“I’m waiting with bated breath.”
“All right . . . well . . .”
“We don’t have all day, Ailey.”
“I could be wrong, but there is a lot of pro-white bias on the part of some interviewers. And I found this bias extremely problematic.”
“Go on. Expound.”
“Those particular white interviewers clearly are invested in downplaying the brutality of slavery and the trauma suffered by formerly enslaved African Americans. They appear to be steering their Black subjects to say how great they were treated by their former masters, and I thought—”
When Rebecca raised her hand, I expected Dr. Whitcomb to ignore her. I wasn’t yet finished, but he surprised me.
“You have something to add, Rebecca?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. Maybe we should consider, just maybe, that the interviewers for these narratives weren’t racially biased. Maybe these former slaves were telling the truth and their masters really had been kind to them. Maybe they had been happy.”
I raised my hand. “Can I rebut?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Whitcomb said. “Can you?”
I cut him a glance, and thought I saw a brief smile, but I couldn’t be sure.
“If slavery was so great, why did the Civil War happen?” I asked.
“Because the north was infringing on our southern states’ rights,” Rebecca said.
“Are you seriously going to bring up that old chestnut?” I laughed, and our professor tapped the table with his knuckles. Keep it professional here. Don’t be derisive.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I would like to ask Rebecca, exactly who is this first-person plural in ‘our states’ rights’？ Is it white people? And are you referring to the fact that only whites were citizens in this country until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 granted citizenship to African Americans, or are you thinking of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, when Native Americans were granted citizenship? Which one, Rebecca?”
“Our southern identity is not about race,” she said. “It’s about the fact that we lost the Civil War—”
“And again, you are using a plural first-person pronoun,” I said. “What ‘we’ are you referring to? Because my Black family didn’t lose the war. We won it.”
“I would expect a Yankee to take that attitude, Ailey.”
“My mother is from Georgia, and her entire family is, too. Further, ‘Yankee’”—I made air quotes—“does not describe African Americans. It is a term that is specific to whites from New England.”
“How did this become a racial debate, Ailey?”
“Rebecca, how is the Civil War not about race?”
“Because the Civil War was about states’ rights.”
“Yes, the right for southern states to hold African Americans in slavery!”
Dr. Whitcomb tapped the table again. “Okay, that’s enough. This discussion has become circular and borderline impolite.”
After class, I waited as he packed his books. “Dr. Whitcomb, I wanted to apologize sincerely for my disruptive behavior. I hope you can forgive me.”
“No harm, no foul.” He zipped up his old-fashioned physician’s bag. But when I began to express gratitude, he cut me off. He told me, have a good afternoon.
But I didn’t want to leave things on an odd note: the next day, I showed up to his office in the multicultural center. I hadn’t made an appointment, and when I knocked on the door, Dr. Whitcomb had a submarine sandwich and chips on his desk. He had rolled up his sleeves, and his cuff links and tie sat on the desk a few inches away from the food. His large-screen television was turned to the sports cable channel.
He waved his hand at me. “Hey there, sistren! I was just watching the playoff report.”
Dr. Whitcomb pressed a button; there was a flash of dark limbs silently running up and down a court. He smiled at me and the dimples flashed. But when I told him I had come to apologize again, the temperature in the room chilled.
“Sistren, I told you it was fine. But now that you’re here, let me give you some advice from an elder with gray in his beard. You need to stop engaging in petty arguments over inconsequential issues. You aren’t here for that foolishness. You’re here to get at least one graduate degree in the discipline of history.”
The rage suddenly overtook me as he put another chip in his mouth. Did he know what it was like, struggling up those steps to the collections to do that research? How I’d lost weight because my appetite had basically disappeared, ever since I’d been reading those journals written by Samuel Pinchard, that asshole of a white man who had the nerve to be one of my blood ancestors? Or the humiliating exercises I had to perform to get those journals from the research librarian? Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Ransom, I’ma be shonuff careful with these here papers. Dr. Whitcomb had no idea how that librarian watched over me, waiting for me to pull out a bucket of fried chicken and start munching on it over her precious original documents.