Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“That rich man’s cult?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“Are you a member?”

“Do I look like a rich white man?”

“Your race eludes me, Professor Brown, but that’s not what I asked you.”

“No, I wouldn’t even know how to find them.”

“Good. It is now July,” John said. “I’d like my class to start in the spring term.”

By late September John had received two hundred eleven applications from community members wanting to attend the infamous professor’s class. The college students would go through the same admission process.

There were one hundred eighty-six student applications but only one of these interested John.

The class was titled The School of Suspicion: The Interpretation of the Formation of the Modern World, Created by Forces Unknown and Undeniable.

The application form consisted of just one request: In one page please write, type or word process a thumbnail biographical statement of your life as it pertains to your desire to take this course.

John spent October alone in his mother’s old apartment poring over the applications. Any document over one page was automatically discarded.

Mary Freeman at thirty-one years of age had five children and no husband. She’d been a straight-A student through high school and expected to go to college, there to become some kind of great thinker. Instead she fell in love with a boy named Alonzo. Twelve years, three arrests, one conviction, two addictions (not including love) and one restraining order later she requested admission to John’s class in hopes of finding her way back.

William Bluebland was a twenty-one-year old part-time drug dealer. Bluebland was born in Arkansas. He left there for New York because he didn’t see anything changing down home. He had little faith it would be different in NYC but maybe, he wrote, what was what down home could be something else in Brooklyn.

At sixty-three Maya Thoms had lived in Brooklyn since the age of two when her parents emigrated from Jamaica. She said that she now knew everything she’d been taught had in one way or another been a lie, from the newspaper to her job description, from the minister’s sermon to politicians’ promises, from the television to the words coming out of her own mouth. Because she had read in the newspapers that Professor Woman had made it his life study to understand this world of lies she said that she’d like to study with him to maybe get a hold of what it is they’re lying to hide.

Talib Mustafa gave his age as most probably forty-two. His application claimed that he was a self-rehabilitated criminal. He’d robbed at gunpoint, was arrested, convicted, sentenced and saved — in that order. Now he wanted to sit in the presence of another black man who might have some idea of why nobody seemed to understand his story.

Amber Martins identified herself as an eighteen-year-old high school dropout. Hers was the one photograph application that John read. She printed a full-page image of her face and superimposed the essay over that. Amber’s brassy skin had many piercings and tattoos. She’d lived with her grandparents her entire life. She wanted to do well in school but found it hard to concentrate because she didn’t care about half of what they were teaching. She wondered why most older black people disapproved of her music, her tattoos and the way she talked. They remember the civil rights days like they were better than we are today. They get mad because I take things like freedom for granted. It’s like they want you to spend your whole life kissing their ass because they marched and protested and got beaten, bitten and hosed.

Student essays were similar and yet different.

I want to know why I’m here in this world, Martinique González wrote. I study and fuck and get high every day and none of it really means anything.

I want to know why I turn right rather than left, Mister Price of Tampa wrote. I think that there must be a reason, a fate, but I’m beginning to doubt that this has anything to do with the God my mother loves so much.

I live with my grandmother, Tom Brawn wrote in pencil. She read about your class in the Clarion and told me that your course description sounds like the only thing in the whole school that was about really learning something. She’s half blind and in a wheelchair but she told me that if she had just one good leg that she’d use it to get down to you once a week. I want to take the course so my Grandma Mary and I can talk about what you said.

The shortest application John accepted read: My name is Christian Van Dyne. I am a first-year student and my mother is Colette Van Dyne, born Margolis.

On January 15 the Brooklyn streets were covered by a thin scrim of snow.

John Woman stood at the front of an empty classroom on the second floor of the main building of Medgar Evers College. He’d been there since 11:38 a.m., eighty-two minutes before the first student arrived — half an hour early. Dark-skinned, short and stout, she carried a walking stick but did not use it.

“Welcome,” the professor said to his first class member. “I’m John.”

“Maya Thoms, Professor,” she replied walking up to the front of the class. “I got a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“Are we going to have reading assignments?”

Two young men entered the classroom through the back door.

“All books on the syllabus will be in the library,” John said, and then to the men, “Come on in, gentlemen.”

“Because you know,” Maya said. “I’m not too good at readin’. I mean, I can read words and stuff but if you asked me later on what they meant I might not be too clear on that.”

“Not to worry, Ms. Thoms. I will ask you what was said, the words you read. It will be the object of the class to make those words make sense.”

Over the next twenty minutes the classroom filled up. College students and community members sat among each other in the blond chair-desks that furnished the bare linoleum-tiled, neon-lighted room.

John stood behind the nicked and scarred dark-wood lectern provided by Professor Brown’s assistant, Dawn Langthorpe. Twenty-three years old, Dawn was a senior with near-black skin and hair dyed platinum blond. She wore bright blue contact lenses and a plastic necklace with a perfect white circle against her dark chest.

“That’s an interesting look,” John said the first time they met.

“I got it from a novel,” she said. “The woman protagonist looked like this before she discovered, or maybe recovered, herself.”

“And this is your gesture toward the road to recovery?”

“I’d like to observe your class, Doctor Woman,” she said, smiling. “Professor Brown asked me but I wanted to anyway. I applied but you turned me down.”

John remembered the first sentence of Dawn’s application. It read, “I believe you should accept me in your class because I have studied the uses of history for my entire college career...” This alone was enough to make him reject her. Regardless of the fact that she started with a personal pronoun the subject of the piece was her education and not herself. Added to this she minimized the size of the font and pitch of the document condensing three normal pages into one.

Dawn sat at the back of the room as they had agreed the day they met.

The thirty members of the class were there on or before the appointed hour; all but one of them black, otherwise nonwhite, or biracial. Not for the first time John considered the random fortune of being a black historian chosen by his own people to teach. This, he believed, was a fitting beginning of the life he’d run away from. He’d been a fugitive, a murderer and a liar. Now like Nesta, the woman he never met, he’d been retrieved by a twist of fate.