As always, when it mattered most for Jamal Hypolite, his mother provided the wisest counsel.
A few months ago, Hypolite’s plan was no different than it had been for generations of seniors at SUNY Fredonia. He would finish the spring semester and earn his degree. His family would then travel from Mount Vernon, N.Y., almost 400 miles away, to celebrate the moment when he walked the stage.
Over a few days in March, everything turned upside down. Faced with the Covid-19 pandemic, administrators suspended in-person classes. The vast majority of students – including most of the 1,300 graduating seniors – left to go home and do their work online.
Hypolite, 22, was among those who did not see leaving as an option. To finish the semester and graduate, he needed to stick around for access to a computer lab still available to students.
With many of his friends and peers clearing out around him, Hypolite called home to describe the scene to his mother, Rhonda Charles. When he was 10, his family came to metropolitan New York from Trinidad. While his parents later divorced, Hypolite said his mother and father maintained a shared commitment to education.
Charles, now a case manager for the New York State Insurance Fund, worked two jobs for years to help her children go to college. When her son called two months ago from Fredonia, alarmed and upset, she turned to the only certainty that always helps her with every twist or struggle she faces in life:
Amid change, rely on fundamental strengths.
“She said the normal we think about now isn’t going to be the normal we’ve always thought of,” Hypolite said. Charles told her son to set aside longtime expectations and instead “take stuff slowly,” while hanging onto the core quality she had seen in him since childhood.
“Integrity,” Charles said this week. “I cannot express to you how proud I am of him.”
She left Trinidad based on the vision of opportunity in greater New York, with education for her family as a driving goal. From the time her kids were old enough to understand, they were raised with the idea that they would attend college.
West Main Street in Fredonia on a recent Friday night, around 10 p.m. Before the pandemic, the street is typically crowded with students and others out for the evening. (Sean Kirst/Buffalo News)
“They never missed school, not one time,” she said. “We taught them to believe in themselves, that they are someone and something, that they never have to wait or stand back.”
For Hypolite, like his siblings, the symbol of that quest became commencement and the chance to walk across the stage. His entire family felt the loss of that galvanizing celebration.
Hopefully, said interim president Dennis Hefner, the moment can still happen in August.
Hefner served as president of the college from 1997 until 2012, then returned to step into the interim role last summer after the retirement of President Virginia Horvath.
Whatever 21st century challenges he expected to face, a campus abruptly emptied by a pandemic was not among them. He reflected last week on how Fredonia has a strong tradition of music education. Part of the magic of the place has always been the sound of students practicing piano, music spilling into the quad from the doors and windows of Mason Hall.
Now?
There are no summer camps, no bustle, few youthful voices. Only a handful of students remain at Fredonia.
“You can whisper at one end of the campus,” Hefner said, “and hear it at the other.”
The seniors, given the choice, voted to hold an August commencement. While that possibility remains uncertain at a time when the state is slowly reopening and no one is sure what classes will look like in the fall, Hefner said he is determined to hold a ceremony – even if it needs to be a year from now.
“I wish the campus wasn’t going through this,” he said, “and I wish our students weren’t going through it.”
The same hush falls upon the entire community. On a recent Friday on Fredonia's Main Street – on the eve of what should have been a busy commencement weekend – only one or two solitary people with umbrellas walked past a line of darkened taverns and storefronts that would usually have been packed with students and visitors.
“There’s just a sense of emptiness in the village,” said Mayor Doug Essek, an absence of the “young spirit and energy” that he said always feels like “a resurgence of life.”
The hardest part, to newly graduated senior Maria Garcia, is both the loss of the ceremony and the absence of farewells. Raised in the Bronx, she overcame many obstacles to earn her degree. She was given a place to stay when she seemingly had nowhere to turn by mentors and confidants who embraced her as family, and they wanted to gather to rejoice at commencement.
Instead, with her apartment roommate already gone, she waits alone. Garcia plans on leaving next week, once the woman who took her in and raised her as a mother arrives from New York City to help her pack. They intend to embark on a cross-country journey to California, where Garcia, 25, will attend the Hult International Business School, an event of monumental importance for those who appreciate all she overcame.
"Graduation," Garcia said, "was a very big deal."
Going back was not really a choice. Garcia lost her grandmother to Covid-19 in Brooklyn, and she said concern about the virus and its spread has left her friends and family in New York “pretty much barricaded in their homes.”
So she stayed for a while longer in Fredonia, near the campus that she said changed her life. Her biggest regret is that she was unable to say personal goodbyes to the professors and instructors who helped her believe in herself, especially by strengthening the communication skills that Garcia sees as critical to everyday success.
"I didn't get the opportunity to tell them how much I valued all of them," she said.
Hypolite, too, is admired for the way he persevered. Liz Lee, a photography professor, spoke of the work he did on a course called the "senior photographic narrative." Hypolite, she said, did a significant amount of traveling to offer an impressive interpretation on differences in detail and philosophy between street art and graffiti in Dunkirk, Buffalo, Toronto and New York City.
While Jamal Hypolite graduated from SUNY Fredonia, commencement plans remain uncertain for the class of 2020. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News)
She described the project as a home run, and she said her worries about the seniors transcend the lack of ceremonies. Lee speaks of how these students will leave Fredonia to try and build careers amid a moment of heartbreaking and overwhelming economic crisis.
"We're graduating them," Lee said, "but to what?"
Hypolite, for his part, turns to his mother's advice. He intends to look for work in photography, and if it does not work out he will return to trade school for electrical engineering. But for a moment, as he catches his breath in a quiet village, he will try to remember the longtime goal, before all else, was attaining the degree.
"I'm so proud of him," Charles said. "I tell him, 'It would have been great to see you walk the stage, but you know and I know: You did it.' "
Garcia will soon take part in a wistful and eternal ritual of college: She will load up her adoptive mother's car and drive out for the last time. Only a few months ago, she envisioned it as a capstone moment to a few weeks of high emotion, a gathering for commencement that would typically bring together the teachers, friends and close family who made such a difference.
Instead, she and her mother will slam shut the trunk and head toward the Thruway, where this kid from the Bronx – now with a degree in international communications – will be on her way to California.
"I didn't think it was possible," Garcia said. "I grew up thinking I was not enough."
As she leaves Fredonia, she just wishes she could find someone to thank.
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com or read more of his work in this archive.
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