1. The first assignment is to write your personal history as a series of events and so-called facts using no more than a paragraph to describe, explain and/or excuse each. This list will include at least half of the following topics: birthplace, income bracket (class), education, relatives, race, religion, gender, major achievements, sexual experiences, fantasies, enemies, loves, hatreds, likes, dislikes, skills, ineptitudes, and opinions held of you by your friends and those who don’t like you, your teachers, your favorite color if you have one, your pets, taste in clothes. And then you must delve deeper, giving an inventory of your disgusting habits, your unsavory secret desires, the crimes and wrongdoings you have committed. Examples? Smelling your own feces, eating the hardened mucus from your nose, killing the neighbor’s dog, rape, murder or the most serious crime in America, theft.
2. Write a similar document on someone you know without that person being aware of the project.
3. Write another personal history on someone you don’t know well.
4. Blend the histories into someone you like best. Create a new man or woman out of your research. Discover the ideal being and bring that history into class, sharing as much of it as you dare.
5. Throughout this assignment we will study methods, techniques, research systems, and various other arcane approaches to accomplish these ends.
“Maybe your headache is an indication that the work required is work you need to do,” John Woman suggested.
“No,” Carlinda said. “It’s intrusive and disturbing.”
“Certainly.”
“You admit it?”
“Of course,” John said with aplomb. “The study of history is not like going to the movies. It’s not even like a film critic giving her needless opinions. The very study of history is intrusive, invasive and ruthless...”
Carlinda gulped and John smiled.
“Most of my fellow faculty members would have you believe that historical analysis must be an objective exercise, something gleaned from old papers, letters and books. They discuss murder, sex and madness without the slightest idea of what state or states of mind are required. They are virgins giving advice about sex; pampered aristocrats striving to understand the starving poor.
“If you want to be a historian you have to know what it’s like to put as much of the truth as you can bear out in the light of day. You have to shatter your illusions, be willing to suffer revelation.”
John stopped because he felt a full-blown lecture coming on and that was not where he wanted this visit to go.
He noticed that there was a line of sweat across the ridge of the sophomore’s upper lip.
“But, Professor,” she said, “once you tell people the things you asked for they will look at you differently. Suppose I’m the only one to take the assignment seriously?”
“Then you would be the only student in the class who has a prayer of success.”
“Do you have to go through something like that just to write or teach?” she asked.
“Just?” John asked. “Have you ever been raped, Miss Elmsford?”
“No... and that’s the truth.”
“If you were to write a paper on the political use of rape throughout history, from the abduction of the Sabine women down to present-day conflicts in Africa, could you give me an accurate rendition by reading historical and official reports and interviews with the rapists and their victims?”
“I, I... don’t know.”
“If you were one of the women experiencing this crime would you have a deeper understanding of what was happening?”
“Possibly,” she said. “But... maybe that would put me too close to it.”
“Exactly so. Without proper training a victim of any crime or tragedy wouldn’t be able to have... perspective. But a researcher in a university library might not have the visceral experience to fully embrace the subject either. The paper I’m asking for will underscore this dichotomy. It will give you the ability to identify with the historical characters you wish to imbue with life. Without this simple self-exploration the contemporary historian may not have the awareness to understand the immensity of her or his study. Thucydides was a physician who contracted and survived the bubonic plague. Therefore he was able to render the experience with accuracy and acuity.”
“It wouldn’t be worth it to infect myself with the Ebola virus in order to understand it,” she said with abject certainty.
“What are you, Miss Elmsford?”
“I don’t know what you mean. A woman? An American?”
“Let’s start with race.”
“That’s kind of confusing,” she said.
“Confuse me then.”
“My, my mother’s father, Joel Pena, is Mexican, a descendent of the Aztecs he says. Mom’s mom is third-generation American Japanese. My father’s father is a black man from Ghana and my grandmother on that side is Danish.”
“So what are you?”
“A little bit of everything, I guess.”
“Where does the name Elmsford come from?”
“It used to be Prempeh but my father’s father changed it when he migrated with my mother to the U.S.”
“And so your name is a lie of sorts,” John said kindly. “A bit of deconstructionist history, if you will.”
“Okay,” Carlinda agreed. “I could say our real family name. I guess that would be interesting. But what if I robbed a bank and wrote it down? Then somebody might call the FBI and have me arrested.”
“Of course,” John said.
“It’s not worth destroying your whole life for a class paper.”
“You have to write down everything you know,” he said sternly, “every act and sin; every omission and mistake; every dark thought and belief... But you don’t have to share everything with the class.”
A sudden light emanated from the worried student’s eyes. John stifled an urge.
“You will be graded,” he continued, “on the quality and fearlessness of your work. It will be one of the few times in your experience of higher education that you will be rated on courage.”
Carlinda leaned forward, listing toward the young lecturer. He wiped the sweat from her upper lip with his thumb and then kissed her. She moved easily from her chair into his lap. There was no hesitation or clashing of teeth. Carlinda’s kisses were soft and somehow enduring. He leaned back in the hard chair. She caressed the side of his neck with both hands.
In the middle of the night, John was sitting up considering the sleeping Carlinda. The sex had been, as he expected, awkward, punctuated with hesitations and surprise. Her first orgasm brought tears to her eyes. When he asked her if she wanted to stop she shook her head, binding him in an embrace of extraordinary strength.
“Have you done this with other students?” she asked.
“No,” he answered truthfully.
They’d said a lot more but John couldn’t remember it.
How could that be? He remembered everything said or read in his presence, every word: obscure passages in Latin and Greek, the lectures of his father and the passionate revelations of his mother. John could recite word for word the sermon given by Pastor Lionel Rehnquist at Wanderers’ Baptist Church. He’d gone there by himself when he was a child of eight.
Young Cornelius asked his father what they talked about in church and Herman said, “It is your assignment to go there next Sunday and find out, an infiltrator in the house of their god.”
He could recite Rehnquist’s entire homily but the words he’d shared with Carlinda were lost.
He got up from the bed, took the smart phone from his pants on the floor and went to the deep windowsill to lounge under the desert moon.