Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“But you’ve seen them,” Beth Weiner said. “Haven’t you?”

John frowned and nodded. “When did they go up?”

“Late Saturday night.”

“And were there arrests made on Monday?”

“No.”

“Have any of the professors mentioned been put on academic suspension?”

“No.”

“Then I think that it’s a cruel hoax perpetrated by angry and immature minds. That’s personal opinion, not professorial authority or knowledge.”

“But it does mean you think they were wrong,” Star Limner proposed.

“I think,” John said, and then he paused, looking around the room for words that momentarily eluded him. “I think... this broadside, this salvo, this pretense at a cry for justice is simply an attempt to alarm students, faculty, parents and even the people of the town of Parsonsville... this compulsion to destroy is both cowardly and misguided.”

“But what if they’re right?” Jack Burns said.

“They are not,” John replied. “And even if someone is guilty of, or at least culpable for, a crime, do we have a right to murder the person?”

“No one tried to kill anybody,” a voice shouted from the back of the room.

“No?” John asked the blue desert beyond the speaker. “What if you had built an entire life dedicated to learning and service? What if any of you had but one love and then the object, the possibility of that love was taken away in a manner so violent and so public that you might never recover? What if you had a pistol in one hand and the long fall before you?

“But it is not simply the callous threat against a few individuals that we’re facing. Each of you is suffering from the passions roused, passions that have no anchor and no proofs. You came here to find answers. You want to know that your world socially, intellectually and spiritually is not falling down around your ears.

“Has anyone not in my regular class heard the term hermeneutics ?”

A young black woman standing at the wall to the left of the lectern raised her hand. John recognized her. She was the woman who had complimented his Trash Can Lecture when he was searching for his mother at the coffee shop.

“Yes?” he said.

“It’s like the study of the meaning of scripture,” she said, almost as a question.

John smiled and nodded. “In ancient times it was. But in modern philosophy, philology and some branches of history it takes on the meaning of a kind of rigorously applied empathy with the experience of others. In a popular song from the sixties a singer asked his self-avowed enemy to, ‘walk a mile in my shoes.’ This is what your yellow journalists have left out of their cowardly diatribe. They threaten, condemn and destroy giving no evidence that they understand the human condition.”

“What is that, Professor?” the black woman from the coffee shop asked.

“Have you ever done something you wouldn’t want others to know about?” The woman hesitated. John noticed she was wearing a butter-colored dress that complemented her dark skin.

“What does that have to do with anything?” she said.

John turned to the rest of the class, looked around a moment and then asked, “Have any of you here committed a crime or misdemeanor that you want kept secret?”

A visible tremor went through the assemblage.

“I have,” said a young man in a white T-shirt seated in row seven or eight. “I stole something once. It was a long time ago but I still feel bad about it.”

“Me too,” said Justin Brown. “It was the last time I ever got drunk.”

John allowed seventeen confessions, most without pertinent detail. Theft, violence and silence were the most common offenses. Each admission, John felt, was a brick removed from the walls of their tombs.

“I cheated on my boyfriend,” Carlinda Elmsford said. “And I liked it. I liked it a lot.”

That’s when John took over again. “I suspect that every one of you in this room has done something you consider wrong at one time or another, things you’d never share with anyone. Maybe it’s a crime; maybe just your nature.”

“So are you saying that these accusations are false?” Carlinda cried out, her voice strained and cracking.

“I am absolutely sure of the professors’ innocence,” John declared. “But at the same time I don’t care about allegations because I live by the rule of law, not rumor.”

For some reason this statement cast a hush over the crowded classroom.

John looked around at the faces. He saw a hunger for understanding in most.

“I have an assignment for you,” he said. “I want you to get a pad of yellow legal paper and to go to a place where you are completely alone, a place where no one can see what you’re doing there, to write down a true statement. Something you’ve done that would get you fired from your dream job or a crime you committed. In the space that’s left you can explain the circumstances or give excuses if you wish. You should not sign the document. Then decide whether or not you would pin this confession on a wall near the yellow broadsides. Would you do to yourselves what the yellow journalists say they have done to others?”

The eyes of many of the students turned inward then.

John recited the Bard’s sonnet silently, then said, “Go.”

“John,” she called as he was going down the south stairs.

He waited for Carlinda to catch up to him.

She was wearing a gray-and-gold full-length dress that might have been a ball gown in some medieval hamlet.

When she reached him she kissed him on the lips then stared him in the eye. It was almost a dare.

“Hi,” he said.

A feeling assailed him like a stiff wind; it was the distance he felt when Colette told him that she was marrying her boyfriend. Even though Carlinda was standing before him she was far, far away.

“Did my confession scare you?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?” she seemed disappointed.

“I asked the question. I can’t complain about an answer.”

Carlinda searched deeply into John’s eyes. Whatever she was looking for — it wasn’t there.

“You got to watch out for Pete,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“He was real mad at the things you said in the lecture.”

“What did he expect?”

“I think he kind of sees himself as a hero,” she said with a single shoulder shrug. “He thought you were going to say that the people who put up the broadsides were brave and true historians.”

“Damn,” John said and then he sucked a tooth.

“What?”

“Nothing. I mean... I should have seen that coming.”

“Me and Tamala will talk to him but don’t go to your office hours and stay out of his way until we tell you it’s all right.”

“How did you guys finally decide to divvy up the crimes and criminals?” he asked, neither distance nor Pete Tackie being of any concern.

“Um,” Carlinda hemmed, “uh, we gave Eubanks’s embezzling charge to Randolph Cordell in economics and Carmody’s pederast charges and trial to Dov Pomerantz in the art department; like that with all of them.”

“You really did it,” John said.

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

“I guess not. I mean I know how it feels to be vilified, to be aware of your own guilt and there’s nothing you can do to change it.”

“What’s changed in you?” she asked.

“I think I might have lost my mask.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I’m not sure, but... I have to go.”

“Just stay away from your office.”

“I will.”

John noticed Annette Eubanks waiting outside the door as he approached his office at four. She wore a maroon dress. Even from the back he could see that her hair was mussed. She clenched a shiny black purse under her right arm, like a football player about ready to go for the touchdown.