The Northbury Papers

by Joanne Dobson

  Jill picked up her sandwich, examined it with a curl of her lip, dropped it back on the plate. “I guess I’m not hungry. Are you finished?”

  I slid the canvas strap of my book bag over my shoulder and picked up the copy of Jane Eyre. “Yeah,” I said. “But I actually ate something. Are you sure you’re okay?” Jill had the milk white skin of the authentic redhead, but today she was paler than usual, and her mouth had an uncharacteristic pinched look. She drained her water glass, then rose from the chair.

  “I’m fine. It’s just that—Karen, watch out!”

  But it was too late. As I moved from the table, intent on Jill’s response, Miles Jewell stormed away from the curriculum meeting and barreled into me. He hit me broadside and, in a blind fury, kept on going. I staggered, fell back, and caught my balance by grabbing hold of the table. My book bag slipped from my shoulder, my arm jerked painfully, and the old book in my hand plummeted to the floor.

  Miles continued his retreat. As he exited the wide French doors of the Commons, I stared after him in astonishment. Miles may be conservative, even retrograde, but he was never rude. What could possibly have been said at the Round Table to cause this gentleman of the old school to forget his manners so shockingly?

  “Karen.” Avery Mitchell, Enfield’s president, was at my side, his hand on my elbow. His tone was solicitous. “Are you all right?”

  I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know whether Miles had knocked the bejesus out of me, or if my current inability to breathe was due to the close presence of Avery Mitchell. Our distinguished president tends to have that effect on me. Tall, lean, and elegant, Avery is the consummate American aristocrat, the type of man my working-class origins had taught me to think of as effete and dangerous. A member of the power elite. A parasite on society. I get palpitations of the heart every time he comes within six feet of me, but I doubt it has anything to do with my politics.

  “I want to apologize for Miles,” Avery continued. “He’s extremely upset.”

  “I could tell.” I had worn my long hair loose today, for a change, and now, pushing strands away from my face, I struggled to control my ragged breathing. That was particularly difficult because Avery still had hold of my arm.

  “Yes, well … You know he would never behave like that if, ah, well … under normal circumstances. Please don’t take offense.” Avery reached for the copy of Jane Eyre sprawled open on the parquet floor. “You dropped this.” As he handed me the volume, something fell from between the pages. He stooped again, retrieved a photograph, gave it a cursory glance, and held it out to me. I took the picture by its corner without really looking at it.

  “I’ve got to get back.” Avery waved his hand in the general direction of the Round Table, smiled at me ruefully, then strolled over to reconvene the disrupted meeting.

  “Always the old smoothie, isn’t he?” Jill was at my elbow. “God, that man has all the moves.” Without responding, I took the book bag she held out to me. I had no intention of being sucked into any gossip about our exalted president.

  “What’s that?” Jill asked, motioning toward the sepia photograph in my hand. I glanced at it, suddenly curious. A picture of a baby, the old photo must have been pushed deep into the center of the book, or I would have come across it earlier when I’d rifled through the pages. The infant was about six months old, propped against a plump pillow with intricate lace edging, and dressed in smothering layers of white mid-Victorian ruffles.

  “Poor thing. She looks uncomfortable.” I assumed the child was a girl—a waterspout curl on the top of her head was tied with a white bow, and on a chain around her neck she wore a heart-shaped locket of what looked like gold filigree.

  “Who do you think it is?” Jill asked. “One of Mrs. Northbury’s kids?”

  I turned the stiff photo over. On the back was written Carrie, August 1861.

  “No,” I said. “Serena Northbury had her children in the 1840’s, when she was in her early twenties. They were named Lavinia, Josephine, and Hortense. There was no Carrie.”

  “A grandchild?”

  “Too early. Her daughters weren’t married yet. Must be the child of a friend. Or maybe she just liked the picture, used it as a bookmark.”

  Jill took the photo from me. “This looks like a studio shot.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The table with the paisley cloth, the ornate book, the vase of flowers: they’re all photographic conventions. Cameras weren’t easily portable, then. This isn’t a casual snapshot. Somebody really wanted a picture of this baby.”

  “I don’t blame them; she’s a beautiful child,” Jill said. “Those dark eyes, the curls.”

  I retrieved the photo and looked at it more closely. “Huh. That’s interesting.”

  “What?” Jill seemed enthralled with this long-vanished baby.

  “Look.” I took the picture over to the window, where the light was better. “Yes,” I said, “Jill, I think this is a black child. What do you think?”

  She gazed intently at the sepia print. “It’s hard to tell, the image is so dim. She’s light-skinned, but her features do have an African-American look. I wouldn’t be surprised; there were a great many biracial children coming off those plantations.”

  “Yeah. Right.” I shook my head sadly. The rape of slave women by their masters was well documented by nineteenth-century slave narratives. “I wonder what Serena Northbury was doing with a photograph of an African-American baby?”

  “Was she an abolitionist?”

  “Well, yes—she seems to have been. But she was never outspoken in the way that women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child were. She was—genteel, you might say.”

  “Sounds deadly. I’m surprised you’re interested in her.”

  “Yeah, well … There’s something there.…”

  I shrugged, tucked the photograph back into the pages of Jane Eyre, where it had reposed for at least a century, and slipped the book into my big canvas bag for safekeeping.

  Crossing the quad on my way back to the office, I sipped carefully at a second cup of coffee and recalled the farcical scene with Miles Jewell. Then I thought about the chaos certain to descend on the English Department when we began to reassess our course offerings and curriculum requirements. If Miles and I hadn’t been at loggerheads before, we certainly would be now.

  It wasn’t until I slipped my key into the lock of my office door that I realized Jill had never told me what was bothering her.

  Two

  Fifteen minutes into a seventy-five minute session on Ralph Waldo Emerson my brain had shut down. Three cups of black coffee will do that. And it didn’t help that I’d spent the hour between lunch and my American Literature Survey class leafing through Mrs. Northbury’s copy of Jane Eyre instead of reviewing my notes on “Self-Reliance.”

  I was tired of Emerson, anyhow. Tired of talking about abstract ideas. I wanted to be teaching stories. I felt like whipping out Jane Eyre then and there and reading aloud, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.…”

  Today was a perfect day for taking a walk, and the class in front of me was somewhat decimated from its usual twenty-two students. After a seemingly endless winter, a day of unseasonable warmth had resulted in an unusual number of absences. And no wonder. The classroom in Edwards Chapel was grim—large and boxy, with scuffed hardwood floors and dreary green wainscoting. Fluorescent strip lights competed feebly with the mid-March sunshine, and several students dutiful enough to have come to class gazed dreamily out the tall multipaned classroom windows. Sunshine slanted across my desk, splashing over the purple-and-green flowered print of my long challis skirt. I toyed with the idea of dismissing the class early.

  Instead, I opened the American Lit anthology and began reading from “Self-Reliance”: “‘The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.’” This is typical Emerson, and always sets my teeth on edge. “
So …” I said to the blank faces in front of me. “What d’ya think?”

  Sometimes when you’re totally at a loss in the classroom that question actually works. Today didn’t seem to be one of those times. The boys—excuse me, young men—in the back of the room had stopped paying attention as soon as I’d finished discussing what they would be responsible for on the midterm exam. Thibault Brewster II, commonly known as Tibby Two, was drawing something on a page of his notebook. His neighbor, Howie Reynolds, looked over at the sketch and sniggered.

  Tibby’s father was a powerful man at Enfield College, Chairman of the Board of Trustees. This made handling Tibby difficult. Without his father’s influence, my disruptive student would certainly have been suspended this year. From an unremarkable but amiable freshman and sophomore, Tibby had become a renegade junior. When I had gone to Earlene Johnson, the Dean of Students, about his behavior in the classroom, she told me Tibby had been a problem for several months: drinking, missing classes, brawling in the dorm. When she’d suggested counseling, Tibby had given an odd little laugh. “My mother’s a shrink,” he said. “Are you telling me I should go talk to her?”

  I glanced around at other faces—Charlie Batistick, Emily Harmon, Amy Franks—but none of my old reliables seemed willing to get engaged in this discussion. They could probably sense my own ennui.

  “Well, Professor Pelletier, I’ll tell you what I think. I think there’s something wrong.” Shamega Gilfoyle was a very vocal student, and her contributions to class discussion were often provocative.

  “Wrong?” My neurons were swimming in pure caffeine.

  “I mean something’s wrong with Emerson’s reasoning. Don’t you think?”

  Oh. Emerson. Of course. “Why don’t you tell us what you mean, Shamega?”

  I sat on the edge of my desk and looked at the one minority student in this class of mostly white-bread, upper-middle-class kids. I hoped my expression was one of benevolent intellectual engagement rather than the spaced-out lack of interest I actually felt. Shamega leaned back in her seat and stretched her feet in their thick-soled black boots out so far they almost touched the platform on which my desk sat. Lug boots. Those heavy crenelated soles are lug soles. I don’t know how I knew that.

  Shamega was thoroughly middle-class, her mother a high-school teacher, her father a social worker, but for the past few weeks she’d been styling herself by the street. Today she wore an oversize T-shirt, baggy jeans, and, of course, the lug boots. She was small and dark, and delicate facial bones gave her a deceptively fragile air but, in her sloppy rap-star clothes, she radiated Attitude.

  “Well,” she said, “just look at his metaphor. I mean, think about it. Emerson says the ‘healthy’ state of mankind is that of a nonchalant boy certain of his dinner. I mean, jeez!”

  “So what’s wrong with that?” The challenge from the back row was male. Tibby Brewster was putting in his twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth. At six feet, with broad shoulders and big hands, Tibby made a striking contrast to the petite Shamega. He had a square pale face with a prominent nose and a surprisingly girlish mouth. His curly brown hair was cut ruthlessly short and he wore a navy blue cable knit sweater over carefully pressed khaki pants.

  “You got something against boys, Shammy?” Tibby’s neighbor sniggered again. Shamega had just gotten a buzz cut.

  Shamega’s lips tightened, and she addressed her response, not to Tibby, but to me. “What I mean,” she said, “is that the sexist and classist figuration of Emerson’s metaphor implies a kind of irresponsible privilege predicated upon someone else’s labor.” Never in his life could Tibby have come up with that kind of sophisticated analysis, and Shamega knew it.

  “Yeah? So that’s a problem?”

  I opened my mouth to intervene, but Shamega swiveled around in her seat to confront him. “Apparently not for you, Tibby Two.” Tibby had been baiting her all semester, but this was the first time I’d seen Shamega lose her cool. “Daddy inherited all the money you’ll ever need, and Mumsy doesn’t have to lift her little white hand to chop an onion. They’ll hire someone who looks like me to make certain you get your dinner.”

  “Well …” eyebrows raised as if he personally had invented the word “supercilious,” “isn’t that what capitalism’s supposed to be all about?”

  “Well, yeah, of course, capitalism in a stinking racist patriarchy …”

  “Okay. Okay.” I slid from my vantage point on the teacher’s desk and walked down the aisle next to Shamega’s seat. If I didn’t get into the fray, I was going to have full-scale war raging in the sedate corridors of Edwards Chapel. I made a mental note to speak to Shamega after class, find out what was going on.

  I began to talk about unexamined assumptions, the way in which “Self-Reliance,” for instance, seems to be based on Emerson’s assumption that all people have the type of freedom in society that he had, as a white, educated male with plenty of money. I made my way down the aisle as I spoke. As I approached the back row, Tibby ripped a page from his notebook and crumpled it noisily into a ball. Howie snickered. I ignored them.

  “‘I shun father and mother, and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.’” I quoted Emerson. I was getting into it now. “Of course, radical individualism—Emerson’s notion of unfettered personal freedom—is all well and good, but what does it mean to a black slave driven by an overseer, or to an impoverished Irishwoman with thirteen children?” Shamega nodded vigorously.

  And what had it meant to me, I wondered, when I was a pregnant eighteen-year-old in Lowell, Massachusetts? When my genius called me to accept a full scholarship to Smith College nineteen years ago, I was three months gone. I got married instead, gave birth to Amanda, and slumped around a dreary apartment in North Adams for a couple of long years until I wised up. When I left my hotheaded trucker husband Fred, I put my daughter in day care, went to work, went to college, then grad school. There was no way I was going to shun Amanda, and that made everything so hard. But I did it. And now here I was, an assistant professor of English at Enfield College. And Amanda was a sophomore at Georgetown. Self-reliance? Well, I guess. But it’s easier for some than for others; Emerson never had to sling hash in a truck stop.

  “And what did it mean to someone like Harriet Jacobs, the fugitive slave?” Shamega’s sharp query brought me back to the present moment. “She spent seven years hiding in a cramped garret so she could be near her children, rather than escape to New York alone.”

  “Has anyone else in the class read ahead to Jacob’s slave narrative?” I asked. No hands in the air. “Well, it’s scheduled for next week, and it would be useful to think about Emerson’s individualist philosophy when you read it, since Jacobs’s story embodies an almost exactly oppositional ethos, one centered around the people she loved.”

  “And,” Shamega continued, “what about someone like the black abolitionist, Joseph Monroe Johnson? What did Emerson’s philosophy mean to him? He actually met Emerson in Boston, and thought the great man was a space cadet.”

  “Johnson?” Tibby responded, dismissively. “Never heard of him.”

  “Really?” I wasn’t about to let this pipsqueak taint the discussion with his patronizing attitude. “That’s too bad, Tibby; you should read more.” The comment hit home; Tibby’s eyes narrowed. I ignored him. “Shamega, why don’t you tell the class about Johnson?”

  “Joseph Monroe Johnson was a fugitive slave from Virginia who lived for a while in Boston in the 1850’s,” she said, running a hand over what remained of her hair. “He joined the abolitionist community there under the name Brent Josephs and helped whisk other fugitives out of the reach of the U.S. marshals, who were charged with returning escaped slaves to their owners.” She spit out the word as if it lay rotten on her tongue. Her dark eyes were alight with fervor. “What struck me, Professor, when I read this Emerson thing was that Johnson didn’t think like Emerson did. Johnson didn’t put himself first, and he certainly didn’t shun his family. As a matter of fac
t, he made really dangerous trips back south to rescue them. Each time he reentered the slave states he risked being captured and sent back into slavery. He was killed in Louisiana in 1860. Shot dead by his young sister’s ‘master.’ I think he probably preferred death to being reenslaved.” The class was paying rapt attention.

  I took up the discussion. “Johnson’s first foray was a trip back to Norfolk, Virginia, to free his mother. After that, things got so hot for him in this country that he fled to Montreal and left Canada only for trips back to slave country to liberate other members of his family. Shamega’s point is that not everyone would choose to put their own genius before the needs of other people, as Emerson seems to advise. Emerson’s radical individualism is an ideology responsible Americans have to examine very closely.”

  In the end, it wasn’t necessary to let class out early; the ensuing discussion was lively, even contentious, and continued well beyond the bell.

  I intercepted Shamega on her way out the door. “What’s with you and Tibby? You two have a feud going on?”

  Her expression shut down. “Nothing I can’t handle. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” The set of her delicate jaw told me that if I asked even one more question, I would be entering a mine field.

  I was silent just long enough to let her know I’d gotten the message. “Well,” I said, “you know where I am.”

  “Yeah, I do.” She smiled. “And I appreciate it.” Then she changed the subject. “Good class.”

  “Thanks to you. With Emerson you’ve always got to be aware of just exactly who’s talking. And he is white, male, well-to-do. That is not universal experience he’s touting there.”

  Shamega seemed in no hurry to leave. Mrs. Northbury’s copy of Jane Eyre was sitting on the desk. She picked it up. “I love this novel,” she said. She leafed through the pages, and the photograph of the baby fell out. She glanced at it, then looked more closely. Then she looked up at me.