“Thanks, baby,” Darden said. He took a step back, and Aspeth and Dede rearranged themselves so they were on either side of him, their arms linked through his, gazing up at him, stroking his shoulder or his forehead. “My ho’s, you know why we’re here tonight,” Darden said. “And Daddy might go away, but you know he always gonna be looking out for you. It ain’t easy when Master Shelby-”
“Stop it,” Ms. Moray said, and her voice was loud and sharp. It was strange to hear a normal voice. “That’s enough. All three of you, sit down. But first change out of those clothes.”
Darden and Aspeth and Dede regarded her silently. Their posture was already different-Aspeth’s arms were folded, she wasn’t touching Darden at all-and none of them were smiling.
“We were just-” Dede began.
“Right now,” Ms. Moray said. “Hurry.”
They walked quickly past us, back into the hall. In their absence, the rest of us looked at one another, looked away, looked back; Chris Graves put his head down on the table. When Darden, Aspeth, and Dede returned, they sat without speaking.
“Would someone like to explain what that was about?” Ms. Moray said.
No one said anything. I couldn’t tell if she was asking all of us or just them, and I also couldn’t tell if she was really asking for an explanation-if, like me, she hadn’t understood-or if she was asking for more of a justification.
“Really,” Ms. Moray said. “I’m curious-curious about what could possibly make the three of you think it’s either relevant or appropriate to portray Uncle Tom as a pimp and the other slaves as prostitutes.”
Of course. I was an idiot.
“Uncle Tom is a Christ figure,” Ms. Moray said. “He’s a hero.”
Darden was looking down, and Aspeth was looking across the room, her face blank, her arms crossed again. To watch Aspeth be scolded was odd and not, as I might have imagined, enjoyable. I would have felt sorry for her, actually, except that she seemed unaffected by Ms. Moray’s comments; she seemed mostly bored. Of the three of them, only Dede was looking at Ms. Moray. “We were being creative,” Dede said.
Ms. Moray smiled unpleasantly. “Creative how?”
“By, like, we were-well, with a modern-day parallel-we just thought it would be fun.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Ms. Moray said. “And this is a lesson that could serve all of you well on that day not so far in the future when you find yourselves out in the real world. The next time you’re being creative, the next time you’re having fun, you might want to stop and think about how your behavior looks to other people. Because I’ll tell you, what this seems like to me is nothing but racism.”
Everyone looked at her then, even Darden and Aspeth. Racism didn’t exist at Ault. Or it did, of course it did, but not like that. Kids came from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, with parents who had emigrated from Pakistan, Thailand, Colombia, and some kids had families that still lived far away-in my dorm alone, there were girls from Zimbabwe and Latvia. And no one ever made slurs, it wasn’t like you got ostracized if you weren’t white. Racism seemed to me like a holdover from my parents’ generation, something that was not entirely gone but had fallen out of favor-like girdles, say, or meatloaf.
“We weren’t being racist,” Aspeth said. Her voice contained none of Dede’s anxious eagerness, Dede’s earnest wish to set things straight. Aspeth knew she was right, and the only question was whether it was worth demonstrating this to an inferior mind like Ms. Moray’s. “How could we be?” Aspeth said. “Darden is black.”
This was a bold and possibly inappropriate thing to say-Darden’s blackness, in our post-racist environment, was not a thing you remarked on.
“That’s your defense?” Ms. Moray said. “That Darden is-?” Even she seemed unable to say that he was black, which affirmed Aspeth’s power. But then Ms. Moray appeared to regain control. “Listen,” she said. “Internalized racism is still racism. Self-hatred is not an excuse.”
I glanced at Darden, who was looking down again. He inhaled, puffed out his cheeks, exhaled, and shook his head. I didn’t think he was self-hating, and I certainly didn’t want him to be-I was self-hating, and wasn’t that enough? Did there need to be so many of us?
“There’s also the issue-” Ms. Moray said, but Darden interrupted her.
“We made a mistake,” he said. “How about we leave it at that?” He was looking up at Ms. Moray, his mouth set in a firm line. He seemed to me in this moment like an adult-his deep voice and his physical size and his reasonableness, how it appeared he wanted the situation resolved more than he wanted himself exonerated. I wished that I were friends with him so that I could tell him after class I’d been impressed by his behavior and it wouldn’t just seem like I was trying to get on his good side.
Ms. Moray hesitated. It had seemed before that she was just warming up, but this was a relatively easy way out. “Fine,” she said at last. “But I’ll make one more point. And that’s that this wasn’t only offensive in terms of the racial stereotypes you guys were playing off. I’m also deeply, deeply troubled by the sexism here. And, no, the fact that you’re women doesn’t make it okay for you to objectify yourselves. Our culture teaches women that our primary worth is our appearance, but we don’t have to accept that idea. We can flaunt our bodies, or we can choose to have integrity and self-respect.” Ms. Moray’s voice had turned high, she sounded a little too impassioned, and I saw Aspeth roll her eyes at Dede. She shouldn’t have been using the word women, I thought. All of us in the room, except for Ms. Moray herself, were girls.
Later that day-news of what had happened in class spread quickly, and even Martha pressed me for details-I was in the locker room when I heard Aspeth talking about it yet again. “Rah, rah, rah,” she said. “Let’s go burn our bras.”
The next day, while we waited before class for the bell to ring, Ms. Moray said, “Who’s psyched to learn?” Then she pretended to be a cheerleader, waving her hands in the air, shouting, “E-N-G-L-I-S-H-what’s that spell? English!” We didn’t have cheerleaders at Ault, and she was making the joke to show that she forgave us; she didn’t seem to realize that she herself had not been forgiven.
One Saturday afternoon in early November, Martha and I were reading in our room. She was at her desk, and I was lying on my back in bed, on the lower bunk, holding up my Western European history textbook until my hands fell asleep, then shutting my eyes and setting the open textbook over my face, the pages pressed to my cheeks, while I waited for the pins-and-needles feeling to pass. As the afternoon wore on, the intervals during which I was reading shrank and the intervals when my eyes were closed stretched. It was during one of the latter periods that I heard Martha stand and, it sounded like, pull on a jacket. I lifted the book.
“I’m going to town,” she said. “You want anything?”
I sat up. “Maybe I’ll come.”
“I’m just running some errands.”
Although it seemed like she didn’t want me to go, I couldn’t imagine this was the case. The feeling Martha gave me, a feeling I got from no one else except, at times, my parents, was that I was excellent company, that almost no situation existed that would not be improved by the addition of my incisive observations and side-splitting wit. “Martha, don’t you know that buying hemorrhoid cream is nothing to be ashamed of?” I said.
She smiled. “I promise that if I get hemorrhoids, you’ll be the first to know.” She zipped her backpack.
“Martha, why are you-” I began, and at the same time, she said, “I’m getting a haircut.” Then she said, “What were you going to ask?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re getting a haircut?”
“Don’t be offended. I think you’re a really good haircutter. I honestly do.”
“I’m not offended.” In fact, I wasn’t yet sure if this was true. “But why are you acting so weird?”