Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“How soon do I have to move out of faculty housing?”

The president sat back crossing his left leg over the right. John noticed that he was wearing a navy blue sweat suit. There was a light blue seam running down the outer edges of the arms and legs.

“They can deny tenure but the faculty cannot fire a teacher. They can suggest your removal but the final decision is mine: mine and Willie Pepperdine’s.”

“Why him?”

“Willie is the man next to the president of the board. Remember?”

“Oh. So... I still have my job?”

“Yes. They might be able to remove you from the department,” Luckfeld allowed. “I have to ask our lawyers about that. But appointing you a university professor will make departmental affiliation irrelevent.”

“Wouldn’t that cause a lot of trouble?” John asked. The starting salary for a university professor was more than that of any other member in his department.

“It is a rare thing, John, for a professor of history to end his presentation with postulation on a far-flung future. That’s the kind of scholarship we need. If you can make an even playing field between Abraham Lincoln and some counter clerk named Andrew then you’re my kind of teacher: the greatest example of an egalitarian.”

“So you’d really promote me just like that?”

“It’s already been done.”

“So I’m not out?”

“Not yet. Eubanks and Carmody can cause a lot of trouble. There may come a point when even Willie Pepperdine will decide to cut our losses.”

John smiled, thinking of his plan to disappear only a day before.

“I had an accident a little while ago,” John said.

“Car accident?”

“It was late and I was drunk. There was a coyote on the highway and I ran off the road rather than hit it. He, or she I guess, followed the wreck and came looking for a meal.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No. I climbed out and faced the prairie wolf.”

“What happened?”

“It disappeared.”

President Luckfeld considered a moment. He moved his head about like a photographer imagining his next shot.

“The thing about Lincoln and Andrew H...” Luckfeld leaned forward clasping his hands together. “Nameless individuals make up this world,” he said and then paused, looking into John’s eyes. After a moment or two he continued, “I’m going to tell you something, something that if it got out could hurt me and the people I answer to. Is that all right?”

John nodded. He was holding his breath.

“Carl Bova Tillman,” Colin Luckfeld intoned. “He owned the property around Prometheus Hall. We offered him six point seven five times the value of his property but he refused to sell; made himself an impediment in the Path. Our founder wanted this university and so we tasked a man to poison Tillman. The causes appeared to be natural and he passed peacefully, without pain or fear.

“There’s a wall we have, very far from here, and on that wall there’s a list of our heroes. Carl Tillman is among them. He made the ultimate sacrifice whether he knew it or not.”

At the beginning of the next semester John was still teaching, a nominal member of the history department. There had been a warrant issued for the arrest of Cornelius Jones in connection with the brutal murder of Chapman Lorraine. Jones was being sought in and around the five boroughs and beyond. Anyone with information was to report to Lieutenant Colette Van Dyne, homicide detective in charge of the investigation.

President Luckfeld had pushed back against Eubanks and her allies saying that pornography was a matter of perspective, that the context of the magazine photo projected was an attempt to validate new and innovative research techniques on the part of Professor Woman.

Eubanks was interviewed by the Parsonsville Investigator, a paper started by graduates of the NUSW School of Journalism. In the interview she claimed that John Woman was a charlatan and a fraud.

John hired a local contract lawyer, Buddy Farr, to sue Eubanks and the history department for defamation of character.

“You do know that I’m a contract lawyer for farmers who live on federal subsidies,” Farr told John. The lawyer was a white octogenarian who was four foot nine and bone thin.

“I don’t expect to win the suit,” John said. “I only want them to feel what they’re doing to me.”

John spent his spare moments wandering the streets of Parsonsville hoping to see his mother. On good days he walked around feeling like a fool, on bad ones he worried that he might be losing his mind.

How can the confluence of so many seminal aspects of a life occur at a single nexus? he asked Posterity in one of his daily writing sessions.

Even with these problems, an emotional calm descended upon John Woman. His life, crazy or not, had a purpose and that was enough.

“There are many ways that we can interpret our world’s story,” he said to the second semester of Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices. “The simpleminded view sees history as a verifiable set of events that occurred, that were somehow recorded and that come to us mostly untarnished and nearly irrefutable.

“Our history, we are often told, is pure objective fact unsullied by the human heart. Richard the Third was a scoundrel and Caligula a man of pure evil. All contemporary historians must do is work out the details by culling from dates, records, contemporaneous events, etcetera. In short, a pig with a good vocabulary and a decent memory could be teaching this seminar.”

That got a few snickers from the room of sixty-eight students. Since the Trash Can Lecture John had gotten requests from students across campus to sit in on his lectures. He had said yes to one and all knowing that would enrage Eubanks.

“But, Professor,” Justin Brown said.

“Yes, Mr. Brown?”

“How can people know anything if they doubt everything?”

John smiled at the handsome, self-assured chemistry major.

“Doubt is what makes us inquisitive, Justin. Doubt about the world we believe in is what brought the philosopher out of his cave. But truth is a slippery fish, easier to observe than it is to catch.”

“But you admit,” Pete Tackie said, “that there’s a real history just as much as there are laws in science.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Tackie, but you have to remember that even the so-called laws of physics can be overturned. We live by these laws all the while knowing that our understanding is at best partial — and sometimes simply wrong.”

“But how can we do work in any field,” Doris Heckerling, a frost-headed daughter of Minnesota, asked, “if we are constantly questioning what we know and believe?”

“That, Ms. Heckerling, is the purpose of history. What we know, or what we think we know, is always in the present, here and now. But the future, almost contradictorily, is where the past will change. We might for instance learn that Richard the Third was vilified by the landowners of his time because he wanted to empower the peasants. What was evil for the ruling body then becomes heroic for us today. Because of the natural limits of our perceptions we come to understand that history is always changing. This transforms a static study into a dynamic engine of thought and investigation. It is the process of continual reinvestigation itself that defines and ranks our work.” The students, John thought, were looking into themselves. Willie Pepperdine smiled broadly.

“I think that’s enough for today,” the young professor said. “Next Tuesday we’ll have Justin present a ten-minute talk on how the study of a so-called hard science is at odds with the notion of historical investigation. Read some of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to prepare for the discussion.”