Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [4]
“Is it because I refused to be on the Diversity Committee?” I demanded. I was loud, the halls were empty. The echo enhanced my argument.
“Well, that certainly would have …,” he began, but seeing that I was hearing every word, already planning my deposition for my discrimination lawsuit, he stopped himself. “Your file was examined as a whole. You were hired to teach African American literature. Not just American literature. You fought that. Simple.”
“So you want the black guy to just teach black books to the white kids.”
“We have a large literature faculty, they can handle the majority of literature. You were retained to purvey the minority perspective. I see nothing wrong with that.” He shrugged, poured a second drink in a second glass and pushed it forward to me with the base of the bottle.
“You have academics going off the farm all the time. Yeats scholars who end up following their way to Proust. You have a film professor who was hired as a German linguist.”
“A Guggenheim, a Fulbright, and a Rhodes scholar. Mr. Jaynes, you … you have accomplished no such honor or distinction. I do not mean that as an insult, just an unfortunate reality.”
A big part of me hurt a lot hearing this said aloud, in a big way. I blushed, and as pale as I was I blushed possibly as no black man had done before me. Staring at him, I settled myself staring at his bastard tie. Look at it. That bow tie was hypnotizing. Usually men of power have useless fabric tied around their necks, but his was smaller, and tied at a different angle. No big phallic thing for this guy. No, it was even worse, it was “Look at me, I have an itty-bitty micro-phallic tie around my neck, and yet I still have all this power over you.”
“Please, listen to me,” I pleaded. “My work, it’s about finding the answer to why we have failed to truly become a postracial society. It’s about finding the cure! A thousand Baldwin and Ellison essays can’t do this, you have to go to the source, that’s why I started focusing on Poe. If we can identify how the pathology of Whiteness was constructed, then we can learn how to dismantle it. The work I am doing, it’s just books, sure, but it’s important, essential research. You’re going to fire me for refusing to sit on the campus Diversity Committee?”
“You could have compensated for your lack of national presence by embracing our role locally, but alas,” he told me and looked away. “Everyone has a role to play.”
I put my hand out to him, and before he could meet my palm with his own I reached higher and grabbed the tie on his neck. It was a clip-on and came off easily, barely shook him when I yanked it off in my fist. I was right about it being his power source. He was totally quiet after it was taken from him. I didn’t hear a peep behind me as I ran from the confrontation.
When I got to the car, I told Garth that my academic career was probably over, but since I’d been saying the same thing for a couple days he just tuned me out as he tuned in the radio.
“Take me to this place, before we go. It was done at a park about two miles from your house. I already Googled it,” he said, reaching across me to get into the glove compartment. Garth pulled out this print of a painting, all scrolled up, and dropped it in my lap. I unraveled it and saw a syrupy sweet landscape of the Catskills, the kind of vista painted on how-to shows in a half hour. The kind of painting Garth adored, done by that artist he idolized.
“It’s called Stock of the Woods,” he said. “It’s a Thomas Karvel Hudson Valley School Edition. A tribute to the painters they used to have here. I have an original signed print. That’s part of my nest egg, and you’re there laughing at it. Look at it. Really look at it, you need to. Don’t it make you all peaceful just looking into that world?”
“Looks like the view up a Care Bear’s ass.”
“I got stress!