Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

In contrast to the president’s building the history department bungalow had a door. It was pale pink with a blue knob and no bell.

John opened the door and walked in.

Kerry Brightknowles, a senior majoring in Eastern European history, sat behind the reception desk.

“Hi, Professor,” she greeted him, smiling.

Kerry was big. She had a large frame and plenty of flesh but only someone in the fashion industry would have thought her fat. Striated blond hair and freckles accented her fair face and arms. She was well formed and carried herself as lightly as a ballet dancer moving across a stage.

“How’s it going, Ms. Brightknowles?”

“Graduating this May.”

“Happy to be getting out of here?”

“Happy to be getting on with my career,” she said. “I’m going to graduate school at Harvard but even if I studied for a hundred years I don’t think I’d ever know as much as you do.”

“How much you know is of little consequence in our field. It is mastering the techniques of discovery that makes any researcher rise above the herd.”

Hearing this Kerry smiled... but that soon turned into a grimace.

“I’m sorry about what they’re doing to you, Professor. I tried to explain to Dr. Tracer how great you are in the classroom. He said, ‘I see you drank the Kool-Aid too.’” Her quote sounded like Tracer’s gravelly voice and John laughed. He liked Kerry.

“I guess you should go on in,” she said. “It’s in the conference room.”

There were eight offices, four on either side of the hallway that led to the glass-walled conference room. Secretaries and assistants behind the open doors glanced at John but looked away before he could greet them.

As he approached John could see the other professors through the glass: jurors facing each other across the long white table. Annette Eubanks had taken the head position. She was looking straight ahead as if she had no idea of his approach. Her dress-suit was shamrock green. Gregory Tracer in a faded blue suit sat to her right. He was in his late thirties. It was said that he’d been Annette’s protégé since he was her student and secret lover at the University of Chicago.

There were five other professors from the department, Theron James and Willie Pepperdine in attendance. Willie was seated not at the table but against the far wall. John went through the open door then stopped one pace into the meeting room.

“Hello, everyone,” he said cheerfully.

Willie Pepperdine saluted then leaned back in his metal-and-plastic chair until it was propped against the wall behind him.

“Professor Woman,” Annette Eubanks said. She was certainly the one in charge. “Have a seat.”

She motioned toward the foot of the judgment table where a solitary chair sat turned out slightly like an unwanted invitation.

John saw another chair placed in a corner behind the department head. He went to the empty chair, grabbed it by a slot in the red plastic back and dragged it over to Willie. He lowered into the seat and sighed, a man taking pleasure in a moment of rest.

“Why don’t you come to the table, Professor?” Eubanks directed.

“I thought this was a brown-bag lunch?” John replied.

“It is.”

“Brown-bag lunches,” John said, “are informal gatherings. Not even in the royal houses of classical China did informal gatherings involve seating charts... except, that is, for the emperor and his queen.”

John counted out Eubanks’s silence in four-four time. He made it through a few bars of this silent melody before she spoke.

“Again I must complain, Dr. James,” Eubanks said turning her attention to the dean. “It is irregular for a meeting of this sort, informal or not, to be attended by someone from outside the department.”

“Like I told you, Dr. Eubanks,” Theron said. “President Luckfeld wanted to be here but had other duties. He sent Mr. Pepperdine as his representative.”

“What are his qualifications?”

“I am advisor to the president of the board of directors of the university,” Willie said using every iota of authority in his deep voice.

Dean James smiled and gave a sideways apologetic nod to concur.

Annette Eubanks went through all the possible replies she might make, came up with nothing satisfactory and then turned to John Woman.

“Do you have something to share with us, John?”

The young killer from back east sat up straight trying to recall the posture that made him a good student in school before his father got sick. He looked around the table, took a deep breath through his nostrils and began to speak.

“I only found out yesterday that I was expected to speak at this monthly get-together,” he said. “So I’m glad that this is just a casual gathering among peers.

“I wasn’t able to create formal arguments about my paper which, I’m told, I am to present to the history review committee this semester. I couldn’t fabricate an argument but I did manage to write a letter.”

John tapped his right hand against the left breast of his yellow jacket.

“I have it right here but I don’t think I’ll read. Instead I’ll summarize the content.”

This introduction brought frowns to a few faces. Already the unofficially accused professor had abandoned protocol. At every other brown-bag lunch session the speaker started by introducing an argument about a little-known personage or event that influenced or elucidated what was already known.

John had such a story in his repertoire.

The summer before he came to NUSW he spent nine weeks reading about Lincoln in the Smithsonian archives. There he discovered a name — Elisa Borgone, an alleged prostitute who had been sent a letter by the president. The letter itself had been lost but it was mentioned in a journal entry of Lincoln’s White House butler, Peter Brown. Later in life Borgone became a fiery minister of an unaffiliated Baptist church in Baltimore. She had a tall and brooding son named Abraham but there was no father documented.

John could have made quite a career for himself following that possible liaison. He would have had the added satisfaction of eclipsing the resident expert on the Civil War — Gregory Tracer.

But John didn’t want to play the game of departmental one-upmanship. He didn’t care about presidential trysts or an illegitimate child who might have joined a circus but instead flew into a rage and killed a man named Booth in a St. Louis restaurant.

“The letter is addressed to someone named P,” he said. “P is, for lack of a better term, a hermeneutic device; but instead of me taking on her qualities I used her implied existence to confess my sin of knowledge. P is not an expert in our arcane field of study so I had to translate pretentious jargon such as hermeneutics, ontology and epistemology into more pedestrian terms like: pretend you are, the world and what people think is true. I believe that my slightly inaccurate language enhances the crux of historical analysis rather than minimizing its power.”

John stopped there a moment and smiled brightly.

“Dear P,” the professor intoned entering a fugue state. “I want to tell you the story of a man named HJ — a black man come to awareness somewhere in the earlier half of the twentieth century. He was raised in the Mississippi Delta but HJ was different from you and me because he was a man without history. I don’t mean to say that he had amnesia or that he didn’t have family or friends. HJ’s people lived inside the dream of another race. We’ll call this other group the meta-culture. HJ knew the meta-culture’s heroes, religions, languages and moral codes. He knew everything they did including the fact that he and his people were inferior to them in every way that was moral, sophisticated or intelligent.