A horn sounds and Cadet Peterson snaps to attention. Shoes polished to a gleam, spine ramrod straight, poker face in place, she is ready for the next military maneuver: Lunch.
On this warm March afternoon, like all weekday afternoons at the Citadel, that means marching in lock step from barracks to mess hall with 1,600 fellow students.
In this sea of blue-gray uniforms, in her classes, around campus, Sha (pronounced Shay) Peterson has a habit: Quickly, quietly, she steals a glance around her. She is looking for a face that resembles her own.
“Am I the only black? Am I the only female?” she asks herself. “Usually I’m the only something.”
At 20 years of age, the soft-spoken Chicagoan is 750 miles and a world away from her gritty Roseland neighborhood. She is an African-American at a Southern bastion of tradition with proud ties to its Confederate history, a woman at a military college famous for fighting like hell to keep females from marching in its ranks.
Through an odd mix of choice and chance, the young woman from deep on Chicago’s South Side is at the heart of a struggle she did not start or even sympathize with at first.
Once here, though, her stubborn streak prevailed. She decided-muscles aching, heels dug in-that there was no going back. Women belonged at the Citadel. She belonged at the Citadel.
Four and a half years after Shannon Faulkner became the first female to enroll at the state military college, women make up a small but growing portion of the ranks. Currently, 1,587 of the school’s cadets are male; 61 are female.
And so Peterson marches with the guys under a cloudless South Carolina sky, tiny gnats biting the back of her neck. She doesn’t swat them away. That would break the all-important precision.
Peterson is a sophomore. What stands between her and becoming one of the first 50 women to graduate the Citadel is 21/4 more years of tests-academic, physical, mental-at a college that moves to its own rigid rhythms and rituals.
Her education began on the blazingly hot first day she arrived on campus. She learned, as all first-year students do, how to respond to that upperclassman yelling in your face about a lapse, however minor: Reply with a crisp, “Sir, yes sir.”
Two other possibilities: “Sir, no sir.” “Sir, no excuse, sir.”
Though only 30 percent of Citadel students now go into the military, the campus retains the flavor of a four-year boot camp. Rules and hierarchies reign, and there are a lot of both.
Peterson’s mother had her doubts about how the slender daughter she calls “no bigger than a dime” would adjust to the demands of a military college, especially the Citadel.
“I said, `Are you sure this is what you want to do?'”
After all, her daughter loved to wear glittery evening dresses and high heels to school dances. She luxuriated in sleeping late and chafed at her evening curfews. (She also chafed at her hard-to-pronounce given name, Lesjanusar. Everyone calls her by the nickname she prefers, Sha.)
But Rena Sterling, 39, also knew her daughter was bent on achievement.
That’s one reason Peterson excelled in the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) program at Chicago’s Whitney Young High School. She liked the teamwork, the discipline, the ribbons for accomplishment. She wanted a career, and she thought maybe the military would be the place to start.
In that way, Peterson has something in common with the white, Southern young men who traditionally have enrolled at the Citadel. The school has its share of privileged sons. But it also long has been a place where students outside elite circles went to earn credentials and make connections for either military or civilian life.
Peterson answered her mother’s doubts about the Citadel with a characteristic confidence: “Don’t worry. I can handle this.”
A stubborn streak
Peterson’s optimism wavered when she arrived on campus, a supremely ordered place with palm trees and imposing white buildings that look like Moorish castles.
“I thought it was very pretty,” Peterson said. But intimidating too. “Everybody’s yelling at you and telling you what to do.”
She realized right away her stubborn streak could either get her in trouble or become an asset. She would make it an asset. She would be too stubborn to fail.
So Peterson memorized the extensive web of rules that govern cadet conduct. She fast-walked a sweaty 120 steps a minute to class, the hustle required of freshmen. She pumped out push-ups until her arms quivered and collapsed.
She did rebel a bit, silently, when an upperclassman took her to task for improperly chewing her deli meat sandwich in the massive mess hall. Peterson was supposed to take a bite, chew three times, then swallow. She chewed more than that, and the upperclassman called her on it. “Three chews, Peterson,” he barked. “Three chews.”
Instead she pretended to take another bite, which meant she was allowed another three chews. Finally, Peterson swallowed. “I’m thinking, I’m not about to choke for you,” she said.
For the most part, she followed rules and passed daily inspections. She was spared one punishment called “tours” (extra marching) that many students endure but did get some “cons” (confinement to barracks), once for chewing gum in a forbidden area.
Only about 80 percent of the students who showed up that first day were still here a year later to begin sophomore year. But Peterson stuck with it.
Hanging tough
Critics of the Citadel, and there are plenty, see it as a relic of another era, an insular, abusive place that relentlessly grinds down cadets in order to make them in the Citadel mold.
Revere it or revile it, part of the Citadel’s mystique is that it roots out anyone who can’t take it, or won’t.A grueling freshman year is at the heart of the school’s “fourth-class system,” which is supposed to foster discipline, obedience and camaraderie.
Peterson returned this year, she said, because she wanted to finish what she started. Pride of perseverance, no matter how rough or even senseless the rules may seem, is a kind of religion here.
That might be why some of the men, including Peterson’s boyfriend, senior Larenzo Champagne, said they admire the women’s fortitude.
“To deal with a lot of the guys who have this attitude that [the women] don’t really need to be here, they have to be determined,” he said. “If they weren’t, they wouldn’t make it. They have to know how to handle rejection and be alone.”
Some male cadets are angry their school is no longer the same-sex one generations of Southern men attended–survived–in a macho rite of passage. Besides teaching academics, the military school boasted it turned civilians into soldiers, men into boys, cadets into brothers.
“Ladies”–and all the unprintable variations of the term–were what you called the guys who couldn’t do push-ups fast enough.
“It’s just not the same,” said one male junior, whose uncle graduated from the Citadel. “You have to worry about what you say, what you do, if there’s a girl around.”
“Get out of my battalion,” is the greeting Peterson sometimes gets when she visits a neighboring barracks. “Usually, I keep walking,” Peterson said. “Lately, I tell them, `Oh, yeah. You’re real cool,’ and keep walking.”
There isn’t far to walk. The school, tucked into a corner of this historic port city, is its own little gated world.
Female cadets said the men who oppose them seem to be less vocal about it each year, though formidable tensions remain. Last year, the Citadel graduated its first woman, Nancy Mace.
Perhaps it is a measure of changing times at the Citadel that Peterson said what is most difficult is simply not knowing how many fellow cadets resent her presence.
“The worst thing is walking around the campus and not knowing,” she said. “You’ll be sitting in class next to someone who doesn’t want you here, not knowing.”
The gospel choir and a Bible study group with other black students have become what Peterson called her “comfort zone.” There she can let her guard down and feel at home.
The Citadel didn’t enroll its first black student until 1965. Currently, 138 of the school’s 1,648 students are African-American.
Peterson said that might be why many of the black male cadets seem to support the women, whatever their race. “They know what it feels like to be a minority,” she said.
An accidental pioneer
Blazing a trail inside the gates of this legendary place was not Peterson’s plan. Far from it.
For all her steely resolve now, she is an accidental pioneer, a sometimes shy young woman who wanted to go to Spellman, the all-black women’s college in Atlanta. She ended up at the Citadel largely because she hit a snag with other college applications and the Citadel, a back-up choice, was quick to say yes.
She had marked the Citadel, without much thought, on a U.S. Marine scholarship application her senior year. The application required her to mark a few potential choices from a list of colleges.
Peterson was a sophomore in high school when the furor over Shannon Faulkner made national news in 1995. At the time, she had little sympathy for Faulkner’s quest.
“When I heard about it, I was thinking, Now why does she want to go there? Somebody’s always trying to mess up something. It was a tradition. It was the same as if a guy wanted to go to Spellman.”
Two years later, Peterson did not get the Marine scholarship. Instead, the Citadel got her. “They sent a letter saying, `You’re the kind of person we’re looking for,'” Peterson said.
She was surprised, but intrigued. Then school officials mailed her a white Class of 2002 T-shirt to try on for size. She liked being recruited.
Now a standard-issue navy blue Citadel T-shirt and shorts lie folded in the metal dresser of the small, spare room Peterson shares with Laurie Auger, of Citrus Springs, Fla. Auger, an accounting major, plans to enter the Army after graduation, a requirement of her scholarship.
The two have a room with a view, Citadel style. A grounded Cobra attack helicopter looms outside the window, one of the military displays scattered around campus.
Earning the ring
Exhausted, with a tight schedule and a difficult calculus course, Peterson had only a C average spring semester of last year. But last semester, Peterson triumphed in the classroom and has the hardware to prove it. A political-science major, the sophomore earned straight A’s and the right to wear gold stars on her collar, a mark of excellence.
Like many here, Peterson ultimately has her eye on the chunky gold class ring that Citadel seniors receive in a solemn ceremony. Students, Peterson included, talk about it as entree to a powerful network of alumni, business and political elites who open doors to fellow graduates.
“Once you have that ring, you’re in that society,” Peterson said. “I guess you can’t call it a fraternity anymore.”
U.S. Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina is an alum. So is novelist Pat Conroy, who wrote an unflattering fictional account of the Citadel in “The Lords of Discipline.”
Though she had considered joining the military after college, Peterson now has decided she will have had enough of life in uniform once her four years at the Citadel are over.
She is thinking about a career in the corporate world, or maybe government. She figures recruiters will notice a female graduate of this unusual place.
As she sees it, “People think, Oh, she must be strong. Being here, they assume you have a lot of character and have yourself together. And you have will and discipline.”
Sometimes, Peterson said, the school’s devotion to discipline seems misplaced, with rules that are excessive or just plain silly.
She wonders if college students shouldn’t be learning more about questioning authority, organizing for change.
Other things rankle. It’s an odd experience to study African-American history in Capers Hall, as the building is named for Citadel grad Ellison Capers, a Confederate Army major during the Civil War. Other reminders of the school’s Confederate and, later, segregationist past dot the campus.
All that aside, Peterson said she would come here again if she had it to do over.
The hazing question
Some female cadets at the Citadel are bent on winning over the guys, showing them women can fit in.
“I don’t understand that, to tell you the truth,” Peterson said. “They’re so worried about what the guys think. They try to be real friendly, hang out with them, go drinking with them on the weekends.”
Peterson has chosen a different path. “If they like me, fine,” she said. “If they don’t, fine.”
She is not interested in yelling at the freshmen, known as knobs for the shape of their head under their regulation, close-shaved hair. (Women must wear their hair short, but aren’t required to get the traditional crew cut.)
“I have too much else to do to worry about the knobs,” said Peterson, who works several hours a week at the campus post office to earn spending money.
Hazing is against the rules at the school, but students said it still goes on behind closed doors, part of a long tradition of freshmen proving their mettle to upperclassmen and to themselves.
It seems to be less intense than in previous years, students said, and school warnings about avoiding sexual harassment have toned down the salty language of some of the cadets.
Peterson said she has not undergone any physical hazing. Another female cadet, who insisted that her name not be used, said an upperclassman told her to do 20 push-ups last year with thumb tacks sticking into the palms of her hands. She did it, she said, though she could have said no. The same student said male cadets have leaned over the open stairwells in the barracks to spit on her head.
Peterson’s closest female friend here, Yaunna Thompson, said she hasn’t endured that kind of thing but is weary of being singled out, in her view, because of her gender. Male cadets have reported her for minor rules violations they don’t necessarily pursue with other students, she said.
Unlike Peterson, Thompson said she would not come here again if she had it to do over.
“I don’t want to stay, but I don’t want them to think they’ve won,” she said.
Vivacious, with a quick sense of humor, Thompson bristled at the way some of the men regard the women in their barracks.
“Their view of us is we’re sheltered and innocent,” she said. “They don’t realize your average Southern belle doesn’t come here. She wouldn’t make it.”
`He’s my support’
Champagne, Peterson’s boyfriend, is a senior from Sumter, S.C. He plans to become a physical therapist.
Like Peterson, Champagne is in the gospel choir and Bible study group. They aren’t allowed even to hold hands when on campus, but the couple have grown close since they met last year.
When she wonders “What am I doing here?” and needs encouragement, Peterson said, she turns to him. “He’s my support,” Peterson said. He said the same of her.
They talk about getting married one day, maybe having kids. If that happens, Peterson has told Champagne, she would consider sending any of their children to the Citadel, daughters included.
“I think it would teach them morals and values,” she said.
“And to respect us,” Champagne added.
Mother-and-daughter Citadel graduates. The normally reserved Peterson let out a hearty laugh at her idea. It could be the start of a Citadel tradition.
