17

Thursday, January 21, 2021, 12:45 PM, Eastern Standard Time

The west wind from the morning remained, but now it seemed to betoken snow or rain, as clouds had closed in over Washington, D.C. Professor Vaneida Allen was headed toward her lone class of the day, Presidential Politics in the Digital Age, at Douglass College, a historically black school.

After her release from custody, she had gotten an Unter cab with the bandaged Jenna and Janice back to their respective apartments. They were mostly silent, after a long night of not sleeping in the lockup, till Janice said, “Hey. What the frack was that about, with that guy Joe?”

Vaneida, startled awake, took in the question.

“What? All the ‘you’ stuff?”

“Yeah. How well do you know this guy?”

“I thought I knew him pretty well,” Vaneida said. “He’s been coming to the meetings for almost a year. But yeah, that came out of left field.”

“More like right field,” Janice said.

Vaneida grinned. Every once in a while, Janice would remind her why Vaneida liked having her around. She was funny as hell, especially when she was angry.

“I mean, that was some mansplaining bullspit right there,” Janice said.

“It was,” Jenna agreed. “Kind of weird.”

“See, even Nature Girl here agrees. You sure this guy is really on our side?”

“I think so,” Vaneida said. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him. He seems legit. Eager to learn. I think he just hadn’t ever been political before. He only went to college for two years before the military. He’s taking e-courses now to finish up.”

“Might be smart to throw him up against a wall and look him in the eyes and make sure he is what he appears to be, Cobra,” Janice said, using Vaneida’s basketball nickname.

Vaneida grinned again. “I should throw his Delta Force ass up against the wall and stare into his eyes? I think we’re learning more than we want to about the mating habits of the wild Janice. Maybe you should throw him up against the wall, Ice. Use your femi-nine wiles to get the truth out of him.”

They all laughed at that.

“Honestly, I couldn’t throw a three year-old up against a wall after lying on that morgue slab in the can last night,” Janice said. “I think I caught your bad back.”

“‘The can,’” Vaneida repeated. “You some cold-ass prison bitch, Ice.”

“That’s me,” Janice answered. “Canned Ice.” She folded her arms and tried to burrow back into the back seat to attempt a nap again.

But her question lingered as they all went back to dozing while the Unter dropped the two other women off, then Vaneida last.

She had had time to grab a short nap before showering and changing for work. For a few seconds when her phone alarm went off she had not known where she was, and for the first time in a while she had not felt the immediate leaden weight of living in 2021 America as a gay black woman. She emitted a muffled curse as she remembered where she had been the night before, and why.

Walking now toward campus, Vaneida recalled how much more she had enjoyed teaching this class a few years ago, when an African-American had occupied the White House and, though the policies she favored were not exactly steaming toward enactment, at least policies she hated were stalled.

Now all that was reversed. Seemingly every day, some longstanding societal consensus was being overturned and replaced by something from the era of Plessy v. Ferguson, if not Dred Scott. And the protests she had hoped to witness from her allies on the “left” had dissolved into infighting and performative self-indulgence, after a promising beginning. She had considered herself to be a pretty jaded customer, difficult to shock or dismay. But when, for example, she had heard this morning on National Public Radio that one of the Inaugural Balls had included a speaker from the European Front, who hailed the Inauguration of the President as “America’s endorsement of European values” and “a national rejection of multiculturalism,” and had ended the speech with the cry “Hail the President! Hail Victory!” and a straight-armed fascist salute, both answered by the crowd, she felt almost hung over. 

And then the President’s obvious happiness at being saluted the same way, when he had arrived at the Ball, responding with a straight-armed wave that seemed to echo the hundreds of straight arms extended toward him. She had seen that for the first time just now on a muted television screen at the Student Union where she got her coffee. The jolt of anger that scene caused her was almost instantly smothered by a tidal wave of depression and ennui. This is what America really is now, she thought to herself. You suspected this all along. Okomo made you complacent. It’s time to get back to reality.

Walking to her class, still a bit disoriented by her nap and the eventful night she had passed, she suddenly remembered walking out of the jail with Janice and Jenna. Had that been Joe walking away from them after they had been released? And who was the guy who had obviously come to pick him up? Something about him had looked familiar, despite the strange leather hat with ear flaps he had been wearing. He certainly did not look like a fellow protester. And the rest of his get-up looked quite fashionable. There was more to that story, she thought.

Like Janice and Jenna, she had been taken aback by Joe’s sudden outburst against the Democratic party. The critique had a lot of truth, she had to admit. And she herself had little love for the party as an institution. It seemed slow on the uptake, both tactically and morally. Of course, back in the day, it had been the party of Jim Crow, and before that, of slavery. It took a hundred years for them to begin to atone for that, first with the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act, both of which were under assault now, ironically, by the Party of Lincoln. Everything had turned upside down since about 1965.

She thought again about her own journey to today. She had grown up in a household that was militant on African-American rights, but that more or less proceeded on the assumption that, as Dr. King had quoted an earlier pastor saying, “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” There had been some bumps along the way, including the Reagan era into which she was born, where things like affirmative action were suddenly open to question. She had been taught that rights had to be fought for; they were never freely given. She had imbibed that attitude from childhood onward.

But the family drama was all about race. Her parents seemed to assume that if racial discrimination was dealt with, all would be well in the world and for their family. Vaneida was the youngest child of three; an older sister blazed the trail she seemed to be expected to follow. Dianne, almost ten years older, had gone to a top- tier university and was now a corporate lawyer. She took some pro-bono criminal cases as well, but her conventional success in a role that African-American women had been denied for so long seemed to satisfy her parents. She had married another African-American lawyer, and they had two children of their own, a son and a daughter. Their brother, the middle child, had had less conventional success career-wise, but everyone seemed to like him. He had never married, but he had one daughter from a now-defunct relationship; he had joint custody, so Rielle was around the family a lot.

Vaneida was, she had to admit, the black sheep of the family. Her mother had often remarked on her eccentricity. “Can’t you be more like Dianne?” was a common refrain. But she couldn’t be more like Dianne. She wore glasses, unlike Dianne, and she was not conventionally beautiful like Dianne. She was tall, and she was a good student, like Dianne, and she was a serious person. Maybe she took things too much to heart at times.

Vaneida recalled the moment her mother chose to tell her “the facts of life.” Up to that point, Vaneida had enjoyed life, going to school, playing basketball, reading, playing outside with friends. But when her mother told her the details of what was about to happen to her and her body, and that she would probably one day marry a boy, as her mother had, and Dianne seemed about to, and give birth to children, Vaneida reacted with complete disbelief. It took her mother the best part of an hour to finally convince her that she was not making it all up.

When it dawned on Vaneida that her mother was telling her the truth, that this entire bizarre science fiction story was not only real, but was about to transform her life, and, in Vaneida’s ten year-old’s opinion, decidedly not for the better, her response was to run out of the bedroom and down the hall to the bathroom and be sick. The deep sense of unfairness engendered that day had not completely dissipated. She looked at her brother through her glasses and thought, Why does he have it so easy? Why do men not have to go through this? And she could not help wondering how Dianne could be okay with her lot in life, as Vaneida thought she herself never could be.

High school was both harder and easier for Vaneida. Harder because it began to be clear to her that she was not developing the attraction to males that most of her fellow female students were, and also harder because she was developing feelings for some female classmates for which there was no easy outlet, as far as she could see.

Easier, because she excelled in high school both academically and athletically. She was captain of her high school basketball team, which she led into the state playoffs twice; she finally developed real friends through basketball.

Vaneida also was a National Merit Scholar, and with her combination of athletic and academic qualifications, the outlook seemed exceptionally bright for her. For the first time in her life, she was not hearing the comparisons to Dianne. In fact, she was being told that she was outshining Dianne’s past accomplishments. The only hitch in this entire tale of future promise was her inability to tell her parents that she was probably not going to outshine Dianne in the heterosexual-marriage- and-children sweepstakes.

College came to the rescue. Vaneida went to a large state school on a basketball scholarship. Fortunately, women’s basketball, unlike men’s basketball, was not seen as a pre-professional training ground. Being serious academically and being serious as an athlete were not mutually exclusive endeavors. Even better, on this big and diverse campus, she met women who were like her, and who were completely comfortable in their identities. Maybe best of all, she met a large group of people who did not share her sexual identity, but who were completely un-shocked by it and perfectly willing to treat her like anyone else. This eventually gave Vaneida the confidence to sit her parents down and tell them. She could tell that neither was perfectly comfortable hearing the news, but they took it reasonably well, all things considered. Ultimate acceptance and perfect comfort might come some day or they might not, she thought. Every year things got a little less fraught.

College was probably the favorite period in her life, combining athletic success (she was a second-team All-American) with academic success (Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude) and personal self-discovery and even a bit of romantic fulfillment, though Vaneida had made it clear her relationships took second place to her academic and career aspirations. Graduate school was a close second. She had been accepted to a state school in a different state to get her PhD. Her dissertation had compared the struggles of African Americans for voting rights with the struggle of gay people for legal status, and examined the handful of key figures who had participated in both struggles. Vaneida’s dissertation had resulted in a book, which did not sell widely, but which was well-regarded in the circles in which she now ran. She had begun teaching at the state school while a graduate student; Douglass eventually came knocking, offering her a specifically-created-for-her endowed position in Intersectional Studies as her doctorate was finishing up. Vaneida had been at Douglass ever since, for ten years now.

Home was an apartment in Columbia Heights. Vaneida had had a girlfriend for several years, but she had moved for a job to Seattle two years previously. She had mourned the end of the relationship for a time, but the rhythms of the life she had established for herself seemed to soothe those feelings. Vaneida began to realize that she enjoyed living by herself, having a home base from which to venture, to the campus nearby, to the houses of friends, to exhibitions in DC, to certain restaurants and coffee shops. Every year brought graduation and then the summer, when she was free to write and read, and then fall came and with it her new students, new minds to try to mold.

And there was her political activism. Vaneida had been more concerned with LGBTQ civil rights than with racial politics for some time now. The spike in old-style harsh racism during the Okomo administration, and the triumphal crowing of real white supremacists, now almost normalized since Okomo had left, and the resurgent crisis of police violence against African-Americans, had hit her like a baseball bat from an unexpected direction. She could scarcely believe that the America that she knew, the one that had elected Okomo just a few years earlier, the one that had seemed to be bending toward justice, could turn around, after Okomo had led them out of a pit of economic despair to a modest recovery and low unemployment, and elect the man who now occupied the White House. It all brought her back home, in a way, to the evils her parents had raised her to fight. She instinctively knew she had to seek out some outlet for her anger, lest it turn to despair and bitterness.

And then Vaneida had found SNRM, and was made its faculty advisor. Her eloquence, her calm, and her commitment impressed everyone she came across in the Movement. She was essentially in charge of the D.C. chapter of the organization; despite its name, SNRM had almost immediately moved beyond its base of students to include alumni, faculty, and non-academic members. Her particular life story and intersectional identity made her a natural for reaching across borders of orientation and race to build the local organization. There were far bigger chapters in New York and in California, but the national capital drew the heads of those groups to Washington on a fairly regular basis. Some of her peers had been at the Inauguration, but had decided to stay outside the ticketed area.

Vaneida had decided that she personally needed to make a more direct statement. Her father had called her the day after the election, and for the first time in her life, she had heard him weeping, at the failure of protests to bring about real change in policing, or to at least stop the President from being re-elected. That phone call had galvanized her; she had to do something, to make a statement, to take up the family fight for civil rights for their people.

That effort had failed; she still wondered what might have been if the President and his wife had not come down with the virus – the ultimate “October Surprise.” Once that failure had sunk in, she knew she had to continue the fight. 

So, she had chosen three of her most reliable (and physically toughest) local SNRM members to assist her in her act of resistance. Vaneida had actually expected that she might have awakened in a hospital, rather than simply spending the night in jail. She had even arranged for a substitute for this class, just in case. But Vaneida had canceled that as soon as she was given her cell phone back. She found herself surprised and happy she could go back to campus and resume the life she had constructed for herself.

As Vaneida approached the building in which she would be teaching today, newly re-named for President Okomo, she thought back to Joe and his harangue in the police van about Democrats. She was glad he had been there to get them out in one piece. But she also wondered about the man who appeared to have picked him up. Vaneida recognized him from somewhere. And Joe’s list of particulars against Democrats seemed to come more from the heart than his regurgitating of SNRM talking points.

On the other hand, Joe’s criticisms of the Democrats were ones she happened to agree with, though without the animus with which he had expressed them. And he had gotten the three of them out of there in one piece, through an angry mob.

Still… how had they gotten out of there in one piece? Aside from Jenna’s face wound, they had passed through the multitude, shepherded by Joe, as if protected by a higher power.

Vaneida would have to ask him about that.

She entered the auditorium-classroom, went to the podium, and hooked her laptop into the audio-visual system.

“Okay, okay,” she said, as a way of hushing the crowd, which was already at its full complement of about 30, properly socially distanced in a checkerboard pattern. “Why don’t we, before we dive right into today’s material, why don’t we open the floor up for reactions to the events of yesterday.”