Though I am suffused with embarrassment relating this, here is the plot of “Train Ride.” A man, taking his dog with him, has gone out onto a deserted Canadian lake in his small motorboat, to fish. Thick weeds have somehow become entangled in his motor, and when he is unable to disentangle them from the boat, he goes into the water to try. But the same thick material gets caught around his feet and legs; the boat begins to drift away from him, and while the dog watches from the boat, the man is trapped there, unable to pull himself free.
While he struggles, a passenger train makes its way along the side of the lake. Three unrelated passengers, all men, glance through the train windows and see the boat, the dog, and the head of the struggling man.
I’ll stop there. It’s enough to explain that each fictional observer has his own past, his own agenda (all of it meticulously recorded by the writer), and his own way of deciphering what is taking place on the lake, though it holds little interest for any of them; as the train ride continues and the lake recedes behind them, their thoughts turn to other things.
The end.
But it wasn’t, not for me. It was the beginning of my awareness of the connections of things: how the Auden poem called “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which I had studied the previous semester, had told me something about man’s disinterest (my smudged pencil note in the margin says “important moments unattended”); and now I connected that to Professor Downing’s art history class and the Brueghel painting of the death of Icarus, when, with melted wings, the boy falls from the sky and no one notices; and both of those were connected to things I had studied in Professor Church’s psychology class, and to the Greek tragedians I had examined with Professor Luck in classics, and . . . and . . . It was as if the small colored squares of a Rubik’s Cube had suddenly fallen into the correct slots and created a finished, organized whole.
It was the start of my becoming an educated person with a beginning understanding of the complex and personal purpose of education. It was an awakening thirst for communication and understanding that has never left me.
When I next boarded the train in Providence for the long ride home, I was still wearing the grubby trench coat, with the same old voluminous striped scarf around my neck. I knew that my mother would once again roll her eyes in despair when she saw my fashion statement, such a sad contrast to my sister’s trim tweed suits and high-heeled shoes. But I was growing up. I would shed my disguises in the years to come, and my adolescent posturing would dissipate like the smoke from the Winstons that I would eventually discard as well. I would become a writer. Professor Philbrick, so tactful and patient, had told me that I would, and it was true.
Invisible Histories
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
I was in the yellow leaf of my senior year at Swarthmore College. And now, as I neared the very end of that stage in my life, I had little idea of, and even less interest in, what the role and purpose of graduate school was to be. I’d had my college experience, three years at Swarthmore and one year at Oxford, and my expectations for graduate school were not extravagant; I pictured myself in a classroom and then in the library and then repeat. That’s it. (For those of you unfamiliar with Swarthmore, this reflects a particular type of “Swattie” intensity that’s difficult to describe to others. Whether it’s based on nature or nurture, I don’t know.)
Poetry had become something of deep and inherent importance to me: a nonnegotiable vocation. I felt that studying it as a discipline and knowing its history inside and out would suit my temperament and aid my growth, however slow, as a writer. What did I expect from graduate school? I wanted to read as much about poetry as was possible; I hoped for good mentoring and I wanted to write a dissertation. I had applied and been admitted to doctoral programs and so I was spending much of March and into April visiting English graduate programs. The way things worked out, Brown was to be my final trip.
From Philadelphia it was a wink of a flight—a small climb and descent of a small airplane, its FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign turning on, then off, then on again in comically quick succession to mark the beginning, middle, and end of the flight—and there I was, in Providence, running my index finger along the return ticket in my back pocket with the vaguest of plans to crash at a grad student’s place. My mind wasn’t in it, but the tickets had already been purchased and sent to me so I had come out of courtesy, even though I had already made up my mind to attend another program. I’d stay at Brown only as long as was necessary—to be polite. And as soon as I could escape, I’d take that feather-drop of a flight back to Philadelphia to enjoy what was left of my quickly fading undergraduate life.
Brown. I savored the word as my cab passed the state house and its lonely air of unaccompanied prominence in the Providence sky, as it crossed the garlanded, newly moved river and slowly climbed College Street toward the dead end of the Van Wickle Gates. I thought about how strange this feeling was—of being there and not being there. I might as well have been on the moon.
I decided to go to Brown that same day.
In short, I decided to go to Brown because of Michael S. Harper and the late Dean Bernard Bruce, both of whom encouraged me to think of the university as something more than an institution, to recognize that it was (and is) a deep canvas, a palimpsest, on which unseen history and institutional history and personal history come together to form something unique, something beautiful and needful, a song still forming, for the listeners and the singers.
As bildungsroman and adventurish as this may first sound I can assure you that it wasn’t. Dean Bruce was as personable, sharp, and full of conviction, as generous of mind and spirit, as any dean I have ever met in my life. And Harper’s poetry I already knew very well, and in knowing it well I held a deep astonishment for the man and for the nuances of his work, its chiasmatic braiding of the personal and the historical and, similarly, the ethical and the aesthetic. While at Swarthmore I had absorbed not only his work but also the deep and distinctive finish of his voice from a dusty cassette recording tucked deep in a cabinet in McCabe Library. The recording was of a reading he had given at Swarthmore in the midseventies. Listening to a great poet’s work in solitude, as I did for a month in my dorm, you fall into a deep pocket of understanding, your ear heightens its capacity for empathy, your mind makes a deal with your heart. I didn’t, while listening, know this. And I came to Brown with no expectation of meeting him. In my youth, I imagined that great poets graced their universities like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, grand diaphanous avatars who descended on rare occasions to instruct and delight. I was very wrong about this.
“Do you know who that is?”
We’re back to my first day at Brown.
Harper had taken it upon himself to spend the entire day with me, showing me the campus, his office, introducing me to Dean Bruce, talking, talking, talking, me listening, listening, listening. They cracked jokes and at times became deadly serious; mentioning book after book, Harper pulled copies of these works—seemingly from the air—and handed them to me, this while grilling me on what I knew. It was a lot to take in (and a hell of a lot to carry), but it appealed to me intuitively as the way I wanted to learn, and grow up: balancing academic rigors with this off-the-grid instruction and challenge; the squared mind rounding its edges and beginning to spin. It caught me off guard and with a particular type of slow, and then sudden, burn that I would learn to sustain throughout the years I would be there.
“Do you know who that is?”
We were entering the Rockefeller Library for the first time and Harper gestured with his large hand toward a painting on the far left of the entryway.
I didn’t know who that was.
“I have something for you then.”
I had already received more books than I could carry back onto the plane with me, on that return flight that my mind was pushing farther back in the week. But each book, each manuscript and letter he showed me had a history behind it, a story and a mission for the entrusted reader. In less than a
day, Michael Harper had become my righteous American Dr. Johnson: a Lives of the Poets enlivened. Five, six years of this: How could I turn that down?
I always think about Brown from the outside in. I can’t tell you the name of a single dorm or dining hall and I barely know any of the traditions. But Brown, after the six years I spent there, is an inalienable part of me. Life as a Brown graduate student is a particular experience; you’re generally there longer than an entire entering class of undergraduates. The campus flickers between real and metaphorical, the walls between town and gown erode after barely a year, and you end up knowing Providence as well as Brown and Brown as poorly as Providence. It’s alarmingly easy to feel uprooted. I was fortunate to have a few important anchors protecting me from this. Two of them were Harper and Bruce and the other two turned out to be the Rockefeller and John Hay Libraries, both of which I probably spent more time in than I did in all my various Providence apartments (and that one apartment in Pawtucket) combined.
“Do you know who that is?”
As I passed through the door to the Rock, entering and exiting day after day and year after year, Inman Page’s stern portrait was always there to greet me and bid me adieu, vigilant and austere in burnt siennas, maroons, and brown hues. Page was one of the first two black graduates of Brown (along with George Washington Milford).
In 1877, Page was elected to give the commencement oration for his class, which garnered praise from the Providence Journal. Painted by Richard Yarde, the portrait of Page was based on a photo of the scholar as a young man. I took up the habit of nodding to the portrait each time I entered or left the library—a quick nod and a futile attempt at eye contact. Inman Page was always looking out the door, gazing, rather intently, onto Prospect Street.
At the close of my first year at Brown, as I saw my first Providence summer widen and empty the campus, I received that thing that Harper had promised to show me when he first introduced me to that portrait. It was a copy of the literary magazine the Carleton Miscellany. I open it now and see the black inscription still clear as an inked fingerprint on the first page:
Michael S. Harper
6 25 97
For Rowan from MSH—
‘every goodbye ain’t gone’
Volume 18, no. 3, of the winter 1980 issue, coedited by Harper and John Wright, would mark the end of the magazine with a special final issue dedicated to a Ralph Ellison festival hosted by Brown at Harper’s initiative during the first week of classes, September 19–21, 1979. The magazine, an influential publication in its day, sang a swan song all too familiar to many of us who work in or follow the arts.
With this issue of The Miscellany we are forced to take a rest. After much discussion, the Administration of the College has decided that, in a time of budgetary constraint, the magazine, because of its small circulation, will have to bow to other needs of the College. This is a very sad time for many of us as the lineage of The Miscellany is a long and noble one.
The issue, some of which is available online in Carleton College’s digital collection, is a veritable feast of Ellisonia: essays by R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Stepto, Nathan A. Scott, Leon Forrest, and another of Harper’s ex-students, the late Melvin Dixon, along with three essays by Ellison, including one of his more famous ones, “Going to the Territory.”
Facing the table of contents is a picture of Ralph Ellison lecturing. He’s clearly in the Rockefeller. And on the wall behind him is Richard Yarde’s portrait of Inman Page. It turns out that, after a successful but peripatetic career in education, Page settled down in Oklahoma, where in 1922 he accepted a position as the principal of Oklahoma City’s Douglass High School, where he taught a student by the name of Ralph Ellison, who graduated with honors. As is well-known, Harper and Ellison would become great friends. And the knowledge that the mentor of the latter was the first black graduate of the institution where the former now taught, a knowledge that worked on “the lower frequencies” of institutional memory and history, became acknowledgment with Page’s portrait and Ellison’s essay “Portrait of Inman Page.”
Sitting outside in the summer heat, tucked under the shade of the Rockefeller Library, mere feet from Yarde’s portrait of Page there in the interior, I closely read Ellison’s reflection on this vivid coincidence he found awaiting him at Brown—a coincidence that, in terms of its power and resonance, clearly affected him.
In the wake of an exhausting first year in the PhD program, I had a renewed sense of why we learn and what an academic institution like Brown can teach us—not just from the brilliant and smooth surfaces of its known and acknowledged self but also, importantly, from the folds, fissures, cracks, and sutures of its unknown and unacknowledged self.
It would have been easy to overlook the Page portrait or to note with Pavlovian good intentions the “firstness” of Page’s status as a graduate as a reason for its conception. Likewise, this final issue of the Carleton Miscellany could be overlooked as easily as the portrait. For although they are matters of history, their poignancy comes from the initiative and participation of people willing to make a difference in the order and hierarchies through which we understand historical connections at places as varied as Douglass High School and Brown University. And this type of action, toward a greater, smarter good, marked my time at Brown. It marked how I was taught and strove to teach, how I read, researched, and wrote. We don’t have to be poor passing facts, after all.
You can hear it in Ellison’s concluding words as he thanked Brown’s administration and Michael S. Harper and his assistants, and referenced the complex union between Brown in particular and American history in general—a union from which vital parts of our overlooked past rise up and take their rightful places, adding voices that are necessary to our understanding and experience of the present day.
In the time since I left Brown, Page’s portrait has been moved to the John Hay Library, which was my second home away from home on campus. I like to think that, among the rare books and manuscripts, the special collections and university archives, Inman E. Page feels at least somewhat at home, as he is one of the rarest and most special aspects of our school.
Did Harper and Bruce know that this was waiting for me? Likely. The library became more than a library for me that day. The Rock was now another Rock, one of many. What other mysteries did it hold, I wondered. There’s an old song that goes, “I ran to the rocks to hide my face, the rocks cried out no hiding place, ain’t no hiding place here.”
When history becomes personal, as opposed to institutional, the hiding places that may have been there before—namely a studious distance between you and the subject—can transmogrify into something more raw, inchoate, and all but impossible to ignore. These sublime, kaleidoscopic, and fissured relationships to Brown also, of course, have their tenebrous side.
I still remember opening—for the first time—the final report of the 2003–2007 special committee convened to research and write Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. While fully expecting to have my worst fears confirmed, I never expected that Brown’s centuries-old history in the slave trade could really pierce my skin. But then, having barely turned the first reading page, there it was—the historical tragedy turning personal with those 109 out of 196 stolen Africans dying in the festering hold of the Brown brothers’ brigantine, the Sally (which was fitted out for its adventure in 1764, the same year that the College of Rhode Island was founded). The survivors, sickly, emaciated, and bringing far less of a profit than was expected, were all sold for a song to cut the traders’ losses, all sold on a twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea called Antigua, where my parents and their parents and their parents and their parents saw the first light of this world.
Thus, despite the early ambivalence of my first arrival there, Brown and I have been tied together by a terribly long cord. I sometimes wonder, given the nightmare of this coincidence and my subsequent joy of having studied
there, whether we were not always destined to be a part of each other’s lives, my personal history braiding with Brown’s public history and leaving such a complex tapestry behind. But the ties that bind us have proved to be strong even in their most broken places.
Bartleby at Brown
JINCY WILLETT KORNHAUSER
When I was young, I assumed that education happened on a strict timeline, a series of steps ending with some kind of advanced degree. After climbing onto the conveyer belt in kindergarten, I had little to do with the process. All I had to do was not fall off. Although I was not in any sense an active, engaged learner, high grades and standardized test scores came easily to me. Learning really had nothing to do with it; performance was all. Then I was seventeen, a class of 1968 freshman at Colby, at which point grades and scores became more challenging; by then, I was sick of performing and still profoundly incurious about the subject matter of my classes. Eventually, sporting a GPA of 1.6, I bailed in 1966 and started work as a secretary at Brown.
I had worked there in previous summers—I started with J. Walter Wilson (the man, not the building) and then found work in other departments. Brown was like home to me. I had lived on campus in the late 1940s while my dad earned his math degree and we lived in Brown Town, a collection of Quonset huts in Aldrich-Dexter Field that were specially constructed for returning GIs and their families.
I was comfortable at Brown, and now, what a relief it was to work from nine to five. I could go home and read whatever I wanted to and not have to prove to anybody that I had done it or remember anything I didn’t think worth remembering. I loved working; the people were nice and the tasks so dull that I could perform them without great thought and with zero anxiety. My mind could wander at will. I wasn’t a student anymore; I was a townie, and that was just swell. After a few years, I left Brown and became a legal secretary downtown, dabbling in paralegal work. The pay was better and the work marginally interesting.
The Brown Reader Page 3