On the blackboard, on a paper handout, and on individual CRT screens in front of each seat in the room was a statement:
The primary requirements are a strong commitment to visually expressing support for all students within our community. By displaying the provided sign or button, a Friend can send a message of acceptance or encouragement.
We encourage proposals on the rhetorical intersections of gender with race, class, age, sexuality, and ability; interpreting the academy, disciplinarity, and professional identities from a feminist perspective; reclaiming the lost or marginalized voices of women (e.g., rhetors, writers, teachers, artists, workers); analyzing the rhetoric of historical depictions of women; the rhetoric of the feminist movement and the feminist backlash; males and men’s studies and scholarship in relation to feminism; extrapolations of theory from the everyday (e.g., etiquette manuals, cookbooks, diaries) …
Mrs. Hollingsworth was dazed by this, but snapped to at “cookbooks”: was she perhaps, she wondered, already extrapolating theory from a grocery list? Maybe she had already written her paper for the course, if she could induce the professor to include grocery lists in the catalogue of extrapolatable genres. That odd phrase rolled in her brain a moment until she became aware that there was a man in sandals and socks speaking very softly and very self-assuredly at the head of the long table that they — she and some much younger students — were sitting at.
He was saying, “… the interactions of discourse and ideology — that is, how the work of the poet operates within a variety of prevalent romantic cultural discourses — e.g., romantic, amatory, religious, hedonist, colonialist — in order to collaborate with, challenge, oppose, or, in rare cases, subvert them.” Here, at “subvert,” the professor raised his eyebrows several times until everyone at the table chuckled, which it seemed to Mrs. Hollingsworth was the actual requirement so far of the course. She had failed to chuckle. At the same moment that she perceived everyone in the room to be staring at her very politely, she noticed in her hand a button of the pin-on political variety that said on it FRIEND.
Into the silence that apparently awaited something from her, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Are we going to read ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?”
“You mean theorize diaspora, adjudicate hybridity?” the professor asked, with more of the eyebrow hydraulics.
She could not respond, so the professor, whose role seemed to be that of helping out the obtuse, went on: “We will focus on the ways in which diasporan subjectivity complicates and problematizes the relationship between theory and identity, on the one hand, and representation and collectivity, on the other.”
This remark had the effect of liberating the other students from staring politely at her. When they resumed their fond gaze at the professor, Mrs. Hollingsworth left the room. In her one hand was the FRIEND button, in her other hand her purse. She had a headache and was breathing hard.
Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing, speech. “Handicapped” had become there “physically challenged” and, ultimately, “differently abled.” A student body of mixed race had become one that was diverse. The diverse engendered something around it called pluralism. Pluralism was the high good, a kind of manna that was supposed to feed the bees and nourish them into new heavenly forms that would not sting each other. Pluralism was going to stop race riots. Saying “the N word” was going to make the black man happy. We could still say “redneck,” she had noticed. The day she heard it on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.
Her getting stranger had something to do with this truly getting stranger the nation was about. She wanted to be somewhere else, so she was making her list.
Forrest and Bobby Lee
— BOBBY LEE, LET ME ast you, friend, what you boys upair in the high cotton wrapping up cigars in you battle orders and droppin em behind enemy lines for? I find fightin hard enough without that.
— That? That warnt but a thang.
— Warn’t but a thang? Put some boy bones in the ground, dint it?
— Yeah. Yeah it did.
— Well then it warn’t just no thang, Bobby E. Lee. I got outright queers on my back down here and it cost me boy bones all day long and it ain’t just a thang. We ain’t got no cigars down here. And it ain’t just a thang down here.
— You do go on, Genel.
— Do I, Genel? Where boy bones is concerned, I don’t hold with the luxury of cigars.
— I take your point, Genel. I take your point.
— You keep on takin it, Genel.
Mrs. Hollingsworth wondered if this item were not too obscure for even a hungry fool to understand. That is probably because it is real, she thought. Few people could credit that the War might have been over had not battle orders from Lee been found wrapped around cigars and given to McClellan in time to avert Lee’s annihilation of him in the Valley campaign. That was harder to believe, she thought, than that, say, Ted Turner might try to produce a species of media baby and fight the War again. She was having these vague visions of television technology and Forrest and a new soldier, a New Southerner. All of this, she thought, more probable than battle orders wrapping up cigars in enemy territory, a sad and ineluctable fact of history. She liked the day that allowed you to say “ineluctable,” and also “eponymous.”
Funeral
THE MAN WHO COULD see Forrest and who would see a yellowtail in a lake and who had known love when he was Lonnie and saw Sally, and who had not known it later, went to the funerals, one hard upon another, of his mother and his father. Both of them were held in desertlike heat.