January 20, 2007--Saturday Story: The Passive Voice--Part Four

In Part Three, the meeting of the English Department continued, moving from memorials for three deceased colleagues to a discussion about a proposed new course on the great works of John Milton. What should have been routine discourse, actually a quick unanimous vote followed by a motion to adjourn to the waiting sherry and cheese reception, turned into a full-fledged conflagration. The department’s Great Man, Mr. John Bell precipitated it all by calling into question both the course content and the “doggerel” in which the description was written. All the while, just outside the meeting room, our hero, Lloyd Zazlo became aware of another kind of memorial ceremony—one to mark the anniversary of the murders of three Civil Rights workers, one a graduate of Queens College. Demoralized and depressed, Zazlo skipped the sherry for double Scotches at the Shamrock Bar, a local watering hole, where, while drafting a letter of resignation, he fell into the hands of a very different kind of colleague, a former cop and political operative, who persuaded Lloyd that it was time to move on to the next stage in his life and come join him as assistant director of a new program at the college for “Coloreds.”

Part Three ended with Lloyd completing his letter of resignation; and in Part Four . . .

Before the end of July, Zazlo had hired six faculty members for the COP Program—all were black and Hispanic.

The first was Sam Haskins. Lloyd had read about him in the New York Times. He was mentioned in an article about the Algebra Project, an apparently new and effective way to teach math to Black kids who lived in rural towns in the Mississippi Delta. Haskins came from Coahoma in the Delta and, after graduating from Howard University, as the Times quoted him, he did not want to enter his “Daddy’s business” but did want “to give something back.” He was the son of an undertaker, an ultimately successful family enterprise started by his self-trained great-grandfather shortly after Emancipation. After joining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and participating in numerous sit-ins across Mississippi, at least twice winding up in the hospital as he found the police in his county less committed than SNCC to non-violence, Sam, thus inspired, among other things by his “battle scars,” said he aspired to “work with his mind and not with his skull.”

Zazlo tracked him down through the Algebra project office in Atlanta, and they agreed to meet to talk about teaching at Queens College over coffee at Café Figaro in Manhattan where Sam was living. Tall and straight as a reed, Sam sat at a corner table, wreathed in cigarette smoke and a halo-sized Afro. Lloyd felt flattered that Sam greeted him with a Black Power handshake. Being welcomed that way was virtually enough for Zazlo, on the spot, to want to offer him a position at the college. But he managed to restrain himself until they were on their third cappuccino.

In spite of the implications of the handshake, Sam remained more skeptical than Lloyd. He wanted to know not only about the college but about Queens itself. “Forgive me for putting it this way,” Sam said, “but I understand that it’s a place full of Crackers.” Lloyd was able to maintain eye contact but didn’t respond. “I mean there are lots of brothers and sisters living there, but from what I hear things are not so different from my hometown.” His eyes probed Lloyd’s for any signs of reaction. Lloyd surprised himself by being able to maintain his cool. “And if that’s so, setting up this program at the college ain’t gonna be no picnic.” Here he slipped into dialect, which Lloyd also liked, perceiving it as a sign of growing comfort—maybe, he thought, my being so cool is working. “I’ve been there and done that and have the scars to prove it.” With that he lowered his head and separated two fistfuls of thick hair to show Lloyd what was indeed a still-raw scar. “I don’t need anymore of these.”

He paused and in a quiet voice asked, “But what about you white boy? Are you ready for some?” Lloyd’s eyes wavered for the first time. “Because I can promise you one thing—you’re gonna come out of this whole thing at Queens College with some well-earned scar tissue.”

Lloyd slowly raised his eyes and looked back at him, feeling as though Sam had reversed things around and was interviewing him. He thought for a moment about what Sam had said and then admitted, “I know this is gonna sound strange to you--I know what might happen; and a part of me hopes it will.”

And with that, as Lloyd had made his deal with Joe Murphy, they shook hands to seal a very different one of their own.

* * *

Next Zazlo hired Carolyn Haskins, Sam’s wife. She was not part of the deal, arrangements that were common in academia where offering a job to a spouse was often necessary, but because she was as attractive a candidate as Sam. In fact, she was a beautiful candidate. So much so that when Lloyd met her, at Sam’s suggestion, also at Figaro, it wasn’t until he had downed two cappuccinos that he was able to concentrate on what she was saying and could more or less stop focusing so exclusively on her looks. Where Sam was hard and straight, the image of a warrior in Lloyd’s mind, she was, again in his imagining, a princess, no, a sub-Saharan queen, a voluptuous one, in full tribal robes and a magnificently wrapped head. Zazlo had never been in the presence of anyone who so literally took his breath away. In fact, it was only the caffeine in that second cappuccino that kept him from feeling faint.

But with her as with Sam, Lloyd was able somehow to maintain a semblance of his cool and got her to talk about her life, actually to finally concentrate on it, and her interest in American History, the subject he was in his mind penciling her in to teach.

She was from Atlanta, from what she called “a fine family.” He father had gone to Oberlin and was a physician, and her mother a high school English teacher. Carolyn graduated from Spellman College and then went on to Howard where she met Sam and where she was in the final stages of completing her doctorate. Her dissertation was on the slave narratives of woman in 19th century Alabama. She had been discovering these in hidden away places, including in the attics of family friends who had kept them from view as they attempted to integrate themselves into the post-Jim Crow south by obliterating the past.

Carolyn already had a publisher interested in these narratives as well as her thesis, and it was clear to Lloyd that this would help launch her academic career. He thought she would have no difficulty securing a tenure-track position and thus wondered why she was even interested in considering his new program. He tried to find out about that indirectly by wondering out loud, “This is very fascinating,” by this he meant as much that she was very fascinating, “and of course important. If I were working on something this significant, I wonder what kind of faculty position I might be looking for. After all . . .”

But before he could complete what would have inevitably turned out to be a truncated and tortured sentence, she cut him off and, leaning so close to him that her sumptuous robe almost dipped into his coffee cup, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” He felt he had just begun to talk. “Look at yourself. What do you see?” He thought, well, not very much. “Well I see someone, a man, who went to an Ivy League college and probably the same kind of graduate school. And I see this too,” she touched her silken face, actually her skin, “This, which is the opposite of what you see here on me.” She stroked her skin as if it were fabric, a commodity and not radiant flesh. “So you can think about anything. About any possibility.”

He thought he understood and attempted to interrupt her, “But I meant that . . .”

“I know what you meant. I know what you see here,” and now she touched her skin in a way to emphasize her beauty. “And here,” she touched her breasts.

“I didn’t mean that,” he stammered.

“Maybe not. Time alone will tell. But be prepared to be surprised. Remember, I have been studying our mutual history,” that he did not understand, “and it is full of the expected.”

He was confused, “You mean the unexpected, don’t you?’

With a deep laugh as beautiful as the rest of her, she said, “You heard what I said.”

Two days later she called to say she wanted to teach in the program. “It’s exactly where I want to be because I know that your folks,” by that she meant the students, “also have attics full of secrets.”

* * *

Third hired was Juan Loperena. Zazlo had learned about him from his Columbia College roommate who taught with Juan in an uptown storefront academy for high school dropouts. Born in Puerto Rico, when he was ten, Juan moved with just his younger sister, Gloria, to New York to live with his grandmother and grew up on East 118th Street in Spanish Harlem. When he met with Lloyd, this time in his makeshift office at the college, he referred to his neighborhood the Barrio and emphasized that when he said he grew up on 118th Street he meant just that--on the street itself. He had been what Joe Murphy called a gangbanger, a founding member of the Crips; and, though they and he had been involved in what Juan called “the drug trade” and periodic territorial wars with the Bloods, he placed equal emphasis on what he claimed were the gang’s “social programs,” their work with street kids who they encouraged to stay in school, even while running drugs for gang members. He had taken his own advice and after graduating from Roosevelt High School went on to the City College of New York where he completed a double major—in Spanish, which he said was “a piece of cake,” and French, which he acknowledged was “a killer.”

Acknowledging it that way, as a killer, brought a wry smile to Juan’s face because he felt he needed to tell Lloyd, before they got too much further, that he had spent five years, after CCNY, “upstate,” which was his shorthand for Attica State Prison. He had been sent there after being convicted of second-degree manslaughter. He had tracked down, shot, and killed a fellow Crip who had, in the hallway of the building where they lived, raped fifteen year-old Gloria.

Sensing Lloyd’s concern about bringing a murderer onto the Queens College faculty, Juan grinned at him; and to allay his fears, said with a wink, “Don’t worry. They do good rehabilitation work up there.” Still sensing doubt, he added, “But to tell you the truth, in my case they didn’t have to do any of that. I promise not to have to kill anyone else. Get me?”

Lloyd in fact was beginning to; and even thought that since, as Murphy had said, the new students were likely to come from backgrounds similar to Juan’s, he would probably be able to relate to them much better than anyone else he was likely to hire. So he said that he would like him, if he was willing, to teach both French and Spanish so the program’s students could have two ways of satisfying the college’s language requirement.

“I’m flattered that you want me; but before I give you an answer,” Juan insisted that Lloyd return his hot gaze, “I have something to ask you.” Lloyd nodded that it was all right to do so, “Tell me what you would have done.” Zazlo returned a puzzled look. “I mean if you were me and it had happened to you.” He saw that Lloyd was not comprehending, “I mean to your sister. If someone had fucked your kid sister.”

Stunned by this, Lloyd stuttered, “B-b-ut I don’t have one.”

“Lucky for you.”

In his head Zazlo had worked out a schedule for Juan—French Tuesdays and Thursdays and Spanish Mondays and Wednesdays. He thought that would work.

* * *

And then there was Benny Anderson. Zazlo needed someone to teach the required art history course but didn’t want it to be the traditional Parthenon-to-Picasso version that used Janson’s ten-pound History of Art as the text. He felt that the kinds of students Joe Murphy envisioned recruiting might respond better to something different. So when he stumbled onto an exhibit of Anderson’s paintings at the Forum Gallery in the city, he knew from the subject matter—expressionistically rendered figures in iconic poses set in urban landscapes—that he was classically trained and thus could bring a working artist’s perspective to art history. And it was also apparent from the images that Anderson was Black. Since Lloyd was keeping an appropriate version of Joe Murphy’s challenge in mind, to hire “a bunch of Coloreds and Spics,” he was instantly interested in meeting with Anderson. Which Samantha Solomon, the gallery owner was pleased to offer to arrange.

What she arranged was a meeting the following Saturday in her office at the gallery. She alerted Zazlo to the fact that Anderson had serious doubts about trekking all the way out to Queens, she quoted Benny—to White Bread Land, from his studio on the Bowery where he lived and worked; and that if Lloyd wanted to recruit him he should be prepared to offer Benny, in her words, “a very attractive package.” She was beginning “to move” his work and thus, she was suggesting, he did not need the work and thus would likely not sign on for a traditional instructor’s paltry salary.

As it turned out he did need the work. Ironically, precisely because she was doing so well moving his work.

Without much of an introduction, and without the need of any prompting from Lloyd, Anderson told his story—He grew up “dirt poor,” one of ten children. The son of a sharecropper in Morgan County, Georgia. Though from an early age he needed to work the fields with his brothers and “daddy,” his father insisted that he walk the two miles to the one-room school house every day, even during planting season. He wanted his son to “get schooled” so that he could lead a different kind of life. He was a self-confessed “mess-up,” barely learning to read and write and was frequently, because he was so frail, “whooped on” by the local bullies as he walked barefoot back and forth. With a hardly audible chuckle, Benny said, “I was a walking cliché right out of an Uncle Remus tale. The only thing missing was a stalk of grass stickin’ out of my mouth. But I had the overalls!”

He might not have been much of a reader but from early on the one thing he could do was draw. He could draw anything and make it look real--in three dimensions and subtle shading. Their house, the land, workers in the field, anything. So at his father’s insistence he continued his education at Burney High School, and somehow became the first member of his family ever to graduate; and with the help of a 4-H Club scholarship, he enrolled at Fort Valley State College where he took the only art course they offered--six times. “Can you believe it, six times,” he exclaimed. “They had such low expectations for us Picaninnies that no one cared what we took. Even in a college that was just for Negroes where all the teachers were Colored. My, my.” Lloyd thought he saw tears forming in Benny’s eyes as he recalled those years.

“Well then,” he continued, “the college arranged a trip for some us up to Chicago. To go to the theater and eat in a restaurant. Things of that kind that were thought at that time to be good for Colored boys. But I slipped away and went off to the Art Institute. I had never been to a museum before and when I walked through that door and up those steps and saw all those paintings I knew why I had taken that art course so many times and what I needed to do.” He paused again, “In truth, after seeing those pictures, I never went home again. Not in the same way. Yes I spent another year at Fort Valley but messed up so much that I didn’t graduate. So I enlisted in the Army to get the GI Bill money, and when I was discharged I used that money to take courses at the Chicago Art Institute.

“It’s a long story,” he checked his watch, “but all you need to know is that I did OK there, came to New York, worked in restaurant kitchens, and here you find me.” He swept his hands in a grand gesture to take in the sweep of the gallery and the city beyond.

And with that he got up and left Lloyd and Samantha in her office. Alone, he walked into the rooms where the whitewashed walls were covered with his vivid work. Zazlo watched him through the open door as he stood with his arms folded across his thin chest with his head cocked to one side as if he was seeking a fresh perspective on his work. But to Lloyd, even here in his fancy New York gallery, Benny still looked as youthful and wiry as he must have been back in his early days in Morgan County.

After what felt like an endless two or three minutes, Lloyd joined him, standing silently at Benny’s side. And, while the two of them looked at the powerful Homesick Blues, inspired by Duke Ellington, Anderson said, as if ignoring Lloyd and addressing the painting, “You know why I want to trek out there don’t you?” Zazlo did not respond, “Because I know there’s some skinny kid in South Jamaica who didn’t learn to read and do his numbers and as a result thinks he ain’t worth shit. But he can draw like a mother. Like I could.”

He paused as if to look back through time at himself many years earlier. “I know Samantha,” who remained in her chair behind her Lucite desk, “I know she probably told you that you’d have to offer me some sort of sweet deal to come all the way out to Queens. It’s true that she’s doing a good job for me now, but she doesn’t begin to know me. What I’m about. Where I’ve been. Where I’m going. She never will. So all you need to do is offer me the job. Just the job. Whatever it pays, whenever the courses are scheduled and I’ll show up.”

Zazlo immediately began to think about what that schedule might look like—maybe it would be good to package Anderson’s sections with Juan Loperena’s. Art History right after Spanish sounded to him like a good idea.

But as he was running the combinations and possible permutations of the block program in his head, Benny turned his back to him and said, just loud enough for Lloyd to overhear, “Nor will you. Nor will you.”

* * *

To anchor the Composition and Literature faculty, Zazlo next hired Margaret Williams, a fifty year-old woman, for woman she truly was, who had been teaching individual courses here and there around the city for almost three decades. She was a Queens native, born and raised and still living in Ozone Park, where she had raised and largely supported three sons, all of whom had graduated from college. One was an electrical engineer and worked for NASA in Houston; her middle son was a high school Phys Ed teacher and coach of the school’s well-regarded football team (every year at least two graduates went on to Division I colleges on full athletic scholarship—and she was quick to point out almost all graduated within five years); while her “baby” was the catering manager at the five-star Garden City on Long Island.

She was a published poet, “in the manner of Maya Angelou” she suggested; and if Lloyd saw fit to hire her, she hoped that she could teach her students expository writing in the same manner in which she taught her poetry classes at the main branch of the Queens public library—in workshop format (which caused Zazlo a momentary flutter as he recalled his own fateful days as faculty advisor at Brooklyn College), a technique she said that depended on lots of in-class “free writing” in order to help break down students’ fear of the blank page.

Her life story, the fact that she was from and of the borough, her ideas about teaching composition, which were similar to his, and above all her solid maturity and maternal bulk convinced him that she would be his ideal Comp and Lit anchor. So he offered her a teaching load of three sections a semester, and she accepted even before they could get to a second cup of office coffee.

* * *

And finally there was Roberto Santos, a third-generation Mexican-American who had grown up in San Antonio before coming east to take a doctorate at Harvard. He was the first Chicano to earn a Ph.D. there in sociology. He had done so well that he had also been on a tenure-track position and it was looking as if he was certain to get it—his dissertation on Hispanic assimilation patterns had been published by Princeton University Press and was already considered a minor classic. And he was well on his way to completing a second book on the role colleges and universities play in reproducing social stratification. So it was quite a surprise to Zazlo when he got a call from Dr. Santos in which he indicated that he was interested in being considered for a teaching position in the Collegiate Opportunity Program. He had read something in the Chronicle of Higher Education about its expansion—he had joked on the phone that its acronym suggested it would be a good COP--and thought they might be needing faculty.

Thus they arranged to meet at Santos’ club—the Harvard Club in Manhattan. “Let me buy you lunch,” he had offered, “The food’s respectable and it’s a good place to get to know each other and do business.”

With some trepidation, Lloyd had never been to any kind of university club much less one this exclusive, he found his way to the Lexington Avenue line and, while on the subway into the City, from his experience hiring the first five core faculty members, he tried to imagine why someone with Santos’ background and professional potential would even be thinking about teaching ex-cons and gangbangers in improvised quarters in Queens. There must be a reason--Could it be that he had plagiarized his dissertation and Harvard was going to strip him of his doctorate? Or, he thought, perhaps it had recently come to light that back in Texas Santos too had killed someone--and in his case, since it wasn’t to avenge a sister’s honor, that would make him a true murderer and therefore unacceptable even in the COP program. They were seeking role models as faculty, not criminals of Santos’ type.

But he quickly learned, over chilled Chablis in the extravagantly fretted oak dining room, from the bespoke suit Roberto Santos was wearing and the extra-deferential way in which the waiters hovered around him, that he did not need a job in Queens, up in Cambridge, or for that matter anywhere.

Dr. Santos, who insisted on being called Robert, told his story quickly. His great grandfather came as a boy from Morales, Mexico and with his parents and brothers and sisters settled in south-central Texas. Somehow over time, parcel by parcel, he managed to amass a thousand acres of land which, in Robert’s words, “was not much good for anything; but he owned it. It was in Luling. Ever hear of it? I suspect not. Though the folks there liked to refer to Luling ‘the toughest town in Texas.’ And there was lots of competition for that title.” Robert mused, “Though his son, my grandfather, struggled to support his family by growing cotton, that was hit or miss depending on the drought cycle. Those were hard times. But during the 1920s, wouldn’t you know it, oil was discovered there. About a gusher per acre. The family ranch was right smack in the middle of the Oil Patch. And the rest is history—end of story.”

At least it was the end of that part of the story. The rest, as it pertained to Roberto, Robert, he recounted in bulleted form over the chilled lobster salad with Remoulade sauce and a second bottle of Chablis: Private Catholic boarding school for his early years of schooling—Prep school up in Putney, Vermont—Four uneventful years at Yale—No Skull and Bones, but he did edit the school paper, the Yale Daily News—Harvard next—Doctorate, “which you know about”—An assistant professorship—First book published—Married: “she’s a psychiatrist”—Moved to New York--Commuted to Boston—There for my two classes Tuesdays to Thursdays—Second book in final stages—First child on the way—no money problems “thanks to granddad’s trust”--Perfect life--

“But then one day,” he moved from bullets to prose, “I asked that famous Peggy Lee question—‘Is that all there is?’” He looked at Lloyd as if he was hoping he might have a good answer. Which, since he didn’t, Zazlo looked blankly back at him.

“That’s what I thought,” Robert continued with a sardonic laugh, “You don’t know any better than I. That’s OK. But I do know I’m not going to find the answer up in Cambridge or on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or for that matter back in Texas.” Lloyd had nothing to suggest. “But my instincts tell me that I’ll have a better chance to find an answer out in Queens.”

He tipped his head in the direction of where he thought Queens to be. But though Zazlo noted that this nod was toward the west, whereas the college was east across the East River, he decided to offer the position to him anyway. Feeling that maybe together they might be able to figure it out.

* * *

So with his lead faculty selected and formally on the payroll, all had filled out stacks of forms, including without protest the required Loyalty Oath, Zazlo took Joe Murphy out to lunch to fill him in about each of them. Joe seemed to like what Lloyd described (he was careful not say too much about where Juan Loperena had spent those five years after CCNY, but he did tell Joe a great deal about Robert Santos’ background), and Joe indicated that he would like to meet with them since, ultimately, they were his faculty; and the success of the program, he reminded Lloyd with an arm lazily draped around his back, would depend more on the six of them and the others they would subsequently hire, than on the director and his assistant—the two of them.

Being thus relegated to the administrative background did not please Zazlo; but pleased he was that Joe was pleased, and he suggested they all meet the following Thursday.

Joe thought that a good idea and ordered them a couple of more Guinnesses.

To be continued . . .