Sappho's Bar and Grill

by Bonnie J. Morris

  Bury the hatchet.

  Beat thy swords into plowshares.

  Or would Hannah give in to temptation and shoot her way out of servitude, freeing women, slaves, servants, and wives, and somehow fitting all into a different ship that sailed to a female colony?

  Then something interesting happened. The bullets melted into kernels. Kernels of corn. The gun grew green, greener, leafy, tasseled—a heavy ear of corn in Hannah’s palm. The kernels on the floor rolled into knotholes, disappearing. Then green shoots began to poke upward.

  “I don’t hear the catechism being recited in there,” roared the Puritan patriarch.

  Weetamoo leaned forward and brought her lips to Hannah’s. The sweetness was indescribable. Their minds locked as well, as the room filled with tall cornstalks. Soon the corn had pushed away any sight of the Puritan hut and they were alone, pressed close in the wild green growth, tasting it on one another’s mouths. The Thanksgiving feast.

  Yeah. Here’s our catechism, you fucker. Remember this.

  “Hey: Hannah, slow down!” Corncobs, wet and heavy from the serving platter in her arms, were tumbling into the compost cans in the alley behind Sappho’s Bar and Grill. But Shoni stood in the doorway, concerned and laughing, wiping Hannah’s lip gloss from her cheek. “That was some kiss. What brought that on? White guilt on Thanksgiving? It’s okay, you’re my friend, you goofball. But come back in. There’s pie for you.”

  Mortified, Hannah stood in her own clothes, soaking wet. “I . . .” Had she been kissing Shoni? Where was Weetamoo?

  “It’s okay,” Shoni smiled, now, steering Hannah back to the party, the particular lesbian Thanksgiving they had all tried to create. “Leave all that now. Just leave it. Nkateman, if you dig. Come on.”

  They went inside where Isabel had their plates and mugs laid out, where Hannah soon realized, over a final wedge of pie, that Sappho’s Bar and Grill was a better-run lesbian colony than she’d ever find in history.

  Chapter Eleven

  Final Exams

  What if it’s like a postcard from another part of my life?

  Eileen Myles

  There was no sound but the scratching of pencils and pens. For the final exam, laptops were forbidden. Take that, twenty-first century, Hannah thought smugly from her swivel chair at the lectern. For the last time that semester—indeed, for the whole of that calendar year—and what a year it had been for her own surreal immersion in women’s history! Hannah faced the first-year students of her survey course in the basement of university Building B. The lecture hall was actually identified on student schedules as Room B-12, making Hannah think of women’s heritage as a sort of power vitamin shot she was jabbing into the firm muscle tissue of young women before it was too late. Before it’s all gone, she mused, morosely turning the pages of a recent academic newsletter announcing her program’s likely name change from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies. A student in the fourth row sighed and then sniffled loudly, bringing up other bleary heads and faces. The clock ticked.

  Then it was 5:00 p.m. “Time,” she called, smiling, forgiving them everything. Her children, her inheritors. And they exploded out of their seats, students she really did love after all. Athletes with ice packs clutched to aching ACL injuries, exchange students, young women she knew were the first in their families to attend college. Scholarship winners, all. And the ones already committed to majoring in women’s history, mightily pissing off their parents with this inexplicable choice of study, and the campus feminist activists, half of them in costumes, headed to rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues. They surged around her like some hot-wired amoeba, thrusting forward test papers and, in some cases, holiday cards and little gifts. “Merry Christmas, Dr. Stern! Omigod, I mean Happy Hanukah!” They laid chocolates and ceramics on the table, bright folded holiday cards scrawled with gratitude. You changed my life forever. This was the high point, the moment that made everything worthwhile. Why would she ever, ever consider a different line of work?

  As the last flushed-faced student bounced out of B-12, Hannah listened briefly to their echoing calls: “Did you pick that question on Hypatia? Or did you do Pirate Grace?” Then she turned to the loose pile of 108 final exams. First, before leaving this room, she had to alphabetize that pile, an eye-blurring task she always hated. Dinner afterward: It would wait. And no opening those shiny gift chocolates until Hanukah. But one of her sweet students had actually left her an apple, and Hannah bit into it now, chewing absently while sliding A last names atop Bs, the pile seeming to grow fatter and fatter as she separated names. Rarely did she get through end-of-semester alphabetizing without a paper cut, the dry air thinning her own skin.

  Did Miller come before Muller? Of course it did. What was the matter with her? This was exhausting. Narita, Olson, Pensyl—had Pensyl written her final with a pencil or pen? Hilarious. This was taking longer than usual. Why couldn’t she focus?

  “Ow!” Once again, she’d caught her finger on the splintered podium serving as her lectern in that classroom. “Damn it. Damn it!” Hannah put the papers down and peered into her writing hand, now bleeding slightly—well, no real damage done. Not a paper cut but a pricked finger this year. She yanked the splinter out of her hand, feeling tough. Why wouldn’t the university get her hugely popular class out of this basement and into a better lecture hall, one with modern, unsplintered furniture? But she knew why. Women’s history wasn’t a priority. It hardly mattered that she filled the seats, that her students passed, and earned good grades, and after grumbling and begrudging the heavy reading load recommended Hannah’s courses to the next crowd of new students. It would always be like this, the oldest and rattiest classroom in the basement of Building B, which everyone joked was haunted, where none of the toilets worked.

  Now she was angry again. So tired. Thank God the semester had just ended. Hannah couldn’t wait to climb into a hot, hot Vitabath. And take a weeklong nap. Her eyelids fluttered; she was actually close to falling asleep. Well, it was after five-thirty by now; and she really hadn’t eaten since eleven, and oh so many papers to grade. She shouldn’t go over to Sappho’s Bar and Grill until the weekend, though she had promised to meet Isabel for drinks after work in celebration of the last day of classes—and then Hannah yawned. Her head sank down to meet the goddess necklace at her chin. She’d have to grab a cup of coffee before she dared attempt that rush hour traffic drive.

  The apple fell from her writing hand, stained with the blood of her pricked finger.

  And when Hannah woke, some time later, she was lying on a scratchy bed of hay in some sort of round tower, and at her feet was a broken spinning wheel. She felt quite sure this wasn’t Building B.

  “Wake up, my sleeping beauty,” snarled a voice. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I’ll wager you have value, but it sure isn’t your hair.” The speaker ran a rough palm over Hannah’s end-of-semester dyke bob, cackling. “Not enough there to let down for a prince to climb into my tower and save you! Mother of God, what manner gal you be? A passing wench, living as a man? Given up your spinning for the sword, is it?”

  Hannah felt the soft lavender fog of enchanted sleep lift from her limbs ever so gradually, tendril by tendril. She was, she realized, chilled and stiff. And hungry. “My apple,” she mumbled.

  “Apple! Never did a bite of it bode well for woman, not since Eve!” The rough-handed one laughed. “That’s what’s washed up in my tower tonight: three apple-eaters! And sinners to the core, if you find my meaning!” Hannah saw a face then, freckled, wind-weathered, lively with interest, leaning down to smile at her. “Granuille goes to find your dinner now,” the face offered. “There’s plenty we took off the Welsh pirateer. I’ll be back.”

  Granuille? There was only one figure in women’s history who went by that name: the Pirate Grace of Achill Island, Eire! She was Hannah’s favorite extra credit final exam question: Who was Granuille? This pirate queen had so fascinated Hannah that one year she visited one of her castles, while vacationing in Ireland,
finding a tooth still embedded in the tower wall. Granuille was far more compelling than the ridiculous Peg-Leg Pete characters of pirate comic books from her childhood. Grace O’Malley had plundered, married, remarried, defeated men, acted as chieftain of a clan, supposedly hidden nine tons of accumulated treasure, and was still raiding past the age of seventy in an era when many women didn’t live to see forty as housewives.

  Hannah remembered now: She had just been administering that final exam when she’d pricked her finger . . . bit into an apple . . . hmmm.

  “Hello,” came a different voice then.

  “Hello, eater of apples,” added a deeper voice. “We also love knowledge more than the needle.”

  “We also paid the price.” And the first speaker moved from the shadows, a woman in a toga so marked by scars and burns, flesh so tortured and distorted, that Hannah could only cringe.

  “Yes, I am Hypatia,” thundered the scarred one. “Torn apart by Christians, hacked to death with seashells, rendered limb from limb and burnt—by monks who didn’t want me teaching men. No one will find me beautiful again. And this is Phillis,” she gestured with her ridged and unhealed hand, “who was born a slave and grew to be a poet, though no one dared believe her writing was her own.” And the great African American writer Phillis Wheatley, another figure from Hannah’s fall exam, swished her skirt in curtsey, though directly meeting Hannah’s eye.

  “We also have some questions,” said Hypatia. “We also have a test.” And she pulled up a wooden box, stamped with foreign markings of some royal shipping line, and opened up a tiny roll of parchment. Phillis sat down too, her straight back against the castoff spinning wheel. Hypatia cleared her throat.

  “To begin. How does a woman in your time live without a man?”

  Before Hannah could answer, the door at the top of the tower stairs creaked back open and Granuille stomped in, bearing a tray stacked with boiled potatoes, fish, and brown bread. “How do any of us live?” she snorted. “We steal, or have men steal for us.” The taste of the bread was rough and wild and real, the Irish soda bread of centuries, biting back assertively on Hannah’s hungry tongue.

  She chewed and swallowed slowly, looking at Granuille, at Phillis, at Hypatia—her final exam come to life. And now they were examining her, exchanging glances as their ancient eyes moved across her dark blazer, her Clarks desert boots, her Venus of Willendorf necklace. Had she brought the DNA of her own sweat into this satellite castle, wherever it was? How had Hypatia been brought forward, reconstituted into a breathing scholar again? And Phillis, sent back as well to Pirate Grace’s tower? But Grace/Granuille had dared her to explain how an unmarried woman might live in the future.

  “I don’t have to plunder to survive. Nor do I live on wench’s wages,” Hannah blundered in the hybrid pirate rhetoric of the hour. “I make my living by teaching about you,” she said, hoping to impress her hostess, who, after all, would have been considered a terrorist in Hannah’s day. Reaching in her pocket, she found one test exam she’d shoved there to read later, written by her favorite student, Elizabeth.

  “Elizabeth! Named for my queen,” Pirate Grace gloated.

  “We didn’t have queens in the colonies; it was meant to be a democracy without monarchs. It ended up a barrier to any women ruling, while those like me were sold. Sold, plundered, and flogged, worse than your piracy,” Phillis remonstrated. “I tried to make my living by the pen.”

  “We had queens and popes, and we could preach and teach men, until they came to kill me,” said Hypatia. “They chased me down the streets of Rome. So what is it that keeps us down? I say it is men who limit women’s knowledge, who rule them with belief!”

  “That’s patriarchy,” nodded Hannah.

  “No,” Phillis retorted. “I’ve had women whip and sell me, and call me by that word. We are not linked by sex in women’s history. When women jeered me in the slave market where I was sold from Senegal at the tender age of nine years, it was a decent man who took me home and trained me in the classics. I learned Hypatia’s subjects, Latin and astronomy. Then as a literate African poet I was received in the very home of a one-time slave-owner, your George Washington. Yes, your founding president and his acolyte Thomas Jefferson, both slave-owners, and my mistress, though a friend, determining my freedoms. So I say it is racial hate that binds us down. That bound me.”

  “It’s racism, as much as or more than sexism,” Hannah agreed.

  “Arr,” said Granuille. “It matters not if fair or femme when food lacks in the larder.” She held up a potato as if it were a weapon. “I know my women, centuries hence, will flood the ocean with their starvelings, will cross the ocean belly-flat for work, will sell their bosoms to working men, and find in your land nothing but contempt for their poverty, white skin nary advancing them.”

  “It’s classism; it’s economic injustice,” nodded Hannah. “Oh, boy, the old, old argument in feminism. Which is responsible for woman’s suffering. Which do we tackle first? Sexism, racism, classism? Is that what you want to see on my final exam? Yes, it’s there. But how about the bias that’s uniquely burdened me? Add homophobia.” The trio blinked. “Fear of the one who loves a woman as she might a man,” she translated clumsily, and they looked at her with wonder and dismay.

  “A Sapphic,” marveled Hypatia.

  “A sodomite,” growled Granuille. “Though I have heard it told that women passed as pirates in men’s trousers after I had been and gone.”

  “If women’s love blossomed in such ways in Senegal, it’s a tradition I was robbed of learning, being brought to Puritan Boston in 1759, where Christianity made room not for loving but for slaves,” and Phillis began to recite one of her more famous poems, which Hannah recognized as Poem on Her Own Slavery. “No more America in mournful strain/Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain . . .”

  “I teach that poem,” said Hannah.

  “Do you have it in my own hand? Not likely,” said Phillis, and began writing down the words on a folded paper, which she passed to Hannah’s pocket.

  “Sex? Color? Class? Love? It can’t be ALL!” Hypatia screamed abruptly, walking in circles in the chill round room. “One has to make a choice, to name this battle: What keeps us women down?”

  “But there is a word for that—in my time, in my classroom,” Hannah tried. “We link all of these problems, and call it intersectionality.”

  Prolonged silence greeted this. Then Granuille snorted, “A word, I’m blessed, that never crossed a priest’s lips as he prayed!”

  “Or showed up in the writings of an abolitionist,” sighed Phillis Wheatley.

  “Is it even Latinate?” asked Hypatia. “Why not say crossroads? Better.”

  “That term has a cross in it,” Hannah dared to tease. “On top of everything, I am a Jew.”

  “A killer of Christ!” gasped Granuille.

  “A money-lending usurer,” claimed Hypatia.

  “And you too bought and sold us, some of you,” Phillis reminded.

  “Look, I’m none of that. Those words are no better than what you three have been called. Add religious bias to the list! Why don’t you take one moment to learn about me? I more or less fainted in my own lecture hall just now, dog-tired at end of term from prepping lectures about you,” was Hannah’s complaint, as if formed from foam and sprayed into their faces. They reeled back and looked at her anew.

  Some time later their arguing was interrupted by a bellow floating upward from far below the tower. “No need to ponder your imprisonment further, good kinswomen! Here, I’ve come to rescue you! Ladies and beauties! Let down your hair!”

  Granuille grabbed a pot of boiling water and a quill of arrows. “Prepare to die before you see one hair of any of my wenches!”

  “Stop calling me a wench,” Phillis remonstrated.

  “What can he do to me, that they haven’t done already?” hissed Hypatia.

  “Who are those guys?” Hannah peered down the jagged walls. “Hey! You there! You�
�re invading women-only space!” she shouted. “And anyway, take a good look. This isn’t Rapunzel’s tale at all; this tale is feminism. We all have short hair, pal, no length to let down. Buzz off.”

  They stood, arms locked, the four of them, faces to the window. None of them had hair. “I cannot see when we’ll unite again,” Hypatia whispered into Hannah’s ear. “Does it take invasion to lock arms?” Hannah felt the bones beneath Hypatia’s charred flesh; the scars on Phillis’s skin. The scrape of ropes and creak of hoisted ladders thudded in the tower’s airless space as men below began to climb. All around the tower were men, climbing up to seize them. “They shan’t take me alive,” Phillis whispered, and Granuille drew her sword.

  Hannah came to fully clothed, rumpled and hungry, in her own bed, bits of straw ground into the knees of her good pants. How in the hell had she arrived at home? Had she actually driven her car while in an apple-induced trance? But no, there was a note in Isabel’s handwriting on her bedside table: Got worried when you never showed up after work, so I came by campus and found you asleep in the classroom—drove you home and put you to bed. Car in driveway with keys under the mat. Iz.

  First thing in the morning, she’d take these trousers to her friend Claudia in the chemistry lab and have the straw date-tested to see if it revealed any markers of sixteenth-century Ireland. Then what? No one would believe . . . she fell asleep again, murmuring sexism, racism, classism, homophobia. And in the warm room she could hear the whisper of Granuille’s voice, sarcastically pronouncing, “Arr, girl, wouldn’t ye better count sheep, like us?”

  When she really woke again, the straw had vanished from her pants, and the poem by Phillis Wheatley was just a blank napkin from Sappho’s Bar and Grill, folded in her blazer.