by Barry Wolfe
Chemistry had been the subject of my only intellectual romance in high school, and I had received one of my few “A’s” in my high school chemistry class. By a process of elimination it became my major. That rare “A” grade catapulted my imagination to the belief that I was destined to become a successful chemist. This belief becomes a full-blown fantasy during my freshman year at Howard when I convince myself that my ultimate purpose in life is to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. This will allow me to eventually earn a $100,000 a year salary. By pocketing such a yearly sum, I would live a luxurious lifestyle that would eliminate financial worry while rocketing me forever out of the orbit of my lower middle class origins.
My hope and enthusiasm are initially expanded by the elegant, droll, and ultimately intimidating presence of our professor. Dr. Moddie Taylor is a rising star in the world of chemistry. He was a 1943 Ph.D. from the prestigious University of Chicago. In 1945, he worked at the U. of Chicago for two years on the top-secret Manhattan Project. From him I know that I will get a good education in chemistry. But his status is a two-edged sword. I am in constant fear of embarrassing myself, which I manage to do virtually every other class. Here is a prototypical example: Dr. Taylor asks the following question, “Who here can describe Aristotle’s view on the theory of the atom?” I raise my hand frantically with a feeling of excited certitude. “Yes, Mr. White,” Dr. Taylor says, expectantly. “Aristotle believed there are four kinds of elements, Earth, Air, Water, and Fire,” I answer triumphantly. Dr. Taylor peers at me with a gentle, avuncular smile of forbearance and says, “I guess Aristotle said a lot of things, didn’t he, Mr. White.” “Anyone else?” he asks, turning his gaze in a completely different direction.
The same dark omen awaits me in the laboratory. For a time, I am at home with the putrid smells, the dirty reagent bottles, the clattering of test tubes, the smoking acids carving trails across the laboratory tables. It isn’t long, however, before the foul smelling and mood killing epiphanies I encounter in those dark dank chemistry laboratories threaten my fantasy of a successful career in chemistry and an opulent life. Initially, I think it’s coolly avant-garde to be playing in the smelly, smoky laboratories, creating oozing, odorific concoctions. And I am thoroughly enjoying my tablemate who seems not only to share, but also to revel in my macabre sense of humor. As we transfer our concoctions from one test tube to another, we both give out with an overly loud maniacal laugh. This earns us a look of disapproval from the lab instructor. When I proclaim with faux hysteria “It’s alive! It’s alive!” the lab instructor is quickly in my face with a rather unpleasant verbal reprimand. My tablemate muffles his laughter with a mouth-covering hand. After the lab instructor returns to his seat, I hear a laughing voice behind me say,
“Hey, Dr. Frankenstein, got any sulfuric acid left? I’m all out.”
“Sure Courtney, here you go. God, this stuff smells.”
“Some chem. major you are. You can’t even take the smells. You know the odor stays with you, Izzy, all day long.”
“Are you talking about the chemicals or your b.o.?” I crack up at my own joke, but Courtney responds with a sour smile. I’m surprised by the easy camaraderie that has developed between me and Courtney Cartwright. Even though we had played on rival basketball teams in high school and had met again our first day in line for the Opening Convocation, it’s only in Howard’s laboratory that we actually become friends. By now we have been tablemates for nine nose-withering weeks.
“Courtney, what the hell are you laughing at?” I ask.
“Your hands, man, your hands,” Courtney answers with a high-pitched chuckle?
“They’re almost as brown as mine now. You better watch out, Izzy, my color’s beginning to rub off on you.” I look at my acid-stained hands and with effort manage a smile. But some nameless dread seizes me. Will the stains ever come off, I wonder. Courtney interrupts my reverie. “Come on, Izzy, let’s take a break. This experiment’s a snap. We’ll have it done in no time.” Courtney reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a box of doughnuts. As he lifts the doughnuts out of the box, the powdered sugar falls off, dusting his hands and wrists. I watch in fascination as Courtney’s hands lose their mocha color to the fine layer of white powder. Courtney leans his lanky frame against the lab table as if he is sidling up to a bar for a drink. With a deft motion of his wrist, he pushes the entire doughnut into his mouth. Courtney suddenly gets a look of dismay on his face and attempts a muffled apology as he belatedly offers me a doughnut. The heebie jeebies return as I take the doughnut from Courtney’s hand. I stare at Courtney’s hand and then at the doughnut. I am paralyzed, unable to bring the doughnut to my lips. Courtney is puzzled and getting frustrated with my reluctance to eagerly consume his gift. “Go ahead, eat it man!” Courtney exclaims a little too forcefully for my taste. “It won’t kill you. The acid’s dry by now. It won’t come off.” I’m not worrying about the acid. I finally work up enough nerve to swallow a bit of the doughnut. I scrunch up my eyes and wait for “the great change” to overtake me. I am near panic as I wait. Will the change be permanent? Will I forever after be viewed with contempt as a Negro with all his imagined faults and foibles? Did I just eat myself into second-class citizenship? When some moments pass and nothing happens, I am consumed again by the familiar tumult of shame. By the time class ends, I’m sick to my stomach and wondering how I will be able to stand my upcoming humanities class.
I’m already late for my humanities class, but the need to evacuate is so great that I make a detour to the largest bathroom in the Chemistry building. I enter the ancient men’s room. I must confess I am appalled by what I see. The concrete floor is cracked and stained with what appears to be old blood. What light there is comes from a single fixture that hangs from the center of the ceiling. A dozen bathroom stalls are lined up against the back wall, but none of them has doors. Privacy and dignity are dispensed with apparently along with the toilet paper. Given my imminent need, I frantically race from stall to stall until I find a lonely roll in the last stall closest to the bathroom’s entrance. Because I’ve waited so long, I’m in considerable pain. I attempt to ease my pain by massaging my member and thinking of Shannon. My fantasy is so compelling that I don’t initially notice the figure standing at the entrance of the bathroom. He is a tall tan-skinned man who is eyeing me curiously. With his muscular arms crossed, he leans against the wall that supports a line of sinks and a mirror above that spreads across the entire wall to the adjoining window. I hear his voice but at first I can’t make out what he’s saying. After he moves a few feet closer, I can see him clearly and unfortunately, he can see me clearly.
“That’s quite a long cock you got there,” he says matter-of-factly, as if he is viewing a work of pictorial excellence.
“I don’t think so,” I reply.
“No, no really,” he reiterates, “That’s quite a cock. “Why don’t you let me massage it for you?”
“I don’t think so,” I say again, this time with greater force.
“Seriously,” he says with greater insistence. ”Why don’t you let me massage it for you?”
“No thanks,” I answer, trying to remain polite but firm. After a third invitation, I stand up and with all the manly assertiveness I can muster, I say, “I think you better leave.” He has a good six inches in height and 40 pounds in weight over me, but I don’t care. It’s a matter of principle. If I say I don’t want my member massaged, I want my wishes to be respected.
“OK, but you don’t know what you’re missing,” he finally opines and disappears from my life forever.
I’m a bit shaken by this strange encounter. Again I feel ashamed because he obviously saw what I was doing and kindly wanted to take over the task. I also consider this as an inauspicious beginning to my career at Howard. Here it’s the first semester of my freshman year, and I am invited to engage in a homosexual tryst of the briefest and most anonymous kind. My father’s words come back to haunt me. “Howard’s filled with queers,” he lect
ured, hoping that he had delivered the coup de grace to my collegiate plans. What I originally took to be a statement of desperation on his part now appears prescient. How did he know? What experience did he have? With Howard? With homosexuals? Why would it be a problem even if what he said is true? Yes, I was momentarily discomforted when the tan-skinned man wanted me for his sexual purposes, but I put a stop to it. There was no violence, no conversion to homosexuality. No harm, no foul. Besides it was only one encounter. I can’t conclude that Howard is filled with queers. Granted it’s only my first semester at Howard, but this could be my first and last episode.
I can’t stop the questions. Why was tan man interested in my member? Was it because I was the only person in the bathroom? Or did he think I was a queer? Do I look like a homosexual? I don’t lisp when I talk. I don’t walk funny? I don’t use flamboyant gestures when I talk. Ok, I do use my hands when I talk and I was a first tenor in my junior high school choir, not a bass or a baritone. But that doesn’t automatically make me a feygela.
I wonder what it’s like being a homosexual, having such unusual desires. I just don’t understand where they put it…and why. Is it about love or sex? Do homos really love one another? Do they actually fall in love? On the other hand, why does it frighten people so? Ok, it is a bit unusual, but why the hatred and the anger? They’re still human. They’re humans who do things differently. Big fricking deal! It’s all a big mystery to me. Maybe I should try it? I wonder what I am missing. But if I am to try it, could I do it with a black man? Would that not be having sex with the wrong race? The wrong gender? I carry these troubling thoughts with me up the stairs to my humanities class. The only image that would give me respite is the memory of making-out with Shannon.
Without interrupting himself, my humanities professor gives me a quick glance of disapproval and turns his attention back to the class. I tiptoe my way to a vacant seat in the front row. Professor Frank Snowden is the first Negro that I ever heard with a Boston accent. What I have taken as the generic Negro accent is actually a southern drawl tinged with Black-based inflections. But here he is a Harvard trained classical scholar who had attended Boston Latin High School before that. He is a dynamic and articulate professor. And every time he opens his mouth, I am so enraptured with his accent that I almost miss the many pearls of wisdom that pours forth from this elegant and educated man. We are currently reading “De Rerum Natura” or On the Nature of Things by the first century BCE Roman poet, Lucretius. Although his poetry is dense and hard to fathom, Lucretius is brought to life by the passion and clarity of Dr. Snowden’s explanations. Lucretius was a devotee of Epicurus and his philosophy of seeking long-lasting intellectual pleasure (rather than ephemeral sensual pleasure) and avoiding pain. It is a philosophy that perfectly captures my aspirations. My mental state is a fairly constant barrage of heebie-jeebies, and I fervently wish for the calm that intellectual pleasures supposedly would bring.
But there is another reason that this class fills me with such joy. I’m so impressed with myself because I am reading an obscure Roman Poet whom I have never heard of. Here at Howard where my father is convinced I will receive an inferior education. And this is the University’s Honors Program in which Dr. Snowden who doubles as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts has placed me. It is vindication of the choice I made and a refutation of my father’s fear-ridden anti-Negro diatribe.
The students in this class are an academically talented bunch. Their comments during the class discussions drive home the point that I am no smarter or better prepared academically than this group of Negro students. A surprising number of these students come from countries in the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica and Trinidad. There is one student, however, who stands out among all the rest: Winston Basil McKenzie, a gangly Jamaican whose demeanor is a shock to my system. He is the first intellectually arrogant Negro that I have ever met. His arrogance, however, seems almost wholly justified. He is brilliant and articulate. And he’s not shy about letting you know how brilliant and articulate he thinks himself to be. He is fond of telling everyone he knows, “I am committed to ‘the Good, the True and the Beautiful’.” My day is incomplete if I do not hear McKenzie tell me about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The more I listen to him, however, the more I get caught up in the Good, True, and Beautiful fever. Through his inspiration, I find myself for the first time in my life thinking critically about morality, searching diligently for the truth, and opening my eyes to the pleasures of the visual arts. Of the three, he is most committed to the truth, particularly the truth about the impact of white racism on American Negroes. He disdains the myth of white supremacy and pities its brutalizing and warping impact on poor and bourgeois Blacks.
Our relationship gets off to a rocky start because he keeps asking me if I have read this book or that book, none of which I’ve ever heard of.
“Izzy,” he says to me one day, “You’ve must have read Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier.”
“Uh, no Winston, I haven’t,” I say in a heebie-jeebies’ voice. I don’t know the book or its author.
“But mon, Dr. Frazier is on our faculty,” McKenzie replies with great incredulity. His lilting Jamaican accent seems to become more pronounced in his disdainfully shocked reply. “He is the Chairman of Howard’s Sociology Department and one of the most respected black scholars in the world,” he adds with a self-satisfied look.
“No, I didn’t know that either,” I respond, wanting desperately for this conversation to end.
“I guess your high school education wasn’t so superior, was it Izzy?” Winston’s tone reeks with condescension. “I guess not,” I mumble spinelessly.
“Don’t you think it’s odd that a white boy like you is named White?” Winston adds finding new ways to humiliate me.
“Not until now,” I answer. “Why do you have such an interest in my reading habits anyway?” McKenzie places a foot on my chair and leans his 6’ 2’’ frame towards me. He has close-cropped hair, deep brown eyes, a striking mustache and a wisp of a goatee. He’s wearing brown, sharply creased pants and a cream-colored turtleneck shirt. “Well, Izzy, where I come from in Jamaica there are not too many white people. Everybody looks like me and this is true throughout the Caribbean. Yet we hear all these stories about the superiority of the white race, particularly in comparison to the descendents of former slaves in America. The movies we see and the characters in the books we read from the U.S.A. all seem to have this underlying feature. The white man is superior. This is so beyond the ken of my experience that I feel a necessity to check it out with every white student I meet. And here you are in the Honors Program at Howard University and yet I am wondering about your fund of knowledge, particularly about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
“Well, I’m sorry to be such a disappointment,” I retort.
“You’re not,” he replies with a wide grin. “In fact, you are proof that the ideology of white superiority is a myth.” “I never claimed to be superior, Winston.” My tone of voice communicates an equal measure of apology and injury.
“For that I give you full credit for candor,” Winston says unkindly. His haughty demeanor and hovering presence seems to suck all the air out of the room. I am feeling a bit claustrophobic since I see no easy way to move beyond him to leave the now-concluded humanities class. Eventually, Winston senses that I need to move and he removes his foot from my chair. “The t’ing is, Izzy,” he continues, “You need to know that a change is gon come, a huge change in the way people treat one another. This change is gon be worldwide. Maybe you can help us bring about this change.”
“What kind of change?” I asked, intrigued by the unclear scope of this undefined change.
Although I have been a student at Howard for nine weeks, I have yet to eat in the school cafeteria. Today, I want to change that fact, and I make my way over to the eatery in an advanced state of hunger. As I approach the largish building, the aromas emanating from within are not encouraging. I go
in and immediately encounter a large room filled with a surfeit of aging tables and chairs and a very busy cafeteria line. Despite whatever I might think about the aromas, the cafeteria is mobbed. This inspires hope that the food will be better than my first sense impressions. I enter the cafeteria line that is now so large that it winds back around the line closest to the food and heads for the entrance to the building. Fifteen minutes later, I finally face some food. What I see, however, almost makes me bolt. There are barbeque beef sandwiches that look days old. The meat’s grayish tint leads me to question the nature of the animal from which it is carved. Gray seems to be colour du jour for today’s lunch. Even the specialty of the day, lamb chops, along with the accompanying mashed potatoes, approached the color of gunmetal. I settle for the wrinkled hot dog and purchase a bag of Wise potato chips and a watered down fountain draft of Coca Cola. I search for a free table and find one with only one other occupant. “Mind if I join you?” I ask the studious-looking fellow with his nose in a textbook. “Not at all,” he answers without looking up. His body language makes it clear that our physical proximity is acceptable, but that I can expect no conversation. He’s obviously cramming for a pending exam, but I can’t understand how he can concentrate in the din produced by a hundred conversations swirling around us. I was therefore left to my own devices and my wrinkled hot dog.
As I eat, I watch the people moving back and forth from the cafeteria line to their respective tables; people moving from table to table or people leaving the cafeteria. I’m amazed at the range of skin color in the people passing by me. There are very black people, people with more of a chocolate brown complexion; also mocha-colored individuals, and there are a fair number of people who are very light-skinned, so light in fact, that I wonder if they’re white, Negro, or what? At first, I keep these ruminations to myself. I am having an intense internal dialogue with myself on the deep philosophical question of what the term race really means or refers to? What does it mean to be white? What determines whiteness? How come these seemingly white people identify as Negroes? I soon tire of this internal dialogue and force myself on my tablemate.