“I understand it did quite well.”
“Six thousand copies. I don’t think Stephen King feels threatened, but I was pleased.”
“So that’s your yardstick? Book sales?”
“Is there a different one?” Eph shifted in his seat.
“Books are meant to be written, not read,” offered Darrin.
“What’s important,” added Blue Feather, “is what you have to say, not how many consumers you can snooker into clicking BUY NOW on Amazon.”
“I guess all things being equal,” Eph said, “I’d like someone to read my books. They do take some time.”
Their main courses arrived. Eph looked down at his lamb and brussels sprouts. His serving appeared as a small island in the middle of an expansive plate. D’Arcy had pumpkin ravioli, while Blue Feather and Darrin were both eating some sort of vegan stew.
“So, Russell,” said Blue Feather, digging into her stew. “There’s a march for trans rights next Saturday, right here in Havenport. I think it would be amazing if you two joined us. Darrin’s dressing as a pussy. I’m still trying to decide what works.”
That must be complicated, thought Eph, willing his face into a bland neutrality. He glanced sideways at D’Arcy, looking for help, but she just smiled pleasantly while giving his ankle a swift kick under the table. Overall collegiality was one of the criteria for tenure. That was the nebulous factor that had tripped up more than a few candidates in the past. Collegiality was strictly in the eyes of the beholder.
“Amazing, yes. Can’t think of anything better.”
“It’s settled then. I’ll email you the details. You know, we might even have some extra costumes.”
Eph raised his hand to catch the attention of their waiter. “Excuse me. More drinks please?”
Milton Gets Occupied
IT TOOK TWO days to remove the graffiti on the base of Stockbridge. The paint had seeped deep into the pores of the building’s limestone, and several applications of borax had been required, followed by blasts of heated water at high pressure.
Milton Strauss longed for a return to normalcy. It didn’t seem an extravagant request. He hoped things had blown over and he wouldn’t have to open the next Board of Governors meeting discussing the video and the graffiti.
Sorting through some paperwork on his desk, he heard some distant chanting from outside somewhere. It grew louder as he listened. He looked out his office window to see several dozen students, all African-American, in an angry knot making their way up Mathers Walk. Some pumped their fists as they poured into Bingham and steered right toward Stockbridge, a peloton of inchoate rage. Milton knew his longing for quiet was shot to hell.
What were they chanting? He strained to make it out, but couldn’t. Despite the cold, he opened his window to hear better.
“We are through with Racist U!”
He watched them file in downstairs. Sitting down, he had a pretty good idea of what was coming next. The chants echoed inside the marble halls, coming closer.
Moments later, D’Arcy rushed in. “Sir, I tried to stop them!”
“I know. It’s all right. Let them in.”
They streamed around D’Arcy into his office, still chanting. Milton tried to speak but was drowned out. He knew he was just going to have to wait them out.
“Should I call security?” D’Arcy was doing her best to be heard.
“No, I’d like to hear what they have to say.” More streamed in, perhaps thirty in all. After a few more chants, they stopped, as if on cue.
“President Strauss. My name is Jaylen Biggs, and I am president of the Afro-American Cultural Center. We are here to occupy your office until our demands are met.”
Milton spread his arms wide. “Oh, welcome, welcome! It’s great to see everybody. Really great. And please, call me Milton.”
“We are through being Devon’s second-class citizens!” declared Jaylen. The protesters, who now occupied every square inch of Milton’s office, many sitting on the Persian rug, snapped their fingers repeatedly. It sounded like the clucking of many tongues.
“I understand, I really do,” Milton said in his most solicitous tone. “Would anyone like some coffee? It must be very cold outside. D’Arcy, would you be kind enough to round up some coffee for everyone?”
“Oh, sure, let the woman of color play servant!” said one of the female students.
“Oh, well, we can all get our own coffee, if that would be better. Or tea. Please remember to use coasters.”
“We are here to be heard, sir!” More snapping. “As a white person of privilege, you will never know what it’s like to walk by a building named after a slave owner, or into a dining hall surrounded by portraits of dead white people, no people of color at all. You don’t know, and you can’t know.”
“You’re so right. How can I know? Why don’t you help me? I’m here to listen. D’Arcy, you’d better cancel my appointments.” Milton adopted an expression of intense interest, one that said, I’m here for you. Share with me.
One of the female students took up the reins. “This place, this place you call Devon, is white, white, white. It’s violent, in your face, everywhere you go. You, the university president, you’re white. It’s oppression. But know this: we owe you nothing. It’s Devon that owes us everything. We built this. This is ours. This place was built on the backs of our people, and yet we are second-class citizens on this campus!” The girl was so worked up tears were now steaming down her face.
Milton nodded, as if in profound agreement, deciding not to point out that slavery was largely nonexistent in eighteenth-century New England when Devon was founded and was completely abolished by the time most of the current campus was constructed. But surely the girl was speaking metaphorically, and her pain was plainly real. “Please, tell me how I can help.”
Jaylen Biggs produced a sheath of papers. “We have a list of forty-seven demands. First, the fraternities…”
Lulu Finds Out About Survivors
ALL OF HAVENPORT rendered in gray scale. It wasn’t as if Devon was that far from her New York home, but somehow winter was worse here, the way the January wind blew off the water right through your bones. Lulu noticed a general sense of depression among her classmates as campus life settled into a somewhat dreary routine. For Lulu, this meant classes, assuming she woke up in time, and working out at the university gym. At least she’d managed to avoid the dreaded “freshman fifteen,” something she made easier by assiduously avoiding student dining halls. Most meals, to the extent she ate them at all, she took just off campus at a chopped-salad place that wasn’t horrible. Socialites were whippet-thin; gaining weight was out of the question.
Years ago—Sheldon thought it was in the seventies—some Devonites decided that the month of February was wanting and, well, something had to be done. Opting for overkill, their solution was to have a party every night of the month. They dubbed it the 28 Club for the number of days in February. Every night, a different group volunteered to host, and it was open to all, assuming one was wired enough to know the schedule. Lulu had been to a couple out of boredom, although she skipped the one at Beta. No need to be seen there again.
When Lulu first got into Devon, she didn’t react the way most did. She didn’t film herself screaming with excitement reading her electronic acceptance letter. She didn’t humble-brag on Facebook, Guess I’ll be spending the next four years in Havenport. I hear the winters are terrible! Truth was, she was surprised to get in. She figured she’d go to NYU, a school much more geographically desirable for her purposes. But there was Sheldon to consider, plus she found that being accepted at Devon while simultaneously making it clear she didn’t give a shit infuriated people. That part was fun. Anyway, Lulu figured she’d stay long enough to please Sheldon, then get on with things, with the brand. But now she wasn’t so sure. There were some people here—not many, to be sure—that she didn’t find completely horrible and might even miss a little if she left. This was an unexpected development. In
particular, the Fellinghams lot, they were friends she imagined she might keep. She did have to ward off Win’s advances that one night, which proved painfully awkward. Win was too light in his loafers for her tastes. But on the whole, other than that and a roommate she wanted to pack off on the next cargo ship to Rangoon, things were tolerable. Almost pleasant.
Campus was blanketed with snow from an all-day blizzard, and the paths were only partially plowed. It was the kind of wet snow that caked tree branches, giving everything a winter wonderland look. Deciding her Stuart Weitzmans were not up to the task, Lulu pulled on some Bean boots and made her way to the campus post office. The walk was not made easier by her hangover, courtesy of Fellinghams the previous evening. She could swear a small man with a ball-peen hammer had taken up residence somewhere just behind her eyes. She would open her third Diet Coke of the day as soon as she got back to her room.
The PO was practically deserted. Once, maybe back in Sheldon’s day, the PO had been a hub of activity, but no longer. The internet had seen to that. Today, though, it was a place that held infinite promise; Lulu was there to pick up this month’s On the Avenue. Surely, this would be the one.
OTA had an online presence, of course, but its glossy articles and oversize pages were meant to be a tactile experience. The magazine encouraged this by delaying online content until the print version had been out for a couple of days.
Peering into the window of her little box, Lulu could see it was stuffed with mail. After checking her phone’s Notes app for her box combination, she spun the little dial and opened it up. Mail spilled out, almost all junk. Lots of credit card offers. She picked up the pile and rifled through it, throwing almost everything in a nearby trash can. She found a card from the PO that said, You have additional mail at the desk. She handed the note to the postal worker behind the counter, who, seemingly in slow motion, retrieved another bundle. “You should get your mail more often.”
“Why?”
Lulu dumped the mail on a nearby table, and the big, glossy copy of OTA was hard to miss. Right away, she could see she wasn’t on the cover. A shot of some society-matron types was under the heading “The New Astors.” Old people, who cares. She flipped rapidly through the pages … boring article … boring article … nothing. Where the hell is it? It should have run by now. She was briefly tempted to call Wendy Faircloth, but thought better of it. Too eager.
She walked back to her room, which was blissfully devoid of Song. Plopping down on her bed, she leafed through OTA at a more leisurely pace, flipping to the party pictures first. It was the usual benefits and openings. Cassie Little, one of Lulu’s erstwhile modeling partners, was shot at an opening for a contemporary art show at the Odeon Gallery in Chelsea. The show featured the work of up-and-coming artist Lucien Smith. Lulu thought his paintings looked like a bunch of black dots on a white background, but a New York Times art critic had dubbed Smith the “new Dada,” so she took it on faith that his work was important. It annoyed her to think of Cassie sashaying around the Odeon Gallery, pretending to understand everything, especially when photographers were nearby. Bitch.
Now bored, Lulu tossed OTA aside and thumbed through Newsweek, a free copy of which had also been stuffed in her box. She guessed they were looking for younger subscribers, although she didn’t know a single person her age who subscribed to a newsmagazine. The very idea seemed ridiculous.
About halfway through, past the hard news, an article caught her attention. Called “Campus Nightmares,” it was about the wave of sexual assaults on American campuses. The victims—known as survivors—were bravely coming to the fore, exposing their pain for the common good. There was a lot about Emma Sulkowicz, the famous “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, who had carried a mattress around campus for an entire year to protest an alleged assault by a fellow student. Lulu thought there must be less exhausting ways to get attention, but she couldn’t argue with the results. Sulkowicz had become a campus celebrity and a feminist hero. She even got invited to one of Barack Obama’s States of the Union. Lulu googled Mattress Girl, and there were 2.7 million hits.
Another girl had accused a teacher of assault and her whole campus had rallied around her cause. She was hailed with words like brave and pathbreaking and was said to be taking on the “power imbalance” between teacher and student.
Something new was happening here. Victims as celebrities. Yolanda Perez had kept on her about that black eye last month, the one that forced Lulu to hide her first week in St. Barts. Perez had even shown up at her door with some woman from a campus feminist group. They pressed Lulu hard for a name, promising to “title nine his ass.” As much fun as it might be to get the hairy man-boy in trouble, Lulu didn’t have time for a bunch of dykes. As a likely English major, she was, however, intrigued that title nine was now being used as a verb.
The article also reminded her uncomfortably of her encounter in Professor Russell’s office. The anger she had felt afterward had devolved into something that most people would understand as shame, although in Lulu the feeling was banished to a dormant level of consciousness before it was allowed to be recognized as such. Alcohol helped with that. And then, to get that B+ on her final paper! She was still smarting over that. Not that she gave a shit about grades, and not because she gave a rat’s ass about Louisa May Alcott, either.
Craving a distraction, she made an exaggerated frown into her phone’s camera and posted the shot to Instagram with the hashtag #SoBored. She was up to two thousand followers. The near-instantaneous likes and comments that caused her phone to vibrate put her in a better mood.
That the picture captured more than she intended she would only come to realize later.
Devon Daily
February 3
Students of Color Continue Occupation
The occupation of Stockbridge Hall by minority students entered its fifth day yesterday. Echoing iconic demonstrations of prior generations such as the Columbia protests of the 1960s, minority students, led by the Afro-American Cultural Center, have occupied Stockbridge Hall since Tuesday. They have vowed to stay until their list of demands is met. The office of Devon’s president, Milton Strauss, was the initial focal point, but as the protest has grown, other offices have been occupied as well, bringing many university services to a halt.
The Cultural Center has cited recent incidents on campus, including a recent party at the Beta Psi fraternity and the alleged racism last semester in the English Department as evidence of a hostile and unsafe atmosphere for minority students. The campus is so on edge that police were called on Thursday to the site of the new residential houses, where a noose was reported hanging from a construction girder. It was later determined that the rope was there to keep electrical wires safely away from construction workers.
There has been increased scrutiny of Devon by the press and on social media, with some questioning Devon’s commitment to social progress. Many believe this to be a seminal test of President Strauss’s tenure.
The Cultural Center posted its list of forty-seven demands online as well as on the door of Stockbridge. Among them, they instruct the university to:
• Ban membership in Beta Psi and other fraternities and convert the houses into living space for all members of the African diaspora
• Eliminate tests and grades in certain non-STEM majors
• Change the names of various buildings and permanently remove plaques honoring Devon’s graduates who died fighting for the Confederacy
• Eliminate cultural appropriation in all forms, including ethnic food nights in the dining halls
• Create a new student-run committee to monitor all forms of oppressive behaviors on campus, including those that are racist, sexist, transphobic, cissexist, misogynist, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and climate denying
Reached by phone from President Strauss’s office, Cultural Center president Jaylen Biggs issued the following statement:
“Our demands are fair and reasonable. It is the university’s resp
onsibility to provide a safe environment for its students and it has failed to do so. We will occupy this office and others until they are met.”
It is reported that President Strauss, in a show of unity with the protesting students, has vowed to stay with them inside his own office until an agreement can be reached. The Daily has also exclusively learned that an emergency session of the Steering Committee of the Board of Governors has been called for tomorrow.
Reading the Daily with growing anger, Red Wheeler took special note of Jaylen’s demands, which now bled into matters of LGBT, feminist, Latino, and Islamic rights. Shit, Jaylen even threw ableist in there. And climate! That fucker. After his big speech about the PSA staying out of race issues, he’d gone and laid claim to every goddamn thing. Ableism, for Christ sake! What the fuck did Jaylen care about ableism? And this, after Red had handed him this whole damn play on a silver platter. The fucking nerve!
* * *
Over at the Beta house, Tug Fowler had just finished reading the sports section of the Daily. The Devon hockey team was making quite a run this year. Seven members of the team were in Beta. Having a few more minutes before he had to leave for his next class, he decided to glance at the front page.
“Fuck, have you guys seen this?”
Eph Gets a Visitor
IT ALWAYS FELT colder in Havenport than it actually was. It was the humidity, people said. Eph wondered if he’d always be a biological Alabaman, shivering in the Northern climes when others went about unfussed. The snow this year had come in December and stayed, with each storm piling more inches on the last until the paths on campus became narrow channels from building to building.
“Is the whole winter like this?” asked Ellie.
“Most of them.” His sister, Ellie, had shown up somewhat unexpectedly. A personal matter had taken her to New York, so she called and said she’d like to come up for a day to visit. It was her first time at Devon, and the first time Eph had seen her in over five years. He’d always had a soft spot for Ellie. Ellie the peacemaker. He was touched she’d made the effort.
Campusland: A Novel Page 17