Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [95]
And as the helicopters became specks to the north, I was startled to hear a woman speak. She was right behind me. She was small and was shod in white sneakers and had come up ever so quietly. I wasn’t expecting company.
She said, “I wondered what it was like up here. Sure is a mess, but the view is nice, if you like water and soldiers.” She sounded tired. We all did.
I turned to look at her. She was Black. I don’t mean she was so-called Black. Her skin was very dark. She may not have had any white blood whatsoever. If she had been a man at Athena, skin that color would have put her in the lowest social caste.
SHE WAS SO small and looked so young I mistook her for a Tarkington student, maybe the dyslexic daughter of some overthrown Caribbean or African dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation’s treasury.
Wrong again!
If the college GRIOT™ had still been working, I am sure it couldn’t have guessed what she was and what she was doing there. She had lived outside all the statistics on which GRIOT™ based its spookily canny guesses. When GRIOT™ was stumped by somebody who had given statistical expectations as wide a berth as she had, it just sat there and hummed. A little red light came on.
Her name was Helen Dole. She was 26. She was unmarried. She was born in South Korea, and had grown up in what was then West Berlin. She held a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin. Her father had been a Master Sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps of the Regular Army, serving in Korea and then in our Army of Occupation in Berlin. When her father retired after 30 years, to a nice enough little house in a nice enough little neighborhood in Cincinnati, and she saw the horrible squalor and hopelessness into which most black people were born there, she went back to what had become just plain Berlin and earned her Doctorate.
She was as badly treated by many people over there as she would have been over here, but at least she didn’t have to think every day about some nearby black ghetto where life expectancy was worse than that in what was said to be the poorest country on the planet, which was Bangladesh.
THIS DR. HELEN Dole had come to Scipio only the day before the prison break, to be interviewed by Tex and the Trustees for, of all things, my old job teaching Physics. She had seen the opening advertised in The New York Times. She had talked to Tex on the telephone before she came. She wanted to make sure he knew she was Black. Tex said that was fine, no problem. He said that the fact that she was both female and black, and held a Doctorate besides, was absolutely beautiful.
If she had landed the job and signed a contract before Tarkington ceased to be, that would have made her the last of a long succession of Tarkington Physics teachers, which included me.
But Dr. Dole had blown up at the Board of Trustees instead. They asked her to promise that she would never, whether in class or on social occasions, discuss politics or history or economics or sociology with students. She was to leave those subjects to the college’s experts in those fields.
“I plain blew up,” she said to me.
“ALL THEY ASKED of me,” she said, “was that I not be a human being.”
“I hope you gave it to them good,” I said.
“I did,” she said. “I called them a bunch of European planters.”
Lowell Chung’s mother was no longer on the Board, so all the faces Dr. Dole saw were indeed of European ancestry.
She asserted that Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other people’s land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves. She was taking a long view of history, of course. Tarkington’s Trustees certainly hadn’t roamed the world on ships, armed to the teeth and looking for lightly defended real estate. Her point was that they were