ii
The Afro-American Question

In 1971, with all the manic desperation of a late arrival, Busiris was just entering its own version of the high sixties. Half a decade earlier, when free speech was shaking Berkeley and a hundred thousand persons marched through New York City streets to protest American involvement in Vietnam, Tech students were too busy with panty raids, beer bashes, and Sweetheart formals to pay much attention. 1967 issues of The Sentinel which survived the McKinley Library fire show Tech men in crew cuts and Madras sports shirts, Tech women in soft Angora sweaters with high collars and long sleeves, and skirts well below the knee. The Lettermen performed at Homecoming, 1968. Not, as I have mentioned, until the dawn of the seventies—when lights were going out at colleges all over the country—did Busiris take the plunge into liberal arts and build an English department which in structure, if not personnel, resembled those at other major American institutions. 1971 was the golden moment in Busiris, Illinois, full of passion, adventure, and a wheel still in spin.

Busiris is not entirely to blame for its tardiness. The Midwest generally runs behind the rest of the country, and some national trends skip downstate Illinois entirely. A common joke on campus in 1972 was, “Who is Martin Stoddard supporting in this year’s election?” The answer was Thomas E. Dewey.

So a curious feeling of deja vu would arrest me as I crossed the Busiris quad on a September afternoon in 1971. Here was at Berkeley, circa 1965: a campus alive with music, miniskirts, and dope (pot a brown-bread staple, speed common enough, LSD for special occasions). Acoustic guitar players lounged in front of B. Hall’s Gothic portals. Hand-lettered posters dotted trees and buildings in open defiance of school policy that all posters and handbills receive administrative sanction. The War in Vietnam was a debatable issue, as were Richard Nixon, R.O.T.C., and the idea of Black Studies. The “Welcome Back” issue of The Sentinel featured a printed debate between representatives of the A. C. L. U. and the Young Americans for Freedom on the merits of affirmative action. Students circulated petitions demanding the Student Activities Board reconsider its refusal to book Stephen Stills and the Jefferson Starship for the 1971-72 concert series. A Student Co-Op Bookstore was challenging the Busiris Buckstore from its temporary location in a garage just off campus. (By November, Busiris University, citing the university’s need for possible future expansion, had purchased the house, and with the garage, and evicted the bookstore.)

Three candidates were running for student body president: a fraternity type named Duane Wenderoth, a refugee from the Students for a Democratic Society named Wyn Schuler, and a Busiris hippie named simply “Jimmy the Geek.”

Schuler was all that remained of the Busiris S. D. S. The year previous, haler and heartier, it had begun publishing The Outsider, an alternative newspaper purportedly funded by faculty sympathizers in the A. C. L. U. The first edition contained, under the headline “Please Get Out of the New Road,” a scathing critique of the Busiris record on five major points of educational reform, including minority studies and segregated student/faculty restrooms, with an equally scorching indictment of Busiris administrators. The article resulted in much heated discussion of both the points of reform and Busiris administrators . . . and in an edict prohibiting the publication of unauthorized student publications on campus property. The second issue of The Outsider brought a warning from President Stoddard that Tech students engaged in publication of unauthorized materials could face disciplinary action including possible expulsion. In an editorial headlined “Busiris Administration and the U. S. Constitution,” the S. D. S. explained that The Outsider was published off-campus and without Busiris funds, that primary distribution also took place entirely off campus, and that they certainly could not control or be held legally liable for whatever happened to their newspaper after that initial distribution. This was an evasion, of course. The Outsiders was indeed printed downtown, but “primary distribution” amounted to the publisher—S. D. S.—handing 1500 bundled copies of The Outsider to a dozen B. T. U. students, also S. D. S. members, in an off-campus apartment. The friendlies then took their bundles on-campus, cut the wires, and scattered them in dorm lobbies, the Student Center cafeteria, the library, and academic buildings.

The S. D. S. leadership also arranged for the third—and final—issue of The Outsider to appear on a weekend when most of them were attending a workshop in Buffalo, New York. Renegade sons and daughters of perfectly respectable middle class parents now far beyond anyone’s effective control, they returned to Riverton to find themselves permanently suspended from Tech . . . in absentia, without cause, without hearings, and without opportunity to appeal.

What on most other campuses would have precipitated a major crisis was in Riverton the merest popping of a small bubble. Faculty allies disappeared into the woodwork, and the dismissed students (some of Busiris’ brightest) drifted north to Madison and Chicago. Marcus DeLotta—my predecessor, unofficial advisor to the group, purported author of “Get Out of the New Road,” and the left wing of the Busiris political spectrum—was notified that by a unanimous vote of the department’s tenured faculty his appointment would not be renewed for 1971-72. No specific reasons were given. Anxious to protect his record, DeLotta never requested any. “I thought of trying to negotiate some kind of compromise,” Ted Jones once told me, “but DeLotta’s position was hopeless. I figured the best I could do was salvage Charles Creed’s reappointment, which I did. In Marcus’ case, all I could do was abstain, and lower the number of votes against him by one.”

This was in January 1971.

Heir-apparent to the leadership of the left was disheveled Aaron Finkelstein, a poor man’s Marxist in the Political Science department, who was also associated with the S. D. S. and probably the author of The Outsider’s three-part series “Their War; Your Life.” Finkelstein was offed by a Young American Female for Freedom who in February 1971 sacrificed her modesty for the good of the cause. At a private conference, scheduled in his office at her request, the woman in question ripped open her blouse and, with cries of “get your hands off me” and “rape,” bolted out the door into the crowded hallway.

Next in line after DeLotta and Finkelstein on the left edge of the Busiris political spectrum: Professor John Charles Creed, advisor to the Black Students Alliance and, let it be remembered, DeLotta’s office partner and therefore probable co-conspirator on The Outsider.

But Charles Creed was not Marcus DeLotta, and by the end of 1971 the Busiris S. D. S. was more rumor than reality.

While Students for a Democratic Society was a hollow shell, the Black Students Alliance was just beginning to flex its muscle. Busiris had had a substantial black population since the middle sixties, when it began importing blacks out of Chicago in ever-increasing numbers to play basketball and, because many came with state scholarships, as a kind of state subsidy to private education. In that capacity Chicago blacks have served Busiris well ever since. Many played sports. Some received degrees. All paid, or had paid for them, full tuition, fees, room and board to a school which relied on tuition, room, and board for about 87% of its operating budget.

In the early ‘70s, however, black students were a subsidy not without price. Chicago blacks transplanted to Riverton were perfectly conscious of national black militancy and vaguely embarrassed by their own timidity. Chicago radicals considered the Black Students Alliance leadership inept at best, Uncle Tom at worst, but they also realized that Busiris was too small a campus to support two black organizations. A competing group could never hope to match the B. S. A.’s funding, which was generous even in 1970. The best a competing organization could hope for was half a pot.

In the September 1970 B. S. A. elections, a cadre of Chicago activists led by one Billy Jo Allen seized control of the organization, using the slogan “Get All of It, Now” (GAIN). Allen’s first and most controversial action as president was to invite a young, untenured, white Assistant Professor of English to replace an aging, black Full Professor of Sociology as the group’s advisor. Charles’ acceptance created a storm among both students and faculty. The B. S. A. lost a third of its membership and all administration support. Undaunted, the group set forth a list of demands: (1) a minimum of four black faculty appointments for academic year 1971-72, (2) an Afro-American Studies Program, to be fully operational in 1974-75 after a four-year implementation program beginning fall 1971, and (3) a Black Culture Center, to be housed in temporary quarters starting in fall, 1971, with a newly constructed facility to be available for academic year 1974-75.

These demands ran into the brick walls of Old Main. Both Allen and Creed drew sharp criticism from blacks and whites alike. The badly split organization might have followed the S. D. S. into oblivion had not 1971 provided Busiris blacks with the issue they needed to focus their energies and achieve the high visibility they sought on campus and in the state. That issue was construction of the new Stoddard Field House and Convocation Center, in which many black basketball players would spend time and talents raising funds for the University. Frustrated by administrative foot-dragging and student apathy regarding its demands, the Alliance determined to vent its anger on the issue of black representation in the unions engaged by field house contractors.

Politically the act was a stroke of genius. The unions could muster only three blacks out of 166 workers employed on the project. White middle-class academics, who would have resisted sharing faculty rest rooms or dining facilities with black colleagues, could easily show their good will by supporting student demands that white blue-collar workers give up their jobs to blacks. The lure of jobs attracted the sizable black population of Busiris “valley nigs,” who had heretofore harbored thinly concealed animosity to the white institution in its midst, including “hill” or “booshie nigs.” These street-wise downstate brethren of streetwise Chicago radicals leapt immediately into the fray . . . and, to the discomfort of most white middle-class academics, onto the campus. In April 1971, fifteen members of the B. S. A. seized the president’s office, using President Stoddard himself as a hostage, demanding that Busiris Tech trustees cancel their agreement with the general contractor until black membership in unions working on the project reached 10%. Unless its demands were met, the Alliance threatened to shut down gymnasium construction . . . which had begun, of course, with demolition of the old field house and excavation of a foundation in the old parking lot. Confronting moral pressure both internal and external, potential adverse publicity rivaling that of the basketball point-shaving scandals of the fifties, and the prospect of playing fourteen home dates of a 1971-72 season NCAA Division l basketball season (including games with U. C. L. A., Wisconsin, and Louisville) in the 1,400-seat Busiris Central High School Gymnasium, Busiris capitulated.

The construction workers did not. Filled with white-socked, Blue-Ribbon-Beer-drinking rednecks from the all-white communities surrounding Riverton, the unions flatly refused concessions to the young punks from Chicago and trash from Riverton South Side. In early May, with a hole dug and footings poured, construction workers walked off the job. Black students offered to scab. White workers offered scabbing black students concrete swim suits and a special river party to try them out.

The old Quonset hut lay where it had fallen.

It was Charles Creed himself who engineered the compromise which saved both sides. In return for a written agreement on the Black Studies Program and the Cultural Center, the B. S. A. agreed to drop its opposition to the field house construction. The four black faculty positions would be phased in over three years as a natural development of the Afro-American Studies Program. To placate town blacks, Administration promised to require contractors bidding on the Black Cultural Center to guarantee 25% minority workers on that project. The Quonset hut debris disappeared, the field house sprung up like a day lily, and each week of construction was hailed as a victory by Old Main and the Alliance both. Charles appeared the very embodiment of moderation and reason, a fortunate choice indeed as B. S. A. advisor. Only Jack’s old enemies held him accountable for creating the crisis he had so artfully resolved.

I heard the story of Stoddard Field House and Convocation Center twenty times during September 1971. Never was it told without due appreciation, glowing or grudging, of Charles Creed’s role in transforming dream into reality.

As the first day of classes approached, I kept waiting for Jack to manifest himself in the flesh. There were notes from students and faculty taped to and slipped under the door. There were requests that I “tell him Jenny Ray and Angela Dawn, from American literature last year, said hello.” One coed left a box of chocolate chip cookies with a card: “Thank-you for American Lit. last spring, the best class I ever took. Love, Laura.” Memos from the department chair, the dean, the vice president—pink, green, white, tan—piled up beside the summer school examinations on his desk. I thought they might disappear in the night, testimony to a midnight raid on the office, but there they lay, accumulating, while I sat in the desk across from them, reading criticism, typing syllabi, rehearsing my opening lectures, gathering evidence toward a proper perspective on Busiris and its faculty.

Apparently Jack was serious about spending every possible moment away from the school and, if possible, out of town.

The English department’s September meeting was scheduled for noon on Wednesday the 6th, the first instructional day of the semester. Although Jack’s first class did not meet until 1:00, I thought he might appear that morning. He was not then in the habit of canceling the first and last weeks of each semester, nor did he then, as later, sprinkle “stop days” across the semester’s syllabus. In the early seventies Jack was religious about classes, although he wasn’t much for office small talk or department lounge politics. He even then detested pointless meetings.

But when I entered the office at 9:00 a.m., the pile on Jack’s desk was exactly as I had left it 5:00 Tuesday afternoon. Nor had Jack appeared when I left for my 11:00—which, in violation of an unspoken compact between Busiris students and faculty, I kept the full fifty minutes of opening day. Returning at 11:50, I fully expected to see Himself at last, chatting up some coed, perhaps even attacking the heap of mail and memos. But the office was empty and the clutter on the desk undisturbed. I fussed, waiting, while voices echoed up and down the hall.

Finally footsteps and Jeremy Jones’s head popped through the door. “Time for the big meeting,” he announced. “Your buddy around?”

I nodded negatively. “Does Charles Creed still work here?”

“Only when legally obligated to, and sometimes not even then. Still, I can’t believe he’d miss a meeting with Afro-American on the agenda. His currency is too much at stake.”

I gathered clipboard and pen, slipped into my suit jacket, and walked off beside Jones.

“The big meeting?” I echoed.

“Yes and no,” Jones answered. “No, in that under terms of the construction crisis compromise, English will offer Afro-American literature. That’s a given, part of Charles’ Afro-American Studies Program. The proposition will be debated, of course, to avoid the appearance of a department too willing to drop its pants and lie down on its back. But everybody in the room knows we’ll offer the course. I’ve got the votes on that.

“The real issue is whether Afro-American will be a bone thrown to the mongrels at the door, something on a level with remedial composition, or a real part of the curriculum. The debate itself will be on offering the damned course, but the real test will be on counting it toward the graduation requirements of all 1.4 English majors. Debate on that motion will be very short, but that’s the vote that these people will remember. It might mean hiring a specialist to teach the course, and that might possibly mean a B L A C K person in the sanctorum of Busiris Hall, consorting with people so full of British Empire that they scarcely consider colonial literature legitimate. I think my coalition will support that motion as well, but a couple of votes are shaky.

“People in this department are terrified by the whole idea of Afro-American culture and the threat it poses to the WASP hegemony. But they’re also terrified of the Black Students Alliance. All those black kids will be sitting in their required composition classes this afternoon, and next week, and next year, the smell of their rage permeating the air. The Old Ones really don’t want to be called racists, although several genuinely are. A lot depends on what secret signals Old Main has given the chosen few.

“I don’t mind telling you I’ve had to cut a few deals on this one. I could have used a little more assistance from your office partner. With all due respect to his improvisational abilities, Charles is not very adept at politics. He’ll get himself in serious trouble one day, and I won’t be able to save him. In the meanwhile he does us . . . well, less good than he could.”

“There is only one reasonable position on Afro-American,” I said. “From the moral, theoretical, and economic points of view.”

“I’m not sure,” Jones said thoughtfully. “Arguments could be made . . . although the thoughtful ones will probably not be made. Some are arguments I could support. To exclude something which is genuinely excellent merely because it is black, or anything else, that’s racism, and racism impoverishes us all. But the qualitative condition must be allowed. If the word ‘racism’ ever comes to mean simply ‘the exclusion of anything black’ regardless of quality, then the campaign against racism becomes a crusade against standards, and the floodgates open. Virgil Cutter is right to worry about that kind of leveling. Not now, but I could see it down the road. What others think, I don’t know.

“One thing I do know,” he added earnestly. “Freshman appointments are well advised to stand out of the line of fire. Vote but don’t speak. Let me take the flack for you. And for Charles, if he’s here.”

We had reached the bottom of the stair well and approached the doors to ground floor corridor of the south wing. “Sharp to your left,” Jones indicated as I opened the dull gray metal door.

Passing through the doorway, I entered what felt like the hold of an eighteenth-century slave ship, a great heap of Afro-American humanity propped against walls, seated cross-legged on the cold linoleum floor, buzzing quietly in small knots around the floor to the conference room. I saw Percy Thompson in earnest conversation with B. S. A. President Billy Jo Allen and another male in Afro, Levi’s, leather sandals, an orange and brown dashiki, and a fist carved from ebony or some other dark wood dangling from a leather lanyard around his neck. The black in the Afro and fist was intense. Thompson was obviously ruffled. Allen was cool. Other members of the department stiffly affected imperturbability, masking their nervousness with talk of Milton and Shakespeare. Ignoring the crowd, they passed through the apparently invisible students and into the conference room.

“Well,” said Jones, frozen in his tracks.

A heavy-set black woman coming in from behind elbowed him aside. “Move you ass, honkie cat,” she told him curtly. “You blockin’ up the hall.”

“Looks to me like they won’t have to wait until this afternoon to confront the Black Students Alliance and its sweaty anger,” I said, putting on my own indifference.

“Looks to me like your office partner was on campus all morning after all,” said Jones as we entered the room. “Looks to me like that’s him right over there.”

It was. Jack was sitting alone in a far corner, dressed not in the jeans which, a few years later, became virtually a uniform with him, but in a dark blue suit not unlike something Richard Nixon would have worn. His hair was cut and groomed; his black loafers were polished. He struck me as leaner than I remembered him from my interview, and darker. He did not look like a radical, a writer, or a leader of the proletariat. What he mostly looked like was a young assistant professor of English.

He was reading Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, and he did not glance up as the other three dozen members of the department entered the room. To the obvious consternation of Virgil Cutter and Lucy Kramer, I sat down beside Jones, a dozen seats from Jack.

“I don’t really think this will affect my opinion one way or the other,” announced Cutter in a stage whisper clearly directed more at those outside than his colleagues, who noisily agreed. Jones winked at me.

Chairman Thompson cleared his throat and announced that he was calling to order the September 1971 meeting of the Department of English at Busiris Technical University. Then he announced that introduction of new members would have to await a vote on a student request that this meeting be declared open to the public.

“The Chair requests a motion to that effect.”

Ben Allen Browne—not Jack—so moved.

“In fairness to members of the department,” Thompson announced, “I am going to rule this motion undebatable, and we will vote upon it immediately by secret ballot.” A murmur of approval whispered through the room; the level of noise outside the door did not appear to increase. Small white scraps of paper passed among us.

“ ‘Yes’ will mean an open meeting; ‘no’ will mean a meeting closed as usual,” Thompson announced.

The ballots were counted.

“By a vote of the faculty, this meeting will not be open to the general public,” the Chair of the Busiris Technical University Department of English announced. “Will the department secretary please so inform the gentleman in the orange shirt in the hallway, and close the door upon her return.”

A murmur of approval rippled through the group. Jones winked again. Charles remained lost in Kerouac. The door to my rear slammed shut, and the atmosphere relaxed slightly.

What followed was mostly trivia. Department minutes were read and approved. I recall standing as my name and credentials were read. Jack, I believe, was actually reading Desolation Angels, missing no more than he had missed by ignoring the memos piled on his desk upstairs. His attention to Kerouac more than Thompson annoyed some senior members (they were not on his side anyway; he hadn’t lost a vote) as much as the black presence behind the closed door, which grew geometrically with each passing minute. Everyone knew that the important business remained unaddressed, and delay served only to remind us all that behind the door lay a reality which would sooner or later have to be confronted. Intended to curtail debate and thereby strengthen the conservative position, Thompson’s strategic delay served mainly to rattle his colleagues, as time outs called late in a close game will ice a field-goal kicker or a free-throw shooter.

Charles Creed did not make the motion to offer Afro-American literature beginning fall 1972 nor did he participate in debate which, as Jones had predicted, ran as long as time permitted.

Lucy Kramer opened for the prosecution with a red herring: “I know of nobody in the department trained in this academic specialty, and I do not see how we can possibly hire someone before 1973-74 . . . unless, of course, one of the junior members would like to vacate his post.”

Thompson: “It is the chair’s understanding that funds are available in a special administrative budget for retraining a present faculty member into Afro-American, and that some junior faculty members have already expressed interest in this field.”

“Could the field, if significant enough to merit inclusion in the Canon, be entrusted to a junior faculty member?” the M.A. from Illinois Normal wanted to know.

“One of those junior faculty has his Ph. D. and is, therefore, potentially senior faculty.”

Faces turned to Charles but were not acknowledged.

“Might not reassignment to this new field draw this person away from his own specialty and thereby weaken department offerings in that area?”

Nobody could say for sure.

Victoria Nation understood that some of the literature in question was sexual in a tasteless, vulgar, and sometimes violent manner, and therefore not suitable to many Busiris students. She mentioned the names of LeRoi Jones, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

“Ellison is no more sexual or violent than Shakespeare,” Ben Allen argued. “Or the Bible.”

“But Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” Lucy Kramer pointed out.

Victoria had brought with her copies of three LeRoi Jones poems and the first chapter of Invisible Man, which she circulated among her colleagues. “I apologize for some of this material,” she said with a gleam in her eye, “but I believe my senior colleagues should know what is represented by this course.”

Virgil Cutter voiced three concerns. “My first is how colored students would react to a white professor, since all of us are white, and whether this would create further animosities when the inevitable D’s and F’s appeared. My second concern is textbooks: what books are available to teach such courses? Do they come from reputable publishers? Have they been assembled with due scholarly deliberation, or might they not be perhaps a trifle slapdash in their methodology and mixed in the quality of their selections? My third concern is McKinley Library. Are our library holdings sufficient to support serious research and publishable scholarship in this field? Is the department budget sufficient to permit expansion of our holdings in this area and to continue to strengthen holdings in mediaeval and Renaissance, areas where we have acknowledged weaknesses . . . and to underwrite the new linguistics program as well?”

On a sheet of paper I listed four books we had used at Stanford. “I don’t know who published them,” I whispered to Jones, “but they made for a hell of a course. Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”

“Hand down, mouth shut. This vote’s already over. Why alienate the people who will decide on your reappointment . . . and in three years on your tenure?”

Considerable discussion on the library budget followed, the minute hand on the clock above Thompson’s head grinding past the 7, the 8, the 9. Finally Jones returned discussion to the issue at hand with some comment about administrators in Old Main having an obligation to fund library purchases if it funded retooling faculty.

Then came the real concerns, the reasons which underlay the excuses voiced earlier. Might not this be just a passing fad, a diversion, Victoria Nation wanted to know, which would drain departmental energies and budgets? “Are we sure that we’re not building today a program of texts, courses, and highly specialized faculty which we will be seeking to dismantle, or retrain, tomorrow?”

Could Afro-American studies be compared with eighteenth-century studies, classical literature, and Shakespeare’s plays, somebody else asked. Was there any real substance to this corpus of literature? Was Afro-American truly the equivalent of Studies in Romanticism, American Realism, or American Modernism? Did not American Modernism incorporate much of Afro-American literature already: Ellison, Hughes, Baldwin, and Booker T. Washington?

Finally Virgil Cutter, who taught one of five sections of Shakespeare’s tragedies offered at Busiris Tech that fall, articulated the real fear hunkering in all the old timers’ minds: might not students taking a course in “this literature” (here he held up Victoria’s photocopies) rather than another departmental offering “cheat themselves out of a richer experience in one of the more traditional fields of British or American literature?”

“It’s a sophomore survey,” I whispered to Jones.

“On this one, I’m with Virgil,” Jones answered. “Today it’s a sophomore class; tomorrow it’s a minor. The day after that, a major. Then a graduate degree. Ellison is good. I’ve read him. Some of the others . . . not so good. I’ve read them too. I just plain couldn’t respect a degree in Afro-American Studies the way I respect a degree in British Literature, or a M.A. thesis on LeRoi Jones the way I could respect a thesis on Charles Dickens. And Ralph Ellison is no Will Shakespeare.”

It was nearly ten minutes before 1:00 when Thompson asked, “Is there any further discussion on the motion?” Charles continued to read, and the black presence without loomed even larger.

A secret ballot was requested and taken, and by a surprisingly wide margin the department found itself offering Afro-American literature, beginning fall 1972.

Thompson consulted his watch. “It’s nearly 1:00,” he observed; “is there any further business?”

Quickly Ted Jones moved that the new course in Afro-American literature be included among those which would meet the requirement for six hours in American literature for program 1.4 language and literature majors.

“Second,” somebody else shouted.

“Some members of the department have 1:00 classes,” Thompson observed.

“There’s a motion on the floor,” Jones said firmly. I’d like to call the question.” Others mumbled uneasily.

“Is there any debate on the motion to allow the new course in Afro-America literature to meet the department’s requirement in American literature for 1.4 majors?” Thompson asked.

“The question has been called.”

Almost without looking up from his book, Jack raised his hand.

“Assistant Professor Charles Creed.”

Closing Desolation Angels, Jack rose to confront, almost as an afterthought, the others in the room. He spoke briefly and without passion: “We are all aware of the students outside that door, as we are all aware of the consequences of our vote on this course. A century ago, those students would have been 3/5 people, people who counted but didn’t count. And we would have approved a 3/5 course, a course that counted but didn’t count. It took a major war to get those students the other 2/5 of their manhood. That war was fought a century ago. It’s over. The free states won.”

There was no further debate. On another secret ballot, the motion passed by five votes. In his journal Jack noted, “Voted on Afro-Am. today. Good guys 20, bad guys 15. I’ll probably end up teaching the fucking thing.”

Thompson adjourned the meeting. Jones turned at me smiling, as if he himself had engineered the victory. “Bet on a revote next month, on some pretext or another. I know this bunch. But the first victory is a key one.”

“Where’d Chas get to?” I asked.

“He’s with his people,” he answered. “You had lunch? The Student Center awaits us.”

“I bring my own,” I confessed. “Linda packs sandwiches. It saves money.”

“I forgot: you’re still young and poor. Stick with me, kid. You’ll soon be dining in the luxury of the Busiris Student Center.”

It was not, of course, baloney sandwiches, but the opportunity to corner Jack in the office that called me.

Without waiting for the elevator, I hurried up the stairs, two at a time. Jack was already in the office, humming some Dylan tune, as I walked in the door. He saw me and laughed aloud. “Little trick I learned from my Italian uncle in Jersey: in a close contest, don’t say nothin’, just flash your heat.”

I held out a hand in congratulations. “How you lasted here one month, let alone one year. . . . You come on like an East Coast heavy, which is the one thing they most fear in you.”

“It is indeed. They smile, they congratulate, and when I put the muscle on them, they vote with me. But they are terrified of everything Jack Creed represents. They hate me.

“However, they are also chickenshit. Old and young, from the phony Shakespearean to the phony classicist to the phony liberal, they are chickenshit one and all. ‘A real man is safe with a thousand of their kind, as long as he doesn’t turn his back.’ Mark Twain wrote that sentence in 1883, four days after lecturing at Busiris Technical Institute, for an honorarium of $37.25. You can look it up in Albert Bigelow Paine’s edition of Twain’s autobiography.”

Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “Besides, if I can’t have this place on my terms, I don’t want it. Who in his right mind would?”

I nodded my head.

“Look at this shit,” he said suddenly, angrily, indicating the month’s accumulation of memos, forms, notices, announcements. “Do I need this? Does anyone need this shit?” In one swipe of his arm he swept the entire pile, unexamined, into his trash can. “What’s important will come back—on the telephone. Then I can deal with whoever I’m dealing with face to face. Or voice to voice. Bullshit. All of it, bullshit.”

“I had one job offer last year, Charles, and this was it.”

“That’s Old Main Think, Tucker. And if you play their game, in their park, by their rules, you will lose every time.”

“The previous occupant of my desk, I understand, is no longer at this institution, and no longer teaching.”

“Marcus is in law school now. He’s going to make a million dollars one day, writing stuff and making arguments in front of small groups of people. The same shit that earns you $9,600 a year. If I had any brains, I’d be in law school myself.”

“I trained eight years to get to Busiris.”

“And you got the job, didn’t you? You got a job. I got a job. There’s always work for workers. Remember that, Tucker, there is always work. Especially for blue-collar types like us. The system has to employ us, so that we can buy the shit they’re selling. We quit buying, the economy collapses. Then the fat cats are jumping out windows. Can’t let that happen, can we? No sir. Study your history: there’s always work for the workers.

“And believe me, that’s all we are: blue-collar workers. All that ‘doctor this’ and ‘professor that’ don’t mean shit to a tree. We are but field niggers in the cotton fields of freshman composition, Tucker. ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Yowzah.’ ” Slave laborers on Plantation Busiris.

“But Busiris needs its field niggers, because we are what makes this place run. Study your Ralph Ellison. We’re the spades in the boiler room of the paint factory. Nobody ever came to Busiris to get administrated by Herr Doktor Professor Martin Stoddard. They come here to take freshman comp. That’s us. And if Old Main don’t treat us right, we got plenty of options. We don’t need them. They need us. Got a lot of forks and knives, and they have to cut something. Do it your way, or piss on it. Always work for a worker, in one form or another. Piss on ‘em.

“Meanwhile, I am late for a 1:00. Back in ten minutes.”

He was out the door and I sat pondering my first, condensed lecture in Charles Creed’s theory of higher education in America.