The World Doesn't Require You

by Rion Amilcar Scott

  12.

  Sometime near the end of the semester, I passed a classroom and saw Chambers slowly, languidly wiping his words from a dry-erase board.

  It was covered corner to corner with tiny malformed letters in multiple colors, blue, red, green, black—accented by crooked and wavy lines, arrows pointing in all directions, multilayered frantically scrawled circles. Even the parts he had brushed away appeared stained with Chambers’s ink.

  My friend, I called. Chambers stopped erasing and turned from the board. He looked around as if unfamiliar with the word friend. He smiled.

  In the teacher’s face is God, he said. So too the student, she / Is God / And the most Godly of all is Her words / My love / May they be God

  Hudson?

  Chambers nodded.

  Student quoted that to me today. Said to erase my words from the board is to destroy God. His idea of a joke. I chuckled. So did the whole class. Even their disruptions are clever now since that fucking guest lecture. Then he got real serious and said if God is the word then to speak becomes sacrilegious because speaking ultimately means the destruction of words. To communicate verbally is to commit blasphemy.

  Was he serious?

  I don’t know, but that’s the type of thinking that starts cults and religious orders. Chambers turned and began wiping the board again, slowly, languidly. I’ve lost them, Reece. It’s the destiny of every generation to become lost, and they’ve cast out in every direction but the one I’m trying to lead.

  I tried to speak, but he raised his hand, silencing me.

  I know what you’re going to say, Reece. The essay. The essay. Publish the essay. If you were a doctor, the medical kind, you’d treat even colds with chemotherapy. The essay. The essay. Who out there is ready for the essay? Not me. It’s either too little to save me or so much that it’ll destroy me. Either way, I’m obliterated. Fucked. Tell me, Reece, have you ever conceived of a life without teaching? I did. I do. And it terrifies me. The classroom is all I really have. I’m an unfinished mansion with one completed room. All those other rooms—parenting, husbanding, anything else—I’m a low-level failure at them. I’m destined to trip over those things as if they were two left feet until I’m dead and my wife and kids are stepping over my corpse on their way to a hopefully better life without me. He paused to chuckle. Teaching is all that I am. This semester got a little rocky, jack. Okay, it’s a total loss. I don’t want to publish essays about porn; I want to teach in such a way that my lessons become the headaches that force these students to rewire their thoughts. This semester, this goddamn semester, won’t produce that. I just want to ride this out, that’s what I want to do; ride this out and restart next year with a new cast of characters. One more stack of essays to grade—he pointed to them at the edge of the desk—and I can put all I tried and failed to do behind me, man.

  You sure?

  My son now walks around with a little plastic Olympic-looking medallion that says I’M ALONE .

  Where’d he even get such a thing?

  I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I’m paying attention to the wrong stuff, man. It’s making everything around me go to pieces.

  You know your problem? I said. You’re too into yourself. You’re an internal person when the world currently needs external people.

  Maybe.

  Listen, I have a Milo Sequoia fable that fits this moment.

  Of course you do.

  Jesus spoke in parables, I speak in Milo Sequoia fables. Listen to me: it’s a story I call “The Ballad of Little Inward Jim.”

  “The Ballad of Little Nigger Jim”?

  What? No. I said Inward, not n-word. I walked to the board and wrote Inward in the middle of a free spot between his surrounding chaos of words. I circled it vigorously over and over until it was surrounded by thick blue lines. Inward, I said. Like inside.

  Oh.

  • • •

  The Ballad of Little Inward Jim

  Sometimes the air blows hazy and is tinged with a burning scent and when it gets like this it also whispers something, but I’ve never been able to make out what is being said. That’s for the best, probably. The haze is Jim. And even if we could understand his words, there is nothing we could do for him anyway. Even the truest bluestream masters couldn’t bring him back—or wouldn’t if they could. It’s best that his consciousness exists as a haze. This all happened so long ago—in the 1850s, as a matter of fact—if he were to be brought back bodily he’d immediately die and rot away, become dust.*

  Jim, it is said, was one of those folks who could go inside himself, past the black, past all the mind’s chatter, past everything, and arrive at a field of pure blue. And within that field of blue, if you know how, you can manifest what some call miracles. He stumbled upon the bluestream† at the first rush of puberty. It came to him in a daydream during class. His one-room schoolhouse sat where the Freedman’s University administration building now sits. He was supposed to be studying math, but he stared ahead and within the blue he became hopelessly lost. Pupils turned to pinholes. Classmates called his name and attempted to slap him back into the present. Inside he bathed in blue.

  Jim awoke later in his bed with a desire to go back in and he did, but without a teacher the bluestream became for him a chaos: others’ thoughts passing through his head, the pain and disorientation of sudden telescopic vision. It’s easy to ignore the bluestream. Keep your mind away from it. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Once you become practiced at never finding that land within you, you will never again find that land within you. But now that Jim knew there lived a world inside himself, how could he avoid it? He began to focus. The easiest feat is to turn one’s self into a pillar of smoke. As you can imagine, most wade into the bluestream and turn their bodies into hot white smoke and return shaking, fearful of the knowledge the bluestream has to offer. They tell themselves it was just a hallucination, all imagination, and they abandon the arts, never learning to fly, never learning to turn themselves into beams of light, never becoming invisible, never learning any of the countless secrets of advanced dislocation, transformation, and transcendence. A small few become smoke, lose their concentration, and simply dissipate.

  Jim studied. Stacks and stacks of books full of questionable bluestream knowledge. He sought masters to teach him the arts. Those who knew best turned him away—the arts are not a children’s toy, they’d say. The frauds took his money and before his eyes became smoke.

  Years passed with no progress and as Jim grew, so did his despondency. His bluestream turned a deep midnight. Such insights the bluestream gave him about life—and his mind was the finest among his peers—but it all seemed so empty without the bluestream’s full power.‡

  During the midst of his deepest despair Jim, now a young man of twenty, left work at the quarry late at night and sat in the Wildlands to meditate. At first, sitting among the trees, Jim thought the dog barreling toward him, snarling silvery saliva onto its fur, was a wild dog, but somehow there in the bluestream Jim connected to the dog’s mind. It had been separated from its group of slave-catching dogs from Port Yooga. Clear as river water he could see the dog’s pain. The beatings it took. Starvation. Being set upon helpless, innocent blueblack flesh. All this in the name of training. Somehow it broke loose and ran many miles. In those days the slave-catchers patrolled the border of Port Yooga and Cross River with a heavy hand. Word among Negroes was that if they could just get to Cross River, they’d be free. How some tried.

  That mean dogthing barreled and barked and snarled toward Jim, all to let his masters know he had found one. So much the mean dog didn’t understand: his masters were nowhere nearby; they had stopped looking for him for the night; Jim hadn’t escaped from a master. Jim was free born. So much that dog didn’t understand.

  Jim didn’t flinch. He didn’t move his body, but in the bluestream he eased that dog’s pain. And after he eased the dog’s pain, he released it from hate, turned the red of the dog’s mind sky-blue. The dog stopped its charge an
d jutted out its floppy tongue and panted, utterly happy.§

  Jim quit the quarry not long after that, just as soon as he realized he could make a business stealing slave-catching dogs and selling them to Cross Riverians as family pets. Business was so good Jim purchased a house in the hills with plenty of space out back for the dogs to roam.

  Any fool familiar with the bluestream will tell you that if you spend more than four hours a day there, you’re pushing it. Spend six and you risk permanent dislocation, mental degradation, bodily disintegration. Jim spent most of his twenty-four hours there, not turning to smoke, not controlling his dogs, just meditating, trying to learn all he could. To master an art is one sort of pride, to be a self-taught master is quite another.

  In his study, his single-mindedness, Jim became abrasive. His friends strayed from him. He grew short with family and they too turned from him. Jim couldn’t keep a woman. Who would want to be with someone who disappeared so far into their own mind it made you feel as if you didn’t really exist?

  Jim, bleary but wealthy, stumbling through the town like a drunk. So inside himself, he missed his call to history.

  To this day many say the Harpers Ferry raid would have turned out differently had Jim—a master of concentration—just paid attention, not to himself, not to his own mind, nor to the bluestream, but if he minded the things all around him just a bit more.

  John Brown came calling in the spring of 1859, made a personal visit to the house in the hills. Son, he said, sinking into the leather chair across from Jim’s desk, they tell me you got the vision. The blue-thing. I have an army of men. Weapons. Supplies. I need an army of dogs. Imagine how dazed and dazzled they’ll be when their own hellhounds come snarling back at them. Just imagine it, Jim. Douglass says it’s a long shot, what does he know? I say that respectfully. He doesn’t believe in that blue-thing, but I’ve seen some of your people turn their bodies to smoke. I have a wild card in this fight that Douglass and his wild hair¶ could never understand. Jim, you are the wild card.

  Jim confidently nodded. Said: You’ll take that armory, if I have anything to do with it. The men shook hands.

  Jim didn’t tell Mr. Brown about his mind shorting out. About the days he lost. About finding himself suddenly wandering the river, apparently having just materialized from a cloud of smoke.

  Well, you know as well as I do that John Brown and his men didn’t take that armory. No dogs came but the dogs employed by the Marines, and contrary to Mr. Brown’s expectations, they did not turn on their masters.

  Jim entered the bluestream the morning of the raid and woke days later with dried blood trailing from his nose; and then the news reached him: all had been lost.

  Eyes watched Jim as he made his way in town. He heard voices bursting all about him calling him a traitor. Perhaps he was the one who told on John Brown, the voices said. Jim couldn’t tell if the voices were real or echoes from the bluestream. A woman in a bar spit in his face. No one would buy his dogs. No matter, he could rarely get them under control anymore anyway.

  And in the cold of December after John Brown’s body# swung from a hangman’s rope, word came down that somebody had to die for the fuckup at the Ferry—and that person was Jim. But Jim, lost in guilt and blue-confusion, couldn’t tell if the person who stood in front of his house in the hills warning him, his cousin Barnes, was a hallucination or the real thing. Had he ever really known a Barnes, or was this just a false memory? Jim reached out and touched his cousin’s face.

  When the people came later that evening, holding tight to flaming lanterns, Jim’s mind had firmed a bit.

  No matter, he thought. What is the chance that anyone in this mob knows the arts as I do?

  Jim stood before them and spread his arms wide. My people! he called, before turning his body into a pillar of smoke.

  Alas, poor Jim. Though he had mastered one of the more difficult bluestream feats—controlling the animals (even if he was only able to control the simplest-minded of the complex animals)—he still hadn’t mastered the easiest of the feats, turning oneself into smoke. His pillar lost integrity nearly immediately and the little inward found himself blown to all corners. Jim tried—tries—with all his might, but still he’s never been able to pull himself together. Even today he lives in the breeze that blows gently across our flesh and he cries out as forcefully as he’s able, mightily, trying to tell us something.

  • • •

  That’s not a ballad, Chambers said. That’s a goddamn tragedy.

  I nodded.

  Damn. Why you tell me that shit? As if my day wasn’t fucked up enough. You see the new posting about me on hatemyprofessor?

  I shook my head. No, I lied.

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and called it up as if he had it saved.

  Professor Chambers asks too much. I felt like I was in an advanced class. Never incountered such immaturity in a teacher. Worst. Professor. Ever. Suckkkkkked. He should be destroyed bodilly, spiritually, economically, and emotionally.

  Here we witness that bastion of maturity, he continued. Calling for a man’s death while anonymously insulting his life’s work on the internet.

  You can’t let—

  Worst of all, you see they gave me a trollface?

  A trollface?

  If you’re hot they give you a fire symbol. If you’re ugly they give you a trollface. Some fucking asshole gave me a trollface!

  But look, Chambers, the story of Jim—

  Jim! Essay! Fable! Essay! You’re a broken record, Reece. Now, you look—Chambers picked up his stack of essays and dumped them into his satchel and swung the thing over his shoulder—I’ve taken enough bad advice from you to last a lifetime. I’m going to empty my head and grade these final essays; I’m afraid they’re all going to fail, Reece. Chambers chuckled. And when I’m done failing them I’m going to soak in the tub for a week. Play basketball for another week, and then I’m going to think about how to get back on track here. Perhaps I should have submitted this class to the committee; they could have helped me conceive of a more workable course. I am like Jim, Reece. You’re right. I need to connect back to what’s happening in the department and the world around me before I fade away.

  Chambers walked out the classroom, brushing me with his shoulder. A rush of sadness passed down my throat, choking me. Momentarily I found myself unable to breathe until I gasped. I tried to stand but I became lightheaded and the feeling knocked me off my feet, back into the chair I had risen from.

  I too was like Jim. On my way to destruction because of a sad inability to act. I thought of the morgue and my boxy computer and that became like a fresh rush of oxygen clearing my dizziness. I would have to take my stand.

  13.

  Dr. Reginald Chambers

  Freedman’s University

  English 101

  Special Topics: Loneliness

  Final Synthesis/Argumentative Essay

  We’ve come to the end of a long semester exploring how the ache of common loneliness has intersected with and shaped our lives. I must admit that this is a difficult thing to think about. Our mind fears taking a spin in that abyss. It fears becoming forever lost and I don’t blame it. I wish I could forgive you all for being confused, but this job does not make much room for the forgiveness of emotional and intellectual cowardice. The purpose of education is clarity. When I think of confusion, I think of Roland Hudson perched on a bridge. In one part of his mind he’s a bird. In the other part Gertrude’s voice is doubling, tripling. He sees her brown face shiny and slick peeking from the black waters and then he jumps. That’s what confusion gets you. It gets you dead. Before you choose your topic, before you sit down to write your essay, please take some time alone to meditate, to daydream. Stay away from everyone until you feel the sting of common loneliness, the bite of isolation. Sit with it until your vision doubles, until your mind conjures voices from long ago. First it will surface your humiliations. Don’t turn away. Then whatever angers you will surface, no
t the superficial things, but the deep lasting rages. Keep going through the sludge until you hit fresh water. There, my students, is where you will find your essay. Please make sure you provide a clear three-point thesis statement that builds a strong ARGUMENT as we’ve discussed in class. Your essay must be five paragraphs, contain at least three outside sources, and have a works cited page—and you should account for a counterargument. Good luck.

  Rebecca Montana

  Freedman’s University

  English 101.15

  Special Topics: Loneliness

  Final paper

  Dr. Chambers

  The Firewater Strikes Back: Roland Hudson and the Uses and Abuses of Common Loneliness

  “. . . [S]o many anonymous bright girls, who never were able to become writers, who we’ll never know about . . . I align myself with a genealogy of erased women.”

  —Kate Zambreno, Heroines

  Gertrude Banks woke one morning with the blue light of the moon beaming into her eye and a fire raging through her head. She rolled about on her bed, sweat soaking into her sheets. Such a strange feeling. A oneness and so lonely at the same time. Sleep now an impossibility, Gertrude rose from her bed and began to write. Whatever she wrote is now lost to time. Almost all she wrote is lost to time (Rampersad 145). Her value to literary history, her fame, her infamy, all stem from her role as a muse. Roland Hudson, often regarded as the greatest poet in Cross Riverian history, wrote reams of poetry in Gertrude’s honor. Much of it he collected into his final volume, The Firewater of Love. Gertrude gave up her home and privileged life in late 19th century Port Yooga, where she and her older sisters passed for white women, in order to study with the great poet. By all accounts he was immediately smitten by her. Hudson was at the time a married man. Little is known of Lucy, Roland Hudson’s wife at the time. His affections toward Gertrude were not reciprocated. Eventually she fled his “love” (150). In Firewater, which he dedicates to her, Hudson identifies Gertrude as a mystical water nymph—a water-woman, a woe, a kazzie, a shauntice—bent on his destruction. In the water-woman myth—still widely believed amongst Cross Riverians—a woe manipulates men into loving them only to leave, forcing a madness and the eventual death of the lover (Channing 355). That night of loneliness, those words Gertrude wrote (whatever they were), happened to be the beginning of her own destruction, of a cycle of destruction. While some may regard Roland Hudson’s The Firewater of Love as a tender treatise on loneliness and love, that obscures the damage it wrought on the hapless Gertrude; the book (and resulting class on it taught recently at Freedman’s University by Dr. Reginald Chambers) truly shows that loneliness in an oppressive society is often used to enact oppressive (patriarchal) domination; loneliness, itself an unruly tyrant, often makes petty tyrants of its subjects; and finally, the human sting of loneliness cannot be obliterated, only mitigated.