4
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, and adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Tuesday morning
I watched as the early morning light slowly illuminated our scruffy kitchen, piteously picking out the holes in the linoleum floor and the light sheen of grease on the faded orange walls. “Gotta call that contractor,” I thought for about the thousandth time.
I was sipping yet another cup of dark coffee and letting my mind settle. I had been up for a couple of hours, finishing the revision of my lesson plan for this morning. This semester I was teaching a class about the American religious reformers that had protested the greed and exploitation that had been so common from the late 19th into the mid-20th century. This movement was called the “Social Gospel.” These reformers had taken on the excesses of industrialization, and some of them had even confronted the outright terrorism visited upon freed African Americans in the same period. Like lynching.
The reading I had already assigned for today sure fit what had happened on campus yesterday. The students were supposed to have read W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic work, The Souls of Black Folk. My original lesson plan had been to use its penetrating sociological analysis to get into a broad discussion of the tenor of his times, including, as he put it, “the problem of the color line.” But now, as I had reworked it, I thought I’d first get the class to focus on what had happened on our campus and then bring up Du Bois, the African American intellectual who had been so revolted by the weekly reports of lynching when he had been a college student at Fisk. And I hoped I’d help them realize how the merciless repetition of those horrors had shaped his views forever. To do that, I was going to have to literally show lynching as it had been photographed, the white population wanting to make a spectacle of this horror. I had been going over those images, and I could still see them in wavy duplicates in my mind’s eye.
Would the students then see the pathetic coil of rope that had briefly hung on a tree on the main quad for the hateful threat it was, or would they tune it out? Probably yes, and no.
Suddenly, my cell phone rang. It startled me. It wasn’t even 7 a.m. I picked up my phone and turned it over. It was Adelaide.
My stomach clenched, hoping it was not more bad news. But, as I pressed “accept,” I knew Adelaide was unlikely to call me at this hour with some really good news.
“Yes, Adelaide?” I said.
“Ah, yes, Kristin?” Adelaide said tentatively.
“Yes,” I said dryly. What was this about?
“Well, I wondered if you would come in a little early this morning. Say about 8:15? I know you have a class at 9, but this shouldn’t take too long. No, really, not long.”
Her voice dropped and the last words seemed to sink and then stop of their own weight.
What?
“What the heck is the matter, Adelaide?” I asked. I was tired and had looked at too many hideous photographs to be diplomatic.
“Well, we’ll go over that when you get here, okay?” Adelaide said, ducking and covering like an administrator.
I was having none of it.
“No. Please just give it to me straight. What’s this about?”
“Well, you see, Dr. Abubakar called me last night. He objects to sharing an office because it gives him no privacy for prayer. I’d like to see if you and I can work out an alternative.”
Well, she was right. This wasn’t something to hash out on the phone at dawn.
“Yeah, alright. I’ll be at your office around 8:15. I need to go and get dressed. Good-bye.”
Adelaide said a stilted good-bye as well and hung up.
I started to put away my phone, and my eye fell on my texting app. I opened it, and I spent a couple of enjoyable minutes re-reading Tom’s and my texts from the previous evening. And then I carefully deleted each one and sent them to the trash icon, so they’d be truly gone. Not a good idea for the boys to see those texts. Then I went upstairs to get dressed, trying not to resent Abubakar. But, I mused, if you go out to deliberately recruit a devout Muslim, you can scarcely expect they’ll behave like liberal Protestants. Yet, it seemed like I had. Go figure.
✳ ✳ ✳
“You can’t be serious!” I exploded.
I had gone directly to Adelaide’s office when I arrived at our building, and she had just floated the idea to me of sharing an office with Donald Willie instead of Abubakar.
“Well, it’s not ideal, I grant you that,” said Adelaide, still being tentative. I didn’t like the tentative Adelaide at all. Events were taking a toll on her. I could see it in the deepened lines on her face. I struggled with my temper.
“Look, Adelaide, it wouldn’t work. Even if Donald agreed, and he won’t, I’d certainly end up punching him out before the end of the first week. It’s not only unworkable, it’s dangerous.”
I managed to say this in somewhat of a wry tone of voice so she’d think I was joking. I actually wasn’t joking.
I sat and thought for a minute.
“You know, Adelaide, Rockefeller Chapel has private prayer rooms.”
“I know that as well, Kristin,” Adelaide snapped back. “It’s the first thing I suggested. Aduba says the chapel is too far away for him to pray during the day and get back to class or meetings. It is all the way across campus.” Then Adelaide gave a deep sigh.
“Well, until we can figure out something permanent, what about giving Abubakar a key to Hercules’s office so he can pray in private?” Hercules Abraham, retired Professor of Judaism, was away visiting his family in France for this whole fall semester. He still had an office because he did teach part-time for us despite being over eighty.
Adelaide had a considering look on her face. I knew she was torn by having such a large office still occupied by a retired professor, but he did help out a lot with our diminished teaching staff.
She nodded.
“It’s a good idea. Let me email Hercules and ask him if that’s okay, and then I’ll run it by Aduba.”
Adelaide opened her computer as if to put act to word, but I still sat there, thinking.
She looked at me quizzically, her bushy, grey eyebrows raised.
“What are you thinking about now?” she rasped, not seeming at all happy I was still thinking.
“I was thinking we need a more permanent solution,” I said. “What about renovating that empty storage room right next to the faculty assistant’s office and making it a permanent prayer room? There’s nothing in it now that the cleaners bring their own equipment.”
