I Feel Like
IT WAS THE third week of classes, and Eph’s English 240 was well attended, maybe seventy students. Technically, his class was a lecture, but it was still small enough to allow for some give-and-take, which Eph valued. The students settled in, virtually all staring down at their phones.
Eph took a moment to mentally pinch himself. Devon days were long and languorous, and he floated from classes to one of the soaringly beautiful dining halls, then perhaps to the Faculty Club or the gym. Campus was a stunning idyll, bathed in intellect. Eph couldn’t imagine a place he’d rather be, even as he questioned whether he deserved to be there. For those inside the bubble, Devon was a reprieve from the ordinary, workaday lives of commuting and cubicles, or in Eph’s case, tractors. Tenure was immutable, impregnable security; but more than that, for Eph it was validation, an imprimatur that declared he had risen above his roots. Getting denied would likely mean starting again somewhere else, the stain of rejection following him. It was unthinkable.
He flashed back to his unlikely journey, from Coastal Alabama Community College to Samford University—also in Alabama—on a scholarship. (When he said, “Samford” quickly enough, he knew people at Devon thought he was saying “Stanford,” a misunderstanding he was content to let go unremarked.) From there he’d gained entry to the English Lit Ph.D. program at Florida State, skipping right over his master’s. After graduating at the top of his class, he submitted an application to Devon for an open assistant professorship in American Lit, his specialty. It was a shot in the dark. He was shocked when he got the call for an interview, and more shocked still when he got the job. He found out later that the Devon English Department felt the need, however temporarily, to reach beyond its usual pool of Northeastern Ivy League academics. That window seldom opened and he got lucky.
It was nine-thirty on the dot. Showtime. He jumped right in.
“Good morning. The Civil War marked a significant turning point in American literature. The Romantic Movement that dominated the first half of the century, with writers like Hawthorne, Emerson, and James Fenimore Cooper, yielded to something new, the Age of Realism. The backdrop was an America first feeling its industrial might, an America where anyone, it was thought, could rise up to become a Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt. It was Twain himself who coined it the ‘Gilded Age.’”
Eph began pacing back and forth, as was his habit on the academic stage. “There were critics, particularly from Britain, who said the Realists were nothing more than a derivative of English literature the likes of Dickens. I beg to differ. This new American literature was something different entirely: unbound, messy, and socially aware. There was no confusing Twain or others with any English writer. The precise turning point, if we’re forced to pick one, would be Walt Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!,’ an elegy for Lincoln, the man he admired above all. Whitman’s poetry was like nothing that came before—highly descriptive, bowing before no conventions of rhyme or cadence, a riotous chronicling of the passing American scene. It was a consciously radical attempt to create a uniquely American poetry.
“Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal. I mean, who reads poetry today, right? In that time, though, poetry was easily the most read literary form. It ranked far above the novel in literary importance.”
Some movement by the classroom door distracted Eph for a moment. Someone was there, in the door’s small window, but the face vanished just as Eph looked over. Was that Toes?
“Uh, so while the Hawthornes and Emersons wrote of an idealized, naturalistic world—thus the term romanticism—these new writers, the Realists, wrote about the lives of everyday people, frequently using a regional patois, bringing to life vivid characters and exploring the human condition. The Romantics viewed nature as the primary channel through which self-reflection and self-realization could take place—think of Thoreau, out on his pond, striving to put into words the sound of one hand clapping—but later writers rejected this for tales of real people doing real things. Twain was the dominant force of this new realism. Hemingway would later say of Twain that all American literature can trace its roots to a single book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which we will read this week.”
He had them. They were absorbing his every word and feverishly taking notes. He thought briefly back to his time as a teaching assistant at Florida State, where the boys would spend class on espn.com while the girls surfed social sites. He realized he was thinking elitist thoughts, but weren’t there some things about which it was worth being elitist?
A girl in the front row raised her hand. She had round blue-tinted glasses and straight black hair that fell halfway to her waist. “I feel like this is all a very white perspective.”
“Well, I suppose you could say that,” answered Eph. “Most of the notable literature from the time was written by whites, although African-American literature began to flower in the very late part of the century when increased access to schooling led to higher literacy rates. I cover that period in a different class.”
The girl was undeterred. “I feel like it’s still kind of racist not to acknowledge the African-American community during the earlier periods.”
“Well, as we’ll see, they certainly were acknowledged, particularly by Twain, but there was little literature actually produced by African-Americans until later.”
“I feel like”—Eph began to sense a linguistic Groundhog Day—“I feel like this is an injustice. It upsets me.”
“The treatment of African-Americans certainly was an injustice,” Eph replied.
“Was?” A murmur spread through the class.
“Uh, was, and is, but for the purposes of this class, we’re going to confine ourselves to the nineteenth century, if that’s all right with everybody?”
There was some audible seat rustling, but no apparent objections.
“Your term paper will be due before you leave for winter break,” Eph continued. “I want you to compare and contrast a Romantic and a Realist. Choose one from each period. I want to see a deep dive. Twenty pages, give or take.” He waited for the groaning to commence, but there was none. Back at Coastal Alabama Community College, a twenty-page paper was unheard of, but this was Devon. It was expected.
* * *
After lunch at the Faculty Club (a delightful poached salmon served with fennel and a beurre blanc sauce), Eph walked back to his office, which, like his class, was in Grafton Hall. In the long hallway that bisected the building, he caught Toes emerging from a meeting room along with a few others. Toes’s prematurely gray hair was in the usual bun, which was pierced with what looked like a chopstick. Eph wondered what purpose that served.
“Eph, dude!”
“Hello, Barrett.”
Glancing through the door, Eph recognized one or two English Department colleagues as well as some professors from the Language Department. He tried hard to suppress his curiosity, not being inclined to give Toes the satisfaction of asking. He failed.
“What’s up in there? Plotting a literary coup of some sort?”
“Ha, no! This is our Esperanto working group. Some of us are trying to persuade the Devon Language Department to offer a course.”
“Aren’t there, like, five people in the world that speak Esperanto?”
“It might surprise you then to know there are over two million Esperantists worldwide.”
“You call yourselves Esperantists?”
“That’s right. Our goal is to make Esperanto the universal language, which we think will promote peace through better mutual understanding.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Say, are you interested in getting involved?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, but just you wait, my friend. Esperanto tranprenos la mondon!” Toes waited for Eph to ask for a translation, but the request was not forthcoming. “That means ‘Esperanto will take over the world.’”
“Okey-dokey.”
“All right, then. Peace, broth
er!” Toes’ shoes made a squishing noise on the marble floors as he walked away. Eph tried to find Toes annoying—well, he was annoying—but he was also relentlessly upbeat, which made him difficult to dislike. Much.
* * *
In his cramped office, Eph checked his email. The first one in his in-box was from a student.
Professor Russell, I am in your 19th Century American Lit class (which I love!) and I was wondering if I could come by your office to discuss my paper.
Eph didn’t recognize the name. It was still early in the semester and he’d only learned the names of the few who regularly spoke up. He proposed a time on Friday during office hours and got an almost immediate response.
Thank u. Can’t wait!
Can’t wait? For a faculty consult?
As a professor, Eph always liked it when students reached out. It usually meant they cared about the subject, at least enough to improve their grades. Many professors at Devon were content to lecture, but to Eph, teaching was all about the interplay between teacher and student.
He looked forward to meeting Miss Harris.
Ashley, Alabama
WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
How Eph dreaded that question. His normal response was always pleasantly misdirecting, especially when Devon people were doing the asking. “Florida,” he’d say. It wasn’t that his roots embarrassed him, but he didn’t want to be a curiosity, or, worse, an object of suspicion. And maybe when you got right down to it, he was a little self-conscious about it.
Florida wasn’t too far off, not really, since his childhood home was only forty miles north of the Panhandle, and a couple of times his family had vacationed down on the Gulf beaches. Life in the Panhandle wasn’t all that different from life in southern Alabama, so it was the whitest of lies. Floribama, some people called it. Also, he’d earned his Ph.D. in Tallahassee, at Florida State, so that established his Floridian bona fides.
Didn’t it?
Up here, when he said, “Florida,” people assumed he was from Boca or Naples or some other warm-weather outpost where Northeasterners always seemed to have in-laws. He did little to dispel these notions. Eph knew if he said he was from the postage-stamp town of Ashley, Alabama, he’d be treated as a lab specimen, some sort of wayward traveler from that other America, the one of tattoos and rednecks driving F-150s with gun racks. He’d be asked questions, ones oozing with fake sincerity, in an effort to “understand.”
Tell us what it’s really like.
He didn’t feel like being appointed Devon’s cultural “explainer,” like that guy who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Besides, he’d worked hard to get here. Or was it that he’d worked hard to get away from Ashley? Maybe it was both.
Not much ever happened in Ashley, anyway, so there wasn’t much to tell. What passed for discourse were debates on the relative merits of John Deere and Allis-Chalmers, or maybe arguments over who would win the Auburn starting-quarterback job the next season. To this day, the town’s claim to fame is the world’s only monument to an agricultural pest. Eph had to admit it was the one story about Ashley he liked to tell. He’d shared it with D’Arcy, anyway.
The story went back to the time Eph’s family first settled there, around the turn of the last century, those boundless years of America’s adolescence. In 1898, the Alabama Midland Railway ran a spur behind Main Street, connecting the town to the world and setting off a flurry of commerce. The soil in Melcher County was rich and mineral laden, perfect for growing cotton to meet the growing nation’s insatiable demand, so Ashley farmers stayed busy. The Alabama Midland Railway carted away the town’s bounty, while the venerable Brink’s corporation arrived with cash and bearer certificates, which were immediately deposited in the Merchant & Planters Bank. The town prospered.
In the summer of 1915, farmers first noticed an unfamiliar insect in the fields, an ugly-looking black thing with a mottled shell and extended proboscis. Some said it came from Mexico, which turned out later to have been the case. Few gave it much thought as it wasn’t a known pest, but the boll weevil proved itself an ambitious consumer of cotton and soon, like some biblical plague, was destroying cotton crops all over Melcher County. In a panic, farmers put entire fields to the torch, sort of an agricultural chemotherapy. It did little good. The damn things would just burrow into the soil until it was safe to come out.
Facing ruin, the town fathers gathered and made a dramatic decision: they would diversify Ashley’s crop base, growing peanuts, tobacco, even indigo. The boll weevil was voracious but picky, and that was its weakness. Word from other counties was that the pest didn’t much care for anything besides cotton, so growing other crops was the solution.
While this may seem an obvious course of action to the modern observer, not so in those days. Cotton had brought wealth to Melcher County, and Ashley’s farmers knew how to grow it and grow it well. Peanuts and the like required different growing and harvesting practices, and besides, who would grow which crop? Folks were just used to a certain way of doing things, and change bred uncertainty. Uncertainty bred fear. Some thought they could ride the infestation out, and they argued the point with vigor. In the end, though, the sight of charred fields was more frightening than the prospect of learning new crop techniques, and the town pushed forward.
The plan worked with surprising speed, and before long Ashley was prospering even more than before the pestilence. In 1919, to commemorate what they’d been through, the town commissioned a statue of a goddess holding aloft an oversize boll weevil. They erected the damn thing right in the middle of the town square. Passers-through took it as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, but it was hard to imagine the God-fearing folks of Ashley putting up an expensive statue as an ironic gag. Little did they know that a century later it would be all the town was known for, even if this renown would never extend much beyond the confines of Melcher County. Still, the Boll Weevil Monument stands as an eternal reminder to all how Ashley withstood adversity.
So that’s what it’s like. We build statues to insects.
Eph seldom dwelled on his own history in Ashley. He was the youngest of three, born to Millie and Big Mike Russell. By that time, Ashley was just another rural backwater, its glory years of wealth, industry, and cleverness decades behind it. Eph’s family owned a farm—growing soybeans and peanuts, mostly. They got by, but only just. There was little money for anything but the basics.
Eph’s early years were monotonous. When not in school, he was helping Big Mike and his siblings, Jack and Ellie, on the farm. He knew from an early age it was not his calling. Any spare time he had was spent reading. This did little to endear him to the neighborhood kids, and Big Mike thought it was a waste.
Still, at times in his younger years Eph valued the sameness of it all. Emerson—one of Eph’s favorites—called consistency the “hobgoblin of little minds,” but Eph suspected Emerson wasn’t talking about kids. For kids, change is always unsettling. Sure, the small things, the things that nudge at the order of things, those you got over. Things such as that time when Eph was eight and his mom announced the family would be eating only healthy food from then on. What did this mean for Tater Tots? Spaghetti night? Or a year later, when his pet rabbit, Jedi, died. He was almost as old as Eph when he went to rabbit heaven, and the family buried him out back with a little ceremony. Eph even said a few words. He couldn’t imagine the world without Jedi, but only for a few days.
Then there’s big change, the kind that sends a life on a different track—the kind that leads to Devon University instead of a soybean farm. That’s a different story, one that comes from a knock at the door.
The Progressive Student Alliance
THE PROGRESSIVE STUDENT Alliance made its headquarters in the space of a defunct fraternity, the old DKU house. The beautiful two-story stone structure evoked an Anglican chapel in the Cotswolds. The university had been openly hostile to fraternities since the fifties and used the considerable tools at its disposal to rid itself of them. Most of the houses, though, were pr
ivately owned, and the university couldn’t simply reclaim the properties. So Devon played the long game, waiting for opportunities. In its view, DKU had housed a particularly noxious gaggle of undergraduate brigands, a label with which the house residents themselves would not have quibbled.
In the mid-seventies, when money was tight everywhere, DKU fell behind on its property taxes. Like a hen appealing to the fox, the fraternity asked for Devon’s help. DKU had been at the school since 1851, went the appeal. It was an integral part of Devon’s history. And the order’s traditional involvement in the community had to be considered. Some of the brothers had even helped raise money for, you know, that thing a few years ago. So went the argument presented by Jamie Riggs, DKU’s president.
“Yes, indeed,” replied the dean of student affairs. “It would be a shame to see DKU leave us,” whereupon he nodded to university counsel, a man from the venerable Shearman & Sterling, who produced a check and a prodigious raft of papers, ready for signature. He held the check up so Jamie could see it, then pushed the papers across the table.
Relieved, Jamie signed here and signed there, imagining the reception he was going to get back at the house. Oh, what a party it would be. DKU lives!
Jamie Riggs would be the last of the Delta Kappa Upsilon’s 127 presidents. The party that night would indeed become the stuff of legend, but mostly as a monument to naïveté. Jamie, having been hungover at the time and not expecting treachery from his beloved Devon, had not actually read the eighteen-page loan agreement and its various codicils and covenants, which, while providing funds to cover the tax payment, required repayment, in full, in a week’s time.
Eight days later, at precisely nine a.m., an eviction notice was posted on DKU’s front door, giving the boys until the end of the semester to vacate. The magnificent DKU house was Devon’s for the bargain-basement price of $18,000.
Campusland: A Novel Page 3