High Crime Area

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I’ve just come from teaching a class in composition in Starret Hall.

  To my students, I am Mz. Mc’tyre. The name usually mispronounced in a mumble as if there is something inherently embarrassing in speaking my name at all.

  If Mz. Mc’tyre is being followed, that is not so good.

  In this class, which is listed as English 101: Composition, there are twenty-nine students formally registered of whom several have not appeared in weeks. There has not been a single class meeting attended by all of the students including even the first meeting when I’d read off their names and tried to determine, by their murmured responses, whether I’d pronounced the names correctly. (At least half of the names were virtually unpronounceable—by me.) For I was a young teacher, in just my second year of part-time teaching at Wayne State, and eager not to offend.

  Two months later, I am no longer that young teacher, I think. But I am still in dread of offending.

  Like many new teachers, I hope to be liked. I hope to be respected as well, but will settle for being liked.

  Yet, I think that I have failed at being liked.

  I am not a full-time instructor in the English Department, nor even in the College of Liberal Arts. I have an adjunct appointment in the Continuing Education Division—“night school” as it’s called, condescendingly. I have a master’s degree in English from the University of Michigan, and not a Ph.D. I have published a few stories and poems in small literary journals but I have published only one scholarly article, in Philological Quarterly. (No one knows this, but that scholarly article will be my last as it is my first.) And so, though I am negligible among the Wayne State faculty, and beneath the radar of those who control tenure-track appointments, still I am hopeful.

  My CE (“Continuing Ed”) students are older than the average undergraduate, some of them in their late thirties, forties. Just a few are my age or younger. (I am twenty-six.) The racial proportion of the class is approximately seventy percent individuals “of color”—(predominantly black)—twenty percent individuals “of Asian descent”—(predominantly Chinese)—ten percent “white”—(including recent immigrants from East Europe). On the whole, the Asian students are younger than the others, and so slender, so youthful, so rapt in attention, they might be mistaken for undergraduates, or even high school students; it’s awkward that the Asian students are generally more skilled in English than their black classmates born in the United States, though for the Asians, English is a second, recently acquired language.

  (Why am I so preoccupied with racial identities, skin “colors”?—I’d never been, until moving to Detroit, Michigan, with my husband soon after our marriage, and being hired to teach at a state university with a broad social mission—as the joke was, to teach the unteachable who’d attended Detroit public schools.)

  But I love my students at Wayne State! I want to love them.

  I think they must sense this. I think they must see the yearning in my eyes, that shifts too readily to unease, alarm, and fear; the yearning that is so very close to woundedness and hurt; yet, an expression of determination, I will make a difference in your lives. Just help me!

  Yes, I would be deeply ashamed. If my students knew that their idealistic teacher has been coming to the Wayne State campus armed.

  Students in the class who are old enough to be my parents gaze upon me with a curious sort of tenderness, even protectiveness; they smile at my attempts at levity, and nod at virtually everything I say, or write on the blackboard. They are my champions: they like me! One of my few white, male students is a police officer who at the start of the course told me he was obliged to wear his service revolver in our class, beneath his jacket, but that he hoped never to use it—not ever.

  What would this husky young man think, if he knew that his instructor Mz. McIntyre has brought a (concealed) handgun with her to class, several times; a handgun for which she has acquired no permit.

  For to apply for a permit would be to make my fear public. And I am very ashamed of my fear.

  A number of the students seem immune to my efforts at friendliness. They gaze at me skeptically, or resentfully; their dislike sharpens each time I am obliged to hand back their papers, covered in helpful red ink. At times their dislike shades into contempt, or impatience, not so much for who I am, or who they believe I am, a young white woman with a nervously cheerful manner, but because they perceive me as an individual, not coincidentally “white,” who stands between them and the next, crucial stage of their lives.

  To them, education is a ladder. Their courses are rungs. They are climbing the ladder, a rung at a time. They can’t afford to do poorly—to “fail.” They can’t afford to throw away tuition money. They are part-time students hoping to acquire degrees in such practical subjects as business administration, accounting, education, nursing, radiology, social work; judging by the autobiographical information they’ve included in their compositions, all have full-time jobs and most have families including “dependents.”

  In the corridors of Starret Hall, in the rarely cleaned restrooms, female students laugh together, sometimes shriek with laughter—it’s disconcerting to hear, especially at a distance, as they seem to be screaming for help. While teaching I’d several times heard female voices in the corridor outside the room, and sudden peals of shrieking laughter, and became so distracted I couldn’t remember what I was saying... A sensation of horror washed over me. God forgive me I ignored cries for help. A girl was raped, strangled... I pretended not to hear.

  Oily perspiration on my sickly-sallow-“white” face, and students in my classroom gazing at me with polite puzzled faces.

  The shrieks have been (only) laughter, evidently. Quickly subsiding, and harmless.

  Among the compositions my students have written the most disturbing is one turned in last week in by a young black woman who stares at me in class with blank (insolent?) eyes that fail to register my attempts at mirth or levity, whom I often see in the corridor before our class, laughing with her friends. Vernella is a hospital worker at Detroit General and has expressed a wish to enroll in the School of Nursing—if her grades are high enough. When I pass Vernella in the hall or on the stairs she cuts her eyes at me and mumbles what sounds like H’lo Mz.—(name indecipherable)—with a tight twitch of a smile even as her eyes remain narrowed, coolly assessing. Vernella’s writing has not improved significantly since the start of the course and with the passage of time she has become increasingly sulky and impatient when others speak or read their compositions aloud. She sighs often, loudly; she fumbles in her enormous handbag, sometimes for a tissue with which to wipe her caramel-colored face, sometimes for a crinkly little cellophane bag of what appear to be tiny chocolates. Perhaps because she has worked a full day at the hospital before coming to our class—(as Vernella has informed me, more than once)—she leans her chin against her hand, slipping into a light doze. She is one of those whom I’ve tried to win over, to liking me, without success. She appears to be about my age, a solid, fleshy young woman with grease-flattened hair and dark maroon lipstick-lips. Her most recent composition and the one that has disturbed me is a character sketch of her thirty-year-old cousin serving a twenty-five-year sentence for manslaughter at the Slate River Correctional Facility (once known as the Michigan Asylum for Insane Criminals—but that was long ago), who’d converted to “Black Islam” in prison. Vernella writes by hand, on lined tablet paper, carefully and laboriously like a grammar school pupil and so the impact of her words seems to me both childlike and threatening. Joah be religis to surprise of our fambly, he have his way of speaking that is Black Islam which is beleif that the White Devel is the enemy of all Black People. Joah say the “War” be starting soon in a citty like Detroit where white polis rain agains the Black. Joah say no white persson is worthy of Trust as history from Civil War to know, has reveled, they are all Enemy and will be punisht.

  With my red ballpoint pen like any devoted English teacher I drew faint querying lines beneath religis,
fambly, Devel, citty, polis, rain (“reign”?), agains, persson, punisht and in the margins of the composition politely I queried Clear? Transition? or noted More development needed or Reorganize paragraph for clarity? I noted Interesting! Excellent! More examples? Though barely literate Vernella’s writing exuded the uncensored ring of truth.

  No subject had inspired Vernella until this one. Everything she’d written previously had been stiff, unconvincing. Here, I could hear the breathless indignation in her words. Between us was the pretext that Vernella had successfully fulfilled an assignment that would require revision to raise it to a grade of C.

  Confronted with a number of barely literate student writers at the start of the course I’d decided not to grade them at all, out of a wish not to discourage them. (And not to provoke their animosity. I may have been a new, young, naïve instructor, but I was not a fool.) Instead I handed back the weaker compositions lightly annotated in red ink, and arranged for private conferences with the students so that we could go through their work line by line. Having writers read their work aloud is helpful, if laborious. What emerged from the conferences were compositions that were collaborative efforts, but which I could claim were written by the students themselves. There were a few reliable writers in the class who received grades of B and B+; there was a middle-aged black minister to whom I hoped to give an A- by the end of the course. The young Asian students routinely earned B+, A-, and an occasional A, but no black student had yet written even an A- paper and I knew that they resented this—“racial discrimination.”

  At each class meeting an ever-shifting number of students failed to hand in assignments, or handed in assignments late; it wasn’t unusual for a student who’d missed several classes to return with back assignments and stammered apologies of varying degrees of sincerity. (One of the older students, male, Ukrainian, returned after a month’s absence with a shaved head and battered-looking face, walking on crutches, not caring to explain what had happened to him except he’d been “hospitalized” with a head injury.) Repeatedly I’d had to modify my stern warning that late papers would be downgraded—I didn’t have the heart to discourage someone who was writing at a C level, with obvious effort; yet, each time I made an exception, I was weakening my authority, melting away like heaps of befouled Detroit snow on the pavement. Nor did I want to fail a student because he or she had missed too many classes, as we were supposed to do, following university policy.

  I wanted to give high grades. Badly I wanted not to give failing grades. By this point in the semester it seemed inevitable that at least one-quarter of the class might receive grades below C, and those who’d disappeared from the course were supposed to receive grades of F. Vernella’s grades hovered between D and C–; she had not come to see me during office hours, with the excuse that she’d had to work at the hospital, or had problems at home. My heart clutched, thinking of her, and of the animosity in her composition; there was a kind of faux-naïve impudence in the very way she regarded me in our classroom, seated at a desk beside a window, fattish thigh of one leg slung over the other, legs shimmering in silver tights and boots to the knee. Her earlobes were pierced with glittery hoops and her fingernails shone with what appeared to be zebra stripes. She sat in front of a tall long-limbed young black man named Razal with a face like something scorched who often leaned forward as if to inhale her stiff lusterless hair. Razal poked Vernella, they whispered and giggled together. At such times, I avoided looking toward Vernella at all.

  These were not adolescent high school students but adults. This was the Wayne State University Continuing Education Division, not the undergraduate College of Liberal Arts but the “night school”—you would not expect of an instructor in this division that she would have to discipline adult students.

  Yet sometimes I saw—(I thought that I saw)—Vernella with the young black Razal—(or someone who resembled Razal)—elsewhere on campus. I would not have wished to concede that, in the myopia of unease, very likely I was confusing my students with strangers who resembled them, for I dared not look at them very closely out of a wish not to force them to greet me, or regard me with “friendly” smiles. Yet, I seemed to see Vernella and Razal often, and couldn’t help but notice how their eyes glided over me, deliberately not-seeing me, as if I were invisible—their anxious white-woman instructor with the obscure last name.

  I was sure that they waited for me to pass by so that they could murmur and laugh together.

  Since the previous Tuesday I’d lain awake in bed beside my (sleeping, oblivious) husband tormenting myself with the character sketch Vernella had written in her large, childish handwriting on the subject of her cousin Joah—All they beliefs come from the Korran that is Allah word they say. The White Church not to be trust for Jesus was a Black Man like Muhammed so Joah say. I am not in judgement of these for my momma tell us there is Good and Evil in all the racis.

  What absurd gratitude I felt, for Vernella’s unnamed mother!

  I waited in my office in Starret Hall for Vernella to come to see me as she’d said she would, in the late afternoon, but she hadn’t shown up. This had been the third time at least, since the start of the semester, that Vernella hadn’t shown up for an appointment. Sitting at my battered aluminum desk pressing my fingers against my throbbing forehead, hoping smirking Vernella wouldn’t come. Please please please please please. Do not come please. No relief so vast as the realization that a “problem” student isn’t coming and that you are free to go home earlier than you’d planned.

  Or just sit at your desk, feeling depleted as an old tire whose air has leaked out, imperceptibly. No drama, just the slow imperceptible leak. But I am still young! I am—how old?—twenty-six... With a dazed smile scratching with a fingernail at some sort of mucus-spillage on the aluminum desk top in the shape of a mandala.

  Melancholy romance of such settings: classroom buildings in off-hours. Fluorescent-lit corridors, trash bins overflowing, Styrofoam cups left on windowsills and on stairs. Stale air recycled smelling of cigarette smoke and disinfectant, echo of raised voices and thunderous sounds of feet on stairs. If there is graffiti in such buildings it is graffiti executed solely in off-hours.

  Sometimes in the corridor there are footsteps, subdued voices, laughter—abruptly silenced as if cut off by a giant hand.

  There may be one security guard in Starret Hall, several floors below and if I called for help, if I screamed, he would not hear. That is why I have brought the “semiautomatic” with me, that I have never (yet) fired.

  My body stings with perspiration, at the prospect of even fumbling for this gun in my shoulder bag. Daring to remove it, “display” it. Lift it in my hand, “aim” it—“fire”...

  I will never do this, I know. I can never do this.

  Joah he says he Know what he know. Since incarcceraton Joah be a wiser man and older saying he will never make Mistakes in the White World ever again, when he is releast on parol.

  We are three months before the race riot of sweltering July 1967. But no one can know that, in wintry April.

  The secret handgun: a purchase from another instructor. A secret from friends as from my unsuspecting students. And my husband.

  Drew had given me rudimentary lessons in using the gun. Safety, how to load, what kind of bullets, how to clean. (Not that I planned on cleaning the gun.) How to aim the barrel, how to “gently press” the trigger. Assuring me that I didn’t really have to be skilled at using a firearm, all I’d need to do was allow anyone who was threatening me to know that I had one—I was armed.

  Like me Drew was an adjunct teacher which is to say temporary, expendable and near-anonymous. He had a master’s degree in English and “communication skills.” Of course, he was white.

  He was leaving Detroit, he’d said. Moving across the continent to Seattle. He’d given up trying to establish a life here in this city that was paved-over like a great parking lot yet had the feel of shifting-sands, that could fall away beneath your feet and suck you down
to Hell.

  If I can get to Cass Avenue. And across. And to the parking garage. There is likely to be—well, there might be—someone in or near the parking garage, at this time—another faculty member and so there would be two of us, and only one of him.

  Frightened white faces, like mine. Snug inside their pockets, worn against their hearts, or hidden in their shoulder bags or briefcases, secret weapons like mine?

  Probably not. Possibly.

  Would I dare remove it? Would I dare—lift it, aim the barrel, press my terrified finger against the trigger? Shoot another person, even in self-defense?

  Drew had said, you don’t have to aim it, even. Just reveal it, that would be enough. Fire it into the air. Fire wildly. And scream. Just to demonstrate you aren’t defenseless, helpless.

  Wildly now I am thinking I will do this! I am strong enough.

  Here, to my right as I approach Cass Avenue, is the six-foot concrete wall covered in graffiti, that has drawn my eye since the start of the fall term. On this ruin of a wall is a tangle of impassioned scribbles like the art of Miró, Klee, Picasso—not a primitive or crude form of that art but near-identical to it. I inquired about the startling graffiti but no one was very helpful. My questions were met with looks of bemusement, disdain—Sorry! No idea. It all looks the same to us—ugly.

  Briefly, before other distractions intervened, and the responsibility of teaching remedial English became a sort of obsession, I’d contemplated the possibility of writing an appreciative essay on the graffiti, and taking photographs of the “art.” I have to concede, I’d imagined making an impression with an essay of this sort, that might appear in an intellectual literary journal, and draw attention to the (white) (woman) author as well as to the unknown artist... But with the passage of months the graffiti has begun to fade into the general shabbiness of the urban campus. The artist hasn’t revisited the wall. I want to protest to him—But you are special. You shouldn’t remain anonymous.