That pair of students, the ones who’d decided to bring the watermelons to their class dean’s office, for maximum impact? Were also Black. One was Harvard-bound, intending to study neurobiology. The other was a powerful young woman heading to Spellman, who’d chaired the school’s Black Student Caucus for the past two years and had landed an internship with Eleanor Holmes Norton that summer. She was also the daughter of a prominent Black novelist who’d won the Pulitzer Prize.
Clueless. Both of them.
“What I couldn’t get over,” Harrison told his audience in summation, “was the failure of it all. On one hand, we’d spent years not really learning because our school couldn’t risk exposing us to anything but the prescribed material. Like, it used to be if you were studying the Holocaust you’d get assigned Mein Kampf to read—I mean, primary source! But if a teacher at my school tried to include that in the curriculum he’d be tarred and feathered. So what we end up with is exhaustive detail about terrible things that happened to the victims, but no idea of why any of it happened, because you wouldn’t want to expose a sensitive, empathic young person to the unfiltered ideas of a person who actually is racist, sexist, or homophobic. Because apparently we just can’t trust a reasonable teenager to be appalled by … I mean, we’re talking about Adolf Hitler here! And not only that, but we have to be these wounded birds, too. I’m offended! I’m insulted! I’m triggered! Because what we learn about the world is that it’s racist and anti-Semitic and anti-gay and culturally insensitive, but all we can seem to do about it is go into a fetal position. How are we supposed to get up on our feet and actually accomplish anything? It’s absurd!”
Harrison paused. He had become aware of the fact that he was losing, ever so slightly, his own thread. The shake in his voice, he didn’t like that, either.
“Well,” he steadied himself. At some point in the story, he had taken hold of the podium and was gripping it so tightly his fingers actually hurt. “Well. That’s what I wanted to say. I’m not claiming racism and all the other isms haven’t always been a part of life, just that I don’t feel I need to apologize for something that was done in the past, by somebody else. I didn’t slaughter any Native Americans. I’m not burning any witches or lynching somebody because I don’t like the way they looked at my wife. I honestly don’t care if you’re a lady or a gentleman or a Vulcan or a Hobbit, and to be completely honest, I also don’t care what bathroom you use. I just kind of wish you’d shut up about it.”
From the front row, Roger Fount was barely suppressing his laughter. A few others were laughing as well, Harrison saw.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess … I guess I should stop.”
Fount rose to his feet and stepped forward.
The others were clapping, all of them, Harrison realized. He felt very warm, and kind of high. Somebody brought him a drink. Somebody’s arm landed across his shoulder.
“That school of yours,” said Vernon Loring, who was suddenly beside him and shaking his head. “It’s a bit of a miracle you made it out.”
“But he did,” Roger Fount laughed, taking Harrison’s hand in his own doughy hand. “And here he is. Which is all that matters.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Deus ex Machina
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer gets lost in the Sacred Grove, and acquires a new secret
Lewyn had an array of fine reasons for remaining in Ithaca that summer, but the greatest of these was the room at the end of a corridor in Jameson Hall where Rochelle had moved, shortly before the summer program teenagers arrived. Reluctance to see his family, of course, ran a very close second. Sometime that spring, Johanna had mentioned that Harrison was going to be in Virginia for part of the summer, and Lewyn had no idea what Sally’s plans might be, but he certainly hoped they involved her leaving town. Neither of his parents had been especially vocal about having him home over the summer, either in Brooklyn or on the Vineyard, but his presence at the cottage, for the ritual observance of the birthday in early September, was nonnegotiable: the Oppenheimer triplets would gather and they would observe and they would, in all probability, be photographed together, and there was no possible way out of any of that.