“Those are things we don’t know,” Justin Brown said with disgust in his voice. “It’s not the same as Nazi Germany.”
A few mutterings agreed.
“I know the names of the men who assassinated Julius Caesar but I cannot know the companies, extant today, that profited from four centuries of slavery?”
The class went silent again. Even Justin Brown seemed a little daunted.
“The sugar companies,” Woman said. “The rum distillers, shipping lines and banks that underwrote thousands of slaving expeditions; the plantation masters, many of whose children today are wealthy landowners.
“You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Brown. You can’t pick and choose your way through history taking what you want to believe and relegating the rest to the limbo of ignorance. You must take a stand, commit yourself to the truth, while understanding that the ground beneath your feet is nothing more than shifting sand.
“One day America may be vilified in the annals of history. We may be seen as an aggressive imperialist nation bent upon the subjugation and domination of the rest of the globe. Our capitalism may be as reviled as Hitler’s anarchy. And who are we to say which version will make it into the history books, into futuristic vid-classes and, most dangerous of all, into the language we speak?
“Who remembers that the Vandals were a people before they became an evil noun?”
“So you don’t believe that there was a Civil War or a Holocaust?” Justin Brown asked.
“Belief, my friend, is the right word,” John Woman said. “History is only, is always little more than an innuendo, a suggestion that we decide to believe, or not. Of course you are right about the list of the dead read aloud day and night in Jerusalem. But in positing one thing you call another into question. Where is the list for the millions of Armenians slaughtered, the Cambodians, Nicaraguans or Vietnamese? If their names are not registered then did they really suffer and die? These questions are the ones we shall address in this class. Questions, I might add, that have no answers, no complete and certainly no permanent answers. We shall fail because history is that unsteady ground I spoke of. It is not a rigid truth but an ever-changing reality. If it were an ironclad actuality then we would be able to learn from it. But all we can do is learn about its edges, insinuations and negative spaces.”
Some of the better students wrote down this last quote.
“But, Professor,” the young woman he met at the door said.
“Yes?”
“Carlinda Elmsford,” she said. “I’m a second-year student and this is my third school.”
“Yes, Miss Elmsford.” John, for some reason, didn’t use the term Ms. for her.
“The name of the class refers to historical devices,” Carlinda said. “That would indicate you believe there are tools we could use to unlock the secrets of history.”
The question put the professor off balance. He was surprised, not only by the sophistication and insight of the query, but also by the gracelessly elegant student who, he now realized, he’d been wrong about. Because of her indecision at the doorway he assumed that she was unfocused, flighty. He dismissed her potential and now had to fight down the desire to start a completely new lecture on the rigor that any investigators have to go through to rid their minds of prejudices and cultural assumptions.
With Winch and Wittgenstein on the tip of his tongue he said, “You are correct. But the devices we shall use are not mechanical or theoretical. We will be the tools. Our minds and hearts, keen and necessarily faulty insights will, in this seminar, deconstruct the presumptions of historical thinking and, so doing, will partially free us from the knee-jerk, rote expectations that litter the field.”
“How?” Carlinda Elmsford asked.
“That’s the question I’ll be asking at every class and office hour,” John said. “It will be the inquiry you make of each other and of the mirror in the morning when you are brushing your teeth.”
John wanted to go on, to tell his students that the certainty of mortality and true creative thinking were one and the same. He would have continued but noticed a movement to his right. Glancing toward the door he saw Theron James, dean of the social sciences department.
“But,” he said, addressing the class, “we will have more than enough time for that. Right now I’d like you to check out two books that I have reserved for you in the library — The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, by Peter Winch, and Culture and Value, culled from Wittgenstein and translated by Winch.”
John waited while the students wrote down the information or entered it on their electronic devices.
“That’s all for today,” he said. “I’ll see you Thursday when we start in earnest.”
The students filed out through the red-rimmed doorway passing between the smiling dean and the history professor.
Pete Tackie, Star Limner, John said to himself. This was his technique for remembering names quickly. Justin Brown, Beth Weiner.
Carlinda Elmsford stopped at the door again, this time wondering, John surmised, if she should leave. She had more questions for him; he could see that in her strained expression. She almost lurched toward him but then moved through the doorway, maladroitly brushing against the jamb with her shoulder.
She was, it seemed, the last student to leave.
John wondered why her question had stirred him. He allowed a few seconds to consider his odd response, then looked up at Dean James.
“Theron.”
Instead of replying the dean made a gesture with his head. John looked behind and saw the young student, waiting for him to notice her.
“Yes? Tamala isn’t it?”
“I didn’t mean that I thought that there was no Holocaust, Professor Woman,” Tamala said without preamble. “I was only trying to show how I understood your lecture.”
She wore a lemon yellow sundress that contrasted perfectly with her light brown skin. Her eyes were a darker shade of brown and her features both delicate and classic — almost Persian, John thought, but probably not from Iran.
“Absolutely, Ms. Marman. You were trying to get at the heart of the argument. I appreciate that — very much.”
“It just seemed like people were mad at me,” she went on, “that they thought I was being anti-Semitic...”
“When,” the professor said, helping her sentence along, “you were actually underscoring the point I was trying to make.”
She smiled and breathed in deeply.
“You’re from Turkey?” John asked.
“How did you know?” She was surprised. “Yes, I mean, my father’s from there. But I was born and raised in Maryland.”
“You’re going to be a valuable asset in our class, Ms. Marman. You will help me show the class, over the next semester, how history is our intellectual culture. It passes through us, creating and abandoning us at the same time.”