The First Letter: M is for More Ass

When I was hired as her counter-part in American Literature, Laura Harris made her own preferences very clear.  Teaching anything prior to the 20th Century was for drudges.  She, after all, had the prime territory of the Harlem Renaissance.  And though I hardly saw in her any semblance whatever to the African American women who played a great role in my life as a feminist, archival researcher, scholar, woman, and writer, she was my senior colleague.  She published and republished the same article under three different titles, once in Italian.  She was an Italian-American posing from everything I could tell, as a black female.

That I was a self-taught expert in Langston Hughes, the poet with whom I shared my February 1st birthdate, Harris was vehemently territorial about a literature I highly doubt she should express such propriety interests in. That she was black or not racially mattered little to me.  She was not nor could ever be a sister by any stretch of the imagination.  No radical black feminist would publish a memoir of welfare fraud and proudly rest her academic laurels on the same.

Her vitriolic, sectarian, and bullying behavior was known far and near.  After she'd done everything in her power to disarm me in the context of sexual harassers by making my life a daily misery despite her knowledge I was being continuously victimized, her staunch feminist credentials gave her what she pursued with a passion for cruelty that distorted her features when in enraged outbursts she claimed the status of an oppressed woman while super-oppressing any oppressed woman she could.

Her large nose on such a squat body might not have seemed so large if not for the pale skin and large shaggy head of hair combined with a cavalier attitude I'd only previously noted in the owner of Damiano's Pizza where I waitressed my way through my last year of studies at UCLA.  He, like Harris, enjoyed the sight of young women in their 20's rushing around in a situation that made them servile sexual objects along with me.

The first scar came from my own name.  M.  My precious letter M.  M was for Morris, Evon Morris, my now 91-year old poet-father.

She began by repeatedly stating the word MORASS with a snide and gleeful guttural sound while laughing loudly and openly at my increasing fear and misery.

First on her mind was how she would assist the administration in punishing me for my whistle blowing activities to expose sexual harassment at the very top of the food chain at Pitzer.  "Anyone wanting to keep their job is going to find themselves in a morass."  

"How do we spell Morass? she blurted while jumping up on her 5 foot-tall stature, and seizing a dry erase marker increasingly adding gusto to the humiliating hazing behavior she was fully engaging in.

She wrote M then O then R then R.  

"How do we spell more ass? How can we make it plural?"

M-O-R-E  A-S-S

M-O-R-E ASSES

Punning between my name, "Morris" and "more ass" she scribbled thesletters on the board,

edited them once and again, each time laughing with derision and becoming more and more hysterical with the power of her pen to dominate the social space in which to vilify my name as a way to sexually degrade me.  I had a horrible nightmare -- a sexual one--a rape by Harris.  In the next couple days, when I ran into her as she lingered outside of my office door, she asked me to go out to lunch with her.  I rejected lunch with her.

Through her direct and other professors' follow-up, I faced constant ridicule over the fact that everywhere I went at Pitzer College, the men were after my ass and the women were there to assist them, or to do it themselves.