“It was really hard my first semester. Really hard,” said Larry Williams eating his breakfast in the Dillard University cafeteria.

People didn’t talk to him, he said. They looked at him strangely.

“I guess they thought I was weird,” he said.

Tall. Slender. The Chicago native was the new kid on the block, coming in a few months after everyone else. He missed the fall semester because he didn’t have the money to come to New Orleans, he said. So he worked several jobs, including selling snacks at Chicago Bears games, to save enough to purchase a plane ticket and make a deposit for his dorm room. Larry said he was excited about “coming to an HBCU down South.”

But all was not rosy when he got to Dillard.

“I ate by myself for the first two months,” he remembered. “I had to dig deep. Me, myself and I were my best friends.”

There were some around, however, who embraced him, like Norma Stewart, who works in the cafeteria and is known to students as Ms. Jeanie.

“I have sickle cell and she took care of me when I got sick,” Larry said. “I love Ms. Jeanie.”

Larry saunters slowly into the cafeteria for his breakfast. “Hey, my baby,” Ms. Jeanie said. Today he is having grits, eggs, bacon, potatoes and a biscuit.

A mass communications major, Larry wants to have his own online magazine.

But first, he wants to finish his breakfast.

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