Quandra Prettyman, MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice | L*STS

    

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MEMO From: Mommy Date: September 13, 1987 Subject: Some Very Traditional Advice 

Quandra Prettyman

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other

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Money 

• Never lend more than you can give. You can give a stranger five bucks. 
• Don’t lend a friend any amount which the failure to pay would cause a lapse in your friendship. 
• In splitting checks, be willing, if you are in a generous mood, to merely divide the check. Among friends, this usually evens out. 
• But if fellow diners (or users of a mutually bought object) feel specific, then be specific. Don't say "all right, that's your bill" and then pay the tip yourself. 
   

Drink 

• Avoid any liquor without food. 
• Avoid sweet drinks if you get a "feel like drinking" mood;
  you’ll probably consume less. 
  
  

Sex 

• A man who is unconcerned about your becoming pregnant is a man who is unconcerned about you. 
• Use contraceptives. Abandon the notion that a nice woman only has sex when she is out-of-control of her body. 
  
  

Religion (or ethics and moral judgment) 

• A person who does not respect yours is a person who does not respect you. A person who does not respect you is not a friend. 
• When among people who cannot understand what you mean by "no," or a courteous "I'd rather not," find a graceful way to excuse yourself, if possible. Blame the potential of your mother's heart attack, if it will help. Run away, if necessary. 
  
  

Grades 

• Of course, grades matter. But grades really are not, to me, the most important concerns. 
• This is how grades matter to me. It will cause me quite a bit of distress if you fail. I mean fail with a certain specificity, that is, get an F. That's because if your work falls so far short of the expectations held for your peers, it is a signal that something is wrong, seriously wrong, wrong enough to require intervention. 
• D's--you should treat as a very serious warning. 
• This is how grades don't matter to me. From C up is acceptable to me. C's won't get you summa cum laude; if you want to be summa cum laude, that's your cross to bear, not mine. 
• There will be times when you do not do as well as you thought you would or hoped you would. When that happens try not to sweat over it. If you think the teacher really made a mistake, discuss it with the teacher. If you think you didn't understand what was required, ask the teacher to show you a more satisfactory response. Don't waste your time (and the teacher's) by nit-picking. Try to see in what way the other work was better. If you don't think it was, try to see how the teacher may have perceived it as better. 
• There will be times when you feel that you did not do as well as you might have because of peculiar circumstances. Some will be petty--you had a cold, you stayed up too late the night before. Don't let that interfere with your next assignment. 
• There will be times when you were not in full control of the circumstances and made a compassionate decision, e. g., a friend was troubled. When you make such a decision, and I think you ought to do so, be prepared for the consequences. 
  
  

Health 

• Your health has become your responsibility in a special way. True, I have been saying how do you feel, etc. But I have also been around to say that if that's how you feel I'm going to call the doctor. You have to call the doctor now. You have to decide to take an extra day off to recover. You will bear the responsibility for your decision. I hope you will go back to Grades and make a sensible decision; the body you have has to last a lifetime. 
  
  

Mother's Worries 

•  I will worry more about your well-being than about your grades. 
•  I will worry more about your safety than about your choice of friends. 
  
  

Anger 

• These things will make me very angry:
  your failure to tell me that you sick your failure to tell me that you are doing well
  your failure to tell me that you are engaged in some political activity for which there may be serious consequences
  your failure to tell me that you are involved in a relationship of which you think I would not approve.
• I cannot promise you that if you tell me these things that my response will be "OK, so what else is new?" 

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In keeping with her activities as a collector and informal archivist, Quandra Prettyman was a list aficionado. Her freezer always had a typed list of its rotating contents; her papers include chronologies of yearly activities, and lists of what to buy (with descriptions of the staff) at her favorite stores. Even one of her poems, “Facing Forty Facts,” takes the form of a list. Her intellectual and pedagogical rigor, coupled with her innate hospitality, care, and deep belief in the power of community, made her a safe harbor and model for countless students, particularly Barnard College’s Black community. They remember lessons on effective writing offered in the classroom and life lessons from class dinners in her book-filled apartment with its brilliantly yellow Kitchen.

This memo written by a single mother to her daughter in 1986 is typical of the practical, caring and wry advice she was known for. The Memo form gives the advice an official feel, perhaps softening the blow of letting go and losing daily mother-daughter contact. Now it is a generational document, as her daughter and friends have passed on copies of the letter to other college-bound women.

The late Quandra Prettyman was a poet, an editor, literary critic, reviewer, book collector, teacher, and scholar. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Prettyman studied history at Antioch College (1950-54) and English at the University of Michigan (1955-57), where she studied 17th century and modernist literature. She joined the Barnard College Department of English in 1971 where, like many women of her generation, she squeezed writing in the spaces between professional life and motherhood. Prettyman edited Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction in 1975, featuring writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ann Petry, Ernest Gaines, Sherley Anne Williams, and Louise Meriwether. She also authored one of the earliest academic articles on African American cookbooks, “Come Eat at My Table: Lives with Recipes” (1992). Her poems have appeared in multiple collections, including Black Out Loud: An Anthology Poem (1970), The Poetry of Black America (1973), and Black World.

When Prettyman passed away in 2021, she had taught at the College for 50 years and left behind voluminous unpublished works. Most recently, her poems “Late Crape for My Mother” and “Carousel” were posthumously published in Callaloo (Spring 2026).

The Quandra’s Table editorial collective is a group of friends, family, and former students, all connected by fierce affection for the late Professor Quandra Prettyman. The Collective is currently compiling a volume of Prettyman’s unpublished writings, including her poetry sequence, A Safe House. For inquiries, please email Professor Kim F. Hall (quandraprettyman [at] gmail [dot] com) or contact Isabelle Robinson (https://www.isabelle-robinson.com)