On a fine spring weekend, college student Roxanne Smith is hunched over her computer in the Calverton, a residence for homeless women, developing notions about St. Anselm, "this little guy from the 11th century" with a big ontological argument.
Ontological argument?
Roxanne leans forward, eyes shining, itching to introduce it. It is an argument for the existence of God that starts with the notion that God is "something than which nothing greater can be conceived." It's all uphill from there.
"This is the kind of thing I love about philosophy, the mental gymnastics," she says. "It's like when a baseball player says 'I'm being paid to play a kid's game,' I'm being paid to have fun."
After a four-year scholarship, Ms. Smith will graduate next month from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland with a double major -- in liberal arts and communications -- and a 4.0 average in liberal arts. Accepted for graduate studies at Harvard, Yale, American and Drew universities, she will attend the University of Chicago's School of Divinity with a fellowship worth $128,000 to study philosophy of religion.
These days, people who have never even met Roxanne Smith are talking about her. Their wonder concerns not only her success but how she managed to achieve it. Roxanne did not come from a family where academic skills were stressed. She did not reach college with the blessings of a long line of devoted teachers.
Roxanne came to college from a homeless shelter and from the kind of hardship that can break a person -- or make her very philosophical.
Just five years ago, she was too afraid of the world to venture outdoors. When acute anxiety and depression forced her into Springfield Hospital Center in 1989, psychiatrists said her greatest trouble was her relationship with her mother. She was ++ released to Marian House, a transitional housing program for homeless women, with the understanding she wouldn't return to her mother's home in Takoma Park.
At 28, Roxanne was suddenly homeless. She had no high school diploma. She had never lived away from home. She had never held a job. She had no money. She was raw from emotional wounds and plagued by physical ailments. She regarded
outsiders with a fear bred from a childhood that was booby-trapped by her mother's mental illness.
But Roxanne was also brilliant, tough and ready to create a life for herself.
At 32, Ms. Smith is a strong, solid pillar of a woman with a deep, rich voice. She suffers from aggressive arthritis -- her right hand bears scars from surgery to replace and fuse joints -- and psoriasis, a chronic skin disease exacerbated by stress.
Passion for knowledge
She has a gift for talk -- "In a previous life, I must have kissed the Blarney Stone" -- and a passion for soaking up knowledge, from the cosmic to the minute. Last year, she won a spot in the national pool of finalists to appear on the "Jeopardy" quiz show.
The immediate story of her transformation begins at Marian House, which is run by the Sisters of Mercy and the School Sisters of Notre Dame.
It was there, in January 1990, that she met Sister Kathleen Feeley, who was then president of the college. The two women fell easily into a six-hour "talk-a-thon," Roxanne unaware that this volunteer possessed the power to transform her life.
That conversation, which ranged over history, current events, civil rights and literature, persuaded Sister Kathleen to offer Roxanne a four-year scholarship to college. The nun remembers being surprised by the range of their discussion, an anomaly in a place where talk usually concerns personal problems.
"Roxanne had the most lively interest in life," says Sister Kathleen. "I didn't know a thing about her, but every topic I introduced, she could speak about. "One time she described something as a Machiavellian tactic. I said, 'Do you know Machiavelli?' And she said, 'Well, I've never read "The Prince," but I know the principles he expounded.'
"She told me her grandmother had taught her to read when she was 4 years old. That she would sit on her grandmother's lap to read the Bible and that when her grandmother's eyes got too bad, she could read the Bible to her.
"And I thought, 'This is an unusual one.' "
Her mother's illness
Roxanne Celeste Smith was born May 17, 1961, in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington. At the time, her mother Florence was a patient there, undergoing treatment for paranoid schizophrenia.
The fifth of six children, Roxanne met her mother when she was 4 1/2 years old. Until then, she was raised by her maternal grandparents, Robert and Florence Gantt at "what amounted to a small farm" in Glendale, Md. She remembers flourishing in a world of affectionate adults who called her "Annie."
"I thought my grandparents were my parents until my parents showed up," Roxanne recalls. "That first day I met my mother, I called my grandmother 'Mama.' My mother literally exploded and it scared the hell out of me. From that moment on, she focused on me because I was the only child she didn't raise from birth. She would say things like, 'I can't be sure that you're really my daughter.'
"It went downhill from that first day until I was 28."
Florence Smith first developed her mental illness while she was a sergeant in the Air Force; she was discharged when she married fellow serviceman Herbert Smith. In the late 1950s, Florence began attempting to control her disease with hospitalization, talk therapy and medication. No treatment worked for very long.
After Mr. Smith died from kidney disease when Roxanne was 8, Florence sold their house and moved the family five times in six years -- they lived in Forestville, Laurel, Silver Spring, Hyattsville and Takoma Park -- making it very difficult for the children to settle into schools or communities.
The 1970s were devastating. Four of the Smith children dropped out -- or were kicked out -- of high school. Then Roxanne's older sister Gail discovered she had developed schizophrenia. She committed suicide in her early 20s.
While Keith and Michael Smith made new lives for themselves in the Army, Roxanne remained at home with her younger brother, Robert, and oldest sister, Jan.
School provided no relief. Although Roxanne had a wonderful time in her Head Start program -- it was there she discovered her love for classical music -- she entered first grade in a county that was predominantly white and hostile to desegregation. For a while, she and her younger brother Robert were the only black children in their elementary school in Glendale.
"It was like perpetual teasing and taunting," she recalls. "They would say things like 'Hershey bar,' really stupid little racial things, and 'nigger,' of course. And I just went into a shell from it. It was rotten. It was awful. And it was a common experience."
By the time Roxanne got to Northwestern High School in Hyattsville in 1977, fellow students also were jeering at her weight.
'I identified with Mr. Spock'
"Kids pick on people who are different, and I was different in a lot of ways," she says. "I identified with Mr. Spock on 'Star Trek,' the ultimate intellectual who's lost because he's not part of one culture or the other."
Roxanne began to skip school in favor of the public library -- the one place where no one disturbed her. She read novels. She read dictionaries and encyclopedias, anything.
"I read every book that library had about ancient history. And I would read anything I could get on Assyro-Babylonian cultures and Egyptian culture and Roman culture and ancient Greece. I read anything that was even partially related to what we should be doing academically. I read a lot of Shakespeare. I read a lot of poetry and a lot of science."
She would show up in class on test days and pass the tests.
In March, 1978, the county school system expelled Roxanne for truancy.
"I thought at the time it was a blessing because I didn't actually have to make the decision. And I was happy to be kicked out of school because I was just tired of that kind of thing.
"Soon after, I realized it was the worst mistake I'd ever made because I wouldn't have a high school diploma. And I wanted to go to college."
Instead, she drifted along, lost in her chaotic home life, for the next 11 years. Every day, every night, Roxanne remembers fighting with her mother, except for times when Florence was hospitalized and the teen-agers were home by themselves.
During that time, Roxanne relied on books and television for peace of mind.
An Anglophile, she is very fond of the humor of P. G. Wodehouse and Monty Python and the sensibilities of the "old" Masterpiece Theatre. During those years at home, she devoured British "comedy-of-manners novels" and watched "Fred and Ginger movies, anything that was old and funny." She wrote stories and listened to classical music, especially Rachmaninoff.
And she became increasingly depressed, angry and frightened of the world.
No place to go
"We all had rocky relationships with my Mom," says 29-year-old Robert Smith, who works in the parts department of an auto dealership in Silver Spring. He looks after his mother with the help of his 39-year-old sister Jan.
"She could fly off at anything; any time you'd walk through the door you wouldn't know what to expect. . . . Some of the kids left or got away. But Roxanne got agoraphobia [fear of going outside]. If you didn't have the chance to get away [from the situation], it made it 1,000 times worse. There was no place for Roxanne to go. . . . She had to get out any way she could."
Roxanne moved from the apartment in Takoma Park to Springfield Hospital Center to Marian House in only two months, a bumpy transition at best.
"I hadn't dealt with people for years," she says. "I didn't know if I had the skills to interact anymore.
"At first, I felt the same as I did in school. We were all there because something had gone wrong, but I thought the others saw me as being strange the same way the kids in school saw me as being strange."
Roxanne had grown up in a world where the only consistent rules were the ones she imposed on herself. She felt confined by such house regulations as chores, curfews, drug testing, counseling and mandatory savings.
"Sometimes it felt like boot camp for homeless people," she says.
Like most Marian House residents, Roxanne arrived with anger and resentment; the staff recalls her combatively sharp tongue. But her differences were also apparent.
"Nobody would watch 'Jeopardy' with her because she would answer everything before anyone else could," recalls assistant director Terry Almon.
"She didn't have minor children who were major concerns," says Sister Augusta Reilly, executive director of the program. "She didn't have any history of substance abuse. She didn't have the same kind of street smarts. She was an intellectual who had been victimized in a different way. There was probably a bit of xenophobia [on the part of the other residents]. Even though she was a black woman -- and two-thirds to three-quarters of our women are -- she didn't fit the profile that was typical. . . . She had to struggle here."
"Roxanne's been able to work for herself in a positive light," says Mr. Almon. "A lot of our women can't do that because they return to their destructive relationships. Not Roxanne."
Roxanne's inner sanctum is a room with three windows, two chairs, a "confusion of books," various stuffed animals -- "Mr. Bear" came from a caller giveaway at a radio station -- a TV, a boom box and her GED, framed by her psychiatrist at Springfield. She tapes copies of her most recent grades to the wall to provide focus and inspiration.
Since 1991, she has lived in the Calverton, the state's first permanent housing facility for homeless women. The building, on Calvert and 25th streets, was renovated by the Women's Housing Coalition, which Roxanne now serves as a board member.
Roxanne borrows a computer and an office at the Calverton; she's often there as late as 1:30 a.m., working on papers.
She's sprinting along the home stretch of a 19-credit semester: Latin poetry, ethics, contemporary philosophy, broadcast journalism, and communication theory and research. She's also working in the college's purchasing department -- a job she has held for the past four years -- and working two days a week at the City Life Museums.
No complaints.
Roxanne credits part of her success to her brothers and sister, various friends, Sister Kathleen and Steve Vicchio, the philosophy teacher who has challenged her, counselled her and made her laugh.
"The most important thing about Roxanne's story is that she XTC probably would have been successful in her life no matter who she met," Dr. Vicchio says. "She's bright and articulate, incredibly hard-working and one of the most focused people I have ever seen."
"It was very clear from early on that Roxanne would go as far as she wanted to go. She needed to do two things: She needed to apply those abilities she had to material she didn't know yet. And she needed to have more confidence in her abilities."
He recalls her early battles with Latin.
"Nine students out of 10 would find an ancient language like that daunting. If they weren't successful right away, they would give it up. It takes a pretty tough person to learn the dative. But Roxanne's like that with everything.
"Her philosophical interests are not in back-burner problems, they are in things like why people suffer and whether there's a God and whether there's an objective standard for morality."
"When I came here, I was literally afraid of everything," Roxanne says. "Dr. Vicchio and I bet on whether I would get into Yale or Harvard. Recently, I said, 'I didn't think I would get into Chicago.' And he said, 'I beg to differ with you; you didn't think you'd get into anything.' And it's true."
Perhaps the greatest reward of teaching, says Sister Kathleen Feeley, is seeing students change their lives with new, powerful ideas.
"But you must set up the situation to make it possible," she says. "Transformation isn't easy. In the beginning, Roxanne would take two steps forward and one step backward. My heart would sink when she dropped out of a course. I remember being conscious about what kind of support and patience people need, about the fact that someone can't do a 180-degree turn without faltering."
Singled out throughout her life, Roxanne has now become an inspirational symbol, a public service announcement for what can happen when determination meets up with the right kind of help.
"With the circumstances under which I came to Notre Dame, I do feel under the microscope at times," she says. "It's not a bad thing, but it's just there. And I don't want to get caught up in it."
However, she does want to express -- over and over and over -- her indescribable gratitude at this gift of a college education.
"What Dr. Vicchio calls 'A life of the mind' has been my aspiration since I was about 7 years old," she says. "This is the first place I've ever been that I felt like I've belonged. I get up every day knowing I'm going to walk up that hill, go into those classes moaning about how awful the workload is -- and be having the time of my life!
"I'm still poor. I've still got problems physically. And emotionally, I'll still be fighting that battle against depression.
"But my dream is here. It has been given to me. As long as I keep following it, I'll be living my dream. And that's the best anybody can hope for. There's nothing beyond that."