Grace (7 page)

“But those boys
could
have hurt her,” Sally said to Justin. “Anna was terrified.”

It was the first day of school for both of them. Hunter College High School, the prestigious high school of Hunter College of the City of the University of New York. Only the city’s brightest were invited to enroll, indeed to sit for the rigorous entrance exam. Sally’s counselor picked her and when the results of the exam came, she had scored in the ninety-eighth percentile. No one was surprised. The surprise was that Sally was willing to take the train from Harlem, where she lived with her aunt and brother, and travel sixty blocks downtown to go to school in an unfamiliar neighborhood, with unfamiliar people. For her aunt, like everyone else, believed Sally was a shy girl, a girl afraid of her shadow.

They were wrong, Sally said to Justin. She stayed in her room because she loved to read. The worlds in novels were a hundred times more interesting than the world outside her room, she said.

Anna’s scores were just below the cutoff line, but it was 1974, nine short years since Malcolm X lay bleeding on the ballroom floor of the Audobon Hotel, just six years since Martin Luther King was shot to death on the balcony of a motel in Tennessee. Hunter had found itself under the microscope: a public institution in a so-called liberal city that, except for a smattering of black, brown, and yellow faces, was lily white. There was evidence of the Old Boys’ Club at work, that not everyone had achieved the same level of excellence in the exam, that there was a network that favored the placement of the sons and daughters of the elite who had made substantial monetary contributions to the school. There were the accusations, too, of bias, that the exam was culturally skewed. Who in Ocean-Hill
Brownsville had been on a ski slope? Who played ice hockey? Who competed in swim meets?
Swim meets?
How many precious minutes could have been lost as a poor, black boy in Bed-Stuy or Harlem tried to shear away images that were alien to him, that made utterly no sense to him, struggling to understand the question he was asked in a reading comprehension or math exam?
If it takes six skiers twenty minutes to reach the ski lift …

Anna was among the few Asians and African Americans carefully selected from the five boroughs to be admitted under the revised criteria. On that first day, terrified by the strangeness of the place, her first outing alone uptown outside of the familiarity of Chinatown, Anna got lost. By accident she found herself on the subway platform for the train heading to the Bronx by way of Harlem. Sally was on the train she boarded.

“She really thought those boys were going to hurt her,” Sally said. “I think at first they were trying to be helpful. They knew she was on the wrong train. There were no Chinese families living in Harlem. But when they approached her, she screamed and held her book bag tightly to her chest. That got them angry. You know that stereotype that white people have of black boys? All of them could be potential criminals? The boys began to tease her. The more she held on to her book bag the more they taunted her. She started to cry and they laughed at her. Eventually, I left my seat and came next to her. I said she was my friend and when the train stopped at the next station, I pulled her off it. Anna never forgot that day. She said she was never so frightened in all her life and never so grateful for someone’s help.”

It is a story that now has the weight of myth. The details sometimes get fuzzy. Sometimes Anna says Sally put her arms around her and shouted to the boys to back off: Sally, the hero, the defender of the persecuted. Sometimes Sally says Anna did not get off at the next station. Anna rode with her all the way to Harlem and together they took the train back downtown. Anna, the brave, the loyal friend who would not run off and leave her defender alone to face the attacks of her persecutors. But the details do not matter. What matters is the unbreakable bond that was sealed between them that day. They lost contact for a while, when Anna went to Smith and then to the University of Colorado for a masters and Ph.D., but when Anna moved to Brooklyn, they renewed their friendship and the eight years they had spent apart vanished with the memory of those high school years when they were inseparable. For the past fifteen years they have been as close as sisters. When Justin speaks of Anna to Sally, he measures his words. He avoids direct criticism. He leaves it to Sally to infer that he does not approve of Anna’s attitude toward her students, that he suspects that if Anna were teaching Asian students she would not so blithely claim that there was no need for her to do research because her students were reading on the seventh-grade level, that she seems to have forgotten that she needed revised criteria to get her foot in the door at Hunter, though, admittedly, she went on to succeed spectacularly at Smith.

“Yes, Aunt Anna will come tomorrow,” Sally reassures Giselle.

“Goody,” the child says.

Later, as if they had already discussed it, Sally and Justin decide to break from their usual routine. Though they take turns reading Giselle her bedtime story and giving her a bath, the other one is always close by, in the same room. Now, each of them has found something else to do. Giselle remarks on this change when Sally reads to her. “Where is Daddy?” she asks. “I want him to hear the story, too.”

“Daddy read to you today already,” Sally says. “He has to read for himself now.” The child accepts her explanation.

In their bedroom, Justin tries to ease the discomfort between them. He tells Sally about Mark Sandler, what Mark said about Sethe and Halle. He does not want to open a door to a conversation about men who mistreat their women, so he says nothing about Mark’s theories about women who become lesbians, though the moment the thought flashes through his mind, he is troubled again by a twinge of conscience. Perhaps he should talk to Mark. Perhaps he should find out what is truly bothering him. It is possible that his girlfriend has threatened to leave him, but surely not because of a woman. He has met Sandra, Mark’s girlfriend. He would use Mark’s word to describe her. Honey. Yes, Sandra is a honey. He can no more see her gay than he can Sally. Sally, he is certain, is not a lesbian. No amount of quarreling between them could make her turn to women. She shares his opinion that lesbians are not made; they are.

Like poets.
If Sally were a poet, she would be poet. Nothing could stop her, not he, not Giselle. She needs space, she said. For what? Space to do what? He is conscious he is no longer thinking of Mark, that Sally is on his mind again.

“So how is Mark?” Sally asks. She knows Mark and agrees with Justin that he has promise. She has read his stories. “More than promise,” she said. “He may be a writer one day.”

He tells her, Confused. He says he has asked him to write a paper on his views on Sethe and Halle.

Mark’s over the top with this one, Sally says. “But I suppose if Halle were alive and he found out that Sethe had killed his daughter, he would hate her for it.” She is coming out of the bathroom, dabbing Oil of Olay on her face. She is wearing silk pajamas, aqua blue ones. The jacket falls softly against breasts. When she steps toward the bed, the pants outline her slim thighs. Justin turns away from her and plumps the pillow under his head.

“But that is not Morrison’s point, is it?” he says carefully, beginning to fear that his effort to find safe ground may not be succeeding.

“Perhaps, yet in that scene I think she
is
talking about fathers who abandon their children,” Sally says, massaging her hands with the lotion. “Seems to me she is saying that there is no excuse for them to do that, even if they found themselves in a situation like Halle’s.”

He hadn’t intended to personalize the discussion, but suddenly he feels compelled to defend himself. “Nothing in the world would make me abandon Giselle,” he says.

Sally gets into the bed and pulls the blanket to her chin. “Things cannot remain the way they are between us,” she says quietly.

They have returned to the morning’s conversation.

“I don’t know what you mean when you say you need space, Sally. This house is more than enough for both of us.”

“You know that is not what I am talking about.”

“Then what is it?”

“You think I am happy just being a school teacher, teaching little children?”

“I thought that is what you love to do.”

“Yes, but it’s not my life’s work.”

The expression irritates him. “Your life’s work,” he says. “What is your
life’s work?”

“Something that gives meaning to my life.”

“I thought our marriage and Giselle gave meaning to your life.”

“But you have more, don’t you?”

“You have more, too. You have teaching.” He sits up in the bed. “And this,” he says. “You have this house. And the garden, and your friends. Anna.”

“You have the articles you write, the papers you give, the conferences you go to …”

“You want to come with me? Is that it, Sally?”

“You can be such a fool, Justin. I don’t care about your conferences. Go whenever you want. Stay as long as you want.”

“Then what is it?’

“I want to write poetry,” she says. “I want to be a poet.”

And he wonders if he did not get it right that morning when he woke up tracing letters in his mind:
Sally does Not love me.

Justin is told by his department how he must teach the Great Books course he has been assigned. He is told that works he selects must not be exclusively European. They must cross cultures, cover the big continents and the major island clusters. Justin believes that cross-cultural is a code word for non-white but he has no problems including nonwhite writers on his reading list. Indeed, he had already selected Walcott, Naipaul, Achebe, Soyinka, Morrison, and García-Márquez, literary giants in his opinion, he tells the curriculum committee—
And not because they are nonwhite
—when the committee delivered its edict in a letter to the chairperson, pointing him out as one of the faculty most in need of guidance. “We are concerned about the lack of diversity on Professor Peters’s reading list. He needs to be sensitive to the evolving canon.”

For the fact is that though Justin has included non-European writers on his reading list, he continues to insist on requiring
Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, the Greeks he calls the Ancients even after the Afrocentrists have reminded him that the Egyptian civilization occurred long before the Greek. But to Justin, the Renaissance, which was the focus of his studies in graduate school, owed its debt to the Greeks not to the Egyptians. He could not begin without them. None of the books on his list would make sense without them.

The committee tells him that his students need to learn about their own heritage, their own culture. He is almost shouting when he responds that the Greeks are part of his students’ heritage, the human heritage. That Western Civilization is his students’ civilization. “Is Hector’s courage when he shirks the protective walls of Troy and faces the mighty Achilles Ancient Greek courage, white European courage? Is Hector’s sense of responsibility for his men white responsibility? Is the shame he feels for having endangered them because of a macho notion of masculinity white shame?”

His canon is the canon of good books, no matter who has written them, Justin says. Homer is relevant to him because Homer writes about human beings and he, Justin, is a human being, his students are human beings. He points to the long epic poem
Omeros
written by the Caribbean Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Homer was Walcott’s inspiration, he says.

The members of the committee continue to suspect him but ultimately they allow him Homer, and, eventually, Euripides’
Medea
when he makes the argument that Toni Morrison’s Sethe was not the first woman to kill her child and expect sympathy, and then Sophocles’s
Oedipus Rex
when he adds that an
understanding of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
is impossible without a familiarity with Oedipus. But they warn him that he must diversify the rest of his course for race, gender, ethnicity, and class. He must have equal numbers of women writers on his reading list, he must cross ethnicities, historical periods, and class. And he must do all this in one semester. He gives in, for they threaten to relegate him to Comp 1 and 2 if he does not fall in line. As it is, he teaches one section of Comp 1 and 2, but also two sections of literature. If he angers them, Comp 1 and 2 are all he will teach.

And Sally, he says to himself, believes he has more.
She
wants more.
She
wants meaning.
She
wants her life’s work. Is he to be responsible for helping her find her life’s work? Is this the obligation of a husband? Was this included in his marriage vows?

On days like these, he thinks, I want my life’s work, too. I was educated at Harvard, the premier university in the country. I am a scholar of Renaissance British Literature. I could have gone anywhere. I was in demand at prestigious institutions, but here I am, in this small public college in Brooklyn, of my own choosing, it is true; out of a sense of obligation, it is true: If not for those who believed a black boy like me from an outpost in the Caribbean could master the Masters, where would I be? I wanted to give back and I chose here, but now I am forced to submit to a political agenda, to a new-wave ideology cooked up by do-gooders operating under the misconception that racism will be eradicated when everyone comes to the table with his piece of the pie.