Thursday, November 1, 2012

B for Beloved: "They Stole my Milk"

I was teaching in Scott Hall on the second floor which I called the hall of my torments.  A number of those professors were dangerously misanthropic.  For their various reasons of mental suitability to such or due to insecurity, egotism, and other impulses of the like, whatever they could not submit to their narrow interest and schtick -- of which desired interests among them they could feign with distinction--they would go to extensive efforts to eradicate.

We're talking here people who grammar-check their prepositional phrases as a way to pretend they are intellectuals.

"I think to think of it with the thinking I've thought..." could open any number of equally annoying successive rejoinders without a subject.

It was also where the sexual games took their toll.  I tended to avoid it at all costs as I did every other hallways, but something far murkier had its place there.  It sits adjacent to the Broad Center where the president serves her duties.  From one door of it to the next, its quadrants were laid out to expose whoever walked within it to the looking up into skirts, the gazing down onto breasts, and the elbows prodding you past.

We were reading Toni Morrison when our class was aborted. Sure Laura Harris would cover it but only in the way she covered any other writers whose humanity she could not comment nor comprehend. All that she understood was power, the abuse of power, and more abuse of power.

Surely, I thought, African American literature deserved more.  The fact I taught BELOVED I have no doubt she was infuriated not because I shouldn't have but because I'd do it better.  I'd do it with the knowledge that art is mercy and that art is moral.

The last day of my class touched on the reasons that the townspeople don't warn the runaway slave that her owner has arrived to retrieve her from Ohio back to her enslavement and her rapists. The reasons you can read about in the novel include: she was too openly happy and she'd only prior to her rape ever had sexual relations with her young husband.

I remember when the Dean told me I was removed from class for discussing the novel and for other charges all exaggerated and false, I turned to Harris to ask her for a response from the "African-Americanist."

Instead of responding she took over my class.  I do not doubt that when I left all of my beautiful students after taking my course, taught her more about women's literature than she ever could have fathomed on her own.

I recall the phrase again-- Toni Morrison's phrase, "they stole my milk!"

No comments:

Post a Comment