“Your gesture was lovely. I’m all for it.”
“But apparently there’s just something about me that makes black people hate me.”
“Not at all.”
“I don’t hate them.”
“Of course not. It’s just…” He took a deep breath, for courage. “It might not be a bad idea,” he said, “to step back and think about how you’re coming across. It’s one thing to be in New Prospect, in your own milieu, with people like yourself. You can be as outspoken as you want. You can openly disagree with people, and they’ll take it as a sign of respect. But that kind of spirit comes across differently when you’re a visitor in a Black community.”
“I’m not allowed to disagree with them?”
“No, that’s—”
“Because it’s not like every black person is so perfect. I’m sure they do plenty of disagreeing among themselves.”
“I’m not saying you can’t disagree with Theo Crenshaw. I disagreed with him myself today.”
“I didn’t see much sign of that.”
“I’m talking about an inner attitude. The first thing I do, when I feel myself disagreeing, is acknowledge my own ignorance. Maybe there’s something in Theo’s experience that leads him to think the way he does, something I can’t immediately see. Instead of just shooting from the hip, I stop and ask myself, ‘Why does he feel differently about this than I do?’ And then I listen to his answer. He and I may still disagree, but at least I’ve acknowledged that a Black man’s experience in this country is profoundly different than mine.”
Frances offered no rejoinder, and Russ dared to hope that he was getting through to her. He had selfish reasons to keep her in the Tuesday circle, but they didn’t make his message less sincere.
“You have a good heart, Frances. A wonderful heart. But you can’t really blame Theo for not immediately seeing that. If you want him to trust you, you need to try to cultivate a different attitude. Begin with the assumption that you don’t know anything about being Black. If you make that adjustment, I guarantee he’ll notice the difference.”
She sighed so heavily that the windshield fogged. “I embarrassed you, didn’t I.”
“Not at all.”
“No, I did. I can see that now. I was trying to be Mrs. Fix-It.”
Russ glowed with pride. He, not Theo, had been right about her true nature.
“You didn’t do anything so wrong,” he said. “But the next time you see Theo, it wouldn’t hurt to tell him you’re sorry. A simple heartfelt apology goes a long way. Theo’s a good man, a good Christian. If you change your inner attitude, he’ll know it. It is so important to me, Frances, so very important, that you keep coming on our Tuesdays.”
This was the mildest of allusions to his pride in her, his hopes for a deepening of their intimacy, but he worried that it was still too much; and, indeed, the allusion wasn’t lost on her.
“Why, Reverend Hildebrandt,” she said. “The things you do say.”
Desire surged in him so powerfully, it felt like a premonition of its fulfillment. He thought of the blues recordings he’d left in his office, the excuse they would give him to bring Frances inside the church, the course that events might take in the dark of his office, if he kept up his nerve and didn’t get them back too late. Feeling one with the Fury, he urged it across Fifty-ninth Street, where the snow was heavily furrowed.
The furrows were deeper than he’d judged. They absorbed his momentum and deflected him into a sideways skid. For a very bad moment, neither steering nor braking had any effect. He clutched the wheel helplessly while Frances cried out and the Fury slid backward through the intersection. There was a bump and a bang and a crunch of metal on metal.
Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.
Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?