Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“HJ couldn’t read and there was no school for him or his little black friends. He picked cotton for ten cents a day from the age of nine. Not only was HJ a child with no past; he, and his people, also had no voice. Don’t get me wrong; they could speak and yell, cry out and sing but the way the world unfolded around them fell upon their backs and there was no ballot box to express their dissatisfaction with the crushing weight of the meta-culture’s progress.

“HJ had no history but he believed that he could steal the meta-culture’s past, claiming it as his own. He suspected that books held the secret of becoming the meta-culture.

“In a deceitful move HJ convinced a local minister that he wished to read the word of God, that he wanted to serve the meta-culture’s deity so that he could better praise the world that was not his.

“He excelled at reading and was seen as the possible successor to the aging minister — a Negro named August Acres.

“But as soon as he could properly read the first few books of the Old Testament, barefoot HJ embarked on a long trek north, along the western bank of the Mississippi River. His destination was Chicago. Once there he got a job in a factory that took Mississippi cotton and wove it into fabric for poor people to make into work-clothes for factory workers and migrant farmers alike.

“Every week he took three books from the library and read them late at night by the light of a kerosene lantern in a room he shared with three other boys. It was there, in that stuffy attic room, that HJ slowly came to understand that the meta-culture’s history was a lie. By leaving his people’s history out of their records they had perverted the memory of their own past.

“As he grew older and learned more HJ understood that the crime committed against him and the people who oppressed him was enacted again and again throughout what might be called history. He understood that the only way to claim true knowledge of the past was to live outside its rubric.... When I say rubric, P, I mean rulebook. HJ came to understand that the only way to own the past was to live outside the rulebook of history in whatever form that structure took. He realized that he was not inferior to the oppressors, because they themselves were the victims of their own crimes.

“Armed with this rare form of anti-knowledge HJ began a lifelong study of the half-truths and lies that formed a world at once ignorant and arrogant about that ignorance. And though HJ was, admittedly, no one from nowhere, he took solace in the fact that he was that rare individual who knew his place in history.

“If this is not deconstructionist historicity in practice,” John said breaking out of his trance and addressing the men and women in the glass room, “I don’t know what is. HJ learned to read and later learned that all he read was lies — this made him a man outside history; a position that every historian must attain before she, or he, can lay claim to the past. HJ and his people had their story demolished by people who had no idea that they were committing cultural suicide by excluding members of their own society.”

John took a deep breath as if his talk had come out of one great inhalation. He felt a little dizzy, somewhat satisfied and curious as to what his peers would think of his mostly accurate rendition of Herman Jones’s journey.

For a few moments the room was silent.

Theron James’s face was blank but mild. His thoughts, John decided, were about the impact of the brief talk rather than its content. Willie Pepperdine smiled and nodded as if he were replaying the words in his head; Annette Eubanks’s head and neck juddered now and then, for probably the same reason.

“Is that it?” Abel George, the resident Middle Eastern expert asked. “I mean what are we supposed to acquire from this, um, this short story?”

George was hardly older than John; he was in his mid-thirties with black hair, and his skin was the color of pale straw. Tall and loose-limbed, George often reminded John of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz if that fabulous being had become a somewhat less interesting mortal man.

“It is fiction certainly,” John replied. “HJ is an amalgam of people I’ve known and read about representing an entire so-called race whose past had been annihilated and who are simultaneously excluded from the scholarly awareness of the people that murdered their souls.”

“HJ was not murdered in your fable,” Lucy Orcell, the department’s Europeanist francophone, pointed out.

Lucy was fifty-one with mild features except for her large hands. Her skin was olive hued. She was from St. Louis — a graduate of Oxford.

John shrugged and gazed into the older woman’s light brown eyes.

“It is my stance,” he said, “that if you take away a human being’s anchor to the unfolding of his past then you effectively remove that person from society. And, as we all know, there can be no me without you and me. This crime is tantamount to murder, wouldn’t you agree?”

Orcell frowned, possibly realizing her assumption that history was always equally present in every human experience might need some... retooling.

“The question is,” John added, “if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel whether he is a slave or not?”

“But you said that the minister could read,” Oscar Pine said.

Oscar was the senior professor of the two-member ancient history department. He was in his seventies, unusually tall, six five, and playful. He was the only other professor in the social studies department who could converse in both ancient Greek and Latin. Annette Eubanks did not intimidate him. He liked to banter with John.

“Yes he could,” John said. “I see this... this irregularity as a solitary beam of sunlight that somehow has found its way into a dark dungeon.”

Pine nodded his long head. His still mostly brown hair was tied back into a ponytail. His much younger Chinese wife, Su Yen, had once told John that she used the thick braid as her reins when she rode him around the bedroom.

“So,” Oscar said, “this light, if it encounters a seed in that dark environment, might engender enough growth to break down the walls from the inside.”

“This is prattle,” Ira Carmody exclaimed. “There is no basis for the argument. Actually there’s no argument at all.”

John liked Ira even though the political historian hated him. The little man with the thatch mustache was an expert on the Soviet satellites prior to the lifting of the Iron Curtain but he liked to dabble in ancient thought. He wrote tight scholarly monographs, usually with more footnotes than content, and gave lectures on obscure internal events that he claimed became a part of history whether they ever happened or not.

“You’re wasting our time,” Carmody added.

“If your time is at such a premium, Ira,” Willie Pepperdine said, “then maybe you should leave us and make better use of it someplace else.”

“Who the hell do you think you are to speak to me like that?” Ira dared Willie.

Oscar Pine’s eyebrows went up.

John smiled, softly appreciating that the focus of his lecture had been commandeered.

Willie let the front legs of his chair come down to the floor and then he stood.

“Come over here and ask me that,” the perpetual board member dared Ira.

“What?”

“I got two or three inches on you,” Willie said. “You have at least a decade and half on me. Let’s see if you can bully your way out of a ass beating.”