accommodate diversity, or who should be our next leader and “spiritual center”—literally that wording came up…high stakes…
I know everyone’s dietary restrictions like the back of my hand, what they eat for breakfast, everyone’s snacking preferences down to who likes nutritional yeast on their popcorn and who doesn’t, who comes home for lunch and who trucks it out with a cold tupperware on an Adirondack chair. I’m realizing this sounds like it’s all about food, but I promise it isn’t. We see each other here, wholly and completely. It feels like a big experiment at a life that centers community, horizontality, self-governance, and a real kind of democracy. Living here has been my ultimate project of college, and the best decision I’ve ever made.