LITMIR.BIZ

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the papers and registered again that John was missing.

      “Jordan, would you read John’s part as well?”

      He had been looking at his phone, but he seemed to hear me and just nodded, not being a smart-ass for once.

      I handed the copies to Nari who was closest to me and she started passing them. They were now almost all so tense their arms moved like robots to take a copy and pass it.

      “Let me read you part of what Du Bois wrote about hearing about lynching while he was a college student at Fisk when he was basically the same age as you are now.” I turned to my notes.

      ‘“Lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days: from 1885 through 1894, seventeen hundred Negroes were lynched in America. Each death was a scar upon my soul, and led me on to conceive the plight of other minority groups; for in my college days Italians were lynched in New Orleans [and there were] anti-Chinese riots, echoes of Jewish segregation and pogroms in Russia.”

      I looked up.

      “See, that’s what Mei pointed out. The riots included Chinese lynching. And more groups considered alien others.

      “That’s more than one per week, week after week, month after month, year after year. And it changed Du Bois. As he says, it scarred him. And it changed his whole career as an intellectual, I believe.”

      I looked at the class and waited a moment.

      “‘Seventeen hundred.’ Let that sink in. Now, I’m going to start the slide show from this website. These are postcards of actual photos of lynchings, collected by James Allen over twenty-five years. I’ll show it twice, once with the narration on and then silently as each of you to read in turn the portion of the Wright poem highlighted on your individual paper.”

      I pressed “play” and the voice narrated the finding of these nauseating postcard images of burned bodies, tortured sometimes almost beyond recognition as human, with crowds of white spectators, often in their Sunday best, gathered around with evident satisfaction, even pleasure on their faces, taking pride at their role in the ruination of these human beings.

      But this time, I didn’t watch the film. I watched the students. Jordan’s smirk was gone. Emma was crying again. The others mostly stared with expressions ranging from shock to resignation to anger. Jayden’s lips were tight, her eyes lasered on the screen.

      The video came to its grisly end.

      I touched mute and signaled to Nari who had the first line. I started the video again and the photos showed the charred proof of the poet’s words. The students’ voices rose and fell, some choking out the words, some reading so softly the sound did not make it around the table, some reading each word like it had nothing to do with the ones next to it, and a couple reading with angry hisses, willing the words away. But still they rose and fell, certain words too powerful to be stilled, either with anger or hesitation, words like “a scorched coil of greasy hemp,” or “trousers still with black blood,” or “a drained gin-flask,” or “gasoline,” and “thirsty voices,” with “a thousand faces,” and “a blaze of red.”

      I had noted each reader and her or his voice. Anger was certainly justified, as was sobbing or whispering. I compared their voices reading the sections of the poem to their earlier remarks. Did anyone sitting at this table know or even suspect who had hung our very own coil of rope? I couldn’t tell. I hoped someone would be moved enough to tell me at some point.

      I let them go early. They were all looking shell-shocked. I know I felt like the class had already been going on for days.

      Chapter 5

      People shouldn’t call for demons unless they really mean what they say.

      —C. S. Lewis, The Wisdom of Narnia

      Tuesday afternoon

      After class ended, I went to my office and just sat behind my desk. The grey skies kept most of the daylight behind clouds, but I didn’t turn on the lights. Aduba wasn’t there, and I was glad to be alone. I wondered briefly if he was already using Hercules Abraham’s office for prayer. Of course, I had only a vague idea of when Muslim prayer times would be. Again I was just astonished I had given no thought to the practicalities of having a Muslim colleague. Neither, apparently, had Adelaide.

      I leaned back and pressed my hands to my eyes. Big mistake. Behind my eyelids I could see again the twisted, charred, but still human forms of the victims of lynching, and the gloating, even glorying, faces of the watching crowds. I shuddered. The white skin and teeth of the watchers had gleamed in the firelight like something summoned up from hell.

      A loud knock on the door made me jump in my seat.

      “Yes?” I called out sharply. “Who is it?”

      “It’s Jordan, Professor. May I come in?”

      “Sure,” I replied in a more civil tone. “The door is unlocked.”

      Jordan. The class clown. I was so not up for his smartass act right now. His “they lynch cows?” snarky question still rankled with me.

      He opened the door, and I immediately saw this was not Jordan the clown coming to see me. His pale, nerd face was even more pasty than usual and his lips were compressed into a solid line of tension.

      “Have a seat,” I said neutrally.

      Jordan dropped his backpack and sat down heavily. He didn’t look at me. He looked down at the floor, his narrow shoulders hunched in his worn T-shirt. I waited.

      He cleared his throat.

      “Well, I just wanted to explain about John, see? And I don’t know for sure.”

      He looked up and peered at me through the thick lenses of his large, dark framed glasses, his eyes magnified like those of an insect. He seemed think this remark might make sense to me. In a peculiar way, it did. Just not in the way he was pretending. Jordan knew something, and he didn’t want to admit how much he knew. The trick in this kind of thing is to keep quiet. Cops know that well. Give a witness enough silence, and they’ll say more than they planned. I just nodded slightly. He looked back at the floor, his large glasses sliding down his nose a little.

      “It’s just that this Muslim guy and his lecture got him going, you know?”

      “Professor Abubakar, you mean,” I said quietly.

      Jordan realized he’d made a mistake.

      “Yes. Yes. That professor.” He paused. “That’s why John left the class, you know. He texted me. I think he’ll drop. He was already pissed, I mean angry, that the department had hired a Muslim, and then in class you went on and on about that stupid rope. He’s a Christian, you know, and since you called the class ‘Social Gospel,’ he thought it would be about Christians.”

      “It is about Christians,” I said dryly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll follow up with John, Jordan.”

      He didn’t reply right away and just picked at holes in the knees of his jeans for a while. They already had large tears in them. If he kept going, he’d turn them into shorts before he left my office. I just watched him.

      Finally he looked up again, and spoke.

      “I can’t really say I know anything, but like people talk online, and well, I mean, John, he was really pissed off, and like he takes this religion stuff so seriously. Not like us in computer sciences. We just write code, you know, and don’t pay attention to that stuff so much.”

      He smiled his lopsided smile, back to being the clown.

      “Is that a nerd thing, ignoring reality?” I inquired, playing along.

      “At this school, it’s more of a geek thing, really. Geeks are the more academically inclined nerds,” he said, mimicking a lecturing voice.

      “How can you tell the difference?” I asked, continuing the game.

      “You

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