Читать книгу When Demons Float - Susan Thistlethwaite - Страница 15

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Tuesday morning

I watched as the early morning light slowly illuminated our scruffy kitchen, piteously picking out the holes in the linoleum floor and the light sheen of grease on the faded orange walls. “Gotta call that contractor,” I thought for about the thousandth time.

I was sipping yet another cup of dark coffee and letting my mind settle. I had been up for a couple of hours, finishing the revision of my lesson plan for this morning. This semester I was teaching a class about the American religious reformers that had protested the greed and exploitation that had been so common from the late 19th into the mid-20th century. This movement was called the “Social Gospel.” These reformers had taken on the excesses of industrialization, and some of them had even confronted the outright terrorism visited upon freed African Americans in the same period. Like lynching.

The reading I had already assigned for today sure fit what had happened on campus yesterday. The students were supposed to have read W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic work, The Souls of Black Folk. My original lesson plan had been to use its penetrating sociological analysis to get into a broad discussion of the tenor of his times, including, as he put it, “the problem of the color line.” But now, as I had reworked it, I thought I’d first get the class to focus on what had happened on our campus and then bring up Du Bois, the African American intellectual who had been so revolted by the weekly reports of lynching when he had been a college student at Fisk. And I hoped I’d help them realize how the merciless repetition of those horrors had shaped his views forever. To do that, I was going to have to literally show lynching as it had been photographed, the white population wanting to make a spectacle of this horror. I had been going over those images, and I could still see them in wavy duplicates in my mind’s eye.

Would the students then see the pathetic coil of rope that had briefly hung on a tree on the main quad for the hateful threat it was, or would they tune it out? Probably yes, and no.

Suddenly, my cell phone rang. It startled me. It wasn’t even 7 a.m. I picked up my phone and turned it over. It was Adelaide.

My stomach clenched, hoping it was not more bad news. But, as I pressed “accept,” I knew Adelaide was unlikely to call me at this hour with some really good news.

“Yes, Adelaide?” I said.

“Ah, yes, Kristin?” Adelaide said tentatively.

“Yes,” I said dryly. What was this about?

“Well, I wondered if you would come in a little early this morning. Say about 8:15? I know you have a class at 9, but this shouldn’t take too long. No, really, not long.”

Her voice dropped and the last words seemed to sink and then stop of their own weight.

What?

“What the heck is the matter, Adelaide?” I asked. I was tired and had looked at too many hideous photographs to be diplomatic.

“Well, we’ll go over that when you get here, okay?” Adelaide said, ducking and covering like an administrator.

I was having none of it.

“No. Please just give it to me straight. What’s this about?”

“Well, you see, Dr. Abubakar called me last night. He objects to sharing an office because it gives him no privacy for prayer. I’d like to see if you and I can work out an alternative.”

Well, she was right. This wasn’t something to hash out on the phone at dawn.

“Yeah, alright. I’ll be at your office around 8:15. I need to go and get dressed. Good-bye.”

Adelaide said a stilted good-bye as well and hung up.

I started to put away my phone, and my eye fell on my texting app. I opened it, and I spent a couple of enjoyable minutes re-reading Tom’s and my texts from the previous evening. And then I carefully deleted each one and sent them to the trash icon, so they’d be truly gone. Not a good idea for the boys to see those texts. Then I went upstairs to get dressed, trying not to resent Abubakar. But, I mused, if you go out to deliberately recruit a devout Muslim, you can scarcely expect they’ll behave like liberal Protestants. Yet, it seemed like I had. Go figure.

✳ ✳ ✳

“You can’t be serious!” I exploded.

I had gone directly to Adelaide’s office when I arrived at our building, and she had just floated the idea to me of sharing an office with Donald Willie instead of Abubakar.

“Well, it’s not ideal, I grant you that,” said Adelaide, still being tentative. I didn’t like the tentative Adelaide at all. Events were taking a toll on her. I could see it in the deepened lines on her face. I struggled with my temper.

“Look, Adelaide, it wouldn’t work. Even if Donald agreed, and he won’t, I’d certainly end up punching him out before the end of the first week. It’s not only unworkable, it’s dangerous.”

I managed to say this in somewhat of a wry tone of voice so she’d think I was joking. I actually wasn’t joking.

I sat and thought for a minute.

“You know, Adelaide, Rockefeller Chapel has private prayer rooms.”

“I know that as well, Kristin,” Adelaide snapped back. “It’s the first thing I suggested. Aduba says the chapel is too far away for him to pray during the day and get back to class or meetings. It is all the way across campus.” Then Adelaide gave a deep sigh.

“Well, until we can figure out something permanent, what about giving Abubakar a key to Hercules’s office so he can pray in private?” Hercules Abraham, retired Professor of Judaism, was away visiting his family in France for this whole fall semester. He still had an office because he did teach part-time for us despite being over eighty.

Adelaide had a considering look on her face. I knew she was torn by having such a large office still occupied by a retired professor, but he did help out a lot with our diminished teaching staff.

She nodded.

“It’s a good idea. Let me email Hercules and ask him if that’s okay, and then I’ll run it by Aduba.”

Adelaide opened her computer as if to put act to word, but I still sat there, thinking.

She looked at me quizzically, her bushy, grey eyebrows raised.

“What are you thinking about now?” she rasped, not seeming at all happy I was still thinking.

“I was thinking we need a more permanent solution,” I said. “What about renovating that empty storage room right next to the faculty assistant’s office and making it a permanent prayer room? There’s nothing in it now that the cleaners bring their own equipment.”

Not, in fact, that much cleaning ever did happen on our floor, but two years ago the university had hired an outside firm to do whatever cleaning did get done, and they seemed to bring what they needed each time.

“Well . . . .” Adelaide said, considering. “We do need a permanent solution, but there’s no budget for that, Kristin, and we can’t just stick someone in a dirty, old closet to pray.”

I wrestled with myself and then blurted out, “I’ll donate the money to fix it up, but it has to be anonymous, okay?”

Adelaide knew about my inherited wealth, though I hoped she was the only one of my colleagues who did. She also knew I was touchy about it.

Before she could reply, however, I had a genuinely good idea.

“Let’s name the prayer room for Ay-seong Kim. We could, you know, do it really well, and dedicate it to her.”

Ah-seong was a student who drowned on campus the previous year. She had been a lovely young woman, and she had suffered a lot of abuse in her short life.

“Oh, Kristin, what a lovely thought. Really, really lovely.” Adelaide looked down at her veined hands, now clenched on the desk. I knew the reasons that dedication would be very meaningful to Adelaide herself, as well as difficult. She had suffered some abuse as well.

I coughed a little, choking back my own emotion.

“Alright then,” I said, trying for a neutral tone. “If you’ll get permission from whomever, I’ll contact my lawyers. We can have it designed and built this fall and then schedule the dedication. Tell the powers-that-be there’s an anonymous donation for it.”

I got up to leave.

Adelaide looked up at me, tears behind her thick glasses. She just nodded.

Look at that. Necessity could be the mother of compassion.

✳ ✳ ✳

I looked around the seminar table. The students were going through their usual motions of doing one last check of their phones for any breaking text messages, getting out their books, putting laptops on the table, and slurping beverages from to-go cups, but I didn’t think I was imagining their tension. Cups were gripped a little too tightly, shoulders were up around their ears, and their eyes were looking everywhere but at me. I hooked up my own computer to the overhead projector, and the screen automatically came down at the far end of the room. The hum it made in descending sounded abnormally loud.

“You’ll not need your own computers and not even the book right now,” I said. “But you will need your cell phones.”

That got a reaction. A few people looked up quizzically. Zhang Mei, a Chinese student, looked up in alarm. I was actually surprised to see her face. Normally her long dark hair hung down on either side of her face, hiding it as she bent over her computer, taking careful notes. I knew from a couple of short book reviews I had already assigned that her written English was excellent, but she had never spoken in class except when I had called on each student to introduce themselves. She was a Christian, and, if she were typical of the Chinese Christian population, likely conservative Protestant. She had said she was a math major. I wondered at that brief look of alarm. Did she know something about what had happened yesterday?

I looked around at the whole class, waiting for them to settle. Before I formally started this class, I wanted to tell them up front what was going to happen and give each one of them the freedom to decide if this was something they could take. I was a big believer in what were called “trigger warnings,” that is, letting people know that distressing issues would be brought up and letting them opt out if they wanted. This university was famous for its supposed tough stand against faculty taking care to warn students about troubling topics ahead of time. I personally thought that was idiotic. I knew trauma and what it could do to you. I knew it all too well from times I had been on the receiving end of violence.

It was only natural that today was going to be hard on everybody, including me. My main educational goal in this class was to show lynching for what it really was. It was terrorism of the most brutal kind. And I was not going to let them stay a century or more away. We’d start with our own campus, as I’d planned early this morning.

I took a breath and looked around the table. They were back to hiding from me and perhaps from each other. A few thousand students is actually a pretty small community in the age of social media. I wondered what, if anything, they really knew about who hung yesterday’s noose.

I cleared my throat and began.

“You know what happened on campus yesterday. A noose was hung on a tree on the main quadrangle.”

I could hear their breathing change, with sighs, small gasps, and one sharp intake of breath.

“Today will be a difficult class, and you know I respect the effect of trauma on people. If you feel at any point this class is becoming too hard for you, you may step out with no questions asked, and you will get full credit for the class.”

I looked around. Everyone except Jordan Jameson, a computer major who, for some reason, was taking another religion class with me, was looking down. Jordan was looking right at me, and he actually looked a little bored. Probably because there was nothing in what I was saying he dared make a joke about. “Not yet, anyway,” I told myself and sighed inwardly.

I waited, giving them time to take in what I had said. There were a couple of students I was worried about. Emma Olson was a Philosophy and Religion major. She was from Wisconsin, and she’d been in my classes before. She was a Protestant liberal and planning on going to seminary. She had told me privately she was a survivor of sexual assault, and I was concerned that perhaps this campus incident could hook some of her bad memories.

I glanced at Jayden Johnson, a junior. Her African American mother was a faculty member here in the Center for Race, Politics and Culture. Her white father was a lawyer, I thought. In her self-introduction in the first class, she had been very clipped, very clear that she wanted a career as an activist, not an academic. I imagined she knew the history of lynching well, but that was no safeguard against pain.

A couple of the others I thought would be okay, though distressed, with what would be presented. John Vandenberg, also a Philosophy and Religion major, was of Dutch ancestry and had gone to a very religiously conservative undergraduate school in western Michigan. Shouldn’t project, though, should I? I told myself. I realized I had no concrete way to know what John’s feelings about this class might be.

Two other international students rounded out the group. Vihaan Acharya, a senior, was from India. He was an economics major, and I had assumed he was in the class because he was filling out a humanities distribution requirement. He rarely spoke in class. Nari Kim, from Korea, was pre-med and quite clear she was exploring her traditional Christian beliefs, even questioning them. She actually reminded me a little of Ay-seong Kim in that way.

“Okay, then, but remember, at any point you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. Now, please open up your cell phones and bring up any photos you may have received of the events on campus yesterday, especially the noose and various reactions to it.”

There was a little rustling while they did that, but since they basically lived through their phones, their dexterity with them was astonishing.

I went to the saved images on my computer where I had transferred them from my phone and projected them.

“Here’s the first photo I took when I arrived on campus.”

I thought I wouldn’t remind them of my consulting status with the campus police, just in case anybody wanted to confess. I doubted it, though.

The resolution on the screen was good. My cell phone camera took a pretty sharp photo. The cheap rope shimmered as the morning dew that had settled on the coil was backlit by the rising sun.

“I also got a lot of images forwarded to me by others, but I won’t display those. What did you get, and what did you think when the photos arrived in your inbox?”

“I thought, ‘What the hell kind of a sick joke is this?’” Jordan said, jumping in first. As usual. “Then I just deleted it, but my idiot friends just kept sending more and more so I finally gave up with the deleting and grabbed something to eat at the Uni.” The Uni was a fast food cafeteria right off the main quadrangle.

So, I thought, Jordan might have been near the quadrangle.

“Well, some of us couldn’t eat after we saw the noose, you know?” Jayden said through her teeth. “We were like nauseated.”

“Uni food can do that too,” Jordan drawled.

Jayden reached into a little purse she had on the table and took out a tissue. She held it out like she was going to give it to Jordan, and then she said dryly, “Here. You can use this to wipe that white privilege off your face.” She paused. “Oh, wait. You can’t. It’s like drawn on with permanent, white marker.”

A few people chuckled.

I was ready to step in if that exchange escalated, but Jayden had actually shut Jordan up pretty effectively.

“I thought it was awful, just awful,” Emma said with a catch in her throat. “I showed it to my roommate, and we couldn’t believe it. It’s disgusting, and vile, and I think whoever did it should just quit school, and leave. They don’t belong here.” Emma got out her own tissue and blew her nose.

“Well, there’s another side to this,” John said slowly, as he tapped a photo on his phone. I could see it was not of the noose, but of the flyer.

“Another side?” Jayden asked, ice coating each word.

“Yeah. Some people are really upset about this department hiring a Muslim guy and then him boasting about America being African. What’s up with that?” John looked challengingly around the room.

“Perhaps,” Nari said softly, “if you actually attended the lecture you could find out ‘what’s up with that’ and learn something. I think that’s the point of a university education, don’t you?”

Well. Nari was stepping up. Her words may have been soft, but the point penetrated, I thought, looking at John’s pale face, now flushing with embarrassment, or was it anger?

Jayden smiled at Nari.

“This image of the noose is a reference to the American history of lynching, correct? From the time after the Civil War, I believe,” Vihaan contributed.

“Yes,” I said. “I think in part it is. But now, as John’s remarks show, it is being used against a Muslim professor here, trying to create enough havoc that his lecture might be postponed, or even cancelled.”

I paused. Since it was Vihaan who had spoken, I thought this was a good time to bring up how global lynching is, even today.

“Lynching is an American word, but the use of mob violence, including public hanging, happens all around the world. In fact,” I looked right at Vihaan, “I believe in India, for example, lynching as a public display of anger has happened and is happening right now, correct? I think there’s a phenomenon of ‘cow lynching’ directed against Muslims, right?”

Vihaan sat back abruptly in his chair. It was a physical display of distancing. He must have thought this whole contentious issue had nothing to do with him as an Indian. Just the feckless Americans going at each other again.

He didn’t answer.

“They lynch cows?” Jordan burst out laughing.

Vihaan actually rose slightly in his chair, ready to stand in outrage, I thought.

I made a small hand gesture for him to sit, and I jumped in to prevent any more insult.

“No, Jordan, no. Cows are sacred in India to Hindus. The lynching is directed at those suspected of killing and eating cows, especially Muslims.”

I turned to Vihaan.

“But there’s more it than that, isn’t there?”

I didn’t think he was going to answer, but then he spoke slowly.

“Yes. Yes there is. Our Prime Minister has a kind of ‘cow-whistle’ politics to promote Hindu nationalism, like your American President has a ‘dog-whistle politics’ about race to promote whites. And yes, it is directed against Muslims. They are accused of being ‘cow-eaters’ and that justifies killing or injuring them. But it’s a way to just say, ‘you’re not Hindu, and we don’t want you here.’ It is terrible.”

“It is.” I gestured at the noose, glistening on the screen at the front of the room.

“Thanks, Vihaan. That was really helpful. All of you. Try to get this. There is a kind of universal vocabulary to lynching. It is a social threat. There is ceremonial shedding of blood. Human blood. The mutilated body is displayed in triumph. The victims are those who are being literally expelled from community by death. And why? So that one group can assert dominance.”

“Chinese too,” came a whisper from Mei. “In California, Los Angeles. Seventeen Chinese men lynched.”

“When was this?” Jayden gasped, looking horrified.

“1871. Every Chinese knows.”

“Wow. I didn’t. Sorry to hear.”

“Yes,” I nodded. “In fact, that is one of the largest incidences of lynching in American history and almost totally unknown.” I cleared my throat. “There’s a lot many of us don’t know about lynching, not only in the United States, but globally. But after the break, we’ll focus specifically on the U.S. history.”

I gave them a generous break. I was sure they needed it, and so did I.

✳ ✳ ✳

I got some coffee from the hall and then came back. I took down the noose photo and connected to the Internet.

Everybody came back except John. Well, I’d said they could leave without penalty.

“Here’s how this part of the class will go. I plan to show you a series of actual photos of lynching, while also asking each person in the class to read a couple of lines of a poem by Richard Wright called ‘Between the World and Me.’

“I have made copies and I have one for each of you, and I have highlighted the lines I’d like you to read. Your name is on the paper.”

Emma raised her hand.

“Yes, Emma?”

“I thought that was by that guy Coates. He like writes for the New York Times and stuff?”

“Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a book by that title, true, but the words are from Wright’s poem. Coates’s book is worth reading if you have not done so. It is in the form of a letter to his teenage son. The original, the poem, I mean, is much older. The reference is on the paper.”

I started to hand out the papers and registered again that John was missing.

“Jordan, would you read John’s part as well?”

He had been looking at his phone, but he seemed to hear me and just nodded, not being a smart-ass for once.

I handed the copies to Nari who was closest to me and she started passing them. They were now almost all so tense their arms moved like robots to take a copy and pass it.

“Let me read you part of what Du Bois wrote about hearing about lynching while he was a college student at Fisk when he was basically the same age as you are now.” I turned to my notes.

‘“Lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days: from 1885 through 1894, seventeen hundred Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon my soul, and led me on to conceive the plight of other minority groups; for in my college days Italians were lynched in New Orleans [and there were] anti-Chinese riots, echoes of Jewish segregation and pogroms in Russia.”

I looked up.

“See, that’s what Mei pointed out. The riots included Chinese lynching. And more groups considered alien others.

“That’s more than one per week, week after week, month after month, year after year. And it changed Du Bois. As he says, it scarred him. And it changed his whole career as an intellectual, I believe.”

I looked at the class and waited a moment.

“‘Seventeen hundred.’ Let that sink in. Now, I’m going to start the slide show from this website. These are postcards of actual photos of lynchings, collected by James Allen over twenty-five years. I’ll show it twice, once with the narration on and then silently as each of you to read in turn the portion of the Wright poem highlighted on your individual paper.”

I pressed “play” and the voice narrated the finding of these nauseating postcard images of burned bodies, tortured sometimes almost beyond recognition as human, with crowds of white spectators, often in their Sunday best, gathered around with evident satisfaction, even pleasure on their faces, taking pride at their role in the ruination of these human beings.

But this time, I didn’t watch the film. I watched the students. Jordan’s smirk was gone. Emma was crying again. The others mostly stared with expressions ranging from shock to resignation to anger. Jayden’s lips were tight, her eyes lasered on the screen.

The video came to its grisly end.

I touched mute and signaled to Nari who had the first line. I started the video again and the photos showed the charred proof of the poet’s words. The students’ voices rose and fell, some choking out the words, some reading so softly the sound did not make it around the table, some reading each word like it had nothing to do with the ones next to it, and a couple reading with angry hisses, willing the words away. But still they rose and fell, certain words too powerful to be stilled, either with anger or hesitation, words like “a scorched coil of greasy hemp,” or “trousers still with black blood,” or “a drained gin-flask,” or “gasoline,” and “thirsty voices,” with “a thousand faces,” and “a blaze of red.”

I had noted each reader and her or his voice. Anger was certainly justified, as was sobbing or whispering. I compared their voices reading the sections of the poem to their earlier remarks. Did anyone sitting at this table know or even suspect who had hung our very own coil of rope? I couldn’t tell. I hoped someone would be moved enough to tell me at some point.

I let them go early. They were all looking shell-shocked. I know I felt like the class had already been going on for days.