He continued to look at the statue. The Angel Gabriel was no longer exactly angelic. “That's better." A small smile crossed the lips of Jonathan Relevant.
A larger smile wreathed the face of Minerva Kaufman when she looked out the window of her room the next morning. She was the only white on campus with advance knowledge of the blacks’ plans regarding the Angel Gabriel. Her lover, G-for-George Pullman Porter, the head of the Harnell Society of Afro-American Students, had confided in her the previous afternoon that he had located a black metallurgy major willing to perform the delicate operation. Now, looking at the result, Minerva judged the operation to be a success.
A large, black penis had been welded on between the legs of the Angel Gabriel! Minerva wondered if the black lads hadn’t perhaps overcompensated. It wasn’t just the size of the appendage; it was the blatant, perpendicular erectness of it.
As the campus came to life, reactions were immediate. The Afro-American Student Society was prepared. Under the signature of its president, G. P. Porter, the society issued a manifesto affirming its commitment to black manhood and approving the addition to the Angel Gabriel as a symbol of black manhood at Harnell. The manifesto spelled out the Afro-American Society’s position that “under no circumstances” would they allow the Angel Gabriel to be “recastrated.”
While the Black Manifesto was being circulated among the student body, the largest and most influential of Harnell’s sororities held a meeting. By unanimous vote they condemned the angel’s new organ as “disgusting” and “an affront to womanhood.” Several BMOC rallied to support their position. The football team captain was the natural leader of this group, which was composed mainly of athletes and athletic supporters. The jocks started making plans to re-emasculate the Angel Gabriel so that “decent girls” might walk the campus unoffended.
On the other side, Minerva Kaufman, who was a wheel in the larger of the two warring factions of SDS on campus, gathered together a group of radical white students pledged to back up the principles of Afro-American culture involved. Meanwhile, off campus, in the nearby black ghetto, a militant in Afro garb stood on a street corner and urged his followers to arm themselves and march on the college so that this symbol of black manhood might be “liberated.” A few blocks away, the white head of the local Urban League office, who hadn’t been asked to comment, issued a statement which added up to “No comment.” Further up town, a black psychologist was accusing the “white power structure” of having itself engineered the penal reform as a means of perpetuating the “sex-fear myth” which was “the basis of all white prejudice.”
Meanwhile, besieged by reporters, Harnell Chancellor Hardlign told them it was just “a typical college prank-—-albeit in particularly questionable taste—-with absolutely no racial overtones.” He added that “of course it will be removed at the earliest opportunity.”
The faculty quaked at the statement. A committee was quickly formed to consider the situation. After a lengthy debate, it was decided to call the ad hoc faculty committee “The Ad Hoc Faculty Committee.”
Directly following this decision, word was received that the Harnell University Alumni Commission-—HUAC for short — was demanding the immediate expulsion of those students responsible for “the desecration of this hallowed work of art which epitomizes the spirit and tradition of our proud Alma Mater.” The Ad Hoc Faculty Committee was immobilized. Teachers, instructors, and professors polarized themselves according to tenure.
The campus air was electric with anticipation. Students thronged to the mall to look at the Angel Gabriel. The first action came shortly after noontime. It was precipitated by an innocent bystander. In the crowd, gazing at the statue, an apolitical home-ec major nudged her boyfriend and observed, “Now that’s the way a man should be built!”
“Nobody’s built that way.” The boyfriend responded defensively.
“That’s what you think!” A black girl standing in front of them had overheard and couldn’t resist the remark.
The white girl was curious. “Are they really like that?” She pointed at the statue with unerring aim.
“Unh-hunh!” The black girl giggled.
“It’s a put-on!” The boyfriend was getting hot under the button-down, white-on-white collar. “It’s all part of that divide-and-conquer black-power strategy,” he told the white girl. “Don’t fall for it! Don’t be a goon!” he added through tight lips.
“Who you calling ‘coon?’ ” A black boy a few feet away misheard and jumped to the conclusion that the black girl was being insulted. “Picking on a girl! You’re pretty damn cocky!”
“Anti-Semite!” A Jewish jock came up, flexing his muscles under his Star of David frat shirt. “Maybe you’d like to try calling me mockey,” he suggested menacingly. “How about it? Think you can make it stick?”
“I’ll show you who’s a spic!” A Puerto Rican student elbowed his way up to the group.
“Nobody but another Irishman can call an Irishman a mick!” A tall boy with the map of the Emerald Isle freckling his angry face confronted the Puerto Rican. “I wouldn’t even take that from my pop.”
“Wop?” An Italian student threw the first punch.
“Prick!”
“Spic!”
“Mick!”
“Kike!”
“Dyke!”
"Wop!"
“Cop!”
“Spade!”
“Raid!”
Fists flew and the fracas spread toward the statue of the Angel Gabriel. A group of Afro-American students clustered there, led by G. P. Porter. When the words “cop” and “raid” reached their ears, they circled the statue and linked arms to protect it. Nearby, Minerva Kaufman was making a speech to her SDS faction on the duty of concerned white radicals to help their “black brothers” against “honky violence.” It was hard to hear her in the confusion, but nevertheless the speech had its effect. The SDS-ers dispersed to form a human barricade around the Afro-Americans.
Marching toward the melee, a large group of Greeks and jocks reacted to the maneuver at the base of the statue. “Come on, fellows!” the captain of the Harnell eleven whooped. “Let’s show ’em they can’t take over our school!” With six husky linemen in the van, he led a flying wedge through the crowd toward the statue. The other athletes and frat men followed at a trot.
From a window in the Administration Building, Chancellor Hardlign had been watching. Now he moved to act. He called the chief of the Campus Security Police and instructed that the entire force of twenty-four men proceed to the scene to break up what was fast becoming a riot.
“How about the locals?” the chief asked. “We might need help.”
“There isn’t time,” the chancellor told him. “We’ve got to break this up before it has a chance to spread. Disperse the crowd and get that statue inside this building. I want it out of sight. That way we can take care of the obscenity without all this nonsense from the students.”
' “Yes sir!” The chief hung up and summoned his men.
“Fuzz!” The cry went up at the first sight of the billy-wielding cops. About half the crowd scattered immediately.
From the window of his room, Jonathan Relevant observed this latest development as he had been observing the mounting situation since early morning. “A detached observer. Maybe that’s my role,” he told himself. “Sort of a cosmic anthropologist compiling information on the ritualistic power struggles of the tribe.”