Tom Wolfe - I Am Charlotte Simmons

Jojo compressed his lips into a slit. “It’s not like—it’s not peer pressure exactly—” He broke it off. Charlotte had him pinned with a cold and dubious stare. “I mean, this thing starts in high school. In junior high school. Coaches, everybody, start telling you you’ve got it. You know what I’m saying? You’re very big for your age, you’re something special, you’re on the way to being a great athlete. Three different high schools, I’m talking about public high schools, three of’m tried to recruit me out of junior high school! My dad told me to go to the one that had the best record for getting players into the Division One basketball programs, and I ended up going to the one the furthest from where I lived, Trenton Central.”

“Where’d you live?” Whirred, she realized.

“Trenton, New Jersey. But everybody on the team, Treyshawn Diggs, André Walker, went through the same thing. You’re a freshman in high school, and everybody’s treating you like you’re way up here, and down there’s all the other students. The other students, they’re worrying about books and tests and homework, but you’re ‘special.’ I mean like I’d sit in the last row of the class and kinda, you know, sprawl back in the chair and hold the book upside down. All the kids thought that was really cool. Then in high school I started getting all this ink in the local newspapers—for playing basketball—and that was a great feeling.”

Still timidly: “Well…isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I guess. But now I’m getting interested in some things, like literature, even if it’s only Frère Jocko.”

“Frère Jocko?”

“That’s what everybody calls that course. That’s French for Jocks. There’s a German class they call Jock Sprache. There’s a geology class they call Rocks for Jocks. There’s a course in the Communications Department they call Vox for Jocks. I never got the Vox part.”

“Vox is voice in Latin,” said Charlotte. “You know, ‘vox populi’?”

Jojo drew a blank.

“The voice of the people?” said Charlotte.

Jojo nodded yes in a distracted fashion that as much as declared he didn’t get that, either. “Oh yeah, and I take a course in econ they call Stocks for Jocks,” he said. “At first you think, wow, this is cool. But one day somebody says something to you, the way you did, and it sort of like…zaps you.”

“Why would you care what I think? I’m just a freshman.”

Jojo cast his eyes down and massaged his huge forehead with his thumb and two fingers. Then he looked up at Charlotte with wide-open eyes. “I don’t have anybody to talk to about things like this. I don’t fucking dare! ’Scuse me. I just get—”

Without finishing his sentence, he leaned farther over the table. “You’re not just a freshman. What you said to me—it was like…like you had just arrived from Mars. You know what I mean? You didn’t come here already affected by a lot of—a lot of the usual sh—stuff. It’s like you came here with clear eyes, and you see things exactly like they are.”

“Sparta, North Carolina, is a long way away from here, but it isn’t on Mars.” She was conscious of smiling at him for the very first time.

Charlotte immediately detected that something other than his concern for academic achievement was now seeping into that sincere expression of his. She knew this was the moment to put a stop to it. The thought of his starting to “hit on” her again was unpleasant and even frightening…and yet she didn’t want to put a stop to it. The present moment was much too early in her experience for her to have expressed it in a sentence, but she was enjoying the first stirrings, the first in her entire life, of the power that woman can hold over that creature who is as monomaniacally hormono-centric as the beasts of the field, Man.

“Charlotte…I love that name,” said Jojo.

Charlotte rheostatted her expression down to a completely blank look.

Jojo apparently took that as the rebuke Charlotte meant it to be. He mopped up the hormonal seepage of his expression and said, “My problem is, I don’t know any a this…cultural stuff. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I mean like where did this idea come from and where did that idea come from. People mention these names, like everybody knows who that is, but I never know. I never paid attention before! It’s embarrassing. I mean like I got this teacher in American history, Mr. Quat, and he’s saying the first settlers in America were Puritans—” He stopped short. “That’s not right. What he said was not Puritans but Protestants, although there was something about Puritans, okay? Then he’s saying in England, the Protestant revolution—wait a minute, or did he say reformation?—yeah, that was it, reformation—he’s saying the Protestant Reformation—this is what he said almost exactly: ‘The Protestant Reformation fed on rationalism, but rationalism didn’t cause it.’ Okay? So I’m looking around, waiting for somebody to raise their hand and say, ‘What’s rationalism?’ But nobody does! All these kids have like ridiculous GPAs, and they know what he’s talking about. And here’s me, and I’m afraid to raise my hand, because they’ll all look at me and say, ‘You dumb jock.’ ”

“They’ll say, ‘You dumb jock’?”

“They’ll think, ‘You dumb jock.’ Do you know what rationalism means?”

Charlotte found herself feeling sorry for him. “Well, yeah, but I had a teacher who took a special interest in me? And she had me read all about Martin Luther, and John Calvin and John Wycliffe and Henry the Eighth and Thomas More and Descartes? I was sort of lucky.”

“All the same, you know what it means, just like all those kids in the class. I never read about Day Cart and—those other people. What did you say—Wycliff? I never even heard a any those names.”

“You never had to take philosophy?”

Self-pitying: “Jocks don’t take philosophy.”

Charlotte looked at him in a teacherly fashion. “You know what ‘liberal arts’ means?”

Pause. Rumination. “…No.”

“It’s from Latin?” Charlotte was the very picture of kind patience. “In Latin, liber means free? It also means book, but that’s just a coincidence, I think. Anyway, the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks. The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers? But only Roman citizens, the free people?—liber?—could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy? Because they were the arts of persuasion—and they didn’t want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something? So the ‘liberal’ arts are the arts of persuasion, and they didn’t want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people.”

Jojo looked at her with arched eyebrows and a compressed smile, a smile of resignation, and began nodding nodding nodding nodding. Dawn was breaking inside that big head of his. “So that’s what we are…athletes—we’re like slaves. They don’t even want us to think. All that thinking might distract us from what we were hired for.” He was still nodding. “That’s kind of cool, Charlotte.” It was the first time he had called her by name. Now he gave her an entirely different kind of smile. “You’re kind of cool.”

The look on his face as he said that frightened Charlotte all over again. She stuck rigidly to her role as schoolteacher: “Take some philosophy. I bet you’d like it.”

Jojo seemed to get the message, because he pulled his elbows back from where they supported his yearning hulk on the table and sat up straight. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”