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Mazie closed her eyes to encourage elusive ideas out of hiding. In the darkness behind her eyelids, fragments of a story began to fall into place. She hovered her fingers above the keyboard, prepared to capture them in words as soon as they coalesced in her mind. She could almost reach out and grab them....
Three sharp knocks on the door scattered her inner visions just moments before she could grab them. She groaned in frustration.
“Yo, yo, yo, Maze,” Rufus called from the other side of the door. “C’mon. The team is meeting in the lounge.”
“Fuck me,” Mazie muttered under her breath. Even though the summer literary program advertised that it would “encourage, nurture, enlighten, and inspire emerging writers,” in fact it created an environment full of niggling distractions that prevented her from writing. She stared at the door and imagined it bursting into flames.
“Are you in there, Mazie?”
Mostly, she just wanted to be left alone. Still, a small part of her wanted to answer him; she would have liked to confess her frustrations to somebody, and Rufus was her most likely confidant. Neither wanting to encourage him nor tempt herself, she covered her mouth and pretended she wasn’t in the room.
“Okay. That’s dope. I guess you ain’t in there,” Rufus said. “I’ll come back and check on you later.”
If truly he believed she wasn’t in the room, why did he say that? Maybe Rufus was more perceptive than she’d originally given him credit for.
Now, though, she was stuck. She couldn’t leave the room until she was sure nobody would see her, not even to go to the bathroom, which, suddenly, she felt the urgent need to do. And she could forget about writing. Nobody ever wrote anything worth reading while they had to take a piss. Mazie crossed her legs and waited.
Taara Ali blew her top, launching to her feet and declaring “I am outraged!” with such a furious expression on her face that her hijab slipped and corkscrews of frizzy hair sprang loose.
“We all are,” El Jefe said. “If you’re not, you aren’t paying attention. I’ve been outraged over this, that, or something else most of my life. Little good it has done for me. My grandfather said to me that Americans will believe anything except the truth. I used to wonder what he meant by that. Now, I think I understand.”
Rufus removed a handful of envelopes from a folder that he’d brought to the meeting and waved them for the others to see. “This is just some of the hate mail that Professor Alolo has received since he wrote that editorial. He read each letter and just laughed and tossed them in the trash, like he was totally unfazed by them, even kind of pleased. But I picked them out. Listen up to the load of bullshit these dumb crackers are writing to him:
‘Philander Fink would kick your ratty black ass.’
‘Your momma wishes that she could “purge the past” so she’d never met your poppa.’
‘You’re so full of shit that you have to use a tarp instead of toilet paper.’
‘Your balls would look good floating in my beer.’
‘Does it hurt to have such a long hard pole up your ass?’
‘I’m drunk. What’s your excuse for being so ignorant?’
“And those are just a few. There are also a ton of ‘die’ letters—die commie, die faggot, die nigger, eat shit and die, don’t die before I can kill you... and such and so on.”
“That’s harsh,” Quang said.
“Very nasty,” El Jefe agreed. “But kind of funny, in a sick redneck way.”
“We much must defend the professor against this slander!” Taara insisted. “The men who wrote these things, they are obviously racists!”
“Well, duh,” Rufus concurred.
“Listen to me.” El Jefe sighed wearily. “It does no good to call somebody a racist. They will always deny it. Nobody thinks that they’re racist. If you were to ask the Grand Imperial Bozo of the Ku Klux Klan, he would swear on his Bible that he’s not a racist. The funny thing is that most racists think they themselves are victims of racism. Ignorance makes everybody a victim.
“All my life, people have called me Cheech, or Taco, or Wetback, because they think I’m Mexican. But I am Cuban. Are these people racist? Yes, certainly. But to them being Cuban, Mexican, Colombian, or from any Spanish-speaking nation is all the same—they are distinctions without a difference. Ignorance cares nothing for details, or for the truth.
“But the sad thing is that racists need people like us, they just don’t know it. They need somebody to blame for all the things they fuck up. Racism is a substitute for self-loathing. Having a scapegoat means never having to admit making a mistake.
“You can’t fix racists. Don’t bother trying. The best you can do is fix their mistakes so they can’t poison other people’s minds.”
Quang had taken notes on his tablet the whole time El Jefe spoke. Rufus had mumbled “uh huh” and “right on” to every point El Jefe made.
Tara stomped her feet and snapped, “We, too, deserve to have scapegoats!”
“Damn straight,” Rufus concurred. “So, that brings us back to the reason we are meeting here today. We need to strike back. But we need to plan it very carefully.”
Taara: “Oh yes. We are going to do it!”
Quang: “I’m in. It sounds like fun.”
El Jefe: “Yes, we should.” He unfolded his legs and straightened in his chair. “But where is Mazie? Is she with us or against us?”
“Oh, she’s down with what we’re going to do,” Rufus assured him, but added in his mind, I hope.
They placed their right hands in front of themselves, one on top of the other, to signify their determination, and their solidarity.
The Golden Springs Town Council invited Roscoe Alolo to speak at its June meeting, on the subject of “Repairing History through Reparations.” Dean Meredith Stokes wasn’t explicitly invited, but Roscoe assured her that she was welcome, which was good, because she really needed to do something to escape from her current headspace.
In the aftermath of Professor Alolo’s courageous letter to the editor of the Golden Springs Gazette, the council members—indeed, nearly the entire populace of the town—felt like their eyes had been opened to the subtle menace lurking just upstream on the other side of the gorge. Once Professor Alolo pointed it out to them, they too deplored the repugnant statue standing in central Coon Creek. At the meeting, each member of the council wore a lapel pin with the name “Fink” and a line drawn through it.
At the same time, that scandal led some Golden Springers to wonder if their beloved town’s history might not likewise contain hidden violations of political correctness. To their universal chagrin, the council members learned that they had skeletons in their closet, too. Pax Oglesby, who in addition to being facilitator of the common good was also the town’s resident historian, discovered several shocking facts. One of Golden Springs’s founders, Otto Vine, after whom Vine Street was probably named, disrespected Native American culture by building a hogpen on Shawnee burial grounds. Thaddeus Smock, the second president of Antaeus College, refused to hire female faculty members and was reported to have remarked in private that women should “open their legs and not their books.” Even the sainted Johnny Appleseed, who planted an orchard in what was now Amity Valley Memorial Gardens, was rumored to have had a worrisome predilection for little girls. It almost seemed like, in the past, nobody behaved honorably.
After thanking the town council, Professor Alolo spoke: “The ravages of slave labor remain a blight upon the American conscience and is the primary cause of today’s economic imbalances and racial strife....”
As stirring as his speech was, it failed to hold Meredith’s attention. Under the pretense of taking notes, she re-re-re-read Vanessa’s letter, which she’d placed in a pocket of her binder. The letter had arrived via registered mail that morning. Meredith had held it to her breast before reading it. She intuited that it contained bad news, first because Vanessa composed it using a word processor, whereas she’d handwritten every other piece of correspondence she’d sent to her. Furthermore, she had sent it via registered mail, which imbued it with a stark formality. Vanessa would only have done that kind of thing at the advice of a lawyer. The letter began:
I hope this finds you well.
That seemed aloof, yet still positive. The letter continued:
The time has come for us to dissolve our relationship and divide our assets.
She could not envision Vanessa even thinking those words. They sounded like they came from some breaking-up form letter.
From the beginning, when you accepted a job in Ohio, I told you that I had reservations about whether we could sustain a relationship via long distance. It is now clear to me that this is not working.
Meanwhile, Roscoe’s speech held the town council in thrall. He spoke with vigor, spitting out vowels as if gargling them and hissing s’s to convey a sense of disgust. “Restoring justice must begin with a formal apology from the highest levels of government.”
I have taken the liberty of removing your name from the lease on my apartment. I have also packed your possessions and shipped them to your address in Golden Springs. If you have any questions or concerns, please address them to my lawyer, whose card is enclosed. I wish you the best. But my mind is made up.
She signed the letter Sincerely and with her full name, rather than her typical, Love, Nessa.
Meredith slipped the letter out of its binder pocket and held it in both hands, pulling it tight between them, and then slowly, deliberately, ripped it in two. She crumbled the halves into tiny balls. Only then did she realize that people were watching her.
But they quickly returned their attention to Roscoe, who was building to the climax of his oration. “So, yes, my friends, we must rend asunder the pages of our biased and erroneous history books. We must purge the past. We must provide long overdue reparations. That is the least it will take to make things right in America today.”
Meredith shouted, “Hear, hear!” and started clapping. Roscoe looked confused, as if he hadn’t finished speaking, but the ovation quickly spread across the room. Pretty soon, everybody had stood and started clapping. Roscoe sucked in his gut and took a bow.
Pax Oglesby slammed his gavel and called for order. When the fracas subsided, he spoke. “Those were stirring words, Professor Alolo. I do believe that everybody in our community would benefit from hearing them. So, sir, if you are willing, I would be happy and proud to yield my place to you as the keynote speaker at our Independence Day Festival of Light ceremony. Would you do us the honor of delivering your speech to the entire town?”
“I will do so proudly,” Roscoe said. He raised his cane above his head, as if to call down lightning.
While everybody in the room cheered and raised a joyful ruckus, Meredith took advantage of the clamor to mask the sound of her saying “FUCK” out loud. She felt feverish. Spikes of heat burst through the pores across her body. Backing away from the table, she restrained herself until out the door, and then ran as fast as she could down the hall to the women’s restroom. She made it to the toilet just in time to vomit green bile.
