He put the Times into his satchel and walked down the hill, turning once to wave at the large brown-shingled house as if she could see him and wave back. From La Loma, he dropped onto Virginia Street where he paused to view the sparkling bay and dark hills of Marin. From where he stood, he saw almost nothing manmade. No sign of highways or blocks of commerce and housing, only the Golden Gate Bridge and perhaps a ship or barge. Bridge and barge were not enough to mar the view. Prelapsarian, he called it.
He entered campus through the North Gate. Rain-washed, it looked especially beautiful, everything shimmering in the cold blue air. The sylvan paths, the towering redwoods, the bare knobby limbs of the plane trees, and the Japanese magnolias dotting the grounds with their voluptuous winter blossoms. When the long, solemn chimes of the Campanile rang out like a muezzin’s call to prayer, he felt summoned to a higher purpose. The chimes, the brisk air, the pungent medley of bay laurel and wet leaves, the students on skateboards and bikes, the fresh, smiling faces, he was buoyed by their insouciance as if he’d fallen in love. He guessed it was the nearness of her.
His buoyance typically terminated at the entrance to Tolman Hall and the elevator ride to his office on the third floor. It galled him that the magnificent discipline of psychology, whose discoveries rivaled twentieth-century physics in its understanding of the universe of human behavior, was housed in one of the ugliest buildings on campus. And that mining, the most destructive of all human endeavors, should occupy the university’s most elegant building with palladium windows and a pantile roof. He took it as a personal affront, but when he remarked on this “disgrace” to the department head, his comment was deemed a joke. A good joke that passed among his colleagues so that they started to mutter disgrace under their breath whenever they passed him, and break out in laughter.
He was popular with students, his courses famous for their eccentric syllabi. The readings for this semester’s seminar, The Psychology of Slavery, included Story of O. In his generation, no other book was so eagerly devoured (except Laing’s The Politics of Experience). Now, it was a rarity to find a student who’d heard of it.
Today’s question under discussion — Are there happy slaves? — sprang from a chapter in Frederick Law Olmsted’s The Cotton Kingdom. Before Olmsted became the country’s premiere landscape architect, he was hired by the Times to chronicle the South and its peculiar institution. He wrote as a journalist, an agronomist, an abolitionist, and periodically described the plantation of a “good” master, whose slaves lived in sturdy housing with adequate food, bonuses in dollars and provisions, and free time to cultivate their own gardens and engage in crafts to earn extra money. Consequently, they worked harder, with fewer whippings, for their good master than their fellow immiserated slaves.
One student suggested that “happy slaves” was inherently racist. Another countered that slavery was colorblind until Europeans invaded Africa. A third remarked that in ancient texts, citing the Iliad and Gilgamesh, slaves were honored to serve a noble master, causing another to protest, “Those were servants, not slaves.” At one point, he suggested they unload the terminology of master-slave, and substitute it with free versus unfree. At the lowest end of “unfree” were war slaves, work slaves, prisoners, orphans, captives, even a battered wife or child. But what actually constituted free? What were its physical, mental, and ontological parameters? Or was it easier to define freedom by its restraints on the individual or collective, such as prejudices, expectations, prohibitions, impositions, desires, customs, and laws? These were questions that had absorbed him for the last two decades.
After class, the seminar usually adjourned for a few minutes and reconvened at Caffe Strada. “I’m sorry to disappoint you today,” he said, apologizing to the loyal group awaiting him. “But I have...”
“We understand,” a student said.
“A puppy,” he said.
“What kind? What’s its name?” they asked.
He was surprised by their enthusiasm.
“It’s a little mutt I’m taking care of... Aimee,” he said.
“If you need help walking Aimee or anything,” a girl offered.
Aimee was the name he’d chosen to call her. Not only was it his mother’s name, but those two long vowels (a and e) were sufficiently elementary for a dullard to pronounce, if dullard she proved to be. However, he was certain from the first and only time she’d looked him in the eye that he had read her correctly. And in making his final selection, it was not her lovely face, or sheen of her skin, or strength of her well-formed limbs, or straight white teeth, but the spark of a deep intelligence. What she had called herself and what she was called by family and friends — her name would be the last thing expunged. After months or perhaps years, the person of Aimee would override her past.
When he went to her mother to negotiate, by way of introduction, he’d announced to the family that he was a tenured professor at a university in California with a doctoral degree in psychology. He also mentioned he was an accomplished pianist and fluent in German and French. And although he had prepared an explanation of his intentions, no one was interested. He guessed they normally met hustlers and pimps and would assume he was a liar.
They were liars, too. He’d been told she was eighteen, but he estimated fifteen or sixteen; she was malleable and frightened, the youngest girl of eleven children.
“You making baby?” the mother asked, giving him a wink. Prostitution and fertility were the reason that men came.
Her question horrified him, as if he were a common trafficker. “No, thank you,” he said, baffling whoever heard him.
The lush mountains, the simple communal life, the tearful farewells, the exchange of money nearly changed his mind. But he rationalized. Throughout his life, for whatever he wanted, he’d been taught (albeit, expected) to rationalize.
Zipping his jacket, adjusting his blue-and-gold Bears beanie, and winding his muffler around his neck, he now walked out of the campus across Hearst Avenue alongside a mob of students en route to La Val’s for pizza and beer. He recalled the defunct art cinema behind La Val’s where he’d seen WR: Mysteries of the Organism thirty-plus years ago. At the time, he’d been interested in Reich and thought he might build an orgone box in his backyard. Another unrealized scheme.
“Dreamer,” his mother used to say instead of loser.
He continued to climb Eunice to Virginia, and struggling uphill, he reached the corner of La Loma and the small concrete staircase built as a parapet, its sharp right angle offering a corner where he could stand. Every afternoon, he stopped there to catch his breath and watch the western light on the water. He was always tired and less hopeful than in the morning.
“Aimee,” he cried softly, and hurried home.