Bentrice Jusu is an old soul. Don’t let her shaved head, ripped jeans, or vintage chucks (of the decidedly non-Greek kind) dissuade you. She listens with a quiet stillness that grants her a maturity beyond her years—and then she laughs. A real kid’s laugh, a raspy laugh, a belly laugh. She casts her spell and then she breaks it, reeling you in. Bentrice, a senior art major and renaissance woman from Trenton, New Jersey, kindly showed me her world one morning in late October.
Bentrice opened up to me about the non-profit she founded two summers ago, called Both Hands Artlet. The organization mentors at-risk local teenagers through the arts.
“Both Hands is my way of giving [back to]… the mentorship that saved my life in high school,” she reflects.
One mentor, an employee at the Trenton Boys and Girls Club, was especially noteworthy.
“I didn’t want to go home because of [domestic] issues,” said Jusu. I got engaged in extra-curricular activities to cover up what was really going on inside. Evonne Williams saw right through that…[I could] really become the best person I could be without any judgment.”
The mentorship spurred the idea for a program of her own.
“There are no centers directly focused on the arts or teens [in Trenton],” Jusu explained. “This attributes to high crime, high pregnancy rates, and other daunting factors in Trenton. It is my belief that if we give these teens something to look forward to, something to create, that will change.”
She piloted the program during the summer of 2011 through the Boys and Girls Club of Trenton, New Jersey, but independently directs the program out of a local high school, currently. This summer, the program ran for seven weeks using Jusu’s curriculum, six volunteer instructors and five student interns who mentored 31 teenagers.
[pagebreak]
The name of her non-profit, like her own, has a higher meaning. “It’s called ‘Both Hands’ because my last name, Jusu, means ‘the right hand of God.’ I thought about how my spirituality is my strength. I can dance, I can draw. I’m a poet as well. I always like to articulate the issues. That’s my strong suit, but what about the left side? The weakness? The tears that no one gets to see? What about the gang members? The teen that’s going to drop out of high school? So together, we’re both hands, left and right, weak and dominant. We need to build a better community, an artistic, ambidextrous community.”
Her commitment to bettering communities clearly extends to Wake Forest. She aired her video project “Robinhood Conviction,” a film that highlights Wake Forest students drowning under the burden of tuition debt, on Youtube in mid-October. In her film, she digs a massive, dirt-filled hole by Martin Residence Hall as a metaphor for the crippling financial deficit Wake Forest students face upon graduation.
“There’s this big hole. How do you get out of it? Who’s supposed to get you out of it?” She pauses. “[Yet] I’m convinced that through artistry, a story can be told properly. I’m convinced that it can get better. ‘Robinhood Conviction’ is optimism about getting one’s self out of the hole somehow.”
Her optimism is infectious. I find myself unconsciously trying to out-grin her throughout the interview and fail, hands down. When I ask Jusu about her contagious joy, she quickly catches my Maya Angelou reference and smiles.
“Many women wonder where my secret lies,” she jokes.
Upon further prodding, she reveals the source behind her non-conventional façade.
“In high school, I had a really striking appearance because I hated what Jordans would do to my peers,” she says. “You had to have Jordans to be popular, or wear Hollister jeans. I deliberately went to the thrift store and bought clothes with wild colors. I wanted to make being different, being smart a cool thing, and it worked.”
Casting a glance at my requisite sorority t-shirt, she reassures me.
“I don’t look down upon anyone who is in a sorority or anyone who is in their Ralph Lauren,” she says. “That’s how they were raised. If that’s who you are, be that! At the same time, I am very aware of who I am.”
As our interview concludes, Jusu reflects upon her life philosophy.
“I just try never to forget,” she says. “A lot of times it’s easy for me, in North Carolina, to [forget] about everything that’s happening with my family. I’m privileged to come here. I am not doing this for myself. Nothing about education is about me. I’m just delivering the message I’m able to receive from it. That would be my message—never forget your origin.”
*Article by Elena Dolman
*Photos by Lauren Lukacsko