I stayed quiet.
“You know how I know, Ailey? Because when Chuck Whitcomb and I were at Harvard years ago, that’s what they said about us. And it didn’t matter that we both worked like dogs to get our grades. We weren’t ever going to be good enough for those bastards. If you want Chuck as your advisor, great. If not, choose somebody else. Or go to another university. It’s up to you. But instead of you trying to please some white folks whose names you won’t even remember a decade from now, how about making your own decisions?”
*
Dr. Whitcomb’s The Peculiar Institution in the Archives was a requirement for any master’s student concentrating in early American history. But that first class, it seemed as if he was pitching his lecture toward the most untrained of students.
At the front of the room, his dimples were on constant display. He spoke in his lulling tenor, explaining that we would spend a lot of time in the archives. He wanted to train us early, because some of us would be continuing for the doctorate. The secondary texts would supplement the original documents, because the point wasn’t just to read letters or wills or what have you that somebody else had found. The point was to learn how to become academic detectives.
Class time would be for presentations and for discussing sources, he told us. There were several class requirements: five one-page book reviews, a twenty-five-page paper due at the end of the semester, and two oral presentations on what we’d found in the Old South Collections. And we’d be responsible for the background reading, which would guide us in the archives. We had to choose which family we wanted to focus on, from a list of thirty slaveholding families that he gave us. Each of these families had papers located in the Old South Collections, and we would be reading their records with an eye toward three themes: kinship, resistance, or economics. We could select one theme to focus on, two, or all three.
“Now, I know this is a lot of reading, but before you deep dive into archival work, I want you to fully comprehend the cultural and emotional contexts of the documents that you’ll encounter in the Old South Collections. This is not a course where my intention is to cut you off at the knees. The work is hard, I cannot lie, but please know that you can come to me anytime and talk these texts through. I’m here for you, and I mean that sincerely. If I’m not teaching, I’m in my office five days a week, nine to five. I can take lunch meetings with you as well. Just so you know, I really like potato chips. The super-crunchy kind.”
There was laughter, and, it seemed, relief in the room.
After Dr. Whitcomb had passed out the reading list, along with the list of families in the Old South Collections, he used that entire class period to give an elementary African American history review that reached back to 1619. He spoke slowly, as if the whole class couldn’t understand English. And Dr. Whitcomb was very patient when Rebecca Grillier Park asked, what was the premise of the Fugitive Slave Acts of both 1793 and 1850? I looked across the table at her, trying to fix my face. Rebecca was supposed to be specializing in early American, like me. She briefly met my eyes, and then looked away, inspecting the walls. Stroking her blond ponytail.
In the corner of the seminar room, there was a record player with an album fitted on top. He turned on the player, and a soft group of voices began to sing as he talked about Olaudah Equiano, his favorite abolitionist. In the eighteenth century, someone had caught Equiano and his baby sister and taken them into slavery, split them up, and sent him across the Middle Passage by himself—if you don’t count the other folks by themselves, too, there in the hold of that ship.
If you get there before I do
Coming for to carry me home
Tell all my people I’m coming too
Coming for to carry me home
Dr. Whitcomb sang along in his passable tenor, completely unembarrassed, as his students exchanged glances. I looked down at my notebook, avoiding anyone’s eyes. Just because the man was Black didn’t make him my relative. I didn’t have to claim him.
“Does anybody know what those lines mean?” After a couple of beats: “Ailey? What do you think?”
The other students turned and looked at me.
Aw, shit.
“Um . . . well, I’m not sure, Dr. Whitcomb . . . you know . . . but I’ve read that whenever a slave was planning to run, he or she might sing that song to alert the rest of the quarters that an escape was taking place soon. Those stories might be apocryphal, however.”
“Exactly! Wonderful, Ailey!”
After class, our professor smiled again, zipped up his old-fashioned doctor’s bag, and left us looking through the syllabus.