Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Next steps Under a picture of herself, William Fleming High School senior Salena Sullivan studies for final exams at home in Roanoke. Salena graduates at the top of her class today and will attend Harvard on a full scholarship.

An extended family Salena Sullivan (bottom), who has a longtime connection to the Gainsboro branch library, is surrounded by mentors (from left) Lynette Lynch, Mariam Correia, Tanya Sullivan and librarian Carla Lewis. With an attentive ear and a world of wisdom, Lewis has been influential in the lives of both Salena, and her mother, Tanya.

All smiles Salena Sullivan (right), laughs with mother, Tanya, at their home in Roanoke. The 17-year-old Salena, who spent her early years in the Hurt Park public housing complex, was nurtured amid the Gainsboro library stacks. She is graduating today from William Fleming High School.

The big one Salena Sullivan had offers from several prominent colleges and universities, but she held out for the elite: Harvard. She told her interviewer that the only way she could attend is on a full ride.

When her baby girl was just 6 weeks old, Tanya Sullivan wasn't sure whether it was safe yet to take her outside. She might catch a cold, the single mother worried.

Sullivan didn't call the pediatrician for advice. She called the ultimate authority, Carla Lewis.

Sullivan's longtime mentor, Lewis runs the Gainsboro branch library, which has long been black Roanoke's intellectual hub.

Lewis still remembers Salena Sullivan cooing from her car seat that day, perched atop the library counter.

As a toddler, Salena took naps on the library's bay window seats. As a teenage library page, Salena went to France with her high school class, compliments of regular patrons who pitched in to help her mother pay for the trip.

So it was fitting that Salena, now 17 and William Fleming High School's No. 1-ranked student, was sitting next to the library's front counter when she checked her e-mail for college acceptance letters.

The University of Chicago, Agnes Scott College, Davidson College, Mary Baldwin College -- they'd already accepted her, some offering full rides.

But Lewis and every regular at the Gainsboro library knew Salena was holding out for the big one. They'd been talking about it since her freshman year:

Our girl at Harvard. Wouldn't that be something?

At 5:10 p.m. March 31, Cambridge gave their girl the electronic nod.

Old men put down the newspapers they were reading and wept. Lewis screamed.

Salena may have been born into a life in the projects. But she was nurtured amid the Gainsboro library stacks by the leaders of Roanoke's black community -- and by her fiercely independent mom.

If the money would just come through, the library's child was going to Harvard University.

A book in hand
Though her teachers swore she had to be older than she was, Salena was just 2 when her mother enrolled her in day care. Already potty trained, she knew her colors, numbers and letters by heart.

At the time, Tanya Sullivan worked split shifts driving a school bus. They were living at the former Hurt Park public housing complex, with no car. So Sullivan took her daughter to day care on the city bus then caught another bus for work.

Salena's teachers at Grandin Court Elementary recall her first day of kindergarten. When it came time for mom to leave, she didn't cry or hang on to a security toy.

She clutched a book.

How did her mother foster the child's intellect? People ask her that all the time.

"I just experienced life with her," she said. "I was always showing her things, telling her what everything was, talking to her. I wanted her to be curious, that's all."

Ask the Fleming teenager the same question, and she turns it right back around: "I had the most awesome mommy in the world, and I had her all to myself. It was like love concentrate."

Tanya Sullivan herself had been a solid C student. But she stayed out of trouble and, when she took her first job as a page at the Gainsboro library at the age of 15, she impressed Lewis with her work ethic. When Lewis needed someone to run a book to a neighborhood patron who wasn't feeling well, Sullivan was always the first to volunteer.

One of six children and reared by a single mom, Sullivan had never met anyone like Lewis. As elegant as she was intelligent, Lewis commanded respect from patrons young and old. She could shush a rowdy teenager with the raise of an eyebrow. Patrons still bring her roses from their gardens.

"When I first met her, I was used to having teachers I'd looked up to. But Miss Lewis was the first black woman who was more than just a teacher to me; she was a mother, too," Tanya Sullivan recalled.

It was Lewis who co-signed for Sullivan when she applied for her first savings account, Lewis who helped her fill out job applications, Lewis who drove her to take the Army enlistment test.

When she became pregnant with Salena at the age of 26, Sullivan was stationed in Germany, where she drove tractor-trailers for the Army. She knew she had no future with the father of her child, to say nothing of raising a baby alone in the military.

She hadn't told anyone at home she was pregnant yet, but Sullivan wound up her courage, deposited a bunch of quarters into a pay phone and made the international call: "Miss Lewis, I have something to tell you. ..."

"Whatever your decision is, I'll support you," Lewis said.

But there was no decision to be made. Sullivan was coming home. She lived with her mother at Hurt Park for a few years then got an apartment of her own in the same public housing development.

Lewis will never forget visiting them there one afternoon -- hearing the bad language, witnessing the open-air drug deals. It wouldn't do, not for her girls.

She encouraged Sullivan to save and, later, to apply for a first-time homebuyer loan. They talked about the American dream to own a home.

"Tanya's a go-getter," Lewis said. "If you help her come up with a plan, she will figure out how to pull it off."

Salena remembers how thrilled her mom was when she found their house -- a two-bedroom ranch on a quiet street in Northwest Roanoke.

They moved in just before Salena's eighth birthday, and Lewis had her wish: The Sullivan girls were miles away from Hurt Park.

Ivy League interview
"Business casual" was the look Salena was going for when she interviewed with Harvard alumnus John Fishwick for admission to the prestigious school. She learned the dress code phrase from "What Not to Wear," one of her favorite TV shows.

She had arrived a half-hour early at Fishwick's Roanoke law office wearing a suit jacket, a wrap skirt and high heels. She was so nervous her teeth chattered.

Though she didn't know it, the next class of Harvard freshmen would turn out to be the most elite in the school's history. Only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied were accepted.

In Salena's memory, she bumbled the first couple of questions, then relaxed when it came time to talk about how hard her mother worked to support her, first as a bus driver and, more recently, as a maintenance mechanic for the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

To send her to France, her mother had even taken a second job, cleaning office buildings at night.

If Salena did get accepted to Harvard, she told Fishwick, the only way she could go was on a full ride.

The lawyer was impressed by her candor and her humility, not to mention her resume: She'd been a leader in theater and dance productions at Fleming, she'd helped at-risk kids at summer school, she'd tutored immigrant families.

And her grade-point average, with her weighted International Baccalaureate courses, just happened to be 4.46 -- better, even, than the genius kid who skipped two grades before knocking all the top-ranked seniors out of their slots, save for Salena. ("For a while, my friends and I talked about locking him in the basement!" she joked.)

"Harvard is trying to reach out to students who don't have much in the way of finances but who have already accomplished great things," Fishwick said. "Salena's done that, and she's done it with a great spirit -- not drawing attention to herself or patting herself on the back."

At Fleming, in fact, she is decidedly not business casual, preferring rumpled Oxford shirts and hippie skirts over suit jackets. She carries a backpack full of textbooks, along with a tote bag for her pleasure-reading books -- which she sometimes reads, while walking, between classes.

Salena wakes up just 20 minutes before school starts, usually because she's stayed up late studying in her bed, which is piled high with papers and books and dwarfed by a poster of Prince, her rock-star idol.

She drives a 1989 Chevy Cavalier wagon with peeling blue paint without embarrassment. A gift from an old boyfriend who had considered it ready for the dump, Salena jumped at the chance to have it. (In addition to being the resident maintenance guru for the Villages at Lincoln, her mom also fixes cars.)

"She talks to everybody at school, relates to everybody," said Liza Deck, her dance instructor since middle school. "But what I love most about her is she's not afraid to be great at many things. That's unusual; many students with her talents don't want people to see them, or they're afraid people will be jealous.

"Salena is completely fearless," Deck added.

Best friend Emily Hannah thinks she will easily hold her own at Harvard.

Salena's been known to politely correct her teachers in class, Hannah explained. When someone challenges an argument of hers in class, "she can get cutthroat."

"The only thing I worry about is that she'll put too much academic pressure on herself" -- a concern seconded by her mother.

Not long ago, Hannah was studying for a math test -- a comprehensive exam that involved material that Salena herself hadn't studied in more than a year. But it didn't keep her from coaching Hannah, rattling off complicated algebraic problems from memory.

"I see her becoming a professor," Hannah said. "I really think that's the only way to utilize all the resources in her head."

'Being Carla Lewis'
The day the financial aid notice arrived in Salena's inbox, the mood at the Gainsboro library was jubilant. Lewis printed the e-mail out -- for her local black-history files -- and then called everyone she knew.

The annual award was $49,650, leaving Salena to come up with just $1,200 a year. Within days, a Kiwanis scholarship came through to take care of the rest.

"Harvard, is that in Washington, D.C.?" her mother had asked, back when Salena first was accepted. But by the time the money notice came, Tanya Sullivan was used to the idea of her daughter showing up in Cambridge, Mass., this fall, sight unseen.

"A guy at work was saying, 'You have to call it Haaah-vid,'" Sullivan said.

"Not me," her daughter shot back. "I'm gonna be like, 'Hi, y'all. How y'all doin'?' "

At Fleming, Principal Susan Willis is so proud of Salena that she shows her off at every opportunity -- telling the mayor about her Harvard-bound valedictorian, trying to set up a meeting between her and Carilion Clinic's President and Chief Executive Officer Edward Murphy.

At the housing authority where Sullivan works, office manager Suzzette McCoy has set up her own fund for Salena. "Our girl's going to be needing some spending money," she said.

To McCoy, who's also a single mom, Sullivan's parenting is an inspiration. "She's proven to me that I can be a strong black woman, that I can raise my child by myself without leaning on another man," McCoy said. "Tanya chose not to put that confusion in Salena's life, and it paid off."

At the library, Salena still shelves books, hugs patrons and recommends new books she thinks they'd like. She wants to study ancient civilizations at Harvard, but she's also thinking seriously about taking Yiddish and fencing classes because, as she put it, "How cool would that be?!"

"I would major in 'being Carla Lewis' if I could, but I don't think they offer that -- yet."

Back in April, she envisioned the campus as being "scary, Gothic buildings, like that want to eat me."

Lewis pictured the same. She and a professor friend tried to prepare Salena for the wealth she's sure to be surrounded by in Cambridge.

"There will be rich kids with huge houses and expensive cars who'll be talking about money like it's nothing," Lewis told her. "But you can handle it."

Indeed, it had already occurred to Salena that she might be viewed as a poster child for affirmative action. Not long ago, some of her friends wondered if she might even be made fun of for attending Harvard for free.

Salena nodded, remembering her rattletrap station wagon, the old days at Hurt Park, her tote bag full of library books.

Then the library's child flipped back her long hair, as she is wont to do, and cracked up laughing.

"I don't care!" she told them. "Because, hey, I'm going to Harvard for free! How cool is that!"