Mat Johnson - Pym

A big part of me hurt a lot hearing this said aloud, in a big way. I blushed, and as pale as I was I blushed possibly as no black man had done before me. Staring at him, I settled myself staring at his bastard tie. Look at it. That bow tie was hypnotizing. Usually men of power have useless fabric tied around their necks, but his was smaller, and tied at a different angle. No big phallic thing for this guy. No, it was even worse, it was “Look at me, I have an itty-bitty micro-phallic tie around my neck, and yet I still have all this power over you.”

“Please, listen to me,” I pleaded. “My work, it’s about finding the answer to why we have failed to truly become a postracial society. It’s about finding the cure! A thousand Baldwin and Ellison essays can’t do this, you have to go to the source, that’s why I started focusing on Poe. If we can identify how the pathology of Whiteness was constructed, then we can learn how to dismantle it. The work I am doing, it’s just books, sure, but it’s important, essential research. You’re going to fire me for refusing to sit on the campus Diversity Committee?”

“You could have compensated for your lack of national presence by embracing our role locally, but alas,” he told me and looked away. “Everyone has a role to play.”

I put my hand out to him, and before he could meet my palm with his own I reached higher and grabbed the tie on his neck. It was a clip-on and came off easily, barely shook him when I yanked it off in my fist. I was right about it being his power source. He was totally quiet after it was taken from him. I didn’t hear a peep behind me as I ran from the confrontation.

When I got to the car, I told Garth that my academic career was probably over, but since I’d been saying the same thing for a couple days he just tuned me out as he tuned in the radio.

“Take me to this place, before we go. It was done at a park about two miles from your house. I already Googled it,” he said, reaching across me to get into the glove compartment. Garth pulled out this print of a painting, all scrolled up, and dropped it in my lap. I unraveled it and saw a syrupy sweet landscape of the Catskills, the kind of vista painted on how-to shows in a half hour. The kind of painting Garth adored, done by that artist he idolized.

“It’s called Stock of the Woods, ” he said. “It’s a Thomas Karvel Hudson Valley School Edition. A tribute to the painters they used to have here. I have an original signed print. That’s part of my nest egg, and you’re there laughing at it. Look at it. Really look at it, you need to. Don’t it make you all peaceful just looking into that world?”

“Looks like the view up a Care Bear’s ass.”

“I got stress!” Garth turned and started yelling at me, his tree air fresheners dancing over the dashboard from the wind. “I got no type of job. I got no savings. The whole world’s hell. The world is pollution and terrorism and warming and whatever, I don’t know, whatever gets dropped next. I drive a bus! Or I used to. I’m a thirty-eight-year-old man who drives a bus and I ain’t even got that now. I got stress!” Garth pushed past me to get another Little Debbie snack cake from the box beneath my legs, and calmed down eating it.

“My man, you’re like a home experiment in type 2 diabetes. Your picture, it’s real nice, okay? And I’ll take you wherever. But you need to calm the hell down,” I told him, and he did. So we took to the road the last few miles to my home.

He was stressed. I understood. I understood even before we got to my house and saw all my books sitting there, on the front porch. Not in boxes, just stacked there. Hundreds of them. My books, my treasure. Sitting in the rain, bloated with a week’s worth of water and dirt and mold. Pages bursting open like they were screaming. Some lug nut from the physical plant had just left them there and driven off again. Tens of thousands of dollars, years of collecting. Destroyed. Irreplaceable. Gifts, inscriptions, ruined. I picked one up, threw it down, started screaming. Jumping. When I finished, Garth held out one of his Little Debbie cakes to me, cellophane already pulled back for convenience. Poking closer and closer to my face till I took it from him.

“Come on, take a bite of the white girl. It will make you feel good.”

“I’m going back to campus. I’m going back to campus and I’m going to get that bastard.”

“Damn dog. You already got his bow tie.”

I went to the bar. Garth was tired from driving and so stayed back. On the way I made a call to my lawyer, and one hopefully to my antiquarian as well. The latter told me he had something special, something signed, first edition, and I caught myself almost smiling in response. Life would move on, I tried to remind myself. Presumably, it would take me with it.

There was one bar in town and there was a black guy sitting in it, and this I took as a divine miracle, maybe even another sign of my impending turn of fortune. It was a town of only 1,163, just eight miles north of the campus. Aside from a handful of students during term, there were no black people in the area. In the summer tourism months, on occasion you could spot a black woman with her white partner passing through, but often these visitors were particularly disinclined to coethnic bonding. This brother wasn’t, though. When I walked in he looked up and smiled at me like he knew me and I gave him the nigga-nod and he hit me right back so I knew we were cool. I sat down next to him.

“Mosaic Johnson. Hip-Hop Theorist.” Of course he was an academic. Of course I was. There was no other reason for two obviously educated black men to be there. And it was obvious, even of him, dressed as he was in his carefully selected baggy jeans, hat to the side, and other matching oversize pop culture juvenilia. But he was a professor of music, so allowances could be made for the styling.

“Chris Jaynes. Americanist.” And our fists bumped in blackademic bliss. Mr. Johnson was a younger man than I, in both years and manner. Dressed like he was straight out of Compton, but clearly straight out of a postdoc instead. Just arrived in town to start teaching the following term, coming in the summer because his lease in Chicago was up and this was his future. Eager. Earnest. Through drunken eyes, I looked at Mosaic Johnson and I saw myself there. I saw myself showing up in this town, seeing it as foreign territory I was hopeful to invade. Twenty-one years of academic training culminating in permanent entrenchment on the business side of the classroom. Theory finally turned into practice, a practice of yapping about theory. Just like me. I wept for this bastard.

“Don’t join the Diversity Committee,” I told him when the third round hit. We’d been talking well, for a minute, mostly me bemoaning the history of Dutch slavery in the area, but he hung with me. A squat dude whose only thinness was his mustache, Mosaic seemed to roll a bit away from me when I said this, but I leaned closer because he needed to hear it.

“These historically white institutions, they get that one black professor, they put him or her on something they call the ‘Diversity Committee.’ Don’t let them put you there. It’s a slave hold. They’ll fight you: they’ll really want you on the Diversity Committee because if there aren’t any minorities on the committee, the committee isn’t diverse.”

“Man, in my work, I deal with the ghetto. The real shit, you know what I’m saying? Reality,” he told me, motioning around the room with a silver-ringed hand as if our present setting was mere computer simulation. “I’m not trying to run from the folks. I want to be on that committee. I’m a fighter. I want to be on that committee, to bring the fight here.” The hand in the air formed into a fist. I looked around the room, at the twenty or so white liberals taking him in on the sly. They loved it. They loved that fist. If I was still here tomorrow, they would come up to me and ask why I never raised the black power fist like the new guy. Undaunted, I continued.